Roberto Nigro

Michigan State University, EE. UU./Institut für Theorie,
Zürcher Hochschule der Künste, Suiza
Assistant Professor

He is an Assistant professor specializing in French and German contemporary philosophy. He has studied and taught at the Universities of Bari, Frankfurt, Berlin (FU), Paris X-Nanterre and
Paris VIII, Harvard and Basel before joining the Department of Philosophy at Michigan State University. He has published articles on Foucault, Althusser, Marx, Nietzsche and Heidegger and is currently preparing a book on Foucault.

Abstract

Nietzsche’s Legacy in Contemporary Political Thought

My paper will focus on Nietzsche’s legacy in contemporary thought and examine some of the critical notions elaborated by Nietzsche in his philosophy and discussed, in particular, by some of the most prominent post-structuralist thinkers. In their works, Foucault and Deleuze, two of the most prominent figures of French contemporary philosophy, have respectively emphasized Nietzsche’s concepts of genealogy, power, subjectivity, and perspectivism. Hence, they have opened up the pathway for a new and different approach to Marx theory. I want to show how their approach to Nietzsche has also allowed for a renegotiation of the Marxist debate. My paper will take into account the discussion of such notions as Apollonian, Dionysian, truth, subjectivity, and power. The concepts of Apollonian and Dionysian may play today an important role to interpret the relationship between power and resistance, i.e. between the exercise of power over life (biopolitics) and resistance of the subjects. In Nietzsche’s first work (The Birth of Tragedy) the concepts of life and Dionysian still rest upon a romantic and realistic epistemology, which is very close, by the way, to the dimension of madness as sketched out by Foucault in Madness and Civilization (1961). However, if we look at the works Nietzsche wrote from the eighties on, we can remark that the notion of Dionysian, as what opposes the power over life, i.e the organisation and control of life, may allow to outline the intricate dialectics between politics and police, as sketched out, for instance, by Jacques Rancière in his work Dis-agreement (1995), where politics is interpreted as a process of dis-identification, which opposes forms of governments (what Rancière terms police). I want to suggest that the dialectic between politics and police in Rancière’s work may be referred to that of Dionysian and Apollonian.
Yet, Nietzsche’s work from the eighties on provides some of the most important materials to elaborate notions such as truth, subjectivity, and power which are at the core of the post-structuralist inquiry. My focus will be on three aspects: 1. Through Nietzsche’s discussion of the question of truth and knowledge (in his texts from On Truth and the Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense, 1873, Human all too Human, to The Gay Science and The Genealogy of Morals) one can restore the problem of the formation of a certain number of domains of knowledge on the basis of its relations of force and the political relations in society. Nietzsche shows, as Foucault outlines, that knowledge is always the historical and circumstantial result of conditions outside the domain of knowledge; 2. The sentence «God is dead» provides the basis for the development of the critique of the philosophical anthropology and of all forms of theoretical humanism. It may be echoed by the concept of «death of Man». Moreover, its importance is twofold, since it also represents an important antidote to the proliferation of transcendental projects; 3. The doctrine of the eternal recurrence, which emphasizes immanence over transcendence, allows for the elaboration of a theory of subjectification.