> I'm disappointed with what appears to be a widespread animosity towards
> Nietzsche among left thinkers on this list. I consider myself to be a
> Marxist, and yet I have always admired the thought of Nietzsche as being
> thought about how to live. To live without a God, without a beyond,
> without resentment.
Nietzsche was intensely contradictory, though -- he himself was terrible at living, and ended up in semi-seclusion in the Swiss Alps, before his illness destroyed his tremendous mind. What makes Nietzsche worth engaging is the energy of his thought: he's the master of the poignard, those short, precise barbs which are the perfect antidote to the bloated, bogus moralities and neo-Victorianisms of the late 19th century. I always felt the, shall we say, orthodox dismissal of the post-structuralists as mere neo-Nietzscheans fatally glossed over the vital importance of both for an enlarged or multinational Marxism. The pleasure which wishes for eternity is one of the key drivers of dialectical thought.
-- Dennis