American Nietzsche.

A History of an Icon and His Ideas by Jennifer

Ratner-Rosenhagen (review)
Larry S. McGrath
MLN, Volume 127, Number 5, December 2012 (Comparative Literature
Issue), pp. 1263-1267 (Article)
Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press
DOI: 10.1353/mln.2012.0127
For additional information about this article
Access provided by Johns Hopkins University (1 Sep 2014 22:30 GMT)
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/mln/summary/v127/127.5.mcgrath.html
1263 M L N
could not read English and therefore had access to Shakespeare primarily
through German translations. He highlights the contradictions implicit in the
concurrent associations of Kierkegaard with both Don Quixote and Hamlet,
despite the prevalent opposing interpretations of the two fgures: Don Quix-
ote as the self-sacrifcing man of faith, Hamlet as the egoistic, introspective
spirit of negation (184). Of greater interest than the fairly routine accounting
for appearances of Shakespearean fgures in Kierkegaards texts, however, is
Ziolkowskis analysis of Kierkegaards challenge to Shakespeares authorial
judgment, as evidenced by his habit of proposing alternate versions of his
works, as he does with Cervantes and Don Quixote as well.
Since Kierkegaard and Carlyle were contemporaries but unfamiliar with
each others work, Ziolkowskis goal in the ffth chapter is to consider how
the theme of suffering is counterbalanced in Kierkegaard and Carlyle by
their dwelling upon the categories of humor, irony, laughter, and the comic, a
preoccupation both men absorbed largely from Hegel, the German Romantics,
and Jean Paul (219). Although the analysis is well developed, this is the least
compelling of Ziolkowskis case studies; the connections he makes between
the two thinkers are interesting, but dont really shed much light on either
mans works as a whole.
The lengthy conclusion considers a series of depictions of Kierkegaard as
a character in literary and cinematic texts. The result is a rather deceptively
minimizing picture of Kierkegaards literary afterlife, since no criteria are
provided for the selection of these particular (in some cases quite obscure)
texts. Ziolkowskis prose is, however, very accessible and his analysis of the
selected treatments of Kierkegaards life and their common themes and
narrative strategies is very insightful. For the most part, the literary texts
Ziolkowski examines are imaginative investigations of Kierkegaards life,
especially his relationships with his mother, his fanc, a prostitute, and his
contemporary and competitor Peter Ludwig Mller. The exception is Kaj
Munks drama Ordet and Theodor Dreyers flm version of the same, which
function for Ziolkowski as a religious response to Kierkegaards writings and
a clue to whether, despite the inward nature of religiousness . . . the literary
Kierkegaard was a religious author (309).
University of Wisconsin at Madison JULIE K. ALLEN
Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen. American Nietzsche. A History of an Icon and His Ideas.
Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2012. 450 pages.
Nietzsches corpus offered European philosophers a conceptual playground.
Throughout the twentieth century, monographs systematically reinterpreted
and reconciled Nietzsches master concepts such as the will to power, the
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eternal recurrence, the bermensch, and the revaluation of values. The
most prominent include Heideggers four-volume study (19361940); Karl
Jaspers Nietzsche: An Introduction to the Understanding of His Philosophical
Activity (1936); George Batailles On Nietzsche (1945); and Gilles Deleuzes
Nietzsche and Philosophy (1962). Jennifer Ratner-Rosnehagen reminds readers
in American Nietzsche. A History of an Icon and His Ideas that Americans were
also probing readers of Nietzsche; even if their readings did not always assume
an exclusively philosophical form. Ratner-Rosenhagen dedicates her book to
unearthing the rich and forgotten American archives of Nietzsches cultural
receptions that paralleled his metaphysical treatments on the other side of
the Atlantic. She demonstrates how Nietzsche remained a fxture throughout
the long American twentieth century by tracing his receptions across literary,
religious, political, as well as philosophical realms.
American Nietzsche is a reception history. Behind it lurks the thorny problem
that Nietzsche has always posed for reception histories. For those giants of
twentieth century European philosophy, reading Nietzsche was like playing
on a conceptual jungle gym with him. That is to say the value of their mono-
graphs depends less on their fdelity to what Nietzsche really said than on
their playfulness: how idiosyncratically each recruits Nietzsche in service of
the authors own project. The problem for reception histories is thus: does
an authoritative account of Nietzsche exist that could serve as a basis for
comparing his disparate readings? Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen tackles the
problem by writing American Nietzsche as a Rezeptionsgeschichte, or a history of
creative appropriations. She affords each reception equal weight, regard-
less of whether it conforms to the Nietzschean letter. The problem of what
Nietzsche really meant is never posed. Ratner-Rosenhagens is not the frst
Rezeptionsgeschichte of this kind. Steven Ascheims The Nietzsche Legacy in Ger-
many 18901990 (Berkeley: U of California P, 1992); Eric Forths Zarathustra
in Paris (Illinois: Northern Illinois UP, 2001); and the recent edited volume
Interpreting Nietzsche: Reception and Infuence (London: Continuum, 2011) are
exemplary. Given the density of Nietzsche studies, it is a feat that American
Nietzsche manages to rejuvenate the feld by following his reception to fertile
American soil.
