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On Affirmation and Becoming: A Deleuzian Introduction to Nietzsche’s Ethics and Ontology

This book re-explores Friedrich Nietzsche’s “critique of nihilism” through the lenses of Gilles Deleuze. A Deleuzian reading of Nietzsche is motivated by a post-deconstructive style of interpretation, inasmuch as Deleuze goes beyond, or in between, hermeneutics and deconstruction. The book is not about Deleuze’s reading per se; rather, it is an appraisal of Nietzsche’s “critique of nihilism” using Deleuze’s experimental reading. As such, the book is an experiment in itself, as it shows how to partly gloss Nietzsche’s critique of nihilism through Deleuzian phraseology.

The critique of nihilism is the book’s basis for introducing Nietzsche’s ethics and ontology. Appraising Nietzsche’s ethics and ontology amounts to clarifying what Deleuze defines as the movement from the “dogmatic image of thought” to the “new image of thought.” Through this new image of thought, Deleuze makes sense of a Nietzschean counterculture, which is a perspective that resists traditional or representational metaphysics. Deleuze takes the reversal of Platonism, or the transmutation of values, to be the point of departure. By abandoning the old image of thought, we are able to free ourselves from the obscurantism of foundationalist or essentialist thinking. It is only through the transmutation of values that Nietzsche’s ethics of affirmation and ontology of becoming would make sense. Through Deleuze, we are able to avoid reading Nietzsche as a moral philosopher and metaphysician. Rather, we are able to read Nietzsche as one espousing an ethical imperative through the thought of the eternal return and one advocating a theory of existence based on an immanent, as opposed to transcendent, image of the world.


Paolo A. Bolaños teaches Philosophy at the Department of Philosophy and the Graduate School of the University of Santo Tomas, Manila, Philippines. He holds an MA in Philosophy from Brock University, Canada, and obtained his PhD in Philosophy from Macquarie University, Australia. He serves as Vice-President of the Philosophical Association of the Philippines (PAP), Inc., and he is a member of the Philippine Academy of Philosophical Research (PAPR). The author is the editor of Kritike: An Online Journal of Philosophy (www.kritike.org).

"Bolaños’ first book ... is a highly textual and an equally highly textured piece. By using the description textual, I am referring to the prodigious amount of research underlying the groundwork of his work. Its size in fact can be deceiving. We have always been warned against judging a book by its cover. The same caution is useful in reading Bolaños; one definitely should be careful not to be taken in by the appearance of its handy size. The book in fact packs a punch and is doubtless equal to the task of propounding the “greatest weight” that Nietzsche spoke of when he described the immanence of eternal recurrence. [...] Besides, readers can find relief in Bolaños’ fluid prose. Lucidity of thought and writing style are a rare combination among doers of philosophy. To the readers’ advantage, this is a gift that Bolaños generously dispensed in his book, page after page. His way with words helps cushion the impact of a dizzying encounter with concepts and notions."

Jovito V. Cariño University of Santo Tomas, Philippines KRITIKE, 9: 2 (2016)

Buy This Book

ISBN: 1-4438-6683-0

ISBN13: 978-1-4438-6683-5

Release Date: 29th October 2014

Pages: 125

Price: £41.99

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