Book by Willow Verkerk
Verkerk identifies Friedrich Nietzsche as an ethical and a political thinker whose writings on fr... more Verkerk identifies Friedrich Nietzsche as an ethical and a political thinker whose writings on friendship, love, and women force us to rethink the ideal of friendship today. Friendship is a significant philosophical topic for Nietzsche because he believes in the diverse capacities of intimate relationships to effect change. In his writings, Nietzsche shows us that philosophical accounts of love and friendship are not only about defining relationships. They have an ethical feature which speaks to the therapeutic role that relationships have in the pursuit of self-knowledge and health. They also have a political component that reveals norms associated with gender.
Nietzsche's challenges to the received principles of friendship offer resources for reinvigorating our thinking about them. Yet few scholars have seriously considered Nietzsche's thinking on these topics. Willow Verkerk revives interest in the ethical, therapeutic, and political dimensions of Nietzsche's thinking by showing the important contribution his work makes to studies on friendship, love, and gender in the history of philosophy.
Journal Articles by Willow Verkerk
Critical Horizons: A Journal of Philosophy and Social Theory, 2023
This paper takes Cavarero’s arguments against the Homo erectus seriously and asks: how can we mod... more This paper takes Cavarero’s arguments against the Homo erectus seriously and asks: how can we model an alternative to it? It proposes that a notion of the mimetically inclined subject is required, one that thickens Cavarero’s affirmative account of inclination by way of a new philosophical understanding of mimesis that includes habit and disciplinarity. Following Cavarero, the mother is positioned as a key figure to place nurturing and love at the centre of subject-making. However, they are shown to be a necessary but not sufficient step for the process of re-evaluation. An account of disciplinary mimesis which draws on a Nietzschean legacy in Michel Foucault and Judith Butler, together with Simone de Beauvoir’s account of woman as a situation, demonstrate the pitfalls of idealizing the mother. I argue that to challenge the particularized universalism of the European subject with an affirmative account of mimetic inclination, other figures which embrace Cavarero’s notion of relational vulnerability alongside the mother are required. The agonistic friend who practices an open, feminist curiosity is proposed as one such exemplar and, in closing remarks, I gesture to other necessary models in feminist and Indigenous thought that are key to remaking the androcentric subject of European philosophy.
Critical Horizons: A Journal of Philosophy and Social Theory, 2023
In this introduction to a special issue on Mimetic Inclinations with Adriana Cavarero, Nidesh Law... more In this introduction to a special issue on Mimetic Inclinations with Adriana Cavarero, Nidesh Lawtoo, Willow Verkek and Adriana Cavarero articulate the genealogical continuities between the concept of inclinations at the foundations of Cavarero's relational ontology and the mimetic tendencies that incline subjectivity to alterity, for good and ill.
Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal, 2021
Nietzsche-Studien, 2017
‘On Love, Women, and Friendship: Reading Nietzsche with Irigaray’, Nietzsche-Studien 46.1 (2017):... more ‘On Love, Women, and Friendship: Reading Nietzsche with Irigaray’, Nietzsche-Studien 46.1 (2017): 135–152.
This essay examines Nietzsche’s accounts of love and the gender troubles of friendship. In many passages, Nietzsche situates love as an impairment to friendship. In particular, he believes that erotic or sexual love, understood as a drive that seeks to possess and control the other, prevents two people from entering into the shared project of friendship. Nietzsche implies that gender roles, and the cultural expectations associated with these types, make friendship very difficult between women and men. The reason why women in Nietzsche’s account cannot move from love relationships into friendship is because they are primarily esteemed for their fulfillment of gender stereotypes. In order to avoid the perils of assimilation, pointed to by Nietzsche, it is imperative to develop an ethics of friendship that changes the way people approach and love one another. Luce Irigaray present such an alternative with her account of wonder. She argues that recognition requires a negative movement in which one acknowledges one’s limits in understanding the other. Irigaray designates a transformative and activist potential to love, as a benefit to friendship in its erotic and practical qualities. She claims that when love is expressed alongside the passion of wonder there is a stronger potential for recognition between two people. With the assistance of Irigaray, this essay questions Nietzsche’s assessment that love is an impasse to friendship by asking if love need be as assimilating as Nietzsche proposes.
