Wednesday, October 19, 2011

Bull's Anti-Nietzsche is out

Malcolm Bull's Anti-Nietzsche is out (while I knew it was coming, h/t to Tim for posting it is out).

I haven't read the book yet, or even been able to find a table of contents online. However, one assumes it follows up his justly infamous article in the New Left Review, "Where is the Anti-Nietzsche?". That article itself gets fleshed out a bit more in some lectures he delivered at Berkeley, which can be found in the book Nietzsche's Negative Ecologies.

Bull's argument is explicitly pro-egalitarian, and challenges the reader to read Nietzsche is a different way. According to Bull, we normally read Nietzsche as if we are one of the victors, one of the nobles, one of the predatory animals, one of the supermen. What if we read him as if we are one of the losers? What happens when we read not as a carnivore, but as a herbivore and herd animal? What happens when we read not as one who finds the difference between humans and apes as a laughable gap, but rather one who reads as closer to the ape? What happens when we read Nietzsche not as a superman, but as a subhuman?

Anyway, I can't wait to get and read the book.

UPDATE: More over here.