Volume 46, Issue 1

This paper investigates Nietzsche’s reception of Spinoza in order to develop our understanding of the complex relations between their respective philosophies starting from their shared commitment to ontologies of power. The first three sections of this essay contain a diachronic analysis of Nietzsche’s engagement with Spinoza and a discussion of the major themes in play. The last section consists in an evaluation of Nietzsche’s explicit and implicit criticisms that helps us gain a sense of the coherence running through them, as well of the core similarities and differences between two philosophies steeped in immanence and naturalism. Even if Nietzsche’s criticisms do not always do justice to Spinoza’s thinking, they nevertheless offer invaluable clues to guide our comparative project.

To what extent does Nietzsche’s concept of Will to Power succeed Spinoza’s concept of conatus? In our approach, based on the history of problems, concepts are viewed as an answer to certain philosophically relevant issues. The concept of conatus is an attempt to solve, among others, the problems of creatio continua, teleology, the will as a faculty, and normativity. Nietzsche reconsiders them, explicitly or implicitly, in a conceptual setting that has much changed over the subsequent two hundred years, and reacts on them with his concept of Will to Power. Such a reconsideration of problems can be conceived as a repetition in the sense of Deleuze, i. e. a repetition that comprises temporal shifts and differences. It is required if problems are considered still as unsolved, or if their former solution seems no longer plausible. The concept of conatus appears therefore in a particular way as an impulse and stimulus for Nietzsche’s own philosophy of Will to Power which is discussed here mainly by recurring to Boscovich. The above mentioned problems arise from ontological concerns, but are ethically oriented in the end, according to Spinoza’s main work The Ethics. A special focus is put on understanding affects as expressions of the conatus on the one hand, and the Will to Power on the other.

This article outlines Nietzsche’s understanding of perspectivism by discussing the critique of metaphysics in Human, All Too Human. In this work, Nietzsche carries out an intrinsic critique of his own enlightened, anti-metaphysical project by drawing both on explicit claims and on formal and aesthetic techniques of relativisation. The concept of dynamic perspectivism can serve as a mediator between these seemingly contradictory tendencies within the work. In contrast to certain tendencies in more recent Nietzsche studies however, this article suggest a reading of perspectivism that does not ensue total subversion or complete relativism but seeks to maintain the validity of individual perspectives.

This paper examines Nietzsche’s relation to the therapeutic philosophical tradition paradigmatically represented by the Hellenistic schools. On the one hand, given his project of rehabilitating Western culture and his understanding of the philosopher as a “physician of culture”, Nietzsche seems also to hold a therapeutic understanding of philosophy; on the other hand, he is extremely critical of any (philosophical, moral or religious) attempt to heal mankind. This paper does not aim to solve this tension but rather characterizes Nietzsche’s endeavor in this respect as a therapy of therapy. Through analysis of a) the basic features of the Hellenistic conception of philosophy, b) Nietzsche’s development of the analogy of the “philosophical physician”, c) his diagnosis of culture, and d) his criticism of previous therapists, I show that Nietzsche can be formally included in this tradition of thought, even if this inclusion has implications for the tradition itself. As I suggest, given the self-referentiality of Nietzsche’s therapy, his inclusion in this tradition might in fact simultaneously entail its own self-suppression.

Nietzsche discusses the emotional level of the love of the sexes in aphorism 363 of The Gay Science where he claims that men and women have different prejudices about love. The basic dynamics of love in GS 363 are explained in terms of the woman who gives herself and the man who takes. How can this model offer more than a reactionary idea of an opposition of a submissive woman and dominating man? It will be argued that a deeper understanding of giving oneself and taking does not warrant an opposition in the sense of a master-slave relation. The preconditions for giving and taking in Nietzsche’s philosophy disclose a richer idea of giving and taking as a dynamic and mutually transformative interaction of partners in love.

Both Nietzsche and Freud offer accounts of temporal disturbances in the processes of cognition, whilst also “forgetting” to notice women’s contributions to the history of culture. Both writers link women’s creative incapacity to their reproductive physiology and also to bodily shame. This paper argues, however, that Nietzsche’s descriptions of cognitive delay and collective forgetfulness are useful to feminist historians and theorists, providing a resource for theorising the belated recognition of women’s forgotten cultural achievements which the Freudian account lacks. The paper distinguishes between two contrasting modes of delayed recognition in Nietzsche, and compares Nietzsche on the temporal discontinuities of the nachträglich with Freud on the slips and skips in memory that derive from trauma, Nachträglichkeit and psychoneurotic repression. Another mode of temporal slippage - that of the Hopsasa - found in Nietzsche is also considered, as is also the potential of “the filigree art” of focusing as a remedy for cultural disappearances.

This essay examines Nietzsche’s accounts of love and the gender troubles of friendship. In many passages, Nietzsche situates love as an impairment to friendship. In particular, he believes that erotic or sexual love, understood as a drive that seeks to possess and control the other, prevents two people from entering into the shared project of friendship. Nietzsche implies that gender roles, and the cultural expectations associated with these types, make friendship very difficult between women and men. The reason why women in Nietzsche’s account cannot move from love relationships into friendship is because they are primarily esteemed for their fulfillment of gender stereotypes. In order to avoid the perils of assimilation, pointed to by Nietzsche, it is imperative to develop an ethics of friendship that changes the way people approach and love one another. Luce Irigaray present such an alternative with her account of wonder. She argues that recognition requires a negative movement in which one acknowledges one’s limits in understanding the other. Irigaray designates a transformative and activist potential to love, as a benefit to friendship in its erotic and practical qualities. She claims that when love is expressed alongside the passion of wonder there is a stronger potential for recognition between two people. With the assistance of Irigaray, this essay questions Nietzsche’s assessment that love is an impasse to friendship by asking if love need be as assimilating as Nietzsche proposes.

