Suchergebnisse

Introduction: toward Earth's "great politics" -- Unmodern thinking: globalization, the end of history, great events -- Living on the Earth: states, nomads, multitude -- Whose time is it? Kairos, Chronos, debt -- "The world awaits you as a garden": a political aesthetic of the anthropocene? -- Earth, world, Antichrist: Nietzsche after political theology.

Carl Schmitt privately acknowledged that his late theory of Erd-Herrschaft (hegemony of the Earth) converged with some of Nietzsche's thought, yet remained silent on this in his book The Nomos of the Earth. This essay reconstructs an implicit Nietzsche–Schmitt dialog, focusing on their related but distinct geopolitical and phenomenological concepts of Earth, the role of binary divisions in ethics and politics, and the nature of hegemony. Nietzsche and Schmitt both derive from a tradition of political theology that relies on the antitheses of state sovereignty and the Antichrist, but they draw opposed conclusions from this duality.

Nietzsche aimed at splitting time into two great parts, before and after himself (EH Destiny 8). Just after finishing The Antichrist, he says that this happens through uncovering the truth of Christian morality "an event without parallel." During his last two years of frantic writing, Nietzsche was avidly reading Dostoevsky. One of the Russian novelist's most "philosophical" characters and psychological studies is Kirillov, who plans a suicide that will divide history into two parts: "From the gorilla to the destruction of God, and from the destruction of God to.the physical changing of the earth and man" (Dostoevsky 1995 115). Kirillov's program derives from a militant atheism. His will be an absolutely free suicide affirming human freedom and defying all superstitious belief in God. Kirillov sees history until himself as the time of the "God-Man" Christ; the coming era will be that of the "Man-God" (who may resemble Nietzsche's Ubermensch or his Antichrist).

Herman Melville's "The Encantadas, or Enchanted Isles," included in his signature set of shorter narratives The Piazza Tales, remains relatively unvisited by readers and critics. So too was the archipelago generally known as the Galapagos, before becoming a chic destination for natural history excursions and eco-tourism. These ten "sketches" relate a narrator's experiences on the Pacific islands, adding a number of travelers' stories, some extrapolated (more or less accurately) from known records, some creatively transformed. One informative, comprehensive handbook suggests that Melville's description of this volcanic archipelago as Encantadas or "enchanted" in the sense of bewitched-uncanny, weird, their very positions and relations apparently forming a zone of indeterminacy-can serve as a metaphor for the critical writing attempting to chart them. That guide asks whether critics have been successful in their efforts to find something more than geographical unity here. Are these sketches just travel narratives connected merely by their subject's equatorial position six hundred miles west of Peru? Naturally, some are struck by the fact that the most celebrated visit to the islands was Darwin's, recorded in the Voyage of the Beagle, which Melville may have read shipboard (apparently ships' libraries were rich enough to justify Ishmael's description of his whaling life as his Yale and Harvard). There is a striking contrast between "The Encantadas'" impressions of utter inhumanity and desolation and Darwin's fascination with the rich variety of birds, reptiles, and amphibians that stimulated his eventual formulation of the grand theory of evolution. Melville too is interested in the beasts-both native and imported-not so much as a naturalist but in terms of how they shock humans, provide food, become part of, or present analogies to our social and political structures, and whose exploitation enables a global economy.

We have Nietzsche to thank for some of the most important accomplishments in intellectual history, but as Gary Shapiro shows in this unique look at Nietzsche's thought, the nineteenth-century philosopher actually anticipated some of the most pressing questions of our own era. Putting Nietzsche into conversation with contemporary philosophers such as Deleuze, Agamben, Foucault, Derrida, and others, Shapiro links Nietzsche's powerful ideas to topics that are very much on the contemporary agenda: globalization, the nature of the livable earth, and the geopolitical categories that characterize people and places. Shapiro explores Nietzsche's rejection of historical inevitability and its idea of the end of history. He highlights Nietzsche's prescient vision of today's massive human mobility and his criticism of the nation state's desperate efforts to sustain its exclusive rule by declaring emergencies and states of exception. Shapiro then explores Nietzsche's vision of a transformed garden earth and the ways it sketches an aesthetic of the Anthropocene. He concludes with an explanation of the deep political structure of Nietzsche's "philosophy of the Antichrist," by relating it to traditional political theology. By triangulating Nietzsche between his time and ours, between Bismarck's Germany and post-9/11 America, Nietzsche's Earth invites readers to rethink not just the philosopher himself but the very direction of human history. ; https://scholarship.richmond.edu/bookshelf/1241/thumbnail.jpg

