Golden calf: Deleuze’s Nietzsche in the time of Trump

Thesis Eleven ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 072551362110059
Author(s):  
Matthew Sharpe
Keyword(s):  
Gilles Deleuze ◽  
Rhetorical Strategies ◽  
Political Movement ◽  
Far Right ◽  
Eternal Recurrence ◽  
Golden Calf ◽  
Political Data ◽  
Race And Sexuality ◽  
The Subject

This paper examines how Gilles Deleuze addresses, and fail to address, the darker strata in Nietzsche’s work which has enabled his work to be claimed by almost every far-right European political movement since the 1890s to the Alt-Right today. Part I argues that four rhetorical strategies are present which serve to domesticate Nietzsche’s ideas concerning class and caste, race and sexuality, and his opposition to forms of liberalism, democracy, feminism and socialism: avoiding directly political subjects which Nietzsche returned to; catachrestic use of political words to describe ostensibly supra- or non-political data; denials of Nietzsche’s rightist positions, followed by justifications which, upon analysis, do not support the denials but ‘change the subject’; openly erroneous misrepresentations of divisive subjects, led by Nietzsche on war. Part II looks at how these sophistical strategies are played out in two key passages in Nietzsche and Philosophy, concerning the second ‘selection’ in the eternal recurrence, with its ‘annihilation of all parasitical and degenerate elements’. Closing remarks address the situation today, and the paradoxes and limitations of Left Nietzscheanism in the academy.

Friedrich Nietzsche

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vanessa Lemm
Keyword(s):  
Friedrich Nietzsche ◽  
Michel Foucault ◽  
Gilles Deleuze ◽  
Georges Bataille ◽  
Giorgio Agamben ◽  
Eternal Recurrence ◽  
German Philosopher ◽  
Point Of Reference

Readers of Giorgio Agamben would agree that the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) is not one of his primary interlocutors. As such, Agamben’s engagement with Nietzsche is different from the French reception of Nietzsche’s philosophy in Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Georges Bataille, as well as in his contemporary Italian colleague Roberto Esposito, for whom Nietzsche’s philosophy is a key point of reference in their thinking of politics beyond sovereignty. Agamben’s stance towards the thought of Nietzsche may seem ambiguous to some readers, in particular with regard to his shifting position on Nietzsche’s much-debated vision of the eternal recurrence of the same.

Antisemitism in the “Alternative for Germany” Party

2018 ◽  
Vol 36 (3) ◽  
pp. 74-93
Author(s):  
Samuel Salzborn
Keyword(s):  
Public Debate ◽  
Rhetorical Strategies ◽  
Popular Vote ◽  
Far Right ◽  
Media Image ◽  
Alternative For Germany

The Alternative for Germany (AfD) has been sitting in Germany’s federal parliament since September 2017, having won 12.6 percent of the popular vote. In considering this young party’s recent development, researchers have focussed on its rhetorical strategies (i.e., populism) and its radicalization. Until now, much less attention has been paid to antisemitism within the AfD— also because the party would prefer to keep this out of public debate. By investigating its treatment of antisemitism, Nazism, and the politics of remembrance, it can be shown that the AfD has the features of a far-right party, to a much clearer extent than might be guessed from its media image, particularly inside Germany.

scholarly journals In Defence of ‘Noir Theory’: Laruelle, Deleuze, and Other Detectives

2019 ◽  
Vol 37 (3) ◽  
pp. 123-144
Author(s):  
Rob Coley
Keyword(s):  
Gilles Deleuze ◽  
Cultural Theory ◽  
Crime Fiction ◽  
Critical Thought ◽  
The Real ◽  
Mode Of Detection ◽  
The Subject

What happens when theory falters? A concern with the anthropocentric limitations of critical thought dominates contemporary cultural theory. For Joanna Zylinska, however, this concern often reflects a longstanding humanist anxiety, one that is today renewed in the form of ‘noir theory’, a reactionary scholarship that redeems the universalist human as the subject of reason. There is, though, more than one mode of noir theory, and a certain tendency of ‘noir’ affords the basis for theorizing another kind of universalism, a non-reactionary account of the real. This article takes seriously the allusion to noir as a particular mode of detection. Its investigation begins with Gilles Deleuze, who commends crime fiction for providing an image of thought that works against humanist orthodoxy. Yet present circumstances demand investigating a blacker kind of noir, one that operates negatively, a noir theory that can be detected in the strange realism of François Laruelle.

