Introduction

By virtually all accounts except Nietzsche's own, The Antichrist(ian) is a disappointment, even something of an embarrassment. His self-appointed executors prudently withheld the book from print, eventually publishing it in a selectively edited form. Once safely, if incompletely, in print, The Antichrist(ian) was summarily denounced as a product of its author's incipient madness.

Unlike many of Nietzsche's other “untimely” books, The Antichrist(ian) has not yet attracted a belated readership of serious scholars. Even Nietzsche's sympathetic readers have largely ignored (or apologized for) The Antichrist(ian), treating his critique of Christianity as an inessential (and perhaps malignant) outgrowth of his more promising philosophical insights. Apparently concluding that a domestication of Nietzsche's thought is a fair (and perhaps desirable) price to pay for his newly accorded status as a respectable philosopher, his contemporary champions have gently nudged this angry book into a shadowy, liminal position on the periphery of his oeuvre.