Vasti Roodt

Nietzsche's legacy for political thought is a highly contested area of research today. With papers representing a broad range of positions, this collection takes stock of the central controversies (Nietzsche as political / anti-political thinker? Nietzsche and / contra democracy? Arendt and / contra Nietzsche?), as well as new research on key concepts (power, the agon, aristocracy, friendship i.a.), on historical, contemporary and futural aspects of Nietzsche's political thought. International contributors include well-known names (Conway, Ansell-Pearson, Hatab, Taureck, Patton, Connolly, Villa, van Tongeren) and young emerging scholars from various disciplines.

Describing an action or a state of affairs as a form of violence is usually shorthand for condemning whatever falls under that description. However, precisely because the concept of violence is taken to have a special kind of moral force, it is prone to conceptual inflation. In this chapter, I argue that we should resist such inflation for epistemic and moral reasons. Specifically, the indiscriminate application of the concept deprives us of the means for saying what violence is not, which leaves us unable to specify the moral end for the sake of which violence is to be condemned. Having made the case for delimiting the concept of violence, I go on to show that violence is not a normative concept, and that expanded notions of “systemic” or “structural” violence add nothing to our understanding of the specific wrong at stake. I conclude that decoupling violence from normative assumptions enables us to distinguish between violence as a feature of specific human actions and injustice as a feature of policies and institutions that cannot be reduced to individual agency. My aim, ultimately, is not to reject violence as framework for explanation and evaluation, but to show that it is self-defeating to expand this framework beyond reasonable limits.

In this chapter, I argue that Nietzsche is not a political thinker in a specific, normative sense of the term: the kind of thinking that starts from the point of view of human beings who must share a common world, rather than from the point of view of the human being in the singular or the human type in general. Consequently, Nietzsche is not the philosopher to turn to for new forms of human solidarity, new political norms or new kinds of polity. I argue further that the value of Nietzsche’s philosophy does not depend on what he has to say about politics. On the contrary, the value of his philosophy lies precisely in what is not political in it; in the extent to which it confronts us with the limits of political thinking.

The purpose of this article is to examine the relationship between the formation of the self and the worldly horizon within which this self achieves its meaning. Our inquiry takes place from two perspectives: the first derived from the Nietzschean analysis of how one becomes what one is; the other from current developments in complexity theory. This two-angled approach opens up different, yet related dimensions of a non-essentialist understanding of the self that is none the less neither arbitrary nor deterministic. Indeed, at the meeting point of these two perspectives on the self lies a conception of a dynamic, worldly self, whose identity is bound up with its appearance in a world shared with others. After examining this argument from the respective view points offered by Nietzsche and complexity theory, the article concludes with a consideration of some of the political and ethical implications of representing our situatedness within a shared human domain as a condition for self-formation.