Human, stubbornly human, sensibly human?

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Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Nigel Dodd, Leon Wansleben, Nader Andrawos and members of the LSE Department of Sociology Writing Group for their comments on previous versions of this review article.

Notes on contributor

Dominika Partyga is a PhD candidate and teaching assistant in social theory at the Department of Sociology, London School of Economics and Political Science. Her research explores the reception of Nietzsche’s experimental philosophy in classical and modern social theory. Her articles on Foucault’s and Simmel’s readings of Nietzsche have been published in the Journal of Classical Sociology and in the four by three magazine.

Notes

1 At least since the translation of Simmel’s Lebensanschauung into English, the boundaries between the ‘sociological’ and ‘philosophical’ polarities in Simmel’s thought have been challenged in various productive ways (Kemple 2018; Pyyhtinen 2017). In this vein, Goodstein (2017) points towards Simmel’s liminal position in-between nineteenth century modernist philosophy and the emerging modern social science as a thinker whose philosophical contributions have been obscured by what she calls ‘canonising modes of reception in sociology’ and a ‘narrowly analytic understanding of what is philosophical’ (250). I would argue that Simmel’s proto-sociological reading of Nietzsche can be used to recover some of those liminal contributions (Partyga 2016).

2 This Nietzschean ‘question of style’ is more pronounced in Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles, where Derrida (1979) explores Nietzsche’s plural and anti-dialectical style by linking it to the multi-faceted trope of truth/woman/castration in Nietzsche’s writings. Read as an intervention into 70 s second-wave feminism, in particular deconstructions of the metaphysical and essentialist conception of woman, this text continues to provoke various controversies with regards to the question of what it means to write from the position of a minority (e.g. woman), and the dangers involved in the consideration of the political category of ‘woman’ as a rhetorical trope, which might be said to obscure its socio-material realities (see Verkerk 2017).