(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
Today, people tweet Nietzsche quotes or attitudes, and pop divas refer to (and ridicule without even realizing it) the noble sentiment: "That which does not kill me makes me stronger," But there is also a serious and outstanding work in the study of Nietzsche's thoughts and life.
Here is a review of three new books about the philosopher. Like Philipp Felsch's account of how two Italian scientists saved Nietzsches reputation from the inglorious bastards who were out for blood after World War II, Glenn Wallis' solid presentation of Nietzsche's approach to life as a fortifier against what ails us today, and Leonardo Caffo's positioning of the Nietzsche catalogue as the 'dynamite' we need as we enter the transhuman era. They are all good reads and worth taking a few minutes to critically consider.
In from the cold
How Nietzsche Came in From the Cold by Philipp Felch tells the story of how the two Italian scholars Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari helped rehabilitate Nietzsche's image after it was abused by the Fascists and Nazis in their quest for world domination. Also, how Nietzsche studies again gained a prominent place in the intellectual circles of post-war Europe, where postmodern thinking – structuralism, existentialism, phenomenology and deconstruction – flourished.
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 presented with the rise of Heidegger, Derrida, Sartre, Saussure, Deleuze, Foucault and Merleau-Ponty, among many others.
They went to Royaumont to deal with the "big wigs" and rediscover the authentic and 'true' Nietzsche.
Colli and Montinari were 'troublemakers'. Felsch describes how in July 1964 they went with a bus full of mainly French and German philosophers to Royaumont in France to convene a meeting of Nietzscheologists. The previous year, the leaders of the post-war governments of France and Germany, de Gaulle and Adenauer, had met in Royaumont to sign the Élysée Treaty. Now the French scholars wanted to take control of the future interpretation of Nietzsche's writings from the Germans. But the temperamental Hills and Montinari had joined the busload of enthusiasts eager to get the Nietzsche re-evaluation program going again, and, the reader is told, they had come to Royaumont as 'destroyers'. As former students and teachers, one from a proletarian background, the other born and raised in the comforts of the bourgeoisie, they went to Royaumont to deal with the 'big wigs' and rediscover the authentic and 'true' Nietzsche.
The same old, the same old: Whoever controls the narrative and the ideological means of production decides in Turkey Cockville, as Nietzsche might have said. Nietzsche had always seen his work as 'dynamite', and its use by the insane power monsters during the Second World War showed that its power could be exploited in a malevolent way. Hitler saw Der wille zur macht as a perfect complement to theirs Mein Kampf- madness.
Felsch describes how the debate at Royaumont, and later elsewhere, was contentious, ego-driven, and at times ponderous and myopic. The handover was not easy. The Germans, for example, sided with Karl Löwith, who argued for relegating Nietzsche to the past – the one with the idols – and argued for “abandoning the catastrophic upheavals of modernism and returning to a classical equilibrium that saw man as part of the eternally unchanging cosmos”. The French rolled their eyes; now it was time again, especially Gilles Deleuze, who at the time was Research Attaché at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique and organizer of the colloquium, who rejected the cosmos thing and advocated “a Dionysian principle of upheaval that guaranteed that the world would never remain identical to itself”. Then Michel Foucault the word and argued against overinterpretation, noting, writes Felsch: “By replacing the idea of the original text with an abyss of interpretations embedded in each other, Nietzsche transformed the work of interpretation for his followers into an endless task.”
Nietzsche's French interpreters
Collie and Montinari had their own view, however, which was far more receptive to Nietzsche's genius and richness. They too were tired of overinterpretation and of the need for thinkers to make a name for themselves in the post-war hermeneutic Wild West. As Felsch writes: "Perhaps because he himself lived the antagonistic tendencies of his time, Nietzsche played the role of a canvas onto which the entire spectrum of twentieth-century ideas could be projected." He adds the considerations of Jürgen Habermas.
Nietzsche's French interpreters, from Deleuze to Derrida, perceived that the real explosive power of Nietzsche's thinking lay precisely in the aphoristic fragmentation, in the lack of a central point of view, in the transgression of the order of philosophical discourse.
I How Nietzsche Came in From the Cold tells the story of Colli and Montinari as two complementary Italians in love with their own communism. Gramsci plays a major role in their conversations, correspondence, and diary entries. The chapters fly by, each adding a new flavor to the final sauce of mutual infatuation. The chapter sections light up like highway signs: “Beauty and Horror,” “Above the Abyss,” “Nietzsche is a Disease,” “Alone Against the Nietzsche Mafia,” and “Nietzsche’s Dirty Secret.” Excellent read. On the edge of your seat.
Nietzsche now!
Humanity is entering an age dominated by the superintelligence of artificial intelligence (AI), and soon we will find ourselves in a reinvigorated quantum metaphysics where things are true and not true at the same time, and where reality has the double-bottom effect of the duck–rabbit illusion.
Great stuff ahead. Glenn Wallis believes it is time for a reassessment of all values, and in his new book, Nietzsche Now! The Great Immoralist on the Vital Issues of Our Time, he deals with some of the German philosopher's most striking and controversial criticisms of modern Western society.
We need Nietzsche now more than ever.
Nietzsche often said that he had come too soon with his astute 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 takes the reader through what Nietzsche wrote on a range of topics that are of interest to a modern audience with concerns about the future – in a world where personal identity, governance responsibility and the politics of freedom are in disarray, and which is characterized by global and potentially catastrophic changes.
Wallis believes that Nietzsche's work has a practical application to these crises. "This book is a guide to thinking," says Wallis, rather than a manifesto. "Exacerbated by an internet culture accessible via our smartphone every minute, day and night, we find ourselves in a loud, hostile and very public limbo when it comes to important issues in our shared social life."
