Nietzsche and Philosophy

Introduction

Deleuze published the book in 1962, after a long silence following his study of Hume (1953); it helped launch a new reading of Nietzsche in France. He interprets Nietzsche through the difference between active and reactive forces and reads the will to power as the principle that determines their relation. Ressentiment, bad conscience and the ascetic ideal are victories of reactive forces; the eternal return, understood as selection, lets only what can be affirmed return. Dialectics, with its labour of the negative, is in Deleuze’s view the thinking of the slave. The book anticipates central concepts of his own later philosophy.

Connections

Builds on

• On the Genealogy of Morality1887 · Friedrich Nietzsche

Criticizes

• Science of Logic1812 · Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

More works by Gilles Deleuze

• 1968Difference and Repetition
• 1972Anti-Oedipus
• 1980A Thousand Plateaus