Abstract

As a philologist, Nietzsche had to be a materialist – a materialist of letters. If letters are not life, however, they are the indices of its limits. You can’t live except at the limit; to get to a limit, you have to reconstruct a genealogy for yourself; once you know where you are, you have the opportunity to lose yourself again, this time effectively. Life is whatever will have greeted you in that loss, the disappearance at the limit.