Keegan Kjeldsen hosts The Nietzsche Podcast and the Untimely Reflections (essentialsalts) YouTube channel — a deep four-year project working through Nietzsche, his forerunners back to the ancient world, and his afterlives in 20th- and 21st-century thought. He’s also a doom metal guitarist with Destroyer of Light and Slumbering Sun, and the author of The Ritual Madness of Rock & Roll, a memoir-meets-aesthetics inquiry written on the road through Europe.
I sat down with Keegan to work through his concept of übermodernism — what’s “over and above” modernism, in the same Nietzschean spirit as the Übermensch is over and above man. We trace the history of “the modern” all the way back to Petrarch in the 14th century, work through Nietzsche’s perspectivism and his critique of the genealogical fallacy, and ask where the next modernism is meant to come from. A conversation for anyone tired of fighting over whether Nietzsche belongs to the right, the left, or the postmodernists.
📚 If you’re enjoying the Nietzschean turn on the channel, I’m joining the Interintellect book club this Sunday 10th May to work through the third and final essay of Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morality — What is the Meaning of Ascetic Ideals? — over Zoom. Tickets here: https://interintellect.com/salons/what-is-the-meaning-of-ascetic-ideals-friedrich-nietzsche-on-the-genealogy-of-morality
(Part of the Interintellect’s three-essay series on the Genealogy: https://interintellect.com/series/reading-friedrich-nietzsche-together-on-the-genealogy-of-morality)
📺 Mentioned in this episode:
• My interview with PF Jung (#6 PF Jung: What is Enlightened Centrism) —
• Keegan’s interview with PF Jung (Untimely Reflections #37: PF Jung – Enlightened Centrism) —
🔗 Links
🎙️ Untimely Reflections (YouTube): https://www.youtube.com/@untimelyreflections
🎧 The Nietzsche Podcast (Apple):
☕ Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/untimelyreflections
✍️ Blog: https://untimely-reflections.blogspot.com/
📖 The Ritual Madness of Rock & Roll: https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-ritual-madness-of-rock-roll-an-inquiry-into-aesthetics-keegan-kjeldsen
⏳ Timestamps:
00:00 James’s Intro
01:59 Welcome and opening with Keegan
02:41 What is übermodernism? Going over and above modernism
05:03 Nietzsche’s perspectivism and the death of objective truth
08:14 Nietzsche as the canary in the 20th-century coalmine
11:47 When did “the modern” begin? Antiqua, nova and the first modernists
13:07 Rousseau’s letter and the first use of “modernist” as a pejorative
19:00 Genealogies, lineage and the string of pearls fallacy
28:42 Reading Nietzsche on the utility of an organ vs. its origin
34:29 Heidegger, Descartes and the “where it all went wrong” move
39:59 Nietzsche’s lectures on rhetoric: language is rhetoric, not information
43:59 Plato’s win over the Sophists as a sophist’s own move
48:59 We Philologists: the Greeks weren’t who you think they were
55:59 Petrarch and the birth of “the modern” as an age
58:29 Toledo and the Muslim transmission of the ancient texts
1:04:29 McGilchrist and the right-and-left hemisphere narrative
1:09:59 Machiavelli, humanism and man as the actor of history
1:15:29 Beyond correctness: value-for-life as the new test of truth
1:22:12 Are we übermodern yet? Great politics vs. petty politics
1:29:49 Keegan’s guest recommendations: Studebaker and Möller
1:31:29 Where to find Keegan and his next book on Nietzsche’s Hellenism
