The work of Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and Jacques Derrida is all but inconceivable without Nietzsche’s example. It was the heyday of post-structuralism, and Nietzsche appeared to anticipate one of the central insights of that era: that we are at the mercy of ever-shifting systems and perspectives. When I was in college, in the nineteen-eighties, the French Nietzsche held sway. Can a philosopher who has sown such confusion be said to possess a coherent identity? Or, as Bertrand Russell once argued, is Nietzsche merely a literary phenomenon? Lurking amid the crowd of avatars is the proto-fascist Nietzsche-the proponent of pitilessness, hardness, and the will to power who is cited approvingly by such far-right gurus as Alain de Benoist, Richard Spencer, and Aleksandr Dugin. One can read about the French Nietzsche, the American Nietzsche, the pragmatic Nietzsche, the analytic Nietzsche, the feminist Nietzsche, the gay Nietzsche, the black Nietzsche, the environmentalist Nietzsche. Countless books on Nietzsche are published in dozens of languages each year, linking him to every imaginable zone of life and culture. The adventures of “super” and “über” are a case study in the inescapability of Nietzsche’s philosophy, which has affected everyday discourse and modern political reality like no body of thought before it.
Somewhere, Nietzsche is laughing hysterically while screaming in anguish. In the late twentieth century, the word “super” rebounded into German as all-purpose slang for “very” if you wish to describe something as really, really cool, you say that it is super super toll. In the nineteen-eighties, Spy described the Hollywood agent Michael Ovitz as an “ über-agent.” The umlaut-free car-sharing service Uber, originally known as UberCab, is a related development, hinting at Silicon Valley fantasies of world domination. It’s unclear whether Siegel and Shuster knew of Nietzsche in 1933, but the word “superman” hardly existed in English before the philosopher’s ideas began to spread.Īs Nietzsche worked his wiles on generations of English-speaking college students, the word Übermensch increasingly stood on its own, and “über” slipped into English as a prefix.
In 1903, three years after Nietzsche’s death, George Bernard Shaw published his play “Man and Superman,” in which he equated the Übermensch with an overflowing “Life Force.” Three decades later, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, two Cleveland teen-agers, created the first “Super-Man” story, depicting the character not as a caped hero but as a bald, telepathic villain bent on “total annihilation.” Super-Man soon reëmerged as a muscle-bound defender of the good, and during the Second World War he jumped into the fight against the Nazis.
A physically stronger being? A spiritual aristocrat? A kind of cyborg? “Overperson” might be the most literal equivalent in English, although it is unlikely that DC Comics would have sold many comic books using that title. Nietzsche altered the destiny of the word when, in the eighteen-eighties, he began speaking of the Übermensch, which has been translated as “superman,” “superhuman,” and “overman.” Scholars still debate what Nietzsche had in mind. As a prefix, über is sometimes equivalent to the English “super”- übernatürlich is “supernatural”-but it has less of an aggrandizing effect. In German, it can mean “over,” “beyond,” or “about.” You are reading an essay über Nietzsche. That is what Friedrich Nietzsche did with the word über. It takes a strong philosopher to assume control of a preposition and propel it into a foreign language.
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