Francesca Cauchi is an Associate Professor National Sun Yat-sen University in Kaohsiung, Taiwan. She is the author of Zarathustra contra Zarathustra: The Tragic Buffoon (Ashgate, 1998), reissued under the Routledge imprint in September 2018. She has published many articles in peer-review journals including Philological Quarterly, Journal of European Studies and Oxford German Studies.

• IntroductionThe naturalist-normative problemThe morality problemMax Stirner and the ‘tyranny of mind’Kant, Hegel, and Feuerbach1. Nietzsche’s Ascetic MoralityPitting a ‘morality of reason’ against the Christian morality of feeling Nietzsche’s self-eviscerating ‘morality of sacrifice’Do ‘free-spirited moralists’ have the right to inflict their cruelty on others? Austerity and artifice2. The Kantian Rational Will and the Tyranny of Self-OvercomingAutonomy and universalityCreator-destroyers and hammer-wielding legislators Shattering the Christian table of valuesErkenntniss and the hard labour of reorienting the affectsReverence and martyrdom: willing the Übermensch3. Hegel’s ‘Labour of the Negative’ and the Lacerations of Self-NegationAffirmative negation and Deleuzian derisionSpirit’s ‘labour of the negative’Practical freedom and the planting of thought into the passionsSpirit’s vicious cycle of bitter deaths and interminable resurrections4. The Bitter Cup of Pure Love: Feuerbach and ZarathustraReclaiming the ’divine’ powers of human greatnessLove as a human absoluteChrist’s Passion and Zarathustra’s sacrificial loveAn excursus on self-love and the I and thou of compassionConclusionZarathustra’s violent rhetoric of truth incorporationZarathustra’s moral tyrannyBibliographyIndex

This is an indelible contribution to Nietzschean scholarship. [...] Recommended.