Nihilsmo, Fin de la Metafisica y Secularizacion en el Pensamiento de Nietzsche, Heidegger y Vattimo

1998 ◽  
pp. 165-172
Author(s):  
Laura Laiseca
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Death Of God ◽  
Eternal Recurrence ◽  
History Of ◽  
Postmodern Philosophy ◽  
The Will ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The One

The purpose of this article is to articulate Nietzsche's criticism of morality which is centered in his experience of the death of God and the end of the subject of Modernity. Nietzsche considers nihilism as a nihilism of morality, not of metaphysics: it is morality and its history that has given rise to nihilism in the Occident. That is why Nietzsche separates himself from metaphysics as well as from morality and science, which differs from Heidegger's reasons. According to Heidegger, Nietzsche places himself in a primal position in the history of metaphysics, by which he means the consummation (Vollendung) of metaphysics' nihilism, which Heidegger tries to transcend. On the one hand, Heidegger shows us how Nietzsche consummates the Platonic philosophy by inverting its principles. On the other, Nietzsche consummates the metaphysics of subjectivity. Consequently he conceives the thought of the will of power and of the eternal recurrence as the two last forms of the metaphysical categories of essence and existence respectively. On this ground it is possible to understand Nietzsche's and Heidegger's thought as the necessary first stage in the transition to Vattimo's postmodern philosophy and his notion of secularization.

Sense and Segmentarity: Some Markers of a Deleuzian-Guattarian Sociology

1998 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 52-74 ◽  
Author(s):  
William Bogard
Keyword(s):  
Social Theory ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Gilles Deleuze ◽  
Molecular Level ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Social Structures ◽  
Felix Guattari ◽  
Deleuze And Guattari ◽  
Organic Form ◽  
The Subject

Although the focus of their work was rarely explicitly sociological, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari developed concepts that have important and often profound implications for social theory and practice. Two of these, sense and segmentarity, provide us with entirely new ways to view sociological problems of meaning and structure. Deleuze conceives sense independently of both agency and signification. That is, sense is neither the manifestation of a communicating subject nor a structure of language—it is noncorporeal, impersonal, and prelinguistic, in his words, a “pure effect or event.” With Guattari, Deleuze notes that it is not a question of how subjects produce social structures, but how a “machinics of desire” produces subjects. In Deleuze and Guattari, desire is not defined as a want or a lack, but as a machinery of forces, flows, and breaks of energy. The functional stratification we witness in social life is only the molar effect of a more primary segmentation of desire that occurs at the molecular level, at the level of bodies. In Deleuze and Guattari, bodies are not just human bodies, but “anorganic” composites or mixtures, organic form itself being a mode of the body's subjectification. The problem of the subject, and thus of the constitution of society, is first a problem of how the sense of bodies is produced through the assembly of desiring-machines. The subject, we could say, is the actualization of desire on the incorporeal surface of bodies.

What do the Peasants Want Now? Realists and Fundamentalists in Swiss and South German Rural Politics, 1650–1750

2001 ◽  
Vol 34 (3) ◽  
pp. 313-356
Author(s):  
Hermann Rebel
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Gilles Deleuze ◽  
Rural Politics ◽  
Modern State ◽  
The South ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Market Relations ◽  
German Cities

In Leibniz, in Whitehead, there are only events. What Leibniz calls predicate is nothing to do with an attribute, but an event, “crossing the Rubicon.” So they have to completely recast the notion of a subject: what becomes of the subject, if predicates are events? It's like a baroque emblem. (Gilles Deleuze)The [Swiss] Confederacy presented a deep political ambiguity, a union of urban oligarchs and peasant producers, all of whom collectively ruled over yet other subjects, which mirrored the tension between the [South German] cities' own oligarchical present and communal past. If there is indeed “an unbroken progressive line” between the communal burghers of this age and the bourgeoisies of a later one, it runs through deep shadows of ambiguity and tension, which flowed from securing the liberties of some through the subjection of others…More and more, the bigger folk in the cities made their livings from the vast web of market relations…and made their peace with the early modern state. (Thomas Brady)

