Nietzsche and the horse: Or the passage to a posthuman community

Abstract

There is a performative gesture of Nietzsche that produces the transition from a human community to a post-human community: when he bursts into tears embracing the neck of a horse, as a passage in act of the rejection of the cartesian machina animata and loss of sovereignty over his person. This gesture expresses an event in the history of philosophical thought. Nietzsche founds a community against the herd and the equals. The rejection of the cartesian machina animata is the rejection of the reduction of the human being to that dark chamber in which he has lodged and enclosed himself: the conscience. We venture with Nietzsche to think of the possibility of a non-human community. This entails entering into the voice of a loner who makes community by saying «we», a we of which he is the first, who is also named as a «ghost of the future», who announces a new relation both to other living animals and to himself.