Does Contemporary Queer Theory Rest on a Nietzschean Philosophical Framework? Is so, to What Extent, and Why?

Richard McDonald

552695

Advanced Theory – Assignment Three

Word Count: 4695

Does Contemporary Queer Theory Rest on a Nietzschean Philosophical Framework? If so, to What Extent - and Why?

The primary concerns of contemporary queer theory are the

locating and destabilising of the incongruities between

sex, gender and desire. The methods used by proponents of

queer theory - who utilise it as a mode of post-

structural analysis - are critical and reflexive

operations principally inherited from the schools of

critical theory. This essay seeks to scrutinise the claim

that the philosophical foundations of contemporary queer

theory can be tangibly traced to the work of Friedrich

Nietzsche, who himself had a profound impact on the

development of the schools of critical theory. This essay

will attempt to critically grapple with Nietzsche’s

original works through a ‘queer’ reading, exploring in

particular Nietzschean conceptions of subjectivity and

their potential intersection with notions of queer

subjectivities offered by queer theorists such as Judith

Butler and Lee Edelman, in the hope of understanding

where Nietzsche’s philosophy may be located within

contemporary queer theory. An exploration of the theories

of Frances Oppel will also be offered, whose queer

readings of Nietzsche’s more poetic works illuminates the

way Nietzsche may have communicated destabilising

critiques on binary forms through his use of form and

structure in Thus Spoke Zarathustra and The Birth of Tragedy. With

the aim of exploring the effects of Nietzsche on queer

theory in a postmodern format and global context, Oppel’s

reading of Nietzsche’s Apollonian/Dionysian dynamic will

be explored in the intersecting context of Yukio

Mishima’s ground-breaking work of ‘queer’ literature:

Confessions of a Mask.

Nietzschean subjectivity is a contested topic, which

is primarily due to the ironic style Nietzsche employs in

many of his works, making his theories difficult to

decipher and unpack. For this reason, it has been

suggested that any work that attempts to offer such an

analysis should include a proviso: Nietzsche’s subjectivity

differs from Nietzschean subjectivity. Where the former

suggests direct suggestion from Nietzsche himself on the

subject, the latter entails where he ‘should have known

better’, or rather, what the rest of his philosophy would

imply on the subject (Cox, 1999, p.110). In light of the

above question, this work will agree with and promote

such a distinction, but refuse a hierarchical positioning

of the two; it is the aim of the following analysis to

examine whether queer theorists have drew from Nietzsche or

the Nietzschean.

It is first important to explore the traits of

perspectivism in the Nietzschean oeuvre, as this will

illuminate his greater project of subjectivity. Although

he rarely used this word reflexively to refer to coherent

ideas in his own work, related terms – and variations of

such – are commonplace in his later works. As a starting

point, perspectivism refers to the idea that we are

natural beings in a matrix of power. We are the

intersections of varying worldviews, which in turn are

formulated from the blending of cultural, social,

political, and religious ‘desires, beliefs and values’

(Cox, 1999, p.110).

In a famous passage in the Genealogy of Morals,

Nietzsche discusses the relationship between perspective

and interpretation. He dismisses objectivity as

‘contemplation without interest’ and thus a ‘nonsensical

absurdity’. Continuing, he ties in the notion of

objective truth into the infamous idea of ‘pure-reason’,

which he argues is dangerous in its unintelligibility. He

suggests that there is: ‘ only a perspective seeing, only a

perspective knowing’ that bolsters our understanding of a

particular object, topic or philosophy, by nature of

there being several perspectivist opinions of it that

inform one another. He then recycles ‘objective’ to mean

the best understanding we have of a particular notion

based on the multiplicity of perspectivist

understandings. To limit the number of ‘affects’

