This article aims to develop transvaluation as a practice of metaphysical thinking. Jesus, Anselm, Nietzsche, and Deleuze have been selected and juxtaposed, for all their contrasts, as paradigmatic thinkers of transvaluation. Jesus offers the best paradigm for transvaluing what matters, what is sincere, and what is trustworthy: his response to a dispute among his disciples poses the problem that changes the signification, value, and binding force of thought. The metaphysical purport of Jesus's problem is clarified by Anselm's restatement (...) of it, set against the backdrop of the contemplative spirituality expressed in the first chapter of Anselm's Proslogion. Anselm leaves us with a pair of problems: what is that than which none greater can be conceived? What is that whose very thought involves existence? These problems provide a context for rethinking the paradigms of transvaluation presented in Nietzsche's writing. Yet it was Deleuze who first presented transvaluation as an explicit method in his interpretation of Nietzsche, describing a metaphysics arising in and through critique. His method may itself be given a transvalued significance oriented, in turn, by the problems presented by Jesus and Anselm. (shrink)

This study traces the transvaluations or transformations in value and meaning Nietzsche's work underwent during the first century of its reception in France. These transvaluations, Smith argues, resulted as various critics, both within and outside the philosophical establishment, contested Nietzsche's theories. He offers a historical perspective on the continuing importance of Nietzsche's work to contemporary debates within the arenas of philosophy and critical theory.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Transvaluations: Nietzsche in France, 1872–1972 by Douglas SmithAlan D. SchriftDouglas Smith. Transvaluations: Nietzsche in France, 1872–1972. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. Pp. xiii + 250. Cloth, $67.00.In a letter to his friend Heinrich Köselitz, Nietzsche described himself as “a battlefield more than a human being.” Douglas Smith appropriately frames his survey of Nietzsche’s reception in France with this image, noting that several significant transformations mark the first hundred (...) years of Nietzsche’s French reception. Perhaps more to the point, Smith argues that the contesting readings of Nietzsche’s works represent other conflicts, both philosophical, institutional, and political. The result is an interesting, albeit selective, narrative that seeks to tell a coherent story of the twists and turns in Nietzsche’s French reception from 1872—the year The Birth of Tragedy was published—to 1972—the year of the Nietzsche conference at Cerisy that Smith takes as the apogee of the sixties Nietzsche revival. As Smith wisely notes, Nietzsche’s works lend themselves to widely divergent readings; he also implies the same may be true of the history of his reception.Several interpretive assumptions guide Smith’s narrative; three are most central. First, the “transvalutions” of Nietzsche’s works are themselves supported by Nietzsche’s own “continual interrogation of identity—of the self, of the nation, of culture” (7). As Nietzsche continually called identity into question, the identity of his own texts were contested, and Smith shows how the political and philosophical left and right exploited Nietzsche’s reliance on metaphor to give themselves the task of constructing a coherent meaning for Nietzsche’s texts, a task discharged with progressively “closer,” more “immanent” readings of those texts. [End Page 477]Smith’s second assumption concerns the shifting privilege given to Nietzsche’s two major themes, as the century witnesses a transformation from an emphasis on will to power to eternal recurrence as the central theme. This transformation is conjoined with another, as attention to the ethical questions posed by Nietzsche’s works is replaced by questions concerning Nietzsche’s relationship to the history of metaphysics as its end or reversal. For Smith, these transformations reflect a shift from Nietzsche’s early reception—framed primarily by European political events (first the Franco-Prussian War, then the two World Wars)—to his later reception, framed primarily by French responses to German philosophy. This leads to Smith’s third and guiding assumption, namely, that Nietzsche’s French reception has throughout been a response first to Hegel and then to Heidegger.Smith’s narrative unfolds in five chapters. The first focuses on the “early reception” (1872–1929) and divides neatly into two periods: an initial period emphasizing Nietzsche’s biography (as friend of Wagner, follower of Schopenhauer), and a second period dominated by questions of national interest that move from valorization of Nietzsche’s polemics against German culture to his vilification as a reflection of Prussian militarism. The second chapter discusses Nietzsche’s reception vis-à-vis National Socialism: here we see the first tension between readings centering on eternal recurrence vs. those focused on will to power, as the French right followed the vitalist Nazi emphasis on will to power, while the left (Lefebvre, Bataille) drew greater attention to eternal recurrence.The third chapter is somewhat unexpected, as it follows the Nietzsche-Hegel connection invoked by the “left” readings’ attention to contradiction to a discussion of decolonization that focuses on Sartre, Fanon, and Lévi-Strauss before concluding with an oddly situated discussion of Foucault. While much of this chapter is quite interesting, the attempt to read the disagreements between Sartre and first Fanon and then Lévi-Strauss as, in some sense, playing out a relationship between Hegel and Nietzsche (universal/particular) seems forced at times. In addition, Foucault’s reading of singularity as a way of reading Nietzsche into Fanon both mutes the substantive differences between Fanon and Sartre and insufficiently appreciates the depth of Nietzsche’s impact on Foucault’s early work (for example, there is no discussion of the role Nietzsche plays in The Order of Things).The final two chapters focus on post-1960s reception. In the fourth chapter, Deleuze’s... (shrink)

