Power seems to indicate also normativity or authority. Majority of people in the society want to (Will) live within the normativity boundaries where moral and legal codes are kept and respected, rather than in the wild or underground, where normativity doesn’t exist.
Power implies the authoritarian entity within the society where moral or legal normativity is broken, it will come down with either criticism or legal charges on those who broke the normativity.
Georg Brandes described Nietzsche political view as "aristocratic radicalism. In response Nietzsche wrote to Brandes saying:
“The expression ‘aristocratic radicalism,’ which you employ, is very good. It is, permit me to say, the cleverest thing I have yet read about myself.” (December 2, 1887)
It should be clear that whatever one’s opinion of Nietzsche as political philosopher, the issue cannot be ignored or resolved by repeating the claim that he was not a political philosopher.
What must be asked in evaluating the debates, and contrary to what you say, the debate is ongoing, is, “what is political philosophy?” My own opinion, following Plato and Aristotle, is it is most generally about how to live and how to live together.
It is Zarathustra’s love of mankind.
I wouldn’t exactly, although it’s an excellent proposition.
I’d say Nietzsche is political in the sense that an arsonist is political when he goes to a political rally to throw a molotov.
It’s that dynamic that makes him explicitly not a political philosopher, formal sense or not.
And I think it makes him political in the sense that he recognizes the noise politics produces.
Now, you might say: Throwing a molotov cocktail at a rally is always a political move. To the outsider, yes. Nietzsche isn’t worried about the outsider’s perspective, though. He cares about the perspective of the individual, and that arsonist just really wanted to start a fire.
Where I think the three converge is on the dynamics of power and how it moves through culture, ethics, language, institutions, etc. Sure, that touches on politics.
Where they meaningfully diverge is the direction their analyses move in. For the postmodernists, it’s the collective being subjugated by the power of institutions and how power works on a societal scale. For Nietzsche, power is a psychological reality to be mastered by the solitary individual.
Which brings me back to the existential nature of his work, rather than the political.
I think the postmodernists were explicitly political thinkers, not because of their blueprints for governance (or rather lack thereof), but because of their views on warding off political and institutional entities; that’s far more clearly a political endeavor to me.
That’s my last one… I’ve spent too much time in this thread already, I’m spent, and I can see a certain special someone furiously typing away, and I truly don’t want to read any of it 
I am not sure if that makes sense. Nietzsche would have been the last man who would emphasize on dominating others, or encourage anyone to dominate others.
Will to Power is a human nature in the DNA, that anyone living in the human society would tend to form moral judgements and volunteer for voicing up against on the immoral actions of others. That is what moral realism is all about.
Nietzsche was just an interpreter of the human nature and the society he lived in, just like here us are trying to do via philosophizing.
@echelon @Fooloso4 These disagreements over meaning are partly why I’ve not much bothered to pursue philosophy in my life. It just ends up sounding like apologists arguing over the meaning of Bible verses. Incidentally, I tried reading the Kaufmann translation of The Gay Science a couple of weeks ago, but found it unpleasant work, and after a lot of reading I find that Iremember nothing I have read. This material just doesn’t hold my interest, but I wish it did.
I am not much bothered by the disagreement. It is to be expected. If the disagreement helps me or others see things differently or more clearly or draws attention to things that were missed, then there is some benefit.
Unfortunately, some have other motives, but I always assume that there are others reading along who have not made up their mind and may find the discussion helpful.
Yes, I understand it’s supposed to work like this. But to me philosophy often feels like an endless churn of (pointless?) disagreements over abstruse material, with people regularly arguing along partisan lines. I get enough of that in my day job. My real interest is in what people believe and why, and I’m certainly not losing any sleep over it.
Well if everyone would just agree with me …
Completely understandable.
This was a rather poor showing of two interlocutors who, in their respective ways, performed inadequate.
What I’d like to push back on, though, is the implication that we can’t get this stuff right. What you’ve got here (and this is ubiquitous online) is a setting that lacks the sufficient epistemic grounding, discipline, and charitability to bring something like this to a proper conclusion.
Most sincerely, I want to point out that we can in fact get interpretative meaning right, and we do. Just not here, among these folks and in this setting.
Part of why I feel strongly about this is because the implication of that sentiment or attitude can easily slip into other fields of thought and experience. It works toward a cynical sense that we simply can’t get the world right.
We can.
As for “The Gay Science”… it’s totally fine if it doesn’t hold your interest. Nietzsche explicitly constructed barriers in his books to keep people out, deliberately choosing an aphoristic, exhausting style.
Not liking Nietzsche is perfectly fine. I love him, but I don’t particularly like him much
Alright! Now I’m officially out! 
I’m not saying someone can’t get it right. I’m saying I have little confidence in my ability to arrive at a reliable reading, and it seems futile for me to try to determine which interpretation anywhere is the more useful or even correct (for want of a better term). For me, the frequent problem is not philosophy itself or how well it maps onto our experience of the world, but whether the distinctions between competing views can be discerned by a non-expert like me, with limited time and many competing interests. And when, as here, the material is difficult to understand, I have even less confidence that any project I could undertake would yield a view that is genuinely informed rather than merely preferred.
I don’t dislike him and I’d love to enjoy the work, but it’s too hard (for me).
To be fair to Nietzsche, it should be added that his psychological analyses are highly complicated and nuanced.
I agree with that point. But I am not sure if there is correct interpretation in any classic thinkers and their texts.
Whatever interpretation we make, if there are points which resonate with current affairs of the world, societies, groups or individuals and their rational paradigms, experiences and way of reasoning, then it would be worth while attempts.
Agreements or disagreements on the points are secondary nature, which would be a bonus if reached. We don’t need to sulk or whine because of disagreements or be too optimistic due to agreements.
Nietzsche is an interesting thinker and writer whose work is great fun to read.
But even professional philosophers and those who have all the time in the world continue to disagree, including disagreeing about getting “interpretative meaning right”. In my opinion, interpretation is a mode of thinking. We strive to understand what we are interpreting correctly, but the best we can do is to provide an interpretation that is consistent with the text and seems to us most plausible.
More generally, there is not even agreeing as to whether, as the history of philosophy shows, questions or answers are to take priority. Some may find the idea that we do not have the answers intolerable but others will see it as the condition that makes philosophy possible.
Of course. But there is a difference between two Wagner scholars arguing about which of his operas is best and someone who has never heard Wagner trying to make sense of him as a composer.
Again, I would suggest there is a difference between a theorised understanding of what we do or don’t know and someone who has no idea what the points being made are in the first place.
But you are somewhere in between the scholar and someone who has never read Nietzsche. You have said that you have attempted to read him. In my opinion, your acknowledgement that you have not understood him puts you at an advantage over some who imagines they do understand him but do not.
There are passages and ideas that read like intellectual zingers; at times he strikes me as a truculent Oscar Wilde. But overall, I don’t get much out of it. Then again, this shouldn’t be about me.