Nietzsche and self-criticism

Nietzsche's "Attempt at Self-Criticism" in The Birth of Tragedy is hailed by innumerable commentators as the self-criticism to end all self-criticisms. But I'd say that the criticism isn't, on the one hand, something that should be simply admired because it is self-criticism taken to the nth level (some simply love to see a thinker destroy themselves), or, on the other, something that should be seen as foreign to the task that Nietzsche is setting himself in August of 1886. To condense these two poles into one formula: one should not read Nietzsche's self-criticism unless one gives enough weight to the fact that it is an attempt. "Versuch einer Selbstkritik:" this is a title that designates a sort of seeking out of the right way to look at oneself--and if one gives proper weight to Nietzsche's theses about the perspectival nature of our relation to things and the world's relation to itself, this search becomes much more problematic. It becomes a way that I would say is only definitively found on the brink of madness and already in the most insane language (extreme irony, extreme hubris, the elevation of the attempt itself to the form of a science), in that other amazing self-critique taking the form of a beholding of the man in Nietzsche, Ecce Homo.
Thus, one can't take it as the prescription of a particular hermeneutic enterprise, which is precisely what you would look to it (like the "pessimists" who flocked to the book upon its release) to find. One wants Nietzsche to specify a relation to himself, thereby disclosing, in a sense, how one can see oneself, how a self is constituted--and in practice, for one is suspicious about Nietzsche's theories about this self (thus mistakenly assuming that Nietzsche's statements in places like Beyond Good and Evil and especially--this is Heidegger's supreme error--in The Will to Power, constitute a theory, and that, in other spheres, they don't). And though a sort of relation to himself is established in this self-criticism, I would suggest that it would be a misunderstanding to take it as prescribing this act as a hermeneutic, as so many do when they admirably look at the extreme immolation to which Nietzsche submits his own work.
And not only because it is merely an attempt--that is, not carried out well enough. This is also because it is not a purely destructive effort: Nietzsche localizes the main fulcrums of the text, extracts what he finds are most useful, and cautions that the other parts may distract one from seeing these more crucial parts. This is because the task of self-criticism is precisely that of subtracting, as it were, the anthropological--not destroying it. The point is to erase it and move on, not to glory in the subordination of a weaker opponent. For it is only through this act--a side-stepping of real conflict, of conflict qua suffering--that Nietzsche sees there being any possibility of power to assert itself. This is why he can confront Paul Ree in the Genealogy of Morals--and why it is not someone else, a mere straw-man, an empty figure against which Nietzsche would pretend to test his genius, only to ridicule the game itself.
All this is too slavish. This bears repeating or elucidating: the sidestepping of the conflict in which one would belittle one's opponent, precisely in order to appropriate exactly that amount of him which shows itself as able to be appropriated--this is the quintessential Nietzschian task. And it is the task of any self-criticism, where this opponent would simply be one's prior self. What this means is that there in a sense is no self pitted against self, no future self against a past self, because neither is a total self--there is only a relation between the two in which parts, forces, can be appropriated. No doubt Nietzsche also lost something by attempting the self-criticism: it is wholly possible that he did. But the main point--that I've hit on already--is that this is a conflict without suffering, two opponents that also are friends. Without suffering: this means that one doesn't appropriate such that one shames--any shaming will be a result of the appropriation, will appear afterwards only because of the subtraction of the inadequate, of what is criticized. And indeed, the ability to do this is precisely the art of tragedy itself which Nietzsche is trying to specify in The Birth of Tragedy--as he says in his writing on the book in Ecce Homo:

die höchste Kunst im Jasagen zum Leben, die Tragödie, wird wiedergeboren werden, wenn die Menschheit das Bewusstsein der härtesten, aber nothwendigsten Kriege hinter sich hat, ohne daran zu leiden.

The highest art in saying Yes to life, tragedy, will be reborn when humanity has weathered the consciousness of the hardest but most necessary wars without suffering from it.

The "war" Nietzsche refers to is precisely that of saying No to oneself, to deny life in order to affirm it, to say Yes to it. And it is in this sense that he criticizes himself: "Nein, drei Mal nein!" he says to himself in one portion of the criticism, repeating it over and over. Indeed, the virulence of passages like this would lead one to say that the whole thing, in fact, is a great No to the work of 1871--but, one would immediately have to add, it is only a No that attempts to say Yes in its own way. To make my minor point too quickly, it is the struggle to lie while saying no, especially to the pessimists to which it is addressed, so that one actually affirms life in this negation--not through the negation, but by sidestepping any negation that would merely destroy, that would not overcome: is this not the greatest lie? And is it not this lie precisely, then, what Nietzsche is attempting? We shouldn't then be surprised--much less be in reverential awe that reduces it to a boring masochism passing for a signal of rigor a la Derrida (who is more and less Nietzschian, perhaps, than we might think--we shouldn't then be surprised at the force with which Nietzsche denies himself, criticizes himself. It is precisely to make the attempt qua attempt more pressing.
In the end, this is why the "Attempt at Self-Criticism" is the most fitting introduction to the book: not because it shows how one looks back at a work and castigates oneself for writing such drivel--as so many self-loathing critics would want it to be--but how one, in the act of reflecting, forgets that drivel by appropriating (or rather, since the success of this side-step is not guaranteed, by attempting to appropriate) what is valuable in it.