Customer Reviews

Nietzsche's Voice

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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.

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.

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!