Nietzsche, Artaud and the Critique of Representation

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Contents

Nietzsche, Artaud and the Critique of Representation… 6.

Introduction, p.6 – Anti-Platonic metaphysics of Nietzsche and Artaud; the problem of

decadence, p.6 – Dionysus and the Double: the experience of Chaos, p.9 – Art and purification:

psychological and physical catharsis, p.11 –Nietzsche and the beautiful: new principle of evaluation, p.13 –

Conclusion, p.14.

Bibliography… 15.

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Nietzsche, Artaud, and the Critique of Representation

Baxter Jephcott

Nietzsche and Artaud’s thoughts on art draw their motivating force from a common source: the

overturning of Platonic conception of art, which takes root in a wider system of thought built upon the

structures of representation. Both writers see the decline, if not complete disappearance of true art as the

consequence of the long lost relationship between art and its primordial metaphysical function.

Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy and Artaud’s The Theatre and its Double are both attempts to bring new life to art

by reconnecting it with these metaphysical sources. While the two works are separated by over seventy

years, their common critical starting point against representation and Platonism determines multiple

points of convergence; by analysing their differences, we will also attempt to bring out a sense in which

Artaud’s work carries their common effort to a new extreme. The problem faced is the following: “In

what sense is art a metaphysical activity?” This question engenders several others “If art is not to find

moral justification in catharsis, how does art heal and purify?” and “If art is no longer judged relative to the

Good and the Beautiful, on what principles can an aesthetic evaluation be grounded?” This essay is

organized around these problems: in a first part, we will analyse how art and metaphysics are re-united

and the critique of their separation through the concept of decadence; after this, we will look more closely

at the chaotic and the Dionysian in Nietzsche and Artaud, as the fundamental source of artistic creation;

in a third part we will contrast the psychological purification of Aristotelian catharsis with the focus on

bodily purification in the Theatre of Cruelty; finally, we will attempt to show how Nietzsche derives a new

system of aesthetic evaluation around the notions of strength and power.

The reuniting of art with metaphysics comes with the demarcation of a new metaphysical object.

Traditional metaphysics builds upon the structure set out by the Platonic metaphysical entity: the Idea.

The relationship between the Idea and the world is one of transcendence and resemblance: the world of

appearances is a representation of the Ideal world. This lays the ground for the platonic conception of art,

where “all art is a copy of the world of sense, which is itself an illusion beyond which the wise man must

be trained to penetrate; works of art are removed into the third place from the truth.”1 If the metaphysical

reality is the Idea, art is determined to stay within the confines of imitation, a position in which it is

granted only limited powers of revelation. But the central problem of the transcendence of the Idea is

that truth here appears as a transcending of life itself. That which is closest to life, that is the instinctive,

the passionate, is erected as an impediment to truth. To have put the Idea before life, thought above the

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1 H. House, Aristotle’s Poetics, Richard Clay and Company Ltd, p.23

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world, this is the object of Nietzsche’s attack, the starting point of decadence: “Whereas in all truly

productive men instinct is the strong, affirmative force and reason the dissuader and critic, in the case of

Socrates the roles are reversed: instinct is the critic, consciousness the creator. Truly a monstrosity!”2 For

metaphysics to become a source of power for art, metaphysics itself has to be recast into a position much

closer to life, indeed must be seen as the source of life’s creative dynamism. The domain of the

metaphysical must be immanent to the world, a depth rather than a height: “We need to live first of all; to

believe in what makes us live, that something makes is live—to believe that whatever is produced from the

mysterious depths of ourselves need not forever haunt us as an exclusively digestive concern.”3 This

depth is what appears as the new object of metaphysics, a depth which is the source of a life that is never

given, an existence of constant creation. The metaphysical object has become dynamic, a chaos that

doesn’t relate to the world by resemblance but is rather another dimension of the world, the unconscious

of a world populated by characters and individuals, words and signs.

A metaphysics closer to instinct than to reason requires the creation of a new fundamental

concept whose characteristics will differ sharply from those of a static metaphysics. Nietzsche’s concept

of drive is such a concept. For Nietzsche, the metaphysical domain consists in forces found in perpetual

antagonism, forces giving rise to the world as products of their creative opposition: “Suppose that

nothing else is ‘given’ as real but our world of desires and passions, that we cannot sink or rise to any

other ‘reality’ but just that of our drives—for thinking is only a relation of these drives to one another.”4

Art is the product of such a metaphysical antagonism; its function is to reveal these metaphysical forces

and allow the artist and the spectator to channel these chaotic forces into their own vital movement, an

invigorating and life affirming experience.

The truth of art and of the world is not beyond the world, but another dimension of the world of

which consciousness grasps only an aspect. There is a parallel to be drawn with the two dimensional

philosophy of Schopenhauer: for Schopenhauer, there is a world as seen through the structures of the

subject, the world as ‘representation’, and the world in-itself as ‘will’. Schopenhauer’s ‘will’ and

Nietzsche’s metaphysics of forces differ, particularly on the level of the latter’s pluralism in opposition to

the former’s positing of a unified will. Nevertheless, both Nietzsche and Schopenhauer accord a

privileged position to art as a way of accessing the metaphysical realm and consider representation an

optic to be surpassed. While representation is to be surpassed for different reasons, for Schopenhauer in

order to access the ‘thing-in-itself’, for Nietzsche because it is at the source of a decadent denial of

instinctive life in favour of the work of Reason and the Idea, these shared points underline a facet of anti-

representational aesthetics: the importance of music. Music is the purest form of art, as it is devoid of all

representative character: “Nietzsche and Artaud, in their first texts, participate in a certain ‘melocentrism’

and accord a metaphysical privilege to music, ‘veritable language of the universal’ for one, capable, for the

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!2 F. Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy, p.84 3 A. Artaud, The Theatre and its Double, Grove Press 1958, p.7 4 F. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil 36.

