Walter Kaufmann’s Nietzsche is pleasing in several ways. A quiet but charged beginning to the year’s reading: it has me writing more than I expected.
I’ve always been stubborn about approaching the major thinkers directly. Stubborn, and in some cases, Derrida comes to mind, naively so. But Kaufmann’s Nietzsche does more than explain. It moves with conviction, with pace; it’s as alive as anything Nietzsche wrote. I’ve set aside books by Nehemas, Safranski, and Malcolm Bull to follow it.
What I’m wondering is this: which other books on the major thinkers stand, themselves, as works of literature? Not just clear or useful, but shaped by pressure of thought. Is there someone who can open Bourdieu that way? Or Deleuze, whose writing I almost receive as poetry, letting meaning settle where it will?
It isn’t just Kaufmann prompting the question. Richard Geldard’s Remembering Heraclitus comes to mind. And Samuel Beckett’s Library, one of the most generative works of secondary literature I know: Beckett reading the thinkers sideways, obliquely, sometimes only after long delay.
If you have suggestions, leave them in the Comments where others can find them rather than on Twitter, where everything disappears.
Anthony, I *highly* recommend Jeremy Barris’s “God & Plastic Surgery: Marx, Nietzsche, Freud & the Obvious” (http://www.amazon.com/God-Plastic-Surgery-Nietzsche-Obvious/dp/0936756411%3FSubscriptionId%3DAKIAILSHYYTFIVPWUY6Q%26tag%3Dduckduckgo-d-20%26linkCode%3Dxm2%26camp%3D2025%26creative%3D165953%26creativeASIN%3D0936756411). Great title, no? I read it 25 years ago, and still think about it once in a while. The “crab” logic Barris outlines is quite nifty, and the prose style is miles above the usual.
~Roman (aka @Zenjew)
Thanks, Roman, great title and there is no chance I can resist a book described thus:
Anthony,
I hope you have a year full of readings. I really enjoy this blog – it is kind of a guide to my own readings. Have you read “Nietzsche” by Bataille?
No, htirado, I know of it but have never read it – do you recommend it? And thank you for reading my blog.
Anthony, my recommendation (apologies if it’s excessively antiquarian) would be Walter Pater’s Plato and Platonism, a beautifully-written and lucid set of introductory lectures for students circa 1890. I approached this book with a grudging sense of duty when I was in grad school and wanting to write on Pater’s fiction, but it turned out to be perhaps my favorite of his books. I also ran across a passage acclaiming it in the letters of Samuel R. Delany for its surprisingly relevant introduction to concepts anticipating deconstruction (I share your tears over Derrida). It pairs perfectly with Nietzsche. From Pater’s wikipedia entry:
“In this year [1893] appeared his book Plato and Platonism. Here and in other essays on ancient Greece Pater relates to Greek culture the romanticism-classicism dialectic which he had first explored in his essay ‘Romanticism’ (1876), reprinted as the ‘Postscript’ to Appreciations. ‘All through Greek history,’ he writes, ‘we may trace, in every sphere of activity of the Greek mind, the action of these two opposing tendencies, the centrifugal and centripetal. The centrifugal – the Ionian, the Asiatic tendency – flying from the centre, throwing itself forth in endless play of imagination, delighting in brightness and colour, in beautiful material, in changeful form everywhere, its restless versatility driving it towards the development of the individual’: and “the centripetal tendency’, drawing towards the centre, ‘maintaining the Dorian influence of a severe simplification everywhere, in society, in culture’. Harold Bloom noted that ‘Pater praises Plato for Classic correctness, for a conservative centripetal impulse, against his [Pater’s] own Heraclitean Romanticism,’ but ‘we do not believe him when he presents himself as a centripetal man’.”
John, Thank you. That is a terrific suggestion and pairs perfectly with Nietzsche. I’ve managed to find a decent copy on Abebooks. I love the fragment that you left from Pater’s wikipedia entry, it captures that tension between Dionysus and Apollo so well.
This isn’t a proper response to your question, but I was in my local English bookshop today and came across a copy of this book: http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/C/bo14365242.html and wondered if you’d seen it/heard of it, and thought it might be interesting for you. I don’t know of her so cannot give a real recommendation, but it looks like a close reading and could be useful.
Thanks, Michelle, this looks fascinating, adding to my Nietzsche reading list.
michelle’s recommendation is seconded, i know her, she’s good.
Thanks, noted.