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Title: Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of Transfiguration by Tracy B. Strong ISBN: 0-252-06856-4 Publisher: Univ of Illinois Pr (Pro Ref) Pub. Date: March, 2000 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $21.95

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Average Customer Rating: 4 (1 review)

Rating: 4
Summary: A Must for Thinking the Political Nietzsche
Comment: When this book first came out a couple of decades ago, it represented an early effort at recontextualizing an oeuvre that had always been seen as inapplicable to political considerations. Today, that apolitical version of Nietzsche is almost unthinkable, and Tracy Strong deserves a lion's share of the credit for that shift. If you're interested in any facet of Nietzsche's potential as a political thinker, this book is a must.

Strong's greatest strength is his ability and willingness to read both the befores and afters that have produced the Nietzsche we thought we knew. He returns to Nietzsche's prized works, from the Greeks onward (with specific attention to Nietzsche's fave pre-Socratic thinkers) and re-evaluates Nietzsche's appropriations of them. Simultaneously, Strong always keeps in mind the various ways in which those who came AFTER Nietzsche have read and mis-read these moments. Such insights go a long way toward making a re-reading of Nietzsche as much about our changing reading agendas as they are about Nietzsche's.

Strong also treats our past penchant for linking Nietzsche with darker politics, when we linked him with politics at all; the long-perceived relationship with fascism is given its airing here, but Strong convincingly prods the reader into regarding such strict alliances dubiously.

The thoroughness of this book is also impressive. Strong covers everything, and covers it well. While he often carefully sets the context every time he cites Nietzsche, though, "Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of Transfiguration" is still guilty of falling into a trap that endangers every book I've read on him: the tendency to regard his thought as one organic whole, always present, rather than as progressive or even disjointed moments. Because of this, Strong often adduces comments from the much later Nietzsche in order to illuminate statements made earlier in Nietzsche's career. It is disingenuous, because it implies--in a way that can't be right--that what Nietzsche thought in the 1870s was also what he thought in the 1890s.

The only other problem I have with Strong concerns some of the readings of more expressly literary texts. A background of political philosophy, with all of its emphases on explicit arguments and whether they bear scrutiny, reveals itself sometimes as a poor substitute for a more literary interest in what a text conceals as it reveals. As Strong revisits some of the more literary texts to which Nietzsche refers in "The Birth of Tragedy," for example--namely Homer, Greek tragedians, etc.--he reads every passage as a lesson-conveying declaration; this is problematic for Nietzsche, who invested far more at that stage of his thought in anti-coherence than in rational argumentation and presentation.

That aside, though, anyone interested in thinking about Nietzsche politically and in how Nietzsche can be thought of as political would do well to pick up a copy of Strong's book. It is clearly argued, well-written, and still provocative today.