There is some irony involved in writing about Friedrich Nietzsche in the context of higher education. After all, he would most likely regard our university — in fact, our way of speaking — as a manifestation of the prison-like “edifice of concepts” built by language (originally) and science (subsequently). For Nietzsche, the original human misfortune starts with the emergence of cognition, which he equates with deception as it deceives humans about the value of pure being. The human intellect, he continues, “shows its greatest strengths in dissimulation, since this is the means to preserve those weaker, less robust individuals who, by nature, are denied horns or the sharp fangs of a beast of prey with which to wage the struggle for existence” (753). Nietzsche seems to idealize the state of being pre-cognition (before it gets corrupted by language and reason) where humans experience existence not just as a type of unmediated onslaught of sense impressions and feelings, but also as a struggle for survival. This confrontation of reason and intuition recurs in part 2 of Nietzsche’s essay where he describes the empirical world of reason and concepts as being challenged by the invincible human drive to form metaphors, which persists despite “the process whereby a regular and rigid new world is built from its own sublimated products — concepts — in order to imprison it in a fortress” (759). It is in myth and art, Nietzsche claims, that humans find a new sphere for their drive to form metaphors. In so doing, the “liberated intellect” uses the framework the reasonable man clings to “as a mere climbing frame and plaything on which to perform its most reckless tricks; and when it smashes this framework, jumbles it up and ironically re-assembles it, pairing the most unlike things and dividing those things which are closest to one another, it reveals the fact that it does not require those makeshift aids of neediness, and that it is now guided, not by concepts but by intuitions” (761). Shortly after, Nietzsche harks back to the motif of existential struggle by saying there are eras where “the man of reason and the man of intuition stand side by side,” both seeking “to rule over life. . . .”  The motif of intensity, pure-being and struggle in conjunction with the recurring terms intellect (pejorative) and intuition reminds me of Umberto Eco essay “Ur-Fascism.” In his analysis Eco outlines several characteristic traits that commonly appear in fascist movements. One of those traits is the rejection of modernism, which Eco describes as an aversion to the rationalistic intellectual and philosophical development of so-called Western culture since the Enlightenment (17^th and 18^th century). Fascist movements tend to view this as a descend into degeneracy, and I would argue that Nietzsche, considering his repeated pejorative use of the words intellect and reason, emits a similar rejection of the empirical world. His return to antiquity (myth and arts) as an area for humans to draw on reinforces his rejection of modernism. According to Eco, the cult of action for action’s sake is another common element of fascist movements and understands action as valuable in itself and to be taken without reflection. Eco emphasizes that this is connected to an anti-intellectual, essentially irrational impulse. In this regard we can recognize an additional echo in Nietzsche’s writing; for example, the motif of struggle, intensity and pure-being, or the emphasis on intuition at the expense of reason. The scene where the ”liberated intellect” uses the framework reasonable man clings to as a sort of staging ground for his wild jumble of actions illustrates this in an impressive way. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that Friedrich Nietzsche’s essay should be read as a proto-fascist text; however, it strikes me nevertheless how neatly central points of his argument fit into the structure of fascist thought as described by Umberto Eco.

I just wanted to give kudos in general for a very stimulating batch of posts right out of the gate: you’re all reading/writing/thinking well, and I really look forward to the rest of the term.

A few posts caught my attention for their thematization of particular moments or aspects of theorists’ work, and I wanted to highlight them. They’re not necessarily the “best,” whatever that means (and, full disclosure, I find rankings and quantification of humanistic work, like grades, to be very much a “prison-house” in Nietzsche’s sense), but they’re worth thinking with in various ways:

• Keegan’s post on Nietzsche nicely differentiates the stoner dorm-room vibes of the first part of the essay (“a leaf…. [exhales and coughs lightly] is just an abstraction of, like, all the leaves ever”) and the more subtle arguments about the “man of intuition” at the end. Though he also notes, in ways that anticipate our reading in the Marxist tradition, that N’s individualism precludes thinking about collective agency and structural oppression.
• Kate’s post on poetry and linearity/syntagmatics in de Saussure speculates on how line breaks in poetry both call attention to the fundamental structuring force of syntax and the liberating/enlivening things that happen when poets use line breaks to underscore and problematize linearity in language.
• Chloee’s examination of “drive” in Nietzsche’s essay takes a rather subtle moment in the essay–N’s early claim of a “drive” to metaphorical representation”–and speculates on what it might meant to put metaphorization up there with, say, needing food and shelter.
• Ian’s reading of de Saussure and Nietzsche, which draws on Culler’s work and emphasizes the way N’s valorization of disruptive uses of metaphor anticipates experiments in non- and antireferential art by Surrealists and others in the early 20thC.

A final PSA for reading each other’s work to the extent you have time and leaving comments on each other’s work. This is not a requirement, but I’ll begin sprinkling in public comments from here on out and invite you to do the same. I won’t grade your work (or even “grade” it) in public, which would be unethical and illegal, but I will kick around ideas with all of you in a nonevaluative mode of intellectual exchange.