c.9 Feminist Readings

Derrida’s challenge is felt in gender criticisms of Nietzsche, too. The notion of ’sexual difference’ and the emphasis on ’writing’ bear testimony to this influence⁸⁷⁴. In his Éperons. Les styles de Nietzsche

(1972/1978), Derrida reads Nietzsche’s texts concentrating on the “exchange between the style and the woman of Nietzsche”. He starts from Dis-tanz, from Nietzsche’s distancing and dancing techniques of parody related to the woman’s power that she exerts by seducing from afar. On the double ground of sheltering oneself from fascination and remaining tempted by it, distance calls for distance from itself, that is, distance from distance. Derrida explains: ”There is not an essence of woman, because the woman distances and distances from herself. [...] Woman is a name for this non-truth of the truth.”⁸⁷⁵

Derrida goes on to detect the “effects” of Nietzsche’s texts. He observes that “if style was (as the penis

would be, according to Freud, “the normal prototype of the fetish”) man, writing was woman”. The heterogeneity of Nietzsche’s texts and the variation of Nietzsche’s types of woman, however, necessitate that “[t]here is, then, no truth in itself of the sexual difference in itself, of the man or the woman in itself”

but, instead, an “undecidability”.⁸⁷⁶ Derrida’s reading is being dealt with in, for instance, the anthology Nietzsche, Feminism and Political Theory (1993), where Keith Ansell-Pearson criticizes the reduction of the issue to a metaphorical discourse or to a rhetorical trope⁸⁷⁷. Kelly Ann Oliver, in turn, starts from Derrida, but develops a reading that emphasizes “Nietzsche’s woman fetishism” as but one version of the patriarchal construal of femininity. Oliver deplores, in particular, what she takes to be Nietzsche’s

stubborn insistence on the linkage between the female and the participatory and dialogic bent.⁸⁷⁸

Irigaray has been the one to elaborate the most original (feminist) reading of Nietzsche. She is said to have accused Derrida for being blinded by the presuppositions of his own reading that still tends to treat woman as “the other of the same”. Yet, Irigaray joins Derrida in dissoluting the specifically patriarchal violence of metaphysical thinking.⁸⁷⁹ In her Amante marine, Irigaray mimes Nietzschean imagery by appropriating his, and developing her own, insights of the question of the sexual difference. She writes mockingly about the forthcoming domination of “sublime discourses”, about “your only woman: the eternity”, about woman becoming an idea and idea becoming a woman⁸⁸⁰. As Ellen Mortensen - who characterizes Irigaray’s project as “an attempt at invoking this dormant, silent but still fecund reservoir of profound difference, namely the dionysian woman, or le féminin” - writes, Nietzsche projected woman in so prettified image that he “is horrified when he fathoms what her nature might be”⁸⁸¹.

Irigaray also connects what she takes to be the crucial question of the era, precisely the one concerning the ’sexual difference’, to destructive contemporary tendencies menacing “the living subject”. In

Nietzschean terms, she writes about the advanced technological consumption society as characterized by its “nihilism without any affirmation other than the reversal of already existing values”.⁸⁸²

This resembles Olivier Reboul. In his view, Nietzsche’s “scandalous” attacks against democracy and socialism contain, in any case, a remarkable insight. The process of leveling coincides with the

production of “passive consumers” freed from all creativity. As Reboul sees it, the root of the matter lies in the effacement of “differences between cultures or between humans, between the child and the adult, between the pupil and the teacher, between man and woman”. He says that Nietzsche foresaw how the

“asexual” human being and the loss of creativity will mark “a condition of inertia and death, a maximum of entropy for a minimum of information”.⁸⁸³

Diane Behler, too, notes Derrida’s work and expresses her wonderment about the scanty research done in the field. Behler’s own contribution consists in arguing that Nietzsche “seeks to discover, in the Greek

state, positive analogies to his own time”. He is likening woman to the original, the primordial, the natural. Based on this, Behler writes: ”Nietzsche sees the modern attempts at liberating woman and making her like man as denaturalization and degradation of her unique capacity and ideality, just as Nietzsche saw the Dionysian vigor to perish with the degeneration of the Greek tragedy.”⁸⁸⁴

It is to these modern movements that Nietzsche’s philosophy is, at times, contrasted. Ellen Kennedy, for one, has called Nietzsche “the founder of modern patriarchality”. She appeals to the early article by Hedwig Dohm, “Nietzsche und die Frauen” (1898), where Nietzsche’s hostility to women’s liberation movement was already denounced. Kennedy also mentions Elisabeth Förster’s pitiful rehabilitative effort, Nietzsche und die Frauen (1935).⁸⁸⁵ Yet, it has been shown that Nietzsche’s work functioned as a more positive stimulus to some early women’s rights activists. The case in point is Helene Stöcker whose career as a spokesperson for emancipatory commitment was, to a considerable degree, fueled by her awareness of Nietzsche’s philosophy. In organizations such as Bundes für Mutterschutz und

