Deleuze Interprets Nietzsche. - Identity and difference

(Original episode was released October 13th, 2024. Minor edits for clarity of text.)

Hello everyone. I’m Stephen West. This is Philosophize This!

If you’re someone who heard what Nietzsche had to say in the last couple posts and went “Wow. Checkmate, philosophy!”

“I mean this guy Friedrich just destroyed all of you! Go grab your herd membership cards and find a place to moo at each other in a field for the rest of your lives! Let the cultural elites like Friedrich take over from now on”— well, if that’s how you feel then unfortunately it’s going to be a very short-lived party for you.

But that’s a good thing I think, ultimately.

As is always the case in philosophy: other smart people came along shortly after Nietzsche and pointed out all the assumptions he was making that led to the shape and scope of his work. One of these was his fellow German Martin Heidegger who next post will be about.

But today I want to talk about someone who was a little more favorable towards Nietzsche’s work. It’s an interpretation that many people out there believe to be the best interpretation of his work that has ever been done. People say it’s the one that reflects the direction Nietzsche probably would’ve been headed in had he not gotten sick and died as early as he did. It’s a book written in the year 1962 called Nietzsche and Philosophy by the now world famous philosopher named Gilles Deleuze.

To Deleuze—yes, Nietzsche’s work was flawed. He was in many ways a product of his time: the hyper-individualism, the herd-mentality stuff. We’ll talk about why these ideas don’t necessarily hold up as concepts when you take the implications of his work seriously. But Deleuze is not interested in spending much time dwelling on these sorts of problems. Because the real interesting piece of Nietzsche, ironically, is what we can affirm about his work, not what we can critique about it.

See, Deleuze is always in the business of getting away from just critiquing things.

He’s always interested in constructing something new when he writes.

And what he said about Nietzsche is that he’s a philosopher that managed to lay the groundwork for an entirely different way of thinking about affirmation and difference as concepts—where when you truly affirm difference at this radical new level that he introduces, it not only allows