Ordinary Made Extraordinary: Nietzsche’s Pedagogy of Non-Identity

What happens when reading makes the ordinary strange? This talk argues that Nietzsche’s lifelong engagement with Emerson recasts criticism as a pedagogy of non-identity: a practice of learning to see differently. Rather than locating philology’s authority solely in the institutional protocols of German Wissenschaft, Nietzsche finds its vital force in everyday practices of reading, habit, and encounters with exemplary others. For Nietzsche, Emerson transforms the past from settled knowledge into a resource for reimagining the relations among scholarship, poetry, art, and life. Against the specialization and moral conformity of the modern university, Emersonian exemplarity provokes thought in unexpected directions. Criticism thus becomes an embodied practice that may disrupt inherited certainties and reopen the present to unrealized possibilities. Tracing this Emerson–Nietzsche connection, the talk illuminates Emerson’s formative role in Nietzsche’s philology and offers a new account of transatlantic intellectual history.

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For more information, call 845-758-6822, or e-mail [email protected].

Time: 12:00 pm EDT/GMT-4

Location: Hegeman 204A

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