In an interview given a few weeks after the attacks of September 11, 2001, Jacques Derrida interrogates the nature of what is popularly called globalization. In his critique of current concepts of globalization, Derrida points out that the very processes of trade, communication, and transport are producing greater inequalities around the earth, and that these inequalities are spectacular, that is, that the very media essential to the process we call globalization make these inequalities vividly clear. The interview is a rich conspectus of the themes of Derrida's political thought, perhaps most penetrating in his thinking the concepts of the event, as that which arrives, and of futurity, the Zu-kunft or l'avenir, that which is to come. I will not discuss this theme directly, but I hope readers will hear resonances of Derrida's questions in this exploration of three thinkers who embody distinct and competing approaches to understanding what it might be for the world, earth, or globe to move toward the condition of being a meaningful whole. I deliberately use three different terms here, both to respect the usage of the three thinkers I want to discuss - Hegel, Nietzsche, and Rosenzweig - and to maintain a certain contact with Derrida's insistence on the importance of the names and language that we use - or better, that uses us - as we try to make sense of things.

What is Nietzsche's concept of the earth? While "earth" is often taken in a general way to refer to embodied life, to this world rather than to an imaginary and disastrous other world, I propose that the term and concept also have a significant political dimension-a geophilosophical dimension—which is closely related to the radical immanence so central to Nietzsche's thought. I shall argue that he often and pointedly replaces the very term "world" (Welt) with "earth" (Erde) because "world" is tied too closely to ideas of unity, eternity, and transcendence. "World" is a concept with theological affiliations, as Nietzsche indicates in Beyond Good and Evil: Around a hero everything becomes a tragedy, around a demi-god everything becomes a satyr play; and around God everything becomes—what do you think? perhaps the "world"? (BGE 150)

Two of Foucault's signature essays on painting are especially well known: the analysis of Velazquez's Las Meninas, and an essay on Rene Magritte that includes a striking account of how abstraction displaced representation in Western art. In addition, many of Foucault's texts are studded with acute descriptions of major painters from Breughel to Warhol; he gave lecture courses on quattrocento painting and Manet and published essays on several contemporary artists (Rebeyrolle, Fromanger, Michals). Since one of Foucault's major themes was the relation between visibility and discursivity, it is not surprising to find that painting is a favored site for exploring variations in this conjuncture. Throughout his work, painting and the visual arts serve as emblems of the epistemes that characterize distinct epochs of thought. At the same time, Foucault's engagement with contemporary art reveals his sense of its political significance and force. These themes coincide in Foucault's continuing interest in how art forms can break with acquired archives, apparatuses, and practices. In (mostly implicit) contrast with romantic concepts of genius (as in Kant, or more generally in the time of "man and his doubles"), Foucault attempted to analyze and articulate the processes of rupture and transformation that mark specific changes in what is called style. Dominant trends in art history either sought to trace relatively continuous developments (following a Hegelian lineage) or operated with sets of categories derived from Geistesgeschichte such as Heinrich Wollflin's linear and painterly modes. Philosophical aesthetics (as Derrida observes) has systematically (from Plato to Heidegger) given premier status to the linguistic arts of poetry and literature. Both of those ways of understanding visual art are put into question by Foucault's engagement with painting and photography.

Once again this fall I was teaching my beloved On the Genealogy of Morals, this time to the frosh in my Core Course "Exploring human experience." Just in college for two weeks, and with no warning or preparation we were asking them to think about masters and slaves, to entertain this insidious assault upon their rather vague Christianity. If Nietzsche imagined that one day wars would be fought in his name (and I don't think he meant culture wars), the professor within him also fantasized that a chair would eventually be established for the teaching of Zarathustra. But when he prophesied that Europe would one day survive in the form of thirty or so imperishable books, I don't suspect he was thinking that historically Baptist institutions, such as the one where I teach, would include the Genealogy as part of the multicultural spectrum of texts with which every first-year student must wrestle along with Lao Tzu, the Qur'an and Don DeLillo's White Noise. And once again, a student asked "What does Nietzsche really think about the Jews?" temporarily frustrating my attempt to steer the discussion towards the opposition between guilt cultures and shame cultures, the brilliant explanation of the origins of civilization, bad conscience and western religion, and the rank order of forms of asceticism (artists are best, followed closely by philosophers, all the way down to historians, with - surprise! - priests squarely in the middle). In my inspired answer, as I recall (all praise to active forgetfulness), I said that in keeping with Nietzsche's lapidary maxim that "only that which has no history can be defined," there was no essence of the Jew or of Judaism in his perspective. He admired the warrior kings and other towering figures of the Hebrew Bible. I could have quoted Beyond Good and Evil: "With terror and reverence one stands before these tremendous remnants of what man once was, and will have sad thoughts about ancient Asia and its protruding little peninsula Europe". But after their political and military defeat, the priests took over from the warriors, exploiting the split which was always already there in the ethos of the masters. It's that defeated, priestly people of ancient times who become the masters of ressentiment, and eventually hatch Christianity, the greatest outrage of history. So, I underline the point pedagogically, it's not a question of comparing Jews unfavorably to Christians; as for modern anti-Semitism, Nietzsche finds it to be a virulent form of plebeian ressentiment, and when given a racial formulation by German ideologues, a grotesque absurdity, since the Jews are a stronger, better race than the mongrel Germans, who would do well to learn some wit and esprit from the Jews among them. I could have gone on to speak of how Nietzsche's writings become increasingly friendly toward the Jews, as he begins to think of his future readers and the way in which his thought will be propagated. One might do a very subtle analysis of Nietzsche's construction of his "friend Georg" Brandes, in the light of Nietzsche's ambition for his work, his difficult notion of friendship and his ambiguous praise of contemporary Jews as actors and logicians.

