[Nietzsche Circle][Footnotes]

Written by Thomas Jovanovski
reviewed by Hugo Drochon, St. John’s College, Cambridge

For a fuller explanation of Geisterkrieg, see my forthcoming “The time is coming when we will relearn politics.” in Journal of Nietzsche Studies, Issue 39 (Spring 2010).

That through being ‘absurdly rational,’ Socrates saved his compatriots from the mass suicide their condition of pessimism would have brought them to, and that ultimately the ‘Socrates who makes music’ points towards the successful exit from decadent western civilisation, which Socrates himself was the first to understand.

Strikingly, Jovanovski makes nothing of the one moment in which Kaufmann most approaches the postmodern dystopia as he wishes to present it. In his discussion of friendship and disciples, Kaufmann claims that to be ‘a “Nietzschean,” … whether “gentle” or “tough,” is in a sense a contradiction in terms: to be a Nietzschean, one must not be a Nietzschean’ (54). This arrestingly echoes the postmodernist mantra that Jovanovski ascribes to Foucault when Foucault explains that ‘I am simply Nietzschean and I try as well as I can, in a number of areas, to see with the help of Nietzsche’s texts-but also with anti-Nietzschean theses (which are all the same Nietzschean!)—what can be done in one area or another’ (75).

There are indeed strong links between Nietzsche’s discussion of democracy being a “school for tyrants” in BGE and the “rise of the justifying nobility” of the late Nachlaß. For the importance of the late notes, see below.

See the commentary volume 14 of the KSA: „Nietzsches Nachlaß 1885-1888 und der sagenannte “Wille zur Macht” (383-400).“ While Kaufmann did consult the archives to try to ensure the notes were as truthful as possible, and did work on the dating, too many discrepancies remain for the work to have scholarly value.

Jovanovski is aware of Magnus’ argument of The Will to Power as a “nonbook,” stating that such a view did not inspire in him “the least uncertainty about appealing to any of its notes” in his creation of his focus on breeding the Übermensch, and continues by providing the arguments for the use of it as outlined above.

See “Editor’s Introduction” to The Will to Power (Vintage Books: New York, 1968).

See again „Nietzsches Nachlaß 1885-1888 und der sagenannte “Wille zur Macht” (383-400).”

For more on this see my “Twilight and Transvaluation: Nietzsche’s Hauptwerk and the Götzen- Dämmerung” in Nietzscheforschung, Vol. 16 (2009): 175-182.

That is to say the “problem” of “what type of human should be bred” over the “petty” nationalistic and democratic politics of his day (GS, 377; BGE, 208).

Aesthetic Transformations is published in the ‘American University Studies’ series of Peter Lang. Conversely, if Jovanovski meant this to reach a more popular audience to warn against the dangers of postmodernism, then the medium is inappropriate.

See Lawrence Hatab, A Nietzschean Defence of Democracy: An Experiment in Postmodern Politics (Chicago: Open Court, 1995).

In other places Jovanovski will posit the “Übermensch as a viable ontological alternative to the current system of political correctness” (99), or again “the Übermensch constitutes possibly the most inspiring idea in the history of intellectual thought” (110), without ever going beyond the idea of the rise of the new nobility as a means to the Übermensch other than saying that it is becoming more and more propitious, something Nietzsche had clearly indicated as the continuous deepening of the crisis of nihilism. See, for example, KSA 13, 11[411].

“ressentiment: … it needs, physiologically speaking, external stimuli in order to act at all,—its action is basically a reaction” (GM, I, 10).

See xxiii: “Division 3 of Chapter One my be found in Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review, Vol. 29, No. 3” (“A Synthetic Formulation of Nietzsche’s Aesthetic Model,” 1990–my additional information). Most of the main body of Chapter Two is included in Nietzsche-Studien, 20 (‘Critique of

Walter Kaufmann’s “Nietzsche’s Attitude Toward Socrates”,’ 1991), while parts of the Preface and Chapter Three are contained in Inquiry, Vol. 44, No. 4 (“Postmodernism’s Self-Nullifying Reading of Nietzsche,” 2001). Lastly, much of Chapter Four may also be read in Man and World, Vol. 22, No. 1 (“Toward the Animation of Nietzsche’s Übermensch,” March 1989). Aesthetic Transformations comprises of a Preface, Introduction, 4 Chapters and an Afterword.

Thomas Jovanoski, “Toward the animation of Nietzsche’s Übermensch,” Man and World, Vol. 22 (1989): 92. I am presuming by ‘scholarship’ he means post-WWII scholarship, previous to that many people were very interested in breeding the Übermensch.

See his discussion with Alan Schrift in Nietzsche-Studien, Vol. 31 (2002): 278-297.

Fredrick Appel, Nietzsche Contra Democracy (New York: Cornell University Press, 1999).

See further Ken Gemes, “Post-Modernism's Use and Abuse of Nietzsche,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. 52, (2001): 337-360, where Gemes wants to argue that “Postmodernists are nearer Nietzsche's idea of the Last Man than his idea of the Overman” (abstract).