Chapter 7 - Standing between Two Millennia: Intimations of the Antichrist

Summary

Just between us, it is not impossible that I am the first philosopher of the age – indeed, perhaps even a little more: something decisive and full of destiny, standing between two millennia. For such a rarefied position one continuously atones, through an ever growing, ever icier, and ever sharper seclusion.

Letter to Reinhardt von Seydlitz on 12 February 1888

Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.

(BGE 146)

One of its heads seemed to have a mortal wound, but its mortal wound was healed, and the whole earth followed the beast with wonder.

Revelations 13:3

Nietzsche holds The Antichrist(ian) in such high regard because it comprises both a statement and a performance of his “revaluation of all values.” In The Antichrist(ian), he “detonates” his residual store of vitality, presenting himself as an “incarnate declaration of war” (AC 13). As a squanderer of expendable affect, he not only articulates an alternative to Christian morality, but embodies it as well. As we shall see, however, Nietzsche is not a reliable judge of his own expenditures. His “explosive” performance of revaluation draws upon reservoirs of expendable affect of which he is ignorant, and its public ramifications deviate dramatically from his self-serving accounts of them.