People of Intensity, People of Power: The Nietzsche Economy

This essay is not about Nietzschean philology. In the following, the name “Nietzsche” is used to refer to a specific reception of Nietzsche’s work in France during the 1970s, and then in Germany during the 1980s, and to the ways this reading helped shape an atmosphere and attitude toward life that paved the way for the aspirations and life-defining decisions of people who are now middle-aged—and have jobs.

Jean-Francois Lyotard, Intensitäten (West Berlin: Merve, 1978).

Jean-François Lyotard, “Bemerkungen über die Wiederkehr des Kapitals,” in Intensitäten, 32. As quoted in Jean-FrançoisLyotard, “Notes on the Return and Capital,” in “Nietzsche’s Return,” ed. Sylvère Lotringer, special issue, Semiotext(e) 3, no. 1 (1977): 44.

See Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, “Many Politics,” in Dialogues II, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 124–47.

Jürgen Teipel, Verschwende Deine Jugend (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2000).

For more on these types, see Jan Rehmann, Postmoderner Linksnietzscheanismus: Deleuze & Foucault; Eine Dekonstruktion (Hamburg: Argument, 2004). Especially instructive for the issues discussed here are 132–136, where Rehmann describes Foucault’s strategy of mobilizing Nietzsche to outdo the Paris radical left in terms of its willingness to fight and its radicalism—but, as it were, on its own territory: the radical rejection of the status quo.

See Michael Schirner, Werbung ist Kunst (Munich: Klinkhardt & Biermann, 1988).

See Diedrich Diederichsen, “Schönheitschirurgie am gewachsenen Schnabel: Der Genuß an der Selbstrezeption in der Floskel: Ich bin ein Mensch, der...,” Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft 52, no. 2 (2007).

Jacob Taubes in conversation with Wolfert von Rahden and Norbert Kapferer, “Elite oder Avantgarde,” Tumult 3 (1982): 64–76.