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  • Guest Editors’ IntroductionWhat Does Nietzsche Mean for Contemporary Politics and Political Thought?
  • Herman Siemens and Gary Shapiro

Over the last twenty years or so Nietzsche’s significance for political thought has become the single most hotly contested area of Nietzsche research, especially in the English-speaking world: Is Nietzsche a political thinker at all—or an antipolitical philosopher of values and culture? Is he an aristocratic political thinker who damns democracy as an expression of modern nihilism—or can his thought, especially his thought on the Greek agon, be appropriated for contemporary democratic theory? These and other ongoing controversies attest to the profoundly ambivalent and controversial nature of Nietzsche’s legacy for political thought. In this issue, we add the question of Nietzsche’s actuality: What does Nietzsche mean for contemporary politics and political thought?

Two significant events dedicated to Nietzsche and politics were organized in 2007: the Sixteenth International Conference of the Friedrich Nietzsche Society was held at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands in March, followed shortly thereafter by a small conference at the University of Richmond. Four articles focused on Nietzsche and contemporary politics and drawn from these events appear in this special issue. Additional essays will soon appear in a volume titled Nietzsche, Power, and Politics.1

One reason for the explosion of literature on Nietzsche and the political in recent years is the perception that he offers a wealth of resources for rethinking key political concepts, theories, and events in a rapidly changing world. This was not always so. In the wake of World War II, Nietzsche was largely considered to be a critic of modernity with nothing constructive to offer political thought, capitulating instead to a blind, irrational voluntarism. But the great polarizations of the twentieth century, its world wars and Cold War, have now given way to a present that is wrestling with terrorist threats, preemptive strikes on the part of a single hyperpower, issues of globalization, environmental crises, and multiculturalism. If the questions of the last century were posed between two poles, the questions of the present revolve around only one: What is it to become “one” (world, market, Europe, democracy, hyperpower . . .)? In this context, Nietzsche [End Page 3] seems to put his finger on the pulse, when he provokes us to ask: What shall be the “Sinn [meaning, direction] of the earth?” or when he states: “Europe wants to become one.” But what is it to become one?

It is around these two questions that Gary Shapiro’s essay in this issue turns. Shapiro explores Nietzsche’s question of the Sinn der Erde from a geophilosophical perspective, as a question about the “direction of the earth” that poses a powerful challenge to globalization theories. Geophilosophy, as developed by Deleuze and Guattari, names a reorientation of philosophy toward spatial or “territorial” coordinates, against the primacy accorded to history by philosophy and modernity’s sense of historical time. Read from this angle, Shapiro argues, Nietzsche’s thought undermines ideologically driven metanarratives of globalization, such as Eduard von Hartmann’s Weltprozess story, repeatedly ridiculed by Nietzsche, but also the more topical “end of history” story popularized by Fukuyama. Yet Nietzsche does not leave us empty-handed. His geophilosophical impulse leads him to elaborate “alternative notions of time and futurity” as he rearticulates the European present in terms of mobility, difference, and multiplicity, declaring that “this is the century of the multitude [Menge]!” (BGE 256).

In taking contemporary politics and political thought as its starting point, Shapiro’s essay opens up some of the more obscure and difficult areas of Nietzsche’s corpus to interpretation, especially the much-neglected chapter titled “Peoples and Fatherlands” in Beyond Good and Evil. Read through geophilosophical spectacles, this chapter locates philosophy in a dynamic tension between deterritorialization (as in philosophy’s universalistic claims) and reterritorialization (as in the unavoidable, if largely unconscious reinscription of thought within spatial coordinates). The book’s discussions of the nation-state, empire, soil addiction (Schollenkleberei), the Jews, and German, French, and English thought and, most importantly, the supranational “good Europeans” can all be understood as reterritorializing genealogical analyses that resolve artificial “unities” (the nation-state, Europe, the German) into variations and movements...

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