Anselm's Proslogion developed its famous argument through meditation on a single formula: ‘Now we believe that You are something than which nothing greater can be thought’. This article aims to re-enact such a meditation under changed conditions, bringing out a different sense of metaphysical dependence. That which cannot be thought without existing can now be located in (a) what really matters, (b) what is truly sincere, and (c) what is ultimately trustworthy. Once conceived as metaphysical problems, these offer a fresh (...) route into comprehending a metaphysical God who truly exists: a Christian Platonism, transvalued. The purpose of this article is introductory: to offer a route into this renewed way of thinking, rather than a comprehensive elaboration or a scholarly assessment of Anselm. (shrink)

Nietzsche's strengths as a critic are widely acknowledged, but his peculiar style of critique is usually ignored as rhetoric, or dismissed as violent or simply incoherent. In this book, Nietzsche's concept of the agon or Wettkampf, a measured and productive form of conflict inspired by ancient Greek culture, is advanced as the dynamic and organising principle of his philosophical practice, enabling us to make sense of his critical confrontations and the much disputed concept of transvaluation or Umwertung. Agonal perspectives (...) are cast on a number of key problems in his thought across a broad range of texts. Topics and problems treated include: critical history and the need for a limit in the negation of the past; Nietzsche contra Socrates and the problem of closure; Nietzsche contra humanism and the problem of humanity; Nietzsche contra Kant on genius and legislation; the problem of self-legislation in relation to life and temporality; Nietzsche's sense of community in its articulation with law, and the normativity of taste; ressentiment and the question of therapy in Nietzsche and Freud; and the problem of total affirmation in relation to critique. (shrink)

에피쿠로스는 쾌락을 위해 욕망을 줄이는 삶의 방식을 제시한 쾌락주의자 혹은 윤리학자라는 지위에 여전히 머물러있다. 하지만 니체 철학과 에피쿠로스 철학이 주요한 지점에서 특징을 공유하고 있으며 이를 토대로 에피쿠로스 철학이 새로운 의미를 가질 수 있음을 충분히 밝혀낼 수 있다. 따라서 본 논문에서는 에피쿠로스 철학이 형이상학적 관점에서 초월 세계를 지향하는 삶과 경험 세계에서의 삶의 가치 전도를 시도했다는 점에서 니체 철학과 연관성이 있음을 드러내고자 한다. 이 작업은 먼저 니체가 에피쿠로스에 대해 긍정적으로 혹은 부정적으로 평가한 구절들을 검토한 뒤에, 에피쿠로스의 윤리학과 자연학, 특히 원자론에서 발견할 수 (...) 있는 에피쿠로스의 철학적 태도를 살펴보는 과정으로 이루어질 것이다. 이를 통해 니체 철학과 에피쿠로스 철학에서 함께 나타나는 특징이 무엇인지 확인하고, 그리고 에피쿠로스 철학이 니체의 관점에서 어떤 형이상학적 의미를 갖게 되는지를 밝혀낼 것이다. (shrink)

