Nietzsche's Conception Research Articles

Texturen des Denkens: Nietzsches Inszenierung der Philosophie in “Jenseits von Gut und Böse.”

Texturen des Denkens: Nietzsches Inszenierung der Philosophie in “Jenseits von Gut und Böse.”

Naturalism, Causality, and Nietzsche's Conception of Science

ABSTRACT There is a disagreement over how to understand Nietzsche's view of science. According to what I call the Negative View, Nietzsche thinks science should be reconceived or superseded by another discourse, such as art, because it is nihilistic. By contrast, what I call the Positive View holds that Nietzsche does not think science is nihilistic, so he denies that it should be reinterpreted or overcome. Interestingly, defenders of each position can appeal to Nietzsche's understanding of naturalism to support their interpretation. I argue that Nietzsche embraces a social constructivist conception of causality that renders his naturalism incompatible with the views of naturalism attributed to him by the two dominant readings.

“Der Faule Fleck des Kantischen Kriticismus”: Erscheinung und Ding an sich bei Nietzsche

“Der Faule Fleck des Kantischen Kriticismus”: Erscheinung und Ding an sich bei Nietzsche

Nietzsche, Selfhood, and the Limitations of the Transcendental Reading

AbstractThe Nietzschean conception of selfhood has been the subject of considerable debate in the Anglophone commentary. This debate has been focused on what Sebastian Gardner coined as ‘the lack of fit’ between Nietzsche’s theoretical and practical remarks on the self. There have been various attempts at a solution to the lack of fit and in this article we address one such solution, which we call the ‘transcendental reading’. We argue that the reading is right to highlight that Nietzschean selfhood risks elimination of first-person practical agency. We contend, however, that the reading limits our understanding of his critique of a strictly first-person conception of selfhood. This critique aims to reject a conception of the self as distinct from the drives. We finally suggest an alternative solution to the lack of fit that takes into account the concerns of the transcendental reading, but seeks to overcome its limitations.

The Re(d)active Force of the Transportation Security Administration

The Re(d)active Force of the Transportation Security Administration George F. McHendry Jr. (bio) It has been a decade since the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), originally part of the Department of Transportation and now part of the Department of Homeland Security, was created as a direct response to the 11 September 2001 attack against the United States. TSA has grown to a workforce of more than fifty thousand “security officers, aviation and surface inspectors, air marshals, intelligence analysts, multimodal transportation experts, and other dedicated professionals who protect the nation’s transportation systems so you and your family can travel safely.”1 TSA is a large organization that conducts searches of every passenger and their belongings. These searches are part of a collective performance, which Louise Amoore and Alexandra Hall argue, requires “focus on the intertwining of the sequential and the contingent, the mundane and the extraordinary within its workings and effects.”2 From checked bags and carry-on luggage to human bodies crossing the limen into secured areas of airports, TSA guards our border crossings. This Sisyphean task of perpetual (in)security has become a controversial project; TSA deploys increasingly invasive techniques. TSA has become the target of angry criticism focusing on its poor proficiency at detecting dangerous items3 and its record of passenger complaints regarding botched screenings, such as the accidental exposure of the breasts of an underage niece of a member of Congress.4 Yet, formal complaints are relatively rare, given the number of people traveling. In 2011, 0.001% of passengers complained about TSA techniques.5 However, the notoriety of individual incidents overshadows the small number of total complaints. For example, Scott MacFarlane’s aforementioned reporting about the niece of Rep. Ralph Hall sparked controversy despite being an isolated event.6 The discourse of and around airport (in)security highlights the simultaneously secretive and invasive nature of TSA. This essay is a critical reading of an improperly redacted, publicly released TSA document, [End Page 211] “Screening Management Standard Operating Procedures” (hereafter, “Screening Management”), dated 28 May 2008.7 A heavily redacted version of this document was released, but the redacted material was easily recovered by using computer software. Five TSA employees were disciplined, and a public controversy erupted over the competency of the agency.8 This artifact affords a rare opportunity to look into the way TSA documents its security procedures, and the artifact serves as an important archival TSA text. Paired with this analysis is a critical reading of images released by TSA that have been produced by its whole-body imagers. This analysis looks at both the photorealistic images and the current use of more cartoonlike images as a way of tracking TSA’s responsiveness to criticisms over the original lifelike quality of body images. The thread that ties the images and manual as artifacts together is their use of redaction to attempt to increase public transparency while simultaneously feeding a paranoiac discourse of (in)security. Redacted manuals and images provide an appearance of public oversight while simultaneously refusing to engage the public directly on open ground. The discourse of secrecy pervades even basic attempts at responding to controversy and public outcry. I use the concept of re(d)active force in this essay to map the simultaneous desire for secrecy and demands for transparency. For me, re(d)active force has a double meaning. Re(d)active force is a play on Nietzsche’s reactive forces in that TSA takes a reactionary posture to the abundance of insecurity post 9/11, and it recognizes TSA’s reactive posture to calls to release some information in the name of transparency while still redacting sensitive information—and failing. This essay unfolds in six remaining sections. First, I address the theoretical apparatus built into this essay, structured around the Deleuzian–Nietzschean concepts of active and reactive forces. Second, I address relevant literature on the ideological nature of airports. Third, I analyze an improperly redacted TSA training manual. Forth, I analyze images produced by TSA whole-body imagers. Fifth, I look at the role of resistance towards TSA based on its use of redaction in airport security checkpoints. Last, I draw implications and conclusions based on...

