I was contemplating a favorite, if highly elementary paper I have written on Friedrich Nietzsche, critiquing Luce Irigaray’s Marine Lover of Nietzsche. I wrote this in 2010. Even as recently as 2018 I still hadn’t realized that the notion contained within this book, that of Irigaray critiquing Nietzsche “from the point of view of the perspective of the element of water” is not nearly as absurd as it sounds in terms of having a historical philosophical prcedent. Who else has thought of philosophy in terms of the elements? The pre-Socratics.
If you are interested, my 2018 Abstract reads as follows:
This paper engages the contradictions and complexities in being both a Nietzschean and a feminist. In it, I am thinking about how to affirm difference between the sexes without resorting to a binary concept of gender and without compromising equality. I use Deleuze’s reading of Nietzsche to critique the shortcomings of one potential feminist interpretation of Nietzsche found within Luce Irigaray’s “Marine Lover of Nietzsche.” Specifically, I identify Irigaray’s approach as motivated by ressentiment, which Nietzsche would link to nihilism. Irigaray accuses Nietzsche of not recognizing the “true” and “essential” nature of femininity, which she says lies partially in the “self-containedness” of “female” genitals, i.e., the vulva. However, linking essential femininity to “female” genitals reinforces a transphobic model of gender. Further, the fact that Nietzsche’s image of women does not reflect an accurate picture of woman as such does not prove that the way he uses “woman” as a metaphor has no philosophical or literary value.
My 2010 self continues:
Irigaray’s complaint that Nietzsche fails to acknowledge her “true” self is already a profoundly anti-Nietzschean attitude. It undermines her own autonomy by reinforcing her dependence on his recognition. It is also primarily used to generate a reason to punish Nietzsche—who probably understood women poorly because he was more or less celibate his entire life—for his autonomy from women. Again, for Nietzsche the desire to punish is always an indicator of ressentiment. Rejecting these ideas, I go on to put forward my own interpretation of how to approach Nietzsche’s moments of misogyny while continuing to appreciate his greatest insights—pointing to the power of laughter, levity, and forgetting, which taken together open up the possibility of affinity and friendship between men and women.
For me at the time, it was basically a highly elaborate Nietzschean take on the question “Can men or women ever really be friends?” The paper is probably lacking greatly in systematic rigor in terms of fully contextualizing Irigaray’s thought in relation to the pre-Socratics. But Nietzsche is very important to me, and a friend once described my superpower as “the ability to recite any passage from Friedrich Nietzsche at will or upon command,” so there is probably some value to my ideas about him. With that in mind, I am going to go investigate the pre-Socratics now. Perhaps that will help give me a greater insight into my own thinking.
You can read Feminist Or Otherwise: Friedrich Nietzsche and the Affirmation of Sexual Difference here.
Princess Giulia Ricci 