Sexualreform and Internationalen Frauenliga für Frieden und Freiheit, in the periodical Die neue Generation, as well as in her novel Liebe, she promoted the creative individual and an ethics of

reciprocal assistance. Stöcker did not see Nietzsche as a conservative chauvinist or as a social Darwinist, but as the one to have pointed the way toward the kind of agency that parts from the ideals of romantic interiority and recognizes its unconscious and material constraints in order to unite the productive powers of volition and cognition. Yet, Stöcker felt the need to move further, since Nietzsche’s philosophy could not possibly fill in the blank space that women had to take in their possession to actualize themselves.⁸⁸⁶

Indeed, the question was urgent and Nietzsche was used in the quarrels. In his 1907 book on “sexual ethics”, Christian von Ehrenfels polemicized against the radical women liberators. To back up his

critique, the author quoted a few lines from Nietzsche and passed on to portray the essential threat of the militant movement. The key words included “denial of all moral responsibility”, “”Jacobinism” of sexual revolution”, “general fall back into pagancy”, “extinction of Western culture, as well as of the white race of humans”.⁸⁸⁷

Kathleen Nutt, for her part, puts the issue as follows: ”Nietzsche’s views on women and politics are deeply troubling. Yet, perhaps more troubling still is the implicit acceptance and lack of criticism of these views by many on the left of centre philosophical community in the English-speaking world.”⁸⁸⁸ Shari Neller Starrett perceives that Nietzsche’s ponderous remarks on women have most often been diplomatically recognized only in order to minimize their import⁸⁸⁹. Staten agrees that Nietzsche’s

“misogyny or gynophobia” is, dubiously, seen as “peripheral” or “irrelevant to strictly philosophical questions”, even though “nothing is more deeply rooted in the totality of Nietzsche’s text than the

gynophobia”⁸⁹⁰. Carol Diethe stresses that Nietzsche’s utterances on women cannot be explained away as sexist jokes or slips of the tongue. His view of woman is a combination of extra-rational motherhood and sex. Nietzsche’s stance is, in Diethe’s view, either aggressive or defensive and he fails to solve this ambiguity in any other way than by constructing a noble man.⁸⁹¹

Ofelia Schutte has thematized the question of woman as a general tension in Nietzsche’s work. She says that there is, in Nietzsche and in the situation he termed as “the death of god”, two opposing thrusts. One points to a new patriarchy and increasing domination. The other is a liberating orientation towards post-dualistic and post-alienative existence. Whereas the latter is, for Schutte, the more fundamental, the former became, in her view, more prominent in Nietzsche.⁸⁹² Gayle L. Ormiston says that “[a]t first blush, Nietzsche appears to be a raging misogynist in addition to being a raging madman. Such a reading of Nietzsche’s text cannot be ignored.”⁸⁹³ Recently, it has been proposed that Nietzsche did try to break through from all dualisms, including the one between man and woman, but grammatical constraints made it exceedingly difficult. According to this reading, Nietzsche’s misogynist enunciations were a part of the old language that he wished to abolish.⁸⁹⁴

An early commentator said that it is no use to ask, with respect to this thinker, où est la femme?, since the “great, unhappy love” of his life “was no woman, but music [...] that inflamed his hottest affects”⁸⁹⁵. Another one ventured to analyze later that Nietzsche “was afraid of women, but he rationalized this fear by saying that man should have a whip in his relationship with the opposite sex”⁸⁹⁶. Referring to the whip quotation, from a line of an elderly woman character in Zarathustra, as the inevitable Nietzsche anecdote to crop up in casual conversations, Wilhelm Weischedel sees it best to instruct how “entirely false” is the impression that it gives of Nietzsche’s utterly shy attitude to women⁸⁹⁷.

Lawrence J. Hatab cannot help but boast when he is about to “even attempt the impossible: argue for Nietzsche’s “feminism”!” To bring about this, he makes the following observation: ”Western culture values knowledge over mystery, reason over instinct, technology over nature. Nietzsche’s thoughts on woman present a defence of, and in some ways a preference for certain sub-cultural forces, the denial of which leads to alienation, weakness and sickness”. Hatab goes on to argue that Nietzsche takes “the creator-type” to be “an androgynous mix of masculine and feminine traits”.⁸⁹⁸