Nietzsche and the Feminine

Abstract

You are going to women? do not forget whip! This admonition, from Thus Spoke Zarathustra, may be most notoriously misogynistic line in all literature and philosophy. It is also only one of many denigrations of women in work of philosopher who has most influenced our century: Friedrich Nietasche. But while Freud's disturbing pronouncements on demininity have received sustained attention, studies of place of in Nietzsche's work are still few and far between. This volume has brought together new studies by outstanding scholars in philosophy, feminism, comparative literature, and German studies, including Sarah Kofman, Luce Irigaray, Benjamin Bennett, Laurence Rickels, Susan Bernstein, and David Farrell Krell. It has been easy to label a misogynist and leave it at that, but to do so is to ignore problem. For Nietzsche's statements about women are not invariably reprehensible; there are other less misogynistic and even sympathetic comments, and many of reprehensible lines themselves occur in contexts that shed a rather different light on them. and feminine, as Burgard demonstrates in his introduction, is a problem of great complexity, and it is this complexity that contributors to volume set into play. Addressing Nietzsche's work in its own context as well as in conjunction with work of contemporary theorists (Cixous, Derrida, Kristeva, and others), their essays reveal central importance of this aspect of his philosophy. Collectively, essays disclose irreducibly ambivalent position of in that philosophy and raise question of whether Nietzsche's treatment of women amounts to kind of essentialization of femininity that a phrase like the feminine suggests. By offering multiple perspectives on perspective on of this philosopher of perspectivism, by refusing either to dismiss, ignore, or excuse his misogyny, Nietzsche and Feminine provides an appropriate response to Nietzsche's excessive articulations of feminine. This book should be of interest to scholars and students in women's studies, philosophy, literary theory, comparative literature, and German studies, as well as to any readers concerned with backgrounds of twentieth-century culture.