Nietzsche's Revolution takes on the ambitious project of constructing an interpretation of Nietzsche that will serve both a left Nietzschean revolution and a radical gender and sexual political project. In so doing, C. Heike Schotten carries out work initiated by authors like Michel Foucault and Judith Butler, and she engages the tactics of those like Wendy Brown and Lee Edelman. Schotten attempts to carry further than Brown the Nietzschean critique of Christianity by avoiding both hopelessness and unfulfilled longings of hopes that cannot be gratified. While Schotten seems finally to be most interested in contributing to the debates in radical politics, feminism, and queer theory, she aims to articulate the full possibility of the Nietzschean basis for such a view. Instead of simply taking his assault on the tradition of Western thought or his explosion of dichotomies as a resource, she offers a close reading of Nietzsche's thought on revolution and the politics of the body. Schotten finds in Nietzsche a contradiction between a revolutionary thinker and one who remains attached to essentialist claims about gender and sex, health, and the body. Schotten argues that contradiction is at the essence of Nietzsche's work and uses this as a way to claim both departure from his claims and adherence to his revolutionary aims. Presenting the tensions in his work, Schotten neglects the opportunity to explore the way in which opposition, tension, and contest operate within his thought. Instead, she argues, the apparent contradictions give his readers license to appropriate and radicalize the challenges to truth claims while combating the essentializing claims he inscribes in his writing.

While the book has many insightful observations about Nietzsche's writing, includes some careful analysis of its themes, and may well serve the political goals to which it is committed, it is not wholly persuasive as an account of Nietzsche's thought. To say Schotten's book contains deep contradictions would not be a criticism from the perspective that the author adopts. Schotten tells her readers that Nietzsche gives us contradictions because dichotomies are inevitable in writing, and he also encourages moving beyond his dichotomies. There are nonetheless some weaknesses that are concealed by the demand to embrace contradiction, which might have been better resolved by thinking with Nietzsche's thoughts a little more thoroughly.

Schotten's claim that Nietzsche is a thinker of revolution after the manner of Rousseau or Marx ignores Nietzsche's expressed critiques of Rousseau in the French Revolution, in particular, and revolution in general. (See, e.g., Nietzsche's comments on the subject in Human, All Too Human, and Twilight of the Idols). Schotten argues that just as Nietzsche's writing is performative, it is essentially political in that it is driven by the will to power and that, through it, Nietzsche attempts to “dominate”(p. 74), to “seduce”(p. 86), and to “refound” (p. 78), and not simply to make truth claims. Schotten's assertion that a radically new orientation for thinking demands a radically new politics, however conceived, ignores Nietzsche's claim to the contrary. He declares in Human, All Too Human that the most radically liberated thought goes hand in hand with moderate action rather than revolutionary politics. Schotten's book would be aided by more fully addressing Nietzsche's statements about the tension between political accomplishments and those in cultural and intellectual realms. There is also considerable Nietzsche scholarship that denies any political content to his thought. While more recent scholarship has found the political to be more thematic, a sustained effort to argue that Nietzsche's thought is essentially political would be served by addressing the debate. Of course, Nietzsche also makes numerous expressly political claims. Pointing to those is not sufficient for the argument Schotten advances, however, for she does not rely on Nietzsche's expressly political claims for her political argument; instead, she builds on his epistemological, psychological, and physiological statements, using these as a source for political arguments Nietzsche would not himself make.

Schotten goes on to catalogue the ways in which Nietzsche uses the body as a metaphor and health as a category in his articulation of goals. She selects those passages that serve her wish to demonstrate that Nietzsche's vision of health is gendered as masculine and that he essentializes gender. What chapters 4 and 5 do show is Nietzsche's frequent use of bodily categories and bodily symbols for psychic and cultural health. This part of the book will provide a useful resource for those who are interested in further exploration of Nietzsche's attention to bodies and to those investigating the meaning of health in his thought. That Nietzsche uses the body and that embodied thoughts and actions are also gendered is clear. It is far less evident that Nietzsche's attention to body, gender, and sex amounts to fear of emasculation or the effort to exclude the female. For two very different accounts of the fecundity of Nietzsche's treatment of sexual differentiation, one might consider the work of Laurence Lampert and Luce Irigaray. The notion that Nietzsche longs for some kind of self-birth (p. 157) and, with it, the elimination of woman conflates claims by Nietzsche and the dramatic narrative of Zarathustra. One might see the limits of Zarathustra and his solipsistic end as Nietzsche's presentation of the limits of such a teacher.

Schotten concludes from her analysis of Nietzsche's treatment of bodies and gender that he betrays a “fear of becoming” (p. 170), and she attributes his sexual essentializing to this fear and to his inability to accept the flux of becoming. Suggesting ways in which he aims to “become feminine” while at the same time taking him to task for valorizing the masculine, Schotten finds herself caught in a contradiction. Rather than thinking with Nietzsche about how to address the tension between radical undermining and apparent truth claims or about why this tension may remain necessary, she simply claims that the contradiction is the essence of his thought. On this basis, she argues that Nietzsche offers a “revolution in revolution” (p. 172) by resisting the substitution of new truth claims for those he has undermined, thereby leaving strategies of radicalization for others to deploy. She characterizes Christianity as the sole source for “heteronormative sexual and gender moralism” (p. 174) without exploring the relation between Christianity and Plato, a constant theme for Nietzsche, on this score. Instead of resolving textual difficulties on Nietzsche's terms, Schotten simply asserts that Nietzsche's thought “cannot be bent to the yoke of logical coherence” (p. 176) and accepts contradiction as a characteristic of his writing as autobiographical confession. Such a conclusion gives Schotten license to turn to her own “autobiographical” concerns and to the task of “queering Nietzsche.” In order to articulate her vision, Schotten engages the debates among Butler, Brown, and Edelman and offers alternatives that are interesting and potentially fruitful but do not rely on her painstaking study of Nietzsche's books. Schotten thus concludes with revolutionary hope of a sort that sees revolutionary hope as futureless, a call to revolution that has no ideal, aim, or purpose, a revolution that is identical to embracing flux, change, and becoming.

Nietzsche's Revolution will take its place in theoretical debates about radical politics, feminism, and queer theory. It will contribute to contemporary political theory because it engages Nietzsche's texts rather than merely leaving his theoretical innovations as an implicit foundation. To Nietzsche scholarship, Schotten's book offers its attention to the body as category and metaphor in Nietzsche's cultural assessments.