[lbo-talk] Leo Strauss

Michael Hoover mhhoover at gmail.com
Tue Sep 26 10:46:39 PDT 2006


On 9/22/06, Charles Brown <cbrown at michiganlegal.org> wrote:
> ^^^^
> CB: Chuck, thanks for another one of your typically interesting discussions.
>
> My reaction to Nietzsche is similar to yours. However, he seems to have such
> popularity on the intellectual _left_, that I have made myself overcome my
> old response of gagging at him, and started to study him. So, I can more and
> more make more knowledgeable responses to his ghost on the left. I can't
> quite understand why leftists aren't turned off more widely by his elitism
> and glorification of ruling classes.
> ^^^^^
<<<<<>>>>>

not sure if above exercpt is charles b or chuck g, in any event, portion of the intellectual left that has been influenced by nietzsche has generally been so indirectly via foucault and derrida, peter levine refers to derrida as a 'left nietzschean' following his characterization of strauss as a 'right nietzschean' (catherine zuckert, one of the few women who studied with strauss to have achieved the status of straussian, suggests in _postmodern platos_ that her mentor spoke with nietzsche and derrida to heidegger)...

the most specific examples of intellectual leftists embracing nietzsche are probably william connolly and bonnie honig, the former positing what he calls 'agnostic democracy', the latter 'agnostic feminism'...

now, agnostics says that they do not have enough information/evidence for affirmation or denial, in the case of connolly (and honig studied with him at johns hopkins, if memory serves, so i think my point is applicable to her as well), his initial attraction to nietzsche (whom arrived at through foucault) was apparently nietzsche's injustice of justice, immorality of morality, untruth of truth stuff, he maintains that a 'creative reading' leads one to understand that nietzsche's argument in favor of contingency and ambiguity is democratic in its recognition of diversity...

therefore, politics operates through an 'ontology of discordance' that 'sets us free' from certainties (the uncertainty of certainty, if you will), akin to what william corlett called 'derridean extravagance' in his book _community without unity_... mh



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