Abstract
In France especially, these three venerable names stand for currents of influence so powerful that they functioned almost as contemporary in the collision of ideas and values that shaped the rise of postmodernism during the 1960s. It is impossible, for example, to understand the work of Lacan and Althusser or, for that matter, Deleuze and Derrida without a working understanding of these canonical nineteenth-century figures. A complete account of their work on its own terms is obviously impossible to convey in a single chapter—so the focus is very specifically on exactly what aspects of their legacy conditioned the thinking of the creators of French theory.
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22 May 2020
The book was inadvertently published without updating the following corrections. These have been now updated.
Notes
- 1.
“Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny” was Ernst Haeckel’s way of summing up the general idea, which was influential throughout the nineteenth century and persisted in one form or another into the twentieth century, especially in developmental psychology. See, for example, the work of Jean Piaget.
- 2.
Explains Safranski: “The first lecture already indicates that words bring about the defeat of music. Logos defeats the pathos of tragedy. … What is language? An organ of consciousness. Music, however, is being” (63).
- 3.
“Will to power” names all forces for Nietzsche, at biological and chemical levels, as well as at the level of human history. It does not just mean seeking “power.” So, in a certain way, the continuity essential to nineteenth-century accounts of natural and social processes remained for Nietzsche, but all sense of direction was gone. This was very much the Nietzsche Deleuze would introduce to his Parisian audience in 1962—a turning point for their thinking.
- 4.
Although Kant seems to have coined the term, Heidegger’s usage and Derrida’s appropriation of it are most relevant. A conflation of religious and philosophical notions is implied. That is what Nietzsche intended when he arraigned Platonism and the Judeo-Christian tradition on the same charge—disguising decadence as idealism.
- 5.
Repelling his followers, Zarathustra demanded “Why then should you not pluck at my laurels?” More specifically, Nietzsche’s “Effective History” (using the past for life-affirming present purposes) in Untimely Meditations ([1874] 1997) inspired Foucault as well (“Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice1980). Compare Deleuze on “buggering” his favorite philosophers.
- 6.
So Richard Wolin is right up to a point; many targets of Nietzsche’s contempt were political. But his justifications were consistently aesthetic. He disdained “the herd” and all its values, for example, because he found its “style” of life repulsive—and style is what matters most to Nietzsche (Wolin 2004: 31–45; 43–59).
- 7.
- 8.
I once overheard a young man running a workshop on gender issues in a secondary school recommending a particular “advocacy camp” to a gay student who approached him after his presentation. I asked “advocacy of what” and he said “anything.” The camp was “about skills and methods,” regardless of content.
- 9.
Nietzsche has always appealed to radicals on the right, of course—the very idea of a Nietzsche for the left once seemed bizarre. One need only recall the many fascist intellectuals and artists in the 1920s and 1930s who were every bit as contemptuous of the bourgeoisie as demonstrators in the streets of Paris in the late 1960s. Hence, the importance of Foucault’s permission slip.
References
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———. (1913) 1998. Totem and Taboo: Resemblances Between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics. Mineola: Dover Thrift Editions.
———. (1930) 1961. Civilization and Its Discontents. Trans. James Strachey. New York: W.W. Norton.
———. (1939) 1967. Moses and Monotheism. New York: Vintage Books.
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de Zengotita, T. (2019). Marx, Freud, Nietzsche. In: Postmodern Theory and Progressive Politics. Political Philosophy and Public Purpose. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90689-8_6
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