The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Two [Paperback]

This is an exciting study, that will be striking in its insights even to those who thought that they got Nietzsche long ago. What Zupancic's book brings out for me is the feeling of reading Nietzsche for the first time... while its not that her insights are shockingly new, its more that they seem shockingly not new at all, that she is alas bringing out the "real" Nietzschean insights that you maybe felt but never articulated. This book also makes nice use and comparison of the works of Weber, Lacan and Badiou among others, but in much more enlightening ways than a lot of other recent scholarship.
And its readable without having a PhD background in the stuff.

Alenka Zupancic is a researcher at the Institute Of Philosophy in Ljubjana: Zizek's old stomping grounds, and there are some similarities in her work with his, particularly with her anti-postmodern Lacanianism. However, though her writing is less flashy than Zizek, her thinking is just as exhilarating. It's tough these days to approach Nietzsche's work freshly. He has been mined as much as any philosophical figure in recent memory. There doesn't seem much ore left in those shafts. but this book finds some valuable nuggets. "The Shortest Shadow" attempts to reconsider two aspesct of Nietzche's thought The Death of God and the idea of "noon" (the time when shadows are shortest). Zupancic is an excellent reader and gives us much to consider. She stays close to her texts; and though she can be a bit difficult at times, she neither loses her focus nor ceases to be provocative. It is a book that in many ways (though is scope is much more narrow) that is almost as suggestive as Deleuze's "Nietzsche and Philosophy" -- which is high praise indeed. It is a somwhat less satisfying work than "Ethics of the Real" but is it about half the length of her first book. Is is a good book nevertheless. However, it is not a good book for an introduction into Nietzsche's thought, for that try Kaufmann's "Nietzsche: Philosophy, Psychologist, Antichrist" or Safranski "Nietzsche: A Critical Biography". Or, as I always suggest, try the primary source -- Kaufmann's "Portable Nietzsche" or "Thus Spake Zarathustra" are excellent entry points into the work of one of the greatest thinkers in philosophy.

Yes, this is THE book that breaks with the liberal-deconstructionist appropriation of Nietzsche, an appropriation that I will not hesitate to say has been as disastrous for thought as that of the Nazis. Gone is the ludic Nietzsche of multiplicitous language games and perspectives, all of which are ultimately equivalent to one another, the Nietzsche of 'truth effects' produced through the duplicitous snares of language, metaphorical figuration and the logic of grammar, the sneering knave who counteracts the debilitating pathos of metaphysics with the no-less pathetic bathos of reflexive self-deprecation, the fatalistic ironist who celebrates the evacuation of metaphysical truth through the limitless proliferation of delirious simulacra. If Nietzsche had simply remained on this side of the frontier, wouldn't he have remained within the ambit of a Kantianism that he strove to break with in definitive fashion? Wouldn't this be 'human, all-too-human', situating thought behind an insurpassable horizon of illusion and semblance? Does Nietzsche's supreme philosophical gesture amount to nothing more than a heroism of alienation, a tragic assumption that we are forever ensconced within the mire of metaphysics, a fate that we can achieve some minimal distance from by use of ironical puns, meta-critical qualifications, writing words 'sous rature' etc.? Where is the dimension of the Real in Nietzsche? Is it a noumenon radically distinct from phenomenal reality? How does Nietzsche manage to think contingency, chance and the New, the event that gives the lie to ontological closure?

Zupancic, reading Nietzsche with Lacan, gives us a Nietzsche of a radical immanence, one that is much closer to Hegel than we'd like to think. Zupancic' Nietzsche is an unflinching rationalist decisively opposed to every form of obscurantist mysticism, as well as a philosopher committed to the question of truth in an age dominated by the University Discourse of verifiable knowledge. She illuminates the shared concerns of Badiou, Nietzsche and Lacan, illustrating the ways in which a critical re-appraisal of Nietzsche can help us understand the 'aleatory materialism' (Alberto Toscano's remarkable description of Badiou's system) that is required today.

Central to Zupancic' book, which should be read alongside Badiou's 'Logics of Worlds' and Meillasoux' "After Finitude', is her demolition of the dyad that counterposes Appearance to Truth, replacing it with the axiom that truth is precisely appearance qua appearance. Or: "Nietzsche's bet on appearance is not a bet on appearance AGAINST truth; it is a bet on truth as inherent to appearance....The object is no longer external to the image or representation (so that the image could be compared to it), but inherent to it: it is the very relation of, say, a painting to itself. In other words, representation represents that which is created in the very act of representtion." The last 10 pages of the book, which clearly outline Nietzsche's conception of the contingency of necessity/the necessity of contingency (the impersonal neutrality of life/the innocence of chance that we find in Deleuze's classic account) are some of the most stirring passages that I have read in recent memory.

To read this book is to encounter Nietzsche as PHILOSOPHER once more, vanquishing , once and for all, the image of Nietzsche as artist manque, Nietzsche as a smart alecky litterateur.

› Go to Amazon.com to see all 6 reviews  4.3 out of 5 stars