Who was Giorgio Colli (1917-1979)? Who was Mazzino Montinari (1928-1986)? The beautifully written and skilfully researched book under review by Philipp Felsch offers an absorbing response to these questions. Felsch also provides intimate testimony to the trials and tribulations of establishing a true and/or authentic text of a famous thinker – in the case in point: Friedrich Nietzsche.

For those outside ‘Nietzscheology’, and perhaps for some inside, the debates – largely of French inception – surrounding the plausibility or otherwise of establishing an Urtext for any author, but especially for Nietzsche – and this by way of a detailed philology – are riveting. The point of departure for Felsch’s study is the ‘German-French summit’ that took place in ‘July 1964 at Royaumont, a former Cistercian abbey located north of Paris’ (p. 1). There, a young Michel Foucault presented a paper that is still read today: ‘Nietzsche, Freud, Marx’ (1998) – a paper that, in the strongest possible terms, threw cold water on the project to establish Nietzsche’s Urtext. For it is, the philosopher said, always a matter of endless interpretation. One never arrives at an absolute truth of the text:

if interpretation can never be completed, this is quite simply because there is nothing to interpret. There is nothing absolutely primary to interpret, for after all everything is already interpretation, each sign is in itself not the thing that offers itself to interpretation but an interpretation of other signs.

Foucault 1998: p. 275

As we know, the French innovation in the wake of the impetus of structuralism was that the signified turned out to be but another signifier. And did not Nietzsche himself propose – if a statement can be relied upon to provide illumination – that there are no facts only interpretations (see The Will to Power  § 481)? In Felsch’s summary, ‘Michel Foucault called for wild exegesis. If indeed no authoritative foundation in the form of an Urtext existed, then there was no alternative but to indulge in ever more novel readings’(8). A reminder: Foucault is speaking on 1964, that is, May 68 and ‘all power to the imagination’ (to interpretation?) was yet to be proposed.

But if such is the case – if interpretation rules, as the dominant majority of the French contingent of philosophers at Royaumont maintained – on what grounds could one judge the notorious efforts of Nietzsche’s sister, Frau Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, in editing Nietzsche’s oeuvre and, in particular, the famous Nachlass (unpublished works), including the putatively ‘gratuitous selection’ of notes from Nietzsche’s papers published as The Will to Power?

As Felsch explains:

Under his sister’s direction, no fewer than four different complete editions were launched. She herself became influentially active in publication, parlayed Weimar’s Nietzsche Archive into a national pilgrimage site, and contributed decisively to the transformation of her brother into the icon with a mustache that he remains – among everything else – to this day.

p. 5

Sister, Elisabeth, had secured copyright to Nietzsche’s Nachlass in 1896 (p. 5). ‘With the publication of The Will to Power in 1901, the year after Nietzsche’s death, she unveiled the purported magnum opus his adherents had long been waiting for’ (p. 5). The point is that if the text called, The Will to Power has been constructed from Nietzsche’s ‘literary remains’ are we to say that it has no connection to Nietzsche’s thought? Rather than dismissing the work out of hand, might it not be better to engage in some serious philology that would enable the status of the text in question to be clarified? Montinari, supported by Colli, certainly thought so.

But even if, for Heidegger, The Will to Power remained ‘the definitive reference’ (p. 6), the controversy over its editing remains to this day. And Frau Förster-Nietzsche has been accused of manipulating the Nachlass (e.g. suppressing certain embarrassing letters).

So, not only did it appear necessary to correct Förster-Nietzsche’s editing of her brother’s notes, as well as previous editions of Nietzsche’s texts, but a hope existed outside French circles that the Nachlass might reveal the truth of Nietzsche’s thought. In other words, there was a call for more philology not less, even if Nietzsche himself, as a trained philologist, said philology was a ‘“science for cranks,” “repetitive drudgery,” and “intellectually middle class.”’ (9). As already indicated, for their part, Colli and especially Montinari were all for philology and establishing an authentic Nietzschean text, one in keeping with its author’s intentions. As Montinari is quoted as saying: ‘in Nietzsche’s texts “not one image, not one word, not even one punctuation mark in lieu of another” was random’ (p. 8).

