CRASSH

Letter to Georg Brandes, 23 May 1888

Nietzsche’s project of Umwerthung (Transvaluation) has been discredited by his sister and Peter Gast’s spurious editions of The Will to Power – an arbitrary arrangement of Nietzsche’s late notes which was to be used by the Nazi party. The conference re-examined both Nietzsche’s literary and philosophical re-evaluative project, which went under the name of Umwerthung aller Werthe, which he pursued for the last five years of his intellectually active life. Papers presented addressed issues as diverse as the dating of the appearance of the Transvaluation theme in Nietzsche’s thought, it’s relation to translation, and indeed to Nietzsche’s idea of ‘Great Politics’. The dating of the Transvaluation theme caused some discussion as to whether one should say that it was an unconscious theme present in Nietzsche from The Birth of Tragedy which became fully conscious later or not. It’s linking to ‘Great Politics’ reopened the old wound of Nietzsche scholarship as to whether Nietzsche can be considered to have a politics, and indeed what status such a politics be accorded. The latter three papers tried to understand what transvaluation meant, what it was opposed to, and where it pointed to in the future. On the issue of translating the German word Umwerthung into English, and thus the implication this might have for our understanding of the project, a consensus almost appeared around ‘transvaluation’, until the final paper which, influenced by the French translation, opted for ‘inversion’, to demonstrate the inversion of the original Christian inversion of all values. It would seem that it is through corporally integrating Nietzsche’s though-experiment of the ‘Eternal Return’ that one might achieve this transformation, this transvaluation.

Due to the immense success of the conference, a selection of the best papers are slated for publication in the Spring 2010 issue of the Journal of Nietzsche Studies.