The roughage and spinach power that reading Nietzsche once provided in one's salad days often seems wasted these days, with so many people tweeting Nietzsche quotes or postures. and pop divas referencing (and unintentionally lampooning the noble sentiment): What does not kill me makes me stronger. This from sleeping around and ending up with a broken heart. And very damn possibly an STD. It's hard to order through Ubereats without conjuring up some fat f*ck Superman wanting you to 'like him' simply for delivering the goods on time. Jeesh.
But there is serious, stellar work being done in the study of Nietzsche's thoughts and life. What follows is an evaluation of three new books on the philosopher that spruce the goose and put a new sense of woo-hoo in the step, just when an old worrier was squinting along wondering, Eternal Recurrence? Are you sh*tting me? Philipp Felsch's account of how two Italian scholars rescued Nietzsche's reputation from the inglorious basterds looking for blood after the Second World War, Glenn Wallis's solid representation of Nietzsche's approach to life as a tonic for what ails us today, and Leonardo Caffo's positioning of the Nietzsche catalog as the dynamite we need as we enter the transhuman era, are all fine reads, and worth taking a few minutes to critically consider.
How Nietzsche Came in From the Cold: Tale of a Redemption
Author: Philipp Felsch Daniel Bowles (Translated by)
Publisher: Polity Press, UK
How Nietzsche Came in From the Cold tells the story of how two Italian scholars helped rehabilitate his image after it was abused by the fascists and Nazis in their quest for world dominance and then return Nietzsche's studies to preeminence in the intellectual circles of post-war Europe out of which postmodern thought reflowered -- structuralism, existentialism, phenomenology, and deconstruction. Real Twilight of the Idols stuff.
Much of this revolutionary energy was described in Felsch's previous book, The Summer of Theory: History of a Rebellion, 1960-1990. Here we are treated with the rise of the stock of Heidegger, Derrida, Sartre, Saussure, Deleuze, Foucault, Merleau-Ponty, among many others.
Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari were trouble-makers. Felsch describes how they set out on a bus laden with mostly French and German philosophers to Royaumont in July 1964 to convene a meeting of Nietzscheologists. The year before, the heads of the post-war governments of France and Germany, de Gaulle and Adenauer, had met at Royaumont to sign the Élyse'e Treaty. Now these mostly French scholars intended to take control of the future interpretation of Nietzsche's oeuvre from the Germans. But the feisty Italian pair of Colli and Mazzino had come on that bus of enthusiasts eager to get the program of Nietzsche revaluations up and running again, and, the reader is told, "they played an ignominious role; they had come to Royaumont as spoilsports."
Same old, same old: Who controls the narrative and the means of ideological production rules the roost in Turkey Cockville, as Nietzsche might have put it. Nietzsche had always seen his work as "dynamite," and its use by the insane power monsters of WW2 showed that its mojo could be wickedly co-opted. Hitler, whose mustache looked like he had castrated his paintbrush and pasted it under his Nase in a rage after being kicked out of art school, saw T he Will to Power as a perfect complement to his Mein Kampf shenanigans.
Felsch describes how the debate at Royaumont, and elsewhere later, was contentious, ego-driven, and sometimes stodgy and myopic. The handover did not come easy. The Germans, for instance, put forward Karl Löwith, who argued for relocating Nietzsche to the past -- the one with the Idols -- arguing for "exiting the disastrous upheaval of modernism and returning to a classical equanimity that viewed humankind as part of the forever-immutable cosmos." French eyes rolled; here we go again, especially Gilles Deleuze, who at that time was attache' de recherches at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique and organizer of the colloquium, who rejected the cosmos thing and pushed "a Dionysian principle of upheaval that guaranteed the world never remained identical with itself." Then Michel Foucault spoke and argued against over-interpretation, noting, writes Felsch,
By replacing the idea of the original text with an abyss of interpretations nested inside one another, Nietzsche, in particular, transformed for his successors the business of interpretation into an infinite task no longer backed by an originary truth.
N'est ce pas?
