Creative engagements: Strauss, Arendt and Deleuze reading Nietzsche

This dissertation responds to recent debates over Friedrich Nietzsche's work and its importance for contemporary political thought. I address the readings of Nietzsche by Leo Strauss, Hannah Arendt and Gilles Deleuze and, in doing so, bring to bear Nietzsche's exploration of the symbiotic relation between reader and writer in textual interpretation. I use this interpretive work to rethink the ethos of interpretation and discussion in intellectual life.; My purpose is to negotiate an impasse in the current debate between theorists who hold that Nietzsche's thought can be a positive resource for democratic theory and those who denounce all democratic uses of Nietzsche as self-serving misreadings. Because of the ineliminable porosity of the texts in question and the different filters through which each party processes them this debate may be irresolvable by appeals to the text alone. The paradoxical impasse, then, is that the standard against which each measures the accuracy of the other is itself a limited and contestable interpretation of Nietzsche's writings.; By exploring readings of Nietzsche by Arendt, Deleuze and Strauss in terms of the distinctive theoretical project and world-view articulated by each, I examine how each thinker reads Nietzsche in ways that aid in the crystallization of his or her own perspective. These readings of Nietzsche find justification in the innovative political and social thought they help to develop. By pursuing significant trajectories of Nietzsche's thought, even at the expense of others, they together illuminate the multi-faceted work of Nietzsche as well.; The mode of reading I adopt is a productive alternative to modes of assessment that fail to probe beyond elementary questions of accuracy. Because the prose of a thinker like Nietzsche exceeds any single interpretation, the existence of multiple readings is not a temporary, pathological condition but an expected state of affairs. Such a persistent condition, I argue, calls for a pluralistic ethos of engagement and critical responsiveness that moderates contestation and critique across horizons with generosity towards divergent positions.