Given the 'grim divisions' that characterize so much of polarized public discourse these days, Wallis shows the reader how we can move forward with Nietzsche's guidance.
A section of great value deals with the construction of democracy. He takes the reader through how Nietzsche saw democracy as an antidote to tyranny, and follows up with a chapter on how democracy can slip into tyranny. Wallis also argues that Nietzsche was concerned about the homogenization process in our preferred form of government. He writes: "When the democratic prophylaxis, when the taste for and mentality around democracy, slips from being a carefully regulated 'stimulant' for dynamism to become a crude 'safety valve' against dangerous tendencies, then it becomes 'a bad habit' .”
Identity politics
Another topic Wallis takes up with great enthusiasm is identity (and identity politics). He writes: "Perhaps it is his treatment of identity that makes Nietzsche such a revolutionary thinker for our time."
In a funny, 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'm Japanese".
A huge paper brawl broke out, and out of the smoke came the fact that the reporter in question was Filipino, Stefani was Irish-Italian-American, and that she had been heavily influenced by Japanese culture in her youth.
Wallis uses this example to discuss Nietzsche's concept of identity. "Can [Stefani's outburst] be considered completely insignificant?" wonders Wallis. "In today's environment," he writes, "such questions will almost predictably be met with a resounding NO! It caused damage.” Since such ressentiment is destructive to notions of pluralism.
«Wild philosophy»
Leonardo Caffo is professor of art and philosophy at NABA in Milan. He has published a new book, Anarchy: The Return of Wild Thought ("Anarchy: The Return of Self-Absorbed Thought", 2024). Some of his previous works include The Contemporary Posthuman (2022), which contains mental designs for a world catastrophically altered by climate change and other anthropocentric 'errors'. For the reader Anarchy, it becomes clear that Caffo is drawing from Nietzsche's dynamic source for his own energetic idea creation. More than ever, we find ourselves in a world that needs bold, explosive Nietzschean thinking—that is, thinking that is autonomous and freed from the past.
The Dionysian is the only thing that can save the skin of our species, a kind of rejuvenation of our animal instincts and primal intuitions.
Anarchy contains clear chapters: "Wild philosophy", "Primitive future" and "Anarchist mind". Here the Dionysian manifesto seems to be in play, in contrast to the Apollonian one, which Caffo now describes as curious and limited. The Dionysian is the only thing that can save the skin of our species, a kind of rejuvenation of our animal instincts and primal intuitions. Caffo writes: "It is difficult to trace an idea about the future that does not cast more shadows than light on the sun of the future." It feels like the nuclear winter after 'the twilight of the idols'. Caffo writes that we need "wild thinking". The reason is clear: "The end of the great narratives, what in contemporary cultural sociology is called 'the postmodern condition', was also a theory about questioning the relationship between knowledge and power."
Like Felsch, Caffo places the consciousness-expanding Twilight of the gods in the post-war period, when the tyranny of stagnation and the complacency of historical readings were put to shame by the ruins around war-torn Europe. The dogmas awoke from their philosophical sleep; brave, 'wild cries' broke out – we will no longer be cannon fodder in the universities.
Central to this new project, Caffo seems to argue, was the rehabilitation of Nietzsche's reputation and the rescue of his dynamic zest for life. IN Nietzsche Now! Wallis gave us Nietzsche's battle song: "I am dynamite!" And i Anarchy Caffo repeats this thesis throughout the text, often with reference to 'exploding' thoughts. But lest we misunderstand this, as one can easily do when someone declares himself an anarchist, Caffo refers to a powerfully lyrical quote from Nietzsche, which provides clarity: "You must still have chaos in you to be able to give birth to a dancing star .” Caffo makes this expressive image the crowning glory of his anarchy, which he distinguishes from the anarchy that destroys and is perceived as violent.
Caffos anarchisticThe way forward is centered around the value of – the need for – lek. This too is reminiscent of a well-known Nietzsche expression that the maturation of a philosophy requires “recovery of the sense of seriousness we had as children in play.” This provides a clue to the understanding of Nietzsche’s love fati. In the new landscape, nothing is true and everything is permitted. Or politically speaking, says Caffo: "From perestroika to the fall of the Berlin Wall, to the G8 meeting in Genoa, to the fall of the Twin Towers or the war in Ukraine and Palestine, state capitalism has stopped presenting itself as a system of governance among others, to become 'the pure reality' ', the sole condition of human existence without alternatives.”
It sounds like a throwback to the hippie collective days I remember so well.
We have seen the inflation of the state and the existential demands for endless expansion that capitalism demands – and now, writes Caffo, we must strike out in new heretical directions. Caffo talks about libertarianism – where less government control and fewer government impositions are better – and the formation of micro-communities with purpose and design without a hierarchy of power. And it sounds like a throwback to the hippie collective days I remember so well, when Abbie Hoffman was out there with her street theater, levitating the Pentagon and throwing money at the greedy wall street crows who refused to take the bastards seriously.
In another separate article entitled "A posthuman Nietzsche?" Caffo describes a new way forward. There Nietzsche's book That's how Zarathustra spoke (1962 [1883]) had given us an image of a line dancer. As man on the uncertain path from the beast to the superman, Caffo now suggests, in Nietzschean fashion, that we are even post-Nietzsche, giving us new steps forward: the superman, the transman and the posthuman – "three axes of anthropocentrism". Suddenly I feel light on my feet and want to dance.
Felsch, Wallis and Caffo give us glimpses of a future worth burning strongly for.
Translated from English by the editor.