Theatre - power - subject: On Dragan Živadinov's Elizabethan Trilogy

Maska ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 28 (157) ◽  
pp. 79-95
Author(s):  
Bojan Anđelković
Keyword(s):  
Friedrich Nietzsche ◽  
Michel Foucault ◽  
Gilles Deleuze ◽  
Philosophical Reflection ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Shed Light

The text offers a philosophical reflection on the cycle of five performances that form the Elizabethan Trilogy project (2008-2013) by director Dragan Živadinov. By introducing four conceptual pairs - theatre and sovereignty, words and things, the subject and the mask, and difference and repetition - it also attempts to reflect on Živadinov's entire opus and on the meaning of his theatre. At the centre of attention in the theatre of repetition, which is opposed to the theatre of representation, there is the relation between theatre, sovereignty and the subject; the author of this text tries to shed light on this relation by drawing on Antonin Artaud's concept of the theatre of cruelty and possible connections between theatre and the philosophies of Friedrich Nietzsche, Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze.

Discipline and Varnish: Rhetoric and Subjectivity at the Museum of Modern Art

Prospects ◽  
2001 ◽  
Vol 26 ◽  
pp. 639-665
Author(s):  
Thomas Patin
Keyword(s):  
Subjective Experience ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
The Body ◽  
Museum Of Modern Art ◽  
Political Movement ◽  
Art Objects ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Artificial Nature ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Cultural Theorist

Literary and Cultural Theorist Terry Eagleton argues that “the aesthetic” was from its very inception a development toward a representation of human subjectivity. For Eagleton, the discourse of aesthetics assigned the body to “a subtly oppressive law … a specious form of universalism … [that] blocks and mystifies the real political movement towards … community.” The aesthetic became a “coercion to hegemony,” by informing and regulating sensuous life while at the same time allowing for what seemed like a prospering autonomy. For Eagleton, aesthetics is not ultimately concerned with art objects but with the project of “reconstructing the human subject from the inside.” Autonomy, as it has been described by many theories of the aesthetic, becomes for many a desirable model of independent subjectivity and individual subjective experience. Even though aesthetics works on the subject “from the inside,” as Eagleton writes, it does so through material means. Architecture, art theory, and curatorial practices provide other instances of what Eagleton describes as “apparatuses” of power in the cultural field. One of the things I want to suggest is that cultural practices represent possibilities for subjectivity. Critical, architectural, and museological representations seem to concern artistic production, but also function as subtle suggestions about what it means to be human. These practices work to affect the formation of subjects by attempting to limit and pre-scribe the possibilities for subjectivity. Joel Fineman has similarly argued that subjectivity is constructed from “subjectivity effects” that are in turn produced in a web of discourses. One of Fineman's primary concerns is for how rhetoric can be used to establish compelling and realistic representations of subjectivity, while providing evidence of the artificial nature of the subject at the same time.

Tycho Brahe and the Separation of Astronomy from Astrology: The Making of a New Scientific Discourse

2013 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-30 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gábor Almási
Keyword(s):  
Public Discourse ◽  
Scientific Development ◽  
Controversial Issues ◽  
History Of Astronomy ◽  
Rhetorical Strategies ◽  
Observational Astronomy ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Tycho Brahe ◽  
Philosophical Questions

ArgumentThe subject of the paper is the shift from an astrology-oriented astronomy towards an allegedly more objective, mathematically grounded approach to astronomy. This shift is illustrated through a close reading of Tycho Brahe's scientific development and the contemporaneous changes in his communicational strategies. Basing the argument on a substantial array of original sources it is claimed that the Danish astronomer developed a new astronomical discourse in pursuit of credibility, giving priority to observational astronomy and natural philosophical questions. The abandonment of astrology in public discourse is primarily explained by Tycho's social position and greater sensibility to controversial issues. Tycho's example suggests that the changes in rhetorical strategies regarding astrology (which happened earlier than changes in astrological belief) should be given more recognition in the history of astronomy.

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