Genealogy Between Health and Illness: On the Ambiguity of the Historical Sense in Foucault's 1969–1970 Vincennes Lectures on Nietzsche

"Beyond Good and Evil" is a concise and comprehensive statement of Nietzsche's mature philosophy and is an ideal entry point into Nietzsche's work as a whole. Pithy, lyrical and densely complex, "Beyond Good and Evil" demands that its readers are already familiar with key Nietzschean concepts - such as the will-to-power, perspectivism or eternal recurrence - and are able to leap with Nietzschean agility from topic to topic, across metaphysics, psychology, religion, morality and politics. "Reading Nietzsche" explains the key concepts, the range of Nietzsche's concerns, and highlights Nietzsche's writing strategies that are the key to understanding his work and processes of thought. In its close analysis of the text, "Reading Nietzsche" reassesses this most creative of philosophers and presents a significant contribution to the study of his thought. In setting this analysis within a comprehensive survey of Nietzsche's ideas, the book is a guide both to this key work and to Nietzsche's philosophy more generally.

Nietzsche's Therapeutic Teaching: For Individuals and Culture

Nietzsche's Metaphilosophy: The Nature, Method, and Aims of Philosophy

Reviewed by: Kontroversen um Nietzsche: Untersuchungen zur theologischen Rezeption Martin Liebscher Peter Köster . Kontroversen um Nietzsche: Untersuchungen zur theologischen Rezeption [Controversies around Nietzsche: Studies on the Theological Reception]. Zurich: Theologischer Verlag Zürich, 2003. 384 pp. ISBN 3–290-17277–5. In the introduction to the first volume of his Apokalypse der Deutschen Seele (1937–39), Hans Urs von Balthasar coins the phrase "Dionysos and the Crucified," consciously replacing Nietzsche's "versus" from Ecce Homo with "and." According to Balthasar, there is no difference between the world of Dionysos and the Christian world—the Dionysian reduced to its foundations shares common ground with Christianity. Thus, Balthasar's line of argumentation follows a fairly common theological reaction to Nietzsche's critique of religion. He simply appropriates the content of the critique for the purposes of the theological interpretation. When Balthasar's studies were reprinted in 1998, Peter Köster objected to this attempt to re-Christianize Nietzsche. Calling upon the likes of Franz Overbeck, Köster claims that Christian theologians like Balthasar have not been able to cope with Nietzsche's uncompromising atheism, an atheism that denies the possibility of returning to Christianity. Rather than trying to appropriate Nietzsche's thought for their own purposes, Köster thinks that theologians should simply confront the radical challenge that his thought presents. Köster's critique of the Apokalypse der deutschen Seele has now been republished in a collection of his articles that bear witness to his lifelong encounter with the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. His critical review of Balthasar's work exemplifies Köster's approach to Nietzsche, one that he describes as persistently posing fundamental questions to the philosopher from a theological point of view. The eight articles from 1972 to 2000 found in Kontroversen um Nietzsche: Untersuchungen zur theologischen Rezeption reflect Köster's attempt to persuade theologians to accept, on the one hand, the "anti-Christian" antagonism found in Nietzsche's work and, on the other, to appreciate the deeply spiritual-practical confrontation. The title of the volume is well chosen. It emphasizes the way in which Köster's persistent questioning of Nietzsche's philosophy puts him at the center of a number of crucial debates in both the theological and the philosophical reception of Nietzsche's work. In raising doubts about all-too-comfortable and seductive interpretations, he seeks to clarify the assumptions of the interpreters he examines and, in so doing, he sharpens their respective points of view. Moreover, by critically engaging with the work of opponents such as Martin Heidegger, Eugen Biser, and Wolfgang Müller-Lauter, Köster affords himself the opportunity to develop and unpack his own rendering of Nietzsche's thought. One of the cornerstones of Köster's interpretation is his insistence that Nietzsche's work constitutes a unified whole. Thus, he rejects those interpretations that posited an inner, even constitutive contradiction in Nietzsche's philosophy. This, however, was not a very popular position to take at the beginning of the 1970s. When he published his article, "Die Renaissance des Tragischen," in 1972, the work of interpreters such as Karl Jaspers, who placed contradiction at the center of Nietzsche's thought, and of Martin Heidegger still dominated Nietzschean scholarship. To present [End Page 71] his case in the aforementioned article, Köster contrasts his own reading of Nietzsche with Heidegger's position, highlighting the continuities in Nietzsche's philosophy from his early writings to his 1888 works. As is well known, Heidegger based his interpretation of Nietzsche's philosophy primarily on the Nachlaß fragments from the late 1880s and, as a result, demoted Nietzsche's published works to mere Vordergrund, which naturally led to the virtual exclusion of The Birth of Tragedy from Heidegger's reading. Köster, however, adamantly rejects this view, and he tries to show that the decisive questions of Nietzsche's philosophy, ones that remained consistent throughout his productive career, had already been formulated in his first work. More specifically, he maintained that the philosophical issues found in both the early and the late Nietzsche could be expressed in one word, "Dionysos." In contrast to Köster, Heidegger argued that there were significant differences between the...