What sort of text is On the Genealogy of Morals, this work that Nietzsche called the "uncanniest" of all books? Is it only a book about morals, as the title might indicate? Even the superficial reader will see that much more is at stake, since questions concerning politics and aesthetics are prominent. But could we also read more attentively and with an ear to hearing a certain diagnosis of the metaphysical condition and its tradition that are necessarily implicated in the genealogy of morals? Certainly Nietzsche begins to suggest ideas of this sort quite early in the text, as in his account of the way in which the morality of ressentiment is responsible for the invention of the metaphysical fiction of free will by which the doer is separated from the deed In this essay I want to suggest that there is a confrontation with the metaphysical tradition on an even larger scale that emerges in Nietzsche's account of the economy of guilt, debt, and credit that forms the subject especially (but not only) of the book's second essay " 'Guilt,' 'Bad Conscience,' and the Like." In order to see this it will be necessary to place Nietzsche's Genealogy in the context of two other texts - Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks and Thus Spoke Zarathustra - that speak of penance, guilt, and redemption as themes characteristic of philosophy as we know it.

Two cautions or warnings (at least) must be heeded in the attempt to do justice to Nietzsche's project of a genealogy of morals in the text that bears that name. While the Genealogy is often regarded as the most straightforward and continuous of Nietzsche's books, he tells us in Ecce Homo that its three essays are "perhaps uncannier than anything else written so far in regard to expression, intention, and the art of surprise." If we should think ourselves successful in penetrating to these uncanny secrets and saying what Nietzsche's text means, once and for all, we would then have to read again its lapidary although parenthetical injunction that "only that which has no history can be defined." For since the work of Theodor Adorno and Max Horkeimer, Jurgen Habermas, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Gilles Deleuze, genealogy has become a polemical word. When Nietzsche published the Genealogy in 1887, the main uses of the term arguably had to do with the ascertaining of actual family lineages to determine rights to titles, honors, and inheritances, as in the venerable Almanach of Gotha, and a careless librarian today might classify the book among those many middle-class popularizations which might all go under the title "Tracing Your Family Tree for Fun and Profit." But Foucault characterizes his History of Sexuality as a genealogy of the modern self, and Derrida describes a large part of his intellectual project as "repeating the genealogy of morals"; Nietzsche's practice and example are invoked in both cases.

This book brings together diverse aspects of postmodernism by philosophers, literary critics, historians of architecture, and sociologists. It addresses the nature of postmodernism in painting, architecture, and the performing arts, and explores the social and political implications of postmodern theories of culture.The book raises the question of whether postmodernism is to be seen as one more epoch or period within a succession of eras, or as a challenge to the modernist practice of periodization itself.The nature of the subject and of subjectivity is explored in order to resituate and contextualize the autonomous subject of the modern literary traditions.Postmodern approaches to philosophy, both analytical and continental (including the work of Deleuze, Derrida, Foucault, Rorty, and Cavell) are scrutinized and compared with a view to the question of foundationalism and with respect to philosophy's historical reflection on its own exclusionary practices.After the Future discusses the ramifications of technology and programs for the renewal of community in a radically pluralistic society. It also discusses the question of language and the diverse ways of distinguishing the articulate from the inarticulate. ; https://scholarship.richmond.edu/bookshelf/1180/thumbnail.jpg