Daniel Tutt

Nietzsche would remark that his genius is in his nostrils, but it must be added that it’s in the ears that his philosophy truly begins. This is evident when we read his first work from 1872, The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music, where the philosopher not only takes on Wagner’s music, but the entire state of “contemporary German music”, referring to it as a “first-rate poison for the nerves” that is “doubly dangerous among a people who love drink and who honor lack of clarity as a virtue, for it has the double quality of a narcotic that both intoxicates and spreads a fog.” (Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, p. 25). At issue is not merely Wagner’s music, there is an implicit critique of his embrace of the optimism implicit in the post-1848 age of revolution. The movements for equality, from the suffrage movement, to the ending of slavery in the colonies all aimed to open the masses to realize equality and foster a sense of dignity and happiness for all. They were guided by an ‘optimistic worldview’ which Nietzsche juxtaposed to the ‘pessimistic worldview’, and over time Nietzsche’s project would blossom into a full-fledged political agenda bent on developing an alternative community to these egalitarian movements, and this reached its most mature form in Thus Spoke Zarathustra.

For Nietzsche, the modern period is marked by the rise in social and political optimism and this constitutes the return of Socratism and the triumph of rationalist philosophy in the political field. One of the metaphors Nietzsche used to refer to these tendencies of thought was the motif of the spider and specifically the tarantula. At their core, Nietzsche argued these philosophies of leveling, equality and the promotion of rights and dignity are all based in envy and revenge, and they have their more modern origin in the ‘moral spider’ of Rousseau whom Nietzsche also refers to as a “tarantula.” It is Rousseau’s moral worldview that functions like a spider’s web that had to be torn down and defeated in order to bring about an innocence of becoming. But how are we to understand the precise meaning of the metaphor of referring to Rousseau as a tarantula? This has a curious and often neglected historical context that is worth teasing out in order to understand how it relates to Nietzsche’s interests in music and aesthetics and how all of that intersects with his deeply reactionary political ambitions.

The historical epidemic known as ‘tarantism’ refers to an odd medical condition that baffled doctors from the 15th to the 17th centuries. Tarantism was a hysterical condition that followed the bite of a venomous spider thought to be a tarantula. The victim would break out in dance as the only means to cure them from excessive melancholia after they had been bitten. Subjects were said to said to dance uncontrollably until they collapsed in exhaustion. Some speculate that the dances were a way of expression that particularly appealed to poor women, precisely as a means to dance out their repression etc.

Rousseau weighed in on the bizarre medical condition in Essai sur l’origine des langues, written between 1754 and 1761.

So long as sounds continue to be considered exclusively in terms of the excitation they trigger in our nerves, the true principles of music and of its power over hearts will remain elusive. In a melody, sounds act on us not only as sounds but as signs of our affections, of our sentiments . . . As proof of the physical power of sounds, people refer to the cure of Tarantula bites. The example proves the very opposite. Those who have been stung by this insect do not, all of them, require either absolute sounds or the same tunes as a cure, rather, each one of them requires tunes [airs] from a melody he knows and phrases he can understand [entendre]. An Italian requires Italian tunes, a Turk would require Turkish tunes. Each is affected only by accents with which he is familiar; his nerves respond to them only insofar as his mind inclines them to it: he has to understand the language in which he is being addressed if he is to be set in motion by what he is told. Bernier’s cantatas are said to have cured a French musician of the fever, they would have given one to a musician of any other nation.

Rousseau understands music primarily as a matter of understanding and not primarily as a matter of purely physical sensations. He argued that listening to music is a matter not of perception, but of understanding. As Rudy Le Menthéour has noted, for Rousseau, “music acted upon men’s hearts and could ultimately become therapeutic inasmuch as it was imitative and not merely “natural.” Melody was superior to harmony, and touching tunes and songs were superior to sophisticated concords, because they unleashed the linguistic function of music. In other words, sounds became efficient (that is, had an effect on both body and soul) only when they turned into signs.”

This offers a richer context to Nietzsche’s important section entitled ‘The Tarantulas’ from Zarathustra. In this highly political passage, Nietzsche lashes out at the intellectuals who, like Rousseau, place a great deal of emphasis on one’s social and class origins. For Nietzsche, mediocrity in philosophy is a reflection on the philosophers social origins, i.e., those of low birth and the propertyless philosopher are prone to empty and abstract thought, and it is Rousseau who stands as the primary moral spider that advocates for the inclusion of such low-born philosophers.

It is thus highly clever and ingenious for Nietzsche to invoke the metaphor of the tarantula as his primary enemy in philosophy because this enemy causes its victims to turn to the ludic, to the Dionysian, indeed to dance in order to overcome their illness. If egalitarianism is also construed medically as an illness that affects the body and the mind, and leads those infected to dance, this called for a precise and comprehensive aesthetico-political solution. We can thus say that if the ‘wound is only healed by the spear that smote it’, the bite (of egalitarianism) is only healed by dancing until the venom is all dried out.

We remember that Zarathustra was meant to be read as a modern opera, as Deleuze puts it. But yet while the great text written for “everyone and no one” is to be understood as an opera, it is also an invitation to the Overmen to learn to dance a dance different than the frenzied dance of the preachers of equality. And although Nietzsche says the Overmen “are to resemble the order of Jesuits and the Prussian officer corps”, Deleuze does not interpret this as “protofascist”, rather he suggests that we must understand this as “[the] remarks of a director indicating how the Overman should be “played” (Deleuze, xiv).

