Left Nietzschean
@DevinGoure
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PhD in political theory, co-host of Moral Minority podcast, eternal return cosmology truther. “The stillest words are those that bring the storm.”
Joined May 2017
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New Moral Minority episode on Kierkegaard’s Repetition dropping later tonight 👀. I’m just telling you now so I can repeat…
Wait didn’t this already happen? Is repetition impossible? Is it the secret to all philosophy? Find out on our new episode.
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“There is no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons.”
-Gilles Deleuze
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10/10, no notes, probably going to frame this
one doesn't need to know anything at all about philosophy to know that anyone who calls himself "Left Nietzschean" can't be taken seriously.
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Marx will literally say “Capital is dead labor which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more it sucks” and MLs will be like “I dunno seems like a totally morally neutral description to me, nothing normative going on here!”
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I heard the Schopenhauerian egirls are holding an event at the exact same time as the Hegelian egirls and it’s really too bad that nobody will attend
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@megynkelly
@jonfavs
I call them like I see them, same as you. You’re out of touch if you think that we can have healing in a nation where half the country have supported a white supremacist authoritarian for 4 years. Top Rs aren’t accepting the results of the election. Go fix that.
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To no one’s surprise, Elon can’t spell Nietzsche correctly
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Breaking news: Left Nietzschean outlasts Right Hegelian
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I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, Walter Kaufmann popularized Nietzsche for English-speaking audiences in large part by presenting him as an individualist philosopher of self-improvement, which neutralizes what is dangerous and disruptive in his thought. 1/13
I’m all for “Nietzsche is not a nazi” readings, but turning Nietzsche into some kind of philosopher of self-improvement has been a disaster for the human race.
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“Every New Year’s Eve night makes us feel the mystery of the contradiction between being and becoming.”
-Nietzsche, “On the Pathos of Truth”
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I consider myself a Nietzschean Liberal. That means that I believe that some lives are more valuable than others, and also that democratic capitalism has proved to be the best system for achieving greatness. This involves five main beliefs.
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Getting drunk and reading Lacan. What could go wrong?
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In my experience mysticism does have the major drawback of sometimes causing you to go completely insane
Everybody likes mysticism. It has the benefits of religion (a sense of cosmic meaning) and none of the drawbacks (subordination to traditional authority); and all the benefits of modernity (individual subjectivity) without any of the drawbacks (a sense of cosmic meaninglessness).
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Ah yes, the famous prefaces from 1900, the year Nietzsche died and 11 years after his collapse. Please, tell me more about how closely you’ve read Nietzsche you fucking Nazi clown.
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If there’s a serious lesson to be taken from this thread it’s that everyone should have more confidence in their own intellect than this. If it seems like obscurantist garbage it probably is! Liberate yourself from your self-incurred immaturity!
i was one of the core "Hegelian egirls", and i left the Hegelian Egirl Council a week ago.
my concern is that the HEC project claims to do be doing political mediation but is effectively platforming the worst of both sides and lending them intellectual legitimacy.
i sincerely
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Marxism still requires a normative foundation.
What Marxist take will have you like this?
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Kant says: always treat others as ends in themselves, never merely as means.
Zarathustra says: treat *yourself* only as the means (to a higher goal), never as an end in itself (Man is something to be overcome).
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What’s funniest about this list to me is that virtually all of these are guaranteed to be the bestsellers at your local Barnes & Noble, yet he presents them as if they’re dangerous and subversive. It’s just a boring reiteration of mass culture.
25 books that should be on every school curriculum but aren't:
Fiction:
1. The Brothers Karamazov - Fyodor Dostoevsky
2. 1984 - George Orwell
3. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
4. The Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien
5. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
6. Atlas Shrugged - Ayn
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my hot take is I don’t think anybody ever actually gets their shit together
my hot take is i don’t think anybody should be dating until their shit is together. eating healthy, working out regularly, having a morning routine, a spiritual practice, a therapist, financial discipline. things like that have to come first.
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One reason I’m skeptical of right-wing readings of Nietzsche that emphasize hierarchy and strength is that they almost always fail to distinguish among the different ways in which hierarchy functions in Nietzsche’s thought. A brief 🧵on Nietzsche’s inegalitarianism. 1/15
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I'm generally glad we don't have excommunication in Judaism. BUT
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Kill it with fire
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Here’s a sneak peek of my review of chapter 2 of Daniel Tutt’s Nietzsche book. Though I won’t focus on it in the text, I’m attaching a table to the end of the entry picking apart each individual citation from the chapter. I’ll let readers judge this for themselves.
