On Love of The Neighbor- Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra: First Part

YOU CROWD around your neighbor, and have fine words for it. But I say to you: your love of the neighbor is your bad love of yourselves.
You flee to your neighbor from yourselves, and would rather make a virtue of it: but I fathom your "unselfishness."
The you is older than the I; the you has been consecrated, but not yet the I: so man presses near to his neighbor.
Do I advise you to love of the neighbor? Rather do I advise you to flight from the neighbor and to love of the farthest!
Higher than love of your neighbor is love of the farthest and future ones; higher still than love to men, is love to things and phantoms.
The phantom that runs on before you, my brother, is fairer than you; why do you not give to it your flesh and your bones? But you are afraid, and run to your neighbor.
You cannot endure yourselves and do not love yourselves sufficiently: so you seek to mislead your neighbor into love, to gild yourselves with his error.
If only you could not endure any kinds of neighbors; then you would have to create your friend and his overflowing heart out of yourselves.
You call in a witness when you want to speak well of yourselves; and when you have misled him to think well of you, you also think well of yourselves.
Not only does he lie, who speaks when he knows better, but more so, he who speaks when he knows nothing. And thus you speak of yourselves, and lie to your neighbor with yourselves.
Thus says the fool: "Association with men spoils the character, especially when one has none."
The one goes to his neighbor because he seeks himself, and the other because he would rather lose himself. Your bad love of yourselves makes solitude a prison to you.
It is the farthest ones who pay for your love to the near ones; and even when there are five of you together, there is always a sixth who must die.
I do not love your festivals either: I found too many actors there, and even the spectators often behaved like actors.
Not the neighbor do I teach you, but the friend. Let the friend be the festival of the earth to you, and a foretaste of the Superman.
I teach you the friend and his overflowing heart. But one must know how to be a sponge, if one would be loved by over-flowing hearts.
I teach you the friend in whom the world stands complete, a capsule of the good,- the creating friend, who always has a complete world to give away.
And as the world unrolled itself for him, so rolls it together again for him in rings, as the becoming of good through evil, as the becoming of purpose out of chance.
Let the future and the farthest be the motive of your today; in your friend you shall love the overman as your motive.
My brothers, I advise you not to love of the neighbor- I advise you to love of the farthest!
Thus spoke Zarathustra.

Hello! Hello! As school has winded down and the first few weeks of summer have now settled themselves....we can all get back to the bloggy-bloggy goodness! Recently, Ive been reading a bit of Nietzsche. Some would call him the father of the geneaology and I would go as far to say that he had some major major influence on our old pal Michel Foucault. So I figured, if Im down with Foucault it would be a good idea to take a look at who he was down with. Right yo! But more to the point, this exerpt above struck me so as an allusion to what we would now call the problem of "self/other" dichotomy. We love our neighbors in the way that allows us to construct the other in opposition to ourselves. So as our neighbors become the self, we enlist those in closest proximity to ourselves whether that be locational, idealogical, etc. We do so sometimes at the expense of a difficult and sometimes contradictary and complex coalition. on a more global scale its the difference between what we call Western feminist neo-imperialism and a transnational feminist politics.

We enlist ourselves under a binary system that fails to address the problems with how and why we construct a 'common identity'. So instead of a coalitional (is that a word?) identity politics, we have the bastardization/demonization/pathologization of the "other" that can parade under the guise of the arrogant self-righteousness of what I see as modern day missionary sensibilities of those who call themselve allies to feminist causes or it can parade under liberal humanist notions of authority and agency backed by science and reason.

So we use our neighbors and the love of our neighbors as a replacement for the love of the the farthest and the future. Even further along, he goes into the idea that higher than the love of the farthest and the future is the love of phatoms and things. In my version that line was translated as...."I esteem the love of things and ghosts." Might this read as a what we can call a post-structuralist account of our histories...much like a genealogy? A love of those ghosts which still present themselves and have a hand in the construction of the languages and discourses which constitute our identities.

And so he goes on to preach the teaching of the friend, love of the friend with the overflowing heart. To be a sponge to such overflow...to learn, to be open to learning, to be open to the furtherst. Now Nietzsche was definitely not a feminist, but he exhibits a degree of honesty throughout what Ive read thus far. He is not afraid to take the polemic stance, and to deconstruct what we take blindly as morality or common sense. And maybe thats where Foucault and others have picked up (non-linearly of course). Maybe the friend with the overflowing heart and the sponge is symbolic of what a transnational politics can look like. Sponges....yea for real yo....sponges-you can get all kinds of nice symbolism of them.

Word. I may be wrong, a high probability. But, I was reading this passage today and I thought it was rather lovely and I wanted to share...

ps- the exerpt i included isnt exactly the same as the translated version ive got, but its fairely close.