To Nietzsche: Dionysus, I Love You! Ariadne

To Nietzsche: Dionysus, I Love You! Ariadne

Author: Claudia Crawford

Publisher: SUNY Press

Published: 1995-01-01

Total Pages: 332

ISBN-13: 9780791421505

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This book explores the possibility that Friedrich Nietzsche simulated his madness as a form of “voluntary death,” and thus that his madness functioned as the symbolic culmination of his philosophy. The book weaves together scholarly, mytho-poetic, literary critical, biographical, and dramatic genres not only to explore specifics of Nietzsche’s “madness,” but to question the “reason/madness” opposition in nineteenth and twentieth century thinking. A rational and scholarly study of this period of Nietzsche’s “breakdown”—presented through his writings, letters, and poetry in combination with relevant historical documents and other critics’ writings—is simultaneously disrupted and questioned by several non-traditional discourses or voices that break in on it. Thus, Ariadne’s voice frames and unframes the research context and plays alongside it. Ariadne’s voice is poetic, revelatory, rhapsodic, and prophetic, sounding much like Nietzsche’s own voice during his “breakdown.” Ariadne’s discourse attempts to seduce through a non-rational, mytho-poetic love story which culminates in the wedding of Dionysus and Ariadne. Other non-rational discourses, critically developed and based upon the work of Nietzsche, Jean Baudrillard, and Gilles Deleuze, are given voice and work together with Ariadne to counter the usual interpretations of Nietzsche’s “madness” and of what “mad” discourse is. These discourses are given the names “catastrophe,” “phantasm,” and “seduction.” The experiment of the book is not only to offer an entirely different perspective on Nietzche’s “madness” but to offer and perform new and challenging forms of affirmative discourse.


Nietzsche

Nietzsche

Author: Walter A. Kaufmann

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2013-10-06

Total Pages: 559

ISBN-13: 1400849225

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This classic is the benchmark against which all modern books about Nietzsche are measured. When Walter Kaufmann wrote it in the immediate aftermath of World War II, most scholars outside Germany viewed Nietzsche as part madman, part proto-Nazi, and almost wholly unphilosophical. Kaufmann rehabilitated Nietzsche nearly single-handedly, presenting his works as one of the great achievements of Western philosophy. Responding to the powerful myths and countermyths that had sprung up around Nietzsche, Kaufmann offered a patient, evenhanded account of his life and works, and of the uses and abuses to which subsequent generations had put his ideas. Without ignoring or downplaying the ugliness of many of Nietzsche's proclamations, he set them in the context of his work as a whole and of the counterexamples yielded by a responsible reading of his books. More positively, he presented Nietzsche's ideas about power as one of the great accomplishments of modern philosophy, arguing that his conception of the "will to power" was not a crude apology for ruthless self-assertion but must be linked to Nietzsche's equally profound ideas about sublimation. He also presented Nietzsche as a pioneer of modern psychology and argued that a key to understanding his overall philosophy is to see it as a reaction against Christianity. Many scholars in the past half century have taken issue with some of Kaufmann's interpretations, but the book ranks as one of the most influential accounts ever written of any major Western thinker. Featuring a new foreword by Alexander Nehamas, this Princeton Classics edition of Nietzsche introduces a new generation of readers to one the most influential accounts ever written of any major Western thinker.


Nietzsche's Last Laugh

Nietzsche's Last Laugh

Author: Nicholas D. More

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2014-03-27

Total Pages: 239

ISBN-13: 1139917048

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Nietzsche's Ecce Homo was published posthumously in 1908, eight years after his death, and has been variously described ever since as useless, mad, or merely inscrutable. Against this backdrop, Nicholas D. More provides the first complete and compelling analysis of the work, and argues that this so-called autobiography is instead a satire. This form enables Nietzsche to belittle bad philosophy by comic means, attempt reconciliation with his painful past, review and unify his disparate works, insulate himself with humor from the danger of 'looking into abysses', and establish wisdom as a special kind of 'good taste'. After showing how to read this much-maligned book, More argues that Ecce Homo presents the best example of Nietzsche making sense of his own intellectual life, and that its unique and complex parody of traditional philosophy makes a powerful case for reading Nietzsche as a philosophical satirist across his corpus.


