Nietzsche and Philosophy

Nietzsche and Philosophy
Cover of the first edition
Author Gilles Deleuze
Original title Nietzsche et la philosophie
Translator Hugh Tomlinson
Country France
Language French
Subject Friedrich Nietzsche
Publisher Presses Universitaires de France, Columbia University Press
Publication date
 1962
Published in English
 1983
Media type Print (Hardcover and Paperback)
Pages 221 (Columbia University Press edition)
ISBN 0-231-05669-9 (English edition)

Nietzsche and Philosophy (French: Nietzsche et la philosophie) is a 1962 book about Friedrich Nietzsche by the philosopher Gilles Deleuze, in which the author treats Nietzsche as a systematically coherent philosopher, discussing concepts such as the will to power and the eternal return. Nietzsche and Philosophy is a celebrated and influential work. Its publication has been seen as a significant turning-point in French philosophy, which had previously given little consideration to Nietzsche as a serious philosopher.

Summary

Deleuze writes that the reception of Nietzsche's thought has involved two key issues, those of whether it helped to prepare the way for fascism, and whether it deserves to be considered philosophy. Deleuze, who compares Nietzsche to Baruch Spinoza, considers Nietzsche as one of the greatest philosophers of the 19th century, crediting him with altering "both the theory and the practice of philosophy." Deleuze argues that Nietzsche's concepts, such as the will to power and the eternal return, have been generally misunderstood, the former as primarily concerning "wanting or seeking power", and the latter as "the return of a particular arrangement of things after all the other arrangements have been realised ... the return of the identical or the same". Deleuze notes that in Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883), Nietzsche twice denies that "the eternal return is a circle which makes the same return."[1]

Reception

Nietzsche and Philosophy became a celebrated work.[2] The philosopher Peter Dews writes that Nietzsche and Philosophy was central to the post-structuralist texts of the decade that followed its publication, including Deleuze's Anti-Oedipus (1972).[3] According to Ronald Bogue, Nietzsche and Philosophy marked a significant turning-point in French philosophy, which had previously given little consideration to Nietzsche as a serious or coherent philosopher. Bogue writes that Deleuze was one of the first commentators to discuss the concepts of the will to power and the eternal return carefully, and that Nietzsche and Philosophy raised questions that became central to Nietzsche studies and to French post-structuralism. He adds that many of the central themes of Deleuze's later work were first stated in the work.[4] The philosopher Richard Rorty reviewed the work in The Times Literary Supplement.[5]

Michael Tanner calls Nietzsche and Philosophy "quite wild about Nietzsche, but interesting about Deleuze."[2] Bernd Magnus and Kathleen Higgins write that Deleuze, like philosophers such as Jacques Derrida, Alexander Nehamas, and Richard Rorty, depicts Nietzsche as "attempting to liberate us from the felt need to provide theories of knowledge, or moral theories, or ontologies."[6] Nehamas argues that Nietzsche has a "double relation" to the philosophical tradition, undermining it while being aware that he cannot completely reject it, maintaining that Deleuze's view that Nietzsche originated a radical mode of "nondialectical" thought attributes an unequivocal view to Nietzsche he could not have held.[7] Daniel W. Smith identifies Nietzsche and Philosophy as "one of the most important and influential, as well as idiosyncratic, readings of Nietzsche to have appeared in Europe."[8] Stephen Houlgate rejects Deleuze's view of Hegelian dialectic as the ultimate denial of life, writing that Deleuze was misled by Nietzsche.[9]

The philosopher Hans Sluga identifies Nietzsche and Philosophy as a possible influence on the philosopher Michel Foucault: he suggests that the work helped Foucault to discover Nietzsche as a "genealogical thinker, the philosopher of the will to power."[10] Che-ming Yang describes Nietzsche and Philosophy as "one of Deleuze's masterpieces which highlights that the reading of Nietzsche is central to his own philosophical project".[11] Axel Pérez Trujillo discussed the book in Estudios Nietzsche: Revista de la Sociedad Española de Estudios sobre Friedrich Nietzsche.[12]

See also

References

Footnotes

  1. ↑ Deleuze 1983, pp. ix–xii.
  2. 1 2 Tanner 1994, p. 83.
  3. ↑ Dews 2007, p. 2.
  4. ↑ Bogue 1989, pp. 15–16.
  5. ↑ Rorty 1983, pp. 619–620.
  6. ↑ Magnus & Higgins 1996, p. 3.
  7. ↑ Nehamas 1996, p. 231.
  8. ↑ Smith 1997, p. vii.
  9. ↑ Houlgate 1998, p. 2.
  10. ↑ Sluga 2003, p. 224.
  11. ↑ Yang 2010, p. 844.
  12. ↑ Trujillo 2013, pp. 107–118.

Bibliography

Books

  • Bogue, Ronald (1989). Deleuze and Guattari. New York: Routledge. ISBN 0-415-02443-9.
  • Deleuze, Gilles (1983). Nietzsche and Philosophy. New York: Columbia University Press. ISBN 0-231-05669-9.
  • Dews, Peter (2007). Logics of Disintegration: Post-Structuralist Thought and the Claims of Critical Theory. London: Verso Books. ISBN 978-1-84467-574-6.
  • Houlgate, Stephen; Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (1998). The Hegel Reader. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. ISBN 0-631-20347-8.
  • Magnus, Bernd; Higgins, Kathleen M.; Magnus, Bernd, Editor; Higgins, Kathleen M., Editor (1996). The Cambridge Companion to Nietzsche. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-36767-0.
  • Nehamas, Alexander; Magnus, Bernd, Editor; Higgins, Kathleen M., Editor (1996). The Cambridge Companion to Nietzsche. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-36767-0.
  • Sluga, Hans; Gutting, Gary, Editor (2003). The Cambridge Companion to Foucault, Second Edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-60053-8.
  • Smith, Daniel W.; Klossowski, Pierre (1997). Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0-226-44387-6.
  • Tanner, Michael (1994). Nietzsche. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-287680-5.
Journals

  • Pérez Trujillo, Axel (2013). "El Nietzsche de Walter Kaufmann". Estudios Nietzsche: Revista de la Sociedad Española de Estudios sobre Friedrich Nietzsche. 13.  – via EBSCO's Academic Search Complete (subscription required)
  • Rorty, Richard (1983). "Unsoundness in perspective". The Times Literary Supplement (4185).  – via EBSCO's Academic Search Complete (subscription required)
  • Yang, Che-ming (2010). "Nietzsche, Deleuze, and Nāgārjuna: Mapping the Dialectics of Will/Desire". Journal of Language Teaching & Research. 1 (6).  – via EBSCO's Academic Search Complete (subscription required)
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.