No wonder, Felsch muses, that at Royaumont, Colli and Montinari came across as two shadowy Italian figures on the very periphery of the fulsome debates, conducted by the French, on endless interpretation. On the bus to and from the conference, various conference attendees asked about the identity and credentials of those two Italians. In fact, Montinari was personally invited to attend by none other than Gilles Deleuze, an organiser of the conference. The irony here is that both Deleuze and Foucault ‘promised their collaboration as co-editors of the French, Gallimard edition’ of the complete works of Nietzsche edited by Colli and Montinari.

Having set the scene, the greater proportion of Felsch’s book is devoted to relating how Montinari in the first place, and Colli as his confidant and intellectual advisor, produced for the De Gruyter publishers the initial volumes in German and French of Nietzsche’s Kritische Gesamtausgabe (Critical Complete Edition) the first of which appeared in 1967, while the volumes of a paperback edition – Kritische Studienausgabe (Critical Study Edition) – first appeared in 1980.

The approach by Flesch is not only to set out the details of Colli’s and Montinari’s arduous philological journey, he is also at pains to provide a profound insight into the personalities of the two researchers. Colli, for instance, the older of the two, was a philhellene who published works on Presocratic philosophers. He had the ambition of being a great intellectual and teacher. As a secondary school teacher in the Tuscan town of Lucca, he focused on the brightest students (‘the chosen few’) and engaged in scholarly debates with them after school hours and recommended they read Nietzsche. Then, as adjunct professor at the University of Pisa, he also gathered around him a circle of adoring students with whom he engaged in philosophical debate. He ‘learned ancient Greek while still at school and learnt German on the side’ (p. 22-23).

For his part, Montinari was Colli’s adoring secondary school student who signed his letters to his teacher with ‘pais’, the Ancient Greek term for ‘pupil’ (p. 26). These and other letters show Montinari’s tastes in music (‘Brahms and Beethoven’), that he read Kant and Nietzsche, and to improve his Ancient Greek translated ‘Plato’s Gorgias’.

The interesting thing about Montinari is that his membership of the Italian Communist Party enables a foray into the post-war political and cultural situation in Italy and Germany. Antonio Gramsci’s fate thus becomes a talking point. It was no doubt Montinari’s left-wing credentials that allowed him access to Nietzsche’s Nachlass in the Goethe and Schiller archive in Weimar in the GDR (German Democratic Republic). There, Montinari was able to engage in his philological work, even though Nietzsche’s texts were themselves banned in the GDR. Montinari made his first trip to Weimar in 1961, moved there permanently in 1964 until 1970, when he returned to Italy with his bride, Sigrid, and their four children.

It is proposed that in Montinari, Nietzsche found his perfect reader, not only because Montinari recognised the philosopher ‘as a radical figure of enlightenment, a proponent of inconspicuous insights won through methodological stringency’ (p. 7), but because more than anyone else, the Italian had the capacity to persevere under difficult conditions: he was constantly under surveillance in the GDR and Nietzsche’s handwriting was notoriously difficult to decipher; it could take days to decipher a single page: thus: ‘in his letters to Colli: “Working in the archive looks like this: seven hours a day, sandwiches and tea for lunch (I bought a Thermos in Milan, but you can get one here now, too!).” – “Today I did not even take a twenty-minute lunchbreak.” – “Today I managed sixteen pages!’ (p. 109).

In the end, Montinari was the one who read and assessed every line, every word – every mark – that the German wrote. As Felsch describes it, there were:

fair copies and first printings of books published by Nietzsche himself; the lecture manuscripts and philological treatises from his time as a professor in Basel; the portfolios full of loose pages with ideas, concepts, and excerpts; as well as the notebooks he had used to record his streams of thought. In order to load onto trucks the avalanche of paper, the scope of which outweighed his published oeuvre many times over, the Russians had needed more than a hundred large wooden crates.

p. 97

To some (Adorno and Derrida), the project to untangle this ‘morass’ came across as pure literalism.

