States and Nomads: Hegel\u27s World and Nietzsche Earth

What is Nietzsche\u27s concept of the earth? While earth is often taken in a general way to refer to embodied life, to this world rather than to an imaginary and disastrous other world, I propose that the term and concept also have a significant political dimension-a geophilosophical dimension—which is closely related to the radical immanence so central to Nietzsche\u27s thought. I shall argue that he often and pointedly replaces the very term world (Welt) with earth (Erde) because world is tied too closely to ideas of unity, eternity, and transcendence. World is a concept with theological affiliations, as Nietzsche indicates in Beyond Good and Evil: Around a hero everything becomes a tragedy, around a demi-god everything becomes a satyr play; and around God everything becomes—what do you think? perhaps the world ? (BGE 150

This Is Not a Christ : \u3cem\u3eNietzsche, Foucault, and the Genealogy of Vision\u3c/em\u3e

There is nothing surprising about linking the names of Nietzsche and Foucault, something that Foucault himself frequently did. We know that the practices of archaeology and genealogy owe much to On the Genealogy of Morals; and in The Order of Things Foucault celebrates Nietzsche for being able to look beyond the epoch of man and his doubles,\u27\u27 thinking of the Obermensch as designating that which is beyond man, and for serving, along with Mallarme, as one of the prophets of the hegemony of language in the emerging episteme of the postmodern world. Here I want to focus on other affinities, influences, or inspirations that have to do with what these thinkers saw, that is, their engagement with visual culture and visual art. Foucault is a theorist of the visual and of the complex and sometimes uncanny relations between the visual and the linguistic, a thought that is expressed gnomically in his reading of Velazquez\u27s Las Meninas when he says that the relation of painting to language is an infinite relation. In addition to his essay on Rene Magritte, This Is Not a Pipe, which contains the outlines of an archaeology of Western painting, the rest of Foucault\u27s work is full of references to the painters of madness (e.g., Bosch and Goya) and to the artists of his own time: for example, there are passages on Andy Warhol and introductions to the work of the photographer Duane Michals and the photographic painter Gerard Fromanger. Foucault began a book on Edouard Manet, which apparently would have developed the suggestion that the artist inaugurates or exemplifies a turn within painting to the kind of intertextuality in which pictures refer to other pictures through the medium of the museum; this parallels the literary intertextuality that Gustave Flaubert exemplified in The Temptation of Saint Anthony, which is said to constitute a Fantasia of the Library. We can imagine that such a work from Foucault would have put a new, archaeological spin on ideas about museum culture and the age of technical reproduction that are associated with Andre Malraux and Walter Benjamin

Dogs, Domestication, and the Ego

In Zarathustra\u27s On the Vision and the Riddle, three animals-a spider, a snake, and a dog-make significant appearances, as do three human or quasihuman figures-Zarathustra himself, the dwarf known as the Spirit of Gravity, and the shepherd who must bite off the head of the snake. Of these animals, it is the dog who receives the most extended attention. Here, in the passage that along with The Convalescent (with its eagle and serpent) is usually and rightly taken to be Nietzsche\u27s most articulate and yet highly veiled approach to explaining the teaching of eternal recurrence, the riddling vision involves animals. This is scarcely the only passage in Nietzsche to deal with the figure of the dog, although it is the one in which the dog has the most active role; frequently the name of the animal appears only in figurative speech. Here, even if the entire passage is a figure for the meaning of recurrence, the dog is as lively and noisy within the text as any of the other protagonists. Unfolding the vision and the riddle, or perhaps at least discovering what questions it asks, requires a confrontation with the figures of the animals and that howling dog. The parallel passage in The Gay Science (341) includes a demon rather than a dwarf and a spider spinning in the moonlight but no dog and no shepherd choked by a snake. Let us note, before proceeding further, that of all these animals, it is only the dog who is domesticated in the real world. Eagles and serpents may speak in fairy tales (or at the beginning of Genesis), but they are fundamentally without language, although we suspect that the style of a dog\u27s whining and whimpering and perhaps its howling may have something to do with its domestication. The need for a more subtle exploration of the role of the animal in the presentation of the thought of recurrence emerges when we realize that nowhere in Nietzsche\u27s published writings is the teaching ever articulately affirmed by a human voice; yet in the two chapters of Zarathustra just mentioned, its dramatic presentation is staged with diverse animals. The discussion of recurrence in On the Vision and the Riddle reaches a turning point when the Miirchen-like dwarf has just murmured contemptuously \u27All truth is crooked; time itself is a circle.\u27 Zarathustra\u27s reply to this reductionistic oversimplification is to pose a series of questions with very little in the way of affirmation, his last question being must we not eternally return? But he tells his audience-the searchers, researchers, and guessers of riddles-that with such questions his voice became increasingly soft, for he was afraid of his own thoughts and the thoughts behind them

