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'An aphorism, properly stamped and molded, has not been "deciphered" when it has simply been read; rather one has then to begin its interpretation, for which is required an art of interpretation.' -- Nietzsche, 'On the Genealogy of Morals'
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'An aphorism, properly stamped and molded, has not been "deciphered" when it has simply been read; rather one has then to begin its interpretation, for which is required an art of interpretation.' -- Nietzsche, 'On the Genealogy of Morals'

Deleuze, Nietzsche, « Previous | |Next »
August 27, 2005

This post on Deleuze's 'Nietzsche and Philosophy' picks up from this one in early July. It is a very historical text, as it was the first book in France to systematically defend and explicate Nietzsche's work, which was still suspected of fascism, even after the second World War.

This text is seen as a classic one in the way that Continental post-structuralism has problematized the foundations of philosophical and political thought. This way of interpreting poststructuralism as a theoretical rupture holds that this inaugurates a post-Philosophical culture where philosophical claims and political judgements admit no justification and rest on no foundation. This 'postmodern' interpretation incorporates post-structuralism into a series of Anglo-American debates between modernists and postmodernists.

Now I'm more interested in the way Deleuze interprets Nietzsche to gain a way out of the philosophical cage that imprisons him through questioning the most general presuppositions of philosophy,

From Nietzsche, Deleuze adopts the desire to create new concepts that challenge conventional ideas about origins and representations and about the distinction between "mental" and "material" phenomena, concepts that attempt to create a critique of reason that is not reactive and negative, but rather affirms or "produces" something other; a philosophy based around the flux of existence.

In the Preface to 'Nietzsche and Philosophy' Deleuze says that Nietzsche's philosophy is organized along two great axes.

The first is concerned with forces and forms of general semeiology. It gives rise to the conception of the philosopher as a physician, active and reactive forces, the reactive forces of ressentiment and bad conscience, and the constitution of the subject as a man-slave. On this axis Nietzsche understands life as a contest between "active" (life affirming) and "reactive" (life denying) forces.

The second axis is concerned with power and forms an ethics and an ontology that gives rise to the will to power, eternal return and affirmation.

Deleuze says that it is important to remove the distorted interpretations assocated with man-slave (a being dominated by a master); the will to power (as a will that desires and seeks power); and eternal return (as the return of the same) since these misinterpretations turns Nietzsche into a nihilist, a fascist or a prophet.

Deleuze reads Nietzsche as opposing nihilism with transmutation, the affirmation of power by the Overman, and does with an interpretative and evaluative philosophy aligned with the arts.

I have little disagreement with this sketch in the Preface. It is a Nietzsche that I would also defend.

What I find most interesting about Deleuze is that he is trying to create an image of thought as affirmative and productive, rather than an image of thought as negative and analytical: one which will lead to alternative, non-dialectical, non-hierarchial, "a-conceptual concepts".

| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 11:53 PM | | Comments (0)
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