Nietzsches Wissenschaftsphilosophie: Hintergründe, Wirkungen und Aktualität

The Problem of Affective Nihilism in Nietzsche: Thinking Differently, Feeling Differently

Reviewed by: Nietzsche's Philosophy of Religion Rebecca Bamford Julian Young . Nietzsche's Philosophy of Religion. Cambridge-New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Pp. xii + 230. Paper, $29.99. Readers might be forgiven raised eyebrows on first noting the title of Julian Young's book. Young's chief and surprising claim is that, even though Nietzsche "rejects the God of [End Page 488] Christianity, he is not anti-religious," and that he is "above all a religious thinker" (201), whose atheism only applies in the case of the Christian God (2), and whose early "religious communitarianism" or "Wagnerianism" persist throughout the texts (1). Young defines Nietzsche's early thought as communitarian by virtue of concern with the flourishing of the community as a whole, and as religious given Nietzsche's view that a people cannot flourish or indeed truly be a community without a "festive, communal" religion (1). Nietzsche is seen as broadly in step with the anti-modernist tradition of "Volkish" thinking in nineteenth-century Germany, but as rejecting "genuinely wicked" aspects of Volkish thinking that might prompt his identification as the "godfather of Nazism" (201–02). While tempting even to Young himself, however, his discussion of Nietzsche cannot simply be summarized by the Heideggerian "slogan" that only a god can save us (179). Young's argument rests, to a significant extent, on the strength of his reading of Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy, where Nietzsche's religious communitarianism is rightly taken to emerge, via two of his key Schopenhauerianisms (pessimism, and the distinction between the metaphysically real and dreamlike appearances), as the solution to the problem of nihilism posed by the myth-lessness of modern culture (32–33, 179). Symptoms of myth-lessness include a loss of cultural unity and community, and the agitated quest for meaning in the face of death (14–15, 29, 32). Nietzsche's solution crystallizes in his call for a modern replacement of the role played by religious myth, "tragic myth and the tragic festival," for the Greeks (33). Nietzsche's acceptance of the Christian God's death, which Young's reading—rightly, in my opinion—identifies even as early as The Birth of Tragedy, is therefore no celebration of the disappearance of religion from our culture: it is a call for a religious revival to reinvigorate our culture (32–33, 210). Tracing this path through Nietzsche's subsequent writings in a manner familiar to readers of his Nietzsche's Philosophy of Art (1992), Young links his claim for Nietzsche as religious communitarian with an argument against previous individualist interpretations of Nietzsche either as having little to say of communal life because it is not his "department," or as seeing the proper role of society as a "support-system" for the "production of übermenschlich types" (2–3). Nietzsche, Young suggests, is far more concerned with the flourishing of the community than of the individual: his religious communitarianism prompts his cosmopolitanism, global cultural community transporting us beyond "national cultures of earlier times and the age of comparisons" (82). The objection that communitarianism is incompatible with cosmopolitanism is countered by an appeal to Nietzsche's definition of human greatness, in section 212 of Beyond Good and Evil, as a unity, or wholeness, in multiplicity (214–15). Supporting evidence for compatibility is garnered from Nietzsche's admiring remarks on the unifying power of the medieval Church as a ruling structure, for instance in the third essay of the Untimely Meditations, and in section 358, book five of The Gay Science (44, 98–99, 214–15)—though tantalizing mentions of J. M. Coetzee's affinity with Nietzsche's view of Christianity as a long aberration (100), of the works of contemporaries such as Cecil Rhodes and Robert Baden-Powell (128), and of the notion of synthesis between West and East (144), hint at unresolved questions concerning the contemporary meaning and status of global "good Europeanism" with respect to (post-) colonial cultural flourishing. Young's discussion also re-opens the case for attending to continuities across Nietzsche's texts. However, while he argues effectively for Nietzsche's religious communitarianism as continuous, he is less comfortable in tracing continuity through Thus Spoke Zarathustra. His discomfort at the "aberration...

