{"id":624,"date":"2016-08-29T09:48:31","date_gmt":"2016-08-29T13:48:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/nietzsche1313\/?p=624"},"modified":"2018-08-11T21:43:20","modified_gmt":"2018-08-12T01:43:20","slug":"bernard-harcourt-introducing-nietzsche-1313","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/nietzsche1313\/bernard-harcourt-introducing-nietzsche-1313\/","title":{"rendered":"Bernard E. Harcourt | Introducing Nietzsche 13\/13"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"neitsche<\/a><\/p>\n

<\/h6>\n

By Bernard E. Harcourt\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

The seminar series this year continues a conversation that we began last year in Foucault 13\/13<\/a>, where we explored the thirteen years of lectures delivered by Michel Foucault at the Coll\u00e8ge de France\u2014as you recall, thirteen years at the Coll\u00e8ge de France, 13 seminars at Columbia University.<\/p>\n

Last year, we set out to examine the different critical interventions that Foucault made over the arc of his research at the Coll\u00e8ge, and the many pistes de recherches <\/em>that he left us. Our goal was constructive: to extract, to mine,\u00a0to\u00a0unearth critical moves that might inform our own critical thought. Our project was also to create an archive to accompany the next reader of Foucault\u2019s Coll\u00e8ge de France lectures\u2014and we believe that the articles and video recordings from those seminars (which are available on line<\/a>) indeed\u00a0constitute\u00a0a “Reader’s Companion” for anyone interested in delving into the series of lectures, from Foucault’s very first L<\/em>ectures on the Will to Know<\/em><\/a> in 1971 and Penal Theories and Institutions<\/em><\/a>\u00a0in 1972\u00a0to the very last on The Courage of Truth<\/a>\u00a0<\/em>in 1984.<\/p>\n

In the course of those seminars, we came across on a number of occasions different ways in which Foucault drew on Nietzsche\u2019s thought to enrich his own critical enterprise.\u00a0Foucault rarely engaged Nietzsche\u2019s biography or the controversies surrounding Nietzsche\u2019s appropriations, but he drew critically on particular insights from Nietzsche\u2019s writings.<\/p>\n

Of particular importance to Foucault was Nietzsche\u2019s idea of the \u201cinvention\u201d of knowledge\u2014an idea that was formative to Foucault especially in 1973 when he was delivering the lectures on The Punitive Society<\/em><\/a> and, a few months later, in Rio, on Truth and Juridical Form <\/em>(also earlier, in his lectures on Nietzsche in 1969 at the Centre Universitaire Exp\u00e9rimental de Vincennes\u00a0<\/i>and in his first lecture series at the Coll\u00e8ge de France on the will to know in 1971).<\/p>\n

In those lectures, it is Nietzsche\u2019s epistemological<\/em> intervention that would serve as Foucault\u2019s guiding methodological<\/em> compass. The passages from Nietzsche\u2019s writings that Foucault would draw were primarily fragments from 1873 and aphorisms from The Gay Science<\/em> (about 1882) where Nietzsche marks epistemic rupture\u2014breaks in knowledge.\u00a0These are moments in Nietzsche\u2019s work, not of genealogy, but of \u201cinvention<\/em>\u201d: the model for knowledge, Foucault reads Nietzsche to say, is not origin, but creation, invention.<\/p>\n

Now, to be invented is not to be born. It is not to derive the birth of the clinic or the birth of the prison, say, from its roots, but rather to find, in Foucault\u2019s words, \u201ca small beginning, one that is low, mean, unavowable.\u201d To discover the \u201cobscure power relations\u201d and \u201csmall beginnings\u201d that are \u201cmesquin<\/em>\u201d and \u201cvilenies<\/em>\u201d\u2014petty, base, vile\u2026 \u201cGood historical method,\u201d Foucault would tell us, \u201crequires us to counterpose the meticulous and unavowable pettiness<\/em> of these fabrications and inventions, to the solemnity of origins.\u201d Or, more brutally: \u201cTo say that [knowledge] was invented is to say that it has no origin<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n

On this reading of\u00a0Nietzsche, knowledge erupts without any prior being or history. It does not evolve from a seed, it does not have parents or ancestors, it has no genealogy, it simply appears at a moment in time, at a particular location, made-up, to be deployed in a struggle or battle:<\/p>\n

Knowledge is simply the outcome of the interplay, the encounter, the junction, the struggle, and the compromise between the instincts. Something is produced because the instincts meet, fight one another, and at the end of their battles finally reach a compromise. That something is knowledge. (1973)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And this would imply that, at the core of knowledge there is\u00a0a \u201cstate of war\u201d: knowledge is made up within a social context of \u201chatred, struggle, power relations.\u201d Foucault would develop these themes further in his lectures a few years later titled \u201cSociety Must Be Defended<\/a>.\u201d <\/em>But as early as 1973, he would articulate\u00a0his\u00a0core methodological task in the following terms: \u201cthe problem of the formation of a certain number of domains of knowledge on the basis of the relations of force and the political relations in society.\u201d<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

