Nietzsche and Race
-
- $28.99
-
- $28.99
Publisher Description
A definitive debunking of the “Nietzsche as Nazi” caricature.
The caricature of Friedrich Nietzsche as a proto-Nazi is still with us, having originated with his own Nazi sister, Elisabeth Förster, who curated Nietzsche’s disparate texts to suit her own purposes. In Nietzsche and Race, Marc de Launay deftly counters this persistent narrative in a series of concise and highly accessible reflections on the concept of race in Nietzsche’s publications, notebooks, and correspondence. Through a fresh reading of Nietzsche’s core philosophical project, de Launay articulates a new understanding of race in Nietzsche’s body of work free from the misunderstanding of his detractors.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
De Launay, a philosophy researcher at the French National Centre for Scientific Research, denounces German philosophers Theodor W. Adorno, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Max Horkheimer for failing to explain why Nietzsche became an "object of obsession... for the Nazis" in this disappointing English-language debut. The Third Reich warped Nietzsche's ideology to reinforce its visions of racial superiority, the author writes, and to that end corrupted the philosopher's idea of the "will to power," which was intended to denote an individual's self-determination, as a Nazi justification for domination. Tracing Nietzsche's posthumous Nazi reception partly to his antisemitic sister (who selectively edited Nietzsche's unpublished writings to highlight racist themes), De Launay contends that Nietzsche called Jews "beyond any doubt the strongest, toughest, and purest race now living in Europe." In fact, he envisioned a "dawn of a new conversion of values" that would negate both Jewish and Christian identities altogether, obliterating "the rigid traditions of given national identities and heritages." Despite some excellent kernels of insight, De Launay's dense, specialist writing ("The causality that Nietzsche believes in is that of will over will. But this causality is positioned in opposition to simply mechanistic causality") is too often impenetrable. It's an admirable project let down by its execution.
