This article shows how the triumph of Socratic optimism in Nietzsche’s first book, The Birth of Tragedy, is due to a slave revolt in morality that promulgates a religious faith in the value of scientific truth. This early argument parallels his critique of the ascetic ideal that infects science in The Genealogy of Morality. I draw out the resemblance between Socrates’s martyrdom in The Birth and Jesus’s crucifixion in the Genealogy in order to illuminate how ritual human sacrifice mythically immortalizes (...) both figures, together inaugurating the ascetic ideals that Christianity will eventually unite. I discuss Nietzsche’s understanding of religious martyrdom and his explanation for the success of Christian Platonism, whose ascetic ideals ground the European value system that he is known for attacking. (shrink)

Este artículo investiga el análisis que Foucault lleva a cabo de la vida filosófica de los cínicos y de la parrêsia en El coraje de la verdad desde la perspectiva de la siguiente pregunta nietzscheana: ¿Cómo puede ser incorporada la verdad? Para considerar a la filosofía como una forma de vida y no meramente como una ciencia o una doctrina, la pregunta de cómo puede vivirse o materializarse la verdad en el cuerpo físico es, evidentemente, crucial. Mientras que tanto Foucault (...) como Arendt pueden ser leídos como defensores de la vida filosófica por sus efectos ético-políticos, Arendt sostiene que la vida filosófica socrática es una vida que habilita una distancia con el cuerpo, en contraste, en el análisis de Foucault sobre los cínicos encontramos una idea de la vida filosófica en la que la verdad se revela o manifiesta en el cuerpo material de la vida. Este artículo recoge la lógica inmunitaria de la biopolítica de Esposito con el fin de sostener que la vida filosófica de los cínicos y su hablar franco utilizan los recursos comunitarios de la encarnación para unificar la vida y la filosofía en una forma de vida cosmopolita. (shrink)

In this essay, I examine Heidegger’s interpretation of Nietzsche, focusing centrally on his understanding of the Nietzschean “body.” Nietzsche’s status as the culminating figure of Western metaphysics depends on the notion that the body, in Nietzsche’s thought, is the last Western subject. I confirm Heidegger’s sense of the importance of the Nietzschean body, and, in particular, the centrality of the word “incorporation”, to a proper understanding of Nietzsche. I argue, however, through a critique of Heidegger’s own understanding of “incorporation” in (...) Nietzsche’s work, that an investigation of the body in Nietzsche does not reveal him to be an unwilling participant in the metaphysical tradition beyond which Heidegger seeks to move; rather, we should see in the Nietzschean body a human finitude that has more resonances in Heidegger’s own thought than Heidegger would care to admit. Ultimately, I show, an investigation of the actual dynamics of the Nietzschean body, as read through the careful tracing of the word “incorporation” to which Heidegger invites us, yields a fundamentally delimited body that operates according to what we might call a kind of physiological asceticism. (shrink)