Errors, Lies and the Suffered Social Histories of Subjectivity
Scenes of Subjectivity: Nietzsche with Marx and Freud
Ricoeur, Kofman, Foucault
Chapter One: Convalescence, Mourning, and Sociality
Convalescence and Mourning
Zarathustra’s Convalescence
Abstraction in Popular Readings of Nietzsche: Derrida and Deleuze
Chapter Two: Relationality, Trauma, and the Genealogy of the Subject
Relationality in the First Essay of On the Genealogy of Morality
Relationality in the Second Essay of On the Genealogy of Morality
Naturalism and Animistic Subjectivity: Common Approaches
Love and the Sociality of Unpayable Debt
Sociality, Masochism, and Dissociation: Section Seven
Socio-cultural Histories of the Bad Conscience and Its Inversion
Chapter Three: Nietzsche’s Negative Dialectics: Ascetic Ideal and Status Quo
Reading Nietzsche in Light of Adorno’s Philosophical Position
Relationality, Ascetic Ideal and Status Quo
Chapter Four: Working-through Perspectives in Nietzsche and Object Relations Psychoanalysis
Signs of Convalescence: Recurrence and Integrating Good and Evil
Klein and Nietzsche
Winnicott and Nietzsche
Integrating the Nonintegrable
Jeffrey M. Jackson is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Chair or the Department of Social Sciences at the University of Houston—Downtown, USA. He is the author of Philosophy and Working-through the Past: A Psychoanalytic Approach to Social Pathologies.
This book presents a reading of Nietzsche as a thinker of the suffered social histories of subjectivity. It suggests that Nietzsche’s concept of genealogy needs the concept of convalescence to be coherent. Genealogy is a form of reflection that traces the suffered scenes of which that reflection is symptomatic, whereas convalescence is the ordeal of reflection’s coming to bear its limits within scenes of embodied suffering. This theme is developed by appeals to Freud’s notion of mourning and the object relations theories of Melanie Klein and D.W. Winnicott, which insist on the primacy of suffered relationality in the genesis of subjectivity. Moreover, Adorno’s notion of negative dialectics and its emphasis on the primacy of the object are suggested as an alternative context within which to read Nietzsche’s writing, in contrast with dominant modes of criticism. The discussion will appeal to anyone interested in Nietzsche, critical theory and the relationship between psychoanalysis and philosophy.