As these things go, it's not awful, even though the author admits being brought up on "the French Nietzsche," one of the more appallingly confused fabrications to have attached itself to the philosopher. (Later, the author describes Deleuze as key to "the French Nietzsche," which is unfair to Deleuze!) The essay is partly a review of Sue Prideaux's book, but the author is sufficiently ignorant to not recognize the problems in her biography. Perhaps tellingly, towards the end, the music critic writes:
Whenever I feel bewildered by endless interpretive skirmishes over the philosophical Antichrist, I return to Alexander Nehamas’s “Nietzsche: Life as Literature,” which appeared in 1985 and retains a commanding place on the near-infinite Nietzsche bookshelf. Nehamas, a Greek-American thinker steeped in classical studies, essentially made a virtue of Bertrand Russell’s dismissal of Nietzsche. The contradictions in Nietzsche’s writings cohere, Nehamas writes, if we look at him as a literary figure who worked within a philosophical context, and who crafted a persona that functions as a literary character of novelistic complexity.
This is actually a somewhat unfair gloss on Nehamas's book (which does not make "a virtue of Bertrand Russell's dismissal of Nietzsche"), but it is true, as I wrote long ago, that Nehamas's book (which, recall, appeared in 1985),
is an imaginative synthesis of several important currents in Nietzsche commentary, reflecting the influence of writers like Jacques Derrida, Sarah Kofman, Paul De Man, and Richard Rorty. These authors figure, often by name, throughout Nehamas's book; and it is perhaps Nehamas's most important achivement to have offered a reading of Nietzsche that incorporates the insights of these writers while surpassing them all in the philosophical ingenuity with which this style of interpreting Nietzsche is developed....
Nehamas has effected this synthesis primarily through the introduction of a novel interpretive rubric: what Nehamas calls "aestheticism." According to aestheticism, "Nietzsche...looks at [the world] as if it were a literary text. And he arrives at many of his views of human beings by generalizing to them ideas and principles that apply almost intuitively to the literary situation, to the creation and interpretation of literary texts and characters."
What were then, indeed, "several important currents in Nietzsche commentary" have not, as many will know, aged well, and my original verdict in 1992 ("there are reasons to doubt whether Nehamas has made an adequate case for the view that Nietzsche is an aestheticist in his sense") probably explains why the work the New Yorker's music critic, understandably, still finds appealing has in fact had much less influence in the philosophical literature on Nietzsche of the last twenty years.
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