Nietzsche’s writing on nationalism raises a series of questions about how we
interpret his genealogical and constructivist insights in light of his often
mendacious cultural stereotyping. More importantly, the misinterpretations of his
work in the name of nationalism have required careful examination to ‘salvage’ his
work from the wreckage of his posthumous Nazi career. A close reading of
Nietzsche raises critical questions about modern political subjectivity. This piece
relates these questions to the methodological problem associated with studying
nationalist violence in the wake of Nietzsche’s academic revival. It argues that
Nietzsche’s desire to place his own subjectivity beyond the dilemmas of his day is
ethically incomplete. If we only understand oppression in terms of different
subject positions or personal subjectivity, then we fail to recognize the ethical
responsibility that inter-subjectivity makes possible through the act of bearing
witness to the oppression experienced by others.

This essay outlines three geographical problem-spaces illuminated by
Nietzsche. The first is Nietzsche’s counterpoint to the ‘real world’: the ‘apparent
world’. The second is a non-totalizing, political elaboration of the first, what
Deleuze once called “the local fires of Heraclitus.” The third, Europe, is a space
that Nietzsche wrote from and against, a space best approached through a
postcolonial, transcritical reading.r

Using the philosophy of Nietzsche as a stimulus, I aim to engage physical
geographers and fellow scientists to reconsider their roles as scientists and to make
their work more action-oriented and powerful. I outline the false mystique of
science and the misconception of seeing science as independent of people and
society. I make a case that science gains its power by the way we attach meaning
to it and its findings, and that we should act on our ability to bestow that power.
Through Nietzsche, I argue that we are challenged to overcome our trained
tendency toward detached environmental science and instead put in place a new
physical geography that includes meaning and action. We have the opportunity to
do so in practical ways, by being reflexive and acknowledging the context of our
science, and by finding more ways to communicate our ideas in support of action to
change our world.

This paper offers a reflection on the relevance of Nietzsche to recent
geographical scholarship. It interrogates what we might mean by theoretically
sophisticated geographies. Drawing on a specific context – the postcolonial
apology in contemporary Australia – the paper turns to the relevance of Nietzsche’s
thinking about morality in charting everyday moral geographies and imagining
more ethical futures.xÅ

Following in the styles of Jacques Derrida (1998) and David Farrell Krell
(1996), or from a different tradition, Gaston Bachelard (1994), I engage in a
phenomenological and deconstructive meditation, arriving at my own construction
of what could be called a Nietzschean geophilosophy. By that, I mean the
deployment of Nietzsche's trope-ic army of metaphors and metonymies in relation
to an analysis of connections that spread like tendrils over themes of space, time,
and the flows of power, life, and beauty, among other motifs. Crucial to my
meditation or analysis is my own positioning as a woman who lives crossculturally,
both in terms of biological and cultural heritage, and in terms of
professional training as someone trained as both a molecular embryologist and
philosopher in the Philippines, England and the U.S. Just as crucial are my own
experiences as a visual artist and dancer: one whose awareness of tyrannical
binaries (‘cultured’ mind versus ‘primitive’ body; outside versus inside; West
versus East) leads me to see that a Nietzschean geophilosophy results not in a
modernist closure nor a nihilist refusal of all boundaries, but in a ‘mapping’ that
resists closure: a space in between oppression and resistance, within which I
personally ground myself as a philosopher-critic and artist. But I believe that this
subject position – one I call an insider-outsider perspective – is one everyone lives,

Friedrich Nietzsche’s revolutionary philosophy is renowned for its shocking
style, bombastic assertions, and apocalyptic visions. Whether lauded or spurned,
Nietzsche is usually read in geography as the anti-foundationalist philosopher who
self-identified with dynamite in order to detonate the “grand narratives” of Truth.
Taking bearings from the work of Alenka Zupanèiè, this essay argues that an even
more explosive Nietzschean bomb is possible. Zupanèiè rewires Nietzsche as
follows: first, instead of simply reading Nietzsche as the postmodern big bang
igniter of systematizing discourses, Nietzsche is also the “philosopher of the event”
whose explosiveness is charged by the intense nuances of stillness, silence, and
subtlety. Second, while Nietzsche is frequently praised for pitting multiplicity
against the totality of the One, Nietzsche also affirms moments when “One turns to
Two”, that is, when totalizing discourses of representation, truth, and subjectivity
become internally fractured. The essay explores these themes and their relevance
to geography by telling the story of a Nietzschean “event” – the taking place of a
positive correlation between nuance and explosiveness – that took place during the
2006 AAG Meetings in Chicago. The essay concludes by considering how
Nietzsche can re-sensitize us to the aesthetics of everyday geographies.

New York City was abuzz with labor struggles in December 2007. The
most prominent were that of the Writers Guild of America (East), picketing as part
of their nation-wide strike for a fair share of online and digital content “residuals.”
NYC-based shows like Letterman’s the Late Show, the Daily Show, and Saturday
Night Live languished for months without their creative workers. In December,
though, another smaller intersecting struggle also erupted at one of the world’s
largest media conglomerates, when Viacom’s vulnerable and (until then)
unorganized ‘freelance’ workers (known in-house as “permalance”) walked off the
job. The following comic and introduction present preliminary observations and
themes from research conducted during this tumultuous time.EªiI