The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Two (Short Circuits) [Paperback]

Alenka Zupancic (Author)

Book Description

Series: Short Circuits | Publication Date: September 26, 2003

What is it that makes Nietzsche Nietzsche? In The Shortest Shadow, Alenka Zupancic counters the currently fashionable appropriation of Nietzsche as a philosopher who was "ahead of his time" but whose time has finally come -- the rather patronizing reduction of his often extraordinary statements to mere opinions that we can "share." Zupancic argues that the definitive Nietzschean quality is his very unfashionableness, his being out of the mainstream of his or any time.To restore Nietzsche to a context in which the thought "lives on its own credit," Zupancic examines two aspects of his philosophy. First, in "Nietzsche as Metapsychologist," she revisits the principal Nietzschean themes -- his declaration of the death of God (which had a twofold meaning, "God is dead" and "Christianity survived the death of God"), the ascetic ideal, and nihilism -- as ideas that are very much present in our hedonist postmodern condition. Then, in the second part of the book, she considers Nietzsche's figure of the Noon and its consequences for his notion of the truth. Nietzsche describes the Noon not as the moment when all shadows disappear but as the moment of "the shortest shadow" -- not the unity of all things embraced by the sun, but the moment of splitting, when "one turns into two." Zupancic argues that this notion of the Two as the minimal and irreducible difference within the same animates all of Nietzsche's work, generating its permanent and inherent tension.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Alenka Zupancic has given us a strikingly new reading of Nietzsche. Against the postmodernist domestication of Nietzsche's philosophy, Zupancic restores the shock of Nietzsche's style and thought, reading him alongside Jacques Lacan and Alain Badiou as a revolutionary 'philosopher of the event.'"--Christoph Cox, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Hampshire College

"Alenka Zupancic is one of those rare writers whose capacity for decision is equal to her intelligence....Read these essays and you will see what kind of a spiritual explosion a writing bomb can produce in the hands of a true pyrotechnist." Alain Badiou

About the Author

Alenka Zupancic is Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Philosophy, Slovene Academy of Sciences, Ljubljana. She is the author of The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Two (MIT Press, 2003).

Product Details

• Paperback: 190 pages
• Publisher: The MIT Press (September 26, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0262740265
• ISBN-13: 978-0262740265
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.4 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.9 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #491,678 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Get into Nietzsche again for the first time, April 18, 2004

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Pen Name? "fluxus" - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Two (Short Circuits) (Paperback)

This is an exciting study, that will be striking in its insights even to those who thought that they got Nietzsche long ago. What Zupancic's book brings out for me is the feeling of reading Nietzsche for the first time... while its not that her insights are shockingly new, its more that they seem shockingly not new at all, that she is alas bringing out the "real" Nietzschean insights that you maybe felt but never articulated. This book also makes nice use and comparison of the works of Weber, Lacan and Badiou among others, but in much more enlightening ways than a lot of other recent scholarship.
And its readable without having a PhD background in the stuff.

15 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Untimely Meditation, February 16, 2004

By 

David "shibano" (St. Petersburg, FL United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Two (Short Circuits) (Paperback)

Alenka Zupancic is a researcher at the Institute Of Philosophy in Ljubjana: Zizek's old stomping grounds, and there are some similarities in her work with his, particularly with her anti-postmodern Lacanianism. However, though her writing is less flashy than Zizek, her thinking is just as exhilarating. It's tough these days to approach Nietzsche's work freshly. He has been mined as much as any philosophical figure in recent memory. There doesn't seem much ore left in those shafts. but this book finds some valuable nuggets. "The Shortest Shadow" attempts to reconsider two aspesct of Nietzche's thought The Death of God and the idea of "noon" (the time when shadows are shortest). Zupancic is an excellent reader and gives us much to consider. She stays close to her texts; and though she can be a bit difficult at times, she neither loses her focus nor ceases to be provocative. It is a book that in many ways (though is scope is much more narrow) that is almost as suggestive as Deleuze's "Nietzsche and Philosophy" -- which is high praise indeed. It is a somwhat less satisfying work than "Ethics of the Real" but is it about half the length of her first book. Is is a good book nevertheless. However, it is not a good book for an introduction into Nietzsche's thought, for that try Kaufmann's "Nietzsche: Philosophy, Psychologist, Antichrist" or Safranski "Nietzsche: A Critical Biography". Or, as I always suggest, try the primary source -- Kaufmann's "Portable Nietzsche" or "Thus Spake Zarathustra" are excellent entry points into the work of one of the greatest thinkers in philosophy.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Finally, A Post-Post-Structuralist Nietzsche!, July 3, 2010

By 

Nin Chan "Nin Chan" (Toronto, ON, Canada) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Two (Short Circuits) (Paperback)

Yes, this is THE book that breaks with the liberal-deconstructionist appropriation of Nietzsche, an appropriation that I will not hesitate to say has been as disastrous for thought as that of the Nazis. Gone is the ludic Nietzsche of multiplicitous language games and perspectives, all of which are ultimately equivalent to one another, the Nietzsche of 'truth effects' produced through the duplicitous snares of language, metaphorical figuration and the logic of grammar, the sneering knave who counteracts the debilitating pathos of metaphysics with the no-less pathetic bathos of reflexive self-deprecation, the fatalistic ironist who celebrates the evacuation of metaphysical truth through the limitless proliferation of delirious simulacra. If Nietzsche had simply remained on this side of the frontier, wouldn't he have remained within the ambit of a Kantianism that he strove to break with in definitive fashion? Wouldn't this be 'human, all-too-human', situating thought behind an insurpassable horizon of illusion and semblance? Does Nietzsche's supreme philosophical gesture amount to nothing more than a heroism of alienation, a tragic assumption that we are forever ensconced within the mire of metaphysics, a fate that we can achieve some minimal distance from by use of ironical puns, meta-critical qualifications, writing words 'sous rature' etc.? Where is the dimension of the Real in Nietzsche? Is it a noumenon radically distinct from phenomenal reality? How does Nietzsche manage to think contingency, chance and the New, the event that gives the lie to ontological closure?

Zupancic, reading Nietzsche with Lacan, gives us a Nietzsche of a radical immanence, one that is much closer to Hegel than we'd like to think. Zupancic' Nietzsche is an unflinching rationalist decisively opposed to every form of obscurantist mysticism, as well as a philosopher committed to the question of truth in an age dominated by the University Discourse of verifiable knowledge. She illuminates the shared concerns of Badiou, Nietzsche and Lacan, illustrating the ways in which a critical re-appraisal of Nietzsche can help us understand the 'aleatory materialism' (Alberto Toscano's remarkable description of Badiou's system) that is required today.

Central to Zupancic' book, which should be read alongside Badiou's 'Logics of Worlds' and Meillasoux' "After Finitude', is her demolition of the dyad that counterposes Appearance to Truth, replacing it with the axiom that truth is precisely appearance qua appearance. Or: "Nietzsche's bet on appearance is not a bet on appearance AGAINST truth; it is a bet on truth as inherent to appearance....The object is no longer external to the image or representation (so that the image could be compared to it), but inherent to it: it is the very relation of, say, a painting to itself. In other words, representation represents that which is created in the very act of representtion." The last 10 pages of the book, which clearly outline Nietzsche's conception of the contingency of necessity/the necessity of contingency (the impersonal neutrality of life/the innocence of chance that we find in Deleuze's classic account) are some of the most stirring passages that I have read in recent memory.

To read this book is to encounter Nietzsche as PHILOSOPHER once more, vanquishing , once and for all, the image of Nietzsche as artist manque, Nietzsche as a smart alecky litterateur.