678 Rezensionen

Hugo H. Drochon

NIETZSCHE, POLITICS AND GENDER

Heike Schotten, Nietzsche’s Revolution: Décadence, Politics and Sexuality,

New York / Basingstoke (Palgrave Macmillan) 2009, 272 S., ISBN
978-0-2306-1358-4.

With the rise of, and demand for, feminist (political) theory in academia, it was not
going to be long before it staked a claim in Nietzsche studies. Heike Schotten’s Nietzsche’s
Revolution: Décadence, Politics and Sexuality is amongst the growing contemporary litera-
ture that examines Nietzsche’s thought from a feminist/gender perspective, and is per-
haps the first monograph to link such a perspective with Nietzsche’s politics. Her gender-
focused interpretation of Nietzsche undeniably brings to light the gendered-biased lan-
guage Nietzsche uses, and her main claim that Nietzsche’s critique of the decadence of
modernity can be seen through the lenses of ‘male emasculation’ is certainly persuasive in
view of Nietzsche’s description of it as a weak, effeminate, even castrated period, pining
his hopes on the re-virilisation of Europe through a manly figure like Napoleon. But if
Schotten has the merit of underlining the gendered language Nietzsche engages with,
something perhaps not sufficiently taken into account in the secondary literature, her
desire to construe Nietzsche’s philosophy and project as fundamentally gendered is less
compelling.
To begin with, her oversexed reading of certain key Nietzsche passages leads to
number of misunderstandings. The book, especially the central chapter 5, abounds with
language such as ‘phallus’, ‘penis’, ‘hard’, ‘rape’, ‘masturbation’, ‘female genitalia’, ‘sexual
intercourse’ and ‘orgasm’. For instance she interprets, with little further ado, Zarathus-
tra’s second commandment of On Old and New Tablets 29, “become hard” (KSA 4.268),
as a phallus symbol (p. 149),1 and this is one of the cornerstones upon which she builds
her argumentation. Quickly glossing over the fact that ‘becoming hard’ might in fact be
a reference to an ‘ability to endure suffering’ and a ‘resistance to pity and pain’, Schotten
prefers to focus on the apparent ‘double-entendre’ of the passage that ‘makes clear the
exclusively male character of creativity’ (p. 153). Is there really such a ‘double-entendre’?
The metaphor Nietzsche uses in the passage is one of the diamond and the kitchen coal
that does not, to my mind, immediately conjure up images of phalluses, and beyond
the direct application of feminist theory to Nietzsche, Schotten does not provide us
with reasons to do so. We might rather want to interpret this passage as a forewarning
on Zarathustra’s part not to let pity and love detract those whose task it is to bring the

1 With the over-abundance of sexual metaphors, one wonders whether the fact that this reference
is note ‘69’ is a coincidence or not.
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Übermensch to life; Zarathustra soon to be tested in his love and pity for the ‘Higher men’
in part IV of the book.2
If we remove the bias from the reading, there is no reason to believe that it is only men
that can be ‘hard’. Indeed Nietzsche’s admiration for Lou Salomé and Cosima Wagner,
the former he thought was the closest contemporary to an Übermensch-like entity, and the
latter he was to identify as his ‘Ariadne’, Dionysus’ lover and a goddess of fertility, in one
of his final ‘mad letters’ to her of 3 January 1889 (Nr. 1241, KGB III 5.572 f.), is well
known, but Schotten does not engage with these themes.3 In fact, Nietzsche conversed
with a number of prominent female figures of his time, including Meta von Salis and Mal-
wida von Meysenbug – a noted feminist – both of which he entertained a lively corre-
spondence with right to the very end.4 Nor does Schotten refer to the fact that Nietzsche
was appropriated as a fore-father of early twentieth century feminism by such figures as
Dora Marsden, as Lucy Delap’s recent study has brought to the fore.5 The failure to en-
gage with these broader contexts leaves Schotten’s study the poorer for it, both in terms
of the Nietzsche scholarship and, I fear, in terms of her contribution to queer theory.6
Indeed, why early feminists like Marsden were drawn to what they saw as Nietzsche’s
elitism, individualism and advocacy of heroic values might have opened up an interesting
discussion between Nietzsche, historical variants of feminism and contemporary queer
theory. What Schotten does do is draw parallels between certain feminist insights, notably
Butler’s questioning of the boundaries of the terms ‘sex’ and ‘gender’, and Nietzsche’s
critique of free-will and the grammatical consequences of ‘I’. This I found to be the most
stimulating and promising part of the book, but Schotten unfortunately does not pur-
sue these thoughts much further, the discussion amounting to only two or three pages
(pp. 192 – 194). How Nietzsche’s critical thoughts might strengthen, indeed supplement,
certain undeniably valid feminist insights seems to be one of the more rewarding paths
to pursue within this perspective, in anticipation of figuring out exactly what Nietzsche’s
own positive project, on his own terms, was.
If Schotten had engaged with these themes I suspect that her analysis of Nietzsche’s
views of woman might have been more nuanced, dare I say more interesting. This is a
shame as Schotten demonstrates the ability to think certain topics through, like the work
she does in her second chapter on ‘race-mixing’. While I am not in full agreement with

