O perfilamento racial em Nietzsche

Abstract

This paper aims to map the different notions of race Nietzsche employs throughout his oeuvre. I examine his varying definitions of the term and whether it has, according to Nietzsche, any use in the cultural battles in which philosophy should be engaged. Although I begin by tracing the occurrences of the concept in his early and middle-period works, I concentrate on Nietzsche’s later published writings, where his interest in race increases dramatically. This growing interest in race is linked to the physiological turn in the 1880s and to his late normative agenda, which follows the racial thinking of his day by insisting that breeding is essential to human development. In the last five years of his productive life, Nietzsche repeatedly claimed that thought is the product of physiology. Race and physiology determine thought, and European thought is in crisis. Nietzsche’s solution is to breed a new European race (although sometimes he writes of class as opposed to race), but in order to carry out a successful breeding project he argues it is first necessary to undermine the self-congratulatory racial myths of the time (such as the purity of an alleged German Race, the inferiority of the Jews and the like). So, even while Nietzsche scorns much of the racial thinking that predominates in his day, he never gives up the notion that the breeding of humans is not only possible but desirable.