It was during those discussions that Jes\u00fas Velasco and I began to imagine exploring more deeply the ways in which critical theorists have drawn on Nietzsche\u2014not just Foucault, but Deleuze as well, and Arendt, and Derrida.<\/p>\n

And so, hesitantly, at the end of the Foucault 13\/13 series<\/a>, we announced that next year we would read critical theorists in the wake of Nietzsche. “What we will try to explore a little next year\u2014although again, you all know how fraught it is to announce this so early, but anyway\u2026 \u2014where we are headed next year is to\u00a0explore, in 13 seminars, 13 critical takes on Nietzsche. The project will be to\u00a0explore the rich tradition of contemporary critical\u00a0thought that has emerged in the wake of Nietzsche. In other words, to explore Nietzschean contemporary\u00a0critical thought in contrast, say, to the Marxian or Freudian traditions,” we announced. And we added:<\/p>\n

there are, of course, many other Nietzsches that have fed and nourished contemporary critical thought. There is Deleuze\u2019s Nietzsche, and\u00a0Arendt\u2019s Nietzsche at the end of her life, in the Life of the Mind: Volume 2, Willing<\/em>.\u00a0And there is, of course, Bataille\u2019s Nietzsche, Heidegger\u2019s Nietzsche, Sarah Kofman\u2019s Nietzsche and Luce Irigaray\u2019s, and Aim\u00e9 C\u00e9saire\u2019s, and\u00a0Pierre\u00a0Klossowski\u2019s,\u00a0and Maurice Blanchot\u2019s. Yes, there are at least 13 Nietzsche\u2019s, and so, next year,\u00a0we will return, Jes\u00fas Velasco and I, perhaps to the Casa Hispanica, or to the Maison Fran\u00e7aise, or the Heyman Center, or perhaps the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, or\u00a0the Columbia Global Center in Paris to explore Critique After Nietzsche 13\/13<\/em>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Well, miraculously, we have stuck to our plans and have put together a remarkable series for you this year called Nietzsche 13\/13:<\/p>\n

Thirteen critical thinkers on Nietzsche<\/em><\/p>\n

Thirteen seminars at Columbia.<\/em><\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Friedrich Nietzsche is a particularly interesting thinker for critical theorists.\u00a0One of the great masters-of-suspicion<\/a> of the nineteenth century, alongside Freud and Marx, he shared with them an epistemological and ethical instinct: the world that we know so well and experience second-hand, it turns our, is terribly deceiving. Like Freud and Marx, Nietzsche took it upon himself to lift the veil that covered our eyes and to try to show us, to shake us into seeing what is going on before us.\u00a0Freud, as you know, would unveil the unconscious. Marx, the political economy as motor of history. And\u00a0Nietzsche turned to a genealogy of our moral conceptions\u2014of everything normative that we own\u2014to challenge the value of our common morality itself.<\/p>\n

Now,\u00a0Marx and Freud were remarkable builders, and they, along with others in their wake would build empires. Empires that, remarkably, would be actualized in our times. Revolutions and governments, in the case of Marx. Entire schools, disciplines, and psychiatric apparatuses in the case of Freud. And, of course, schools of thought in both cases. The Frankfurt School. The Lacanian schools of all different stripes. Followers, practitioners, theoreticiens who would call themselves \u201cmarxist\u201d or \u201cfreudien\u201d or \u201cpost-marxist,\u201d etc.<\/p>\n

Not so, or less so, for Nietzsche. He was, to be sure, appropriated at different moments in history. Thus Spoke Zarathustra\u00a0<\/em>was distributed to German soldiers during World War I. And, as you know, the Nazis notoriously would appropriate his thought, with the help of his sister, Elisabeth F\u00f6rster-Nietzsche. But there was no empire. There were no real followers. No school, certainly. Nietzsche\u00a0attracted, it seems, a different kind of critical reader. More solitary. More outcast. A non-member.<\/p>\n

Despite that, or perhaps because of it,\u00a0Nietzsche\u2019s writings and thought had tremendous influence across the disciplines, upending many\u2014especially philosophy, political thought, philology, and critical theory\u2014and significantly marking others, such as law, anthropology, and the humanities. A number of contemporary critical thinkers in the 20th century\u2014Georges Bataille, Martin Heidegger, Hannah Arendt, Frantz Fanon, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Luce Irigaray, Ali Shariati, and others\u2014would draw inspiration from Nietzsche\u2019s writings and develop strands of critical theory that have had great influence in disciplines as varied as history, law, philology, and the theory of science. These twentieth century thinkers helped forge unique Nietzschean strands of contemporary critical thought that radically challenges the way we think and engage the world today.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

The purpose of Nietzsche 13\/13 is to explore this rich tradition of contemporary critical thought that has emerged in the wake of Nietzsche. In other words, to explore Nietzschean critical thought in contrast, say, to the Marxian or Freudian traditions. So the\u00a0seminar will focus on 13 critical thinkers and their surroundings:<\/p>\n