Review: Review
Author(s): Keith Ansell-Pearson
Review by: Keith Ansell-Pearson
Source: Journal of Nietzsche Studies, No. 40 (AUTUMN 2010), pp. 82-84
Published by: Penn State University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/jnietstud.1.40.0082
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BOOK REVIEWS
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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” (1). This involves Lemm in a wide-ranging treatment
of key motifs in Nietzsche’s corpus, including illuminating his views on culture and civilization,
morality and politics, history, forgetfulness and memory, and truth. For her the human being is part
of the continuum of animal life, and, in part, she takes her inspiration from the pioneering work of
Margot Norris in her book Beasts of Modern Imagination. In Norris the author finds a new approach
to culture that is “biocentric,” that is, it is thought from the perspective of “life.” For Norris there is a
biocentric tradition of thought that includes Nietzsche and in which these thinkers—Kafka is another
example—do not create “like” the animal or in imitation of it but, rather, “as” the animal, with their
“animality” fully alive and speaking. As Lemm acknowledges, this is a contentious approach to
problems of culture and civilization simply because it is contesting the widespread Enlightenment
and humanist view that what makes culture distinctive is the way it separates the human from the
animal and sees culture as the task of civilizing the human animal into a moral and rational one.
With this focus, however, on “life,” this privileging of humanity over animality is reversed and the
human is given back its repressed animality.
The critical question to ask is whether this is indeed an “enlightening” move to make and whether
it accurately captures what is taking place in Nietzsche’s philosophy with respect to questions of
humanity and animality. Lemm is aware of the dangers of her perspective and endeavors to steer
an approach that avoids the main ones, including the “biologism” of a materialist approach and the
anthropomorphism of a spiritualist approach. For her the error of a biologistic approach is that, while
taking into account the intimate relationship of human and animal life, it fails to provide an exegesis
of the meaning and significance of culture except in terms of survival and self-preservation (not core
values in Nietzsche, as is well known). The spiritualist approach cannot do justice to the physiology
of life, and here Lemm contends that Nietzsche’s reliance on physiology does not denote a crude
scientism—the application of mechanical or chemical causality to inert matter—but, rather, requires
a genealogy that is able to capture the “spiritual historicity” expressed in physiology.
Throughout the work Lemm skillfully negotiates these various antinomies and shows herself
to be an astute and mature reader of Nietzsche. There is an abundance of genuinely fresh insights
running throughout the text, and even when she deals with seemingly all-too-familiar material,
such as the second untimely meditation or the “Truth and Lies” essay, she has novel and arresting
things to say. This also extends to her appreciation of the figure of the “sovereign individual” in GM,
which provides one of the best readings of GM II:1–2 I have come across in the recent literature.
As she notes, the promise of the sovereign individual has traditionally been understood either as
antipolitical or as nonpolitical with the emphasis on individual perfectionism. Contra these readings,
Lemm seeks to show that in the figure of the sovereign individual Nietzsche provides an idea of
freedom (as responsibility) that intimately concerns the political life of human animals. For her the
primary feature of human development is the antagonism and agonism between human and animal
life forces. The restoration of animality to humanity is liberating: “When humankind defines itself
against its animality or denies its animality a productive role, forms of political life emerge based
on domination and exploitation of humans by humans” (5). One of the striking features of the
work is the extent to which it seeks to divorce Nietzsche’s thinking from being an advocate of an
authoritarian politics (of the domination and exploitation of humans). Chapter 4 is a riveting and
remarkable chapter, on giving and forgiving, in which Lemm brings Nietzsche into rapport with
the likes of Hannah Arendt and Jacques Derrida on the gift-giving virtue. Here she is at her best,
showing the extent to which Nietzsche’s politics is one of generosity and hospitality in which the
“other” is not reduced to being a mere permutation of the self.
Lemm does not pursue a chronological approach in her appreciation of Nietzsche, and for me
this is one of the weaknesses of the book. She starts with GM and culminates with chapters on “On
the Use and Disadvantage of History for Life” and “On Truth and Lies in an Extra-Moral Sense.”
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BOOK REVIEWS
Her approach has a tendency to collapse into one seamless whole the different and disparate parts
of Nietzsche’s corpus in which there are real and serious tensions, as well as reversals and overcomings, sometimes within the same block of writings (e.g., the free spirit trilogy I would contend).
Lemm reads as unproblematic, for example, Nietzsche’s position in Human, All Too Human that
because everything is necessity then all is innocent. However, I would contend, it is possible to
see in this position a certain nihilism that the later Nietzsche was concerned to overcome. In HH
Nietzsche advises us not to judge but to be just (to imitate Christ, in effect); in the 1886 preface
to the text, however, he recognizes that injustice is inseparable from life, and the task of justice
thus becomes that much more difficult and a question of perspectivism. I am also troubled by the
way Lemm divides “civilization” and “culture,” with the latter being concerned with cultivation
and education and the former, with taming and breeding. Where civilization aims to morally and
rationally “improve” the human animal, culture for her aims to bring forth new forms of life, which
are not forms of power over animal life but overflowing with life. This is incisive but neglectful,
it seems to me, of the positive role breeding plays in Nietzsche’s late philosophy. Lemm sees in
Nietzsche a “politics” and a philosophy of spontaneous animal energies, vital forgetfulness, and
exuberant life, all of which is seen to work against a politics of control, calculation, prediction,
and engineering. This, however, underestimates one important aspect of Nietzsche’s late thinking
on culture and politics, namely, the need to take control of the future and to engineer it—see, for
example, his remarks on what could be bred in BGE 203 given the proper masterful conditions of
philosophical hegemony and political legislation.
Finally, what of the plausibility of the reading of Nietzsche’s philosophy as animal philosophy?
I have to say I am not convinced ultimately that Nietzsche is as remote from Enlightenment and
humanist traditions as Lemm thinks. Here one could point to the middle-period Nietzsche, where
he clearly thinks that the liberation of the human being requires an emancipation from its animal
ancestry (see, e.g., WS 350). One could also lay stress on what Nietzsche says in “Schopenhauer as
Educator” (of which Lemm is a first-rate reader). On the one hand, the human feeds productively
on its own animality (e.g., animal vigor and the power of forgetting); on the other hand, it enjoys
a supreme advantage over the animal in that it is able to understand its existence metaphysically.
The animal by contrast is the site of “senseless suffering” since it is subject to hunger and desires
without having any insight into the nature of this mode of life: “To cling so blindly and madly to
life, for no higher reward, far from knowing that one is punished or why one is punished in this way,
but instead to thirst with the inanity of a horrible desire for precisely this punishment as though it
were happiness—that is what it means to be an animal” (SE 5). Surely, this is a highly lamentable
and dreadful condition humanity has the evolutionary potential to transcend or overcome. Lemm
is aware of this section in SE and reads around it (see 52). She tries to ingeniously interpret the
passage not as indicating a removal of humanity from its animal heritage but, rather, as a specific
reference to the animality of the civilized human being or an animal defined by its attachment to
a life of mere self-preservation. I am not convinced by this. This does not deny, of course, her
ensuing insight that Nietzsche also prizes throughout his writings the return of an animality that
is overfull with life.
In conclusion, let me stress the rich and richly instructive character of this book. I have greatly
enjoyed and admired the essays on Nietzsche Lemm has been publishing in recent years. Now with
this book she consolidates her reputation as one of Nietzsche’s most original, attentive, and lively
readers. It is quite simply a superb book and one of the most thought-provoking I have read for some
time. It is both lucid and engaging and can be highly recommended.
University of Warwick
keith.ansellpearson@btinternet.com
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