Trevor, I've been laid very low with the flu since Friday so I have not been able to repond to what you have written. This will be quick response.

You wrote here:

"I can agree that we will read these texts [of Nietzsche's] in the light of our own concerns but that does not mean that we can read them in any way we like. What Salome says about Nietzsche wasn't just true in 1894. Either she is right or she is wrong. This will never change.

It seems to me that you are not addressing the points Salome raises. She would not have disagreed that Human, All Too Human is a recoil from Nietzsche's earlier Schopenhauerian position... Yes, this is a long way from the death-orientated, romantic surrealist interpretation; just as it is also a long way from the final phase in Nietzsche's system identified by Salome. She doesn't call this final phase beyond will and representation; but I will. Bataille's position, and that of surrealism in general, is just as far from Schopenhauerian romanticism as the final position in Nietzsche's system Salome identifies. You want to stop at the critical free-thinker. Bataille and Klossowski want to go all the way."

However, I disagree with the next point you make:

"What Salome says about Nietzsche wasn't just true in 1894. Either she is right or she is wrong. This will never change."

Interpretation of Nietzsche's texts are much looser and more fluid than that sentence implies, as there are many different interpratations of Nietzsche's---Salome's, the fascist's, the surrealists, Heidegger's, Kaufman's, the analytic philosophers, Derrida and Foucault's, poststructuralist feminists, American postmodernists. These are very different interpretations and they arise because the reception of the Nietzsche texts has been so very different; and these texts have meant different things to poeple. Even amongst the French Nietzscheans there are differences ---say between Bataille, Deleuze and Irigarary. Which are right and wrong here? Which of these will never change?

So I'm not saying that Salome's 3 stage interpretation is wrong. Far from it. I am happy to explore it and see what it opens up. I do concur with her second free spirit/negative critique period, which I suggested started from Human, All too Human. What I was pointing out was that Salome's kind Nietzsche with his revaluation of values by the new kind of philosopher as a free spirit does not figure in the Bataille/surrealist interpretation. The revaluation of a values of the middle texts------The Gay Science, Beyond Good and Evil and Thus Spake Zarathustra----is outside their horizons.

But I do not have Klossowski's book so I cannot see what is done with these texts.

My concerns are not about scholarship here. Scholarship is the ethos of the liberal university. I am more at home with Derridean style readings. So I'm not saying that the surrealists do not understand Nitzesche as a philosopher. That is something an academic would do inside the philosophy institution. This weblog is centred outside academia even though it overlaps the boundaries of academia.

I'm trying to get a handle on the surrealist interpretation and what they are using Nietzsche's texts for. I accept that Bataille is telling his own story about modernity, and that Nietzsche plays a pivotal role in that. Bataille---like Heidegger---wants to escape the prison house of modernity, displace instrumental reason and utility and overcome individual subjectivity. He launches an attack on the pre-eminence of the philosophical subject.

Yet, I would now add, that one can read Bataille as a moral critic of modernity, and more particularly of the French morality of the 1930s. Does he not concentrate on ethical rationalization of social life that had been structured by utility and capital accummulation. The whole attack on utility and success-orientated utilitarian action is a moral critique in the Nietzschean tradition. We have the self-dissolution of the individualist/monadic subject and the reconnecting with life from which the subject had been cut off. The reconnection with life comes through the spontaneity of the repressed bodily desires.

Is this not an interpretation of Nietzsche's revaluation of values? Is this not an affirmation and enhancement of life?

This brings me to the second point I want to address. I'll be brief here because I'm getting tired. You write in response to one of my earlier posts:

"You want to stop at the critical free-thinker. Bataille and Klossowski want to go all the way."

I presume this 'all the way' is linked back to Salome's third period of the aesthetic Nietzsche who turns against his embrace of an enlightening scientific reason in Human, All too Human. I presume because I don't have the Salome and Klossowski books. Salome marks the turn back to the aesthetic in Beyond Good and Evil and Thus Spake Zarathustra.

So which of Nietzsche's texts does "all the way" refer to? I have referred to The Will to Power, in my instincts as the body post. The Will to Power text is very much the one that Heidegger uses for his construction of a metaphysically more systematic Nietzsche who revolts against Platonism, embraces becoming and wants to enhance life.

My puzzle is: Is The Will to Power the final position of Nietzsche? If so, then it's hardly the final position of the surrealists given your reading of them as engaged in poetics, and not being philosophers or doing philosophy.

So what texts constitute Nietzsche's final position for the surrealists 'all the way'?

Is it Twilight of the Idols?

The AntiChrist?

Ecce Homo?

Nietzsche Contra Wagner?

I'm puzzled because, when I read these late texts, I more or less do so in terms of both the revaluation of all values as a response to the advent of nihilism, and the revaluation that is part of the philosophy of the future. Those middle period concerns continue to run through these texts.

Or have the surrealists displaced these texts in favour of Nietzsche the person going mad. Going mad is "the going all the way"? Or do they read the texts in the light of Nietzsche going mad?

I will re read the Salome text in the Library again.