However, the critical apparatus that Colli and Montinari established in the editing of Nietzsche’s ‘Werke’ in the Kritische Gesamtausgabe and the Kritische Studienausgabe reveals that whether or not it is a matter of literalism depends on how the material is presented. 

When it comes to the establishment by the heroes of our story of Nietzsche’s text, it is fair to say that a certain amount of information already exists in the public arena. The great merit of Felsch’s study, however, is to provide a totally new insight into the way the quasi entirety of the Nietzschean oeuvre came to see the light of day and become the standard German reference for the said oeuvre. In other words, Felsch shows what is required of a philologist-researcher if success is to be won in establishing a truly authentic and almost universally accepted Urtext. Implied here is not just what it takes in a physical sense to carry out the required work (although this is important), but also that the achievement of such a goal requires the determination to resist the pressures of current theoretical and philosophical trends – in this case, the trend to oppose the possibility of an Urtext and to promote the idea of endless interpretation. Those who oppose an Urtext forget two things: 1. That the establishment of a powerful critical apparatus (such as the one produced by Colli and Montinari) allows distinctions to be made in the presentation of the material under consideration, and 2. That it makes no sense to claim that every interpretation has the same value as every other interpretation. And this is crucially important in the case of Nietzsche more than any other philosopher when there is so much at stake, politically speaking: whether Nietzsche gave succour to the Nazi’s, whether the writings reveal an inveterate anti-semitism and misogynism, etc. Even if, as Flesch also says, ‘Some of their editorial decisions come across as astonishingly gratuitous’ (p. 171), the basis of such a judgment owes much to Colli and Montinari’s critical apparatus itself.

And there is a final point: how can Nietzsche’s originality or otherwise be gauged without reference to an authentic, critical edition of his works. One might ask, for instance: How much did the philosopher borrow from other writers and thinkers? In this regard Felsch tells us that: ‘Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy established that Nietzsche had borrowed his theses on the figurative character of language, down to the way they were phrased, from the works of long-forgotten contemporaneous linguists. Once again, he turned out to be a tinkerer playing with the set pieces of nineteenth-century culture’ (p. 142-43).

Sadly, Montinari was to die of a heart attack in 1986 while organising his library at the young age of 58, Colli, for his part, having died in 1979 at the age of 61. The question then became: how was the mammoth project inaugurated by the two philologists to the completed? Only three volumes of the predicted eight of the critical apparatus had been published at Montinari’s death. While, at that moment, there was a certain amount of disarray about how to proceed, eventually the project found the personnel to complete the job, and, today, the standard German reference to Nietzsche’s oeuvre is the text established by Colli and Montinari, with the English translation of Kritische Studienausgabe published by Stanford University Press. In 2007, Alan D. Schrift, one of the editors of the latter edition wrote that:

‘In addition to interpretive restraint in terms of the translator’s interventions into the text, I think the level of textual fidelity required of a critical edition should manifest itself in other ways as well. For example, it is incumbent on a critical edition to reproduce exactly Nietzsche’s emphases (whether underlined or bold) as well as his punctuation and paragraph structure’.

Schrift 2007, p. 69

Far from a plurality of interpretations, such a requirement is perfectly in keeping with the statement by Montinari, already cited, that in Nietzsche’s writing ‘not one image, not one word, not even one punctuation mark in lieu of another’.

Thus, it is fair to say, in conclusion, that things have moved on from that day in 1964 when it was said that: ‘The life of interpretation [. . .], is to believe that there are only interpretations’ (Foucault 1998, p. 278). 

References

Foucault, Michel (1998) ‘Nietzsche, Freud, Marx’ in Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, ed. James D. Faubion, trans. Jon Anderson and Gary Hentzi, 269–78. Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984, vol. 2. New York: New Press.

Schrift, Alan D. (2007) ‘Translating the Colli-Montinari Kritische Studienausgabe’, Journal of Nietzsche Studies, 33, 64-72.