Book description
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche 1844-1900 'God is dead', announced
Nietzsche - before going on to abolish himself. For there is no
Nietzsche, suggests Ronald Hayman in this stimulating, provocative
guide: just a shifting set of contradictory voices. Those envious
contemporaries who smeared Nietzsche with the mark of madness came
closer than the knew in characterizing a philosopher in whose thought
ambivalence approximated to disintegration of the self. Yet while the
nineteenth century's coherent, consistent systems of certainty would
come crashing down ingloriously a the very first touch of the twentieth,
Nietzsche's disjointed discourses survived - more modern, it seemed,
than the moderns. Today his work seems more contemporary than ever, his
various voices speaking compellingly to a sensibility for which paradox
is the only truth, plurality the only consistency, fragmentation the
only integrity. This enthralling guide reveals a new Nietzsche for a
new, postmodern age. Ronald Hayman's books include Nietzsche: A
Critical Life, K: A Biography of Kafka, Thomas Mann: A Biography and
most recently Hitler and Geli. His play, Playing the Wife, was performed
at the 1995 Chichester Festival with Derek Jacobi as Strindberg.