Die Funken des freien Geistes: Neuere Aufsätze zu Nietzsches Philosophie der Zukunft

Die Funken des freien Geistes: Neuere Aufsätze zu Nietzsches Philosophie der Zukunft

Nietzsche on Spiritual Illness and Its Promise

ABSTRACT This article reconstructs Nietzsche's conception of spiritual illness, especially as exhibited in various forms of the bad conscience, and asks what positive, ennobling potential Nietzsche finds in it. The relevant concept of spirit is arrived at by reconstructing Nietzsche's conception of life and then considering what reflexive life—life turned back against itself—would look like. It distinguishes four independent features of spiritual illness: the measureless drive to make oneself suffer, self-opacity (or mendaciousness), life denial, and a self-undermining dynamic in which life exhausts the sources of its own vitality. The article ends by considering various suggestions as to how these features of spiritual illness might also be preconditions of great spiritual health, including the preconditions for erecting new “ideals.”

A TRAJETÓRIA DO CONCEITO DE GENEALOGIA EM FOUCAULT (1971-1984)

In this paper I intend to consider the various inflexions through which passes the Nietzschean concept of genealogy in Michel Foucault’s work throughout the 1970s and 1980s. I wish to point out that the genealogical procedure is modified according to the addressed subject, i.e. it does not share the same theoretical and methodological assumptions when it is focusing (1) the rejection of the metaphysical notion of an essential origin; (2) the relationship of reciprocity between Knowledge and Power; (3) the project of transforming human life into a sort of work of art and, finally, (4) the developing of an idea of truth divorced from logical, epistemological or ontological parameters.

Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morality: A Critical Guide

Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morality: A Critical Guide

Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil: A Reader's Guide

Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil: A Reader's Guide

Beyond nursing nihilism, a Nietzschean transvaluation of neoliberal values

Like most goods-producing sectors in the West, modern health-care systems have been profoundly changed by globalization and the neoliberal policies that attend it. Since the 1970s, the role of the welfare state has been considerably reduced; funding and management of health systems have been subjected to wave upon wave of reorganization and assimilated to the private sector. At the same time, neoliberal policy has imposed the notion of patient empowerment, thus turning patients into consumers of health. The literature on nursing has accordingly reported on the significant repercussions on all aspects of the profession, from delivery of care and treatment, through training for new nurses, to legislated policy reforms regarding the role and responsibilities of modern nurses. In light of these developments, this paper analyses and theorizes about the way the injection of neoliberal policy is linked to and affects the practice of nursing. Drawing on a number of Nietzschean arguments, we begin with an exploration of the complex effects of neoliberalism, bureaucratization, and technocratization on the health system and the practice of nursing. Our main theoretical point here is that neoliberal policy engenders and promotes a neoliberal tide, which results in the conversion of the values that drive modern nursing practice. We then examine this tide in the light of Nietzsche's concepts. Starting with an analysis based on the ontology of the will to power, we show that nurses are dominated by neoliberal values embedded in technocratic and bureaucratic ideologies. Finally, we argue that the application of neoliberal policy constitutes a form of domestication from which one might potentially be freed through the Nietzschean concept of transvaluation of values. This transvaluation, as its freeing from some of the neoliberal tide, may be accomplished in accordance with a hierarchy of specific life-affirming values for nursing culture and practice.

Historical Sense as Vice and Virtue in Nietzsche's Reading of Emerson

ABSTRACT Nietzsche was an avid reader of Emerson's essays, and their influence is discernible from his earliest philosophical writings through to his final philosophical works. Nietzsche's copies of Emerson's books are covered with traces of his reading, from underlinings, exclamation marks, question marks, and dog-eared pages to numerous annotations and philosophical comments written in the margins. I use some of these to analyze the influence Emerson exerted on Nietzsche's conception of history and historiography. The two authors can be considered “twin souls” in that they both praised the strengthening effects of past greatness and, at the same time, opposed psychological subjugation or fanaticism. Nevertheless, they were not twin minds: Nietzsche rejected Emerson's metaphysical concept of an Oversoul and turned it into the ideal of a Dionysian soul, which aims at reliving the history of humanity in order to increase its power.

Funções regulativas em Kant e Nietzsche

A presença de Kant e possível influência na filosofia de Nietzsche é motivo de muita controvérsia. Se em seus primeiros escritos Nietzsche é claramente influenciado por Kant, os textos do período maduro não deixam perceber com clareza o teor do diálogo que neles se estabelece, uma vez que Nietzsche assume uma postura radical contra Kant. Essa postura esconde justamente que, em meio aos rompimentos diante do idealismo transcendental, Nietzsche permanece devedor de Kant. Um aspecto dessa dívida é a noção de ficção regulativa. Pretendemos, assim, mostrar, primeiramente, que a concepção de Nietzsche de que a falsidade de um juízo não constitui uma objeção contra ele é um traço decisivo de seu pensamento antidogmático e, em seguida, defender que esse antidogmatismo tem ascendência na concepção de Kant de princípios regulativos.

Futures We Live In: Quetelet and Nietzsche

Social and ethical concepts in Western modernity are marked by orientation toward the future. Two modes of such orientation can be distinguished: the orientation toward a future that is structured as continuous with the present, on the one hand, and the orientation toward a future that constitutes a break with every preceding time, on the other. As examples of these two modes of futurity in the nineteenth century, Quetelet's social statistics—a futurity continuous with the present—is discussed alongside Nietzsche's concept of the promise—a theorem of the discontinuous future event. Despite their opposition, both instances of futurity imply a constitutive reference to the other. This essay suggests that this mutual implication of the conflicting modes of futurity is essential for their modern theorization. The conflictual or even paradoxical intertwinement of continuous and discontinuous futurity appears as an irresolvable element in how the world in which we live is thought in modernity.

