Andrea Rehberg

The place of God in Nietzsche’s thought remains central and controversial. Nietzsche’s proclamation of 'the death of God' is one of the most famous slogans in modern philosophy, seeming to encapsulate the nineteenth-century loss of religious faith in the affirmation that God has "turned out to be our oldest lie" and yet the nature of Nietzsche’s own ‘theology’ is far from clear. This volume engages with Nietzsche’s arguments about God, theology, and religion. The volume extends the discussion to an engagement of Nietzsche with alternative models of God, with ancient Greek religions, and with discussions of diversity in dis/conjunction with religion. The chapters examine Nietzsche’s genealogy of religion and his claims about the place of God and theology in the history of Western thought, as well as his engagements with alternative conceptions of God. The volume also examines the historical and contemporary reception of Nietzsche’s arguments about God by religious and non-religious thinkers, asking to what extent Nietzsche’s philosophy of God speaks to the challenges of today's globalized philosophy and religion.

This collection brings together original essays on a wide variety of topics in the broad area of Nietzsche and Phenomenology. Some of these papers take a thematic approach, thinking through key issues that connect or divide Nietzsche and phenomenology, while others approach the conjunction of the title via an encounter between Nietzsche and one of the central figures of the phenomenological tradition or other relevant philosophers. In either case, new and often surpising connections are uncovered in many of these essays, while others bring out the profound differences and discontinuities between aspects of Nietzsches project and the projects of phenomenologists. Through both of these general tendencies, significant new insights are won that broaden our understanding both of the work of Nietzsche and of twentieth-century phenomenology. The international group of scholars gathered here, all of whom are steeped in the history of philosophy and particularly in the works of Nietzsche, includes some of the most important figures in contemporary continental philosophy, as well as some as yet relatively less well-known scholars. All are equally driven by the desire to get back to the things themselves, or the matter of thought, or however else that which incites us to think may be called.

This chapter seeks to explain populism as it presented itself in recent history; but it then goes beyond the mere phenomena of populism by considering a number of explanations for them. It then enters a philosophical terrain by turning to a Nietzschean reading of reactivity in terms of nobility and slavishness, and of the ascetic ideal, as analysed by Nietzsche in On the Genealogy of Morality. Next, it discusses the import of Nietzsche’s physiological thinking for these analyses. The chapter concludes with an exploration of Nietzsche’s and Deleuze’s concept of immanence, since it is arguably only on this terrain that the phenomena of reactivity, specifically, the phenomena of populism, can ultimately be overcome. Hence, this chapter progresses from the most immediately given, through increasingly complex levels of analysis, to an ever more comprehensive understanding of the structures and forces involved in the current political situation.

The question of Nietzsche’s use of political theory has a long and vexed history. The contributors of this book re-situate debates around the notion of difference, in relation to historical and scholarly concerns, but with a view to the current political context. Given that today we are faced with a host of political challenges of domination and resistance, the question raised in this volume is how Nietzsche helps us to think through and to address some of the problems. The authors also discuss how his writings complicate our desire for swift solutions to seemingly intractable problems: how to resist slavishness in thought and action, how to maintain hard-won civil liberties and rights in the face of encroaching hegemonic discourses, practices and forces, or how to counteract global environmental degradation, in short, how to oppose ‘totalitarian’ movements of homogenization, universalization, equalization, and instead to affirm, both politically and ontologically, a culture of difference.

This dissertation seeks to substantiate the thesis that Nietzsche's physiological thinking constitutes a radicalisation of Kantian critique. To this end it attempts to mark out some of the salient points of the latter project and to examine the ways in which it falls short of its own potential radicality. In chapters one and two the categories of relation - in which Kant articulates his theory of the temporal connection of phenomena explicitly - are traced through the Analytic and Dialectic of the Critique of Pure Reason and are read against the Deduction of the Pure Concepts of the Understanding which implicitly contains another theory of time. Since the Critique of the Teleological Faculty of Judgement complements Kant's theory of the temporal cohesion of phenomena, the third chapter offers a reading of it under the aspect of its relation to the wider project of critique. Chapter four draws together the multiple strands around which Kantian critique can be shown to mutate into Nietzsche's philosophical physiology and the theory of temporality implicit in it. Finally, Nietzschean physiology is presented in terms of his thinking of the becoming of matter, in terms of the will to power as eternal recurrence

One of the central notions running through Heidegger’s oeuvre, early and late, is that of ‘world.’ By examining some issues and problems surrounding Heidegger’s statements relating to ‘world’ in his essay “The Origin of the Work of Art,” both aspects of Heidegger's broader trajectory of thought, as well as the workings of the artwork essay itself are thereby illuminated. Several, partially competing senses of ‘world’ are discovered in “The Origin of the Work of Art,” and their provenance traced to specific concerns of Heidegger. In a hermeneutic strategy of immanent critique, the artwork essay is shown to harbour the resources for its own deconstruction, and to do so precisely at certain aporetic textual points centred around the concept ‘world.’