Nietzsche As Affirmative Thinker

The full century that has elapsed since Nietzsche was at the height of his work did not obliterate his impact. In many ways he is still a contemporary philosopher, even in that sense of 'contemporary' which points to the future. We may have outgrown his style (always, however, admirable and exciting to read), his sense of drama, his creative exaggeration, his sometimes flamboy ant posture of a rebel wavering between the heroic and the puerile. Yet Nietzsche's critique of transcendental values and, especially, his attack on the inherited conceptions of rationality remain pertinent and continue to pro voke anew cultural critique or dissent. Today Nietzsche is no longer discussed apologetically, nor is his radicalism shunned or suppressed. That his work remains the object of extremely diverse readings is befitting a philosopher who replaced the concept of truth with that of interpretation. It is, indeed, around the concept of interpretation that much of the rem:wed interest in Nietzsche seems to center today. Special emphasis is being laid on his manner of doing philosophy, and his views on interpretation and the genealogical method are often re-read in the context of contemporary hermeneutics and "deconstructionist" positions.

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.

The book contains the proceedings of a seminar, Nietzsche: Philologist, Philosopher and Cultural Criticheld at Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi in November 2004.The papers appearing here were written by scholarsfromIndia, France, Germany and Spain. They also come from several disciplinary backgrounds such as Philosophy, Literature, Political Science Semiotics, Mathematics and Aesthetics. The authors deal with different and variedaspects of the 19th century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche's life and work. Nietzsche has been one of the most important influences on contemporary cultural criticism. Post-structural and post-modern thought in the late 20th century French context owes much to Nietzsche's philosophical critique of European culture, in particular and by extension, of any totalising cultural, political and ethical theory or practice anywhere. Beginning his career as a trained philologist, Nietzsche employed a mode of critical hermeneutics in order to deconstruct the highly cherished values and orientations of Europe, especially those associated with post-Socratic Greek thought, puritan Christianity and modern science. Nietzsche's critical relationship with philology was similar to that between post-structuralismand structuralism in the 20th century. Nietzsche was a controversial, colourful and multifaceted philosopher. The effects of his philosophy have been felt in fields as literature, aesthetics, religion, ethics, musiccriticism, ecology and feminism. The over-valuation of art with respect to the domain of knowledge was one of his enduring contributions to modern/post-modern philosophy. Nietzsche is also known, not the least, as a stylist of philosophical writing: the transformation and transgression of the limits of the dominant discourse being one of his more important philosophical concerns.

Anas Karzai’s timely book emphasizes how modern progressive sociological and political thought including the work of Weber, Adorno, and Foucault, is based on an often unacknowledged debt to Nietzsche. Karzai’s book highlights how Nietzsche’s observation of the human condition in modernity is to be read as an affirmative critique.

Explores the development of an affirmative ethics or morality in Nietzsche's work, and attempts to demonstrate that this process is that of an increasingly complicated articulation of the encounter with otherness. Pays particular attention to the fundamental premise of Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy: that a Dionysian ground of pleasure underlies all meaning-creation. Analyzes how Nietzsche adapted the imagery of Greek Dionysianism to describe a contradictory world of joy and suffering in which joy is fundamental. This contradictory relationship is found to be present in Greek thinkers who propound the metaphysics of the Mysteries.

Friedrich Nietzsche is one of the most influential thinkers of the past hundred and fifty years and On the Genealogy of Morality (1887) is his most important work on morality. A polemical contribution to moral and political theory, it offers a critique of moral values and traces the historical evolution of concepts such as guilt, conscience, responsibility, law, and justice. It is a text affording valuable insight into Nietzsche's assessment of modern times and how he envisaged a possible overcoming of the epoch of nihilism. Nietzsche himself emphasised the cumulative nature of his work and the necessity for correct understanding of the later as a development of the earlier. This volume contains new translations of the Genealogy and of The Greek State and sections from other of Nietzsche's work to which he refers within it (Human All Too Human, Daybreak, The Joyful Science, and Beyond Good and Evil).

Safronov’s Nietzsche’s Political Economy is a pioneering appraisal of Nietzsche’s critique of industrial culture and its unfolding crisis. The author contends that Nietzsche remains unique in conceptualizing the upheavals of modern political economy in terms of the crisis of its governing values. Nietzsche scrutinises the norms which, not only preside over the unfathomable build-up in debt, the proliferation of meaningless, impersonal slavery and the rise of increasingly repressive social control systems, but inevitably set these precarious tendencies of modern political economy on a collision course liable to culminate in an unprecedented human and environmental catastrophe. Safronov explores the core themes of Nietzsche’s political economy—debt, slavery, and the division of labour—with reference to the influential views of Adam Smith and Karl Marx, as well as against the backdrop of the Long Depression (1873–1896), the first truly international crisis of industrial capitalism, during which most of Nietzsche’s work was completed. In Nietzsche’s assessment, modern political economy is predicated on the valuations that diminish humankind’s prospects and harm the planet’s future by consistently enfeebling the present, as long as there is profit to be made from it. Nietzsche’s critical insight, which challenges the most fundamental tenet of modern economics and finance, is that in order to build a stronger and intrinsically more valuable future in lieu of simply speculating on it, as though the liberal Promised Land could descend upon us like the manna from heaven at the wave of an invisible hand [of the market], it is necessary to walk from the future we dare to envisage resolutely back to the present we inhabit to determine what demands achieving such a vision would impose upon us, instead of embellishing the ‘here and now’ by cynically discounting the future to the [net] value of the present while disparaging, disowning and rewriting the past to unburden ourselves of its troubling legacy, as we continue to frivolously squander its capital to the alluring tunes of the ‘sirens who in the marketplace sing to us of the future’. The enabling mechanism for changing our valuing perspectives, Nietzsche tells us, lies dormant in us and it must be unlocked before it is too late.