Contra-Nietzsche

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Why We Are Not Nietzscheans by Luc Ferry

Review by Fredrick Appel

The familiar view of Friedrich Nietzsche as a philosopher of emancipation
can be traced back to Walter Kaufmann, whose role as Nietzsche's foremost
English-language translator and interpreter can scarcely be underestimated.
In the pervasive annotations accompanying his translations and his own
scholarly studies, Kaufmann challenged the prevailing (and largely
unjustified) postwar reputation of Nietzsche as a proto-Nazi by portraying
the volatile German iconoclast as an heroic figure worthy of membership in
the Canon of Enlightenment thinkers.

Nietzsche's reception in the Anglo-American intellectual world evolved in
the 1970s and 1980s, when part of Kaufmann's legacy was called into
question. Under the guise of the new holy trinity of Deleuze, Derrida, and
Foucault, a new Nietzsche appeared on the scene who turned from
torch-bearer to gravedigger of the Western philosophical tradition. This
apparent repudiation of Kaufmann's reading served, however, to reinforce
one of his central motifs: his portrait of Nietzsche as an essentially
benign, admirable figure.

For the French and American post-modernists and post-structuralists held
that Nietzschean thought is emancipatory in its laying bare of the
oppressive, stultifying dogmatism of all philosophical "grand narratives"
and in its outline of a radically new, dizzying type of freedom from all
traditional forms of thought and practice. Even English-language
philosophers out of sympathy with French post-modernism, such as Allan
Bloom and Alasdair MacIntyre, routinely came to associate Nietzsche with
the epistemic and value relativism of his post-modern champions.

The recent appearance of Why We Are Not Nietzscheans, a provocative
collection of seven essays in English translation (the original
French-language edition was published in 1991), suggests that we may be on
the verge of a new and salutary paradigm shift in Nietzsche scholarship. As
the editors Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut note in the Preface, all of the
contributors began their academic studies in the 1960s under the influence
of the post-modernist older guard and unquestioningly accepted its
insistence that "the ideals of the Enlightenment could not but be a bad
joke, a somber mystification." Having attained a degree of intellectual
independence, the contributors now boldly proclaim post-modernism's
"exhaustion" as a philosophical tradition and profess a renewed commitment
to Enlightenment rationalism.

Complete review at: http://bookwire.bowker.com/bookinfo/review.aspx?5423


Louis Proyect

(The Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org)