Beyond Good and Evil is one of the classics of western philosophy. Pithy, lyrical and densely complex, it demands that its readers are already familiar with key Nietzschean concepts – such as the will-to-power, perspectivism or eternal recurrence – and are able to leap with Nietzschean agility from topic to topic, across metaphysics, psychology, religion, morality and politics. As a concise and comprehensive statement of Nietzsche's mature philosophy, it has served many readers as the point of entry into Nietzsche's work as a whole. Reading Nietzsche is an authoritative, insightful and detailed examination of this landmark text. It explains the central concepts, the range of Nietzsche's concerns, and highlights Nietzsche's writing strategies that are key to understanding his work and his processes of thought. In its close analysis of the text, Reading Nietzsche reassesses this most creative of philosophers and presents a significant contribution to the study of his thought. In setting this analysis within a comprehensive exposition of Nietzsche's ideas, the book serves as a guide both to Beyond Good and Evil and to Nietzsche's philosophy more generally.

Nietzsche's Revolution: Décadence, Politics, and Sexuality

The Use and Abuse of "Ursprung": On Foucault's Reading of Nietzsche

Nietzsche and the Metaphysics of the Tragic. By Nuno Nabais Metaphysics without Truth: On the Importance of Consistency within Nietzsche's Philosophy. By Stefan Lorenz Sorgner

