Manifesto

INCIPIT ZARATHUSTRA ediciones takes its name from the aphorism “How The True World Ultimately Became A Fable. History of an error”, which appeared in Twilight of the Idols. How to philosophize with the hammer, by Friedrich Nietzsche:

1. The true world — attainable for the sage, the pious, the virtuous man; he lives in it, he is it.

(The oldest form of the idea, relatively sensible, simple, and persuasive. A circumlocution for the sentence, "I, Plato, am the truth.")

2. The true world — unattainable for now, but promised for the sage, the pious, the virtuous man ("for the sinner who repents").

(Progress of the idea: it becomes more subtle, insidious, incomprehensible — it becomes female, it becomes Christian. )

3. The true world — unattainable, indemonstrable, unpromisable; but the very thought of it — a consolation, an obligation, an imperative.

(At bottom, the old sun, but seen through mist and skepticism. The idea has become elusive, pale, Nordic, Königsbergian.)

4. The true world — unattainable? At any rate, unattained. And being unattained, also unknown. Consequently, not consoling, redeeming, or obligating: how could something unknown obligate us?

(Gray morning. The first yawn of reason. The cockcrow of positivism.)

5. The "true" world — an idea which is no longer good for anything, not even obligating — an idea which has become useless and superfluous — consequently, a refuted idea: let us abolish it!

(Bright day; breakfast; return of bon sens and cheerfulness; Plato's embarrassed blush; pandemonium of all free spirits.)

6. The true world — we have abolished. What world has remained? The apparent one perhaps? But no! With the true world we have also abolished the apparent one.

(Noon; moment of the briefest shadow; end of the longest error; high point of humanity; INCIPIT ZARATHUSTRA.)

The text is one of the shortest histories of Western philosophy and, as Nietzsche says with the title, it is the “history of an error”. That error is the separation between true world and false world, between idea and appearance, between what is and what is not possible to achieve, a structure that has kept humanity away from what it can become. With Zarathustra begins the philosophy of the noon, of the body, of the pleasure that wants eternity and of the eternal return as an affirmation of life. What there is in Nietzsche's philosophy, what calls us, is the impulse to question everything, the recognition that ideas have a history and that their antiquity is no guarantee of their truth. Today - as then - is full of false truths, of institutions and people who claim to be masters of knowledge, of norms that dictate what can be done and thought, and of apparatuses that decree what must be seen and what must circulate.

With the above in mind, INCIPIT ZARATHUSTRA ediciones wants to publish that which positions itself and moves on the edges, that which tries to cross the boundaries and finds no place in traditional academic and publishing institutions. We want experimental and radical writings; not those that fall into fashions and that present themselves as supposedly radical. We want texts that go beyond the limit, that address the unexplored or that provide new insights into old problems. In this way, we join Pasolini's 1974 statement: "artists must create, critics must defend, and democrats must support... works so extreme that they become unacceptable even to the most open minds of the new state. To a large extent, of course, Pasolini's demand for “extreme” works was fueled by his conviction that only ‘unacceptable’ art could resist being consumed by the hated world of neocapitalism, which was rapidly destroying everything he had known and loved."

In INCIPIT ZARATHUSTRA ediciones we want to give a space to those who inhabit the limit, or those who are beyond it. We wonder who those people really are (not the posers and snobs who want to pretend to be). Perhaps they are the crazy, criminals, children, adolescents, migrants and sex workers: to them we want to open our publishing house.

We don't care about prestige, academia and its networks, its miserable power and the petrification of its ideas. Fuck peer review and the academic publishing mafia. To hell with political correctness, with uncritical support, with blind militancy, with the military, with hierarchy, with the police, with authority. Fuck this society and its ideas.

What matters to us is the creation and affirmation of life, and we think that a concrete contribution to this is the publication of books that point in this direction. We invite you to contact us if you have something written and you think this is the place to publish it.