The Journal of Nietzsche Studies

In his recent book on the art of power, Diego von Vacano aims to contest traditional political theory understood as the attempt to "realize, on earth, an ideal vision of justice," an attempt that [End Page 95] he categorizes as "deontological-normative" (8). His proposed alternative model to traditional political theory so conceived is "aesthetic political theory" (e.g., 6). To ground his challenge, von Vacano develops a comparative account of the "similar aims and perspectives" of Machiavelli and Nietzsche and pursues the political implications of one particularly important shared feature of their work that he identifies: "aesthetic, sensory cognition" understood as fundamental to political life (1). The book is divided into three main parts, each comprising two chapters, and also includes a concluding chapter on the theme of "spectacular politics," in which von Vacano aims to apply the alternative model of political theory, derived from his historical analysis of Machiavelli and Nietzsche, to selected contemporary political experiences, including 9/11 and the U.S.–Iraq war that began in 2003 (186).

In part 1, von Vacano directs our attention to Machiavelli as an "artist of words" (11). He contends that scholars of Machiavelli have tended to neglect the political significance of the literary writings, in favor of attending to the question of the relationship between the "apparently despotic" Prince and the "putatively republican" Discourses, which has left us with the impression of Machiavelli as a cynic, or at best a pragmatist (11–12). Von Vacano suggests that by examining the literary writings, we gain a way to integrate Machiavelli's writings into a whole that is unified through the concepts of the aesthetic, the tragic, and the heroic (12). Machiavelli's The Ass is read in light of Lucius Apuleius's Metamorphoses/The Golden Ass, a historical contextualization that is important to von Vacano's argument for two reasons: (i) it enables him to identify the political content of Machiavelli's poem, and (ii) it allows him to show why the poetic is key to the functioning of Machiavelli's wider political project. Von Vacano contends that Machiavelli's poem, like the rest of his literary works, counts as an example of aesthetic political reasoning "that has significant insights into both the nature of political life and the human condition" (37). Von Vacano uses his reading of how Machiavelli's politics are expressed in artistic terms in The Ass to develop an account of the aesthetic politics of The Prince, arguing that the aesthetic dimension of Machiavelli's work facilitates his well-known distinction between the political and the ethical.

In part 2, a further pair of chapters focus upon the ways in which Nietzsche deepens and enriches Machiavelli's aesthetic political insights. Von Vacano identifies references made by Nietzsche to Machiavelli (in, e.g., HH V:224; BGE 28; TI "Ancients" 2; WP 211, 304, 776; and a passage from Nachlass 1888), counting references to Machiavelli in "eight passages of his [Nietzsche's] published work and in nineteen of his published notes" (76n21, 105) and using these to structure his discussion of the ways in which Nietzsche broadens Machiavelli's project. Von Vacano suggests that Machiavelli is Nietzsche's key historical source for the separation of the moral and the political, while also arguing that Nietzsche goes beyond Machiavelli's separation of the ethical and the political, by positing a "new brand" of ethics that "stands higher than political change" (75). In the course of developing this account, von Vacano discusses important sets of Nietzsche's remarks on subjectivity, will, self, the will to power, and reason and invites us to juxtapose these with Machiavelli's views. But in doing so he might perhaps have engaged more critically with Nietzsche's remarks in significant depth, rather than leaving us with an overview of relevant remarks and positions that required far more detailed explanation. For...