Far from discouraged by the proliferation of controversies over the last half-century of Nietzsche scholarship, Peter Sloterdijk considers Nietzsche's ability to elude definitive interpretation to be evidence of his status as a classic (Peter Sloterdijk, Thinker on Stage: Nietzsche's Materialism, trans. Jamie Owen Daniel [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989], 3). Consequently, Sloterdijk does not attempt to resolve exegetical difficulties within Nietzsche's thought, but argues that such Nietzschean impasses remain relevant today. To this end, his most recent work, Nietzsche Apostle, draws from Nietzsche's critiques of the bad conscience and ressentiment underpinning Christian metaphysics and morality to propose an understanding of language as intrinsically narcissistic. For Sloterdijk, Nietzsche's view of language as self-laudatory by nature, as well as his belief that this eulogistic function should celebrate rather than diminish the individual, is expressed in his grandiloquent style. Far from being inconsequential, these moments of self-praise express a renewed individualism central to Nietzsche's legacy. Enthymematic reliance on his earlier account of subjectivity as torn between Apollonian and Dionysian drives allows Sloterdijk to conclude his book by gesturing beyond egoism toward “hetero-narcissism”—that is, a passionate pursuit of what is other within the self. However, how “hetero-narcissism” informs our approach to Nietzsche's texts and what it means for Nietzsche's philosophy of language remain unaddressed.In his introduction, Sloterdijk describes “the event-Nietzsche as a catastrophe in the history of language” (9). Overturning the Christian approach to “the Word,” Nietzsche reveals the narcissism intrinsic to discourse. This is central to Sloterdijk's account: whether we translate the Gospel or criticize ourselves, “language says one and the same thing over and again: that nothing better could have happened to the speaker than, precisely, to have been who he is … at this place and in this language” (9). Herein lies Nietzsche's distinctiveness. From ideological critique to analytic philosophy, from discourse theory and psychoanalysis to deconstruction and theories of encounter, contemporary examinations of discourse often understand language as a distortive medium signifying a symptomatic lack (11–12). For Nietzsche, by contrast, language is inescapably affirmative and creative vis-à-vis the self.The book's first chapter sketches an evolution of narcissistic discourse within Christianity. Initially, languages are media for God's unending self-praise. With the rise of monarchies, this self-laudatory function is redirected so that national languages express the crown's divine right. For example, the ninth-century poet-priest Otfrid von Weißenburg translates the Good News into French, securing “an effective link … between the veneration of God and the poetics of Empire” (15). Similarly, Thomas Jefferson later undertakes Gospel-redaction to clarify the divine heritage of neo-humanism. Regardless of dialect, every use of language affirms the speaker, albeit to different degrees based on the speaker's philosophical presuppositions. Under humanist notions of equality, for example, “the strategy of indirect self-celebration in high culture hits the investor with ever greater costs and diminishing narcissistic returns” (26). Opposing such humanism, Sloterdijk returns to Nietzsche's treatment of language.In chapter 2, Sloterdijk reads Zarathustra as a fifth gospel, aimed at preserving the link between the speaking subject and language's eulogistic function against the threat of Enlightenment humanism and cultivated Protestantism to sever this link by insisting on self-depreciation. By critiquing the insidious self-praise of Christianity, poisoned by the metaphysical outlook born of ressentiment, Nietzsche lays bare language's eulogistic function. The cost of this evangelism favoring the self is a repudiation of all life-serving illusions to the point of “unlivable disillusionment” (39). If Nietzsche's self-praise is not an individual pathology, but the mark of a historical rupture, the same holds for his descent into madness, which Sloterdijk views as an unavoidable risk posed by such a disillusioned life. Although the Übermensch represents someone capable of enduring Nietzsche's challenge without profound despair, Sloterdijk considers this a fool's wager (41–43)—a pessimism that extends to Sloterdijk's broader view of the contemporary world, as he considers Nietzsche “the paradigmatic thinker of modernity” (43).Nietzsche Apostle's third chapter places language's eulogistic function and its capacity for self-praise in the context of the debt of bad conscience and the promises of master morality. Sloterdijk argues that academics who tone down Nietzsche's grandiloquent passages not only overlook the way ressentiment and bad conscience inform the contemporary decorum of authors, but also forsake the reward offered by Nietzsche's challenge, that is, the chance to make oneself noble through the promise of self-praise. Of course, praise alone is not enough. Nietzsche insists we become distinguished, thereby earning the right to make promises about and to ourselves (52–53). By offering his readers the ability to make themselves noble, Nietzsche escapes the traditional economy of giving and its concomitant sense of debt. For Sloterdijk, this nobility escapes from ressentiment and the closed economy of indebtedness through active generosity toward the future (58). Such wealth “is necessarily not worth acquiring unless with a view to being able to squander it” (59). Applied at a textual level, this results in a hermeneutic openness that “is a spring of pluralism beyond all expectations of unity” (62). Such textual openness transforms the dissensus within Nietzsche scholarship: failure to secure the monopoly of meaning motivated by ressentiment is simply the inverse of Nietzsche's wealth and his fulfilled promise to become dynamite.The final chapter of Nietzsche Apostle evaluates a brand of individualism as Nietzsche's continuing legacy. Again, Sloterdijk takes Nietzsche to be not merely an egotistical individual, but an embodiment of “a type of human being … able to individualize counter to its ‘societal preconditions’” (66). The plasticity of individualism facilitates endless permutations with various ideologies, moralities, and lifestyles. Unfortunately, this malleability, coupled with Nietzsche's hermeneutic generosity, also enables misappropriation. Sloterdijk accordingly criticizes the National Socialist adaptation of Nietzsche, partially for redacting Nietzsche's message, partially for conflating mass society and