Nietzsche and the Feminine (P) (Feminist Issues) [Englisch] [Taschenbuch]

Try to imagine hundreds of scholars coming and going to Nietzsche at the same time. Coming and going: you can do it!

The essays in this book are divided into six parts: Mothers, Figures of the Feminine, Beyond Antifeminism, Feminist Philosophy, "Digression" (Insurance for and against Women: From Nietzsche to Psychotherapy) and Supplements that include fragments from Luce Irigaray.

The scholars that tackle sexual dialectic and sexual dualism in Part Three interested me in 2012 as a way to define myself as a male reviewer of literary life at a time when other activities lack the same level of intellectual insight into how much my behavior has been inspired by the trope:

I want little girls to want to be me.

I should give Janet Lungstrum credit for the intellectual stereotypes provided in a paragraph on page 143 which begins with Nietzsche's interest in "woman's seductive ability as that of creating dissimulation, or dissimulating creatively" which rock and roll has provided an ironic contrast to in the lines:

I know what I am
and I'm a man
and so was Lola.

I want little girls to want to be me

is best pictured as the narcissism of a young model, Kelly Stewart, quoted in a Sunday New York Times Magazine by Jennifer Egan as an endearing tautology of a 14-year-old trying to become the object of her own desire. Freud's essay "On Narcissism: An Introduction" (1914) grants young women "self-contentment" simply in loving and decorating themselves so much that their indifference to everything else excites the "greatest fascination" among men. There is an entire book by Bram Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siècle Culture (1986) on art circulated in magazines that gets mentioned in the notes to this paragraph. Anything in print might be considered literal, as my interest in the last sentence of the paragraph links Nietzsche to literal self-sufficiency:

However, it is also possible,
and ultimately more liberating,
to view the narcissistic display
of the Nietzschean woman as a
creative state of literal
self-sufficiency, and indeed
as Nietzsche's highest aim of
self-engendering. (p. 143).

Modern life has so much adoration for anything that will prompt millions to buy that a creative literary life seeking to create phrases like a cosmic pogo stick up meeting an atomic bomb that can't find its knees is becoming utterly personal for me in a way that can only be funny to other people. Little girls are not responding by attempting to become more funny than I am. Any link to reality drives them further into their shell. The literary life of Frau Lou following the attempt to write aphorisms about women with Nietzsche is opposition from inside that shell:

In a most Nietzschean move,
Salomé's creative woman as
life-force is positioned in
opposition to the truth-seeking
theoretical man. (p. 144).

The discussion of Irigaray sees her efforts "to improve what she sees as his failed mission of self-overcoming. (p. 145).

Irigaray's view of Nietzsche's
self-seduction as a culpable
inversion or misuse of woman
refuses to acknowledge dialectic
of "you in her, and her in you" (p. 145).

Inversion is the scholarly mission that makes the world seem like everybody wants everything to be all different. If this is the basis for the scholarly diagnosis of breakdown in relationships behind restraining orders to keep people from talking to each other so their lives can begin again in a new direction, then Nietzsche is great for:

Nietzsche, wanting to stress
the opposite of synthesis in
his dialectic of creativity,
later reproached his Birth of
Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music
for having implied too smooth and
final a "rebirth" of tragedy, in
a burst of Wagner-influenced
Hegelian Aufhebung (KSA 6:309; EcH p. 78). (p. 145).

Nietzsche thought of "The veil of woman" in a context that included:

the illusory barrier that serves as an
individuating, life-saving force,
renewing itself each time it is torn
apart . . . (p. 147).

This book plays with those ego boundaries.