ABSTRACT
Alan Schrift’s argument is informed by the Deleuzian interpretation of Friedrich Nietzsche, particularly its emphasis on process, and by a theory of radical democracy articulated by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, its opposition to a politics of identity, and by the ‘agono-pluralistic’ reading of William Connolly which invests in the construction of “a post-Nietzscheanism one is willing to endorse and enact”. Schrift claims that the Nietzschean corpus is a repository of democratic potential. He argues that there are “political” and “conceptual resources”, comprising fundamental themes in the Nietzschean corpus, which are “amenable to the project of radical democracy”. These are Nietzsche’s anti-atomistic subject and his themes of perspectivism and agonism. The ‘danger’ to democracy is defined, in Schrift’s essay, as any “fixed notion of identity”, or more specifically, following Laclau, the “closure of [ethnic] groups around full-fledged identities that can reinforce their most reactionary tendencies and create the conditions for a permanent confrontation with other groups”.