The impact also resonates through intellectual history generally. Ratner-
Rosenhagen extrapolates from Nietzsches case to refect on what constitutes
the very notion of a reception. In a methodological interlude, she examines
personal letters written to Nietzsche that did not formulate their authors
thoughts in systematic, let alone published form. She takes it as her project
to rethink what counts as a reception by resisting the picture of readers as
passive vessels into which the historian pours Nietzsches ideas. Fan mail
demonstrates a productive dimension in how readers used Nietzsches words
to imagine new moral and intellectual worlds for themselves (208). Ratner-
Rosenhagens project of writing, as it were, a production history animates the
books close attention to Nietzsches cultural infuence and sets the books
methodology apart from other histories of his reception abroad.
1265 M L N
Each chapter is organized chronologically and thematically. They march
through the long twentieth century following the waves along which Ameri-
cans read Nietzsche. Each wave concerns both the content of ideas received
and the channel of reception. The book opens with Ralph Waldo Emerson,
whom Nietzsche read as a young Gymnasium student. Ratner-Rosenhagen
mines Nietzsches personal library at Weimer both to illuminate the neglected
infuence on Nietzsche and to signal her recurring method of closely reading
marginalia. Following her account of Nietzsches enthusiasm for the American
philosopher, Ratner-Rosenhagen demonstrates how, like in Europe, Nietzsche
was frst read as literature outside the academy. The frst chapter examines
how the arts critic James Gibbons Huneker frst popularized Nietzsche in the
States in the short-lived journal Mlle New York from 1895 to 1898. The early
Nietzschean vogue, as the chapter is titled, widened under the pen of H.L.
Menken and reverberated through radical newspapers like Benjamin Tuckers
Liberty and Robert Reitzels Der Arme Teufel.
The second chapter surveys early Christian receptions. It is a surprising
account of Nietzsches cool religious treatment given the assumption of his
hostility to the Judeo-Christian tradition. Protestant, particularly of the Social
Gospel kind, and Catholic readers saw Nietzsches thought, Ratner-Rosenhagen
claims, as symptomatic of their decadent modern culture. Nietzsche was by no
means a close ally. But in his thought many theologians found opportunity
to restore a sense of enchantment, if not faith, in the face of the secularizing
force of industrialization. Ratner-Rosenhagen builds her argument on read-
ings of theological reviews and sermons. Notable among them is the liberal
Protestant theologian George Burman Foster, whose writings functionalized
Christianity and pressed Nietzsche into service in sculpting the vision of a
de-divinized Jesus.
There is nothing homogeneous about each wave of Nietzsches reception.
Ratner-Rosenhagen presents them as felds of contestation over key concepts.
The third chapter examines the feld staked out over the bermensch. Ratner-
Rosenhagen draws attention to the personal force that the concept assumed.
Rather than conceiving it in straightforward opposition to slave morality, she
contends that World War I drove philosophers to use the bermensch to
examine the sources of the self in a world without foundations (112). Josiah
Royce embraced the concept, evident in the opening pages of his Philosophy of
Loyalty (1908) while contemporaries at Harvard, like Irving Babbitt and the New
Humanists, rejected Nietzsches account of self-overcoming and the Romantic
tradition of which they claimed it was symptomatic. George Santayana went
so far as to identify the bermensch with the bellicose German empire.
Ratner-Rosenhagens most intriguing chapter is the fourth. Her focus is the
young literary radicals, including Jack London and Kahlil Gibran. In read-
ing their marginalia and the outpouring of adulation over Nietzsche (150)
therein, Ratner-Rosenhagen takes as her task to recover the lived experience
of historical persons, to try to recapture not only what they thought but how
they felt about certain ideas (150). Marginalia illuminate the feelings that
1266 REVIEWS
Ratner-Rosenhagen seeks: through writing in Nietzsches books, readers
forged a personal connection with him. The stakes of the claim, however, are
left wanting. Ratner-Rosenhagen insists that the young radicals enthusiasm
was not neo-romantic hero worship (191). Rather, such experiences reveal
that Nietzsche satisfed a need for models of intellect that could educate
them about their own roles in modern America (191). Yet I am left won-
dering what is gained by construing readers notes as revealing feelings in
opposition to thoughts. Would readers thoughts not reveal their need for
guidance? What is peculiar to readers feelings that might better envision
an independent intellectual life freed from the constraints of academe? The
dualism that Ratner-Rosenhagen erects between thinking and feeling cries
for a more explicit account, if she needs the dualism at all. Its aim is to bring
to fruition her method of an intellectual history of productions in support of
the claim that Nietzsches readers werent consumers, and their uses of his
ideas demonstrate that the ideas were not ready-made but, rather, made-to-
order (199). Ratner-Rosenhagen succeeds in closely reading marginalia. But
as it stands, the chapter reads as a string of references to emotive comments
encumbered by the weight of awkward theoretical baggage.
