From life affirmation to a politics of healing: Between Nietzsche and Anzaldúa

Abstract This article explores the connections between Gloria Anzaldúa's and Friedrich Nietzsche's accounts of health, resilience, and life affirmation. While some of the ways in which they think about health and sickness as at once bodily, psychic, and cultural are similar, I argue that Anzaldúa's politics of healing turns a transformed sense of Nietzschean life affirmation into a liberatory project, overcoming the deeply problematic implications of Nietzsche's discussions of decadence, namely, his celebration of the culture of the oppressor. Anzaldúa's account enables a vision and practice of active values as part of a liberatory social movement, the analogues of which Nietzsche disavows as indicative of a herd morality. In this way, I suggest that Anzaldúa's decolonial feminist politics of healing involves an overcoming of ressentiment by way of politically mobilizing and collectivizing a transformed Nietzschean sense of life affirmation.