The Agonist, 2017
This essay explores how Nietzsche’s joyful friendship, active especially in the free spirit texts... more This essay explores how Nietzsche’s joyful friendship, active especially in the free spirit texts of the middle period, shares with Epicurus an emphasis on health, community, and freedom from the fear of death. Nietzsche wants to renew the Epicurean garden by creating a community of free spirits who will experience pleasure through shared reflection and self-affirmation. In The Gay Science (338) Nietzsche emphasizes that friends should share joy not suffering and in Human All Too Human he writes that “Fellow rejoicing (Mitfreude), not fellow suffering (Mitleiden) makes the friend” (HAH 499). After examining how Epicurus’ writings on community and health are reflected in Nietzsche’s middle period, this essay focuses on the therapeutic role of Nietzsche’s joyful friendship. I argue that the joyful friendship is most praised by Nietzsche for its capacity to become a healing balm for the wounds of pity (Mitleid) which represent our more fundamental feeling of the fear of death. In Nietzsche’s joyful friendship, the friends turn away from the burden of mortality and, in an Epicurean fashion, turn to the lived activities of the everyday to heal the self.
philoSOPHIA: A Journal in Continental Feminism, 2017
‘Transgendering Nietzsche: Male Mothers and Phallic Women in Derrida’s Spurs’. philoSOPHIA: A Jou... more ‘Transgendering Nietzsche: Male Mothers and Phallic Women in Derrida’s Spurs’. philoSOPHIA: A Journal in Continental Feminism 7.1 (2017): 99-108.
In Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles Derrida disrupts the coherence of ‘woman’ through exposing her as a fetish. ‘Woman’, whom Nietzsche describes as so artistic, as a great actor, is exemplary of a truth-making discourse about heteronormative cisgender sexuality. In Derrida’s reading of Nietzsche, the presumptions of essentialism that attach performative qualities to a biological sex are undermined through the exposures and conflations of many kinds of ‘woman’ who shun ‘truth’. These disruptions are complimented by Derrida’s attention to Nietzsche’s phallic rhetoric and his metaphors of pregnancy. Gender is displaced and put into a productive crisis in Spurs, but not without also reifying the feminine, through Nietzsche, as distance itself. This paper brings Derrida's Nietzsche into confrontation with Nietzsche and new notions of gender in order to question how reading Nietzsche on 'woman' today has changed in light of recent theoretical developments in transgender studies.
Symposium: Canadian Journal for Continental Philosophy, 2016
‘Nietzsche’s Agonistic Ethics of Friendship’. Symposium: Canadian Journal for Continental Philoso... more ‘Nietzsche’s Agonistic Ethics of Friendship’. Symposium: Canadian Journal for Continental Philosophy 20.2 (Fall 2016): 22-41.
In this essay, I argue that Nietzsche’s account of friendship must be understood as part of his therapeutic philosophy that promotes shared self-overcoming. Previous accounts of Nietzschean friendship give a strong foundation, but concentrate on his middle works and overlook the role of agon in higher friendship. In order to grasp the ethical connections that Nietzsche makes between friendship, agon, and self-overcoming, I argue that we must turn to Nietzsche’s writing on friendship in Thus Spoke Zarathustra and Beyond Good and Evil, as well as in the middle works. Nietzsche brings enmity into friendship not to deny the possibility of friendship, but instead to transform friendship into an exercise of therapeutics that promotes free-spiritedness and, in doing so, challenges the life-denying practices of nihilism.
