ABSTRACT
Nietzsche’s work has been well described as containing ‘a vast storehouse of suggestive themes, ideas, and categories’. Furthermore, his resolute resistance to systematisation, and a provocative and complex aphoristic style, coloured by hyperbole, invective, acerbic irony, paradox and dramatically shifting narrative viewpoints, have undoubtedly encouraged a ‘protean fascination’ with his legacy, and facilitated appropriation in the service of wildly incompatible causes, from feminism and bohemian anarchism to Nazism (Ascheim, 1992 p. 7). This intensely contradictory quality, both in Nietzsche’s work and in the uses to which it has been put, is certainly troubling, and brings some of the key difficulties of an unbounded postmodernism into sharp focus.1 Commentators tend to find themselves taking up positions in long-running controversies around accusations of misogyny and anti-Semitism, the implications of his consistently and robustly anti-democratic values, and a perceived irrationalism which some detractors have portrayed as evidence of ‘madness’. Allison, who has been an influential advocate for a ‘new Nietzsche’, expresses concern that his reputation, though it ‘rarely has any substantial bearing upon the content of his work’, hardens contemporary prejudice against him. Nietzsche himself repeatedly asked for a ‘generous’ reading which recognised the perspectival nature of his texts, and the partial, provisional and circumstantial quality of any claims he was making (Allison, 2001 pp. 1, 80). But how generous can contemporary interpreters afford to be?