2 I have always been inclined to read the final book of Zarathustra as akin to The Communist Mani-
festo’s long critique of all the versions of socialism that are not the true communism: the ‘Higher
men’ are all examples of failed Übermenschen (see part 3 of The Communist Manifesto, London 2002).
This may shed some light on the disputed nature of Book IV of Zarathustra: whether Nietzsche
meant for the book to end at Part III or not. On this reading, the first three books are an exoteric
presentation of Nietzsche’s fundamental thought of the eternal return, and thus for mass pub-
lication (at least Nietzsche hoped). The fourth book, for private circulation only, was destined to
the limited number Nietzsche thought had already embarked on the route to the Übermensch, and
thus took the form of esoteric advice on the pitfalls, in the shape of the ‘Higher men’, such a path
entailed.
3 Schotten does not refer to either Nietzsche’s letters or indeed his Nachlass in her study.
4 See Sigridur Thorgeirsdottir, Frauen im Leben Nietzsches, in: Nietzsche-Studien 38 (2009),
pp. 410 – 419.
5 Lucy Delap, The Feminist Avant-Garde: Transatlantic Encounters of the Early Twentieth Cen-
tury, Cambridge 2007.
6 I was further surprised not to find a sustained discussion of Zarathustra’s infamous ‘whip’, a pas-
sage that inevitably became a talking-point for Nietzsche’s alleged misogyny.
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Schotten’s conclusions,7 she demonstrates in this instance a care for detail and getting
the interpretation right that results in a rather subtle account. This seems to go out the
window when Schotten turns to her analysis of woman and gender, where she seems to
be more concerned to fit Nietzsche into feminist interpretations than really figuring out
what Nietzsche was trying to get at. Simply put, her interpretation is too drivingly ideo-
logical, which results in a rather cavalier reading of Nietzsche’s texts.8
Paradoxically, this leads Schotten to essentialise Nietzsche, while her praise of
Nietzsche’s philosophy is that it avoided such essentialism. So the fact that Nietzsche is a
man is sufficient to interpret his commandment to ‘become hard’ as a phallus symbol. Of
course, Schotten’s argument is premised on the notion that while Nietzsche’s philosophy
is anti-essentialist, the fact that he is a decadent man means he falls back onto essentialist
views of gender that betray his revolutionary potential. Schotten’s idea is to capture this
revolution by applying it to gender, to ‘castrate Nietzsche’ (p. 187). Building on the
thought of Edelman who sees in the logic of the ‘Child’, encapsulating hope and futurity,
the oppressive means through which the ‘normal, heterosexual and reproductive humans’
keeps queers at bay, Schotten concludes that ‘the future of queer politics, then, is no fu-
ture at all – it is rather the very narcissistic, future-sacrificing, self-indulgent jouissance for
its own sake to which queers are condemned, anyway (p. 204). The twist is that the af-
firmation of death, queers’ future, is an affirmative negation and thus a Nietzschean rev-
olution, in the sense of being both ‘yay’ and ‘nay’ saying.
From a Nietzschean perspective, this is flawed. For one, as Schotten admits,
Nietzsche is invested in children, hope and futurity. Indeed the first commandment
Schotten identifies in Zarathustra, drawing from his statement that “your ch i l d r e n’s
land shall you love: this love shall be your new nobility […] This new tablet I place over
you” (Z III, On Old and New Tablets 12, KSA 4.255), is, as she puts it herself, ‘man must
become fertile and invest himself only in his children’ (p.148). But Schotten wants to in-
terpret this procreation as a ‘self-birth’, consisting purely of the ‘phallus and its offspring’,
concluding that ‘at best, the childbearing woman is only a means’ because she herself ‘can
never become hard’ (pp. 156 – 157). While it might be true that Nietzsche has a traditional
or sometimes misogynistic view of women, he undeniably does see a role for woman in
giving birth and rearing children. In the same section On Old and New Tables, Nietzsche ex-
plains that “this is how I want man and woman: fit for war the one, fit for bearing children
the other,” a rather conservative view, but adds “but both fit to dance in head and limb”
(Z III, On Old and New Tables 23, KSA 4.264), which suggests at least some intellec-
tual/spiritual and physical equality. Nietzsche continues with “not merely to reproduce,
but instead to surproduce – to that goal, my brothers, may the garden of marriage help

