Michel Haar assesses the overcoming of metaphysics urged by Nietzsche. He probes tensions usually acknowledged without further questioning, and he probes discrepancies. Haar points out that Nietzsche s overcoming must be conceived as a task both critical and reconstructive. Instead of indulging in the deconstructionist intertextual obsession with idiosyncratic traces, Haar shows how Nietzsche criticizes philosophical concepts as being traceable to a process of simplification and identification thus subverting traditional categories and identities.
Haar presents Nietzsche as an aesthetic stoic. Although opposed to any doctrinal tenet, Nietzsche rekindles a Stoic return to nature in the register of a creative and aesthetic decision. Necessity is no longer a single rational force permeating all beings. Instead he conceives of the will to power as a schematization of the natural chaos and refers Dionysos to an inspiring voice: the genius of the heart.
Rejecting the Deleuzian essay of interpretation that unleashes the simulacra of an untamed imagination, Haar points out that Nietzsche s rejection of Kant is much less extreme than imagined in Deleuze s eccentric readings. Haar also shows that the rupture with Schopenhauer came very early in Nietzsche s itinerary although he accepted the idea of a social conditioning of science. Haar shows that two Apollonian sublimities are distinguished by Nietzsche: one generating idyll, epos, and mythic language; the other a compensatory illusion on the dramatic stage destined to dismiss the horror of an endlessly swelling ground. It is this monstrosity that a creative forgetfulness is destined to replace by seeking a place for the work of art amidst tragic joy."