Nietzsche's Voice [Paperback]

Henry Staten (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 1993

Henry Staten adopts an innovative "psychodialectical" approach to Nietzsche, drawn from Nietzsche's own doctrine that philosophical thought is governed by drives and instincts that--for Nietzsche as for Freud--are fundamentally sexual in nature. Staten explores what he calls the libidinal economy of the Nietzschean text, focusing on the dialectic between Nietzsche's conscious project and the system of erotic influences upon his writings. Addressing both Nietzsche's thematic concerns and the nuances of his rhetoric, Staten offers penetrating interpretations of individual works including The Genealogy of Morals, The Birth of Tragedy, and Thus Spake Zarathustra.

Product Details

• Paperback: 223 pages
• Publisher: Cornell University Press (December 1993)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0801497396
• ISBN-13: 978-0801497391
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 6 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #367,071 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An alternately exhilarating and mind-numbing de-knotting of Nietzsche's writing, April 28, 2007

By 

Tim (Chicago) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Nietzsche's Voice (Paperback)

A demanding but rewarding book. Staten is hyper-focused on the subtle contradictions of Nietzsche's writings, and often this proves very illuminating. His accounts of Nietzsche's politics and Nietzsche's ambivalent fascination with the ascetic priest are the best I've read. But be warned: around page 120 your brain will be struggling to claw its way out of your skull.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Best N. analysis out there, May 23, 2009

By 

L. Nocera - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Nietzsche's Voice (Paperback)

This is easily the best N commentary book that's out there. It helps a lot of course if you are pretty intimately familiar with N's books. This book also helped me a lot with Derrida and Freud, both of whom I had read, but found quite difficult. This book clarified a lot from both of those authors and N himself, and helped me to do a Nietzschean reading of all of them. Philosophies can be seen as a sort of unconscious memoir of their author. But ideas also have a real logic to them. The interplay between what is argued and what motivates the arguments, what is said and what is unsaid, is here deeply explored.

5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant, but. . ., August 20, 2008

By 

david 1234 (UK) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Nietzsche's Voice (Paperback)

This is an extremely important, insightful and serious book for those of us who are Nietzscheans. It is a brilliant book in many ways and the best book on Nietzsche that I have read. Impossible to summarise, it deals with many of the most important Nietzschean themes, while simultaneously trying to highlight the emotional/psychological stance that Nietzsche variously adopts to those themes and why.

The work, outlines various Nietzschen paradoxes, denials and contradictions, but it's emphasis is not on the abstract dialectics involved in various topics, but suffering and pleasure that lie behind them. Nietzsche is, for all his faults, an extremely profound, insightful and terrifying thinker, and Staten's book, for all it's academic appearance, acknowledges that fact throughout.

My main criticism of the book is that it can, at times, seem content to "localise" various issues within the domain of the Nietzschean "text", without reference to the importance of these issues for the rest of us. But then, any author doing so would run the very great risk of being vilified and unemployed!