Transvaluations

Yesterday I finished reading a book on Nietzsche's reception in France ('Transvaluations' by Douglas Smith). I wouldn't have expected to say this, but, more than anything else I've read over the past year, I would recommend you read it if you get a couple of days. It starts off pretty much as you would expect... The first people in France to read Nietzsche were Wagnerians who were mainly interested in things like 'the Birth of Tragedy', were quick to embrace anything nice he said about Wagner and Schopenhauer, and quick to denounce everything else as symptoms of his madness. Maybe the second reading of Nietzsche was a predictably decadent symptomology, treating all his ideas either as stemming from or causing madness, and would sometimes suggest that his madness was contagious, that reading too much of him and getting into his writings might drive you mad. With the ill-will between the French and Germans at the turn of the century, Nietzsche could be embraced for a while as a German who praised France and denounced Germans, but he then started being condemned as a typical representative of militant German thought. This first part of the book, which is sober, scholarly and a bit dry, pretty quickly gives way to one of the best overviews of twentieth century French thought that I've ever read (which isn't actually saying all that much), and the focus on Nietzsche just gives coherence to what would otherwise spin out of control. Smith tries to stick to monographs of Nietzsche, but to make various thinkers reception of Nietzsche intelligible, he has to go on digressions to explain the overall bodies of work of a lot of the thinkers that dealt with him, or explain intellectual trends that shaped their readings. As a sort of further structural principal, he takes as a more or less constant theme an opposition between the Will to Power (as a linear, teleological view of history associated with voluntarism and the Ueberman - though the last man is another teleological offshoot) and Eternal return (non-linear, and non-teleological, as a more deterministic philosophy), as contradictory aspects of Nietzsche's thought which can only be reconciled with great difficulty, if at all. He believes that Eternal return has traditionally received more emphasis in French readings of Nietzsche than in German or Anglo-American readings, though he thinks that two early German attempts to foreground eternal return were Karl Lowith, who has a thematic reading, and Jaspers, who focuses more on intentional contradictions as an important part of Nietzsche's thought, which is more methodology than a set of stable, positive propositions. Smith thinks that Lowith and Jasper's readings didn't have much of an afterlife, unlike their French counterparts, Henri Lefebvre (an excentric communist whose writings on revolutionizing everyday life foreshadowed a lot of what the situationists would later write), and Georges Bataille, whose reading is comparable to Jasper's. To skip ahead a bit, he shows the evolution of Deleuze's use of Nietzsche from 'Nietzsche and philosophy' in the early sixties to 'Difference and Repetition' about a decade later - his first book an anti-Hegelian tract focusing largely on Nietzsche's thought as being based on the interplay of competing forces, his later work being more anti-Platonist and looking to show a denial of original essences. Both of them do take the concept of eternal return as a central tenant, the second being largely influenced by Klossowski's book on Nietzsche... I'm not going to explain any of this in further detail here, because I have to read almost all the books I'm mentioning this summer, and I'll have occasion to make this clearer, and show how what this fits into the evolution of Deleuze's thought in general. At the end of the book he talks first about the influence of Heidegger's two-volume book on Nietzsche, which even Derrida was initially critical of as being overly-reductive. Heidegger paints Nietzsche as the last metaphysician, who merely reversed Plato's hierarchy of the world of being and the world of appearances, not managing to escape this opposition (he also sort of ignores the whole element of 'becoming' in Nietzsche's thought). Derrida, of course, points out that Heidegger fools himself in thinking that he has himself escaped from metaphysics, and points out that such an escape is impossible. When talking about metaphysics, even to condemn metaphysics, one is always using the language of metaphysics (which has become sort of a truism, but needed to be said at the time), and he shows Nietzsche as a more radical thinker than Heidegger when it comes to his relation to the history of western philosophy. When I was visiting you in Oxford, I told you a little about Derrida's discussion of truth as a woman in Nietzsche. This is another thing I'm going to have to reread and talk about later in this summer, but the basic ideas that truth, like one of the three definitions of the feminine that Derrida locates in Nietzsche, is itself through a complex interaction of veiling and unveiling, which Nietzsche can only approach through the mobilization of tropes. All language, including philosophical language is understood as an army of metaphors, metaphors being non-self identical, etc. etc. Like I said, I'll save that for later in the summer, but the central realization is that... well, if you go back to the Symposium, where Socrates and eros come to resemble one another, both representing the philosopher, the wise man, having wisdom does not desire wisdom. The wholly ignorant man, not realizing that he lacks wisdom, doesn't desire wisdom either. Philosophical ignorance is a self-aware ignorance that is capable of pursuing ignorance. Heidegger doesn't realize he is a metaphysician. Most metaphysicians don't realize there is a problem with being metaphysicians. Nietzsche would have the honor of being the rare philosopher who is aware of his situation, trapped in a system whose shortcomings he has been able to identify... Derrida is also the most interested in the concept of play in Nietzsche... it's surprising how many French thinkers (almost all of them) bring up the section in Twilight of the Idols on how the real world became a fable. Anyway, the last phase addressed in the book is the interest after Derrida in style and language in Nietzsche, the most prominent example probably being Sarah Kofman's 'Nietzsche and Metaphor' (Sarah Kofman is best known as a writer, she's one of those writers whose place in the canon of 20th century literature seems, to me at least, uncertain. She's kind of a major writer).
This summary took more time and space than I foresaw. I was planning to get through this summary quickly and devote most of my entry on the part I skipped, which is the strangest part of the book, the part on Nietzshe and decolonization. It's the strangest part of the book because, first off much of the chapter seems to have little relevance to Nietzsche. Before talking about Bataille and Lefebvre, Smith had explained a lot of Hegel, and in particular Kojeve's reading of Hegel (which every book talking about twentieth century French thought talks about. In talking about Decolonization, he goes back to Hegel for a while, building up to Sartre, who had nothing interesting to say about Nietzsche, at least nothing that came out in this book and nothing I've come across, but who was the most prominent spokesman against colonization in France. Sartre's reliance on Hegel is clear, and his praise of third world empowerment movements, most notable negritude, treats their writing as the negative moment in a dialectic, which will become irrelevant once their political goals are accomplished. Franz Fanon is more nuanced and interesting than Sartre, and he does take up concepts like active forgetting from Nietzsche, and the use he makes of a couple other Nietzschean ideas sort of justifies putting him in the book (sort of, but not really. Nietzsche was one influence among many, and not one that Fanon wrote about directly). Smith also talks about Camus and Levi-Strauss, he's a little all over the place in the chapter, here more than anywhere else in the book. You kind of get the sense that his reason for writing the chapter, apart from filling out an overall history of French thought, which he never admits he is writing, is to lead into a totally a-historic finish to the chapter where he seems to want to enter into these debates himself to show how Foucault's reception of Nietzsche has everything that was lacking in all these other people talking about the relationship between Europeans and the rest of the world. The book as a whole also ends with Foucault... while most of the book manages to avoid any teleological progress from ignorance to wisdom (Bataille and Klossowski come across as probably Nietzsche's best commentators, the first writing at the end of the thirties, the second working with Bataille but continuing to develop his thought on Nietzsche until 'Nietzsche and the vicious circle' which comes out in '69), Foucault really comes across as a moral - Nietzsche brought to light and made politically as well as intellectually useful.
I shouldn't end like this if I want you to take my statement at the beginning of the entry - that it would be a helpful thing for you to read - seriously. But as I said, in spite of these flaws, you really would come away with a stronger notion of twentieth century French thought (minus major figures like Bergson, Merleau-Ponty and Levinas of course).