Nietzsche's Task

Nietzsche's Task

Author: Laurence Lampert

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2008-10-01

Total Pages: 332

ISBN-13: 0300128835

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When Nietzsche published Beyond Good and Evil in 1886, he told a friend that it was a book that would not be read properly until “around the year 2000.” Now Laurence Lampert sets out to fulfill this prophecy by providing a section by section interpretation of this philosophical masterpiece that emphasizes its unity and depth as a comprehensive new teaching on nature and humanity. According to Lampert, Nietzsche begins with a critique of philosophy that is ultimately affirmative, because it shows how philosophy can arrive at a defensible ontological account of the way of all beings. Nietzsche next argues that a new post-Christian religion can arise out of the affirmation of the world disclosed to philosophy. Then, turning to the implications of the new ontology for morality and politics, Nietzsche argues that these can be reconstituted on the fundamental insights of the new philosophy. Nietzsche’s comprehensive depiction of this anti-Platonic philosophy ends with a chapter on nobility, in which he contends that what can now be publicly celebrated as noble in our species are its highest achievements of mind and spirit.


Dionysus after Nietzsche

Dionysus after Nietzsche

Author: Adam Lecznar

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2020-04-16

Total Pages: 259

ISBN-13: 1108482562

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Explores how, after Nietzsche, Dionysus and the ancient Greeks would never be the same again.


The Routledge Guidebook to Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra

The Routledge Guidebook to Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Author: Matthew Meyer

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-09-12

Total Pages: 277

ISBN-13: 1351806750

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The Routledge Guidebook to Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra is an engaging introduction to this rich and provocative philosophical text. Nietzsche is arguably one of the most influential and yet least understood philosophers of the nineteenth century. The same can be said of his self-proclaimed magnum opus, Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The work has influenced everything from poetry, literature, and music to philosophy, psychoanalysis, and soldiers on the battlefields of World War I. Its contents, however, are still far from being understood. On the one hand, the principal aims and even the genre of Zarathustra remain unclear. On the other hand, the work expresses, in poetic fashion, some of Nietzsche’s most important, controversial, and enigmatic doctrines: the Üebermensch, the eternal recurrence of the same, and the will to power. The Routledge Guidebook to Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra is essential reading for students of nineteenth-century philosophy, German philosophy, and intellectual history and suitable for anyone studying Nietzsche’s most famous text for the first time.


Nietzsche's Dangerous Game

Nietzsche's Dangerous Game

Author: Daniel W. Conway

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2002-05-02

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 9780521892872

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This is the first book-length treatment of the unique nature and development of Nietzsche's post-Zarathustran political philosophy. This later political philosophy is set in the context of the critique of modernity that Nietzsche advances in the years 1885-1888, in such texts as Beyond Good and Evil, On the Genealogy of Morals, Twilight of the Idols, The Antichrist, The Case of Wagner, and Ecce Homo. Daniel Conway has written a powerful book about Nietzsche's own appreciation of the limitations of both his writing style and of his famous prophetic "stance".


Adorno's Nietzschean Narratives

Adorno's Nietzschean Narratives

Author: Karin Bauer

Publisher: State University of New York Press

Published: 1999-09-09

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 0791495973

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This is the first book to provide a broad and comparative analysis of the relationship of these two influential thinkers to one another. Defying conventional appropriations of Nietzsche's and Adorno's thought, Bauer establishes crucial links between different traditions of critical thought, suggesting elective and selective affinities in the pursuit of a radicalized critique of ideology and culture. Against Habermas, Bauer argues that Nietzsche did not abandon the project of modernity, but rather achieved its most radical confrontation with the myths of the Enlightenment. Bauer's inquiry into Nietzsche's and Adorno's critiques of rationality, historicism, metaphysics, and Bildung culminates in an exposition of their readings of Wagner, who serves as a medium and supplement for their critiques of modern culture.