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I just don’t believe Marxists when they say this. Marxism calls for abolishing forms of exploitation and alienation. Neither concept is even minimally intelligible without presupposing some kind of normative framework. It’s really bizarre and pointless to claim otherwise.
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“It was doubtless his book The Destruction of Reason which revealed most clearly the destruction of Lukács’s own.”
-Adorno
holy shit there's no way Lukács needed to go this hard
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This is what fascism means. What else did y’all think I was talking about?
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Marxists just don’t want to admit that the only way to stop a right Nietzschean is with a left Nietzschean.
sure, Nietzsche's whole entire thing is affirming the necessity of cruel and violent subjugation of those deemed lesser for the sake of producing a stronger, more vital, finally free being. and that might sound like fascism. but what if he's actually an extremely subtle leftist?
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Harari’s position involves an erroneous form of all-or-nothing that is unfortunately quite common - either there has to be some final objective fact of the matter (usually physical or biological) or we’re left with a mere subjective fiction. 1/
What a philosophically inept position.
Villainously inept.
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In all seriousness, I had a minor life crisis when I discovered that most people do not walk around with their heads full of voices 24/7.
I think about the fact that 30%-50% of the population doesn’t have an inner monologue at least once a week. It’s actually a fascinating topic.
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Embarrassing confession: the first work of philosophy I read in its entirety was Sartre’s Being and Nothingness and I still kind of think it’s underappreciated.
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I remain convinced that scientists trying to debunk the idea of free will would be much better off studying the history of Christian theological debates throughout the Middle Ages than trying to find scientific evidence for or against a fundamentally incoherent concept.
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It would not be an exaggeration to say that the right wing revival of Nietzsche, and the left reaction to the same, are together likely to render Nietzsche totally unintelligible to an entire generation of readers.
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@puredemosonly
Not yet, I only recently became aware of his existence and made the connection that Costin was *that guy* I went to grad school with who never showed up to any department events and repeatedly trolled the department listserv complaining about anything diversity-related.
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I didn’t know it until just now but it turns out I’m a proud member of the Adornio-Deleuzian Pervert Coalition
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To me the best argument for having proficiency in multiple languages isn’t really accuracy of translation but more Wittgenstein’s point that our own grammar is too familiar for us to see it perspicuously. It’s hard to see grammar perspicuously without learning another language.
academics who speak and read multiple languages are so obsessed with saying u can’t engage with ideas properly without speaking and reading multiple languages. funny
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“Hegel forgot what Kierkegaard remembered when Kierkegaard said that the tragedy of the speculative philosopher is that he must turn aside from his place as a spectator of time and eternity in order to sneeze.”
-MacIntyre, Marxism and Christianity
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The four great political thinkers of the 20th century are Arendt, Foucault, Rawls, and Hayek. Deal with it however you want - I am no fan of Hayek - but that’s the way it is.
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Tell me you haven’t read Oedipus without telling me you haven’t read Oedipus
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This you?
I’m appalled to learn of Nina Power’s direct neo-nazi affiliations and I just want to say I’m happy to have held back from publishing my interview with her and to have kept a distance from Compact. I know that Compact publishes a very wide range of authors but I have been
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OK but will they also hire an assistant professor in Schopenhauer to hold all their lectures at the same time?
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Impossible, I have it on good authority that the Left is not allowed to read Nietzsche
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Thanks everyone for getting me to 5,000 followers! As promised, I will now reveal the secret meaning of Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence. Seriously though, let’s talk about one of the most bizarre and oft-dismissed parts of N’s thought: his cosmological proofs of the ER.
A 🧵 1/24
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Isn’t Nietzsche an elitist who values greatness or genius over the common man? I defend a version of Nietzschean moral perfectionism that I’d argue is not only compatible with political commitments to democracy and equality, but actually required by them.
A 🧵 1/17
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Right Nietzscheans, particularly the return to the ancients types that clog this site, would benefit from a careful rereading of the first untimely meditation, on David Strauss and the cultural philistine. 1/
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Guess what thread I’d recommend if you want to learn absolutely nothing about Nietzsche
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Finally reading a text of Lacan’s on psychosis that I find marginally comprehensible and I regret to report that he might be onto something.
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The morality of resentment at its finest from Peterson here - good and evil determined entirely by hatred of the perceived enemy, and complete inability to affirm values without first triangulating that enemy.
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I think the reason that this is Nietzsche’s most ignored teaching is probably that this is not what Nietzsche says at all
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“Discover the errors of the ego! Realize egoism as error! Certainly do not construe altruism as the opposite! That would be love of the other reputed individuals! No! Get *beyond* ‘me’ and ‘you’! Perceive cosmically!”
