The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Two

(Paperback)

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What is it that makes Nietzsche Nietzsche In this volume Alenka Zupancic counters the contemporary appropriation of Nietzsche as a philosopher who was "ahead of his time" but whose time has finally come - the rather patronizing reduction of his often extraordinary statements to mere opinions that we can "share". Zupancic argues that the definative Nietzschean quality is his very unfashionableness, his being out of the mainstream of his or any time. To restore Nietzsche to a context in which the thought "lives on its own credit", Zupancic examines two aspects of his philosophy. First in "Nietzsche as Metapsychologist" she revisits the principal Nietzschean themes - his declaration of the death of God, the acetic ideal and nihilism - as ideas that are very much present in our hedonist postmodern condition. Then, in the second part of the book, she considers Nietzsche's figure of the noon and its consequences for his notion of the truth. Nietzsche describes the noon not as the moment when all shadows disappear but as the momment of splitting, when "one turns into two". Zupancic argues that this notion of the two as the minimal and irreducible difference within the same animates all of Nietzsche's work, generating its permanent and inherent tension.

Reviews

"Alenka Zupancic has given us a strikingly new reading of Nietzsche. Against the postmodernist domestication of Nietzsche's philosophy, Zupancic restores the shock of Nietzsche's style and thought, reading him alongside Jacques Lacan and Alain Badiou as a revolutionary 'philosopher of the event.'"--Christoph Cox, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Hampshire College "Alenka Zupancic is one of those rare writers whose capacity for decision is equal to her intelligence...Read these essays and you will see what kind of a spiritual explosion a writing bomb can produce in the hands of a true pyrotechnist." Alain Badiou

Author Bio

Alenka Zupani, a Slovenian psychoanalytic theorist and philosopher, teaches at the European Graduate School and is a researcher at the Institute of Philosophy at the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and the Arts. She is the author of The Shortest Shadow- Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Two and The Odd One In- On Comedy, both in the Short Circuits series, published by the MIT Press.