Nietzsche’s concept of overcoming and his analysis of traditional disembodied thinking patterns and values stand in an uneasy tension. How can anything be overcome, if it is analysed? Nietzsche himself not only seems sceptical about this possibility, but outright pessimistic. His concept of the eternal recurrence undercuts the possibility of overcoming our habituated ways of thinking, behaving and acting. Therefore, the overhuman as a concept itself needs to be overcome, as Zarathustra sees clearly in his most silent hour. This paper strives to show that feminist and phenomenological approaches are able to pick up where Nietzsche’s thinking stopped and went no further. These approaches involve a shift from an analytical to a transformational mode of thinking. This means that one not only thinks about, but is with the body. In order to explain what this method involves I turn to Judith Butler, Luce Irigaray, Claire Petitmengin, and Eugene Gendlin.

Nietzsche’s Venice poem has the form of an ‘Erlebnisgedicht’. Its motives and phrases, however, refer back to Nietzsche’s first happy years in Basel: Richard Wagner’s Beethoven , the correspondence with Erwin Rohde, the Hölderlin enthusiasm, the preoccupation with ancient and modern music

In the prevailing tradition of European philosophy, thinking has been thought in such a way that final certainties are to be gained from it. However, what is called ‘thinking’ is in fact not observable. Instead, it manifests itself in a multitude of shapes, most clearly in speech and particularly in writing. Both Nietzsche and the late Wittgenstein were facing this. They tried to simply describe thinking by means of observable clues without already ascribing a certain logic to it and, in doing so, they altered philosophy altogether. Their yardstick is no longer mathematics, but music. This paper first deals with the family resemblances of their personal situations, their textual situations, and their sign approaches, all of which are characterized by decisions and selections, instead of being given as stable grounds. Then, Nietzsche’s and Wittgenstein’s descriptions of speaking and writing as signs for thinking are brought into dialogue with each other. Thus, thinking proves to be unsteady and groundless in the chaotic emergence of thoughts as well as rambling in the chaotic speech about thinking; but it proves to be both guided and seduced, both accompanying and directing in the orders of speech and, at the same time, to be confined and gliding, selecting and dancing, flying and overflying in the orders of writing

The problem of subjectivity is of central concern in contemporary philosophy across traditions and disciplines. If it was already obvious that Nietzsche’s significance in this field can hardly be overestimated, Nietzsche and the Problem of Subjectivity - a recent volume of Nietzsche Today - provides the means to assess it in a historically saturated and systematically fruitful way. In the present paper, some of the research avenues opened is probed while at the same time some remaining omissions are indicated. The editorial framework highlights especially Nietzsche’s contribution to the theoretical problem of self-consciousness and to the existential problem of decentering and nihilism. However, a third dimension also runs through the book: the expressive problem of subjectivity. The present paper highlights this dimension. The ensuing question becomes, whether subjectivity is indeed most properly addressed as a problem of self-consciousness or perhaps rather as a problem of life and of the art of survival

In FW 372 Nietzsche distinguishes between “idealism” and “sensualism”. The ancient philosophers thought that the senses would lead “to some dangerous southern island”. This island refers undoubtedly to the rock from which the Sirens attempt to compel Odysseus. The aphorism could nevertheless contain another reference, i. e. to the island whose philosophical meaning relies exactly on the distinction between idealism and sensualism. I refer to the Island quoted from Heraclitus, fr. B 56 D.K., that Nietzsche borrows from Aristotle (fr. 76 Rose). FW 302 confirms in fact that Nietzsche is familiar with this text.

In FW 110 Nietzsche criticizes the erroneous articles of faith indicating “enduring things”, “equal things”, “things, substances, bodies”. In the same way Erasmus of Rotterdam, in his Praise of Folly, makes a mockery of the philosophical inconsistences showed by the ideas of universality, form, first matter, quidditas, ecceitas and so on. Since a copy of Erasmus’ work is in Nietzsche’s personal library, the paper aims to show that Nietzsche’s reformulation of a gaya scienza in a humanistic way could relies on Erasmus’ thinking

After discovering the short cosmological treatise L’éternité par les astres at the end of 1937, Benjamin ‘constellates’ the author, Louis-Auguste Blanqui, with Baudelaire and Nietzsche under the sign of eternal recurrence. From then on, eternal recurrence is given a central place in Benjamin’s analysis of modernity. Under many aspects his thoughts are rooted in the dramatic years in which they were developed: a conception of myth problematic in itself is misapplied to Nietzsche, the analogy with Blanqui’s cosmology leads to misunderstandings, and Benjamin does not grasp the connection between a task relevant for himself, the redemption of the past, and Zarathustra’s thought of eternal recurrence. Nevertheless, this constellation charged with tension is theoretically productive. Benjamin interprets the two faces of Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence in the context of his own theory of the structural change of experience in modernity. On the one hand, eternal recurrence is linked in multiple ways to the new forms of technical reproduction and compulsory repetition arising in the nineteenth century. On the other hand, it is assigned the task of compensating for an irretrievable loss. Is this compensation thoroughly illusory? Or does it contain a ‘motive of salvation’? Guided by these questions, the paper investigates the ‘polyphony’ of Benjamin’s remarks on Nietzsche’s thought of eternal recurrence and their heuristic potential.