However, Colli and Mazzino had their own take, far more accommodating to Nietzsche's genius and plentitude. They, too, were tired of overinterpretation and the need for thought-slingers to make a name for themselves in the Wild West of postwar hermeneutics. As Felsch has it, "Perhaps because he himself acted out the antagonistic tendencies of his age, Nietzsche played the role of a canvas onto which the entire spectrum of twentieth-century ideas could be projected." He adds the observations of Jurgen Habermas, who Felsch avers,
Nietzsche's French interpreters, from Deleuze to Derrida, perceived the true explosive power of his thought to be located precisely in its aphoristic fragmentation, in its lack of a central viewpoint, in its transgression of the order of philosophical discourse.
Colli and Mazzino, former students and teachers, one from a proletariat background, the other with the comfort trappings of the bourgeoisie, made their way to Royaumont to take on the "big wigs" and rediscover the authentic and "true" Nietzsche.
How Nietzsche Came in From the Cold tells the tale of two complementary Italians in love with their brand of communism. Gramsci figures largely in their talks, correspondence, and diary entries. The chapters fly by, each adding a new flavor to the eventual sauce of their co-insouciance. Chapter sections light up like highway signs: Beauty and Horror, Over the Abyss, Nietzsche is a Disease, Alone Against the Nietzsche Mafia, and Nietzsche's Dirty Secret. Excellent reading. Edge of the seat stuff.
Nietzsche Now!
Author: Glenn Wallis
Publisher: Warbler Press, 19.95
Humans enter an age dominated by the super-smarts of artificial intelligence (AI) and will soon be immersed in a souped-up quantum metaphysics where things are true and not true at the same time, and reality has the double-bind effect of the duckrabbit illusion.
Heady stuff ahead. Glenn Wallis believes it's time for a revaluation of all values and, in his new book, Nietzsche Now! The Great Immoralist on the Vital Issues of Our Time, he revisits some of the German philosopher's most salient and controversial critiques of modern Western society.
Nietzsche often said that he had come too soon with his penetrating observations, and that the world was not ready for his truths. Wallis believes that the time is ripe and that we need Nietzsche now more than ever.
He brings the reader through what Nietzsche wrote about a number of topics of interest to a modern audience concerned about the future in a world where personal identity, the responsibilities of governance, and the politics of freedom are in disarray at a time of global, and potentially catastrophic change.
Wallis believes that Nietzsche's work has practical application to these crises. "This book is a guide to thinking," writes Wallis, rather than a manifesto. "Exacerbated by an internet culture that is accessible via our smartphones literally every minute day and night, we are at a loud, hostile, and very public impasse concerning vital questions of our shared social life."
Given the "grimly divided" quality of so much public discourse these days, Wallis shows the reader how we may proceed with Nietzsche's guidance.
One section of real value deals with the construction of democracy. He takes the reader through how Nietzsche saw democracy as an antidote to tyranny and follows that up with a chapter on how democracy can slide into tyranny.
Wallis argues that Nietzsche was worried about the homogenisation process of our preferred form of government. He writes: "When the democratic prophylactic, when the taste for and mentality of democracy, slips from being a cautiously regulated 'stimulant' for dynamism, to being a crude 'safety valve' against dangerous tendencies, then it becomes a 'bad habit'."
Another topic that Wallis enthusiastically addresses is that of identity (and its politics). He writes that: "It may be his treatment of identity that makes Nietzsche such a revolutionary thinker for our times."
In an amusing, if convoluted, example of identity issues today, Wallis brings in pop diva Gwen Stefani, and deconstructs the time she told an "Asian" reporter that "I am Japanese."
A big paper kerfuffle broke out, and out of the smoke came the fact that the reporter in question was Filipino, Stefani was Irish-Italian-American, and she had been greatly influenced by Japanese culture in her youth. Jeesh.
Wallis uses this example to discuss Nietzsche's notion of identity. "Could [Stefani's blurt] conceivably be considered wholly inconsequential?" Wallis wonders. "In today's environment," he writes, "such queries almost predictably meet with a resounding NO! It caused injury." Such ressentiment is destructive to notions of pluralism.
