enowning
Saturday, December 25, 2010
 
Twas yet another Night before Christmas.
I knew right away it was postmodern Santa.
More rapid than eagles discourses they came,
As he named and destabilized each language game!

“Now Heidegger, Nietzsche! Now, Levinas and Lyotard!
On Derrida, Foucault! On Butler and Baudrillard!
To each modern foundation, to each stucturalist wall!
Now deconstruct! Deconstruct! Deconstruct all!”
 
Comments:
It's interesting how continental types lump together the various PoMo greats (while realizing the Night before Xmass be just a jest). Im pretty sure Nietzsche at least would not sit quietly in the PoMo boat with the others (Heidegger included). Nietzsche has at various times been recruited--first via something like the Aynnie Rand right, and then the parisian Heideggerians, a few leftists. Not sure where he properly belongs (in brief, perhaps Nietzsche's sort of an Aristotelian, tho sans Ari's few traces of virtue, and the monotheism--and he's not as Ludditeish as some pomos read him, but rather Darwinian in ways). Were FN to reappear say on Cal when Guru Buttler's offering her wit n wizdom he'd most likely reach for his horsewhip.
 
The other problem you have is "which Nietzsche?" Will to Power Fritz, or Genealogy of Morals/Zarathustra Nietzsche, or Gay Science Nietzsche, or Birth of Tragedy Wagnerian-Schopenhauerian Nietzsche, or Insane Nietzsche - and then there's pre-Lou vs post-Lou Nietzsche, and even post-Lou horsewhip Fritz counted feminists among his friends and admirers. (am getting this largely from the new Nietzsche bio, linked in the sidebar of the blog where you found the poem).

Cheers!
 
I was perusing a bookstore today, and they had a book on Fred the democrat and another on Fred the feminist. Just goes to show, there's a Nietzsche for every pot.

I read the Lou book on him this year. It's interesting that those who knew him were convinced his madness was self-induced, from thinking too radically. The it-was-the-syphillis-that-done-it explanation was invented later.
 
Julian Young is very complimentary regarding the Lou book. His take on the syphilis theory was that it was at that time and place trendy as a diagnosis. N's other symptoms don't fit, nor do other medical theories, but the premise of the "self-induced" diagnosis can be read both ways: Radical -> Mad or Mad -> Radical.
 
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