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Klossowski on Nietzsche: Combat against culture#3

As we have seen in the earlier discussion of the first chapter of his Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle entitled 'The Combat against Culture' Klossowski has argued that Nietzsche puts Christian culture into question and attacks Hegel's master/slave dialectic at its roots.

So Nietzsche rebelled.

Then I get lost. We have a long paragraph about the reproduction of the world of affects (emotion?) through art produced through a servile consciousness that leads to a guilty culture. Klossowski says:

"Nietzsche will remain in within this perspective of a guilty culture up to the time he puts consciousness and its categories in question----in the name of the world of affects.Until then, there will always be 'carriers of the general guilt' of a culture that mask the antinomies of bourgeois morality."

The emphasis appears to be on the individual's emotions (Nietzsche's) as a way of rebelling. And there the chaper more or less ends ends. It points to the forces within Nietzsche: a typology of forces, or the dyadic forces of Master and Slave, or manic side countered by his depressive side? It does appear to point to a reading centred on Nietzsche's psychic states one structured on Nietzsche's struggle with his own descent into madness.

The chapter reads more like a stand alone essay than a chapter in a book. There is a particular reading being developed here: one that wants to show how strange, unique, and disorienting Nietzsche's thought can be?

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Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at September 20, 2004 08:48 PM | TrackBack