Gary Shapiro

From the Sublime to the Political: Some Historical Notes

These lines suggest that the idea of the beautiful as a self-sufficient aesthetic experience in which we achieve a synthesis of motion and rest, desire and contemplation, is an illusion. The illusion is destined to give way to a more genuine experience of terror when we confront the pure and cold poetic consciousness which is represented by Rilkes angels. As such it is typical of a strain of modernist poetics and aesthetics which exalts the sublime at the expense of the beautiful. Let me document my suggestion that modernist poetics tends to give a privileged position to what has traditionally been known as the sublime by adducing two examples from rather disparate traditions. Martin Heideggers ontological poetics can reasonably be viewed as a renewal of the aesthetics of the sublime-although Heidegger never uses the term sublime, so far as I know-and is explicitly hostile to the limitations of aesthetics, conceived as an autonomous study of a certain kind of experience. Harold Bloom does recur to the Romantic terminology of sublimity in his attempt to construct a poetics which will focus on the Freudian and Nietzchean themes of power and repression. Heidegger is interested in the Ur-sprung of the work of art, that is, the original leap or thrust by means of which it opens up a new sense of the world; this is experienced as shock or displacement and as a threat to what is so far established. Such displacement, combined with Heideggers concern with death, which occupies a central

Nietzschean Aphorism as Art and Act

Nietzsche is commonly said to be an aphoristic writer, perhaps the master of the aphorism. Yet it is not clear what is entailed by this stylistic designation or how far it takes us in understanding Nietzsche’s thought and writing. It is a mistake to see Nietzsche’s writings as exclusively aphoristic, if this is meant to imply that his writings lack philosophical and literary structure. Certainly sections of those books (conveniently numbered and titled) can be regarded as independent aphorisms (if aphorisms are ever independent, a question which must be assessed). In fact the long third essay of The Genealogy of Morals claims to be an interpretation (Auslegung) of just one aphoristic sentence from Zarathustra. Yet Nietzsche does not say that the interpretation of the aphorism is independent of the rest of his thought and writing; and the form of the interpretative essay need not itself be aphoristic. As Nietzsche was himself aware, the aphoristic form is a dangerous temptation. It invites us to classify what we are reading as belonging to a rather minor literary and philosophical genre. We’re tempted to suppose that the aphorism is simply an amusement, a playful recreation, perhaps, from the difficult pursuits of science and philosophy which should be expressed in more continuous and systematic forms.

The Rhetoric of Nietzsche's Zarathustra

dominated by a single prophetic voice with a coherent message or will it take its place among the many literary patterns (the narrative, the romance, the philosophical tale) which already exist? And who, if anyone, is its proper reader? Just as the thought of eternal recurrence collapses the distinction between the one and the many (for there is no way of individuating a plurality of absolutely exact repetitions), so as a book Zarathustra challenges us to think through the conceptions of the unity or plurality of a text which we tend to presuppose in our reading. The unity of philosophical thought and understanding is classically opposed to the plurality of poetry which is always contradicting itself. We need to know the rhetoric of Zarathustra, the manner in which it demands to be read.

Earth’s Garden-Happiness: Nietzsche’s Geoaesthetics of the Anthropocene

Abstract This essay proposes a reading of the concept and metaphor of the garden in Nietzsche’s philosophy as a contribution to exploring his aesthetics of the human earth and, accordingly, of his idea of the Sinn der Erde. Following Zarathustra’s agreement with his animals’ repeated declaration that „the world awaits you as a garden,” after his ordeal in struggling with the thought of eternal recurrence, the essay draws on Z and other writings to explore the senses of cultivation, design, and perspective which the garden embodies. Nietzsche recognizes and endorses another dimension of the garden in his discussions of Epicurus’ garden: it can be a site of refuge for the philosopher a nd a few friends when the right time for large scale cultivation is still to come. The relation between Z and BGE, as two different ways of expressing the same basic ideas, is clarified by delineating these contrasting aspects of the garden. Zusammenfassung Der Artikel schlagt eine Interpretation des Begriffs und der Metapher des Gartens in Nietzsches Philosophie vor - als Beitrag zur Erschließung seiner Ästhetik der „Menschen-Erde“ und entsprechend seines Gedankens vom „Sinn der Erde“. Ausgehend von Zarathustras Zustimmung zur wiederholten Erklärung seiner Tiere „die Welt wartet dein wie ein Garten“ nach seinem schweren Ringen mit dem Gedanken der ewigen Wiederkunft, zieht der Artikel Za und andere Schriften heran, um dem Sinn der Kultivierung, des Designs und der Perspektive nachzugehen, die der Garten bei Nietzsche einschließt. Nietzsche erkennt in seinen Erörterungen von Epikurs Garten eine andere Dimension des Gartens und macht sie stark: Er kann für den Philosophen und einige seiner Freunde ein Rückzugsort sein, solange die rechte Zeit einer umfassenden Kultivierung erst noch zu erwarten ist. Indem diese kontrastierenden Aspekte des Gartens nachgezeichnet werden, wird auch die Beziehung zwischen Za und JGB geklärt als zweier verschiedener Weisen, denselben Grundbegriffen Ausdruck zu verschaffen.

Nietzsche's Graffito: A Reading of The Antichrist

Even those writers who have good things to say about Nietzsche usually do not have good things to say abut his penultimate book, The Antichrist. Like Ecce Homo it is often described as at least prefiguring Nietzsches madness if not (as is sometimes the case) said to be part of that desperate glide itself. Those inclined to reject the book may be encouraged in this view by Nietzsches statement to Brandes, in November 1888, that The Antichrist is the whole of The Transvaluation of All Values (originally announced as a series of four books) and that Ecce Homo is its necessary prelude. The reader will have already discerned my intention of retrieving this exorbitant text for the Nietzschean canon. Such operations of retrieval are standard enough moves within a certain kind of philological discourse which privileges the book as an expressive or cognitive totality. But Nietzsche, the arch philologist, is today often regarded as not only undercutting the grounds of such moves by challenging their hermeneutic presuppositions but as having exemplified in a paradigmatic fashion the discontinuous, fragmentary or porous text. The second view of Nietzsches writings is a very traditional one; it is a commonplace with Nietzsches earlier readers to regard all of his writing as distressingly wanting in order and style, despite their admiration for his thought. Such has continued to