Nietzsche’s Private Library on the Web: Digital Edition and Philosophical Commentary – BibNietzsche
Nietzsche’s library. Digital edition and philosophical commentary
Authors’ libraries are an intellectual object that is increasingly attracting the attention of researchers.
Authors’ libraries as a research object
The interest of an author’s library for the study of the genesis of works is obvious: entering the library of a writer, a philosopher, a historian, consulting the books and manuscripts of his workshop allows to grasp more easily the paths of creation. The importance of an author’s library for the history of culture in general and for the phenomena of cultural transfer in particular is also striking, since the library is often the place in which the processes of resemantisation that accompany the circulation of texts take place. <br />A number of digitization projects of authors’ libraries have been initiated, which are of great help to researchers. However, to date, there are no examples of a complete edition of an author’s library. Our project aims to publish online a complete digital edition of Nietzsche’s personal library, to write a philosophical commentary on the most important books for the genesis of his philosophy and to link all this material with scholarly criteria.
1) Digital edition of Nietzsche’s personal library. The project will publish a digital version of the catalogue of the Nietzsche library, reviewed, corrected and supplemented by digital facsimile reproduction of all the pages of the library’s books; this edition will be freely accessible to researchers around the world on the scholarly website «Nietzsche Source«.
2) Establishment of a philosophical commentary on the most important books. An international working group of Nietzsche specialists is in charge of writing the philosophical commentary of a selection of the most significant books. In addition to a detailed documentation of Nietzsche’s reading traces and annotations and a list of existing critical essays on the subject, each selected book will benefit from a detailed philosophical commentary highlighting its importance in the evolution of Nietzsche’s philosophy. The philosophical commentaries will be freely available in Nietzsche Source.
3) Contextualization. Using a specially designed hypertextual contextualization software called Contexta, the various components of Nietzsche Source, namely Nietzsche’s library, his philosophical commentary, the facsimile and critical edition of the posthumous letters and fragments, and the existing critical studies, will be linked together by bi-directional links.
Main results of the project
A first version of the digital edition of Nietzsche’s personal library is available, for the moment, in restricted access; it will be published in open access in the course of 2020: Nietzsches Bibliothek, Paris, Nietzsche Source, 2020, www.nietzschesource.org/BN. In addition, a series of articles that philosophically comment on a set of books from Nietzsche’s library is being published in the journal «Studia Nietzscheana«: Kommentar zu Nietzsches Bibliothek, Paris, Nietzsche Source, 2020-, www.nietzschesource.org/SN/BN-Kommentar.
Some of these comments have also been published in book form: Nietzsche als Leser, edited by Hans-Peter Anschütz, Armin Thomas Müller, Mike Rottmann, Yannick Souladié, Nietzsche-Lektüren, Bd. 5. Ca. 400 pages. Berlin/Boston, Walter de Gruyter, during 2020. Other publications related to the project include Andreas Urs Sommer, Nietzsche und die Folgen, 208 p, Stuttgart, Metzler, 2017, second expanded edition in 2019, 247 p., Andreas Urs Sommer, Was bleibt von Nietzsches Philosophie? 93 p, Berlin, Duncker & Humblot, 2018.
The BibNietzsche project is a research project in philosophy coordinated by Paolo D'Iorio, director of the Institut des textes et manuscrits modernes (CNRS / École normale supérieure) and Andreas Urs Sommer (head of the Nietzsche Kommentar of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and professor at the University of Fribourg). The project began in March 2016 and ended in December 2019. It received an ANR grant of €230,000 for a total cost of around €780,000.
Nietzsches Bibliothek, Paris, Nietzsche Source, 2020, www.nietzschesource.org/BN.
Kommentar zu Nietzsches Bibliothek, Paris, Nietzsche Source, 2020-, www.nietzschesource.org/SN/BN-Kommentar.
Nietzsche als Leser, hg. von Hans-Peter Anschütz, Armin Thomas Müller, Mike Rottmann, Yannick Souladié = Nietzsche-Lektüren,Bd. 5. Ca. 400 Seiten. Berlin/Boston: Walter de Gruyter, erscheint 2020 (https://www.degruyter.com/view/product/533160)
Andreas Urs Sommer, Nietzsche und die Folgen. VI + 208 Seiten. Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 2017, 2., erweiterte Auflage. VI + 247 Seiten. Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 2019.
Andreas Urs Sommer, Was bleibt von Nietzsches Philosophie? 93 Seiten. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot 2018.
