Deep Thoughts: Deleuze on Nietzsche

From Continental Philosophy: Deleuze on Nietzsche

Nietzsche is often interpreted as a proto-fascist and a nihilist.  In Deleuze's Nietzsche & Philosophy he suggests that this reading of Nietzsche is based on how four aspects of Nietzsche's philosophy are interpreted.

"As long as the reader persists in: 1) seeing the Nietzschean 'slave' as someone who finds himself dominated by a master, and deserves to be; 2) understanding the will to power as a will which wants and seeks power; 3) conceiving the eternal return as the tedious return of the same; 4) imagining the Overman as a given master race - no positive relationship between Nietzsche and his reader will be possible.  Nietzsche will appear a nihilist, or worse, a fascist and at best as an obscure and terrifying prophet."

These seem to me to be the received interpretations (at least in the English speaking world of philosophy) of slave morality, the will to power, the eternal return, and the Overman.  If Deleuze is correct, however, and there's textual evidence for alternative interpretations, then Nietzsche has certainly been misinterpreted by many English-speaking commentators.

WHAT I like about Nietzsche is how he writes: expansively, extravagantly, unlike any other philosopher. It's actually readable, moist, freaky: neither academic nor dry. Dionysian, not Apollonian. He wrote: "Art represents the highest task and the truly metaphysical activity of this life." He's right.