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WRAP THESIS Rehberg 1993
Becoming-Body: The Repetition of Kantian Critique in the Physiological Thinking of Nietzsche
A Warwick dissertation arguing that Nietzsche radicalizes Kantian critique through physiology, temporality, and the body.
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Core idea
Rehberg reads Nietzsche's physiology not as anti-critical excess but as a repetition and transformation of Kantian critique. The thesis asks how the body and temporality rework the limits of critique from within.
It reconstructs Kant's theory of temporal connection and teleology before turning to Nietzsche as a force that radicalizes critique through bodily and physiological thinking. Time is the hinge that keeps the two projects in argument with each other.
This matters because it reveals how Warwick's intellectual environment was already experimenting with the collision between critique, temporality, and embodiment. That terrain feeds directly into the formation context around the CCRU without being reducible to it.
How to read this text
Start with the abstract and the opening Kant chapters, then move to the sections where Nietzsche is introduced as a radicalization rather than a repudiation. That contrast is the engine of the dissertation.
Read for the repeated return to time. The thesis becomes clearer once you treat temporality as the thread binding Kantian categories to Nietzschean physiology.
Representative extracts
Definition · paragraph 23
For this reason the comparison between Kant's notions about the categories (of relation, in our case) as the transcendental constituents of experience and Nietzsche's complete re-thinking of them in terms of the non-causal auto-production of the will to power is also of considerable import. The radicality of Nietzsche's re-thinking of physiology can be brought out when it is shown which transformations the categories of relation have undergone by the time his post-metaphysical thought of the body is produced.
Definition · paragraph 3
ABSTRACT This dissertation seeks to substantiate the thesis that Nietzsche's physiological thinking constitutes a radicalisation of Kantian critique. To this end it attempts to mark out some of the salient points of the latter project and to examine the ways in which it falls short of its own potential radicality.
Definition · paragraph 14
To recognise, affirm and establish the suppurating, aching, dying body of the thinker as the basis, even as a perverse 'ground' for thinking, this I take to be the chief task of philosophy after Nietzsche. It must also be remembered, though, that Kant understands critique as a propaedeutic to the system of philosophy (eg.
History · paragraph 2
BECOMING-BODY THE REPETITION OF KANTIAN CRITIQUE IN THE PHYSIOLOGICAL THINKING OF NIETZSCHE by Andrea Rehberg A PhD thesis submitted to the Department of Philosophy University of Warwick September 1993
Method · paragraph 14
It must also be remembered, though, that Kant understands critique as a propaedeutic to the system of philosophy (eg. KrV/CPR A841, B869), and as not yet actually carrying out the metaphysics for which critique determines the legitimate scope. In a distant echoing of this, the present reading of Kantian critique merely understands itself as a quasi-propaedeutic to the (wholly unsystematic) affirmation of physiology.
Appears in sections
Warwick and Formation Primary section
How the CCRU emerged around Warwick, Sadie Plant, Nick Land, and an unstable collaborative scene.