Jim Urpeth

This paper outlines a central tension and difficulty within Heidegger's thought in relation to his attempt to articulate and promote the turn in the history of being. Particular attention is paid to The Question Concerning Technology and related late texts as well as aspects of Heidegger's interpretation of Nietzsche. The basic claim advanced is that Heidegger tends to fall short of the most rigorous and radical stance he occasionally glimpses (in a few texts which are identified) for which the contemporary age of technology would be regarded as the highest manifestation of being in the series of historical epochs as Heidegger conceives them. Heidegger senses but rarely affirms this non-privative, affirmative perspective on the essence of technology within which the withdrawal that constitutes the essence of being explicitly and unambiguously reveals itself for the first time in the historical relationship of being and human being.

This paper argues that Foucault’s The History of Sexuality contains an implicit but important interpretation of Nietzsche’s critique of the ‘ascetic ideal’. It suggests that Foucault undertakes a non-reductive synthesis of seemingly conflicting aspects of Nietzsche’s thought, on the one hand, its valorisation of the ‘Dionysian’ and, on the other hand, its enthusiasm for ‘self-disciplining’. The consequences of a failure to appreciate how Nietzsche’s thought combines these two themes is illustrated through a sketch of what is termed an ‘oppositional’ interpretation of his thought. This erroneously imposes the nature/culture distinction upon Nietzsche’s thought and reads its critique of morality in terms of ‘repression’, the ‘renunciation of instinct’ etc. An alternative, ‘economic’ interpretation of Nietzsche’s thought in which his ‘affirmation of the Dionysian’ and valorisation of self-disciplining are conjoined is outlined and recommended. Foucault’s interpretation of Nietzsche is presented as an example of such an ‘economic’ reading, in that it appreciates Nietzsche’s libidinal interpretation of self-denial. This combination of Nietzsche’s and Foucault’s thought is termed ‘noble ascesis’. This is illustrated through a reading of Foucault’s account of Greco-Roman ethics. Attention is drawn to how Foucault’s implicit interpretation of Nietzsche helps to clarify Nietzsche’s conception of the possibility of a ‘healthy’ appropriation of the ‘ascetic ideal’. The paper attempts to show how the ‘non-moral’ ethical practice Foucault retrieves from the classical world, on the basis of Nietzsche’s distinction between different forms of self-denial, emphasises the affective and libidinal investments of asceticism. This, in turn, is related to Foucault’s critique of the ‘repressive hypothesis’ and overcoming of the ‘repression/transgression’ model of the nature of power. However, the paper identifies some tensions between Nietzsche’s and Foucault’s accounts of asceticism and interpretations of the ethical practice of the Greco-Roman world and closes by considering whether or not these tensions can be resolved.

In order to challenge the ontological and evaluative assumptions of 'metaphysical' accounts of the nature of art many thinkers have attempted an 'overcoming of aesthetics'. Through a focus on the notion of aesthetic form, I shall pursue a critique of traditional aesthetics which undertakes a 'naturalisation' of its key themes in order to develop a non-anthropomorphic account of the domain of art. Such an approach conceives art as a pre-eminent site for the dissolution of the 'human'. I shall sketch a trajectory of thought within which the liberation of aesthetic form from both subjectivity and the key metaphysical assumptions that have historically governed its thematisation within aesthetics can be discerned. i The notion of form has been particularly susceptible to metaphysical appropriation and is seemingly irretrievably associated with the 'repressive' imposition onto the field of mobile material intensities of static structures of a transcendent origin. In modern thought the notion of form has been persistently appropriated in idealist terms as an a priori dimension of experience inherently beyond the capabilities of matter. In response to the apparently intrinsically 'metaphysical' nature of form there has been a tendency to affirm 'matter', a perspective motivated by the privileging of form within the 'form/matter' hierarchical opposition of metaphysics. The possibility of a non-idealist thematisation of aesthetic form which I shall outline challenges the alleged radicality of such a response to the metaphysical prioritisation of form and is also a corrective, on behalf of the 'beautiful', to the recent attention paid to the 'sublime'. ii

Special Issue - Nietzsche and Religion
The Journal of Nietzsche Studies, no. 19, Spring 2000

A selection of papers given at the 8th Annual Conference of the Friedrich Nietzsche Society held at the University of Greenwich (Sept. 1998) - 'Nietzsche and Religion'. 

https://www.jstor.org/stable/20717731

This paper offers a critique of Meillassoux's articulation of a 'philosophical divine' based on his radical ontology of contingency.  The claim is made that Meillassoux's conception of the divine is inconsistent with his wider commitment to immanence and that this is due to his uncritical endorsement of key evaluative and affective features of the religion of the transcendent. It is argued that this shortcoming is evident in Meillassoux’s claim that the phenomenon of 'unjust death' generates a problem concerning the justification of a world thus characterised and in the solution to it he proposes. An alternative conception of a religion of immanence is sketched which, it is argued, integrates more consistently than Meillassoux's the evaluative-affective and theoretical domains of a religion of immanence.

Nietzsche and Foucault offer radical articulations of the ‘death of God’ in its critical-negative import for religion. However, the resources their thought contains for the elaboration of a positive conception of the nature of religion premised on the same epochal development has received less attention. This piece sketches a nascent conception of such a post-theistic account of the nature of religion by bringing into dialogue aspects of Nietzsche’s and Foucault’s respective ontologies of power and critical interrogations of religion (particularly Christianity). Drawing on aspects of both philosopher’s thought an emerging hybrid – an immanent religion of power itself – will be outlined. The perspective sketched cross-fertilizes aspects of both Nietzsche’s and Foucault’s genealogies of religion to propose an affirmative conception of the relation between religion and power that contests both notions of the infinite power of the transcendent and anthropocentric analyses of the power of specific religious institutions, values and practices. Focusing on Nietzsche’s and Foucault’s respective genealogies of Christian values and practice, as elaborated in their accounts of the ‘ascetic priest’ and ‘pastoral power’ respectively, a possible turn from the socio-political ‘reduction’ of religions of the transcendent to the emergence of the immanent religion of power itself is proposed.

This paper discusses various aspects of the thought of Nietzsche, Freud and Heidegger respectively in relation to the theme of anti-humanism. It clarifies the sense the terms humanism and anti-humanism have in recent philosophical debates within modern European thought and undertakes a critical evaluation of the extent to which the three thinkers under discussion can be considered to be anti-humanists. The criteria of naturalism and the critique of theological and humanist values are proposed. On this basis it is argued that, of the three, only Nietzsche can be said to combine both naturalism and an overcoming of the normative presuppositions of humanism. The ways in which both Freud and Heidegger retain either an attachment to humanist values or an anti-naturalist ontology are outlined.

This paper outlines how Kant's conception of the sublime is radicalized and transformed in the thought of a number of his key successors. The claim is made that the philosophers discussed can all be said to develop an immanent conception of the sublime. These alternatives are critically evaluated.

A consideration of Kant's treatment of the 'material' aspect of aesthetic experience and the work of art and the implicit critique of this aspect of his aesthetics and the alternative approaches to them as developed in texts by Heidegger and Deleuze/Guattari.

A discussion of Bataille's "On Nietzsche" with a focus on themes of immanence and the sacred therein.

Paper presented at the Centre for Philosophy and Critical Though, Goldsmiths College, University of London - “Bataille’s Nietzsche” Conference (November, 2016).