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  • Nietzsche: Storia di un processo politico: Dal nazismo alla globalizzazione by Massimo Ferrari Zumbini
  • Gabriella Pelloni
Massimo Ferrari Zumbini, Nietzsche: Storia di un processo politico: Dal nazismo alla globalizzazione. Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino Editore, 2011. 322pp. ISBN: 978-8-84-982846-7. €16.

Massimo Ferrari Zumbini’s book, Nietzsche: Storia di un processo politico: Dal nazismo alla globalizzazione (Nietzsche: History of a Political Trial: From Nazism to Globalization) is a laudable reconstruction of the political-ideological debate over Nietzsche. The two main historical and interpretative stages of this debate treat Nietzsche as a forerunner of Nazism and as a philosopher of liberation, respectively. More specifically, in the opening chapters of the book Ferrari Zumbini delineates four distinct phases of historical-political response to Nietzsche, each of which hinges on the issue of the relationship between his philosophy and the Nazi regime (15ff.): “the Baeumler phase,” in which Nietzsche was taken into the Nazi ideological canon on the basis of Alfred Baeumler’s interpretation; “the Lukács phase,” continuous with the previous phase in its interpretation, but viewed from an opposed ideological perspective (the condemnation of Nietzsche as a pillar of the capitalist, imperialist and fascist bourgeoisie was the central argument of György Lukács’s Die Zerstörung der Vernunft); “the Montinari phase,” which marked a turning point in the interpretation of Nietzsche attributable to the reevaluation of his thought by contemporaneous French and Italian philosophers, Gilles Deleuze and Gianni Vattimo; and “the Losurdo phase,” in which the interpretation of Nietzsche as an Enlightenment philosopher and a critic of anti-Semitism was subjected to radical criticism and his connections to Nazism reasserted (representative here is Domenico Losurdo’s Nietzsche. Il ribelle aristocratico [Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 2002], which interprets Nietzsche as a theorist of global imperialism, but Ferrari Zumbini also rightly considers Thomas Mittman’s Vom “Günstling” zum “Urfeind” der Juden [Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2006], which views Nietzsche as complicit in anti-Semitic ideas).

Ferrari Zumbini’s reconstruction of this century-long “political trial” aims to rewrite the historical narrative of the political-ideological reception of Nietzsche. Significantly, at the end of the book (312–13), he reminds the reader of Mazzino Montinari’s call to read Nietzsche in a historical-philological mode, rather than an ideological and modernizing one. He also cites Eckhard Heftrich’s conviction that the labyrinthian character of Nietzsche’s thought requires a patient interpretation of his texts, which Heftrich defined as “cryptograms of circular thought.” These conclusions are preceded by a solidly documented analysis of the major interpretations, which have occurred since the end of the nineteenth century, when Nietzsche’s sister, Elizabeth Förster-Nietzsche, transformed the Nietzsche-Archiv into an international reference point for artists and philosophers.

Ferrari Zumbini clarifies his aim in the fourth chapter, which is dedicated to the method of reconstruction he employs (33ff.), namely, the “reader-response” method developed by the Constance school of Hans Robert Jauß and Wolfgang Iser. Although this method is usually addressed to the literary field, Ferrari Zumbini’s reconstruction convincingly invokes both the category of a “horizon of expectation [Erwartungshorizont]” and that of an “implicit reader [impliziter Leser]” to demonstrate that this method can also be applied fruitfully to documents in the history of ideas and political thought. In contrast to the traditional history of an author’s reception, this method examines the history of his or her “influence [Wirkungsgeschichte]” from the point of view of the reader. The analysis thus adopts new perspectives of inquiry, according to which the misunderstandings surrounding Nietzsche’s work constitute the material for study, rather than errors to be overcome. Indeed, the initial question is changed as well: rather than reconstructing what the Nazis believed themselves to have found in Nietzsche, the emphasis is placed on what they were seeking and for which reasons. The goal is thus the “rediscovery of the horizons of expectation” (35), which have come to characterize the various phases of Nietzsche’s “political trial.” Ferrari Zumbini sketches out three crucial elements that he considers indispensable for reconstructing these horizons: Martin Heidegger’s interpretation, published in 1961, which represents the key moment of the philosophical “transvaluation” of Nietzschean thought; the...

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