{"id":899,"date":"2016-11-01T15:38:02","date_gmt":"2016-11-01T19:38:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/nietzsche1313\/?p=899"},"modified":"2016-11-06T10:41:01","modified_gmt":"2016-11-06T15:41:01","slug":"alex-campolo-translation-of-deleuze-and-foucaults-general-introduction-to-nietzsches-complete-works","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/nietzsche1313\/alex-campolo-translation-of-deleuze-and-foucaults-general-introduction-to-nietzsches-complete-works\/","title":{"rendered":"Alex Campolo: Translation of Deleuze and Foucault’s “General Introduction” to Nietzsche’s Complete Works"},"content":{"rendered":"

by Alex Campolo<\/strong><\/p>\n

This is a hasty translation, inspired by John Rajchman\u2019s comment in his recent post for the Nietzsche 13\/13 blog<\/a> , of the “general introduction” written by Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault to the complete works of Nietzsche published by Colli and Montinari. I thought that the risk of errors and lack of refinement may be worth it, given the compressed timeframe of the seminar. This is more an invitation to further research than a finished translation.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze \u00ab\u00a0Introduction g\u00e9n\u00e9rale\u00a0\u00bb aux \u0152uvres compl\u00e8tes de <\/em>F. Nietzsche, Paris, Gallimard, 1967, t. V: Le Gai Savoir. Fragments posthumes (1881-1882), <\/em>hors-texte, pp. 1-IV. [Dits et \u00e9crits<\/em> t. 1, texte no <\/sup>45, pp. 561-564]<\/p>\n

Translated by Alex Campolo<\/p>\n

November 1, 2016<\/p>\n

General Introduction<\/em><\/h2>\n

\u201cAccursed\u201d thinkers recognize themselves from a distance by three traits: a brutally interrupted \u0153uvre<\/em>, abusive kin who influence posthumous publications, and a mysterious book, something like \u201cthe<\/em> book\u201d whose secrets have never been exhausted.<\/p>\n

Nietzsche\u2019s \u0153uvre<\/em> was brutally interrupted by mental illness at the beginning of 1889. His sister Elisabeth made herself the authoritarian guardian of his work and memory. She published a certain number of posthumous notes. Her critics accuse her perhaps less of falsification (the only obvious ones concern the letters) than of distortion: she secured the image of an anti-Semitic Nietzsche, a precursor of Nazism\u2014the anti-Nietzsche par excellence<\/em>.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

From the editor\u2019s point of view, the main problem is that of the Nachlass<\/em>, long identified with the project for a book that would have been called The Will to Power<\/em>. As long as the most serious researchers were not able to access Nietzsche\u2019s manuscripts in their entirety, we had only a vague understanding that The Will to Power<\/em> did not exist as such, that it wasn\u2019t one of Nietzsche\u2019s self-contained books, but that it was the result of an arbitrary d\u00e9coupage<\/em> made on the posthumous fragments that mixed up dates and origins. The first editors put together a fictional volume around a kernel of about four hundred \u201cnotes\u201d and a four-part outline.<\/p>\n

We must remember that Nietzsche was sketching different outlines at the same time; that he changed the goals for his major work; that he may have even given up by deciding to publish his other works in 1888, and, in any case, that he conceived the rest of his \u0153uvre<\/em> according to \u201ctechniques\u201d that would be absurd for us to claim to reconstitute and fix. Nietzsche\u2019s readers understand how prodigious his innovations were, if only in their technique of philosophical expression: the intentional fragment (not to be confused with the maxim), the long aphorism, the holy book, the exceptional arrangement of The Antichrist<\/em> or Ecce Homo<\/em>. Theater, opera, food, music, the poem, and parody are always present in Nietzsche\u2019s work. No one can foresee either the form or the content that would have appeared in the great book (nor the other forms that Nietzsche would have invented if he had given up on his project). At most, the reader can dream; still she must be given the means to do so.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

The set of hand-written notebooks represents at least three time the amount of work published by Nietzsche himself. The posthumous papers that have already been edited are much less numerous than those still awaiting publication.<\/p>\n

Some editors have maintained that knowledge of these posthumous works will not bring about anything new. In fact, when a thinker like Nietzsche, a writer like Nietzsche presents several versions of a single idea, it follows that this idea ceases to be the same. Furthermore, the notes taken by Nietzsche in his workbooks would have been used not only for revisions or reworking but also for future books. It would be absurd to think that he had used everything and even more absurd to claim that the unpublished notes contain nothing different from those that were published. To name just two examples: in a notebook from 1875, Nietzsche studied and critiqued in detail one of D\u00fchring\u2019s books, Der Werth des Lebens<\/em>. How could anyone claim that the full publication of this notebook would teach us nothing on the development and meaning of Nietzsche\u2019s concept of value? An entire workbook from 1881 is on L’\u00c9ternel Retour<\/em>; it seems likely, according to Ecce Homo<\/em>, that Nietzsche went back to this notebook just before his illness. Once again, how can anyone deny that a complete edition is required?<\/p>\n

The new development is the free access to these manuscripts, since their transfer from the old Nietzsche-Archiv<\/em> to the Goethe und Schiller Archiv<\/em> in Weimar, in East Germany in 1950. This event has profoundly changed our reading of Nietzsche in three main ways. We can now find the distortions made by Elisabeth Nietzsche and by Peter Gast; we can identify errors in dates, reading mistakes, and the innumerable omissions of the present editions of the Nachlass<\/em>. Finally, and most importantly, we can study the mass of unpublished texts.<\/p>\n

Through careful study of the immense Weimar archives, Mr. Colli and Mr. Montinari have opened the only possible route for a systematic publication: to edit the entirety of the notebooks in chronological order<\/em>. Doubtless Nietzsche returned to old notebooks to add something new, or did not follow temporal order when working within a notebook. The fact remains that each notebook in its entirety can be dated (if only by allusions made from personal correspondence and fragments) and corresponds to a period in Nietzsche\u2019s creative activity. In addition, these notebooks refract Nietzsche\u2019s published works in new ways. They show how Nietzsche returned to and transformed a prior idea, how he gave up an idea that he would later take up, how a future idea was prepared or sketched out, and at what moment Nietzsche\u2019s major concepts were formed. We must therefore edit the complete notebooks in chronological order, and according to the periods corresponding to the books published by Nietzsche<\/em>. Only in this way can the many unpublished texts reveal their multiple meanings.<\/p>\n

This edition follows the manuscripts that were read and transcribed by Mr. Colli and Mr. Montinari. The published works were translated from the last edition that appeared during his lifetime. The entire edition will thus include:<\/p>\n