Nietzsche as Postmodernist

Clayton Koelb, ed. Nietzsche as Postmodernist: Essays Pro and Contra. Albany: SUNY P, 1990.

1.

Since his death in 1900, Friedrich Nietzsche has been associated with almost every major movement in the twentieth century. No other writer has succeeded as well as Nietzsche in impressing such an array of subsequent thinkers. Putatively opposing ideologies have competed for his patronage; traditions that otherwise admit nothing in common find Nietzsche an ally in their endeavors. On the political front he has been considered a promoter of anarchism, fascism, libertarianism, and--despite his pointed polemics against the most modern manifestation of slave morality-- socialism. In the realm of culture he has been viewed as an inspiration for aestheticism, impressionism, expressionism, modernism, dadaism, and surrealism. In philosophical circles he has allegedly influenced phenomenology, hermeneutics, existentialism, poststructuralism, and deconstruction. This remarkable record of affinities and effects may be less a tribute to the fecundity of Nietzsche's actual oeuvre than to the resourcefulness of his various interpreters. Nietzsche touched on a wide variety of topics over the two decades in which he wrote, and the manner in which he expressed himself, the elusively suggestive and vibrant style in his mostly aphoristic oeuvre, has been obviously seductive for succeeding generations of intellectuals. Postmodernism is thus only the latest movement to claim Nietzsche as its spiritual progenitor, and it is to the credit of Clayton Koelb that in the volume under review here he has collected fourteen contributions that explore various and often antagonistic aspects of this possible affiliation.

2.

Actually, most of the essays in Nietzsche as Postmodernist have less to do with postmodernism as an artistic or general cultural phenomenon than with "postmodern theory," i.e., contemporary philosophical and theoretical tendencies generally subsumed under the rubric of poststructuralism. In this regard there are three recurrent strategies for connecting Nietzsche with recent French and Francophilic tendencies. The first of these is heavily reliant on Paul de Man's essay on Nietzsche and rhetoric found in Allegories of Reading (New Haven: Yale, 1979, 103-18). De Man focuses his attention on a particular phase in Nietzsche's career when the young classical philologist at Basel was preparing a course on rhetoric for the winter semester in 1872-73. Citing fragmentary lecture notes for this course (which had only...