Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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20 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
the double affirmation, August 23, 2000
contrary to some beliefs, gilles deleuze was NOT a psychoanalyst. in fact, neither was (strictly speaking) felix guattari. if anything, the "anti-oedipus" was set to univocally destroy without remission any notion of the psychoanalyst and his couch. nevertheless, it wouldn't be inaccurate to read nietzsche as a psychologist since he himself prided himself in that dimension among philosophers. the amazing thing about "nietzsche and philosophy" is how deleuze does a nietzschean reading of nietzsche: basically in gathering the force of nietzsche's writings, appropriating them, and extending them without corrupting the radical implications of nietzsche's philosophy. here, deleuze remarkably reinterprets many of nietzsche's key concepts (the will to power, the eternal return, active and reactive forces) and creatively channels them into what was the initial stages of his own philosophical project. what would be striking to readers familiar with deleuze's later works (especially those with guattari) is the lucidity and rigour of his meticulous presentation here. "nietzsche and philosophy" is illuminating precisely because it allows us to situate poststructuralist theories/thinkers and their relationship to nietzsche's writings. in particular, this book had a huge influence on michel foucault of which his debt to deleuze is outstanding, especially seen in his genealogical work from then till the end of his life.
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45 of 55 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Beyond Neuro-Syphilis, November 17, 2000
This is a classic, bitterly controversial study. Along with Klossowski's writings, it almost singlehandedly revolutionized Nietzsche studies in the early 1960s. And like all experimental "revisionist" treatises, it reaped an undertow of resentment and scholarly dissensus. Some have accused Deleuze of "fetishizing" the Nietzschean trajectory into something it never was, assimilating concepts and motifs that served his post-Bergsonian project while omitting the very weaknesses and blindsights that crippled Nietzsche's thought, promulgating his dubious teachings of the Ubermensch without taking into account the latter's embedded shortcomings. William H. Gass, an otherwise brilliant critic-philosopher, went so far as to dismiss Deleuze's project as "pretentious and barbaric," another pitiable attempt out-Heideggerize Heidegger in the French game of jargon-laden reflexivity. While these arguments are defensible, any patient reader of Deleuze's book will find it impossible to dismiss outright this complex, wheels-within-wheels exegesis, for it is precisely the "selective" or affirmative character of Nietzsche's thought that is being put on the rails here, a brave attempt to EXPERIMENT WITH the greatest of 19th-century philosophical experimenters. Deleuze refuses to read his mentor as a displaced novelist, or a mad poet, or a befuddled classicist, or an inverted priest, or even a pretentious non-philosopher, but rather allocates to him the capital role(s) of Clinician and Pathologist, a visionaire who went deeper and further than Freud in disseminating "the psychopathology of everyday life," the highest achievement possible for a thinker who rejects the soul-on-ice "sanity-mongering" of Kripkean analytical philosophy. Granted, this may be more the Nietzsche many of us *want* than the Nietzsche that catastrophically "is" (at least according to conservative exegetical consensus). Many dimensions of his thought are purposefully laid aside or forgotten in favor of the Heraclitian firestorm that would reach its apotheosis in such works as *Difference & Repetition* and *The Logic of Sense*. Also, nearly half the citations are from *The Will to Power*, rather than Nietzsche's fifteen other key texts, which divests Deleuze's arguments of the culture, history, and politics that supplemented the former's adventures into counter-Kantian nomadic critique. In his attempt to compose the most absolutely condensed and shattering language possible, much of the breadth or "life" of Nietzsche's writings seems squashed and suffocated, where "machinic" discourse veers dangerously close to the merely machine-like. But then, the title *Nietzsche AND Philosophy* seems to connote Deleuze's critical focus on cognitive, ethico-genealogical models, taking precedence over any rampant excursion into history and politics. In the end, I wouldn't want this book to be any longer (or shorter) than it is. Deleuze has done a stirring job of breaking down then reassembling his great forbear into a fresh and exhilarating image of thought, one that may have gone undiscovered without his sublime intervention. I can't imagine any serious Nietzsche student who hasn't taken the time to work through the issues of this startling treatise. Forty years on, Deleuze's book is still flinting sparks in the great Nietzsche debate.
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9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
one of the greatest books i have ever read, July 8, 2006
i first picked up nietzsche and philosophy in 1989 and couldnt make it past the first chapter which discusses theories of forces,semiotics, and other unintelligable things..i regarded the book as 'hyper abstract'..
I returned again to it in 1996 after reading deleuze's interviews, and, with a more general understanding of his ideas,the book became a revelation for me.
Deleuze presents a systematic and coherent philosophy for nietzsche, one which grounds his rather paradoxical and sometimes enigmatic writings. deleuze clearly expresses nietzsche's core concerns, showing the sanity and genius of this sometimes denigrated 'mad' philosopher.
Its a pity this book will never find itself in the self help section because thats where it belongs..Feeling depressed and worthless? A bit burnt out or indifferent? read this book! While most philosophy falls to the side with abstractions, nietzsche and philosophy goes after life itself , attacking every nihilistic habit in our psychic, social, and cosmological repetoire. Deleuze traces nietzsche's assertions on how we are reactive and despicable creatures and goes on to show why and how we can overcome, well, all those things that make humanity "the skin disease of earth'.....
so...since we all suffer from nihilism and its ailments, Nietzsche and philosophy provides antidotes and cure for our human condition...
below are some less than praiseworthy comments on this book..deleuze appropriates nietzsche, for example...or deleuze says simple things in a complicated manner...this is nonsense..
readers, this is not an easy book to grasp..its takes a few readings to fully understand whats being said..people who dont like this book just simply fail to understand it...or havent read it through at least once..
that may be the books fault..but if simple ideas are what one seeks, then try simplistic books. ..this isnt one of them
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