Nietzsche

For Alain Badiou, Friedrich Nietzsche is the “prince” of anti-philosophy. French leftist thinkers celebrated Nietzsche in the second half of the twentieth century, but when a backlash emerged in the 1990s, Badiou refused to join the attack. Instead, Badiou devoted his 1992–1993 seminar to an astonishingly original reading of Nietzsche—to whom he had previously shown indifference or scorn—in which he appears almost enamored with the author of The Anti-Christ and Ecce Homo.

This book presents Badiou’s seminar on Nietzsche’s late works, which for the first time addresses what would become one of his central concepts: anti-philosophy and its adversarial yet intimate relationship with philosophy. For Badiou, Nietzsche is the key modern anti-philosopher, his antagonist—and occasional ally—in the battle to redefine the work of philosophy. Badiou takes for granted Nietzsche’s declaration that “God is dead,” yet he rejects Nietzsche’s assertion that philosophy too is past its expiration date. Badiou engages a century-long tradition of grappling with Nietzsche’s paradoxes, considering thinkers such as Heidegger, Deleuze, and Derrida. Examining Nietzsche’s impassioned writings on Wagner, he reflects on the nature of art and aesthetics. Provocative and profound, this seminar shows Badiou’s ongoing project of reasserting the value of philosophy from a new angle.