Contesting Nietzsche

A brilliant exploration of a significant and understudied aspect of Nietzsches philosophy. In this groundbreaking work, Christa Davis Acampora offers a profound rethinking of Friedrich Nietzsches crucial notion of the agon. Analyzing an impressive array of primary and secondary sources and synthesizing decades of Nietzsche scholarship, she shows how the agon, or contest, organized core areas of Nietzsches philosophy, providing a new appreciation of the subtleties of his notorious views about power. By focusing so intensely on this particular guiding interest, she offers an exciting, original vantage from which to view this iconic thinker: Contesting Nietzsche. Though existenceviewed through the lens of Nietzsches agonis fraught with struggle, Acampora illuminates what Nietzsche recognized as the agons generative benefits. It imbues the human experience with significance, meaning, and value. Analyzing Nietzsches elaborations of agonismhis remarks on types of contests, qualities of contestants, and the conditions in which either may thrive or deteriorateshe demonstrates how much the agon shaped his philosophical projects and critical assessments of others. The agon led him from one set of concerns to the next, from aesthetics to metaphysics to ethics to psychology, via Homer, Socrates, Saint Paul, and Wagner. In showing how one obsession catalyzed so many diverse interests, Contesting Nietzsche sheds fundamentally new light on some of this philosophers most difficult and paradoxical ideas.