Nietzsche would be the primary example of a philosopher who produced his work without being subject to the limitations which a publisher who was aware of refined taste and the boundaries of public opinion might have imposed. Reading NIETZSCHE AND PHILOSOPHY by Gilles Deleuze in an English translation by Hugh Tomlinson, with a new Preface by Deleuze written for the translation in 1983 of a work originally published in French in 1962, serves as a reminder of the limits imposed on thoughts which are expressed within a scholarly milieu. Philosophy is a goal which can easily be imposed upon Nietzsche because Nietzsche's writings show an in depth knowledge of pre-Platonic and Schopenhauer's philosophies, and a meaning restricted to the confines of decent philosophical practice is entirely praiseworthy.
What else could Nietzsche show? Pornographic practices hardly fit well in a social setting, and Nietzsche's tendencies to show autoerotic mental patterns in his approach to what Deleuze designates as species activities and culture lie beyond the scope of anything considered in this book. Nietzsche might also be thought to emphasize jokes and laughter somewhat more than Deleuze, who is not afraid to devote sections of this book to The Essence of the Tragic, The Problem of Existence, Hierarchy, Will to Power and Feeling of Power, Against Pessimism and against Schopenhauer, Realisation of Critique, The Concept of Truth, Art, The Problem of Pain, Bad Conscience, Responsibility, Guilt, Nihilism, Analysis of Pity, Nihilism and Transmutation: the focal point, Affirmation and Negation, and even Dionysus and Zarathustra. In fantasy as in reality, Nietzsche's ideas are suitable for consideration in a book on philosophy because they are capable of operating on a high level where "the selection of being which constitutes Nietzsche's ontology: only that which becomes in the fullest sense of the word can return, is fit to return." (Preface to the English translation, p. xi).
Before proceeding to compare this book to the works of Nietzsche which it discusses, it behooves me to remind myself and others how I obtained knowledge of the market for books by building a collection of rejection slips for MY VIETNAM WAR JOKE BOOK, which culminated in a letter informing me that such a book was extralimital to the presses' goals, particularly in philosophy. Even NIETZSCHE AND PHILOSOPHY seems to be aware of the joke which made a free world attack on godless Communists ironic:
"Pluralism is the properly philosophical way of thinking, the one invented by philosophy : the only guarantor of freedom in the concrete spirit, the only principle of a violent atheism. The Gods are dead but they have died from laughing, on hearing one God claim to be the only one, `Is not precisely this godliness, that there are gods but no God?' (Z III `Of the Apostates', p. 201). And the death of this God, who claimed to be the only one, is itself plural; the death of God is an event with a multiple sense. This is why Nietzsche does not believe in resounding `great events', but in the silent plurality of senses of each event (Z II `Of Great Events'). There is no event, no phenomenon, word or thought which does not have a multiple sense." (p. 4).
The very funny thing that separates Nietzsche from this totally philosophical reflection on his work is the declaration "and I have seen the truth naked, truly! barefoot to the neck." (Thus Spoke Zarathustra, II, "Of Great Events" translated by R. J. Hollingdale, p. 153). Considering this pornographic is a sign of the loss of appetite for further thinking along this line. Nietzsche appropriately saved this thought for after:
"And this is the tale of Zarathustra's conversation with the fire-dog:
"The earth (he said) has a skin; and this skin has diseases. One of these diseases, for example, is called `Man'.
"And another of these diseases is called `the fire-dog': men have told many lies and been told many lies about him."
The sense of condemnation that clings to experiences of this nature might be considered anti-social when applied to an existing society. Social activity is a narrow form of human endeavor, compared to which philosophy might be considered a vast wasteland, but one that is subject to considerable change. Comparing books about philosophers to the philosophers themselves, including the things which they did not say in their books, but sometimes only in their notebooks, is an activity fraught with confusion. Deleuze can be given credit for devoting much of his book to the philosophical context in which each philosopher has a unique self occupying a particular point in the grand sweep of ideas, but Deleuze and Nietzsche might not coincide in their views on particular individuals. The first example in the book, on "Nietzsche's twofold struggle: against those who remove values from criticism, contenting themselves with producing inventories of existing values or with criticising things in the name of established values (the `philosophical labourers', Kant and Schopenhauer, BGE 211)" (p. 2), does not mention the same philosophers as BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL section 211, in which Nietzsche observed:
"Those philosophical labourers after the noble exemplar of Kant and Hegel have to take some great fact of evaluation--that is to say, former assessments of value, creations of value which have become dominant and are for a while called `truths'--and identify them and reduce them to formulas, whether in the form of logic or of politics (morals) or of art."
Nietzsche sometimes considered Schopenhauer a better kind of philosopher, as in "it is they who determine the Wherefore and Whither of mankind," but subject to the question, "Are there such philosophers today? Have there been such philosophers? Must there not be such philosophers?" (BGE 211).
Politics and philosophy have much in common. As Deleuze wrote, "It is difficult in fact to stop the dialectic and history on the common slope down which they drag each other. Does Marx . . . ?" (p. 162).
There are two ways to read this book. It could be read as an attempt to present what Nietzsche thought, or the perhaps unconscious core of his thought, or it could be read as a statement of Deleuze's own philosophy. Considered as the former, it is worse than useless. Deleuze's methodology is poor; he quotes selectively, and relies too much on the posthumous notes published by Nietzsche's sister, ignoring those that explicitly refute his claims. For example, he denies that Nietzsche ever considered that the eternal recurrence might be a literal truth about the world; this ignores, amongst others, a note in which Nietzsche sat down to calculate that it must actually happen given a finite number of atoms in the universe that they find themselves in the same configuration again. Furthermore, he attempts to consider Nietzsche's entire oeuvre as a coherent whole, entirely forgetting the enormous changes it underwent as he developed his thought. He makes no attempt to discover what questions Nietzsche actually set out to answer. Therefore, as a contribution to the Nietzsche bibliography, it is eminently forgettable.
As a work of Deleuzean philosophy, one has to be accustomed to this style of writing. If you are the type of person who finds mystic writings and meditations on religious texts to your taste, you'll probably enjoy his barely-coherent style and habit of presenting simplistic truisms as though they give great insight into the universe. Equally, if you feel that sophistication is best demonstrated by cloaking your meaning in meaningless words and phrases just for the pretty effect of oxymorons, then you'll be happy here. Otherwise, don't waste your time.
