Nietzsche, die Orchestikologie und das dissipative Denken by Axel Pichler (review)

Toward the conclusion of his study, Axel Pichler likens Nietzsche’s writings to the actions of a suicide bomber, for whom fulfillment of purpose necessarily entails self-destruction. Such explosive imagery is certainly not alien to Nietzsche, who notoriously claims to be dynamite, tearing a rift between philosophy’s past and future, and when we speak with Richard Rorty of “post-Nietzschean philosophy,” we breathe the fumes of this blast. Descriptions of this rupture have largely focused on Nietzsche’s attacks on the pillars of systematic philosophy, which tremble at his accounts of the arbitrariness of language, the unavoidably perspectival nature of all knowledge, the irreducible contingency of truth, and the potential evolutionary advantages of error. But are Nietzsche’s own writings immune from the flames of his critiques? What status do they enjoy in the new environment he has helped shape? The question of how or whether Nietzsche can launch his critiques without himself espousing a new form of dogma has vexed scholars for decades. In his study, Pichler develops a novel reading of how Nietzsche might continue to assert the validity of his claims without contradicting his own critical insights regarding the nature of philosophical discourse.

The title of Pichler’s study highlights its innovative contribution with a provocatively unfamiliar term. “Orchesticology”? The original German is no more familiar than this direct translation. Does it connote an organized, perhaps even systematized body of knowledge (“-logy”) based on Nietzsche’s interest in music (“orchestico-”)? Thus understood, it would appear to represent a counterimpulse to the juxtaposed term “dissipative thinking,” which suggests both a more entropic and less substantive process. Pichler suggests as much throughout his work, but he makes his reader wait until the final chapter before elucidating his crucial neologism in detail. Nonetheless, both terms make clear that issues of method stand at the center of this study.

As one might expect from a largely unrevised dissertation (Pichler openly acknowledges his study’s origin), the book first devotes a large amount space to establishing a solid foundation in secondary scholarship. Key figures include Heidegger, Deleuze, Danto, and Derrida, but it is Foucault who plays the most prominent role in Pichler’s own reading of Nietzsche. Interestingly, it is not the later Foucault, the theorist of power/knowledge, who provides Pichler’s study with its theoretical apparatus but the earlier Foucault of The Archaeology of Knowledge and The Order of Things. Pichler identifies in Nietzsche’s critiques of knowledge and truth a method akin to Foucauldian discourse analysis, with its concern for the conditions of expression (the subject they infer, the institutions they require, the objects they engender, the practices they embrace, the rules they perpetuate). In the wake of the death of God, truth and knowledge dissolve as objects of epistemology and emerge as discursive entities, compromising their privileged status and opening up the potential for nihilism. Nietzsche’s perspectivism both results from and provides the basis for this position, which emphasizes the interpretive nature of existence. Interpretation becomes the character of knowledge and truth, inextricable from the discourse that enables it. Building on recent work by Werner Stegmaier, Pichler explores Nietzsche’s work as a philosophy of grammar, a grammar that makes communication possible, even as it begets endless interpretation.

On this reading, Nietzsche’s writings are best understood as a discourse rather than a collection of works. Nevertheless, the form of these writings is crucial for their characterization as such. The “fragmentism” of Nietzsche’s publications reflects a mode of perspectival writing in which every passage establishes its own microdiscourse. Relations between utterances (Pichler aligns the fragment/aphorism with the Foucauldian énoncé) do not always follow the same schema; interpretation is never settled but always open to reactivation in new discursive formations (here we see the influence of Claus Zittel on Pichler’s analysis).

Pichler perhaps overstates the necessity of such writing, as though Nietzsche’s turn to “fragmentary” writing were required by his critiques of language, knowledge...