(subjects holding perspectives) would be to ‘castrate the

intellect’ (Nietzsche, 2006, p.87). Thus, for Nietzsche,

objectivity is a fallacy that limits the subject in what

they may know. The perspectivist subject is a construct

of the various perspectives of others, and we grow and

expand our knowledge through this on-going cumulative

process of social learning. In this sense, there is no

pre-constituted ‘knowing subject’ that exists before the

cultural domain. Brian Leiter has noted that the

Nietzschean concept of perspectivism is the way in which

humans see objects in accordance with its use to them,

and ‘particular interests and needs’, thus, the greater

the number of ‘perspectives’ one has of an object or

theme, the closer to the ‘true’ sense of it we step, and

the more a subject can use or appreciate an object or

idea, due to the multiplicity of desires there are in

relation to it (Leiter, 1994, p.344). This example of

Nietzsche’s hesitance – or outright philosophical denial

– to accept pure reason helps to define him as an anti-

enlightenment philosopher, against the essentialising of

subjectivity.

In The Gay Science, Nietzsche uses the terms ‘Christian

Interpretations’ and ‘Christian perspectives’ to discuss

particular moral standpoints. Thus, Nietzsche is using

perspectivism as a conduit for analysing desire in

concordance with religious subjectivities. He also

interchangeably uses ‘perspective’ and ‘interpretation’

in other stanzas, showing their theoretical cohesiveness

(Cox, 1999, p.112) (Nietzsche, 1974, pp.304-310 ; 336).

Similarly, regarding the subject at the heart of

perspectivism, Nietzsche gives an account of several

identity markers that may represent such subject

perspectives, such as ‘master and slave’ that not only

mark perception, but different ways of modes of ‘,

desire, cognition, evaluation, and action’ that one

possesses as essences of their faculties (Cox, 1999,

p.120) (Nietzsche, 1966, p.260).

Judith Butler, in her seminal work Gender Trouble,

shows themes of Nietzschean perspectivism in her

discussions on cultural intelligibility, her theory of

performativity and her notion of drag. Of the most

important influences Nietzsche had on Butler, his concept

of genealogy (particularly Foucault’s understanding) is

to stand as the most strident, and is apparent in her

delineations of the aforementioned topics. It is

important to understand this influence before Nietzschean

perspectivism is conflated with Butler’s work, as her

primary mechanisms owe much to the genealogical method.

Nietzschean genealogy is the critique and

challenging of philosophical or social beliefs, in

particular, by placing the belief in the context of its

original temporal setting and thus understanding how

meta-narratives have come to be formed through

manipulation and misrepresentation. Foucault’s work on

genealogy expanded the inherent methodological process,

taking into account the possibilities that must have been

present for a certain ideology to come into existence and

the power dynamics at play that allowed certain

narratives to distort the truth and become ‘accepted’

(the understanding of truth being unknowable) (di

Georgio, 2013, pp.97-111) (Foucault, 2003, p.306).

Foucault particularly stressed in his writings the

antiessentialist nature of Nietzschean genealogy. For

example, in discussing punishment; Nietzsche explained

how the definition (and thus, use) has shifted from being

a source of enjoyment for the punisher, to being a form

of corrective discipline for the criminal. Foucault’s

reading of Nietzsche stresses that history is a series of

constant, conflicting conceptions of knowledge that

prevail over each other (Foucault, 2001, pp.347-48).

However, Foucault seemingly does not incorporate

Nietzsche’s conception of ‘active bodily forces’, that

is, the inherent will to power in an individual that

drives them to overpower and control and dominate others

(Nietzsche, 2006, p.55). Instead, Foucault argues that

power dynamics work directly on the subject, constituting

them in the process in ‘the image of power’, which makes

the body ‘fully historical’ and subject to power

(Foucault, 2001, p.347) (Stone, 2005, p.1).

