My understanding of the French Nietzscheans, (e.g., Foucault, Derrida, Kofman, Deleuze), is that they resist the effort to unify his thought, arguing that Nietzsche's shifting meanings and contradictions resist systematization. Much of the French work on Nietzsche can be seen as a refutation of Heidegger's [metaphysical] interpretation by insisting on the metaphorical character of Nietzsche's writings, his style, his irony, and his masks.
For the French Nietzscheans how Nietzsche writes, his use of aphorisms, metaphors, and wide range of literary styles is seen as important as what he writes about. If literature as language grounded in rhetoric, then it is the forgetfulness of the metaphorical origin of concepts that leads to the mistaken belief that concepts literally represent reality. The metaphorical character of Nietzsche's concepts serves to foil any definitive reading of his philosophy.
Fair enough. I can accept a variety of interpretations is contrasted with Heidegger's metaphysical interpretation of Nietzsche. In contrast to Heidegger's metaphysical interpretation of Nietzsche, we can argue that Nietzsche's fragmentary and contradictory writings have more than one meaning. So we can read Thus Spoke Zarathustra by focusing on its literary structure, seeing parody (of both the Platonic dialogues and the New Testament), tragedy, and Bildungsroman as literary models that operate throughout the book. Hence we have a very different kind of Nietzsche.
Yet there is also a unity or a narrative to Nietzsche's thought structured around the idea of the 'death of God' and the impending cultural catastrophe, which he called nihilism, that is its consequence. Nietzsche can be interpreted as devoted much of his philosophy to thinking through the consequences of this great event in history.
Secondly, many of the French scholars, including Derrida and Deleuze, stress Nietzsche's theory of interpretation and language and downplay the way that Nietzsche is primarily an ethical thinker concerned with both what is the best life and the creation of a severe, aristocratic ethic.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at May 8, 2005 11:59 PM | TrackBack