Blood Writing

I have this thing, and I know a lot of other people have it to, where I never want to buy used books if they have marginalia or underlining from a previous owner. It's fairly common, and I've passed up more than few good books on the cheap simply because I wanted a clean copy. A few times I've broken down, like when I found the Purloined Poe anthology for $10. What is this? Appreciation of the book-as-object? That futile impulse to avoid influence? Maybe.

I've been reading Nietzsche lately (Kaufman's translations from the Viking Portable), and I bought my edition even though it had underlinings because that much Nietzsche for $7 was just too good to refuse. Most of the notes are in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, which is included in its entirety, and one of them actually made me think. The first part of "On Reading and Writing" reads,

"Of all that is written I love only what a man has written with his blood. Write with blood, and you will experience that blood is spirit. It is not easily possible to understand the blood of another: I hate reading idlers. Whoever knows the reader will henceforth do nothing for the reader. Another century of readers - and the spirit itself will stink."

Next to that last sentence, someone wrote "they should be writing." I interpret this bit of marginalia as a reading of those sentences, and it seems to me to be a bit off. Zarathustra doesn't exactly seem to be saying people should write (rather than read) more, but that the only writing worth reading is difficult writing. He who writes with blood is worth reading, and the blood of another is difficult to understand, therefore writing that is difficult to understand is worth reading. Hence, for idlers, who "know the reader" and can give the reader what the reader already knows, there is no blood, only an attempt at "clarity" (which word is probably indicative of a betrayal of writing itself, a making-invisible of signifying power) - the writer bypasses himself in order to reach the reader. Writing becomes a communicative act. It's not that far of a leap from Nietzsche's blood-writing to Barthes's writerly text, at least in their effects. Certainly you'd be hard pressed to find the Lord High (Post)Structuralist leaning on the notion of spirit, but there seems to be a sympathy between the two ideas. I'm sure someone has written a dissertation on this or something - and this is mine.