Nandita Biswas-Mellamphy

While this book promotes itself as an overtly political book, in both title and overall tone, one cannot help but relay the metaphysical when it comes to Nietzsche. Mellamphy takes an extra step in this direction by comparing Nietzsche's 'great politics', 'eternal recurrence', and 'philosopher of the future', to a science fiction novel, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch by Philip K. Dick. While this comparison is only brought up in the preface and postface, it does inform the metanarrative of the book.

Indeed the focus appears to be on the tug of war between the old system and Nietzsche's new system (Can-D and Chew-Z in Dick's novel). The three stigmata reflect a battle from the "thou shalt", to its inevitable nihilistic destruction and "no-saying", to the philosopher of the future rebuilding the world with "yes-saying". The highly transformative nature of all these phases are relayed in the chapter titles, and the constant use of a Nietzschean Heraclitus and Dionysian throughout the text. Fire and flux eternally recurring through the ages. These reality shifts are given legislative and "nomothetic" value throughout the text to bring the metaphysical into the political and immediate realm.

While the scope of ideas primarily represents a later Nietzsche, with an emphasis on Thus Spoke Zarathustra and Beyond Good and Evil, much use is made from a posthumously published series of early lectures, Nietzsche's The Pre-Platonic Philosophers. This tie from Nietzsche's philologist days to his much later thought provides an insight to his conceptual continuity at a time when some biographers often consider Nietzsche to have lost it. With the mythopoetic Thus Spoke Zarathustra and the shocking title The Antichrist, it does seem that Nietzsche had changed.

This book views things differently. This is just a phase when Nietzsche took the gloves off and got real. When he decided to bring the "metaphysical" torch of Heraclitus down to earth, the political, and light the world up.… (mere)