Robert Gooding-Williams

Gooding-Williams offers an extremely thorough and considered reading of Nietzsche's Also Sprach Zarathustra. As the title indicates, he favors a modernist understanding that stresses an effort to innovate and progress beyond received intellectual and moral frameworks. He confronts and contradicts Paul de Man's perlocutionary pessimism in the body of his text, while also providing extensive annotations that position Gooding-Williams's conclusions relative to a vast field of secondary literature.

Throughout his analyses, Gooding-Williams emphasizes the ambivalence and doubt involved with Zarathustra's aspirations (and thus Nietzsche's ambitions). He offers the stutter as a key attribute of the text, with incomplete repetitions halting desired advances. And yet he brings out the persistently future-oriented aspect of Zarathustra's project, along with Nietzsche's desire to interrupt the repetition of an exhausted Platonic-Christian value system.

The analysis of the doctrine of eternal recurrence makes up a substantial portion of the study. Gooding-Williams helpfully proposes to distinguish among the different forms of recurrence as approached in the context of the "Three Metamorphoses" sketched at the outset of Zarathustra: thus the Camel's idea of recurrence differs from that of the Lion, which is not the same as the Child's idea of eternal recurrence. I found a similar disaggregation of the concept of "redemption" to be somewhat less clear--his jargon of redemption1, redemption2, etc. tended to get in the way of his meaning.

Overall, Zarathustra's Dionysian Modernism provides an insightful and highly coherent approach to this monumental work of imaginative philosophy.… (meer)