Anti-Nietzsche
Anti-Nietzsche is a subtle and subversive engagement with Nietzsche and his twentieth-century interpreters—Heidegger, Vattimo, Nancy, and Agamben. Written with economy and clarity, it shows how a politics of failure might change what it means to be human.
Hardback, 256 pages
ISBN: 9781859845745
October 2011
$26.95 / £14.99 / $33.50CAN
Other Editions
Ebook, 256 pages
ISBN: 9781844678938
September 2011
$11.99
Reviews
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“[A] stimulating and delightful book…Anti-Nietzsche is charming, but Bull’s argument is also subtle and deep”
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“Seven witty, erudite, and highly stylized chapters. Recommended.”
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“Anti-Nietzsche pursues Nietzsche’s logic but pulls out all the stops.”
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“The breadth and depth of Bull's scholarship are ... incredibly impressive.”
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“Bull is an excellent writer of philosophical prose… it is hard to deny the boldness of his thinking, or the seductive force of his writing”
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“Bull’s book deserves attention both as a scholarly engagement with continental philosophy and political theory, and as a challenging intervention into contemporary left politics.”
Blog
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Malcolm Bull ups the ‘Anti’ on Nietzsche
Writing in Radical Philosophy, Keith Ansell-Pearson lauds Malcolm Bull's new book Anti-Nietzsche as, "a fascinating provocation, and one that will unsettle anyone schooled in Nietzsche through the so-called 'continental' tradition of philosophy." Bull's argument is innovative, as it asserts that there is no reason Nietzsche's nihilism should persist in marking the "limit-philosophy of the modern imaginary." Bull argues that Nietzsche does not solve the problem of Nihilism, but rather halts it. Furthermore, the all-too-humanist response to Nietzsche is inadequate—to attempt to conquer or triumph over the problem of nihilism fails to understand it. Bull proposes a different approach—that which he calls 'negative ecology' or the notion that a thought can always be undermined by another that is still more negative. Bull's negative ecology accompanies what he calls 'subhumanism'—a politics of failure, "politics as species-changing practice."
Despite his praise, Ansell-Pearson criticizes Bull's polemic with regard to the timeliness of the work. He asks:
"Why Anti-Nietzsche' now? What reactionary forces and groupings centered on Nietzsche are at work at present, and, more than this, concertedly working against the progressive forces of the Left? I know of none."
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Reading Nietzsche like a loser
For a long time people have said that to really think with Nietzsche is to think against him. Yet, as it stands, so many of the writers, philosophers and critics who draw on him or self-identify as "Nietzscheans" rarely, if ever, seek to contest the rhetoric or dominant narratives of strength and superiority in his writings. Surely anyone who has read Nietzsche will be familiar with the seductiveness of his prose and the remarkable ease with which one can --- consciously or not --- identify with the powerful and the masterly. Nonetheless, in spite of this well-known aspect of reading him, it has not been until quite recently that writers on Nietzsche have begun to question the apparent failure to resist this temptation and what broader implications it has on understandings of his thought.
Over at The New Inquiry, David Winters has reviewed Malcolm Bull's new book Anti-Nietzsche, which takes this question centrally and, in an astonishing twist, exhorts us to try and "read Nietzsche like a loser." That is, he encourages us to read Nietzsche's texts through a process of consciously dis-identifying with its dominant perspective and, rather than simply reproducing the relations of dominance it posits, enter into a critical engagement against the grain of the work. For Bull, to do this is to seriously attend to the radical ideas under the surface of Nietzsche's writings, and, crucially, to open oneself up to the radical force and political salience of his thought today.
In his review, Winters notes that,
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"Reading like a loser" — Costica Bradatan reviews Anti-Nietzsche
Costica Bradatan describes Malcolm Bull's new book, Anti-Nietzsche, as a work that is not "about" Nietzsche but one "with" Nietzsche. Writing in Times Higher Education, he praises Bull as an "excellent writer of philosophical prose" and admires his writing for the way that it
plays with Nietzschean topics andthemes...experiments with them by undermining, inflating or taking them to the extreme; in order either to validate or invalidate them, it systematically pushes them to a breaking point.
Bradatan identifies Bull as a disciple of Nietzsche, but only "in a profoundly Nietzschean sense, which means he is obliged to rebel against his master." This is something Bull openly acknowledges, suggesting that his project in this book is not to provide a "post-Nietzschean, view" (unlike other critics who he believes "appropriate Nietzsche for their own ends,") but to produce a, "post-Nietzschean anti-Nietzschean perspective" that is designed not "prevent" us from getting to Nietzsche, but to "enable us to get over him."