individualism, and largely for advocating a politics of ressentiment (69–72). Those unfamiliar with Sloterdijk's earlier work, Thinker on Stage: Nietzsche's Materialism, will find Nietzsche Apostle's conclusion wanting. Sloterdijk's insistence that Apollonian individualism takes priority over Nietzsche's Dionysianism (78) as well as his view that the will to power is a dead end reliant on a refuted notion of volition (82) are specious absent additional context. This also holds for Sloterdijk's closing proposal of ‘hetero-narcissism,’ wherein “what [Nietzsche] ultimately affirms in himself are the othernesses which gather in him and make him up like a composition” (81). Although this account of “hetero-narcissism” attempts to rebut the charge that narcissism has no positive relationship to otherness, precisely by internalizing such otherness as the center of the self such an account assumes an understanding of the subject as fractured and opaque. Each of these themes—Apollonian individualism, the rejection of the will to power, and the depiction of subjectivity as intrinsically fractured—thus requires the reader to turn to Thinker on Stage for substantiation.Nietzsche Apostle advances a stimulating take on Nietzsche's philosophy of language capable of shedding light on the textual conditions for contention within Nietzsche studies, even if it does not clarify a particular debate within such scholarship. However, this only exacerbates the disappointment of Sloterdijk's complete neglect of other interpretations of Nietzsche. In particular, it is difficult not to hear resonances of the French reception of Nietzsche in Sloterdijk, such as Bataille's, Cixous's, and Derrida's discussions of economics and expenditure, Deleuze's treatment of being swept up in an active force guided toward the future, or Foucault's analysis of the author function. Sloterdijk's surprising celebration of Emerson would similarly benefit from engaging Anglo-American interpretations of Nietzsche (77). Granted, this lack of engagement with extant Nietzsche scholarship is more understandable if Sloterdijk merely intends to use Nietzsche, rather than interpret him. However, his insistence that we must not redact Nietzsche (48) as well as his criticism of particular appropriations of Nietzsche suggest that Sloterdijk himself is offering an interpretation of Nietzsche, not just a use of his thought (69–73). And yet, Sloterdijk seems to allow disparate uses of Nietzsche––provided we interpret him correctly––thereby raising an ambiguity concerning the way hetero-narcissism implicates textual approaches to Nietzsche.Academically, Nietzsche Apostle is less than rigorous. Sloterdijk admittedly questions notions of academic decorum and proper readings. Nonetheless, further substantiation from Nietzsche's own texts would make his work stronger. This is especially true of Sloterdijk's discussion of ressentiment, bad conscience, debt, and promises, which lacks any references to GM. One might maintain that Nietzsche Apostle is a playful foray into the space opened by Thinker on Stage, but this Pyrrhic victory concedes that nearly every significant aspect of the former is better addressed by the latter. (For a discussion of classics as resisting interpretation, see Thinker on Stage, p. 3; for a discussion of Nietzsche's bombastic rhetoric, pp. 10, 19, 48–49; for an explanation of the negative value of Nietzsche's project, pp. 16–17; for the prioritization of the Apollonian over the Dionysian, p. 25; and on thought as a physical force expressed in language, pp. 63, 65–69.) What is more, the absence of any reference to Thinker on Stage, or to the physicalist take on the philosophy of language it advances, suggests it may be overly generous even to read Nietzsche Apostle as an afterword to Sloterdijk's earlier work.More significantly, Sloterdijk's irreverence for academic conventions as well as his ambiguity concerning whether his work is interpretive or experimental make his pessimistic reading of Nietzsche suspicious. Though disguised as praise for Nietzsche's critical force, which makes life unbearably disillusioned, Sloterdijk's negativity seems pathological in light of his view of Nietzsche's textual openness. Why do the work necessary to preserve narcissism while moving beyond traditional notions of the subject, only to dismiss the Übermensch out of hand as an unattainable ideal? The Übermensch could be a moment where egoism is overcome by hetero-narcissism, an expression of Nietzsche's hope in the future, or the height of the Apollonian illusion of individualism necessary to ward off unendurable Dionysianism. Readily apparent counterinterpretations such as these deserve warranted refutation, rather than neglect or merely implicit dismissal.Similarly, Sloterdijk's passing remark toward the end of Nietzsche Apostle that “there is no will, and therefore no will to power” cannot but disappoint Nietzsche scholars (82). In Thinker on Stage, Sloterdijk dismisses The Will to Power as a work compiled by Elizabeth, before arguing that “the tenets of the will to power represent positive versions––as dubious as they are desperate––of the negative model … in The Birth of Tragedy” according to which art is merely a flight from the unbearable (45). Sloterdijk then describes the will to power as “Nietzsche's most serious psychological and philosophical error” (47), since some faculty—namely, strength—“must precede any volition” (46). Even if this context is granted, however, Sloterdijk still fails to address those who place the will to power closer to Nietzsche's theory of drives that operate beneath the volitional subject (cf. BGE 36) as a heterogeneous multiplicity (cf. D 119). As these nonvolitional explanations of the will to power appear consistent with Thinker on Stage's physicalist account of language as strength expressed discursively, as well as with Nietzsche Apostle's expansion of this view, explicit refutation of such interpretations would strengthen Sloterdijk's analysis.Nietzsche Apostle is as interesting as it is provocative and, if judged by the modest measure of demonstrating Nietzsche's continued relevance, it is certainly successful. For those already convinced of this relevance, however, it only inspires a desire for a more thorough treatment of Nietzsche's philosophy of language. Nonetheless, Sloterdijk's irreverent and original work is a welcome departure from apologetic readings of Nietzsche's pomp. Nietzsche Apostle insightfully accounts for Nietzsche's grandiloquence by applying his critiques of ressentiment and bad conscience to his philosophy of language, so as to provide a compelling account of self-authorship that promotes individualism while remaining open toward otherness.

