Resentment and the "Feminine" in Nietzsche's Politico-Aesthetics (review)

Resentment and the "Feminine" in Nietzsche's Politico-Aesthetics. By Caroline Joan S. Picart. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999.

In Resentment and the "Feminine" in Nietzsche's Politico-Aesthetics (1999), Caroline Picart argues: (1) that Nietzsche's thought is centered on the questions of politics and aesthetics; and (2) that these questions are bound up with the question of the feminine. The first claim is relatively unproblematic. The assertion that the question of the feminine, like the issues of politics and aesthetics, is crucial to Nietzsche's philosophical agenda is, however, somewhat contentious. Picart is aware of this. She opens her reading of Nietzsche by noting that recent assessments of Nietzsche's works have divided into four camps: those who read Nietzsche as a feminist, those who find

Nietzsche potentially useful to feminists, those who identity Nietzsche as a misogynist, and those who see no connection between Nietzsche's work and feminist concerns. Picart says that she is not interested in establishing membership in any of these camps. She does not intend to get involved in their quarrel. She is interested in seeing what Nietzsche's misogyny means for his political thought (2-3). By not attending to the question of whether or not Nietzsche is a misogynist, however, Picart develops her case against Nietzsche by taking it for granted that the criteria for identifying Nietzsche's misogynous statements are obvious. I think this is problematic. Reading Nietzsche is never a straightforward affair; statements that appear degrading, for example, the charge that women are superficial, take on ambiguous and positive meanings within the context of Nietzsche's critique of metaphysics. Given Nietzsche's style and deconstructive project, determining whether or not a statement is misogynous is no simple matter.

Resentment and the "Feminine" in Nietzsche's Politico-Aesthetics develops the general thesis that the attempt to devalue women and the patriarchal appropriation of the feminine power of birthing is a mark of the resentment that characterizes modernity. It argues that overcoming this resentment is essential to a postmodern politics of justice. More specifically, it finds that Nietzsche is riddled with modern resentments; the evidence for this being his words about women, his portrayal of Zarathustra; and his autobiographical designation of his mother and sister as hell machines (127). In Picart's words: "The driving thesis of this book is that the disease that (em)powers and disempowers Nietzsche's philosophy is ressentiment. This is strikingly revealed in the onset and progression of the clustering symptoms of his macroscopic and microscopic treatment of the 'feminine'/ woman" (19). I find Picart's general thesis compelling. I am not, however, convinced that her specific charges against Nietzsche will hold; for these charges depend on making the case that Nietzsche is a Romantic; on a Straussian reading of Zarathustra as a noble lie; on seeing Nietzsche as caught in the Hegelian matrix of a master-slave politics; and on taking what Nietzsche says about women at face value.

Thus Spake Zarathustra (1976) is seen as marking Nietzsche's misogynist turn. Prior to Zarathustra, Picart tells us, myths of the feminine function as symbols of the vitality and enigma of life. Further, Nietzsche's early portrayals of the gods Apollo and Dionysus complicate patriarchal heterosexist models of reproduction (42-43). Interestingly, Picart reads Nietzsche's references to nature as a reference to Demeter, and finds the beginnings of Nietzsche's ambivalence toward the feminine evidenced in the way he rewrites Demeter's desire. For in Nietzsche's version of the myth, according to Picart, Demeter's joy at being reunited with her daughter is transformed into a desire to birth Dionysus—a not so innocent erasure of a feminine genealogy (66).

In Zarathustra misogyny replaces ambiguity. Picart reads Zarathustra as the story of a hysterical phallic mother, and as a political noble lie designed to lure the masses to a quick death and to induce the noble to give birth to the Übermensch...