October 15, 2003

politics and philosophy

I can see that Bataille his essay, "Nietzsche and the Fascists", does a good job in disengaging Nietzsche from the Fascist (Italian and German) appropriation of his work. It was a betrayal of Nietzsche by his relatives. Nietzsche's wings cannot be clipped through servility to a political movement. His texts addressed free spirits who are incapable of letting themselves be used. Bataille sees the movement of Nietzsche's texts as constituting a labyrinth, the very opposite of the directives of that political systems demand.

So Fascism is pushed to one side.

However, I do not see that Bataille shows that a political perspective does not stand in the middle of Nietzsche's philosophy; a political perspective that arises out of Nietzsche's diagnosis of Europen nihilism. The politics has been interpreted in terms of Nietzsche being the great destroyer of all that is sacred in European culture: he is the great destroyer who dethrones that which is falling; the annihilator par exellence who tears things apart with his philosophical hammer. That is pretty much the current American conservative understanding of Nietzsche.
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Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at October 15, 2003 11:17 PM | TrackBack
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