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Title: Infectious Nietzsche (Studies in Continental Thought) by David Farrell Krell ISBN: 0-253-21039-9 Publisher: Indiana University Press Pub. Date: April, 1996 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $20.95

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Average Customer Rating: 5 (1 review)

Rating: 5
Summary: Balancing honesty and comedy
Comment: This is about as good a book as the interpretation of Nietzsche by a college philosophy professor and translator from the German might offer for my consideration. The second paragraph of the Introduction is already into the humor of the situation. "Nietzsche is like laughter from a beautiful mouth or in dancing eyes--soon everyone in the room is swept away by hilarity or hysteria, where the line that separates good health from noxious influence is obliterated." (p. xiii). The funny things for me in this book are "an old story that comes from Umbria during the High Middle Ages" (p. 187), the fantasy set "when Nietzsche celebrated his fiftieth birthday in 1894" (p. 251), and notes 8 and 9 of Chapter 6, "see also my PUREST OF BASTARDS, forthcoming," (p. 262).

Chapter 5, "Der Maulwurf/ The Mole," has 17 pages of German with English translations. The little poem:

sole
role
of the
mole
--pp. 118-19

rhymes so much better in English (3 perfect rhymes in 5 words) than in the German translation: "geworfener/ Entwurf/ des/ Maulwurfs" (p. 119). I don't know much about German, so I'm struck that the German word "Entwurf" seems remarkably like J.R.R. Tolkien's Entwives, which were missed so much by Treebeard in Chapter 4 of THE TWO TOWERS that he sang an Elvish song to the hobbits, in which an Entwife sang, "I'll look for thee, and wait for thee, until we meet again: Together we will take the road beneath the bitter rain!" Chapter 5 of INFECTIOUS NIETZSCHE ends with five pages of a poem, from "Dideldum!" in German and English, from the book HUMORISTISCHER HAUSSCHATZ by Wilhelm Busch (1963), illustrated by 15 cartoons of man and mole in a garden. This must be for comic relief, but adding things like this to a book on philosophy might also count as a reality check.

Among the serious sections in this book, "The Biopositive Effects of Infection" on pages 201-03 mentions "metaphors in motion." The next section mentions "the contagion of chronic indirect illness." (p. 205). There is a bit of psychology in that paragraph. "It may not be a mere contingency that Freud invokes eternal return of the same in the context of re-experiencing trauma. If war neurosis consists in the effort to discharge the excessive energy of the traumatic event through repetition of the original event in active remembrance, if in repetition compulsion the traumatic event is felt again, is re-sented, it may well be that recurrence is essentially bound up with ressentiment." (p. 205) That last word there is in French. Nietzsche used it so much Walter Kaufmann defined it as "a desire for revenge that is born of the sense of being underprivileged." (THE GAY SCIENCE, section 370, note 126, p. 331). It wasn't a big surprise to me, when I was drafted, that I might be sent to Nam, or that I dreamed I was in Vietnam, and when I woke up in the morning, I really was in Vietnam. The joke is that it didn't end there. Just mentioning Nam makes me sound like I was underprivileged enough to think that I have something to complain about, as if I still haven't gotten used to my life being one thing after another, mostly things I shouldn't talk about, especially the worst. It was the new Nixon that was really funny for me. I could never believe that people really wanted a new Nixon, particularly as my commander in chief, if his bright idea was to send me to Cambodia, which was like being re-sented all over again. Comedy is the only excuse for thinking that I understand how this works, and if you don't get that, you might not like this book.