In this remarkable exploration of Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche’s Native American roots, D. Harlan Wilson explodes all former notions of the German philosopher, amoralist, and über-saint in the same vein that his Zarathustra exploded universal principles. Based upon extensive research in the Nietzsche Archives at the University of Arts-Gatlinburg, this so-called “autohagiography” reveals what it meant for Nietzsche to be a person of color and a “gay scientist” masquerading as one of the whitest, straightest, most entitled men in the history of Western civilization. Do not look to these pages for an exegesis of yet another archbishop of heteronormative patriarchy. Nietzsche was much more than an Anglo-Saxon descendent crying wolf from a Swiss mountaintop, and unlike most career-spanning monographs, Wilson completely ignores his insanity and preoccupation with Christian morality in favor of his Cherokee affect and early-American genealogy as much as his transgender proclivities. This is the unmanning that Nietzsche Studies has been waiting for—utterly absorbing, insufferably profound, and a testimony to the hammer of truth that forged an entire arsenal of modern thought.

Reviews

"I have never been so unreservedly offended and confounded by a book. Nor have I enjoyed a book so much or recognized its scholarly valence. To some degree, Nietzsche: The Unmanned Autohagiography reads itself. It may have even written itself. One thing is clear: D. Harlan Wilson is not, as many critics have claimed, a ghost in the machine of history. He is the machine in the ghost of futurity." —NATHAN BEDFORD FORREST, Professor of Art History and Chair of the Department of Viticulture and Enology at Fostoria University

"Friends of this book, eagle and serpent, here are the blistered berries of joy, amor fati. Here is the abyss, gazing back." —JAMES REICH, author of Soft Invasions

"No one does it like D." —GABINO IGLESIAS, author of The Devil Takes You Home

"Nietzsche is the fourth installment in one of the smartest and funniest series on anti-autofiction, anti-biography, and ultimately anti-everything. It's as if Tex Avery adapted Deleuze and Guattari. The result is that each cell of animation becomes the logical foe of the one preceding it." —ANDREW C. WENAUS, author of The Literature of Extinction

"This book escapes the stodge of academic thinking with a single deft step and such apparent ease." —ANSGAR ALLEN, author of Plague Theatre and The Wake and the Manuscript

"Nietzsche: The Unmanned Autohagiography refuses to be systematically classified. Its point keeps moving, and that is the point. When talking about dismantling grand narratives, we are talking about postmodernism, and we are all sick to death of post-everything. What now is not post when everything is always-already post-core or something like that, complete with a hashtag and some twenty-something admins? What difference does any of it make—an authentically Nietzschean sentiment. We have found the Abyss, and the Abyss does not care, which makes the Abyss that much more of an Abyss. Ultimately, what makes Nietzsche so compelling is how Wilson dangles all of this before you without ever letting you have whatever it is that gives it all meaning. He has written a new myth." —BIG OTHER MAGAZINE