-Nietzsche, 1881 fragment
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In the early stages of writing this book on Nietzsche’s madness, I’ve been doing a lot of research into the impossible diagnostic question: did Nietzsche have syphilis, and if not, what caused his breakdown?
A 🧵on some interesting tidbits I’ve learned so far.
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Shapiro’s nonsense rarely surprises me but this is just so incredibly nihilistic. Capitalism has destroyed nearly every source of purpose other than selling yourself into exploitation until you die, so forcing the elderly to work is good! Last Man energy is off the charts here.
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18 started college
18 smoked first joint
22 graduated college
22 started PhD
23 smoked more weed
26 married
28 went insane
31 finished PhD
33 went insane again
35 completed the system of German Idealism
Feeling pretty good relative to the rest of you tbh
I’ll play
19 married
21 started community college
24 first kid, graduated cc, started uni
27 second kid
28 graduated uni, started MA
30 finished MA, started PhD
36 finished PhD, started VAP
42 moved to T-T
44 tenured
I’ll be 47 tomorrow
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All right, it’s time to talk about the elephant in the room, and the elephant is Domenico Losurdo’s Nietzsche: The Aristocratic Rebel. Hopefully the first in a🧵series picking apart the book’s arguments, I’ll start w/ an overview and Losurdo’s reading of The Birth of Tragedy.
1/
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Excellent interview with Wendy Brown (one of the best political theorists alive) on Max Weber that includes a brilliant explanation of the problem of nihilism and its political import today. Weber, of course, owed a great deal to Nietzsche.
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The shell game that Peterson plays with theological concepts here is instructive for understanding Zarathustra’s “last men”. He cynically affirms dead theological concepts, not because he believes them, but because there’s nothing else, and he’s too empty to invent anything new.
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The last 36 hours have been an object lesson in Arendt’s warning about the dangers of collectively refusing to exercise political judgment in unprecedented circumstances and choosing to deny reality instead.
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“To turn philosophy into pure science is to throw in the towel.”
-Nietzsche, unpublished fragment, 1873
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Nietzsche’s preoccupation with life-affirmation makes more sense when viewed in the context of his lifelong experience with bipolarity. One reason that a number of interpreters (e.g. Cybulska, Young) have suggested bipolar disorder as the most likely diagnosis is the presence 1/
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I really need to start collecting examples of ableist assholes trying to discredit Nietzsche’s philosophy because he was a madman. If anyone has other good examples send them my way, but this one sets a pretty high bar.
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It seems like every day Žižek does something new to validate my decision to never read him.
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It’s essential to Nietzsche’s thought that the human urge to deny our all-too-human condition, out of shame and disgust, runs so deep that simply repudiating that urge would alone precipitate a radical transformation in culture. This is the revolutionary potential of amor fati.
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🧵Learn the secrets that academic Nietzsche scholars don’t want you to know! You too can learn to will the eternal return in 11 easy steps! 🧵
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From:
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Wild how much of what is currently called “panpsychism” can be found in early Nietzsche: “The difficult thing is not the awakening of sensation, but that of consciousness in the world. However, it is still explicable if everything has sensation.” (notebooks 1872-1873)
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Was having coffee this morning and my wife was like “babe are you ok? you haven’t even touched the Nietzsche’s micropenis discourse”
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What Heidegger reached circuitously and mystically Wittgenstein reached instinctively and intuitively. A lesson in the greatness of 20th century philosophers.
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20th century philosophy would have been much better if analytic philosophers had used a broader range of games in their analyses of rules than just chess and baseball.
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This is openly genocidal and the fact that the Biden administration is sending military aid to support it is reprehensible.
Israel Defense Minister Yoav Gallant:
"I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed. We are fighting human animals and we will act accordingly."
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There’s a lesson to be learned about how to read philosophy in Nietzsche’s comment in Dawn 195 that “the only possible critique of morality” must grow out of “a brave a rigorous attempt to *live* in this or that morality”. Too often students read philosophy in one of two ways: 1/
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Apparently there’s a rapidly spreading case of brain worms going around that makes you forget that Jan 6 rioters were armed to the teeth with assault rifles, killed police officers, planned to lynch the Vice President, and tried to overturn a legitimate election.
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4 books that had a major influence on your political thought:
4 books that had a major influence on your political thought:
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Summary of the evening: the “Hegelian left” are mad at me for pointing out that using “retard” as a slur means you’re probably a eugenicist piece of shit.
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Emerson’s influence on Nietzsche still has not been adequately appreciated.
