Nietzsche notes.

April 3, 2008 | 5 comments


Nietzsche was semi-quoted on “Law and Order: SVU” this year, and I was like, “Nietzsche? Oh, yeah, I remember him. Wrote a dissertation that was largely about him, or, at least, dealing with him.” I mean, Nietzsche is hugely quotable and all.  And I did spend months doing nothing but studying him, hate, and power.

I keep forgetting that I have a dissertation to edit and send to my committee and have since the end of last summer. Honestly, I’ve been putting it off because, once I send it, I’m unemployed. Now, I tell myself, I am a student. Even though, of course, in practice and in my own mind, my student days are effectively over. Still, it will be nice to get this out of my life and over-with. And for everyone to have the “option” of calling me Doctor.  It might have been nice if I had realized that I implied I was still a full-time student on every job application I have sent minus one.  Damn it.

I have a stack of Moleskine Cahiers with Nietzsche notes in them from last year.  Most of them have some of my favorite quotations on them, like these do.  Those notebooks worked well, especially since I spent last fall in a semi-nomadic fashion, much like Herr Nietzsche himself.  Not that I had any great thoughts long the way.

Please do keep any “Nietzsche hated women” and “Nietzsche was an anti-Semite” comments to yourself, lest you reveal that you do not, in fact, understand Nietzsche at all. Or, at least, have not bothered to read any of his books.  And if you feel the need to do it, don’t troll.  Come back and answer for yourself.  Nietzsche would.

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  1. Matthew on April 4, 2008 at 7:52 pm

    I tried to read Zarathustra last year. I was pretty moody at the time, so I didn’t finish. It was sort of on the tail end of my 8-year long attempt to read up philosophy/theory, right before I had my virtual lobotomy and started only reading short stories… I read a fair amount of Deleuze and poststructuralist, Lacanian, post-modernist junk, but it tended to make my head spin more than anything.

    I still haven’t tried to read Heidegger (when I bought Being and Time, a friend leaned over and said, “you know, he was a Nazi…”), but I’d like to give it a whirl. Anyway, the whole “Nietzsche was a Nazi” thing reminded me of that moment. Then he said, “not that that means you shouldn’t read it…”

    People…

  2. Johnny on April 5, 2008 at 11:26 am

    Ecce Homo is my favorite Nietzsche book, though there are those that would say he was crazy by the time he wrote it, lol. To be honest, I have had trouble getting past Heidegger being a Nazi thing. That, and I don’t really like his work. He stabbed other philosophers in the back, like Nietzsche and Husserl. Nietzsche’s work was stolen by the Nazi’s, even though few of them ever read it — and if they understood it, they would never have made him the official party philosopher. The most f-ed up thing is that Heidegger understood Nietzsche and let them do it. He did write four books about Nietzsche to try and make up for it later, but they were really just Heidegger. My prof told me that when someone asked Heidegger how he could write about Nietzsche’s Eternal Return so badly in one book, Martin replied, “This is terrible Nietzsche, but it is excellent Heidegger!” Punk! :)

  3. Matthew on April 5, 2008 at 4:31 pm

    wow. never knew all that!

    I’ll have to check out Ecce Homo – sometimes the best writing is after someone loses his/her mind.

  4. Johnny on April 6, 2008 at 12:55 am

    On the Genealogy of Morals is awesome, too, but it lacks chapter headings like “What I Am So Wise” and “Why I Write Such Good Books.” :^)

    If I ever write something super-uber awesome, it must have chapter headings like Nietzsche!