Miguel Vatter

Universidad Diego Portales, Chile
Full Profesor

His main areas of research are republicanism, biopolitics, and political theology. He is author of Between Form and Event: Machiavelli’s Theory of Political Freedom (Kluwer, 2000) and editor of Hannah Arendt: sobrevivir al totalitarismo (LOM, 2008). Among his most recent articles are “The Idea of Public Reason and the Reason of State: Schmitt and Rawls on the Political” (Political Theory, 2008), and “In Odradek’s World: Bare Life and Historical Materialism in Agamben and Benjamin” (Diacritics, forthcoming 2009).

 

Abstract

 

Will to Power as Vindication of God: On Leo Strauss’s Reading of Nietzsche

In this paper I shall discuss Leo Strauss’s controversial interpretation of Nietzsche contained in one of his last essays, composed shortly before his death and only published posthumously. Strauss’s interpretation takes the form of a commentary on the plan of Beyond Good and Evil. It argues for two radical and paradoxical theses: the first is that Nietzsche’s atheism is in the last instance a vindication of God. The second is that Nietzsche’s conception of nature is in the last instance a vindication of the stupidity of custom, best exemplified by religious laws. On Strauss’s reading, Nietzsche not only reopens the question, apparently closed after Hegel, as to whether philosophy or religion, reason or faith, ought to be the ruling power in society, which is the question of grosse Politik, but he also appears to give an answer that distinctly favors the rule of religion over the rule of philosophy. The politics that corresponds to the doctrine of will to power is thus best understood as a political theology.

 

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