I am responding to George Shulman’s letters on Nietzsche and on prophecy. I do so by offering some thoughts on Nietzsche’s prophet, Zarathustra. In addition to considering Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra in light of Shulman’s “Political Theology” seminar, I also take illumination from Shulman’s American Prophecy: Race and Redemption in American Political Culture (2008).

I am interested in this sense of the ordinary, ongoing strike. This humble strike—not necessarily modest but rather close to the ground—could involve a politics of refusal and boycott, where those terms could be understood not only as negatives, but also as holding space for a new international community, and thus connecting explicitly something already connected or entangled in practice.