M-L-M Mayhem!

My recent participation in an event about how anarchists and maoists can work together ––in Hamilton, in the really neat anarchist Tower collective space––has caused me to think of Nietzsche in a non-Nietzschean manner.  As many of my normal readers will be aware, I have particular problems with Nietzsche and a very low tolerance for those (usually philosophy undergraduates or self-proclaimed "intellectuals") who think that Nietzsche is the colloquial "cat's pyjamas."  Because I supposedly have a degree in a discipline that gives me some sort of "authorative" right to speak of Nietzsche––because I, you know, teach him from time to time in a post-secondary setting with the requisite degrees––I do like telling his fans to screw off with dismissive posts about what I generally argue is his reactionary politics.  Even still, due to recent events and hours of reading time, I found myself thinking through some of Nietzsche's categories in a somewhat prod

When I started this blog my first post was a somewhat strident entry on why I hate Nietzsche .  In retrospect, it was probably not the most logical choice for my first blog-post, but since I was my blog's only reader at the time, and was under the impression that this would be the normative state of affairs forever, I just wrote a quick rant to try out the space.  (Also in retrospect, I should have thought more clearly about the name and url of the blog rather than, in my typical slap-dash manner, just throwing something together randomly.)  Apparently my sloppily written rant about Nietzsche has annoyed at least one reader who felt the need, like a first year philosophy student, to "correct" my understanding with a rather typical pro-Nietzschean response in that entry's comment string. Although I do not feel the need to write a prolonged and devastating critique of every aspect of Nietzsche's philosophy now or ever (I have better things to do with my time), I w

"In the question “Marx or Nietzsche?” Marx stands for the theoretical revolution represented by the dialectics and the historical outlook of the new materialism, for the theoretical revolution that was initiated before and without Nietzsche." (Andras Gedo, Why Marx or Nietzsche ) An obsession with Friedrich Nietzsche is so common amongst first year philosophy students and people who do not study philosophy that it has become cliched. Those who first encounter Nietzsche are so impressed by his literary style that they immediately assume that everything written by this philosopher is profound. Sometimes I discover passages in novels where a character who is supposed to be clever/smart is demonstrated as clever/smart because he has Nietzsche books sitting on his shelf (most recently I discovered this convention in Melissa Marr's YA novel, "Wicked Lovely"): wow, he reads Nietzsche - he must be brilliant. And yet, if we can speak of a coherent "Nietzsch