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To study Nietzsche psychobiographically might at first seem a bit nahe, ingenuous-missing the point. Wasn't it Nietzsche's work itself which through deconstructive and poststructuralist readings, helped bring about the “death of the author,” and thus- the “death” of psychobiography (Sarup, 1993)? Wasn't it Nietzsche who foresaw the postmodern reduction of subjectivity to a function of cultural codes?
Perhaps. Yet as we so often find when examining Nietzsche's texts, these elements are themselves juxtaposed with and even superimposed on their polar opposites. Nietzsche's apparent flight from the semiotic oppression inherent in the notion of all-determining authorship is coupled with a passionate desire to reconnect text with author, to use the lived experience of authors in rescuing their texts from what he saw as the thin, unbreathable air of impersonal and bloodless intellectuality. Philosophical ideas, for instance, are envisaged as “hav[ing] always lived on the ‘blood’ of the philosopher, they always consumed his senses and even if you will believe us, his ‘heart’ “(Nietzsche, , p. 333). They are, Nietzsche says in The Guy Science, “a kind of long concealed vampire in the background who begins with the senses and in the end is left with, and leaves, mere bones, mere clatter… “ (p. 333).
It was this sentiment, we think, that led Nietzsche to intellectually reverse the devitalizing process he saw in philosophy by famously suggesting that “it has gradually become clear to me what every great philosophy has hitherto been: a confession on the part of its author and a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir” (p. 37), with this statement and others expressing his