All posts filed under: universal politics

Nietzsche and the Capture and Domestication of Peoples

Wednesday, November 14, 2007
by Taylor Adkins
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apparatus of capture / culture / custom / decay / democracy / genealogy / image of thought / individual / instrumentality / Nietzsche / nomad / overman / Politics / power / religion / society / sovereignty / state / unground / universal / universal politics / utopia / war / war machine / warrior / Zarathustra

  “You shall obey—someone and for a long time: else you will perish and lose the last respect for yourself”—this appears to me to be the moral imperative of nature which, to be sure, is neither “categorical” as the old Kant would have it (hence the “else”) nor addressed to the individual (what do individuals matter to her?), but to peoples, races, ages, classes—but above all to the whole human animal, to man (Beyond Good […]

‘The Teacher of the Destruction of the Law:’ Introduction to Alain Badiou’s St. Paul

Friday, September 21, 2007
by Taylor Adkins
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anti-philosophy / atheism / badiou / Christianity / declaration / event / fidelity / Paul / universal politics

Badiou, Alain. Saint Paul: The Foundations of Universalism. Trans. Ray Brassier. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2003. Badiou starts off his book with an interesting definition of the fable: A ‘fable’ is that part of a narrative that, so far as we are concerned, fails to touch on any Real, unless it be by virtue of that invisible and indirectly accessible residue sticking to every obvious imaginary (4). Thus Badiou asserts that Paul reduces the Christian narrative […]

Nietzsche’s Glance at the State: Socialism, Nationalism, Universalism

Thursday, September 13, 2007
by Taylor Adkins
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democracy / justice / nationalism / Nietzsche / socialism / universal politics / utopia

In January of 1872, less than a year after Germany officially becomes a nation, Nietzsche gives a series of five lectures at the University of Basel on the future of our educational/cultural institutions. Six years later in section 8 of Human All Too Human we find Nietzsche discussing the future of political institutions and the fate of European nations. One of the questions that Nietzsche asks in his analysis of socialism, nationalism and democracy is […]

‘A Chain of Necessary Rings of Culture’: Nietzsche and the Ability of Science

Thursday, August 30, 2007
by Taylor Adkins
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aesthetics / culture / Eternal Return / Human All Too Human / Nietzsche / religion / Science / Mathematics / Technology / universal politics

In sections 4 and 5 of Human All Too Human, Nietzsche develops a non-linear train of thought that attempts to analyze and reconstruct the experiences and concepts of religion, art and science. There are developmental factors and connections among these three, for “art raises its head when religion relaxes its hold,” and the “scientific man is the further evolution of the artistic” (150; 223). Poets, for example, construct bridges to distant ages and dying religions, […]

Nietzsche’s Historical Chemistry and the International Scene

Wednesday, August 22, 2007
by Taylor Adkins
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culture / habit / history / institution / Nietzsche / pleasure / Serres / universal politics

“Departure requires a rending that rips a part of the body from the part that still adheres to the shore where it was born, to the neighborhood of its kinfolk, to the house and the village with its customary inhabitants, to the culture of its language and to the rigidity of habit. Whoever does not get moving learns nothing, Yes, depart, divide yourself into parts. Your peers risk condemning you as a separated brother. You […]