while we're at it, i might say i've been re-reading and re-thinking nietzsche (both he and arendt apropos of my political aesthetics project). he's what turned me to philosophy, while i was a teenager. i loved his particular form of genius: inversion. then, just maybe, an inversion of the inversion. of all the great values of the west: truth and morality and democracy. i find him a little less charming now, let's say. he forced himself to be a genius, manufactured his own genius,declared his own genius: it's hard not to see that as the center of the whole authorship. he willed himself to be a genius, had to turn out to be a genius, maybe still to impress cosima wagner or someone. something pathetic underlies the incredible self-aggrandizement, and sometimes the perversity is just willful and almost purposeless. the lightning rhythm of the prose is amazing at times. at others it's just pretentious (thus spoke zarathustra, which i once loved and now find unreadable) or almost...mechanical, like a reflex. his drive toward, need for, love of, affirmation, and his discovery of it precisely in tragedy, or in the face of pain, is a beautiful contribution. his incredible self-congratulation for this discovery is insufferable.