ABSTRACT
This riff or mini chapter focuses on the essay “Nomad Thought” (1973) by French philosopher Gilles Deleuze. In his discussion of Friedrich Nietzsche, Deleuze compares Nietzsche with Freud and Marx, who similarly disrupted prevailing codes (in psychology and political economy). Freud and Marx, however, at least as interpreted by their followers, established new codes. Nomad thought, the term that Deleuze applies to Nietzsche, does not refer to a codified body of beliefs but rather to a manner of thinking: a manner that deliberately seeks to disrupt the established codes or doctrines, while taking the even more radical step of embracing the uncodifiable. Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, who identifies himself as a wanderer, offers a significant point of contact between the Nietzschean embrace of the uncodifiable and the action of wandering. This chapter also suggests a link with Wallace Stevens when, in his poetic credo “Of Modern Poetry” (1942), Stevens describes the poet as “A metaphysician in the dark.” Nietzsche has no time for metaphysicians, but the modern poet for Stevens is similarly deprived of former verities and, like Nietzsche, content to replace disrupted codes with brief “intensities.”