We can see clearly this Foucauldian reading

prevalent in Butler’s reconceptualising of feminism and

in her genealogical analysis of ‘woman’. In the first

chapter of Gender Trouble, Butler offers a radical

reconceptualising of feminism. She charges feminism with

the essentialising of its own subject: ‘woman’. Although

this has obvious political benefits in that it

consolidates and organises the ‘represented’ into one

manageable category, it belies the feminist project of

political representation. It establishes a pre-

constituted subject that has the basis of its identity in

assigned birth sex, belying the manifestations of gender

across temporal, political, cultural and religious

discourses, as well as among subjects of varying birth

sexes - a claim by Butler that is in coalition with

Foucault’s notion of the subject constituted by power and

discourse. In destabilising this essentialising approach

to ‘female’ subjectivity, Butler relies on the

Foucauldian rethinking of Nietzschean genealogy.

Similarly to Foucault, she does not utilise Nietzsche’s

concept of ‘bodily forces’, instead explaining the

discursive formation of gender as an effect of the

heterosexual matrix (Butler, 2008, p.xxv). Furthermore,

Butler has directly criticised Foucault for not fully

rejecting the notion of ‘active bodily forces’, citing

his insistence that the body is exterior to power

(Butler, 2008, pp.96, 101-106). It has been noted that

Butler’s reading of Foucault’s rearticulating of

genealogy allowed her to solidify her non-essentialist

stance of gender that does not reduce the subjective

importance of the gender identity in question. In arguing

that women (or rather, ‘woman’) has a genealogy, and

thus, that woman is a term of multiplicity; Butler notes that

each woman performs their gender in accordance with their

own perspective, but can still validly be defined as part

of the consolidating term ‘women’ due to the agreement

between subjects that their understanding of gender

revolves around discursive notions of femininity that

tangibly link them (Butler, 2008, p.138). This is not to

say that they all have similar performative features,

rather that it is the fact that they are all part of a

genealogical chain of reiterations of ‘woman’ that binds

them (Stone, 2005, p.5). This is part of the foundation

for Butler’s ‘coalitional feminism’, and has similarities

to Nietzsche’s perspectivist subject who is part of –and

formed by – the culturally changing perspectives on ideas

and their intersections.

Regarding subversive sexualities, Butler disregards

the notion of a pre-discursive subject, inciting Foucault

to argue that such an assertion occurs within discursive

temporalities, ergo; the notion of ‘before’ and ‘after’

is an anachronistic construct. She argues the contrary,

stating that subversive identities are formed by the same

‘matrix of power’ that creates normative models of

identity and that seeks to consolidate them. Instead of

dismissing such identities as a replication of the

‘masculinist economy of identity’, she posits that

systems of power allow for the production of subjects who

stand in contrast to what is ‘culturally intelligible’

(Butler, 2008, p.40). For Butler, the existence and

repetition of such identities expands social discourse

and what is culturally intelligible. For example, ‘butch’

and ‘femme’ identities may be seen as queer

appropriations of heteronormative performative

characteristics, and thus, repetitions of the

‘masculinist economy’. However this is not the case, and

to assert the above is to remove the importance of such

identities from the queer subject. Instead, these

identities are noted as subversive in that they denaturalise

gender. The notion of masculine identity becomes open to

women through the repeated enacting of ‘butch’, as it

makes the ‘phantasmatic structure’ of gender apparent and

shows the ‘original’ or normative gender: ‘ a masculine

man’ to be a mere copy of an imaginary concept.

We can see that the way in which cultural

intelligibility is expanded is similar to the way the

Nietzschean subject consolidates their knowledge of

themes through an interaction with other ‘perspectives’.

Furthermore the anti-essentialist stance of Butler is

clearly a growth from her prolific engagement with

Nietzschean-cum-Foucauldian genealogy. The refusal of the

pre-discursive and pre-constituted subject is important

for the successful operation of both theories; it is

integral to the process of ‘knowing’ that one is created

through interactions with the other. If we take the

abstract ‘Gender’, the Nietzschean subject, similarly to

the Butlerian; through encountering queer identities,

would begin to overcome their original unease through

experience with the ‘other’s’ perspectives on gender and

their subjective identity, increasing their own

understanding of the concept. The notion that there is no

‘objective’ gender is also important to both, as cultural

understandings and manifestations of gender change, so do

the ways in which one understands it. This is incredibly

important in the study of queer identities; Nietzsche’s

refusal of objective truths and ‘pure reason’

