Nietzsche and the Becoming of Life

Throughout his writing career Nietzsche advocates the affirmation of earthly life as a way to counteract nihilism and asceticism. But what does Nietzsche mean by "life" on earth? and what does the affirmation of such a life entail? This volume takes stock of the complexities and wide-ranging perspectives that Nietzsche brings to bear on the problem of life's becoming on earth by engaging various interpretative paradigms reaching from existentialist to Darwinist readings of Nietzsche and measuring their continued importance against the standards of the latest advances of scholarship on Nietzsche.

In an age in which the biological sciences claim to have unlocked the deepest secrets and codes of life, the essays in this volume offer plenty of arguments to maintain a more skeptical view on the value of the results provided by the biological and evolutionary sciences, as well as their application to the human sciences. The essays in this volume give accounts of why life is in becoming precisely because life is both what is closest and what is furthest from us, because life experiments through us as much as we experiment with it, because life keeps our thinking and our habits always moving, in a state of recurring nomadism, and, lastly, because our best approach to life remains a mimetic one, rather than a representational one: life is there to be lived and enjoyed, rather than methodically studied and exploited. Nietzsche's philosophy is perhaps the clearest expression of the antinomy contained in the idea of "studying" life and in the Socratic ideal of an "examined" life, and precisely for this reason, his philosophy remains for our age the deepest source of wisdom about living.

Vanessa Lemm is Professor in Philosophy at the School of Humanities and Languages of the University of New South Wales, Australia. She is the author of Nietzsche's Animal Philosophy: Culture, Politics and the Animality of the Human Being (Fordham, 2009) as well as Nietzsche y el pensamiento politico contemporaneo (Fondo de cultura economica, 2013).