Deleuze nietzsche and philosophy download

The genealogist also sees the future — he is something of a fortuneteller Deleuze points out that the idea of the legislative philosopher, while it has pre-Socratic roots, its reappearance in the modern world must nonetheless be ascribed to Kant.

This leads us to what Nietzsche calls, in Ecce Homo, a relatively superhuman type, man insofar as he wishes to be overcome; somebody or some-ones which may be the fathers or ancestors of the overman We may pose some questions about monism and pluralism, about the tragic and even about certain criticisms addressed by Nietzsche to his predecessors.

On the one hand, we have known since Plato and Heraclitus that unity is affirmed of multiplicity, on the other hand, when the diverse is so resolutely affirmed, one may wonder if unity can persist. In other words, can there be a unity between this empirical plurality that Deleuze defines in Nietzschean terms and the affirmation of unity. If this unity is tragic, affirmation Dionysian see 72 , and the method a tragic one 73 , this raises a second question.

No doubt we will be told that the very fact that this unity of the one and the multiple is questionable means there is the tragic. It is interesting to see how Deleuze critiques the idea of the struggle of the master and the slave as it is in Hegel and as it has been popularized so often since. He proceeds from the idea that, according to Nietzsche, it is the slave, or the sick, who wishes to represent superiority under any form whatsoever But is there not something more profound in these passages from the Phenomenology of Spirit that could withstand the Nietzschean critique?

But this assertion is this not pronounced a little quickly? It is concluded that all the ambiguities which we face have their starting point in the Kantian critique, and everything that has followed has depended on this poor way in which the problems were posed.

We may ask ourselves if Kant is not examined a little hastily here, even if we agree that on some points Nietzsche is right. We would follow Nietzsche more willingly if so many horrible and detestable consequences had not been drawn from his ideas, and if it seemed to us that in the face of these consequences there is something to be said in favour of true virtue, as slight as it appears in comparison. We would still need to know what this legislation consists of and if it is not this will to legislate that has led to the frightful consequences to which we alluded.

It must be admitted that the grandiose spectacle which has been promised to us has been prefigured in a way which arouses not so much hope as disillusion and anguish. However, this ideal should not gain its realization by passing through too many disasters, which Nietzsche undoubtedly would have condemned. But we still think that these principles remain a little vague despite Nietzsche's desire for precision. But it seems very difficult to eliminate this idea of struggle from Nietzsche's conception, and the frequent appeals to Heraclitus seem to support this.

We are forever finding ourselves faced with the question of what the principle of evaluation is. It is true that the fundamental question for Nietzsche is, as we are told, how to preserve, increase, create what is noble. By what right? There is no possible reply to this question if as we consider the will to power in itself or abstractly, as merely endowed with two opposite qualities, affirmation and negation. Why should affirmation be better than negation?

We will see that the solution can only be given by the test of the eternal return. But the idea of affirmation, we say to ourselves, implies the idea of activity, and the idea of activity implies the idea of affirmation, and we wonder to what extent this distinction between the affirmative and the active can be used. Like Heidegger, Deleuze emphasizes the passages in Nietzsche where art is regarded as a stimulant to the will to power and those in which it is regarded as the opposite of disinterested 95— The second principle of art is that it is the highest power of the false, that it sanctifies the lie.

The couple of pages on art culminate with the assertion that in Nietzsche the inventors of new possibilities of life, seekers after knowledge or truth, are the artists But we see many questions arising here: how can one speak of falsehood if one has destroyed the idea of truth?

But this very issue rests on the value of the distinction between the active and the affirmative. We note here that the two words which had been distinguished seem to be identified with each other, and above all we ask ourselves if there is not here a definition of culture which to a certain extent strains Nietzschean thought.

But is this not to accentuate somewhat a characteristic of Nietzsche's thought which might perhaps be complemented by other aspects? In a sense, these other aspects are there, for example on p. We are told that truth is not the element of thought. We are tempted to say both yes and no, yes, because the essential problem for Nietzsche is, as has been shown so well, which one is noble? Those pages which form the conclusion of Chapter 3 "New Image of Thought" are without doubt among the best of this book.

It shows clearly that there is no eternal philosophy, nor is there any historical philosophy For which author has, more than Nietzsche, declared that others, so many others, are in error?

And perhaps the critique which Deleuze makes of Plato, the Plato of Theaetetus, remains more on the surface of things than the rest of the work ibid. When reaction ceases to be acted in order to become something felt, ressentiment ensues Perhaps we should not just say that ressentiment is a sickness, but also that sickness as such is a form of ressentiment It is here that one can utilize the Genealogy of Morals.