When writing reception histories, intellectual historians confront the
diffculty, even nuisance, of what to do with blatantly bad receptions. It is
compounded for Nietzsche, who the Third Reich adulterated as a faux-
philosophical forefather. In the ffth chapter, Ratner-Rosenhagen handles
the problem in a subtle and ingenious manner. She examines Nietzsches
Nazi reception through the lens of Walter Kauffmanns copious translations
and commentary. In her effort to defend Kauffmann against the charge of
de-Nazifying and thus watering down Nietzsche, Ratner-Rosenhagen situates
him in the World War II context of German migrs like Arendt, Adorno,
and Horkheimer, and their collective effort to inoculate Nietzsche against
charges of anti-Semitism (229). Ratner-Rosenhagen resists posing the hack-
neyed question: was Nietzsche really a Nazi? (Its rehashing in other cases,
that of Heidegger chief among them, might be said to be endemic to the
history of metaphysics in Germany.) Rather, she aptly demonstrates that
Kauffmanns aim was to separate Nietzsche from politics altogether. Where
Ratner-Rosenhagen could have used the distant American context to demure
from the nuisance of Nietzsches Nazifcation, she instead cleverly puts that
context to use, freshly re-conceiving the problem anew by way of the transla-
tor on whom most American readers now depend.
The sixth and fnal chapter offers the anti-foundationalist reading of
Nietzsche in 1960s France as a springboard from which to recount its home-
grown variety in the work of Allan Bloom, Richard Rorty, and Stanley Cavell.
Ratner-Rosenhagen reconstructs their idiosyncratic accounts of Nietzsches
engagement with foundationalism. Blooms oft-scorned The Closing of the Ameri-
can Mind (1987) redeemed a Nietzsche who trained students to better evalu-
ate moral claims from one who rejected all moral claims outright. Nietzsche
was the ironist who Rorty invoked to prepare a politics divorced from moral
1267 M L N
foundations in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989). And Ratner-Rosenhagen
treats Cavell as a ftting bookend, for his work has resuscitated Emerson in
academic philosophy. Emerson undergoes a Nietzschean treatment in Cavells
many essays that set the two alongside each other in order to explore modern
mans absence of grounds. The accomplishment of the chapter is its argument
for a uniquely American brand of anti-foundationalism. Ratner-Rosenhagen
gathers together its contours from not only the three thinkers major works;
she traces Nietzsches infuence on their intellectual itineraries as well. It is
a fne example of the use of reception history for the sake of conceptual
argument that is penetrating enough to leave readers thinking she is partisan
to these Americans rejection of a Nietzsche narrowly concerned with the
assault on logocentrism (304).
American Nietzsche offers enthusiasts and critics of Nietzsche more than a
formidable appendix that sets his legacy in a new context. Ratner-Rosenhagen
fnds an inventive way to tell the story of his reception with a deft sense of
the contestations and communities that characterized Nietzsches American
readership.
The Johns Hopkins University LARRY S. MCGRATH
Susan Stewart. The Poets Freedom: A Notebook on Making. Chicago and London: U of
Chicago P, 2011. 320 pages.
A Notebook on Making. The subtitle of Susan Stewarts latest critical work, The
Poets Freedom, captures the attention of any reader interested in questions
of form. With its simple aesthetic beauty, spacious layout, wide margins and
generous chunk of pages left blank in the back for the readers own notes
and refections, the book immediately invites a different form of readerly
engagement, and a more intentional consideration of critical form itself.
Stylistically, Stewarts characteristically luminous prose is equally inviting and
open-handed. Yet in its eight short chapters, we fnd perhaps Stewarts most
probing, ambitious and abstract philosophical exploration to date. This com-
bination of accessibility and rigor, open form and abstract argumentation,
produces a work of critical thinking that is diffcult to place, challenging to
engage with, maddening from an argumentative standpointand a fascinat-
ing refection on the boundary between primary and secondary literature.
Conscious of the unfamiliarity of the notebook as published genre to
both scholarly and lay audiences, Steward begins the book with a prefatory
note On the Method of This Notebook: Although I have spoken to
[my] readers as if they will turn the pages continuously from start to fnish,
I imagine, and hope, I have made a book for perusing from time to time. I
have not unwound a single story or hammered a fnal argument into place,