On the morning of 3 January Nietzsche had just left his lodgings when he saw a cab-driver beating his horse in the Piazza Carlo Alberto. Tearfully, the philosopher flung his arms around the animal's neck, and then collapsed. The small crowd that gathered around him attracted Davide Fino, who had his lodger carried back to his room. After lying unconscious or at least motionless for a while on a sofa, Nietzsche became boisterous, singing, shouting, thumping at the piano. He probably thought he was clowning deliberately.… But the 'inspired clowning' which had already been hard to control by the end of November was now in unchallengeable possession of his mind. He wrote notes to the King of Italy ('My beloved Umberto'), the royal house of Baden ('My children'), and the Vatican Secretary of State. He would go to Rome on Tuesday, he said, to meet the pope and the princes of Europe, except for the Hohenzollerns. He advised the other German princes to ostracize them, for the Reich was still the enemy of German culture. Writing to Gast, Brandes and Meta von Salis, Nietzsche signed himself 'The Crucified', and writing to Burckhardt, Overbeck and Cosima Wagner, signed himself 'Dionysus'. The note to Meta runs: 'The world is transfigured, for God is on the earth. Do you not see how all the heavens are rejoicing? I have just seized possession of my kingdom, am throwing the pope into prison, and having Wilhelm, Bismarck and Stocker shot.' The note to Burckhardt starts: 'That was the little joke for which I condone my boredom at having created a world.'
Deconstruction presupposes the critic's insight into the contingency of the construction of authority. By exposing the empowering presuppositions of the author's discourse, deconstruction effectively discredits any claim to an epistemically privileged authority. But does deconstruction adequately provide for the author's own insight into the construction of textual authority? How does deconstruction (or any other self-conscious interpretative strategy) deal with a text whose textuality presupposes the kind of indeterminacy and self-referentiality upon which deconstruction operates? These questions are especially central to an engagement with Nietzsche's most forbidding book, Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Rather than deny or ignore the contingency of his own textual authority, Nietzsche anticipates the deconstruction of Zarathustrs, thus forging a deconstructive relation between himself and his readers. By accommodating the deconstruction of his own authority, Nietzsche encourages/forces his readers similarly to acknowledge the contingent construction of their own claims to authority. A genuinely free and empowered agency, Nietzsche believes, involves the recognition that one's own claims to authority are just as partial, fragile, and contingent as those of anyone else. Underlying Nietzsche's self-compromising ideal is the conviction that partiality, fragility, and contingency do not in themselves constitute objections to one's specific claims to authority. In order to encourage his readers to reconstruct Zarathustra on their own (similarly contingent) authority, Nietzsche accommodates the deconstruction of his textual authority, thus providing his readers with an example of the ideal agency he recommends to them.
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