7 It seems to me that rather than Christianity, as Schotten suggests (p. 57), being the starting-point
and sole culprit for Europe’s decadence, nihilism is always in existence in human societies (man
is the ‘animal who has lost it’s purpose’) but Christianity is responsible for making nihilism,
rather than the life-affirming values of the ancient nobles, the dominant values of society that
then leads to its decadence.
8 I should say at this point that my first encounter with Heike Schotten was at the Ecce homo con-
ference in London, November 2008 (i.e. before her book came out), where, along with being
very friendly, she presented a paper entitled ‘Ecrasez l’infâme! A Revolution for all and (N)one’,
whose aim was to theorise Nietzsche’s Ecce homo as a political manifesto in the Marxist spirit. I
must underline how I found this to be both highly stimulating and promising, and I hope that
she can continue to flesh out these thoughts. In fact, I was disappointed to discover that her
book did not treat of this same subject matter.
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you!” (Z III, On Old and New Tables 24, KSA 4.264). Thus it is indeed both men and
women who will be involved in the act of procreation. Earlier Nietzsche had defined mar-
riage as: “what I call the will by two for creating the one who is more than those who cre-
ated it. Respect for one another I call marriage, and respect for the one who wills such a
willing” (Z I, On Child and Marriage, KSA 4.90).
Schotten’s conclusion that Nietzsche would prefer a ‘world that does not really in-
clude woman at all’ (p. 159), where men give birth to themselves through some act of self-
masturbation,9 seems a little rash, not to say convenient in terms of the castrated male
future she wants to endorse through Edelman. In fact it is rather surprising that though
Schotten accuses Nietzsche of being essentialist when it comes to gender, she would
want to ascribe to him some sort of homosexual, or indeed hermaphrodite, reproduction.
Nietzsche is traditionalist in the sense that he ascribes at least birthing and a motherly role
to woman, though from the marriage passages above and Nietzsche’s insistence on teach-
ing through his books, we might suspect that he would expect fathers to be heavily in-
volved in the rearing of his children. In his late Nachlass, Nietzsche proposes some rather
radical measures for his time for a new type of marriage, having already severely criticised
the modern reasons for marriage in Zarathustra (Z I, On Child and Marriage, KSA
4.90 – 92), and “love matches” in TI, Skirmiches 39, KSA 6.142. These include: “a h a r -
den ing of taxe s on inheritance,” “a dva n t a g es of all kinds for fathers who bring many
boys into the world: possibly a plural vote” and “as an antidote to prostitution (or to en-
noble it): provisional legal marriages (for years, months, days), with guarantees for the
children” (Nachlass 1888, 16[35], KSA 13.495). These will appear, of course, strikingly
paternalistic, but should this come as a surprise? After all the only label Nietzsche ac-
cepted during his lifetime, given to him by Georg Brandes, was that of ‘radical aristocrat’,
suggesting that if his project was to be revolutionary, it would be conservatively revol-
utionary.10
That Nietzsche’s project contains both seemingly revolutionary and conservative as-
pects does not imply, as Schotten would have it, that it is necessarily contradictory. Indeed
her critique of Nietzsche’s return to an essentialised gender seems to be a demand that
Nietzsche be revolutionary not only in every aspect of his thought, but moreover in a cer-
tain way: that he become the ‘granddaddy of queer theory’ (p. 191).11 This is an unfair de-
mand. That Nietzsche revolutionises how we might understand morality or free will does
not imply that he must also revolutionise our understanding of gender (though he does
seem to have some radical ideas about how to re-organise marriage, as discussed above),
and surely not in the manner that Schotten would have it. And there is a specific reason,
which she overlooks, why Nietzsche’s project is neither Schotten’s nor is amenable to it:
the ‘very narcissistic, future-sacrificing, self-indulgent jouissance for its own sake’ queer fu-
ture that Schotten advocates is precisely that of the ‘last man’.

9 It appears that Wagner’s indictment of Nietzsche’s health problems as arising from ‘excessive
onanism’ is something that will continue to haunt the secondary literature.
10 It might appear that Nietzsche’s ideal society would be one within which everyone, including
woman, would play their respective roles: a typically aristocratic/paternalistic vision (see his Ar-
istotelian definition of justice in TI, Skirmiches 48, KSA 6.150 f.). This is why he is against the
feminist movement as he sees it, because its desire is to make men out of woman, and thus blur
the roles.
11 Other interesting subtitles include: ‘Will to Power: The Kitchen Sink Hypothesis’ (p. 24), ‘Truth
as Femme Fatale’ (p. 113), ‘Nietzsche as John Wayne’ (p. 123) and ‘Castrating Nietzsche’ (p. 187).