Chapter 3 Performing the Agon: Towards an Agonal Model for Critical Transvaluation

Having introduced Nietzsche’s concept of the agon in the first two chapters, I turn now to the main thesis of this book and consider the agon as a dynamic principle regulating Nietzsche’s philosophical practice of critical transvaluation. A number of formal and dynamic features of Nietzsche’s concept of the agon will be singled out, in order to ask what they imply for Nietzsche’s critical transvaluative discourse if, indeed, it is governed by the agon. But first, the collective, cultural presuppositions of Nietzschean critique, viewed as an agonal practice, are set out and situated in the context of Nietzsche’s diagnosis of the present as a condition of nihilism. Given the generalised crisis of authority that is nihilism, Nietzsche, like Zarathustra, is dependent on contingent, historical communities to authorise his affirmative discourse. In the absence of the ‘right’ community, he can only create fictional communities that might stimulate and guide actual readers in the collective creation of affirmative values beyond good and evil. In the last part of the chapter, I return to the question of agonal culture and examine it as an aesthetic techne of measure and transformation inspired by the poets, in opposition to the war against the passions waged by the ‘morality as anti-nature’ of the church (GD) and humanism. The case for an agonal reading of Nietzsche’s philosophical practice rests largely on the results of reading his texts in this way. In other words, ‘the proof is in the pudding’, and in this book I hope to demonstrate that the agon is a fruitful model for Nietzsche’s writing in at least two senses. The first is that the dynamic form peculiar to the agon allows us to make sense of Nietzsche’s polemical style – of certain puzzling, yet recurrent features of his textual confrontations that tend to get ignored or written off as inessential. In the second place, the agon is also philosophically fruitful because it addresses certain problems intrinsic to transvaluation itself; problems that threaten the very coherence of Nietzsche’s philosophical project. I begin with the latter. Nietzsche’s life-project of critical transvaluation (Umwertung) involves the critical contestation of European, life-negating values in the name of life as the highest value. The basic and recurrent task is to overcome theoretical discourse (metaphysics), morality and religion in the name of life, its affirmation and enhancement.1 Now this task originates in a critical diagnosis of the present, which in turn raises a number of problems for it. If Nietzsche is right that western values originate in a ‘decadent’ form of life, a sick and impoverished will, then the task of overcoming re-