In this extraordinary contribution to Nietzsche studies, Alejandro offers an original interpretation of Friedrich Nietzsche's philosophy viewed as a complete whole. Alejandro painstakingly traces the different ways in which Nietzsche reconfigured and shifted his analyses of morality and of the human condition, until he was content with the final result: nothing was dispensable; everything was necessary. is a philosophy of reconciliation--hardly nihilism--and it is a perspective that is not adequately addressed elsewhere in the literature on Nietzsche. Alejandro traces the evolution of Nietzsche's thought by identifying the different layers of his philosophy, expressed in a complex array of stories and historical narratives. Alejandro analyzes the different stories of Nietzsche, places those stories within a tradition of genealogical theorizing, and interprets both the stories and the genealogy in terms of one of Nietzsche's unique features, his use of historiobiography. According to Alejandro, historiobiography blends the idea of an attunement with all history and one's awareness of this attunement. As a mode of philosophizing, historiobiography allows Nietzsche to view all human history as if it runs through his own life and thoughts. Alejandro argues that Nietzsche deployed three strategies to find relief from his sense of the meaninglessness of life: his magnified concept of what he himself represented in human history, his doctrine of the eternal recurrence, and his philosophy of reconciliation. am confident that this book will be considered essential reading for any scholar doing serious research into Nietzsche's thought and its implications. . . . The author carefully traces the shifts and turns and occasionally the contradictions and dead-ends in the development of Nietzsche's major themes. I have never read an account of Nietzsche's thought as fully and convincingly supported by textual reference as this book. Others will disagree with the author's readings of Nietzsche, that is the nature of scholarship, but I cannot see how they could be ignored. --Edward Portis, Texas A & M University This is a major work on Nietzsche. Alejandro offers us a reading of Nietzsche's Herculean efforts that Nietzsche scholars and scholars who write about modernity and postmodernity will be unable to ignore. wide ranging and deep book addresses major issues in cultural history, psychoanalysis, cultural anthropology, and the vast literature on modernity and secularization. I expect this to be a book that generates debate and discussion for years to come. --Robert Hollinger, Iowa State University Robert Alejandro delivers a rich, lively account of Nietzsche's quest for meaning. By focusing on the theme of historiobiography, Alejandro illuminates Nietzsche's bold attempt to place himself at the center of a comprehensive account of the rise and fall of Western civilization. A thoughtful, well-crafted book, written very much in the spirit of Nietzsche himself. --Daniel Conway, Texas A & M University

Open Letter to Bret Davis: Letter on Egoism: Will to Power as Interpretation

This essay is an attempt to think of dancing per se as a mode of improvisation. It draws on Nietzschean philosophy as a means to conceive of dance as a dynamic flux, made up of a multiplicity of forces. Improvisation ensues from the selection of these forces and their consequent corporeal becoming. What follows is a reading of Nietzsche’s work in terms of force and the will to power, which also draws on Deleuze’s engagement with Nietzschean philosophy. Improvisation is posed in these terms, as an encounter with chance that offers and produces the force of the future.