The right’s response to Bishop Mariann Budde helpfully illustrates the logic of the Last Man. If the right had the strength of their convictions, they would simply reject Christianity and recognize that their nihilistic, power-worshipping movement is anti-Christian. 1/ But a nihilistic movement driven by resentment and impotence to either understand or resolve the crises of the present can’t create anything new. It is built upon slavish yearning for authority, and it must therefore resurrect all of the old authorities of the past. 2/

The way I tend to think about the Nietzsche/Deleuze vs Hegel antithesis is this: (🧵)

Nietzsche views the dialectic as a species of error, a form of reactive thought that is premised on negation and can never generate affirmation.

1/7 But Nietzsche also sees all of human history as the history of an error, one that is rooted in the form conceptual thought that animates the dialectic. He also often sees error as something positive, an indispensable feature of life required for affirmation.

2/7

In what order should you read Nietzsche? There’s no one answer to this question, but here are my suggestions if, like the OP, you have only read the Genealogy.

🧵1/11

https://twitter.com/musicalcolin/status/1821605725518598612

Start with the 2nd and 3rd Untimely Meditations, “The Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life” and “Schopenhauer as Educator.” These give you an early example of themes that Nietzsche will develop throughout his work.

2/11

Over the next couple weeks, I’ll be going chapter by chapter through @DanielTutt’s new book on Nietzsche, How to Read Like a Parasite, on my s*bstack (link in bio). In the meantime, I want to address one question: was The Birth of Tragedy a response to the Paris Commune? A 🧵1/13 In The Aristocratic Rebel, Domenico Losurdo makes a bold claim: that Nietzsche’s first book, The Birth of Tragedy, was directly inspired by the events of the Paris Commune. Tutt also argues for this claim. But on a closer look, the textual evidence for this is thin at best. 2/

Isn’t Nietzsche an elitist who values greatness or genius over the common man? I defend a version of Nietzschean moral perfectionism that I’d argue is not only compatible with political commitments to democracy and equality, but actually required by them.

A 🧵 1/17 Nietzsche in “Schopenhauer as Educator: “For the question is this: how can your life, your individual life, receive the highest value, the deepest significance?…[O]nly by living for the good of the rarest and most valuable exemplars, not the good of the majority.” 2/

Active and reactive forces - a 🧵 on Nietzsche, Deleuze, and the art of interpretation.

Deleuze centers his interpretation of Nietzsche around the distinction between active and reactive forces. What does this distinction mean, and why is the idea force so important? 1/23

https://twitter.com/acidhorizonpod/status/1710252613940224446

Deleuze’s reading is distinctive in trying to flesh out a Nietzschean ontology centered around the concepts of force and will. This means he draws heavily on some passages in the Nachlass that have few clear analogues in the published work. What is FN up to in these fragments? 2/

One reason I’m skeptical of right-wing readings of Nietzsche that emphasize hierarchy and strength is that they almost always fail to distinguish among the different ways in which hierarchy functions in Nietzsche’s thought. A brief 🧵on Nietzsche’s inegalitarianism. 1/15 First, Nietzsche often refers to the concept of “rank order” (which is sometimes related to the “pathos of distance”), which seems expressly aristocratic. And sometimes this is true: in Antichrist and TI he uses the terms to characterize social caste systems. 2/

All right, it’s time to talk about the elephant in the room, and the elephant is Domenico Losurdo’s Nietzsche: The Aristocratic Rebel. Hopefully the first in a🧵series picking apart the book’s arguments, I’ll start w/ an overview and Losurdo’s reading of The Birth of Tragedy.

1/ There’s no denying the truly impressive volume of detailed historical research that went into Losurdo’s book on Nietzsche. Insisting upon a primarily historical interpretive strategy is a big part of what distinguishes Losurdo from other critics of Nietzsche’s philosophy and 2/

This is an instructive response, because there’s a sense in which it’s undoubtedly true: it’s not even clear that Nietzsche read the Critique of Pure Reason! But there are also a couple issues with presenting this fact as evidence that the Kantian framing is wrongheaded. 1/

https://twitter.com/carlkandutsch/status/1659286259741650944

First, Nietzsche does clearly demonstrate an understanding of various technical problems in Kantian philosophy throughout his work. For example, early notes show him grappling with Kant’s presupposition of the thing-in-itself and whether this idea, and Schopenhauer’s “will” 2/

What was Kant’s influence on Nietzsche?

Nietzsche is correctly read as a sharp critic of Kant, but focusing on his rejection of Kantian ethics overlooks the extent to which Nietzsche’s epistemology and metaphysics respond to core problems in Kant’s critical project.

A 🧵 (1/) One reason for the lack of attention to N’s Kantian roots is that Schopenhauer’s influence on N often overshadows Kant. But we know that N read the Critique of Judgment prior to writing Birth of Tragedy. I would suggest that in BoT, N isn’t uncritically accepting Schopenhauer 2/