This article argues that language without the body does not `mean' at all; corporeality provides language with meaning under socio-cultural constraints. Traditional ways of interpretation have been dominated by the transference of linguistic interpretation to the non-linguistic. At the same time, traditional linguistically focused interpretation is heavily laden with orthodox value systems. This makes the body a secondary phenomenon. In many art forms, however, the body is primary and yet transient. This requires a reversal of traditional approaches. Recent liminal performances (...) have attempted to offer a non-verbal critique of both that linguistic dominance and such value orthodoxy. Unless the immediacy of the body, including corporeal readings (visual, tactile, haptic, olfactory, gustatory, kinetic, proximic, etc.) is made the focus of interpretation, such recent experimental genres as Viennese Actionism, Tanztheater, digitized music, high-definition television and its filmic consequences, cannot be appreciated. However, I suggest it would be a mistake to read their presentations of the immediacy of the body as an escape from representation altogether. Rather, what we are dealing with here is a radical transvaluation of corporeality. The article questions some recent theories from this perspective, using selected excerpts from liminal performances to illustrate this critique. (shrink)

Like most goods‐producing sectors in the West, modern health‐care systems have been profoundly changed by globalization and the neoliberal policies that attend it. Since the 1970s, the role of the welfare state has been considerably reduced; funding and management of health systems have been subjected to wave upon wave of reorganization and assimilated to the private sector. At the same time, neoliberal policy has imposed the notion of patient empowerment, thus turning patients into consumers of health. The literature on nursing (...) has accordingly reported on the significant repercussions on all aspects of the profession, from delivery of care and treatment, through training for new nurses, to legislated policy reforms regarding the role and responsibilities of modern nurses. In light of these developments, this paper analyses and theorizes about the way the injection of neoliberal policy is linked to and affects the practice of nursing. Drawing on a number of Nietzschean arguments, we begin with an exploration of the complex effects of neoliberalism, bureaucratization, and technocratization on the health system and the practice of nursing. Our main theoretical point here is that neoliberal policy engenders and promotes a neoliberal tide, which results in the conversion of the values that drive modern nursing practice. We then examine this tide in the light of Nietzsche's concepts. Starting with an analysis based on the ontology of the will to power, we show that nurses are dominated by neoliberal values embedded in technocratic and bureaucratic ideologies. Finally, we argue that the application of neoliberal policy constitutes a form of domestication from which one might potentially be freed through the Nietzschean concept of transvaluation of values. This transvaluation, as its freeing from some of the neoliberal tide, may be accomplished in accordance with a hierarchy of specific life‐affirming values for nursing culture and practice. (shrink)

I argue that Diogenes and early Cynicism can be understood in an explicitly social and political context, where Cynic praxis, performative public action, can be seen to make visible oppositions inherent to the polity. In doing so, Diogenes’ praxis should be understood as a form of immanent critique, one that demonstrates, for example, that nature and custom are interrelated oppositions in the polis. Cynicism here is understood as a form of immanent critique because Diogenes challenges the social norms of the (...) polis without endorsing external universal standards or predetermined models, but from illuminating dynamics from within the polis and polity. (shrink)

Normal 0 21 false false false ES X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Tabla normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} The idea that is possible to produce new forms of subjectivity, trough an intelligent use of expression, has been recurring in modern and contemporary literature. Fiction, in this sense, has played a central role in the (des)construction (...) of national identities. Even if programmatically he always stud up on the antipodes of literary commitment, in his youth Borges saw in art a «political compensatory function » of this type. Namely, he claimed that, in order to escape from the tight spots in which we get enclosed, literature can help us in the work of reinvent ourselves as individual and collective subjects. Using concepts from Deleuze and Foucault, Ranciére and Burgoyne, this article tries to analyze that secret borgean politics, as a case study of a wider aspiration of literature to operate on the agency of the forms we have to say «I» and «Us». (shrink)

Abstract:This article investigates Ahn Changho's notion of 'mutual love', the central features of which present a picture of society in which the selfish desires of free-spirited individuals can be regulated through the self-cultivation of mutual love. Specifically, first, by analyzing Ahn Changho's reconfiguration of the Confucian ideal of parent-child intimacy with mutual love, I will argue that his notion of mutual love sheds light on a hybrid imaginary of modernity that cannot be reduced to either the anti-Western rehabilitation of Confucian (...) 'filial piety' or the pro-Western adaptation of 'individuality'. Second, scrutinizing Ahn Changho's empirical criticism of early modern Korea, which has been termed 'the absence of mutual love', it is proposed that his pragmatic vision of individuality is shaped through non-domination as an alternative to the Weberian framework of modernization in which the processes of individualization and rationalization are unduly opposed to those of cultivating a commonality in a society. (shrink)

The Enlightenment is generally painted as a movement of ideas and society lasting from the late seventeenth to the early nineteenth century, but this book argues that the Enlightenment is an essential component of modernity itself and in fact can be seen to have lasted from the late sixteenth century to the present day. In the course of the study, Martin Davies offers an original world-view and a critique of some recent interpretations of the Enlightenment.

