Willow Verkerk

In this essay, I argue that Nietzsche’s account of friendship must be understood as part of his therapeutic philosophy that promotes shared self-overcoming. Previous accounts of Nietzschean friendship give a strong foundation, but concentrate on his middle works and overlook the role of agon in higher friendship. In order to grasp the ethical connections that Nietzsche makes between friendship, agon, and self-overcoming, I argue that we must turn to Nietzsche’s writing on friendship in Thus Spoke Zarathustra and Beyond Good and Evil, as well as in the middle works. Nietzsche brings enmity into friendship not to deny the possibility of friendship, but instead to transform friendship into an exercise of therapeutics that promotes free-spiritedness and, in doing so, challenges the life-denying practices of nihilism.

ABSTRACT The purpose of this article is to illuminate the topic of “Redlichkeit” in The Gay Science in order to provide a greater understanding of the relationship among friendship, knowledge-seeking, and overcoming in Nietzsche's GS and Thus Spoke Zarathustra. In GS 14 Nietzsche formulates friendship as involving “a shared higher thirst for an ideal.” Although higher friendship, for Nietzsche, involves a mutual goal, this article argues that the goal is not truth. First, the notion of the intellectual conscience and how passionate knowledge-seeking is distinguished from the standardized practices of truth that Nietzsche rejects is explained. Second, the problem of the Übermensch, or Overhuman, and its status as an ideal or goal is examined. In conclusion, the link that Nietzsche makes between becoming Overhuman and the development of Redlichkeit by the intellectual conscience in passionate knowledge-seeking friendship is explained.

In Nietzsche and Friendship, Willow Verkerk provides a new and provocative account of Nietzsche's philosophy which identifies him as an agonistic thinker concerned with the topics of love and friendship. She argues that Nietzsche's challenges to the received principles of friendship from Aristotle to Kant offer resources for reinvigorating our thinking about friendship today. Through an examination of his free spirit texts, Human, All Too Human, Daybreak and The Gay Science together with Thus Spoke Zarathustra and Beyond Good and Evil, Verkerk unlocks key aspects of Nietzsche's thinking on friendship, love, 'woman', the self, self-overcoming, virtue, and character. She questions Nietzsche's misogyny, but also considers the emancipatory potential of his writing by brining him into dialogue with postmodern, feminist, and transgender thinkers. This book revives interest in the ethical, therapeutic, and political dimensions of Nietzsche's philosophy.

This paper takes Cavarero’s arguments against the Homo erectus seriously and asks: how can we model an alternative to it? It proposes that a notion of the mimetically inclined subject is required, one that thickens Cavarero’s affirmative account of inclination by way of a new philosophical understanding of mimesis that includes habit and disciplinarity. Following Cavarero, the mother is positioned as a key figure to place nurturing and love at the centre of subject-making. However, they are shown to be a necessary but not sufficient step for the process of re-evaluation. An account of disciplinary mimesis which draws on a Nietzschean legacy in Michel Foucault and Judith Butler, together with Simone de Beauvoir’s account of woman as a situation, demonstrate the pitfalls of idealizing the mother. I argue that to challenge the particularized universalism of the European subject with an affirmative account of mimetic inclination, other figures which embrace Cavarero’s notion of relational vulnerability alongside the mother are required. The agonistic friend who practices an open, feminist curiosity is proposed as one such exemplar and, in closing remarks, I gesture to other necessary models in feminist and Indigenous thought that are key to remaking the androcentric subject of European philosophy.