The problem would be for Nietzsche to discover the nature of the good, without there being any comparison with the one who is less good or with the one who is bad. Here we must resort to Greek wisdom as we find it in Theognis. Here one must untangle the often ambivalent attitudes of Nietzsche towards Judaism. Throughout the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche follows the formation, through the morality of mores, of man freed from the morality of mores, and through the spirit of the laws, the formation of man freed from the law At the same time, we can note that culture transcends itself — In the Untimely Meditations Nietzsche was already putting his trust in the non-historical and supra- historical element of culture, which he called the Greek sense of culture This places a rather different emphasis than that of Heidegger and which deserves to be placed alongside it as its complement.

The ultimate problems of Nietzsche emerge in relation to Nihilism. This is where the idea of the death of God comes in. The dramatic proposition is synthetic, therefore essentially pluralist, typological and differential.

Who dies and who puts God to death? Religion, as Deleuze has reminded us, is not essentially connected with ressentiment or bad conscience. For Nietzsche there are many varieties of gods, and he recognizes a plurality of senses in religion in accordance with the various forces which may take possession of it.

But there remains an ambiguity in the Nietzschean conception of Christ. Sometimes he seems like a kind of Buddha see p. He teaches reactive life to die serenely, to fade away passively ibid. He is the gentlest of the decadents, the most interesting He would have been a precursor to the last stage of nihilism. But this conception cannot satisfy Nietzsche completely, and sometimes when he speaks of Christ, we can see that he wants to make him the model of something that will succeed nihilism.

But there is something quite incomprehensible in the idea that we should return to the one who merely foresaw the last stage of nihilism. Be that as it may, is there not a problem here that remains unresolved? The problem remains unresolved. The pages on dialectic are among the best in the book. Deleuze demonstrates that Nietzsche preserves difference as the only principle of genesis or production.

Difference is thus opposed to opposition. The reader gets the impression that in these pages Deleuze gives free rein to a certain ill temper [mauvaise humeur], which we may ourselves feel to be justified, against Hegelianism.

And yet, notwithstanding our approval, we cannot follow him in every detail of his criticism. The critique of Deleuze is no less superficial on this point than that of the Marxists, which, moreover, does not mean that Hegelianism was right, or that it is rational. To the various expressions of left Hegelianism, Deleuze opposes Stirner. Stirner was the audacious dialectician who tried to reconcile the dialectic with the art of the sophists. Must we find a point of equilibrium and rest in Marxism?

Does Marx do anything else but mark the last stage before the end, the proletarian stage? Leaving to one side the question of how Marxism and Nietzscheism can be united and to what extent the former can be conceived as a stage leading to the latter, our attention is directed in the following pages to what is essential in the Nietzschean solution. It is therefore a matter of seeing how man can be overcome, and this, Deleuze says, is carried out by means of the typological method ibid.

We wonder if there is any drawback to translating into some kind of scientific explanation what in Nietzsche is essentially lyrical affirmation. Deleuze puts it well when he says that it is a question of creating a new way of feeling, of inventing something other than man, a type other than the human type. Here the question arises whether man is essentially reactive. There is a polemic in the book, which is extremely useful and relevant, against certain aspects of contemporary philosophy.

A little Christian spiritualism, a little Hegelian dialectic, a little phenomenology our modern scholasticism and a little Nietzschean fulguration oddly combined in varying proportions. We see Marx and the pre-Socratics, Hegel and Nietzsche, dancing hand in hand in a round in celebration of the surpassing of metaphysics. We notice that Heideggerian philosophy in particular is attacked here. The negative has been introduced into chance, and opposition into becoming and multiplicity In the end, his interpretation can be seen as binding together very tightly the two ideas of the will to power and the eternal return.

Affirmation turns back on itself, then returns once more, carried to its highest power. Difference reflects itself and repeats or reproduces itself.

As interesting and profound as this interpretation is, we are still faced two dangers, or, at any rate, with two difficulties: first, there is the difficulty of completely eliminating the negative and, second, there is the difficulty arising from the fact that the positive may no longer appears as much as it should. The first difficulty, and the first danger, concerns the idea that the eternal return will only make the positive return.

We have said that eternal return and the will to power are linked. The idea is ingenious and profound, as we have said. However, it runs up against some profoundly Nietzschean affirmations, since to affirm a moment of pleasure is to affirm, at the same time, that totality in which the depths of pain as much as the depths of pleasure are integrated. Is there not here a Nietzschean tension that we risk neglecting? In fact nihilism is defeated, but defeated by itself. But we might point out that, for example, if Zarathustra is sometimes filled with sadness, this does mean his decline and his tendency towards his decline is any less a preparation for the overerman.

