We’d Jump the Life to Come: TAZ versus Patchwork in the Political Afterlives of Friedrich Nietzsche

When Shakespeare’s Macbeth fantasizes about “jumping the life to come,” he voices a temptation that continues to animate modern theories of sovereignty: the dream of securing the future by collapsing time itself. The political afterlives of Friedrich Nietzsche reveal divergent responses to this impulse. Neoreactionary political theory—most notably in the Patchwork model proposed by Curtis Yarvin—draws upon Nietzsche’s language of hierarchy and the Übermensch while detaching it from the temporal ontology that grounds it: the doctrine of eternal recurrence. In Yarvin’s neocameralist vision, sovereignty becomes a project of security and futurist stabilization, seeking to eliminate contingency through technocratic monarchy. By contrast, the anarchist esotericism of Peter Lamborn Wilson retains Nietzsche’s Dionysian temporality and its yea-saying. Wilson’s concept of the Temporary Autonomous Zone imagines sovereignty as fleeting, ecstatic rupture—carnival time rather than fortified permanence. Juxtaposing these interpretations reveals that there is more than one way to play the King.