The theme of the animal was largely overlooked in twentieth-century Nietzsche scholarship and has only very recently started to attract attention in philosophy and the humanities.¹ This book aims to provide the first systematic treatment of the animal in Nietzsche’s philosophy as a whole. I hope to show that the animal is neither a random theme nor a metaphorical device, but rather that it stands at the center of Nietzsche’s renewal of the practice and meaning of philosophy itself.²Nietzsche’s Animal Philosophycritically reexamines Nietzsche’s views on culture and civilization, politics and morality, and history and truth based on the...

This chapter investigates the formations and transformations of human life and culture through a reevaluation of Nietzsche’s discourse on culture and civilization. The key to this discourse is to understand culture and civilization as antagonists: “Civilization and Culture: an antagonism” (KSA13:16[73]). In my view, the antagonism between culture and civilization has not been emphasized enough in discussions of Nietzsche’s philosophy of culture. One reason for this is that commentators have interpreted the significance of the dualism of culture and civilization only within the context of its nationalistic use in the German academic and political debates of the nineteenth and...

For Nietzsche, the possibility of human self-overcoming is represented by the promise of the overhuman. In this chapter, I investigate the idea of this promise through a reevaluation of Nietzsche’s distinction between promise as an artifact of civilization (the memory of the will [Gedächtnis des Willens]) and promise as an artifact of culture (the promise of the sovereign individual) (GMII: 1, 2). The promise of the overhuman has been traditionally understood to be either antipolitical or nonpolitical. While, in an antipolitical interpretation, Nietzsche figures as a precursor to totalitarian and authoritarian ideologies, in a nonpolitical interpretation, he figures as...

One of Nietzsche’s narratives about becoming overhuman takes the form of a vision of a “higher aristocracy” of the future (WP866; 898). This vision has frequently been interpreted as if Nietzsche were offering a political program that pursues the implementation of “higher culture” by means of authoritarian politics of domination and exploitation.¹ The view that a politics of domination and exploitation is a means to achieve “higher culture” presupposes that politics, as an “inferior” means of culture, can be identified with culture. From this perspective, culture and politics both pursue the same aim—an ennobling elevation of the human...

Nietzsche’s opposition to Christian morality is commonly thought to be an aspect of his immorality or nihilism. In this chapter, I argue that Nietzsche rejects Christianity in favor of a positive morality that has its source in the practice of gift-giving. Gift-giving is of great importance to Nietzsche—especially inThus Spoke Zarathustra—for its ability to promote freedom and justice. Not only does gift-giving liberate both the one who gives and the one who receives, but it is also a way to do them justice. In this sense, the virtue of gift-giving belongs to a positive conception of morality...

In this chapter, I consider one of Nietzsche’s untimely considerations (Betrachtung), “On the Use and Disadvantage of History for Life,” in order to explain the importance of animality and animal forgetfulness in Nietzsche’s conception of history.¹ In the recent literature on this essay, one can distinguish two basic interpretative approaches to Nietzsche’s remarks on animality and animal forgetfulness. The first emphasizes the difference between human and animal life, contrasting the animal’s forgetfulness and a-historicity with the human being’s memory and historicity. The second emphasizes the continuity between animal and human life, linking animal forgetfulness and a-historicity to human memory and...

Nietzsche is often perceived as being most radical when he articulates his views on truth. On these occasions, he is seen as the anti-metaphysician, the “denier of truth.”¹ Interpretations oscillate between ascribing to him a self-refuting, relativistic doctrine of truth and claiming that Nietzsche’s idea of truth remains the traditional one of correspondence to facts.² Such divergent and often mutually exclusive readings fail to acknowledge that his writings on truth cannot be reduced to a single, homogenous discourse which assumes that truth is an elementary concept, an irreducible predicate that applies in the same way to every proposition. I shall...

While it has been widely accepted that Foucault’s notions of sovereign and disciplinary power have their conceptual origin in Nietzsche’s genealogy of morals, the relation between Foucault’s notion of biopolitics and Nietzsche’s political thought has only recently entered the scholarly debate.¹ In conclusion, I would like to make a few remarks about how biopolitics can be approached through Nietzsche’s treatment of the question of animal life.² This question centers on whether (and, if so, how) the recovery of animality in Nietzsche’s philosophy contributes to an understanding of what Foucault calls the “biological threshold of modernity.”³ In my view, Nietzsche provides...