The Whip

There is a line about women and a whip in this book, maybe the most infamous sentence Nietzsche ever wrote. Clancy Martin translated it, and he starts plainly: read literally, the chapter is misogynistic nonsense, and he will not smooth it, or apologize for it, or pretend Zarathustra's words are his own. Then he argues for a stranger reading, one that begins a speech early, on the path of the creator, and runs through a sentence Nietzsche later set at the front of another book: supposing truth is a woman. Where the whip lands in that reading, and why it sits where it does, is the argument.