Abstract

For the most part, discussions on Nietzsche's relation to the "feminine"/"woman" range from Ofelia Schutte's vehemence that Nietzsche "maintains what can be characterized fundamentally as an antifeminist position both on gender difference and on the issue of social and political equality" to David Farrell Krell's attempt at a more sympathetic reading of Nietzsche as someone who "writes with the hand of woman." For schematic purposes, four general warring camps of readers seem to emerge: those who believe Nietzsche's writings are essentially feminist; those who believe Nietzsche's writings are at least potentially useful to feminism; those who maintain that Nietzsche's writings are irrecuperably misogynist; and those for whom a possible connection between Nietzsche and feminism is not even a mentionable or speculative issue. ;In opposition to such approaches, what I do is a more genealogical or developmental approach, involving the use of a larger frame of investigation employing a horizontal and vertical analysis rather than an in-depth examination of only one or two specific texts, as many readers of Nietzsche have tended to. Notwithstanding the observation that Nietzsche admittedly displays a type of misogynism, I am more concerned with interpreting his peculiar misogyny via symptomatological criteria that he himself establishes. While other scholars seem to have focused on classifying the degree of offensiveness of Nietzsche's ambivalent and developing misogyny, I attempt an approach that seeks to examine what this misogyny means for his political philosophy as a whole. Ultimately, in this study, I employ a Nietzschean critique of Nietzsche--using his own symptomatological "art of interpretation" to track the way his initial use of "feminine" mythological anthropomorphisms as figures for modernity's regenerative powers, indicative of his early political optimism, gradually gives way to an increasingly pessimistic and misogynistic politic, resulting in the silencing and emasculation of his earlier figure-ations of the "feminine."