For Deleuze, the text must be kept at the level of play. But this is not an adequate treatment of the work. Let us turn to the section on The Tarantulas to get a better sense of it. The tarantulas are the harbingers of ressentiment, they are the ones who spread revenge through their bites. The passage stages a drama about different ways a new aesthetic community can overturn the revengeful philosophers of ressentiment and bring about a new separation from their dance for equality, which Zarathustra insists stems from revenge. The passage ends by stating that, “if he [Zarathustra] be a dancer, he is not at all a tarantula-dancer!” Let us consider a longer excerpt:

My friends, I will not be mixed up and confounded with others. There are those who preach my doctrine of life, and are at the same time preachers of equality, and tarantulas. That they speak in favour of life, though they sit in their den, these poison-spiders, and withdrawn from life—is because they would thereby do injury. To those would they thereby do injury who have power at present: for with those the preaching of death is still most at home. Were it otherwise, then would the tarantulas teach otherwise: and they themselves were formerly the best world-maligners and heretic-burners. With these preachers of equality will I not be mixed up and confounded. For thus speaketh justice unto me: “Men are not equal.” And neither shall they become so! What would be my love to the Superman, if I spake otherwise?

It is crucial that we understand that the ‘preachers of equality’ are the tarantulas, they are not the masses themselves. This means that the community project Nietzsche is after is one meant to rival the Rousseauist, the socialist and all other leveling intellectuals, i.e., Nietzsche is best understood here as offering a rival and alternative community to the socialist levelers. And he diagnoses these socialist tarantulas to have an inherited sense for justice, “What the father hath hid cometh out in the son; and oft have I found in the son the father’s revealed secret” he writes. This resembles Nietzsche’s fear over the uprising of the proletariat in the Paris Commune, to which he writes in The Birth of Tragedy:

“a Saturnalia of barbarism” …. “a haunting spectre embodied in a class of barbaric slaves who have learned to regard their existence as an injustice, and now prepare to avenge, not only themselves, but all generations.”

Ultimately, it is highly reductive to cast the impulse of the revolutionary as driven primarily by envy. But this is what Nietzsche makes of the desire for revolution. He understands the revolutionary in a metaphorical way as bitten by a tarantula, i.e., as infected with the lofty ideals of equality to which they dance in a stupor only to become sick with decadence. The Dionysian is an invitation to mimetically imitate the dance of egalitarianism by re-directing it towards a completely different conclusion as he makes clear in The Tarantulas.

Let us now consider how Deleuze treats the theme of the tarantula and this important passage from Zarathustra in Nietzsche and Philosophy. For Deleuze, the tarantula refers to a “venomous memory” and it is bound up with a view of philosophy based in causality and purpose. Deleuze completely sidesteps the political critique of egalitarianism implicit in The Tarantulas, which as we noted above, stands as an all out assault on the intellectuals who preach equality. Deleuze mentions nothing of the problem of Nietzsche’s critique of equality and he instead moves to conflate the ‘spirit of revenge’ with reason and with philosophical views on purpose and causality. Deleuze writes:

“…but what is the root of reason? The spirit of revenge, nothing but the spirit of revenge, the spider (Z II “Of the Tarantulas”). Ressentiment in the repetition of throws, bad conscience in the belief in a purpose. But, in this way, all that will ever be obtained are more or less probable relative numbers. That the universe has no purpose, that it has no end to hope for any more than it has causes to be known – this is the certainty necessary to play well” (VP III 465).

Deleuze completely neuters Nietzsche’s intent to separate his community from any political community that would preach equality or seek justice. Nietzsche writes of such communities that they “are of bad race and lineage.” The higher men are encouraged to see the tarantulas as enemies, but at the same time, Nietzsche warns that the tarantulas teach a higher truth, namely “That there is struggle and inequality even in beauty, and war for power and supremacy: that doth he here teach us in the plainest parable.” Nietzsche invites the reader here to build a pillar on the den of the tarantula and get out of its “whirl of vengeance!”

What all of this indicates is clear enough: the Nietzschean praxis is meant to enact a separation not only from the disease and the sickness of egalitarian philosophy, especially when it is taken up politically, but it is also meant to shore up an alternative community based in a different cadence, the Nietzschean philosopher must not be a scholar (for the Rousseauists insists the same!) and they must learn a different dance, they must promote a different type of intoxication! This explicit community-building aim is clarified when we consider Nietzsche’s long aphorism in The Gay Science, 381, “On the question of being understandable.” In this passage, Nietzsche writes of his style as “opening ears for those whose ears are related to ours” but also as meant for nobler spirits. He notes that for is community:

We are different from scholars. […] It is not fat but the greatest possible suppleness and strength that a good dancer wants from his nourishment – and I wouldn’t know what the spirit of a philosopher might more want to be than a good dancer. The Gay Science, 381

It is here that we arrive at an idea of what Nietzsche’s community is meant to cultivate: an aesthetic break from egalitarian communities that embrace Rousseauist optimism and happiness for all. All of these obvious political agendas are again completely glossed over by Deleuze when he writes,

This intestinal and venomous memory is what Nietzsche calls the spider, the tarantula, the spirit of revenge . . . We can see what Nietzsche’s intention is: to produce a psychology that is really a typology, to put psychology “on the plane of the subject”.8 Even the possibilities of a cure will be subordinated to the transformation of types (reversal and transmutation). Deleuze, p. 116

Not only does Deleuze depoliticize the meaning of Nietzsche’s statement that “I fight the eternal spider” (GM, III 9), we the reader are led to assume that the spider is a dehistoricized effect of memory and a purely psychological phenomenon when in fact the tarantula represents the very political movements that are in line with the revolutionary tradition opened in the French Revolution.