This paper examines the therapeutic implications of Nietzsche's critique of ressentiment and revenge as our signature malady. §I examines the obstacles to a therapeutic reading of Nietzsche's thought, including his anti-teleological tendencies and the value he places on sickness. Then there is the energetic problem of finding resources to tackle ressentiment, given the volitional exhaustion of modern nihilism. Finally, the self-referential implications of Nietzsche's critique of slave values threaten to trap his thought in a futile ressentiment against ressentiment. If the (...) impulse to cure or redeem us from revenge through critical destruction repeats the logic of revenge, then the challenge for a therapeutic reading is to think through the transformation of revenge on the basis of repetition.An agonal reading of Nietzsche's philosophical practice is proposed to tackle these problems in §II. (shrink)

This chapter aims to articulate the motivation behind an insurrectionist philosophy. On this account, insurrectionist philosophy is about rejecting a world (and its norms and intervening background assumptions) and creating the possibility for transvaluation or a radical revolution of values. To shed light on this, McBride offers an account of Leonard Harris’s idiosyncratic philosophy born of strife and struggle, clarifying the role of Alain Locke’s critical pragmatism and the insurrectionist spirit needed to disavow the conventional norms and the intervening (...) background assumptions that lurk tacitly behind the dominant order of things. (shrink)

. This paper discusses the transformative power of aesthetic narrative within the framework of Nietzsche’s theory of transvaluation. The transformative power of creative narrative is the power to give meaning to life’s activity by keeping ahead of forces that would deny it. The power of aesthetic transvaluation plays a fundamental role in the dynamic of the resistance movement that sprang from the Gezi Park sit-ins. The movement erupted with an aesthetic intensity that surprised detractors as well as supporters, (...) employing aesthetic creativity in a way that sets it apart from other protests in Turkey and the Arab world. On several levels, the young movement has become a form of artistic protest. Striking parallels are found in Nietzsche’s aesthetic claim that the existential transformation of one’s narrative is the principle aim of the artist and the dynamic action of the people in Turkey who resist what they feel is an encroachment on their democratic rights and their way of life. The point of the essay, however, is not merely to illustrate the parallels. It is to examine how aesthetic imagination plays a role in forming a narrative that conjures meaning solely through creative fiat, showing how the power of transvaluation is manifested in the Gezi Park resistance. (shrink)

Nothing reveals the differences between an internal (i.e., inherently pedagogical) reflection on educational processes and an external (i.e., derived from a philosophical, sociological, psychological, theological or other perspective) more clearly than the differing attitudes towards alienation. Looked at from outside a pedagogical context, alienation appears only negative, deserving nothing but contempt and rejection; examined from inside a pedagogical framework, it proves to be a conditio sine qua non, the process through which transformative education is possible. This article juxtaposes both perspectives (...) in order to defend the conviction that within educational reflections, only an inherently pedagogical, i.e., positive, understanding of alienation is persuasive, whereas other approaches by definition either are outside of pedagogical reflections or belong to a kind of metaphysical thinking that nowadays seems rather outdated. This paper forms part of a Special Issue titled ‘Beyond Virtue and Vice: Education for a Darker Age’, in which the editors invited authors to engage in exercises of ‘transvaluation’. Certain apparently settled educational concepts (from agency and fulfilment to alienation and ignorance) can be radically reinterpreted such that virtues can be seen as vices, and vices as virtues. The editors encouraged authors to employ polemics and some occasional exaggeration to revalue the educational values that are too readily accepted within contemporary educational discourses. (shrink)

In this article we aim to support the thesis that Nietzsche, from his first work The Birth of Tragedy, to his last texts, such as Twilight of the Idols, in What I owe to the ancients, proposes a radical transvaluation of the meaning of suffering human. He adopts a completely different perspective from Western metaphysical and religious conceptions, which considered suffering as an objection to life, arising from faults, failures, “sins”, which must be expiated through countless constraints, until inexorable (...) death. The nietzschean transvaluation, with its unique tragic perspective, inaugurated in The Birth of Tragedy and sustained throughout his entire work, far from considering suffering as an objection or imperfection of existence, values it and even exalts it as another modality of becoming. vital, consubstantial and inherent in every affirmation, every pleasure, every possibility of joy. (shrink)