acknowledges the changing and fluid nature of ‘knowing’,

yet it does not detract from the importance of subjective

definitions, that are based on one’s personal truth,

allowing for queer identities to be validated through

existing, while also helping to expose the mechanics of

the heterosexual matrix. It is also important to

understand that Butler sees the body as being a

historical subject with a genealogy, thus the process of

expanding what is culturally intelligible comes about

from her reading of Foucauldian genealogy, that is - it

is due to the constant conflictions of perspectives and

knowledge.

Performativity offers another intersection of

Butlerian and Nietzschean frameworks of subjectivity. For

Butler, the culturally constituted subject is complicit

in maintaining modes and stereotypes of gendered identity

through constant repetitions of physical, verbal and

mental characteristics, therefore, gender only exists

insofar as we are willing to pretend it does. To say that

gender is performative means to say that it is culturally

scripted, and becomes naturalised in most subjects

through mental embedding and repetition. However, the

possibility for queer identities to emerge comes from the

fact that the subject – when performing internalised

gender norms – ‘organises them anew’ with each individual

manifestation (Butler, 1983, p.131). This is

methodologically tied into Butler’s genealogical process;

the constant reiterations of internalised gender norms

work to constantly reinvent and re-establish what is

meant by gender, creating spaces – over time – for the

validity of queer identities. Although it ignores the

active bodily forces Nietzsche employs, it stands in

agreement with his anti-essentialist and

perspectivist/discourse approach to the changing nature

of cultural intelligibility. Nietzsche’s conception of

‘active bodily forces’ show an area of his thinking that

may not be in line with contemporary queer mechanics, in

placing the changing nature of perspectives in the

genealogical process as the result of the individuals

will to power, that is, their will to dominate, Nietzsche

ignores the cultural dynamics of power and knowledge that

also govern and disseminate definitions and perspectives.

Lee Edelman, in his work No Future, offers a

dissection of the notion of the ‘death drive’. He asserts

that the term stands to mark queerness as that against

‘erotic futurity’, it is a term that encompasses: ‘…the

negativity opposed to every form of social viability.’

(Edelman, 2004, p.9). In short, the death drive is the

rejection of what is required of the subject to be valid.

It delineates the internalisation and resulting abjection

of social and heteronormative norms within the queer

subject, while labelling the ‘queer’ as everything that

is against such norms and the ‘future’. Although Edelman

primarily cites Freud and Lacan when discussing the death

drive, Paul Gordon has noted that Nietzsche’s commentary

on tragedy reveals much about the theory, such similar

traits that are apparent in No Future.

Gordon stresses Nietzsche’s avocation that we hold

an affinity for: ‘the original, procreative force that

lies behind things…rather than with individual things

themselves…’ (Gordon, 2006, p.68). He then ties this in

to Nietzsche’s notion of the will to power, noting that

in the innate desire to overcome all things, including

one’s self, the subject seeks to defy and destroy all

‘abiding phenomenon’. This notion of the subject’s

obsession with futurity, and the want to overcome it is a

step beyond Freud’s original theory, and intellectually

validates the intellectual crux of Edelman’s work that is

that those of us who are queer should accept our

identities as anti-identities and the social

destabilisation caused by our existence as non

futuristic/reproductive beings as inherently positive

attributes. Likewise, Nietzsche describes the process of

the ultimate will to power rejecting even those norms

that bind us as a positive process that inheres within

the journey to personal wholeness and self-discovery. The

concepts of reproduction and futurity are commonplace

discussions throughout No Future, and Edelman’s work finds

many similarities in the mechanics of Nietzsche’s will to

power. The subject who both internalises yet externalises

– through abjection - the norms that would otherwise bind

them to a stringent social order, in the name of

individuality; seems to suffer the same obsessions with

‘origins’ as their Nietzschean counterpart.

