Your short question on if Nietzsche would deny that the overman was just a phantasm was probably just rhetorical, but I'll answer it anyway, as he quite literally affirms it (for Nietzsche's standards then). See the following quote from TSZ 'On Poets':
"Indeed, there are so many things between heaven and earth of which only the poets have dreamed! And especially above the heavens, for all gods are poets’ parable, poets’ cock and bull!
Indeed, always it lifts us up – namely to the kingdom of the clouds; atop these we set our motley bastards and then call them gods and overmen – And they are just light enough for these chairs – all these gods and overmen! Oh how I am weary of all this imperfection that is supposed to become an event at any cost!”
As we can see he posits the overman as a poets' parable like gods are, but like Stirner he acknowledges the power these parables can have on people, as an imperfection that is supposed to become an event at any cost. The difference between Stirner and Nietzsche is then both smaller and greater than you state, and I loosely follow Deleuze in my understanding of this distance. Per Deleuze then, Stirner seems to have been the first to draw out the self-refuting nihilism of the dialectic, but as (supposedly) surrenders thought to the dialectic the only logical step for him would then be to discard thought, lacking any alternative way of thinking. This is where Deleuze sees Nietzsche's contribution: namely in proffering an anti-dialectical way of thinking, one that sees the phantasms like Marx did: as symptoms of other processes, which can then become tools for the diagnosis of the contemporary (and the future in the case of Nietzsche).
This mirrors Marx' critique of Stirner, which is the fact that we're not really done when we dismiss a phantasm as some word-virus (a la Burroughs) making us forget our authenticity, for these viruses differ in their ways of entry and attacks, and to be able to rid ourselves of them we have to engage in a continuous and specific symptomatology.
Nietzsche seems to have a slightly different view, and in some way acknowledges the strength of these different phantasms, or at least uses this perceived strenght as an indicator in his diagnosis, to then try and discover the specific forces animating history. It therefore seems to me mistaken to read Nietzsche as proposing a teleology, while his thought of the overman seems more an idea that he in some sense discovers through listening to the bowels of the earth, sees as the future of man, and seems to see fit to act as a 'justification' of man. Justification in scare quotes, because Nietzsche does not view life as something that can in any sense be justified, but sees a reason to live as a pragmatist way to empower one's life, to be able to bear ones suffering as one now has a reason for living, even if this reason is also in some way a phantasm created for ulterior purposes by processes invisible and obscure.
Oh and Nietzsche was definitely a nihilist, he even admits it in his later years in one of his notes. His tentative presentation of an ethics of power, which would knowing Nietzsche probably just be subsumed in an aesthetic justification of life, was quite definitely not meant as a final rebuttal of nihilism, but as a possible direction of a cure, already seen from the side of the sickly and thus eminently fallible.
Anyway, still a great and informative piece on Stirner that definitely helped me understand him better again, but I guess don't be so quick to surrender thought to the dialecticians or you might end up like our friend Land. Or idk, what do I know?
On an infinitely more interesting note, have you listened to Of Montreal already? It's a manically pessimistic pop project with cool poppy instrumentation and deeply gloomy and weird lyrics that you'll probably dig. I'd recommend 'Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer?' as a nice starting album, and to then just jump around a bit to see what you like in their huge discography.
Thinking about it, I might want to reverse my conclusion as I really admire your insurrectionary Daoism, but just wanted to show that Nietzsche might be more of an ally than you're showing here.
Your short question on if Nietzsche would deny that the overman was just a phantasm was probably just rhetorical, but I'll answer it anyway, as he quite literally affirms it (for Nietzsche's standards then). See the following quote from TSZ 'On Poets':
"Indeed, there are so many things between heaven and earth of which only the poets have dreamed! And especially above the heavens, for all gods are poets’ parable, poets’ cock and bull!
Indeed, always it lifts us up – namely to the kingdom of the clouds; atop these we set our motley bastards and then call them gods and overmen – And they are just light enough for these chairs – all these gods and overmen! Oh how I am weary of all this imperfection that is supposed to become an event at any cost!”
As we can see he posits the overman as a poets' parable like gods are, but like Stirner he acknowledges the power these parables can have on people, as an imperfection that is supposed to become an event at any cost. The difference between Stirner and Nietzsche is then both smaller and greater than you state, and I loosely follow Deleuze in my understanding of this distance. Per Deleuze then, Stirner seems to have been the first to draw out the self-refuting nihilism of the dialectic, but as (supposedly) surrenders thought to the dialectic the only logical step for him would then be to discard thought, lacking any alternative way of thinking. This is where Deleuze sees Nietzsche's contribution: namely in proffering an anti-dialectical way of thinking, one that sees the phantasms like Marx did: as symptoms of other processes, which can then become tools for the diagnosis of the contemporary (and the future in the case of Nietzsche).
This mirrors Marx' critique of Stirner, which is the fact that we're not really done when we dismiss a phantasm as some word-virus (a la Burroughs) making us forget our authenticity, for these viruses differ in their ways of entry and attacks, and to be able to rid ourselves of them we have to engage in a continuous and specific symptomatology.
Nietzsche seems to have a slightly different view, and in some way acknowledges the strength of these different phantasms, or at least uses this perceived strenght as an indicator in his diagnosis, to then try and discover the specific forces animating history. It therefore seems to me mistaken to read Nietzsche as proposing a teleology, while his thought of the overman seems more an idea that he in some sense discovers through listening to the bowels of the earth, sees as the future of man, and seems to see fit to act as a 'justification' of man. Justification in scare quotes, because Nietzsche does not view life as something that can in any sense be justified, but sees a reason to live as a pragmatist way to empower one's life, to be able to bear ones suffering as one now has a reason for living, even if this reason is also in some way a phantasm created for ulterior purposes by processes invisible and obscure.
Oh and Nietzsche was definitely a nihilist, he even admits it in his later years in one of his notes. His tentative presentation of an ethics of power, which would knowing Nietzsche probably just be subsumed in an aesthetic justification of life, was quite definitely not meant as a final rebuttal of nihilism, but as a possible direction of a cure, already seen from the side of the sickly and thus eminently fallible.
Anyway, still a great and informative piece on Stirner that definitely helped me understand him better again, but I guess don't be so quick to surrender thought to the dialecticians or you might end up like our friend Land. Or idk, what do I know?
On an infinitely more interesting note, have you listened to Of Montreal already? It's a manically pessimistic pop project with cool poppy instrumentation and deeply gloomy and weird lyrics that you'll probably dig. I'd recommend 'Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer?' as a nice starting album, and to then just jump around a bit to see what you like in their huge discography.
Thinking about it, I might want to reverse my conclusion as I really admire your insurrectionary Daoism, but just wanted to show that Nietzsche might be more of an ally than you're showing here.