Jill Stauffer and Bettina Bergo locate multiple affinities between the philosophies of Nietzsche and Levinas, challenging the belief that the two thinkers held fundamentally antithetical views. Both Nietzsche and Levinas questioned the nature of subjectivity and the meaning of responsibility after the "death of God." While Nietzsche posed dilemmas of self and ethics at a time of cultural upheaval and technological change, Levinas wrestled with subjectivity and the possibility of ethics in the wake of the Shoah. Both philosophers argued that goodness exists independently of a naïve faith in reason-for Nietzsche, goodness was an act moving beyond reaction and resentment, whereas Levinas defined it as something enacted rather than theorized. In a world at once without God and haunted by multiple divinities, both philosophers rejected transcendental foundations for politics and worked toward an alternative vision encompassing a positive sense of creation, a complex fraternity or friendship, and rival notions of responsibility.
The volume's three sections group arguments around the following debates, which are far from being settled: What is the reevaluation of ethics (and life) that Nietzsche and Levinas propose, and what does this mean for politics and sociality? What is a human subject-and what are substance, permanence, causality, and identity, whether social or ethical-in the wake of the demise of God as concept and belief? Finally, how can a "God" still inhabit philosophy, and what sort of name is this in the thought of Nietzsche and Levinas?
