Agonal Perspectives On Nietzsche S Philosophy Of Critical Transvaluation

Die Reihe Monographien und Texte zur Nietzsche-Forschung (MTNF) setzt seit mehreren Jahrzehnten die Agenda in der sich stetig verändernden Nietzsche-Forschung. Die Bände sind interdisziplinär und international ausgerichtet und spiegeln das gesamte Spektrum der Nietzsche-Forschung wider, von der Philosophie über die Literaturwissenschaft bis zur politischen Theorie. Die Reihe veröffentlicht Monographien und Sammelbände, die einem strengen Peer-Review-Verfahren unterliegen. Die Buchreihe wird von einem internationalen Redaktionsteam geleitet.

Nietzsche, Theories of Knowledge, and Critical Theory, the first volume of a two-volume book collection on Nietzsche and the Sciences, ranges from reviews of Nietzsche and the wide variety of epistemic traditions - not only pre-Socratic, but Cartesian, Leibnizian, Kantian, and post-Kantian -through essays on Nietzsche's critique of knowledge via his critique of grammar and modern culture, and culminates in an extended section on the dynamic of Nietzsche's critical philosophy seen from the perspective of Habermas and critical theory. This volume features a first-time English translation of Habermas's afterword to his own German-language collection of Nietzsche's Epistemological Writings.

Drawing upon a wide variety of authors, approaches, and ideological contexts, this book offers a comprehensive and detailed critique of the distinct and polemical senses in which the concept of ressentiment (and its cognate 'resentment') is used today. It also proposes a new mode of addressing ressentiment in which critique and polemics no longer set the tone: care. Contemporary tendencies in political culture such as neoliberalism, nationalism, populism, identity politics, and large-scale conspiracy theories have led to the return of the concept of ressentiment in armchair political analysis. This book argues that, due to the tension between its enormous descriptive power and its mutually contradicting ideological performances, it is necessary to ‘redramatize’ the concept of ressentiment. By what right do we possess and use the concept of ressentiment, and what makes the phenomenon worth knowing? Inspired by Marxist political epistemology, affect theory, postcolonialism, and feminism, the book maps, delimits, and assesses four irreducible ways in which ressentiment can be articulated: the ways of the priest, the physician, the witness, and the diplomat. The first perspective is typically embodied by conservative (Scheler, Girard) and liberal (Smith, Rawls) political theory; the second, by Nietzsche, Deleuze and Foucault; whereas the standpoint of the witness is found in the writings of Améry, Fanon and Adorno; and the diplomat’s is the author’s own, albeit inspired by philosophers such as Ahmed, Stiegler, Stengers, and Sloterdijk. In producing a dialectical sequence between all four typical modes of enunciation, the book demonstrates how the first three reinterpretations of ressentiment are already implied in the theater set up in Nietzsche’s late polemical books, while the fourth proposes a line of flight out of it. The Dialectic of Ressentiment will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in critical theory, social and political philosophy, cultural studies, sociology, history, literature, political science, anthropology, and Nietzsche scholarship. It will also appeal to anyone interested in the politics of anger, discourse ethics, trauma studies, and memory politics. The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

Representations of violence are often said to generate cathartic effects, but what does “catharsis” mean? And what theory of the unconscious made this concept so popular that it reaches from classical antiquity to the digital age? In Violence and the Oedipal Unconscious, Nidesh Lawtoo reframes current debates on (new) media violence by tracing the philosophical, aesthetic, and historical vicissitudes of the “catharsis hypothesis” from antiquity to modernity and into the present. Drawing on theorists of mimesis from Aristotle to Nietzsche, Bernays to Breuer, Freud to Girard to Morin, Lawtoo offers a genealogy of the relationship between violence and the unconscious with at least two aims: First, this study gives an account of the birth of the Oedipal unconscious—out of a “cathartic method.” Second, it provides new theoretical foundations to solve a riddle of (new) media violence that may no longer rest on Oedipal solutions. In the process, Lawtoo outlines a new theory of violence, mimesis, and the unconscious that does not have desire as a via regia, but rather, the untimely realization that all affects spread contagiously and thus mimetically.

Nietzsche's work has become a crucial point of departure for contemporary critical theory and debate.

These essays strip away Nietzsche's flamboyant style, his tragic biography, and his notorious "influence" to reveal him purely as a philosopher, a thinker occupied with problems of justification, value, science and knowledge, truth and God. They discover a profound and very human philosopher who has too long been ignored and distorted by the wrong kinds of admiration and criticism. Contributors include Walter Kaufmann, Arthur Danto, Richard Schacht, Karl Jaspers, Kathryn Pyne Parsons, Max Scheler, Ivan Soll, Thomas Mann, and Herman Hesse.

Imitation is, perhaps more than ever, constitutive of human originality. Many things have changed since the emergence of an original species called Homo sapiens, but in the digital age humans remain mimetic creatures: from the development of consciousness to education, aesthetics to politics, mirror neurons to brain plasticity, digital simulations to emotional contagion, (new) fascist insurrections to viral contagion, we are unconsciously formed, deformed, and transformed by the all too human tendency to imitate—for both good and ill. Crossing disciplines as diverse as philosophy, aesthetics, and politics, Homo Mimeticus proposes a new theory of one of the most influential concepts in western thought (mimesis) to confront some of the hypermimetic challenges of the present and future. Written in an accessible yet rigorous style, Homo Mimeticus appeals to both a specialized and general readership. It can be used in courses of modern and contemporary philosophy, aesthetics, political theory, literary criticism/theory, media studies, and new mimetic studies.

Nietzsche is famous for rejecting a great many standard philosophical methods. He does this on the basis of critical assessments of these methods. Nietzsche's historical critiques are justly famous but the question of what his new philosophy is often not explored. The important issue is what Nietzsche believed were some of the possibilities left for philosophy if his criticisms of previous philosophies were correct. This book is called the 'Reclamation of Philosophy' because Nietzsche is engaged in a task of reappropriating certain characteristics of past philosophies into his work. He reclaims philosophical reflection as practiced by French moralists, some Presocratic philosophers, and some German thinkers. As a mature writer he is no longer interested in philosophy simply as a place to display skill in analytic or logical reasoning. He is interested in a philosophy which can address the cultural and personal issues of people constructing themselves in their world. He is particularly interested in using philosophical talents to help to discover the values implicit in practices and assumptions which people hold. These 'values' are not just moral and aesthetic they are also epistemologically relevant. Nietzsche's Reclamation of Philosophy elucidates what Nietzsche has to say about value; particularly what he has to say about moral value, by looking at his views of aesthetic value.