The Camel, the Lion, and the Child

Abstract:

Nietzsche unsettles the reader by exposing accidents and mistakes which shape(d) particular institutions and/or categories that are(were) believed to be essential, true ,or natural. Nietzsche frequently asserts jarring, highly cynical comments concerning women through which he seems to treat these categories as if they were essential. These comments about women appear contrary to Nietzsche’s treatment of other categories such as good, evil, freedom, and Christianity, which he describes as non-essential or genealogical accidents. These polemics about women might lead many readers to consider him profoundly misogynistic. However, with this essay, I hope to save Nietzsche from those claims by asserting there is more to his rhetoric than meets the eye. I analyze select works of Nietzsche and argue that his crudely misogynistic statements, rather than being unfortunate aberrations in an otherwise radical and emancipatory agenda, are instead an exercise in philosophic rhetoric. I evaluate, within a Derridean 4 framework, Nietzsche’s rhetorical method and theoretical scheme pertaining to the three part metamorphosis of free spirits [freie Geister] from camel to lion to child, as expressed in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. I attempt to show that his criticism of “women” and gender is a framing mechanism subtly woven around his seemingly larger critique of institutions such as “Nietzsche’s Christianity.” This essentialized notion of Christianity and other institutions like it 5 prevent free spirits from undergoing metamorphoses through which they can dismantle oppressive intuitions and create non-oppressive ones. I weigh my reading of Nietzsche and Derrida against that of Kelly Oliver’s in her study Womanizing Nietzsche. Oliver argues that both Nietzsche and Derrida resort to describing the most desirable woman as masculine, and that within these frameworks the feminine will always be an object of masculinity. I conclude that Nietzsche’s (and Derrida’s) playful rhetorical style and critique of essentialized institutions are successful in the deconstruction of this binary. Nietzsche, in this sense, is very much a proto-feminist and his work ought to be considered a powerful and prevalent critique of gender.

 The Camel, The Lion and The Child