Nietzsche and the Rhetoric of Nihilism ed. by Tom Darby, Bela Egyed, Ben Jones (review)

194 LETTERS IN CANADA 1989 formulations of other cultures but also undergoing significant internal changes as traditional literacy itself is increasingly displaced, bemused tolerance of other modes of thought is not enough. And any form of analysis that accepts so readily its own claims to evolutionary privilege requires careful reconsideration. (R.L. KESLER) Tom Darby, Bela Egyed, Ben Jones, editors. Nietzsche and the Rhetoric ofNihilism Carleton University Press. x, 205. $24.95 paper This volume brings together a series of essays in what might now be called the postmodern reading ofNietzsche - an approachborn essentially in the works of Heidegger, Derrida, and Deleuze. The juxtaposition of 'rhetoric' and 'nihilism' in the book's title will not be surprising to those familiar with this approach. Both postmodernism generally, and the narrower school of deconstructive thought which has dominated French philosophy for the past twenty years, put the question of language (i.e. speech, writing, text), and of the possibility of traditional conceptual language coming to an experience of its own nullity, at the forefront of reflection and research. The role that Nietzsche has to play in the address of such questions has been deeply ambiguous. He was the first to treat the problem of nihilism seriously and exhaustively and to diagnose the illness of traditional metaphysics, and so became a prophet of that modernism which celebrates its emancipation from the past, especially as represented in the institution of Western religion. But if the Heideggerian critique (still the most influential interpretation of Nietzsche) is correct, this modernism is itself consummate nihilism. Heidegger's central claim is that Nietzsche's counter-movement to nihilistic metaphysics, as expressed in the doctrines of will to power and eternal recurrence, is in fact the perfection and closure of metaphysical thought - a closure that now announces itself everywhere in the endless expansionism ('the will to will') of modern technology. Finally, against this critique but in recognition of its depth and force, recent French philosophy has attempted to vindicate Nietzsche ; not by defending modernism, but byarguing that the Nietzschean text represents precisely the sort of postmodern, post-metaphysical position Heideggerian thinking (rightly) demands. In the works of Derrida and Deleuze, the question of the status of Nietzsche's various doctrines is displaced and subordinated to a sustained attemptatworking out the literary and political implications of his style. A book which takes as its point of departure this rather esoteric debate concerning Nietzsche's relation to language or rhetoric, to the nihilistic language or rhetoric of the tradition, and to nihilism as such is obviously not for beginners. Indeed, some contributions will prove challenging HUMANITIES 195 even to those quite well acquainted with the area (Constantin Boundas's 'Minoritarian Deconstruction of the Rhetoric of Nihilism' comes immediately to mind). This problem of accessibility, however, is offset by, first, an almost heroic introduction by Bela Egyed, and second, the quality and originality of the essays themselves. In his introduction, Egyed summarizes briefly the positions of Heidegger , Deleuze, and Derrida, exploring and evaluating significant discrepencies between them. The discussion is generally informative (it makes explicit the basic hermeneutical context of the essays that follow) and also pointed. It moves towards the development of the book's guiding theme -'difference' (i.e. difference from and within nihilism, from and within metaphysiCs, from and within conceptual language, from and within rhetoric). Egyed argues, convincingly and with an admirable directness and simplicity given the subject matter, that the postmodem reading of Nietzsche, in virtually all of its variations, attempts to represent 'difference ' (i.e. so that differences within the general reading are invariably differences on the question of representing 'difference' as such). One way of accounting for almost all of the contributions to this volume would be to say that they explore different figures and configurations of Nietzschean 'difference,' different possibilities in the interpretation of Nietzsche's reversal or transvaluation of traditional values. In the book's first essay, 'Nihilism: Reactive and Active,' Gianni Vattimo meditates upon whether and how Nietzsche can surmount nihilism without positing some new transcendental (read: metaphysicaVnihilistic) value which would negate the movement it seeks to complete. In the provocative 'Language to the Limit,' Claude Levesque develops the view that Nietzschean...