The essays that Jill Stauffer and Bettina Bergo collect in this volume
locate multiple affinities between the philosophies of Nietzsche and
Levinas. Both philosophers question the nature of subjectivity and the
meaning of responsibility after the "death of God." While Nietzsche
poses the dilemmas of a self without a ground and of ethics at a time of
cultural upheaval and demystification, Levinas wrestles with
subjectivity and the sheer possibility of ethics after the Shoah. Both
argue that goodness exists independently of calculative reason--for
Nietzsche, goodness arises in a creative act moving beyond reaction and
ressentiment; Levinas argues that goodness occurs in a spontaneous
response to another person. In a world at once without God and haunted
by multiple divinities, Nietzsche and Levinas reject transcendental
foundations for politics and work toward an alternative vision
encompassing a positive sense of creation, a complex fraternity or
friendship, and rival notions of responsibility.
Stauffer and Bergo group arguments around the following debates, which
are far from settled: What is the reevaluation of ethics (and life) that
Nietzsche and Levinas propose, and what does this imply for politics and
sociality? What is a human subject--and what are substance, permanence,
causality, and identity, whether social or ethical--in the wake of the
demise of God as the highest being and the foundation of what is stable
in existence? Finally, how can a "God" still inhabit philosophy, and
what sort of name is this in the thought of Nietzsche and Levinas?