https://www.pdcnet.org/pdc/bvdb.nsf/purchase?openform&fp=symposium&id=symposium_2016_0020_0002_0022_0041
Journal of Nietzsche Studies, 2014
The purpose of this article is to illuminate the topic of “Redlichkeit” in The Gay Science in ord... more The purpose of this article is to illuminate the topic of “Redlichkeit” in The Gay Science in order to provide a greater understanding of the relationship among friendship, knowledge-seeking, and overcoming in Nietzsche’s Gay Science and Thus Spoke Zarathustra. In GS 14 Nietzsche formulates friendship as involving “a shared higher thirst for an ideal.” Although higher friendship, for Nietzsche, involves a mutual goal, this article argues that the goal is not truth. First, the notion of the intellectual conscience and how passionate knowledge-seeking is distinguished from the standardized practices of truth
that Nietzsche rejects is explained. Second, the problem of the Übermensch, or Overhuman, and its status as an ideal or goal is examined. In conclusion, the link that Nietzsche makes between becoming Overhuman and the development of Redlichkeit by the intellectual conscience in passionate knowledge-seeking friendship is explained.
Philosophy and Literature, 2014
Book Chapters by Willow Verkerk
Rethinking Political Thinkers, edited by Simon Choat and Manjeet Ramgotra, 239-255. Oxford: Oxford University Press., 2023
Placing traditional thinkers alongside and in conversation with neglected and unheard voices open... more Placing traditional thinkers alongside and in conversation with neglected and unheard voices opens up important debates, and presents political thought in a new light. Each thinker is examined within the contexts of patriarchy, white supremacy, and imperialism, and the relations and structures of race, gender, and class which different theories have reflected, defended, or challenged. Rethinking Political Thinkers is designed to support the study of a decolonised political theory curriculum, revitalising political thought as a practice that belongs to us all.
The Spell of Capital: Reification and Spectacle, edited by Samir Gandesha and Johan Frederik Hartle, 2017
'Reification, Sexual Objectification, and Feminist Activism'. In The Spell of Capital: Reificatio... more 'Reification, Sexual Objectification, and Feminist Activism'. In The Spell of Capital: Reification and Spectacle, edited by Samir Gandesha and Johan Frederik Hartle, 149-161. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2017.
This essay poses a critique of reification in light of feminist concerns about agency and activism. Late capitalism, which seeks to exploit the most marketable human characteristics, retains patriarchal interests in objectifying female sexuality and reproductive labour. Feminist activism still requires, I argue, in conversation with Lukács, MacKinnon, Haraway, and Butler, an understanding of reification that includes its sexually objectifying trajectories as well as the opportunities for agency that women have under capitalism.
The book is now open access:
http://www.oapen.org/search?keyword=9789089648518
Nietzsche’s Therapeutic Teaching: For Individuals and Culture, edited by Horst Hutter and Eli Friedland, Bloomsbury, 2013
Book Review by Willow Verkerk
Translation by Willow Verkerk
Helikon, 2023
Hungarian translation of “Reification, Sexual Objectification, and Feminist Activism” by Tarnai C... more Hungarian translation of “Reification, Sexual Objectification, and Feminist Activism” by Tarnai Csillag for a special issue on contemporary women's philosophy for the journal Helikon. Originally published in The Spell of Capital: Reification and Spectacle, ed. Samir Gandesha and Johan Frederik Hartle, 149-162. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2017.
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Book by Willow Verkerk
Nietzsche's challenges to the received principles of friendship offer resources for reinvigorating our thinking about them. Yet few scholars have seriously considered Nietzsche's thinking on these topics. Willow Verkerk revives interest in the ethical, therapeutic, and political dimensions of Nietzsche's thinking by showing the important contribution his work makes to studies on friendship, love, and gender in the history of philosophy.