The indoctrination debates have been a key feature of the philosophy of education over the past 50 years. While it is generally acknowledged that the pejorative associations of indoctrination only emerged over the last 100 years, those normative associations are widely taken to be an essential part of the concept itself as are the positive connotations of education. I explore some of the problems of assuming that the term must refer to something negative and the essentialism that this implies. The (...) attempt to ‘transvaluate’ indoctrination results in the claim that the concept is virtually indistinguishable from education. Drawing on Ivan Snook's Indoctrination and Education, I examine several candidates for indoctrination to show that the pejorative label is not a good fit. I argue that much of what is framed as indoctrination turns out to be either impossible–implausible or necessary–inevitable; the fact that there is scarcely a gap between these extremes should give us pause to wonder about this term and its relation to education: By providing a term for those influences of which we generally disapprove, does the concept of indoctrination act as a way for educationalists to uphold and protect the normative view of education (that education must aim for something intrinsically worthwhile)?Eds.: This paper forms part of a Special Issue entitled ‘Beyond Virtue and Vice: Education for a Darker Age’ in which the editors invited authors to engage in exercises of ‘transvaluation’. Certain apparently settled educational concepts (from agency and fulfilment to alienation and ignorance) can be reinterpreted and transvaluated (in a Nietzschean vein) such that virtues become vices, and vices, virtues. The editors encouraged authors to employ polemics and some occasional exaggeration to reimagine educational values that are all too readily accepted within contemporary educational discourses. (shrink)

Irigaray's critique of the phallocentric subject's implicit dependence on the maternal-feminine “outside” is compelling. Her postulation of nonhierarchical sexual difference gives the relational world of woman specificity and Irigaray brings the subject's worldview to earth as merely the relation of the male human to the world. But the focus of her transvaluation remains largely anthropocentric; and she maintains too many aspects of the privilege of the subject's sovereignty as proper to male subjectivity. I suggest that, we need to extend (...) Irigaray and to think sexual difference beyond the human. Drawing from Elizabeth Grosz, Gilles Deleuze, Henri Bergson and Jakob Von Uexküll, I argue that we need to think life beyond the constitution of the organism as the continuous enmeshment of different milieus. Sexual difference is a force of differentiation that articulates relationships between organisms and organs as crucial aspects of many milieus that make up the Earth. Along with the sexually differentiated aspects of milieus, there are rhythms of difference constitutive of milieus that are not sexed. The first section of the essay describes Irigaray's conceptualization of sexual difference between humans. Then I turn to her engagement with the status of nonhuman animals in “Animal Compassion.” I suggest her approach in this essay is too anthropocentric and move to a discussion of Uexküll's thinking on milieus as a way to extend the concepts of difference and sexual difference into posthuman contexts. The essay concludes by reading Irigaray's concept of difference with Deleuze and Bergson. (shrink)

Since writing his For the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche has been developing a project marked by an increasingly radical distrust of the fundamental bases of culture. This project has even reverberated in several epistolary exchanges with Georg Brandes, of which the one on December 2, 1887 stands out, with the expression “Aristocratic Radicalism.” Aristocracy can be inferred from the philosopher’s criticism of the entire gregarious dimension, through which culture is marked. And, as a response, Nietzsche, in the Posthumous of 1887, (...) presents the virtue that is affirmed in the will to dominate. In the course of this work it will be observed to what extent Nietzsche’s effort for this conception of transvalued virtue, that is, stripped of morality, is capable of contributing to the political project of domination and overcoming. The very notion of aristocracy has, in its dimension of radicalism, virtue as the will to dominate, one of its differences. Would this virtue be understood exclusively as strength, and therefore devoid of morality, informed by Christianity as a civilizing project? (shrink)

By denying to vegetal life the core values of autonomy, individualization, self-identity, originality, and essentiality, traditional philosophy not only marginalizes plants but, inadvertently, confers on them a crucial role in the current transvaluation of metaphysical value systems. From the position of absolute exteriority and heteronomy, vegetation accomplishes a living reversal of metaphysical values and points toward the collapse of hierarchical dualisms.

