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Knowledge and History. the Postmodern French Humanities and Deleuze's Nietzscheanism

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Knowledge and History. the Postmodern French Humanities and Deleuze's Nietzscheanism Management Inspirations Marek Kwiek Knowledge and History. The Postmodern French Humanities and Deleuze's Nietzscheanism INTRODUCTION - „THE POSTMODERN TURN" guages, war machines or nomad art), I would like to focus on AS „THE NIETZSCHEAN TURN"? his Nietzscheanism which, I suppose, has turned out to be most The general context for this essay is the following: postmodern useful in the humanities generally today. I appreciate his im- philosophy was strongly influenced by Nietzsche, especially in pressive monographs on Hume, Bergson, Kant, Spinoza or his postwar French readings from Bataille to Blanchot to Deleuze Leibniz, as well as the books he co-authored over the years with to Klossowski. It was Nietzsche in these readings who provided Felix Guattari; but it was his book on Nietzsche - Nietzsche et la basic contours of a new self-image of the philosopher (or the philosophie - that exerted the greatest, although hidden influ- humanist, more generally): instead of (modern) thinking about ence, on French, and subsequently American thinkers in recent changing the social and political world, philosophers now found three decades. It was Deleuze who introduced to the intellectual new terrains for thought. no longer associated with History, and arena a new figure of the philosopher: called Nietzschean first less and less associated with politics. From the perspective of and then merely postmodern. It was in Deleuze's book(s) and this essay, it is interesting to think about philosophy through the articles that the whole generation of such seminal writers as lenses of the self-images philosophers (more or less consciously) Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida or Jean-François Lyotard assume. The transformation of the self-image of philosophers found their much less socially-bounding, much more individu- entails the gradual transformation of the role and place of phi- alistic, self-creational and relativistic self-images. Nietzsche as losophy in culture. For what is philosophy, in broadest terms - is read by Deleuze provided a powerful impetus for a generational what philosophers regard (regarded, or will regard) as accepted change in France in the sixties, which continues to affect us to- as philosophy. The passage from the Hegelian to the Nietzschean day, in the account of the role, place and tasks of the humanist - self-image in France in recent decades heralded the advent of be it the philosopher, sociologist, historian, literary critic etc. - postmodernity - if we accept the idea that what philosophers in culture and society. The example provided by Nietzsche and think about themselves while practicing philosophy is culturally read for current purposes by Deleuze turned out to be very ap- significant. pealing indeed. Both of them show what can and what cannot be expected from today's humanist. Deleuze is inspiring, brilliant, What remains to be done, and what is left over here, is to recon- far-reaching in his conclusions. He combines an analytic talent sider the postmodern (or Nietzschean) vision of the philoso- of a philosophical reader with a visionary talent of a philosophi- pher's role in society in face of what is increasingly called the cal prophet. Global Age: is there a new self-image currently sought that could respond to challenges globalization theory and practices bring Few participants in current discussions about postmodernity about? What is the place of philosophy in the rapidly changing actually refer to the early Gilles Deleuze (as well as to the early Academe, and what is the place of the Academe itself (from the Pierre Klossowski, frankly speaking) from their fundamental traditional university to higher education in general, or „tertiary books about Nietzsche; much more is written in this context education" in more recent terms) in rapidly changing social sur- about Michel Foucault's or Jacques Derrida's Nietzscheanism. rounding? What remains to be done is also to trace the intercon- But, and this is the main point of the present essay, the nections between (cultural, philosophical, intellectual) „postmodern turn" we are currently witnessing results also from postmodernity and (economic, political, social) Global Age. It the „Nietzschean turn" the humanities took in recent decades: was much easier to think of the „postmodern turn" before glo- from the passage from the Hegelian (surely, more as read by balization came as a dominant social concept in the 1990s; now, Alexandre Kojeve than as read by Jean Hyppolite) to the it might be safer to avoid the term „turn" altogether. Nietzschean self-image of the philosopher, the Nietzschean in spirit change of expectations directed toward the philosopher To start with the Nietzschean spirit in philosophy: Gilles (and philosophy as a discipline itself), the change of his or her Deleuze's contribution to the appearance and development of awareness of participation in culture, history, and politics that the postmodern