Journal Articles by Willow Verkerk
This essay examines Nietzsche’s accounts of love and the gender troubles of friendship. In many passages, Nietzsche situates love as an impairment to friendship. In particular, he believes that erotic or sexual love, understood as a drive that seeks to possess and control the other, prevents two people from entering into the shared project of friendship. Nietzsche implies that gender roles, and the cultural expectations associated with these types, make friendship very difficult between women and men. The reason why women in Nietzsche’s account cannot move from love relationships into friendship is because they are primarily esteemed for their fulfillment of gender stereotypes. In order to avoid the perils of assimilation, pointed to by Nietzsche, it is imperative to develop an ethics of friendship that changes the way people approach and love one another. Luce Irigaray present such an alternative with her account of wonder. She argues that recognition requires a negative movement in which one acknowledges one’s limits in understanding the other. Irigaray designates a transformative and activist potential to love, as a benefit to friendship in its erotic and practical qualities. She claims that when love is expressed alongside the passion of wonder there is a stronger potential for recognition between two people. With the assistance of Irigaray, this essay questions Nietzsche’s assessment that love is an impasse to friendship by asking if love need be as assimilating as Nietzsche proposes.
In Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles Derrida disrupts the coherence of ‘woman’ through exposing her as a fetish. ‘Woman’, whom Nietzsche describes as so artistic, as a great actor, is exemplary of a truth-making discourse about heteronormative cisgender sexuality. In Derrida’s reading of Nietzsche, the presumptions of essentialism that attach performative qualities to a biological sex are undermined through the exposures and conflations of many kinds of ‘woman’ who shun ‘truth’. These disruptions are complimented by Derrida’s attention to Nietzsche’s phallic rhetoric and his metaphors of pregnancy. Gender is displaced and put into a productive crisis in Spurs, but not without also reifying the feminine, through Nietzsche, as distance itself. This paper brings Derrida's Nietzsche into confrontation with Nietzsche and new notions of gender in order to question how reading Nietzsche on 'woman' today has changed in light of recent theoretical developments in transgender studies.
In this essay, I argue that Nietzsche’s account of friendship must be understood as part of his therapeutic philosophy that promotes shared self-overcoming. Previous accounts of Nietzschean friendship give a strong foundation, but concentrate on his middle works and overlook the role of agon in higher friendship. In order to grasp the ethical connections that Nietzsche makes between friendship, agon, and self-overcoming, I argue that we must turn to Nietzsche’s writing on friendship in Thus Spoke Zarathustra and Beyond Good and Evil, as well as in the middle works. Nietzsche brings enmity into friendship not to deny the possibility of friendship, but instead to transform friendship into an exercise of therapeutics that promotes free-spiritedness and, in doing so, challenges the life-denying practices of nihilism.
https://www.pdcnet.org/pdc/bvdb.nsf/purchase?openform&fp=symposium&id=symposium_2016_0020_0002_0022_0041
that Nietzsche rejects is explained. Second, the problem of the Übermensch, or Overhuman, and its status as an ideal or goal is examined. In conclusion, the link that Nietzsche makes between becoming Overhuman and the development of Redlichkeit by the intellectual conscience in passionate knowledge-seeking friendship is explained.
Book Chapters by Willow Verkerk
This essay poses a critique of reification in light of feminist concerns about agency and activism. Late capitalism, which seeks to exploit the most marketable human characteristics, retains patriarchal interests in objectifying female sexuality and reproductive labour. Feminist activism still requires, I argue, in conversation with Lukács, MacKinnon, Haraway, and Butler, an understanding of reification that includes its sexually objectifying trajectories as well as the opportunities for agency that women have under capitalism.
The book is now open access:
http://www.oapen.org/search?keyword=9789089648518
Book Review by Willow Verkerk
Radical Philosophy 2.02 (June 2018).
Translation by Willow Verkerk
Nietzsche's challenges to the received principles of friendship offer resources for reinvigorating our thinking about them. Yet few scholars have seriously considered Nietzsche's thinking on these topics. Willow Verkerk revives interest in the ethical, therapeutic, and political dimensions of Nietzsche's thinking by showing the important contribution his work makes to studies on friendship, love, and gender in the history of philosophy.
