Fragment: A Quick Note on Nietzsche’s Overman

04/29/2021

For Georges Bataille, the issue with Friedrich Nietzsche’s Overman is that it “betrays” (I’m hesitant to use this word) base materialism for a high idealism. Valorizing the high, hence the ‘sur’ in Surhomme (French translation of Übermensch) or the ‘over’ in Overman (English translation of Übermensch). Going beyond humanity, not into animality or continuity, but into an “existentialist” nightmare. A nightmare in which man must transvalue all of his values, which is nothing more than the reduction of man to a function. This reduction reinscribes us within the world of project and the capitalist order but also it leads to alienation. Bataille puts forward the Acéphale which is neither man nor beyond man (God). He is headless.

I then drive off numb. I have one thing playing on my phone as I drive aimlessly, trying to find myself because I had just lost it in them earlier that day: “À perte de vue” which is a documentary on Georges Bataille. Bataille comforted me during my descent into the labyrinth that night and I still have yet to find my way out of it! I continue to read Bataille as if it holds the map of the labyrinth in which I can then finally escape. But to no avail, I have found nothing… I’m trapped in the labyrinth of my feelings.