orientation of the humanities and social sciences occurred in the sixties in the French humanities. If there had is still undervalued. Instead of writing about the unique themes been no new Nietzsche-inspired self-image of the philosopher he introduced to postmodern discourse (such as e.g. rhizomes in France, suddenly growing and suddenly more and more ap- and trees, difference and repetition, schizoanalysis, minor lan- pealing to philosophers' imagination, there would have prob- 26 MBA 6/2000 ably not been the books by Foucault, Derrida or Lyotard in the ers produced works that merely used him, hardly ever mention- forms we know them today. A powerful impulse questioning ing him.5 the (modern) role of the philosopher as the one who changes the world of public and political affairs originated in a specifically Thus Nietzsche in extreme versions is either an object of a thor- reinterpreted (French) Nietzsche opposed by a new generation ough deliberation (Klossowski, Deleuze) or is a silent accom- of thinkers to a specifically reinterpreted (French) Hegel. And plice, a tacitly assumed and never fully expressed horizon of that was done in a powerful manner by Gilles Deleuze. thought (Foucault). Nietzsche's thought in Deleuze is presented as an ordered, anti-Hegelian system; in Klossowski, in turn, The generation of Foucault and Derrida, Deleuze and Klossowski Nietzsche does not present his philosophy but his „variations on thinks that between Hegel and Nietzsche there is no compro- personal themes" that rotate „around madness as if it were its mise. But they still mean a postwar French Hegel and a new own axis".6 Klossowski's energetic interpretation, following Nietzsche read in France, two intellectual constructs, needed Nietzsche, asks the question who the philosopher could be. In a especially by the second generation of French thinkers to settle violent, anti-Hegelian move Nietzsche as read by him is not their philosophical and intellectual relations with their predeces- willing either to think from the perspective of the „care for the sors. Vincent Descombes is basically right when he says in his human condition", or to be a traditional „teaching" philosopher. Modern French Philosophy that the signs put next to Hegel and „Who is the adversary, who is the enemy one is to defeat? The next to Nietzsche got changed in the sixties: wherever there was more fully thought is able to nail him, Klossowski says, the more „minus", there appeared „plus", and the reverse.1 powerful it becomes. To determine its adversary is to produce one's own space, to expand it, to breathe with it".7 One can assume a number of parallel interpretations of the Hegelian-Nietzschean passage of the account of the role and place of the philosopher in culture and society that took place in French thought in the sixties with the help of the aforementioned thinkers: Deleuze, Derrida, Foucault, and Klossowski.2 Each of them can take as their point of departure a different aspect of the „change of sign" from plus to minus mentioned by Descombes. For it was already in the fifties that Nietzsche was a rarely ex- plored margin in French philosophy (and were it not for Georges Bataille or Maurice Blanchot, he could have been hardly heard of). So what was so appealing in Nietzsche in the sixties? He attracted philosophers with his otherness, methodophobia, idi- osyncrasies, personal tones, vividness of metaphoric, versatility of styles, multitude of genres, as well as, more philosophically speaking, with his criticism of oppositional (binary) thinking, stressing the role of style in philosophical discourse, underlin- ing the significance of persepctivalism, possibilities of judging without criteria etc. etc. THE ALLIANCE WITH NIETZSCHE Before we pass on to the fundamental in this respect book by Gilles Delcuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, let us say a few words And that is precisely in this question that I can see the clue to the by virtue of an introduction to his problematic about the book Nietzschean turn in French philosophy and it is by means of this by Pierre Klossowski, Nietzsche et le cercle vicieux. The two question that I am going to show the role played in this turn by books together provide a brand new perspective in reading Gilles Deleuze. Hegel in the late fifties and early sixties became Nietzsche. It is already in its opening statement that the book by the enemy of the whole generation; it was the Hegel mainly from Klossowski is conceived as a challenge to several generations the Phenomenology of Spirit in an influential interpretation popu- of Nietzsche's readers, commentators and scholars: „This is the larized in France by Alexandre Kojeve's Introduction to the book that may testify to rare ignorance: how are we to talk about Reading of Hegel, and it was mainly against this Hegel that ar- «Nietzsche»s thought' without ever referring to anything said guments were presented and misreadings were shown; it was about him before?"3 It was already in his text „Nietzsche, le the young Hegel who was being attacked, owing to which one's polythéisme et la parodie" (dating from 1957) that Klossowski, own space was produced.
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