This essay examines Nietzsche’s accounts of love and the gender troubles of friendship. In many passages, Nietzsche situates love as an impairment to friendship. In particular, he believes that erotic or sexual love, understood as a drive that seeks to possess and control the other, prevents two people from entering into the shared project of friendship. Nietzsche implies that gender roles, and the cultural expectations associated with these types, make friendship very difficult between women and men. The reason why women in Nietzsche’s account cannot move from love relationships into friendship is because they are primarily esteemed for their fulfillment of gender stereotypes. In order to avoid the perils of assimilation, pointed to by Nietzsche, it is imperative to develop an ethics of friendship that changes the way people approach and love one another. Luce Irigaray present such an alternative with her account of wonder. She argues that recognition requires a negative movement in which one acknowledges one’s limits in understanding the other. Irigaray designates a transformative and activist potential to love, as a benefit to friendship in its erotic and practical qualities. She claims that when love is expressed alongside the passion of wonder there is a stronger potential for recognition between two people. With the assistance of Irigaray, this essay questions Nietzsche’s assessment that love is an impasse to friendship by asking if love need be as assimilating as Nietzsche proposes.
In Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles Derrida disrupts the coherence of ‘woman’ through exposing her as a fetish. ‘Woman’, whom Nietzsche describes as so artistic, as a great actor, is exemplary of a truth-making discourse about heteronormative cisgender sexuality. In Derrida’s reading of Nietzsche, the presumptions of essentialism that attach performative qualities to a biological sex are undermined through the exposures and conflations of many kinds of ‘woman’ who shun ‘truth’. These disruptions are complimented by Derrida’s attention to Nietzsche’s phallic rhetoric and his metaphors of pregnancy. Gender is displaced and put into a productive crisis in Spurs, but not without also reifying the feminine, through Nietzsche, as distance itself. This paper brings Derrida's Nietzsche into confrontation with Nietzsche and new notions of gender in order to question how reading Nietzsche on 'woman' today has changed in light of recent theoretical developments in transgender studies.
In this essay, I argue that Nietzsche’s account of friendship must be understood as part of his therapeutic philosophy that promotes shared self-overcoming. Previous accounts of Nietzschean friendship give a strong foundation, but concentrate on his middle works and overlook the role of agon in higher friendship. In order to grasp the ethical connections that Nietzsche makes between friendship, agon, and self-overcoming, I argue that we must turn to Nietzsche’s writing on friendship in Thus Spoke Zarathustra and Beyond Good and Evil, as well as in the middle works. Nietzsche brings enmity into friendship not to deny the possibility of friendship, but instead to transform friendship into an exercise of therapeutics that promotes free-spiritedness and, in doing so, challenges the life-denying practices of nihilism.
https://www.pdcnet.org/pdc/bvdb.nsf/purchase?openform&fp=symposium&id=symposium_2016_0020_0002_0022_0041
that Nietzsche rejects is explained. Second, the problem of the Übermensch, or Overhuman, and its status as an ideal or goal is examined. In conclusion, the link that Nietzsche makes between becoming Overhuman and the development of Redlichkeit by the intellectual conscience in passionate knowledge-seeking friendship is explained.
This essay poses a critique of reification in light of feminist concerns about agency and activism. Late capitalism, which seeks to exploit the most marketable human characteristics, retains patriarchal interests in objectifying female sexuality and reproductive labour. Feminist activism still requires, I argue, in conversation with Lukács, MacKinnon, Haraway, and Butler, an understanding of reification that includes its sexually objectifying trajectories as well as the opportunities for agency that women have under capitalism.
The book is now open access:
http://www.oapen.org/search?keyword=9789089648518
Radical Philosophy 2.02 (June 2018).