Acknowledgements; Abbreviations and Translations; Introduction; The naturalist-normative problem; The morality problem; Max Stirner and the 'tyranny of mind'; Kant, Hegel, and Feuerbach; 1. Nietzsche's Ascetic Morality; Pitting a 'morality of reason' against the Christian morality of feeling ; Nietzsche's self-eviscerating 'morality of sacrifice'; Do 'free-spirited moralists' have the right to inflict their cruelty on others? ; Austerity and artifice; 2. The Kantian Rational Will and the Tyranny of Self-Overcoming; Autonomy and universality; Creator-destroyers and hammer-wielding legislators ; Shattering the Christian table of values; Erkenntniss and the hard labour of reorienting the affects; Reverence and martyrdom: willing the Übermensch; 3. Hegel's 'Labour of the Negative' and the Lacerations of Self-Negation; Affirmative negation and Deleuzian derision; Spirit's self-lacerating 'labour of the negative'; Practical freedom and the planting of thought into the passions; Spirit's vicious cycle of bitter deaths and interminable resurrections; 4. The Bitter Cup of Pure Love: Feuerbach and Zarathustra; Reclaiming the 'divine' powers of human greatness; Love as a human absolute; Christ's Passion and Zarathustra's will to sacrificial love; An excursus on the I and thou of compassion; Conclusion; Zarathustra's violent rhetoric of truth incorporation; Zarathustra's moral tyranny; Bibliography; Index.