Book Review: Nietzsche’s Final Teaching, by Michael Allen Gillespie

• Author: Shilo Brooks
• Date: 01 June 2019
• Published date: 01 June 2019
• DOI: 10.1177/0090591718785361
• Subject Matter: Book Reviews

424 Political Theory 47(3)

3. Hazem Kandil, The Power Triangle: Military, Security, and Politics in Regime

Change (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 333–36, 340–50.

4. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards

a Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso, 2001), 167–71, 176–93.

5. Ibid., 190.

6. Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge, MA:

Harvard University Press, 2010); David Scott, Omens of Adversity: Tragedy,

Time, Memory, Justice (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014).

7. Asef Bayat, Street Politics: Poor People’s Movements in Iran (New York:

Columbia University Press, 1997); Asef Bayat, Life as Politics: How Ordinary

People Change the Middle East (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010).

8. Jacques Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, trans. Julie Rose

(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 29–30.

9. James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts

(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990), 184; Robin D.G. Kelley, Race

Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (New York: The Free

Press, 1996), 13.

10. Foucault, “Des espaces autres,” 1581.

11. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences

(New York: Vintage, 1994), xviii.

Nietzsche’s Final Teaching, by Michael Allen Gillespie. Chicago: University of Chicago

Press, 2017, 264 pp.

Reviewed by: Shilo Brooks, Herbst Program of Humanities in Engineering, University

of Colorado, Boulder, CO, USA

DOI: 10.1177/0090591718785361

Friedrich Nietzsche’s intellectual life came to an abrupt halt in 1889 after he

suffered a mental breakdown on a street corner in Italy. As the decades since

his collapse have multiplied, so too have the scholarly interpretations of his

work. Nietzsche’s late writings, which are among the few books of philoso-

phy still kept in perpetual stock in bookstores, have stimulated the thought of

Heidegger, Arendt, Foucault, Strauss, Habermas, and Derrida, to name just a

few. For all of the attention he has received during the past century, it is sur-

prising that the doctrine upon which much of his final teaching was staked is

still so mysterious to so many of his readers. This doctrine is known as the

doctrine of the eternal recurrence of the same. It is frequently decoupled from

treatments of other aspects of his late thought on account of its almost mysti-

cal inscrutability.