Chapter 7 Law and Community in the Agon: Agonal Communities of Taste and Lawfulness without a Law

As argued in chapter 3, agonal texts do not consist simply of dyadic confrontations with Nietzsche’s chosen representatives of the values under critique. The ancient Greek agon, Nietzsche’s model for critique, was deeply embedded in communal life, mores and institutions, and artists were dependent on ‘the right public’ for adjudicating performances and outcomes (16[21], KSA 7.402). But what is the ‘right public’ (das rechte Publikum)? From what standpoint is it right (recht) – and by what standard of judgement or justice (Gerechtigkeit)? At stake here is the question of judgement or adjudication in the agon, of the law or standard of adjudication, or of justice. As readers of Nietzsche’s texts, the agon also implicates us as a public, together with his chosen adversaries in his critical confrontations.We can speak of an agonal law of production regulating his transvaluative texts only if production is inseparable from the question of interpretation: how to understand and adjudicate his agonal confrontations? What does it mean to respond to them and interpret them in agonal terms? And for Nietzsche’s readership, too, the question of ‘the right public’ needs to be raised.What is an agonal community of readers today? And by what standard or law can this community be convoked and constituted as the right readership? These questions, first raised in chapter 3, will now be pursued from a perspective in law by asking: What is the nature and status of law in an ‘agonal community’?1 In what sense can we speak of justice (Gerechtigkeit, Dike) as a standard of adjudication binding the public with agonal contestants, us readers, with Nietzsche’s critical confrontations? Given Nietzsche’s focus on values and the project of transvaluating all values, we also need to ask whether there is an ethical dimension to the question of law in the