Nietzsche and Philosophy
니체와 철학
A study of Nietzsche by Gilles Deleuze, published in 1962 by the Presses Universitaires de France. It sets Nietzsche up as the adversary of Hegel's dialectic and reconstructs his philosophy as a typology of "active" and "reactive" forces, with the "will to power" as the principle that generates difference, "genealogy" as the questioning of the value of values, and "eternal return" as a selective test. In a French philosophical scene dominated by phenomenology and Marxism, it became the starting point of a Nietzsche revival that led into post-structuralism. It has been criticised, however, for leaning heavily on the posthumous compilation The Will to Power and quoting it without critical examination.
In depth
Why is this book the starting point of the French Nietzsche revival?
In the 1950s French philosophy centred on the so-called "three H's", Hegel, Husserl and Heidegger, alongside Sartre's existentialism and the Marxism of the Communist Party. The French Wikipedia presents Nietzsche and Philosophy as a book that shows renewed interest in Nietzsche at a time when phenomenology and Marxism dominated the scene. According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, after his 1953 book on Hume Deleuze went through a quiet period he later called "a hole in my life", and the considerable acclaim that met this book in 1962 established his reputation in academic circles.
A French wave of interest in Nietzsche followed. Deleuze led the Nietzsche colloquium at Royaumont in 1964, and with Michel Foucault he wrote the general introduction to the first volume of the French edition of Colli and Montinari's critical edition, published by Gallimard from 1967. At the 1972 Cerisy-la-Salle colloquium "Nietzsche aujourd'hui?" Deleuze and Jacques Derrida appeared together. Here the French Nietzsche took shape: read not, as by Heidegger, as the "last metaphysician", but as a thinker who leaves metaphysics behind. The Korean translation is titled 니체와 철학.
What does it argue?
The book has five chapters: The Tragic, Active and Reactive, Critique, From Ressentiment to the Bad Conscience, and The Overman: Against the Dialectic. Deleuze reads the core of Nietzsche's philosophy as relations between forces. Every phenomenon is the result of forces entering into relation, and forces are either "active", affirming themselves and going to the limit of what they can do, or "reactive", obstructing other forces and dragging them back from their limit. The "will to power" is not a desire to seize something but the internal principle that produces the differences and hierarchy between forces.
As the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy summarises, Deleuze holds that Nietzsche completed and at the same time inverted Kant's critique. Kant criticised only false claims to knowledge and morality; Nietzsche made true knowledge, true morality and even truth itself the object of critique. His method is "genealogy", and its principle the will to power as a principle of difference. The affirmative forces that Nietzsche calls "noble" distinguish themselves by first affirming themselves, and only secondarily consider that from which they are distinguished.
The victory of reactive forces runs from "ressentiment" through the "bad conscience" to the "ascetic ideal". Deleuze reads the "eternal return" not as a cosmology in which the same comes back but as a selective test that filters out the reactive and lets only what can be affirmed return.
Why is it an "anti-Hegelian" book?
For Deleuze, Hegel's dialectic is a thought that advances through the negation of the negation. But for the Nietzsche Deleuze reads, a thought that starts from negation is the thought of the slave. The slave first says "you are evil" and only then "therefore I am good". The master first affirms himself, and negation is only a by-product that follows. Deleuze therefore defines the dialectic as the ideology of ressentiment, the thought of reactive forces, and sets Nietzsche up as its adversary. As the French Wikipedia puts it, he presents Nietzsche as the enemy of the Hegelian dialectic, opposing to its dynamic of overcoming a vitalist philosophy of affirmation. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy writes that Deleuze's anti-Hegelianism shows in his focus on the productivity of the non-dialectical, affirmative forces of difference that Nietzsche calls "noble".
This anti-Hegelianism also matters for the relation to Marxism. French Marxism at the time had been Hegelianised through Alexandre Kojève's lectures on Hegel and through Sartre. By targeting the dialectic, Deleuze also targeted the philosophical ground of that Marxism. Deleuze did not later abandon Marx: in Anti-Oedipus, written with Félix Guattari in 1972, he wove Marx, Nietzsche and Freud together in an attempt at a critique of capitalism.
What criticisms has it met?
The most frequent criticism concerns the text. According to the French Wikipedia, Pierre-André Taguieff among others points out that Deleuze relied heavily on The Will to Power in this book without examining it critically. The Will to Power is not a book Nietzsche wrote but a compilation in which Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche and Peter Gast selected notes from his notebooks and rearranged them by theme. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari's critical edition exposed the arbitrariness of that editing. That Deleuze a few years later co-wrote the introduction to the French edition of that very critical edition shows the double character of the French reception of Nietzsche in these years.
There are also questions of interpretation. In the English-speaking world Richard Rorty and others judged that the book laid Deleuze's own system over Nietzsche, and from the side of critical theory Peter Dews in Logics of Disintegration critically examined the post-structuralist reception of Nietzsche as a whole. On the other hand the book opened a way to reread Nietzsche not as a forerunner of Nazism or an irrationalist but as a philosopher of affirmation and difference. Lukács's The Destruction of Reason and this book are the two poles of twentieth-century Nietzsche interpretation, drawing opposite conclusions about the same Nietzsche.