Nietzsche and the Political (review)

I

The question raised by this book, as by all the recent studies of the subject, is: Why Nietzsche and politics? How is an apparently apolitical philosopher, who eschews any direct or detailed analysis of political institutions, to be taken seriously as a political thinker? A skeptical answer might run: through a very thin concept of the political, what Conway calls a “micropolitics” of resistance, as against a “macropolitics” of transformation. The political dimension of Nietzsche’s thought, he argues, is an inadvertent by-product of his private pursuit of self-overcoming: in this, the central thesis of this book, the political means no more than a semiotics of self-creation, Nietzsche’s self-creation as a public mask or sign. When pressed, it seems, the author identifies any practice contributing to the enhancement of humankind “through the legislative deployment of the ethical resources of the community” as political in nature (48, 79). Neither concept is, to my mind, distinctively political, and it is unclear why we should speak of politics where Nietzsche himself preferred idioms like “culture” and “values.” For Conway, however, Nietzsche is a thinker of the political because he dares to ask the most neglected question, the founding question of politics: What ought humankind to become? It is a question posed in a genuinely radical and open way, without prepared answers or moral restraints (see the introduction), to which Nietzsche, in the final analysis, is unable to give a specific answer (see chap. 6).

The major motivation for this book is to challenge and correct the political readings of Nietzsche that prevail. These are beautifully summarized and diagnosed in the closing chapter under “the standard reading” (121–22), which includes the view of Nietzsche as a failed radical voluntarist, whose investment in redemptive übermenschliche figures contradicts his own critique of modernity, and the view of Nietzsche as a prophet of extremity, who underestimates the residual restorative powers of modernity in promoting the other of reason. Against such readings, Nietzsche’s awareness of his implication in modern decadence and his operation within the dialectic of Enlightenment are both built into Conway’s argumentation throughout.

The relation between Nietzsche’s politics and his ethics forms the central concern of the book. Nietzsche’s ethics are identified with the kind of perfectionism presented by Stanley Cavell in “Aversive Thinking,” an essay on Emerson and Nietzsche:¹ through untimely or aversive thinking, Nietzsche aims at the perfection (not transcendence) of humankind, at the completion (not the reversal) of the transition from natural into human animal. Nietzschean perfectionism is purged of any finality in a predetermined telos of completion, designating instead an open-ended process of self-overcoming. Conway is not the first to identify an ethics of perfectionism in Nietzsche, but he wants to save it from the apolitical, privatized readings of Kaufmann and Rorty.² His main thesis is that ethical perfectionism always takes precedence for Nietzsche, as the “core” of his political perfectionism, which is never any more than a vehicle or instrument for his ethics. In distinguishing Nietzsche’s ethical from his political perfectionism, Conway appeals to Cavell, who emphasizes the ethical character of Emersonian/Nietzschean perfectionism yet links it to politics, as the unique training needed for democratic life. Conway’s distinction is, at the same time, tied up with a chronological thesis: the political perfectionism of Nietzsche’s youth gives way to an ethical perfectionism dominating his writings post–Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Under the increasing pressure of a realistic assessment of decadent modernity—its depleted resources and corrupt institutions—Nietzsche’s “macropolitics” of transfiguration contracts into a “micropolitics,” focused on the ethical core of his political thought. A consideration of the complex and tangled notion of die grosse Politik, identified by Ottmann with a return from apolitical Freigeisterei to a Herrschaftslehre in the third part of Z, would certainly have complicated this neat thesis.³

While this study aspires to span Nietzsche’s entire oeuvre, it has a distinctive textual bias...