Frances Oppel offers both a lucrative and invaluable

insight into the subliminally queer nature of Nietzsche’s

work, through gendered and queered readings of

Nietzsche’s original texts. She asserts that while

Nietzsche combatted western dualities of ‘God and Human

and Heaven and Earth’, he also did the same to

conceptions of sex and gender and other cultural

dualities in strategic or passive ways. Such a critique

of binaries is inherently important within queer theory,

and would reveal Nietzsche as fertile ground for the

queer project. Regarding Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy, she

analyses it as a ‘mythic text’, pointing out Eliade’s

point that myth historically represented sacred truth.

Through reason, myths become destroyed, as do the

supposed ‘sacred truths’ that inhered within their

exemplariness (Oppel, 2005, p.66). The German translation

of Trieb can also be understood as instinct, and Nietzsche’s

connotations of this instinct reference the ancient

male/female binary: instinct is irrational, formless and

thus, feminine, which he pits in opposition to the reason

that destroys it. Thus, it would appear that in this work

Nietzsche is using a structuralist and ancient form of

female essentialising that places the feminine into a

place of irrationality. Oppel’s reading suggests

otherwise.

The Birth of Tragedy uses myth to refer to the truth and

the fictitious simultaneously. As a plot device, myth is

used to highlight the epistemological and genealogical

differences in knowledge between the past and the

present. For the past, myth represents sacred truth, and

for the present, spurious falsity. This is in concordance

with Levi-Strauss, who posited that myth has a

chronology; Strauss describes myth as having its origins

in binary oppositions, but then moving towards an

awareness of its own erroneousness. Such ‘opposite terms’

eventually admit a ‘third way’ into their chronology,

mediating and destabilising the binary (Oppel, 2005,

p.67) (Levi-Strauss, 1972, pp.I:224). For the notion of

truth itself to be maintained in such a transition, the

‘interchangability’ of terms must be accepted (that is,

their fluidity). Reflecting this, The Birth of Tragedy –after

portraying the ‘nature/culture opposition’, gives the

example of ‘Greek Tragedy’ as an art form that was born

from the ‘art impulses of nature’. Such a statement

requires a serious recalibration of the nature and

culture binary, and signals the breakdown of culturally

understood truths, as two distinct terms, nature and

culture, begin to birth and trespass upon each other.

This destabilisation, caused by the system itself coming

to recognise its own instability and incorrectness, is

empathetic to Butler’s notion of cultural intelligibility

in the sense that in both schematics, the system – that

is, the subjects that it produces – become aware of their

own faults and the domain of cultural truth is expanded.

The notion of ‘interchanging parts’, such as art lending

from ‘natural artistic desires’ is analogous to the

‘butch female’ who lends from the original ‘fallacy’ of

normal gendered behaviour. Likewise, both of these

interchanges expose the fallacy of the ‘original’ as a

truth, a construct in itself. Oppel’s reading dismisses

the aforementioned claims of essentialising misogynist

links that Nietzsche attempts to draw between femininity

and myth, instead, his exposing of myth as something

knowable with its own genealogy brings it into the domain

of reason, blending and amalgamating its characteristics,

much like the notion of interchanging that myth indulges

in.

Regarding the text as a whole, Oppel stresses a

dichotomy that she asserts structures the whole work as

an implicit commentary on masculinity and femininity. The

work uses an apparent heterosexual analogy to claim that

art requires the coalescence of two opposing ‘art drives’

‘just as the production of new organic life depends on

that of the two opposite sexes’ (Oppel, 2005, p.63).

Interestingly, the two figures Nietzsche uses to

represent this blending are Apollo and Dionysus - two sons

of Zeus. Immediately, the use of two masculine figures as

a conduit for an analogy regarding procreation becomes

suspicious. Furthermore, in Nietzsche’s notebooks that

contain the drafts for The birth of Tragedy, there are several

references to the ‘feminine’ attributes of ‘music, nature

and myth’, with notes specifically delineating chapter

headings regarding women. In the published copy however,

in a work that rests on a heterosexual analogy, the word

‘woman’ is a rarity (Oppel, 2005, p.63) (Nietzsche, 1988,

pp.7:93).

