“We Hyperboreans” is how Friedrich Nietzsche headed a fragment from his unpublished works dated November 1887. A few months later he wrote The Anti-Christ. We Hyperboreans, we who live in the “hyperborean zone”, in inhospitability or uninhabitability itself, the exterior. The “hyperborean zone that is far removed from the temperate zones”. We Hyperboreans, we immoderates who only exist in contact with the immeasurable, the unmeasurable or incommensurable, we who would rather live “in the ice”, says Nietzsche, we withdraw from the “fake peace” and the “cowardly compromise” of a certain “tolerance” and “largesse of the heart”. We resist the “happiness of weaklings” and the ethics of compassion which these “weak ones” demand (for themselves, for good reasons) rather than practising it themselves. And soon after Nietzsche pronounces one of his most monstrous statements (“The weak and the failed shall go under: first maxim of our love of humanity”), we read, “Nothing is more unhealthy in the midst of our unhealthy modernity than Christian compassion. To be a physician here, to be merciless here, to wield the knife here — that is part of us, that is our love of humanity, with this we are philosophers, we Hyperboreans!” Hyperboreanism seems to be connected with a certain we, with the we of the philosophers. As if the position of this elementary singularity, the thinking of the essential solitude of the hyperborean subject could only be articulated through a kind of paradox or contradiction. As if one had to be in company to legitimize one’s solitude. We Hyperboreans also means: we, the community of those who are without community, without we-community. We solitary ones. We singularities. We who touch the limits of the Logos that represents the principle of the Western we-community. We who have fallen out of the we-cosmos. We who have separated from the universality of a transcendental community, from the habitable zone of transcendental we-subjectivity. We homeless ones. We arctic natures. We monsters who are in contact with the limits of what is familiar, habitual and habitable. We contact-subjects, we border-natures, we come up against this limit and accelerate beyond this limit. We uncanny ones or, as Heidegger also says, we homeless ones. We who are at home in being homeless in uncanny homelessness. We over-confident ones, we exaggerated ones. We are subjects of an always violent self-overcoming. Subjects of self-overwinding, of self-over-stimulation and self-unbounding. We who are who we are by betraying the idea of the we and our self through transgression. We traitors, we non-identical ones without a secured origin or future, we faceless ones, we should confront ourselves with ourselves by learning to look ourselves in the face. “Let us look ourselves in the face,” the first lines of The Anti-Christ demand, “we are Hyperboreans, — we know well enough how far removed we live. ‘Neither by land, nor by sea will you find the way to the Hyperboreans’, that is what Pindar already knew about us. Beyond the North, the ice, beyond death — our life, our happiness … we have discovered happiness, we know the way, we found the way out of all the millennia of the labyrinth.” The hyperborean subject is the hyperbolic subject of self-transgression and self-surpassing toward an absolute exterior that is Uninhabitability itself, Chaos, Incommensurability as such. It is the subject of a non-identity-building self-assertion, subject of failed anamnesis, of transcendental non-recognizability, subject without name, without memory, without teleological inscription, subject of transcendental facelessness — barbaric subject. Barbarians touch chaos. The barbarian has the aggressiveness and uncompromisingness of the inventor ahead of his time who denies what lies in the past and what is only present, in order to enable something new for which the reason of the times, sound common-sense and moral considerations (mostly they are indistinguishable) are lacking an eye, imagination, language, courage and decisiveness. “Among the great creators there have always been the relentless ones who to start with made a clean slate.” To start again from the beginning, the barbarians have to leave behind what is old. They have to hazard a kind of risky forgetfulness, active and self-assured amnesia. “Just as the one who acts, according to Goethe’s expression, is always without a conscience, he is also without knowledge; he forgets almost everything to do one thing; he is unjust against what lies behind him and knows only one right, the right of that which now should become.” Barbarians try to rejuvenate humankind. They want to renew it in the spirit of an uncertain future. The “new task” of the “new barbarians” is “to create a new locus in a non-locus, to construct ontologically new determinations of human being, of life — a powerful artificiality of being”. Like Benjamin’s destructive character, they must themselves be “young and cheerful”. The cheerfulness liberates the barbarian from the burden of the past. It gives him the lightness of birds. Barbarians can only be cheerful and confident like aeronauts. They throw themselves toward the sun like Icarus who, acting crazy at the moment of flight, already on high, suddenly flies higher, increasing the hubris by starting to soar even higher. The barbarian does not seek the protection of the clouds. He denies himself this protection. Instead of staying on the ground administering his treasures, he rushes away from the earth. He cuts himself off from it, to pass through a space that lies beyond his possibilities and beyond what is reasonable. The barbarian has to leave the universe of reason in order to go through unheard-of, unbearable and improbable experiences. He must make contact with chaos.