Nietzsche

Last week, I bought a graphical novel on the life of Friedrich Nietzsche by Michel Onfray and Maximilien Le Roy. While the book has no strong philosophical content, it is quite pleasant to read and it gives a well-drawn presentation (or should I write interpretation) of his life. I have always found Nietzsche fascinating and I read some of his books during my last year of high school, even though I was more attracted by his active atheism, his aphorisms, and the surrealistic Also sprach Zarathustra than by his global philosophical perspective. The graphical novel Nietzsche is thus reminding me of this exciting time! It also points out the absurdity of presenting Nietzsche as a precursor of Nazi theories, when he railed at German nationalism,  racism and antisemitism. Now, I am a bit skeptical about the underlying message transmitted by the book, which reproduces Onfray’s thesis of Nietzsche as a revolutionary or at least an eternal rebel, a sort of philosophical Che Gevaresque icon… The novel was highly criticised in the French press, mostly because Michel Onfray is himself a controversial character: He aims at making philosophy a popular topic of interest, hence launching “Freaklosophic” books, he just published a manifesto against Freud and psychoanalysis, which is a library bestseller (4th on amazon.fr!), he maintains an anti-establishment and libertarian (in the 19th Century meaning of the term) stance in his writings, supporting (for a while) the Trotskyist NPA of Olivier Besancenot, he has launched a “popular university” in Caen, in reaction against the academic elite, and he is currently (and somehow paradoxically) one of the most popular philosophers on the French medias.