American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and His Ideas

by Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen

Two who employed French readings of Nietzsche to great effect were Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Judith Butler. They drew on a quotation from Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals—a text that had formed the mainstay of American Nietzsche interpretations—but which, thanks to their effort to identify power relations masked as a stable subject, took on new resonance in the 1980s: “There is no ‘being’ behind doing, effecting, becoming; ‘the doer’ is merely a fiction added to the deed—the deed is everything.”21 In Epistemology of the Closet (1992), Sedgwick employed a Nietzschean hermeneutic to challenge compulsory dualisms in human sexuality, in order to examine how notions of desire have been encoded with damaging epistemes, thereby showing how his antiessentialism was essential for queer theory.