A Philosophy of the Antichrist in the Time of the Anthropocenic Multitude: Preliminary Lexicon for the Conceptual Network

Antichrist. Nietz sche’s not just being scary and shocking. He speaks of a “philosophy of the Antichrist” in one of the more explicitly political sections of Beyond Good and Evil,1 in fact in a long concluding aphorism in §8, “Peoples and Fatherlands.” He reviews the mixed accomplishments of figures who helped to teach the nineteenth-century concept of “the higher human (Mensch),” including such diverse men as Napoleon, Wagner, Stendhal, and Heine. While all invented various forms of cul-tural hybridity (cf.übernational), escaping the limits of nation-alism, still all reverted to religion, and none “would have been capable of a philosophy of the Antichrist.” In the late preface to The Birth of Tragedy Nietz sche ventures to reveal the Anti-christ’s true name: Dionysus. The book The Antichrist, com-pleted by Nietz sche and published laterin distorted form by his sister Elisabeth, was first described as the initial one of four in The Transvaluation of Values, and later as the work’s whole. In choosing the name and figure of Antichrist is Nietz sche simply aiming at ultimate blasphemy, a poke in the eye for Chris-tianity?