The presence of the feminine, however, is signified

by repeated motifs and in a rhetorical pandering to

‘feminine’ concepts such as music and myth. The omission

of women from the texts, when the formative analogy and

the presence of ‘nature’ (inhering within discussions of

the aforementioned ‘art drives of nature’) demands her

explicit presence, implies Nietzsche’s use of literary

technique to raise a larger issue. In displacing the

feminine (in a similar fashion to the way Dionysus was

‘dismembered by the titans – Oppel notes), it is raised

to the level of the ‘mythic’, and further literary

manifestations – albeit sparse - of women stand them in

close alignment to Dionysus, who himself retains

stereotypically ‘feminine’ traits: ‘boundless, formless.

Destructive…’ (Oppel, 2005, p.65). This, when combined

with the texts tendency to self-reflect as a construct,

highlights the fact that femininity within The Birth of

Tragedy was intended to be a set of positive, unbound

attributes accessible by anybody. This may be seen to

fulfil the heterosexual analogy, in that the two

masculine/feminine needs are sated, but the larger point

is that femininity becomes denaturalised and removed from

the need to be corporeally signified.

Yukio Mishima’s pseudo-autobiographical novella

Confessions of a Mask has been seen as a practical

philosophical working of a directly Nietzschean

Apollonian/Dionysian dialectic (Starrs, 2002, pp.1,20).

The protagonist, Kochan, a cisgender male; relentlessly

tries to conceal his inner Dionysian sexual and primal

desires through self-discipline and an outwardly rigid,

‘Apollonian’ performativity. His failure is the

maintenance of wearing his ‘mask’, and he is never truly

able to overcome or satisfy this dialectic. In the

process, he finds some solace in imagining himself

mentally exhibiting female stereotypical traits, such as

sexual submissiveness. The notion of a ‘queer’ identity,

such as trans-feminine would not have been an option to a

male in post-war Japanese society, as masculinity was

conceived as corporeally strong, stoic and self-

disciplined (Sugihara, 1999, pp.1-10). This may explain

why such internal clashes of a socially

feminine/Dionysian psyche with the social demand for a

masculine/Apollonian performativity caused Kochan

matchless torment.

Thus, Kochan is the prime example of Nietzsche’s

Apollonian/Dionysian dynamic in a queer context in that

he is outwardly male with feminine attributes. The use of

this dynamic as a literary device by Mishima shows the

affinity that a critical Nietzschean approach to binary

forms has for the representation and development of queer

identities under discourses that promote binary systems -

that have historically operated to separate and oppose

ideals from one another. Although Kochan finds no respite

in his identity struggles, this can be attributed to the

sheer trauma of his upbringing and the prevailing gender

discourse of post-war japan that barred the dialectic

from its potentially fruitful ends (Starrs, 2002, pp.19-

25). The fact that Kochan never stipulates that he wants

to be – or feels to be – a woman, is again clearly

analogous to Nietzsche’s omission of ‘woman’ from The Birth

of Tragedy; Mishima and Nietzsche are both trying to

communicate that such characteristics do not need to

physically signified with the physical representation of

‘woman’ and that these attributes are in fact, unbound by

gender and sex.

Oppel offers a similar analysis of the development

of Zarathustra, who absorbs notions of ‘the feminine’

(such as eternal return that inheres in the fulfilment of

his prophecies) into his own identity, signalling his

transmutation into an identity that blurs commonly

understood gendered characteristics. Oppel notes that

when the reader realises this, the ‘oppositional

categories’ are not only brought into question but become

defunct. (Oppel, 2005, p.180). In converging the feminine

with the masculine, Nietzsche alters what is viable

masculinity, thus rattling the sense of a male/female

binary. Man has, in a sense, gone ‘beyond himself’, as

has the woman in their dismissal of stereotypes. Oppel

notes that such a blending should not be read as

bisexuality, or ‘half-and-halfness’, but rather, an

opportunity to form new modes of self-identification and

gendered characteristics in the journey to personal

wholeness (Oppel, 2005, p.5).

