Sunday, April 19, 2009
More Polling Amusement: Rank Order Your Favorite Books About Nietzsche
Here. Obviously the list omits books that some might have included; I've tried to give a decent sampling of English, German, and French literature, though I've no doubt over-represented recent Anglophone literature just because it tends to be better and I follow it more carefully. Worthy candidates not included should be noted in the comment section, but the comment must be signed or it will not appear.
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9 comments:
Christoph Cox's Nietzsche: Naturalism and Interpretation (1999) is better than quite a few of those listed.
I think Owens' Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morality (ISBN: 9780773533493) is worthy of inclusion on the list. But I'm unaffiliated, so see Poellner's review as a reliable basis on which to make a determination:
[http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=15005]
Well, I'm French and I guess it's not surprising I don't find the list very conclusive. Yet, so far as I know, I'm inclined to think that US literature is sometimes quite excellent and I particularly noticed, working on Nietzsche's philosophy of law, that this aspect was hardly emphasized by French commentators. Anyway, among French distinguished scholars, I would propose Patrick WOTLING, Eric BLONDEL and maybe Didier FRANCK rather than Klossowski... As for the US, what about Peter Goodrich and Marianne Valderde?
Maybe not including your own book would have been quite decent however good it may be (which I do not contest here).
I'm sure readers can discount for the fact that the survey appears on my blog, whose readership is probably not, shall we say, wholly representative. That being said, I'm surprised at how well the Kaufmann, Heidegger, and Nehamas books are doing so far. So who knows who is reading?
Peter Goodrich is many things, but a Nietzsche "scholar' is not one of them I'm afraid I've never herad of Valderde.
Indeed, Goodrich is not a Nietzsche scholar. I had in mind a book the editor of which, along with Valverde, he is, at Routledge. I'm surprised you don't mention it given its title: Nietzsche and Legal Theory. Goodrich also edited a huge book entitled Nietzsche and Law quite recently with Mootz. By the way, how come you haven't created a blog on Nietzsche's legal theory yet?
I'm familiar with the book, and some of the essays, which were uniformly incompetent. Nietzsche has little relevance to legal philosophy.
That's what I can't grasp. How is it just possible? How can one read Genealogy, Daybreak, Human all-too Human and not realize Nietzsche was obsessed with law? Well that's not positivist jurisprudence or american realism, for sure. That's not jurisprudence at all. But it provides with unvaluable tools for understanding the origins and meaning of rights. Criminal law and tort law for example would have a lot to learn from Nietzsche I guess. As for the essays you and I have read, they were not thought-provoking from a nietzschean point of view. But they express an interest in Nietzsche from the legal community, which, as such, is thought-provoking enough not to ignore it. But since he's in your list, Volker Gerhardt wrote a brilliant paper (in Deutsch) about the Gleichgewicht (equilibrium) principle in Nietzsche. Actually there are many references on this topic. Legal theory regularly suffers from a lack of sense of history. And I'm not sure Nietzsche would have approved. Does not naturalizing jurisprudence also imply tracking its genesis?
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