Nietzsche and stuff

ken kenneth.mackendrick at utoronto.ca
Mon Aug 9 07:45:38 PDT 1999


Zizek doesn't talk much about Nietzsche, for a very singular reason: Lacan doesn't talk about Nietzsche.

What Nietzsche denounced as a 'nihilistic' gesture to counteract life-asserting instincts, Freud and Lacan conceive as the very basic structure of human drive as opposed to natural instincts. Zizek notes, without much argument, that Nietzsche cannot accept the radical dimension of the death drive - "the fact that the excess of the Will over a mere self-contended satisfaction is always mediated by the 'nihilistic' stubborn attachment to Nothingness. For Lacan, Nothingness is constitutive of the metonymy of lack, a stand-in for Nothingness. Zizek has noted that Nietzsche can be claimed by three positions: traditional (aristocratic warrior), modern (hermeneutics of doubt) and postmodern (play of appearances and differences). He notes that all three share the sanme reduction of the political to a pre-political ethics (the same charge I had made against Bernstein earlier).

ken



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