Anarchia: Il ritorno del pensiero selvaggio
Author: Leonardo Caffo
Publisher: Raffaello Cortina, Milano,
Leonardo Caffo is a Professor of Art and Philosophy at NABA, Milan. He has put out a new book, Anarchy: The Return of Wild Thinking (2024). Some of his previous work includes The Contemporary Posthuman (2022), which includes mental designs for a world catastrophically altered by climate change and other anthropocentric failures. It is clear from reading Anarchy that Caffo draws from Nietzsche's well of dynamism for his own energetic ideation. Now, more than ever, we are in a world that needs bold, explosive Nietzschean thinking -- which is to say autonomous and liberated from all pasts.
Anarchy includes lucid chapters: Savage Philosophy, Primitive Future, and Anarchic-Mind. The Dionysian manifesto seems at play here, as opposed to the Apollonian, which now, with Caffo, is described as quaint and limited, and the only thing that can save our species' skin is a kind of rejuvenation of our animal instincts and original intuitions. Caffo writes, "It is difficult to trace an idea of the future that does not cast more shadows than lights on the sun of the future." It feels like the nuclear winter following the Twilight of the Idols. Caffo tells us we need "wild thinking." The reason is clear: "The end of the great narratives, what in the sociology of contemporary culture is called the 'postmodern condition', was also a theory of questioning the relationships between knowledge and power."
Caffo, like Felsch, locates the mind-exploding Götterdämmerung in the postwar period, during which the tyranny of stasis and complacency with historical reads was left flaccid and mocked by the rubble all round in war-devastated Europe. Dogmas woke from their philosophical sleeps; brave, wild cries erupted -- we will no longer be canon fodder at the universities. Central to this new project, Caffo would seem to affirm, was the rehabilitation of Nietzsche's reputation and the rescue of his dynamic affirmation of life. In Nietzsche Now! Wallis keys us to Nietzsche's battle charge: "I am dynamite!" And in Anarchy, Caffo resounds the strain throughout his thesis, often referring to "exploding" thoughts. But lest we take this the wrong way, as one is apt to when someone declares themself an anarchist, Caffo references a powerful lyrical quote from Nietzsche, which provides clarity: one must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star. Caffo makes this expressive image the capstone of his anarchy, which he differentiates from the anarchy that destroys and is seen as violent.
Caffo's anarchic way forward is centered around the value -- the need -- for play. This, too, recalls a well-known Nietzschean expression about how maturing a philosophy requires "the recovery of the sense of earnestness which we had as a child at play." This provides a hint to understanding Nietzsche's amor fati. In the new landscape, nothing is true and it is all permitted. Or, seen politically, Caffo tells us:
From perestroika to the fall of the Berlin Wall, to the G8 in Genoa, to the fall of the Twin Towers or the war in Ukraine and Palestine, statist capitalism has stopped presenting itself as one of the simple systems of government among others to become the "pure reality", the only condition of human existence without alternatives.
We have seen the bloating of state and the existential requirements of endless expansion required by capitalism -- and now, writes Caffo, we need to strike out in new heretical directions. Caffo talks about libertarianism -- less government and state imposition is better -- and the formation of micro-communities of purpose and design with no power hierarchy. It sounds like a throwback to the hippie commune days I so fondly recall, when Abbie Hoffman was out there with his street theater, levitating the Pentagon, tossing money down on the greedy pork snorkelers of Wall Street refusing to take the Bastards seriously.
In a separate paper titled "A Posthuman Nietzsche?" Caffo describes a new path forward. Where Nietzsche had given us in Zarathustra an image of a tightrope walker, Man treading precariously from beasthood toward Superman, Caffo now suggests, in a Nietzschean way, that we are even post-Nietzsche, and gives us new steps ahead: superhuman, transhuman,and the posthuman -- "three axes of anthropocentrism." Suddenly, I feel light on my feet and wish to dance.
Felsch, Wallis and Caffo provide glimpses of a future worth burning brightly for.
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