I had my first real experience w reading Nietzsche earlier this semester and it was pretty much what I expected.
but I still don't get why, when he asks (in one translation I read, I know its not the awful Scarpitti one I read or the one we were actually assigned in class) "One may have every right to remain fearful and suspicious of the blond beast beneath all noble races: but who would not one hundred times prefer fear accompanied by the possibility of admiration to freedom from fear [...]?", its not reasonable to go 'um, me. Id rather not be afraid.'
like anything that "conceives the fundamental concept of 'good' spontaneously and in advance [...] and only then does it proceed to create for himself an idea of 'bad'!" sounds pretty flat out evil to me.
I feel like I far more identify with "happiness as understood on the level of the powerless, the oppressed" whether or not he's trying to paint that as something we should revile (I think?) and whether or not I am powerless
I think it was the Douglas Smith translation that identifies that second type of good/happiness as an "orientation outward" (Scarpitti calls it a "gravitation to the objective" which is some bullshit) and like that sounds like the notion of an 'orientation towards difference' I've carried with me from Lorde idk
>>7986469
You're missing the whole point of the Nietzschean project. His goal is to affirm life, and to do that means the destruction of reactive values. You can't understand Nietzsche without understanding the difference between active and reactive forces, and between the will-to-power and the will-to-nothing. Chances are you're interpreting power as representation (a classical Hegelian mistake) and not as the genetic and differential element as it exists in Nietzsche's thought. Deleuze elucidates this better than I ever could.
I don't understand your question.
>>7986505
im thinking of power as in like power knowledge relations, the creation of knowledge, the processes of subject construction, etc mostly in terms of Deleuze, Bhabha, of course Foucault but in a history after him sort of way
>>7986469
just read the wikipedia article for "Last Man" or the prologue to the tomes of Zarathustra (the part about the tight-rope walker(.
>but I still don't get why ... its not reasonable to go 'um, me. Id rather not be afraid.'
>evil
>I far more identify with "happiness
woman detected. you will never get any nietzsche, or any other primary philosophy of valuation and life-affirmation. you aren't even letzte mensch, you are nie war mensch. stick to post hoc rationalisations of your comfort and huddle up against someone's dick for warmth, eternal faggot.
>>7986645
you might be right I'm not sure if there is any other 'primary philosopher' I like. I despise Kant and pretty much any old Europeans involved with contractarianism and anything that resulted (Enlightenment, modernity)
Idk if Foucault counts but even as much as I've gotten from him I wouldn't call myself a fan of him like I do Deleuze or Bhabha or Steiner or Morrison
I mean I adore Marx if that means anything
a blonde noble beast just sounds more like something I'd find more interesting to be against. to kill in dark souls or have be a sci fi villain, not revere and strive towards. I feel more aligned with something like Susan Stryker's theorization of the monster/monstrous and the creature
>>7986714
What did you find so objectionable in Kant?
>>7986714
in all seriousness you are reading post-nietzschean readings back onto nietzsche, readings which appropriate nietzsche's idea that truth is relative and structured by power (more plainly, the idea that value systems and cultural deep structures are established by valuation, and valuation is at least usually accomplished by those with the power to effect or "impose" it) for very specific purposes in social and political philosophy. these may intersect with nietzsche's original intentions, but they don't completely encompass or coincide with them.
more vulgarly, you're doing a postwar, postmodern, "school of suspicion" reading of one of the three supposed founders of that school, as if he predicted the coming century and a half. it's not necessarily a terrible reading but it is only one reading.
nietzsche is glorifying positive valuation on multiple levels. it's a moral, epistemological, and spiritual project. he already has an innate tendency for hyperbole, for provocative polemics, but the intellectual contexts he is responding to are especially inviting of attention-getting overstatement as well. ressentiment isn't just something that personally bothers him, he thinks it's philosophical and spiritual bad faith, inauthenticity.
it's an old point of argument whether nietzsche was transparently trumpeting master morality, i.e. whether he was just jerking off over the idea of archaic age theseus motherfuckers traipsing around the countryside doing whatever they wanted because they could. but elsewhere in his writings it's pretty obvious that he sees value in tempering raw "master morality." he just admires it and sees it as the wellspring of human value. it's like saying "ambition to know at all costs, to subdue the universe by understanding it, is what makes man great!", in deep admiration for mankind's tendency to conquer and create and develop, and then being misunderstood as shallowly glorifying columbus' rape of the indians or some shit.
the problem is that this point of interpretation gets elided for you right now while you're taking this class, because the postcolonial studies dickheads don't care about it even if they do themselves know it, and then the gap of understanding gets sedimented under a hundred billion pounds of trendy pomo moralising.
>>7986754
he's the father of white supremacy as it still exists today as a global political force of mass social violence
i just happen to have these handy from organizing work over the past few semesters
“‘The Different Races of Mankind’... is a classic pro-hereditarian, antienvironmentalist statement of ‘the immutability and permanence of race’” (Mills 70).
“the embarassing fact for the white West (which doubtless explains its concealment) is that their most important moral theorist of the past three hundred years is also the foundational theorist in the modern period of the division between the Herrenvolk and Untermenschen, persons and subpersons, upon which Nazi theory would later draw” (Mills 72).
>>7986783
jesus christ daniel goldhagen, learn to historicize for fuck's sake
why are you even at university if you just wanted ready-made political slants to vomit out?
>>7986783
Wow. The strategies of indoctrination seem to be getting more aggressive and far less subtle.
Unpack those claims a bit, please.
>>7986760
I was the only person who found Nietzsche objectionable really in the class. I tried to give a presentation on it (I was already assigned for a presentation before I knew that'd I'd choose that topic, and I was doing it in a 'here's how the cool ideas work with/within the shit that I think could expose a repressive underside to his thought') but I had the translations messed up
but anyway yeah I appreciate a lot of what Nietzsche did/was doing, I definitely come off unfair to him in that regard. The use of genealogies in the following portions of On the Genealogy of Morals was great, and his theorizations of justice and conscience were great, and he and Foucault are the reason despite my love of Deleuze I won't let go of the genealogy as a potentially useful model for knowlege
I just think that that initial proposition of necessitating a reverence for the noble beast/aristocratic race/noble lion predator whatever when he even goes so far as to say under the nonspontaneous good cultures of cunning and intellect and activity are developed, in part in resistance, and we're supposed to find that to be some sort of unjustifiedly malicious?
>>7986783
>he's the father of white supremacy as it still exists today as a global political force of mass social violence