Gadamer, Habermas and the Death of Art

Since the appearance of Jurgen Habermas\u27s critical review of Hans-Georg Gadamer\u27s Truth and Method [Wahrheit und Methode], there has been talk of the ‘Gadamer-Habermas debate\u27 among those who are interested in the nature of historical understanding and social rationality. More recently a number of philosophers have come to see that the issues involved are of wider scope, and that the opposition of the two can be seen as emblematic of two very general styles or approaches to philosophy, which are at the centre of contemporary discussion. As one might expect, differences at fundamental levels concerning truth and understanding are likely to be reflected also in views of the arts and aesthetic questions. In this essay I want to approach the Auseinandersetzung between Gadamer and Habermas with an eye to constructing an exchange between the two concerning their analysis of recent and contemporary art. In the process I hope to suggest some of the ways in which what might be taken to be the primary issues of \u27first philosophy\u27 between the two, that is, issues pertaining to knowledge and value, turn, in some crucial ways, on aesthetic questions and concepts

Habit and Meaning in Peirce\u27s Pragmatism

The pragmatic movement has often been misunderstood; the most frequent misconceptions, which assimilated the philosophies of Peirce and James in particular to forms of positivism, reductionism, or crude voluntarism seem to be on the wane. Peirce\u27s scholastic realism, his doctrine of signs, and his conception of truth as the unique and destined goal of inquiry now tend to receive the attention that was formerly reserved for his empiricism and pragmatism. A similar change in the estimation of James seems to be taking place insofar as his theory of truth is seen as much less simplistic than was formerly supposed; and both his conception of truth and his pragmatism are coming to appear as more powerful philosophical suggestions when seen in their connection with his radical empiricism. It would, however, be too easy for those sympathetic to the early pragmatists to attribute the misunderstandings to unsympathetic critics (or, in Peirce\u27s case, to the additional factor of the late appearances of the Collected Papers). Much of the misunderstanding appears to have been generated by the pragmatists themselves; on a superficial level, they seem to be responsible for sometimes misrepresenting their own ideas. This is not a clear case of philosophical bad faith, for there is sometimes an incoherence in their thought which is quite capable of generating several interpretations. The most general discrepancy has always seemed to be between the metaphysics espoused by the pragmatists and their theory of meaning. When the theory of meaning (in its more reductionist versions) was taken to be the primary philosophical contribution of the pragmatists, their metaphysical speculations were regarded as aberrations, to be explained perhaps in terms of the heady climate created by the competing forms of idealism in their philosophical milieu. However, the more we see of the speculative vigor and coherence of their metaphysics, the more we may be tempted to reverse this interpretation

Assassins and Crusaders: Nietzsche After 9/11

Nietzsche describes his four Unzeitgemiisse Betrachtungen as Attentate, assassination attempts. The first of these, his self-described duel with David Friedrich Strauss, published in 1873, begins with the question of war and time. It is untimely or out of season insofar as it challenges the smugness of the cultural philistines who take Germany\u27s victory in the Franco-Prussian War to be a testament to the superiority of German culture. As those in the United States might have learned after the end of the Cold War and after the first Gulf War, a great victory is a great danger, and we might substitute the name of another nation state--or an emerging globalizing empire--when Nietzsche speaks of the defeat, if not the extirpation, of the German spirit for the benefit of the \u27German Reich \u27 (UM I, § 1). Assassination is always untimely, an instrument of war and a response to war. Assassination interrupts the steady, sedentary time of the state

Thinker on Stage: Nietzsche\u27s Materialism (Book Review)

Review of the book, Thinker on Stage: Nietzsche\u27s Materialism, by Peter Sloterdijk. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989

The Politics (Book Review)

Review of the book, The Politics, translated by Carnes Lord. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984

Nietzsche\u27s Gift (Book Review)

Review of the book, Nietzsche\u27s Gift, by Harold Alderman. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1977