While Foucault’s work on biopolitics continues to inspire diverse studies in a variety of disciplines, it has largely been missing from the debates on the possibility of “affirmative biopolitics” which have been primarily influenced by the work of Agamben and Esposito. This article restores Foucault’s work to these debates, proposing that his final lecture course at the Collège de France in 1983–1984 developed a paradigm of affirmative biopolitics in the reading of the Cynic practice of truth-telling. The Cynic problematization of (...) the relation between truth and life and their transvaluation of conventional truths by relocating them to the domain of bare life not only seeks to transform one’s life in accordance with the truth but also, through the confrontation with the existing conventions and norms, to transform the world as such. Cynic parrhesia is thus biopolitical, insofar as it reclaims the power of one’s life from the social order and its rationalities of government and applies it to oneself, investing one’s existence with truth. Since Foucault developed this reading of Cynicism in the context of his political engagement on behalf on East European dissidents, the article proceeds to analyse the resonances between parrhesia and Václav Havel’s idea of “living within the truth,” elaborating the biopolitical significance of both practices. We conclude by addressing the implications of our interpretation for Foucault scholarship and the wider debates on biopolitics. (shrink)

In the mid-1980s, Richard Rorty debated aspects of Jean-François Lyotard’s evolving theories of language and politics, embracing the latter’s critique of metanarratives as forms of metaphysics we should discard but rejecting Lyotard’s claims about the incommensurability of language games. Largely overlooked was the force of Lyotard’s critique of the transvaluation of knowledge in the emerging digital age, canvased in The Postmodern Condition. This article revisits the encounter between these thinkers to reconstruct the more central challenge that Lyotard’s theory posed (...) to Rorty’s pragmatic politics and to liberal cosmopolitanism more broadly. Lyotard’s work was prescient in detailing an emerging technological order in which ideals of tolerance and solidarity in the form of Rortian translation and redescription come into conflict with imperatives of performativity, profit-seeking, and power – fostering dominance rather than universal progress. The article concludes by drawing implications of the encounter for current scholarship on Rorty and political theory. (shrink)

This paper explores the Eichmann trial in its dimension as a living, powerful event, whose impact is defined and measured by the fact that it is "not the same for all." I examine this legal event from two perspectives: Hannah Arendt's and my own. I pledge my reading against Arendt's, in espousing the State's vision of the trial, but in interpreting the legal meaning of this vision us one that exceeds its own deliberateness and distinct from the State's ideology. I (...) use Nietzsche's terms to contrast "critical history" with "monumental history." Whereas the official State vision of the trial is, I propose, precisely one of "monumental history, " Arendt's vision offers a substitutive "critical history." I analyze, one against the other, what I call the monumental legal vision of the Eichmann trial and the critical vision offered by Arendt. Exploring thus the monumental versus the critical as two opposed but non-exclusive and, in fact, profoundly complementary perspectives, I examine, side by side, the Eichmann trials' monumental focus on the victims and Arendt's critical objections to this focus: her objections, I show, are based in a jurisprudential conservatism coexisting with a historiographical radicalism. The Eichmann trial, in my view, is on the contrary and diametrically, historiographically conservative, but jurisprudentially revolutionary. I argue that Arendt failed to see the way in which the trial in effect did not simply repeat the victim's story, but historically created it for the first time. I submit, in other words, that the Eichmann trial legally created a radically original and new event: not a rehearsal of a given story, but a groundbreaking narrative event that is itself historically and legally unprecedented. Examining the trial's transformation of victims into prosecution witnesses, I analyze the victim-oriented focus of the trial as s legal process of translation of private traumas into public ones and as a public scene of the recovery of language and legal subjecthood by victims who were formerly defined by the oppressor's language and who were, therefore, not just injured, but essentially robbed of a language in which to articulate their injury and name their victimization. I argue that the Eichmann trial expanded the space available for moral deliberation in creating a new legal language: the trial was the victim's trial only insofar as it was now the victims who, against all odds, were precisely writing their own history. To enable such a writing, the Eichmann trial had to enact not simply memory, but memory as change. It had to dramatize upon its legal stage before the audience nothing less than a conceptual revolution in the victim. And this, in fact, is what the trial did This historically unprecedented revolution in the victim that was operated in and by the Eichmann trial is, I suggest, the trial's major contribution not only to Jews, but to history, to law, to culture - to humanity at large. I further argue that as a singular legal event, the Eichmann trial calls for a rethinking - and sets in motion a transvaluation - of the structures and the values of conventional criminal law. I submit that the quintessence of the Eichmann trial is the acquisition of semantic authority by victims. It was the newly acquired semantic and historical authority of this revolutionary story that, for the first time, created what we know today as the Holocaust: a theme of international discussion and world conversation designating the experience of the victims and referring to the crime against the Jewish people independently from the political and military story of the Second World War. (shrink)

