Taylor Swift is one of the most important “idols” of our time. Reason enough for our regular authors Henry Holland, Paul Stephan and Estella Walter to pick up on the Nietzschean “hammer” and get to grips with the hype a bit: Does Swift deserve the cult around her that goes down to philosophy? Is it grossly overrated? And what explains the discrepancy between appearance and reality, spectacle and life?

You can watch the entire unabridged conversation on the Halcyonic Association for Radical Philosophy YouTube channel (link).

‍

After two previous contributions to Nietzsche in the Anglosphere For this blog, Henry Holland interviewed American thinker Daniel Tutt about his perspective on Nietzsche as the most important antagonist of the left. The discussion included Huey Newton, leader of the Black Panthers in the 1970s, and what his “parasitic” way of reading Nietzsche prompted him to read. An unedited and unabridged version of this interview, in original English, can be heard and watched on Tutt's YouTube channel (link).

‍

To commemorate the 124th anniversary of Nietzsche’s death, Paul Stephan conversed with a rather particular kind of Nietzsche expert—the now near ubiquitous ChatGPT. Their discussion circled around questions of why Nietzsche matters today and his concept of authenticity. During the course of the conversation, Stephan switched from asking to fielding questions, and elaborated briefly on how his own doctoral dissertation also focuses on authenticity. As Stephan’s experiment aimed at probing deep into the program’s capabilities, and because brevity is not ChatGPT’s strongest asset, we present here an abridged version of the conversation. Readers of German who wish to delve deeper can view the unabridged and annotated PDF that’s available as a download (link). Watch out for Stephan’s critical reflections on this truly remarkable dialogue within the next few days (link).

The pictures accompanying the interview were created with DeepAI software, which was asked to produce “A picture of Friedrich Nietzsche with a quote by him.”

After discussing Jonas Čeika's book How to Philosophize with a Hammer and Sickle and bis YouTube channel (CCK Philosophy) (link), Henry Holland interviewed the American about the blockages of academic philosophy, Nietzsche's relevance as a thinker on the “guideline of the body,” and about tensions between his claim as an anti-philosopher and his social position.

Nietzsche has repeatedly become the subject of political interpretive projects, from left and right. Nietzsche and Marx was seen time and again as a double team of a concept of comprehensive emancipation beyond the well-trodden paths of dominant left-wing political trends. In his book How to Philosophize with a Hammer and Sickle. Nietzsche and Marx for the Twenty-First Century and in countless YouTube videos, Jonas Čeika updates this perspective for our time. For Nietzsche PopArts, Henry Holland addressed the question of what to think of this approach.