Die Reihe Monographien und Texte zur Nietzsche-Forschung (MTNF) setzt seit mehreren Jahrzehnten die Agenda in der sich stetig verändernden Nietzsche-Forschung. Die Bände sind interdisziplinär und international ausgerichtet und spiegeln das gesamte Spektrum der Nietzsche-Forschung wider, von der Philosophie über die Literaturwissenschaft bis zur politischen Theorie. Die Reihe veröffentlicht Monographien und Sammelbände, die einem strengen Peer-Review-Verfahren unterliegen. Die Buchreihe wird von einem internationalen Redaktionsteam geleitet.

Representations of violence are often said to generate cathartic effects, but what does “catharsis” mean? And what theory of the unconscious made this concept so popular that it reaches from classical antiquity to the digital age? In Violence and the Oedipal Unconscious, Nidesh Lawtoo reframes current debates on (new) media violence by tracing the philosophical, aesthetic, and historical vicissitudes of the “catharsis hypothesis” from antiquity to modernity and into the present. Drawing on theorists of mimesis from Aristotle to Nietzsche, Bernays to Breuer, Freud to Girard to Morin, Lawtoo offers a genealogy of the relationship between violence and the unconscious with at least two aims: First, this study gives an account of the birth of the Oedipal unconscious—out of a “cathartic method.” Second, it provides new theoretical foundations to solve a riddle of (new) media violence that may no longer rest on Oedipal solutions. In the process, Lawtoo outlines a new theory of violence, mimesis, and the unconscious that does not have desire as a via regia, but rather, the untimely realization that all affects spread contagiously and thus mimetically.

Representations of violence have subliminal contagious effects, but what kind of unconscious captures this imperceptible affective dynamic in the digital age? In volume two of a Janus-faced diagnostic of the cathartic and contagious effects of (new) media violence, Nidesh Lawtoo traces a genealogy of a long-neglected, embodied, relational, and highly mimetic unconscious that, well before the discovery of mirror neurons, posited mirroring reactions as a via regia to a phantom ego. Rather than being the product of a solipsistic discovery, the unconscious turns out to have haunted philosophers, psychologists, and artists for a long time. This book proposes a genealogy of untimely philosophical physicians that goes from Plato to Nietzsche, Bernheim to Féré, Freud to Bataille, Arendt to Girard, affect theory to the neurosciences. In their company, Lawtoo promotes the transdisciplinary field of mimetic studies by reevaluating the unconscious actions and reactions of homo mimeticus. As a new theory of mimesis emerges, Violence and the Mimetic Unconscious offers a searching diagnosis as to why the pathos of (new) media violence—from film to video games, police murders to the storming of the U.S Capitol—continues to cast a material shadow on the present and future.

After the linguistic and the affective turns, the new materialist and the performative turns, the cognitive and the posthuman turns, it is now time to re-turn to the ancient, yet also modern and still contemporary realization that humans are mimetic creatures. In this second installment of the Homo Mimeticus series, international scholars working in philosophy, literary theory, classics, cultural studies, sociology, political theory, and the neurosciences engage creatively with Nidesh Lawtoo’s Homo Mimeticus: A New Theory of Imitation to further the transdisciplinary field of mimetic studies. Agonistic critical engagements with precursors like Plato, Aristotle, Nietzsche, Bataille, Irigaray and Girard, involving contributions by leading international thinkers such as Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, William E. Connolly, Henry Staten and Vittorio Gallese among many others, reveal the urgency to rethink mimesis beyond realism. From imitation to identification, mimicry to affective contagion, techne to simulation, mirror neurons to biomimicry, homo mimeticus casts a shadow—but also a light—on the present and future, from social media to the Anthropocene.

Nietzsche, Theories of Knowledge, and Critical Theory, the first volume of a two-volume book collection on Nietzsche and the Sciences, ranges from reviews of Nietzsche and the wide variety of epistemic traditions - not only pre-Socratic, but Cartesian, Leibnizian, Kantian, and post-Kantian -through essays on Nietzsche's critique of knowledge via his critique of grammar and modern culture, and culminates in an extended section on the dynamic of Nietzsche's critical philosophy seen from the perspective of Habermas and critical theory. This volume features a first-time English translation of Habermas's afterword to his own German-language collection of Nietzsche's Epistemological Writings.

The first attempt at assessing the references to interpretation theory in the Nietzschean text.

GENERAL PROBLEMS IN NIETZSCHE INTERPRETATION Every philosopher presents special problems of interpretation. With Nietzsche these problems are especially crucial. The very richness of Nietzsche's thought and expression becomes a trap for the incautious or imaginative mind. Perhaps the greatest temptation for the in terpreter of Nietzsche is to attempt to "systematize" his thought into a consistent whole. Any such attempt necessarily results in distortion, for there is a fluidity in Nietzsche's thought which does not lend itself to strict categorization. This is not to deny that there are certain organic patterns in his philosophy. These patterns emerge, however, as Jaspers correctly insists, only upon careful, critical comparison of pertinent passages drawn from the entire corpus of Nietzsche's works. No single passage can be taken as a definitive statement of Nietzsche's views of any particular subject. Frequently, by presenting two or three especially relevant quotations from the author being considered, the correctness of his interpretation. With Nietz a critic can support sche, however, such a procedure is inadequate, for in many cases other passages can be found which will support an alternative, if not oppo site, interpretation. Nor is this difficulty alleviated by vast compi lations of relevant passages, for then one could gain just as much, and quite likely more, from re-reading Nietzsche's works themselves.

It is difficult to imagine a world without common sense, the distinction between truth and falsehood, the belief in some form of morality or an agreement that we are all human. But Friedrich Nietzsche did imagine such a world, and his work has become a crucial point of departure for contemporary critical theory and debate. This volume introduces this key thinker to students of literary and cultural studies, offering a lucid account of Nietzsche's thought on: * anti-humanism * good and evil * the Overman * nihilism * the Will to Power. Lee Spinks prepares readers for their first encounter with Nietzsche's most influential texts, enabling them to begin to apply his thought in studies of literature, art and contemporary culture.

These essays strip away Nietzsche's flamboyant style, his tragic biography, and his notorious "influence" to reveal him purely as a philosopher, a thinker occupied with problems of justification, value, science and knowledge, truth and God. They discover a profound and very human philosopher who has too long been ignored and distorted by the wrong kinds of admiration and criticism. Contributors include Walter Kaufmann, Arthur Danto, Richard Schacht, Karl Jaspers, Kathryn Pyne Parsons, Max Scheler, Ivan Soll, Thomas Mann, and Herman Hesse.