This paper, while not presenting a general discussion of authority in education, attempts to uncover some of the anomalies, paradoxes and tensions in the concept. It will argue for a revaluation of authority as an educational virtue, as a form of participatory guidance that is an aid to growth. The paper intends to help provoke continued debate over our perceived educational virtues and vices. I argue that virtuous authority is authority exercised from the point of view of a larger experience (...) and a wider horizon. If teachers’ ‘pedagogical imperative’ is to bridge the gap between forms of knowledge and their pupils, then their practice will involve authority. I suggest here that such authority should be repositioned as participatory, immanent and democratic. As Dewey says, ‘The need for authority is…constant…[I]t is the need for principles that are both stable enough and flexible enough to give direction to the processes of living in its vicissitudes and uncertainties.’ In answer to this, I suggest that teachers practice their authority in order to create stable yet flexible, open and indeterminate, but not chaotic situations that combine with pupils’ experiences in such a way as to enable educational growth. Authority practised as a form of participatory guidance, to pursue this Deweyan line of argument, can be ‘an aid to freedom’ and not freedom's enemy. This paper will argue that authority, so revalued, ought to be cultivated in our educational thought and practice. Eds: This paper forms part of a Special Issue titled ‘Beyond Virtue and Vice: Education for a Darker Age’, in which the editors invited authors to engage in exercises of ‘transvaluation’. Certain apparently settled educational concepts (from agency and fulfilment to alienation and ignorance) can be reinterpreted and transvaluated (in a Nietzschean vein) such that virtues become vices, and vices, virtues. The editors encouraged authors to employ polemics and some occasional exaggeration to reimagine educational values that are all too readily accepted within contemporary educational discourses. (shrink)

In this paper, I would like to explore Nietzsche's philosophy of value, its influence on contemporary thought and culture and what it means for us today, that is, what we can appropriate from it in order to shed light on some of the problems of our age and to overcome them. These problems are in the areas of conflict, globalization and chronic injustices. I will approach the question of value in three parts: 1) Nietzsche's explicit writings on value starting with (...) the second half of his works (The Gay Science and after). Here I will explore his value-related thoughts such as transvaluation, value-positing as legislation or law-giving, language and value, the locus of value-creation and the unconscious -psychic and somatic, for instance- aspects of valuation. What search and research has been done in these areas in the 2 0 t n century will also be surveyed here. 2) The value of individuality and 'unity' or belonging in Nietzsche's thought, that is, the individual and his or her 'environment.' In this part, I will reexamine his notion of individuality within the context of culture. 3) What Nietzsche sees as value in culture or "interpretation of existence". In this part, I will examine "forces of culture" such as ecstasy, creativity, language, body, soul, wisdom, knowledge, character-formation and education and how these different values form a meaningful constellation. In conclusion, I will try to bring these three parts together as I, at the same time, discuss philosophers who have been influenced by Nietzsche's ideas. (shrink)

Marx reminded us that the critique of political economy is also the critique of religion, that economy is religion. Thus, a critique of religion that would not attend to economy, or let it continue to expand its dominion – what passes for “secularism” today – would fail to reach its aims. “One might just as well abolish the Pope while leaving Catholicism in existence.”Money is religion, then, and economic theology is the history of religion as political economy. More precisely, and (...) because Christianity is evidently not just any religion but rather conceals itself under that general term, economic theology is primarily the history of what Jacques Derrida has called mondialatinisation. It is the history of a concealed trinity: the translation, transubstantiation, and transvaluation, whereby Christianity became, in fact, “religion,” blood became money, and money – faith and works, paceWeber – became what it is all about. (shrink)