Nietzsche and the Question of Interpretation

Although Nietzsche is frequently cited as a forerunner of contemporary approaches to interpretations, little attention has been paid to the specific contributions to interpretation theory found in the Nietzschean text. Schrift's well-documented study rectifies this situation. Drawing on resources from classical and contemporary French, German and English Nietzsche scholarship, this study focuses on a basic interpretive dilemma: how to avoid the dogmatic positing of one interpretation as the correct one without lapsing into unmitigated relativism in which all interpretations are regarded as equally legitimate. While making Heidegger, Derrida, and several other French post-structuralists of Nietzsche accessible to specialist and non-specialist alike, this study clearly exposes the dogmatic tendency of Heidegger and the relativistic tendency to deconstruction. In a wide ranging and lucid commentary, this study puts Nietzsche in contact with the hermeneutic tradition in a unique way. Arguing that a tension in Nietzsche's diverse remarks on interpretation anticipates the hermeneutic pluralist alternative to Heidegger and deconstruction. By examining the tension between perspectivism and philology and showing how it animates Nietzsche's own genealogy as an interpretative practice which can accept multiple and conflicting interpretations as better than others. Along the way he provides a cogent exposition of Nietzsche's accounts of language, metaphor, rhetoric, truth and textuality.