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Matt is getting a lot of shit for this comment but I do think it’s a feature of Marxist discourse that you can’t just make an argument like “degrowth is good” but also have to go on about how Marx was actually an unrecognized degrowth communist.
I'm always struck by the attitude some people take towards Marxism as an intellectual tradition. Most other traditions are expected to evolve ala self-critique; you don't find a lot of people saying Locke is right about everything. But innovating on Marx is treated like cheating.
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@iCirithPVP
@Liv_Agar
Lmao I’m not 100% certain but I’m pretty sure there is something in his unpublished fragments about this, yes. Nietzsche bought into all sorts of crackpot science when trying to cure his various ailments (e.g. his diet was not far off of ridiculous “carnivore” diets today lol)
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Obviously this is detestable, but it’s also telling. It seems to me that capitalists being this cynical and open about exploitation is a sign of significant weakness, or at least overconfidence, in the ideological apparatus capital deploys to legitimize itself.
Gurner Group founder Tim Gurner tells the Financial Review Property Summit workers have become "arrogant" since COVID and "We've got to kill that attitude."
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I am begging people like this to read literally anything on external world skepticism. The simulation argument doesn’t add anything! It’s just Descartes with a different set of metaphors!
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“We want to heal ourselves of the great fundamental madness of *measuring everything according to ourselves*”
-Nietzsche, 1881 fragment
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THIS LIFE AS YOU NOW LIVE IT AND HAVE LIVED IT YOU WILL HAVE TO LIVE ONCE AGAIN AND INNUMERABLE TIMES AGAIN THE ETERNAL HOURGLASS OF EXISTENCE IS TURNED OVER AGAIN AND AGAIN AND YOU WITH IT SPECK OF DUST
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I am calling for a total and complete shutdown of mentioning Foucault on this platform until we can figure out what the hell is going on
This is very important to understand. Foucault himself would not have approved of the Critical Social Justice (woke) movement which he would have seen as an example of what he warned of - a reconstitution of oppressive power dynamics. He wanted to deconstruct, not reconstruct.
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No one tell them about the Der Spiegel interview
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Cicero once said: “I’d rather be wrong with Plato than be right with those men.” Maybe I’m wrong to see potential resources for left politics in Nietzsche. But I’d rather be wrong than keep this kind of company.
An observation I have come to understand about the various groups that the left has named the "patriotic socialists". They see themselves as fighting the racist alt-Right (Fuentes, for example). So while the left see them as irredeemably racist and reactionary, they see
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The funny thing about Twitter Hegelians is that they never actually answer any objection you raise. They just say “you’ve clearly misread Hegel”. The assumption being: If you have read Hegel well, you must realize he is correct, QED.
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I’m late in responding to this, but: a few scattered thoughts on the problem of romanticizing madness and whether Anti-Oedipus is guilty of doing so.
I don’t think that D&G romanticize schizophrenia. That said, I believe them when they insist it’s not just a metaphor. 1/
It was really weird, but one of the effects of Anti-Oedipus was it romanticized schizophrenia. I take this story as a negative proof of that very problem. I can only hope that this is going away now for younger people but I don't know.
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Active and reactive forces - a 🧵 on Nietzsche, Deleuze, and the art of interpretation.
Deleuze centers his interpretation of Nietzsche around the distinction between active and reactive forces. What does this distinction mean, and why is the idea force so important? 1/23
To follow up our Deleuze reading group, I hope
@DevinGoure
can revisit this:
Deleuze's view of active/reactive forces shows how deeply enmeshed we are in reactive forces. How can differing interpretations of the same situation elicit or express either active or reactive forces?
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Oh you mean it was a bad idea to have a Biden campaign surrogate talk to Isaac Chotiner?
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The “Hegelian egirls” are throwing a launch party in NYC Saturday August 3rd celebrating the announcement of a series of collaborative initiatives both online & in person 🥰 you’re all invited & we hope to see you there! RSVP on Partiful for the address ❤️
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There is something very funny about informing a Nietzschean that the opinion of the masses is against him
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Really? My intuition is the exact opposite: it’s hard for me to imagine genuinely emancipatory political praxis that doesn’t also involve an ethical/spiritual transformation on the part of participants.
If your political project demands that participants do some sort of moral/quasi-spiritual "work" on themselves, what you've got going is something other than a political project.
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I’m more excited about this than any book that has come out in quite awhile. Stay tuned, Moral Minority listeners…
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@iCirithPVP
@Liv_Agar
Sue Prideaux on Nietzsche’s belief in quackery: “He read medical and physiological texts voraciously and yet, for all the miracle cures he tried…it was the one area in which he suspended his analytical rigor. He was as credulous as a newspaper reader believing in horoscopes.”
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