Response to Don Dombowsky

“The only valid tribute to thought such as Nietzsche’s,” Michel Foucault remarked in a 1975 interview, “is precisely to use it, to deform it, to make it groan and protest.” ¹ While this may not be the only valid tribute, it is certainly one way to honor the thinking of this most protean and experimental of thinkers. Don Dombowsky would seem to disagree, and he objects to the interpretive work of those “radical democratic readers of Nietzsche” who wish to find in Nietzsche’s texts resources for a project of radical democracy, a project that I, and others like Lawrence Hatab or Mark Warren, readily admit is one that Nietzsche himself would likely have repudiated. That Nietzsche makes the antidemocratic comments that Dombowsky cites is not, therefore, at issue. Nor is the “real question” the one Dombowsky articulates: “is Nietzschean agonism really democratic?” Rather, the fundamental thesis I sought to articulate in Nietzsche for Democracy? ² was simply this: there are themes in Nietzsche—perspectivism, his affirmation of agonism, his destabilization of the subject—that a radical democratic theorist can appeal to in developing their political theory. This is not to claim, as Dombowsky thinks I do, that, for example, “concern for those in positions of social subordination” is a value “reflected in the Nietzschean corpus,” or that Nietzsche can be viewed “as an activist for those who suffer from unjust or inequitable distributions of power.” I make no such claim about Nietzsche’s “concern for those in positions of social subordination,” nor do I put him forward as a role-model for socially progressive activism. I do claim that the ability to see things differently (“with different eyes”) from the ways encouraged by the hegemonic power structures of the socially dominant is necessary “for those individuals who find themselves in historically marginalized and socially subordinated positions” ³ if they are to resist these hegemonic power structures. But this is not to claim, as Dombowsky seems to imply, that Nietzsche would want the socially subordinated to resist. Nor is it to claim that 123Nietzsche thought the three themes I discuss—perspectivism, his affirmation of agonism, his destabilization of the subject—were democratic. Rather, my claim is that we can understand them democratically. This, I think, is the strength of William E. Connolly’s appropriation of Nietzsche; like Foucault, Connolly is not particularly interested in the question of whether or not he is being faithful or unfaithful to Nietzsche, and this frees him to make use of Nietzschean ideas in his own theoretical project.