I Am Not a Man, I Am Dynamite!: Friedrich Nietzsche and the Anarchist Tradition Book

This book is a mix of downright terrible essays and great pieces of writing.

As for the poorly-done, I want to believe some of it is the fault of translators. In particular, the "Death of God" essay is almost unreadable, patched together by sentence fragments and practically undecipherable concepts. A couple other pieces weren't terrible, but a little boring or uninteresting.

I really appreciated some of the final essays, especially the pieces by Saul Newman and John Moore. Both of these highlight in different ways the importance of Nietzsche's thought to anarchists. In the Newman piece, he makes it clear how classical anarchist thought is a politics of ressentiment, but shows how individualist strains of anarchism break out of this bind. I feel like this piece opens the door for anarchist thought that isn't reliant upon inverted moral codes. The John Moore piece takes Nietzsche's writing-as-attentat as a point of departure in order to discuss how art can serve as a means toward a Dionysian way of life (anarchy) as long as we also recognize how it can confine us. In other words, it too must be destroyed in the end.

The bad parts were pretty bad, but the good pieces were worth reading, and I'm wanting to be generous to this book.