Thus, Oppel shows us that Nietzsche’s ironic,

prosaic and poetic styles have potentially obscured the

more critical elements of his more literary works. The

way in which she understands Nietzsche to have been

implicitly destabilising binaries of truth and also the

nature of ‘myth’ itself as a feminised construct reveals

a characteristic of Nietzsche’s methodologies in harmony

with critical queer mechanisms that seek to offer a

genealogy for cultural knowledge. Oppel argues that where

Nietzsche has been historically charged with misogyny,

were actually points in which he was building a

prevailing literary rhetoric that exposed the feminine

traits held in contempt as culturally bound and created

by male desire (Oppel, 2005, p.1).

An example of this is further exemplified in

Nietzsche’s denial of ‘the eternal feminine’. In The Gay

Science, Nietzsche makes reference to the patriarchal

construction of female identity and characteristics that

covertly instruct one how to perform their gender. A

young man is charged of being ‘corrupted by women’, to

which a sage explains that it is in fact men who should

‘atone’ for the failings of women, due to the fact that

they imprint their desires upon them. Although shrouded

in poeticism, this aphorism shows how Nietzsche uses a

literary style to examine patriarchal power as a conduit

for producing gender norms. The enlightened sage is a

metaphor for the learned man, and the spectators

represent society. Their essentialising of women as the

‘corrupters’ is pointed out as being a product of their

own ideals. This passage is problematic however; it is

somewhat complicit in the essentialising of women by

iterating the fact that one cannot blame women for the

way they are, as though that is the case (Nietzsche,

1974, p.126) (Oppel, 2005, p.28). This, however, is

somewhat rectified in a similar aphorism in Human, all too

Human, in which the ideals that men imprint on women in

the hope that they emulate them are in fact impossible

ideals that men themselves wish to attain, rooted in a

psychological unease with gendered characteristics and

the painful internalisation of what one ‘should be’,

causing the subject to seek and imprint this on the

‘other’ (Nietzsche, 1924, p I: 411). The two

aforementioned aphorisms provide a clear vantage point

from which one can see similarities with Butler’s notion

of performativity. As Butler notes, performativity

shrouds the originally genderless person - the impossibly

pre-cultural subject - in gender norms and ideals.

Nietzsche exposes these ideals as arbitrary and damaging,

bolstering Butler’s claims that gender characteristics

are born from particular cultural hierarchies of

preferable traits that exist within certain discourses.

To conclude, Nietzsche can be shown to have had

considerable impact on contemporary queer theorists and

the critical mechanisms they employ in their project of

analysing queer identities and destabilising arbitrary

conceptions of truth. This essay has utilised the work of

Judith Butler and Lee Edelman to show points in which

their work references, borrows and shares similarities

with Nietzsche’s writings, and also the points in which

these scholars have developed Nietzsche’s own work in an

attempt to remedy the inconsistencies that stem from

methodological flaws and his loquacious, layered tone.

Frances Oppel has demonstrated that while Nietzsche did

indeed make derogatory comments towards women in

particular, close queer readings of his work reveal new

critical interpretations that recognise his affinity for

queer mechanisms concerning destabilisation. In using

Yukio Mishima’s autobiographic work as an example of the

Nietzschean Apollonian/Dionysian dialectic in action,

this essay hopes to have sufficiently explored the effect

of Nietzsche’s philosophy not only on academic grounds in

the western academy, but also in other forms of ‘queer

theory’ manifest in Japanese literature. To close, this

essay asserts that Nietzsche stands firm in the academic

hinterland of contemporary queer theory, with his

critical predilection for anti-essentialism and the

challenging of truth being an irremovable part of the

historical preamble to queer theory.

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