Postponements: Woman, Sensuality and Death in Nietzsche

by David Farrell Krell

117 pages, Hardcover

First published August 1, 1986

About the author

David Farrell Krell is an American philosopher and professor emeritus at DePaul University, specializing in Continental Philosophy. He earned his Ph.D. from Duquesne University, where he focused on Heidegger and Nietzsche, two figures central to his scholarly work. Krell has taught at various universities in the United States and Europe, contributing extensively to the study of German Idealism, Romanticism, and deconstruction.
He has authored numerous books, including Daimon Life: Heidegger and Life-Philosophy (1992), Infectious Nietzsche (1996), and The Tragic Absolute: German Idealism and the Languishing of God (2005), examining themes of mortality, time, and finitude. His work also explores the intersections of philosophy, literature, and aesthetics, as seen in Lunar Voices (1995) and Archeticture: Ecstasies of Space, Time, and the Human Body (1997). Krell has been a key translator of Heidegger’s lectures on Nietzsche and edited Basic Writings (1977), a widely used collection of Heidegger’s essays.
Influenced by Jacques Derrida, Krell has engaged with deconstructive approaches to Nietzsche and Heidegger, shaping contemporary discussions on these thinkers. His later works, such as Ecstasy, Catastrophe (2015) and The Sea: A Philosophical Encounter (2018), continue his inquiries into existential and aesthetic themes, cementing his reputation as a major voice in modern Continental thought.

Reviews

[Zoonanism]

I think this should be titled eternal recurrence under the veil of a promised riff on sensuality. Krell dives deep into notes and sketches for never completed dramas and drafts of what eventually became the works we know of the master, exposing indecision. What constitutes a fitting demise for Zarathustra for Dionysus for Empedocles? Wherein and how will the mother of tragedy intervene? Can the Overman transcend pity, slaughter the feminine and laugh? Should he instead embrace the plague ridden body of the woman in the drama and only then die ?

So the same questions recur in each chapter, the account of these postponements start to feel
more and more alike, and by Calina's turn we feel we have lived and read this same postponement before.

One gets the impression that each revision may have had something to do with an event in the Nietzsche's life and that more than anything he would have preferred his Zarathustra to resign and settle to delights of some earthly attention which seems never to have been granted Nietzsche in real life.