Andreas Urs Sommer, Nietzsches Luther. Zum umwerterischen Umgang mit Erich Schmidt, Friedrich von Hellwald, Jacob Burckhardt, Johannes Janssen und Hippolyte Taine als Quellen zur Geschichte der frühen Neuzeit, in: Faber, Richard / Puschner, Uwe (Hg.): Luther zeitgenössisch, historisch, kontrovers, Frankfurt am Main / Bern / Bruxelles 2017, S. 591-604.
Andreas Urs Sommer, What Nietzsche Did and Did Not Read, in: Stern, Tom (Hg.): The New Cambridge Companion to Nietzsche, Cambridge 2019, S. 25-48, portugiesisch variiert unter dem Titel: O que Nietzsche leu e o que não leu [übersetzt von Saulo Krieger], in: Cadernos Nietzsche 40 (2019), Heft 1, S. 9-43 (Print: ISSN 1413-7755, online ISSN 2316-8242, direkt unter dx.doi.org/10.1590/2316-82422019v4001aus.
Andreas Urs Sommer, Friedrich Nietzsche liest Sigmund Freud. John Stuart Mill und Harriet Taylor Mill als Selbstmodellierungsgehilfen, in: Freiburger literaturpsychologische Gespräche. Jahrbuch für Literatur und Psychoanalyse, Bd. 39: Nietzsche, hg. von Dominic Angeloch, Joachim Küchenhoff und Joachim Pfeiffer, Würzburg 2020, S. 267-297.
This project aims to publish on the web a reconstructed catalogue and a digital reproduction of all the preserved books contained in Nietzsche’s private library and to provide a philosophical commentary of the books which played a significant role in the genesis of Nietzsche’s philosophy.
ITEM has a large scholarly experience in studying authors libraries (Bibliothèques d’écrivains edited by P. D’Iorio and D. Ferrer, CNRS-Éditions 2001, www.item.ens.fr/index.php) and the project coordinator, along with some members of his “Équipe Nietzsche et son temps”, has already published the complete catalogue of Nietzsche’s private library in print (Nietzsche persönliche Bibliothek, Berlin, de Gruyter, 2003, 732 p., www.degruyter.com/view/product/14295) and reserved the right for the publication on digital media.
Thanks to a collaboration with the Herzogin Anna Amalia Bibliothek in Weimar, which holds the original volumes, the Équipe Nietzsche has already digitized all the original books of Nietzsche private library including about 500.000 pages. 18.000 pages of these books contain Nietzsche’s marginalia or reading traces.
The Research group “Nietzsche-Kommentar” at the Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften has been working since 2008 to the philosophical comment of Nietzsche’s Works. Andreas Urs Sommer, the director of Nietzsche-Kommentar, will gather a group of eminent Nietzsche scholars to comment a selection of the most important philosophical books. Specialists will provide for each chosen book an exhaustive transcription and detailed description of Nietzsche’s marginalia and a list of existing research on the relationship between Nietzsche and the considered book. Above all, the scholars of Nietzsche-Kommentar will provide a more general commentary and a philosophical explanation and interpretation of the role of the considered book in the evolution of Nietzsche thought.
The digital version of the catalogue, the facsimiles reproduction of all the pages, and all the philosophical commentaries will be published in the Nietzsche Source web site and will be freely available for all the community of Nietzsche Scholars in the world (www.nietzschesource.org). Nietzsche Source, edited by the Équipe Nietzsche, already published a facsimile edition of Nietzsche’s manuscripts, the digital version of the reference critical edition, and a newly founded international and multilingual Nietzsche journal. In year 2013, the website was used by more the 67.000 readers from 217 countries which consulted more then one million of pages.
Thanks to a specific contextualisation feature called Contexta, the Nietzsche Source website will allow the interlinking of Nietzsche private library with all existing material. In this way it will possible, for example, while reading the facsimile of a annotated page of a book from the private library, to switch to the relevant passage of the philosophical commentary, to the page of Nietzsche manuscripts in which Nietzsche copied his marginalia and finally to the textual places in the complete work in which Nietzsche finally published the considerations born in contact with his reading.
Project coordination
Paolo D'Iorio (CNRS, Institut des textes et manuscrits modernes)
The author of this summary is the project coordinator, who is responsible for the content of this summary. The ANR declines any responsibility as for its contents.
Partner
HB Ak. d. Wiss. - Nietzsche Komm. / Uni Freiburg, Deutsches Sem. II Forschungsstelle Nietzsche-Kommentar der Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften. Deutsches Seminar II der Universität Freiburg
CNRS, ITEM CNRS, Institut des textes et manuscrits modernes
Help of the ANR 230,173 euros
Beginning and duration of the scientific project:
December 2015
- 36 Months