Nihilistisches Geschichtsdenken: Nietzsches perspektivische Genealogie

Nihilistisches Geschichtsdenken: Nietzsches perspektivische Genealogie

The Passions, Power, and Practical Philosophy: Spinoza and Nietzsche Contra the Stoics

ABSTRACT This article reviews the influence of Stoic thought on the development of Spinoza's and Nietzsche's ethics and suggests that although both philosophers follow the Stoics in conceiving of ethics as a therapeutic enterprise that aims at human freedom and flourishing, they part company with Stoicism in refusing to identify flourishing with freedom from the passions. In making this claim, I take issue with the standard view of Spinoza's ethics, according to which the passions figure exclusively as a source of unhappiness and bondage from which we must be liberated. I argue that, in fact, Spinoza anticipates Nietzsche and breaks with the Stoics in offering a more positive assessment of the role of passion in a flourishing life. The reading pursued here takes Spinoza's divergence from the Stoic account of the passions to be a consequence of his insistence on the immanence of human being in nature. I outline Spinoza's and Nietzsche's conception of immanence and suggest that it entails a common understanding of our nature as dynamic power or desire, which is simultaneously expressed as a capacity to act and be acted on, to affect and to be affected. The recognition of the complex relationship between passive and active power requires a revaluation of our vulnerability and openness to what can affect us and leads each philosopher to a consideration of the ways in which the passions might be made to support our striving to increase our power and to realize an essentially limited freedom and precarious flourishing.

Nietzsche and the Horror of Existence

Nietzsche and the Horror of Existence

Nietzsche, Einverleibung and the Politics of Immunity

According to the Italian philosopher Roberto Esposito, Einverleibung (incorporation or embodiment) is an immunzation device that offers a response to both life’s need for self-preservation and life’s need for cultivation. Esposito claims that with Nietzsche, the category of immunization has already been completely elaborated. This article addresses the problem of immunization in late modernity through an analysis of the Nietzschean conception of Einverleibung. Nietzsche recurs to two different semantics to understand the process of incorporation: on the one hand a semantics of appropriation according to which Einverleibung reflects a process of life through which ever more powerful wholes are constituted and preserved by the annihilating and excluding incorporation of the other; and, on the other hand, a semantics of creative transformation where Einverleibung is driven by a receiving and hospitable force, an openness to the other that furthers the pluralization and diversification of life. While the first logic of incorporation reflects the problem of the preservation of life by means of an immunization that carries with it all the dangers inherent to what Foucault refers to as thanatopolitics, Esposito raises the question of whether it is possible to preserve life by means of immunization without thereby destroying itself. This article argues that the idea of Einverleibung in Nietzsche understood as a creative transformation offers an answer to the question posed by Esposito. It moreover points to a different politics of immunity, where immunity does not name the including exclusion of the other, but the openness of life to the horizon of justice and community.

Charles Drummond and Carlos Baudelaire : an Encounter Over Urban Botany

Author(s): Chataignier Gadelha, Gustavo | Abstract: This text aims to entertain a dialogue with the modern pathos as evidenced by two poets, separated by eras but nevertheless close in their effort to understand the new experiences offered by life in big modern cities: Charles Baudelaire, in France, and Carlos Drummond de Andrade, in Brazil. Bearing in mind especially the writings of Walter Benjamin, for whom the transitory character of the present in vivid experience could liquefy individual expectations and models of uniqueness, we put forth the thesis that the verses of these poets are able to offer a privileged literary image - for both their newness and their beauty. Ultimately, Nietzsche's concept of eternal recurrence is called upon, as the reiteration of commodification and the modus vivendi bourgeois can lead to the emergence of a critical subjectivity which is therefore immanent.

PENSAMENTO-ACONTECIMENTO: ALGUMAS INCURSÕES A PARTIR DA EXPERIÊNCIA DA LINGUAGEM/ Event-thought: some incursions from the experience of language

This study discusses the issue of thought provided a political event, from the articulation of the legacy of Friedrich Nietzsche and Michel Foucault. First of all, explores the Nietzschean conception of event. After, evokes the Foucauldian studies on language and literary experience, especially about the conception of outside thought, from Maurice Blanchot. Questioning thought as operation of reflexivity, the work points to the political urgency in discuss the thought as differentiation potential.