Perhaps we should distinguish between two, if not more, forms of becoming-weak, two forms of sadness. Nietzsche likes nuances. And we are always finding these tensions within Nietzschean thought, which make us, whether we like it or not, rediscover the dialectic. But, on the other hand, there is a deep suspicion about knowledge. We will no doubt be told that there is not any genuinely dialectical thought here. But it is a question of knowing whether we can succeed in this operation, which consists in affirming the negative without getting caught up in any dialectic.

We will doubtless be told that rather than the negative, ultimately we have alterity, the other, more as a moment of negation. It is a matter of making negation appear as a quality of the will to power, as a face of this will, but we always find the same danger — will the dialectic be reintroduced? But could we not say, quite the opposite, that it is extremely dialectical?

All philosophy, according to Deleuze, is an explication of the unhappiness of consciousness. Nietzsche would, in contrast, be the one who provides what he called the innocence of becoming. But we always face the same questions.

But can difference really be presented without using opposition? Plato had no doubt succeeded in this, but it is less clear that the same success is attained by Nietzsche.

But it remains very difficult to skip over nothingness and opposition, and Nietzsche was the first to realize this. So we would gladly say that when confronting the dialectic we are ourselves facing a situation that is rather dialectical.

We are constantly witnessing transmutations take place. For example, nihilism is transformed when the quality of the negative transmutes itself into the opposite quality The negative, Deleuze tells us, changes its quality and comes into the service of affirmation — it is only valid as a preliminary offensive or a subsequent aggressiveness.

We have already said as much. Like Heidegger, whose collected lectures on Nietzsche had just appeared in , Deleuze relies heavily on the unpublished notes of the Nachlass. It is there that Nietzsche interprets the world in terms of "force," that is, as "dynamic quanta" in perspectival "relations of tension. Thus, in place of a topology of concepts which asks, "What is. However, there are three notions in particular that make their first appearance in the course of this study that account for the far-reachingimpact of this book.

First, the development of such a theory of force leads to the deeper and For the point of all this talk about properly Deleuzian problematic of difference.

Nietzsche's critique of the nihilistic enterprise of denying life is thus transformed, in Deleuze's work, into a critique of the egalitarian and "indifferent"tendency of philosophy to reduce differences- a critique, he says, that "operates on three levels: against logical identity, against mathematical equality, and against physical equilibrium: against the threeforms of the p.

In Derrida, it is this conception of undifferentiated" difference that constitutes textuality; in Deleuze, difference "the unequal in itself" -and not, as in Kant, space and time-is the empirical condition by which the identities of the sensible world appear. Second, Deleuze interpretsthe word powerin the will to power as the genetic element that determines these differentialrelations of force.

It is this notion of power and its complex mechanisms that becomes increasingly influential in the later work of Michel Foucault "I could give no notion by referencesor quotationswhat this book owes to Gilles Deleuze and the work he is undertaking with Felix Guatarri"[Disciplineand Punish New York: Vintage Books, , p.

Finally, it is in the complex function of repetition as eternal return that Deleuze locates the affirmation of these free differences and the means by which Nietzsche paradoxically gave identity to difference. Pierre Klossowski, in a book dedicated to Deleuze, has perhaps taken these observations to their conclusion. The doctrine of the eternal return--that there has never been a first time no origin and that there will never be a last time no teleological or eschatological end of history - is really only the "simulacrum" of a doctrine, for the identities it affirms are always decentered or "cracked": their difference is interiorized, they differfrom themselves.

Whence Nietzsche's affirmationof masks, his positive notion of the false, and his insistence that the intellect is merely a caricature of delirium. As Klossowski concludes, "if we demystify it is only to mystify further, no longer to abuse, but to favor those obscure forces" Nietzscheet le cerclevicieux[Paris: Mercure de France, ], pp.

The implications of these three ideas and their appropriation by other thinkers can only hint at the fecundity of this study. Like much of Deleuze's early work, it is written in a straightforwardand fairly technical style that contrasts sharply with the flamboyance of the later Capitalismeet Schizophrenie Paris, As one French reviewer commented, it is excellent, but dry, very dry. Nonetheless, Nietzscheand Philosophyremains a touchstone for an entire generation of French thinkers.

One can only hope that more of Deleuze's important texts will be made available to English readers in the near future. Report "Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy ". Please fill this form, we will try to respond as soon as possible.