I've finally got myself a copy of Gilles Deleuze text 'Nietzsche and Philosophy' that came out in 1962. At long lastI can see how he uses the materials of previous philosophers to build his own one based on a field of forces.

Now, it is true that not many in the English speaking world really care about making the long and arduous detour through Nietzsche and the various interpretations of his texts. Nietzsche's reception in Australia for most of the 20th century has mirrored that of England. He was read by artists, novelists and poets. He has only been taken up as a philosopher by Australian philosophers working within the continental tradition in the last quarter of the 20th century.

Within this Australian reception Deleuze's 'Nietzsche and Philosophy' is interpreted as being instrumental in turning French philosophy of the sixties and seventies away from Hegel and towards Nietzsche. It is held to be a seminal post-structuralist text that not only illuminates Nietzsche's thought, but also enables a deeper understanding of the works of French philosophers such as Foucault, Derrida, and Lyotard.

But you have to know your philosophical tradition to read Deleuze, as Deleuze views the fundamental antagonism and opposition to Hegel as an urgent and central element of his reading of Nietzsche.By posing Nietzsche as the ultimate anti-Hegel presents Nietzsche appears in the position of negation, of reaction, and of ressentiment. Such a stark opposition, appears, from the perspective of Hegel's dialectics to imply the initiation of a new dialectical process.

I'm going to read this book from the perspective of Nietzsche as a critical dialectical thinker in the sense of a living dialectics and his texts embodying a (revised) dialectical thinking. Does not Nietzsche's early text, 'The Birth of Tragedy' present a "semi-dialectical" argument based on the Dionysus/Apollo opposition? Similarly with 'The Genealogy of Morals' opposition between master and slave morality? Or active and reactive forces in 'The Will to Power.'

That interpretation should make reading a '60's Deleuze on Nietzsche interesting, as it is reading the 'Nietzsche and Philosophy' text against the grain. That would be to see Deleuze as attempting to create an autonomy from Hegel's terminology, and to transport a revised dialectics to Deleuze's terrain of sense and value.

Is the significance of Deleuze's reading of Nietzsche to be found in counter-ontology developed through a discourse of the body? Is a materialist ontology based not on the interactions of organic bodies but on connected flows of matter where the route called Deleuze-Nietzsche leading?

What is the value of a vitalist materialism compared to say Adorno's materialist ontology? Or to the reductive one of scientific materialism? We should ask this given the Deleuzian claim to be making new beginnings and opening up new possibilities from the rubble of our philosophical history and tradition.