On Nietzsche [Englisch] [Taschenbuch]

No disrespect intended, but the above review's take on this text was just so radically different than how I read it that I felt compelled to make a few comments. Bataille is in some sense writing "on Nietzsche", but more/instead of that he is using Nietzsche's work to explore the dynamics of communication and the limits of language, to question at a very fundamental level whether communication is even possible and if so how it takes place. In this exploration, of course, pain, suffering, loss, lack, desire, etc. all come into play, as they must since this is a work of Bataille's. But to speak of this pain as "sadistic" might be misleading... for (to essentialize perhaps too much) Bataille's "argument" centers more on what the individual must do to itself, its own subjectivity, in order to even approach community. When one inflicts pain on onesself, is that sadism? Masichism? The intense introspectivity of this work, much in tune with Nietzsche's, opens the door for the destruction of these very types of subject/object relationships, perhaps even to the point of obliterating the categories altogether. So despite the biographical and stylistic quirks of the author, which some might find troubling, others amusing, others entirely inconsequential, and yet others absolutely essential to the questions at hand (a la F.N.), ON NIETZSCHE is quite a provoking work if any of the issues mentioned are of concern.

*On Nietzsche* really isn't a book explaining the philosophy of Nietzsche, but a personal meditation on Nietzsche's influence on Georges Bataille's own manner of thinking and living. For Bataille, it must be understood, thinking and living are inextricable; philosophy must be tested against life, and life--inner and outer--provides the raw material for philosophy. Bataille is no armchair theorist. So it is that a good portion of *On Nietzsche* consists of fragmentary entries from Bataille's own 1944 diaries which illustrated, more or less, his struggle to embody the thrust of Nietzsche's thought--the thrust of it, because Nietzsche, in Bataille's view, is a thinker who points the way beyond himself and into mankind's future. Bataille attempts to take up the torch and carry it further forward into the darkness of the not-yet-and-never-to-be-known. His method, if you want to call it that, is to leave himself open to "chance."

Well, it's something like that.

Bataille takes Nietzsche's work as a template rather than doctrine, a method for a never-ending and open-ended inquiry into what it is to be human, which in itself is a concept that is forever developing.

Bataille is often difficult reading and *On Nietzsche* is no exception. His thinking tends to turn repeatedly in on itself until you feel as if your brain is tied up into some sort of neural Gordian knot. He is also prone to verbal flights of fancy that seem a vestige of his surrealist days--he's a philosopher always straining for the inexpressible. It's all part of the appeal of Bataille, if you find that appealing. Some, most notably Jean-Paul Sartre, did not. And called Bataille a mystic, not a philosopher at all. This, coming from Sartre, was not a compliment. It strikes me that Bataille, like Jung, considered subjective states of mind as objective facts inasmuch as they are every bit as influential over us as any other objective phenomenon. So the concept "God," for instance, has a "truth" regardless of whether an actual God exists or not.

I found the first part of *On Nietzsche* to be the most coherent and most compelling part of the book. Here Bataille presents his radical theory that communication depends on an act of violence--the infliction of a sacrificial wound that breaks our own autonomy and the autonomy of another. The crucifixion of Christ being the highest example of this principle--facilitating the communication of God and Man. This transgression, which serves to make us human, thus illustrates the necessity--indeed the good--of evil.

The rest of *On Nietzsche*--the diary entries--I found much less compelling, often incomprehensibly fragmented, and of interest primarily for the copious excerpts Bataille reproduces from Nietzsche's *Gay Science* and *The Will to Power.* Bataille makes some enlightening observations in this section regarding his take on Nietzsche and, as always, provokes with the occasional stunning and illuminating aphorism, but, on the whole, I didn't feel *On Nietzsche* was one of Bataille's best works. Certainly it isn't the book I'd recommend for first time Bataille readers. *Erotism* would make a better--and more readable--choice of his nonfiction work, or, maybe, something like *The Impossible.*

But for those already familiar with Bataille, his general train of thought, and his idiosyncratic way of philosophizing, *On Nietzsche* provides a light into some of the deeper, though not the deepest, workings of Bataille's subversive oeuvre

So for those who aren't overly concerned with Bataille, with proto-Deconstruction, or French literary theory in general, I would bump this rating down to four stars. As other reviewers have indicated, this text relies less on a point by point textual exegesis of Nietzsche's oeuvre, and more on a particular reading of Nietzsche which may or may not be obfuscated by the appropriation of Nietzsche by the National socialism. Bataille's Acephale group had for one of its task the safeguarding of Nietzsche from a explicitly fascist interpretation. Thus Bataille's presentation of what appear to be simply journal reflections written during the tumultuous wartime years at the end of the occupation of Paris seem indicate a way of reading Nietzsche that moves past rigid political conepts the of mid-20th century Europe. This is a childlike Nietzsche of play, rather than the strictly lion-like Nietzsche of Heidegger who offers only the will to power as the last epoch closing possibility of Western metaphysics. Derrida indeed takes up the thread of this reading, and, in my opinion, deconstruction distinctly emerges from out of an attempt to approach Nietzsche in this manner.