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other to reconnect us with the Original Word.”5 The un-individuated and intangible nature of music

allows us to perceive some preliminary aspects of the Dionysian in Nietzsche, which we will see is the

fundamental artistic drive. However, before looking more closely at the Dionysian drive, we would like to

look at Artaud’s effort to connect art with metaphysics.

As with Nietzsche, with Artaud the metaphysical domain is brought closer to life, through the

notion of ‘levels of reality’: everyday reality only exists as a product of an original Chaos, which is the

proper object of art. Indeed, Artaud’s concept of decadence meets with Nietzsche’s, the characteristic

tendency of modern European thought to separate thought and life: “All our ideas about life must be

revised in a period when nothing any longer adheres to life […]”6 or his portrait of the ‘civilized’ or

‘theoretical’ man, “a person who thinks in forms, signs, representations—a monster whose faculty of

deriving thoughts from acts, instead of identifying acts with thoughts, is developed to an absurdity.”7

Starting from the vital and instinctive as the location of truth, therefore recasting the metaphysical as a

dimension of bodies rather than of thoughts, this is the fundamental anti-platonic move. Art, and

specifically the theatre, opens up the metaphysical dimension not through a relation of imitation, but by

constituting itself as a ‘Double’ of the virtual reality of Chaos: “the theatre must be considered as the

double, not of this direct, everyday reality of which it is gradually being reduced to a mere inert replica—

as empty as it is sugar-coated—but of another archetypal and dangerous reality, a reality of which the

Principles, like dolphins, once they have shown their heads, hurry to dive back into the obscurity of the

deep.”8 In the same way Platonism relegates art to the ‘third order’ of imitation, in anti-mimetic thought

psychological realities are the symptoms of corporeal impulses, consciousness is not primary, but “the

highest extremity of the body”9. In addressing itself first to the body, art acts as a force against the

decadent, who views the body merely as “an instrument of consciousness […], reducing the body’s

presence to an automatism.”10 Artaud’s Double escapes the structures of imitation insofar as it is itself a

creation: the theatre, as double, does not resemble Chaos but rather constitutes a Second Order of

creation, a powerful physical reality harnessing the energy of the metaphysical. In this sense, the Double is

a sign of the metaphysical; however, the sign of the theatre is a physical sign, part of a concrete symbolic

language of gestures. Spoken word, as the psychological double of a physical reality, is furthest away from

the metaphysical sources of art.

Nietzsche and Artaud redefine art as a metaphysical activity by creating a new meaning for the

meta of metaphysics: 1. Platonic metaphysics mediates between the static world of Ideas and the world of

appearances through a relation of resemblance and representation, the relation of art to truth is one of

copy to model. Here, truth is accessed through consciousness, hence the psychological emphasis of

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!5 C. Dumoulie, Nietzsche et Artaud: Pour une ethique de la cruauté, p.50 6 A. Artaud, The Theatre and its Double, p.8 7 Ibid. 8 A. Artaud, The Theatre and its Double, p.48 9 P. Klossowski, Nietzsche and the vicious circle, p.27 10 Ibid.

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Platonic art. By relating the work of art to the transcendence of the Idea, art is judged by reason, and is

therefore the object of moral concern. The reversal of the priority of the moral over the aesthetic, reason

over passion and the Idea over life is the starting point of a critique of decadence. 2. In opposition to

this, the metaphysics of forces, or chaos, describes a dynamic metaphysical realm, not of being but of

becoming. The relationship of the work of art to the metaphysical is not one of resemblance, but of

production: the work emerges from chaos as the product of a metaphysical ‘copulation’ of forces. The

reversal of the relation reason-instinct in favour of the instinctive leads anti-mimetic art to address itself

firstly to bodies, to the detriment of the spoken word and the intrigue of psychological theatre. Now that

we have drawn the broad lines of an anti-platonic metaphysics, we will look more closely at the themes of

dissolution and dispersal in the Dionysian.

The opposition between the Apollonian and the Dionysian drives in The Birth of Tragedy

establishes a polarity between order and dissolution, the individuating tendency of consciousness and the

chaotic dispersal of the metaphysical unconscious. Through the coupling of the Apollonian and

Dionysian drives, tragedy emerges from the depths; yet both drives account for different aspects of the

tragic. Insofar as art must constitute a material event, its emphasis on the physical unconscious realities

rather than the conscious psychological realm, the Dionysian is erected as the determining force in art, the

Apollonian acting more as a limiting factor of the dangerous intensity of absolute dispersal. Nietzsche

takes from Schopenhauer the notion of a subject as principium individuationis, which is a product of the

Apollonian drive: in a sense tragedy must be seen as a phenomenon produced by the Apollonian

conditioning or ‘individuation’ of a Dionysian noumenon. Apollo is needed as a protective force from the

brutal power of the Dionysian: “What kept Greece safe was the proud, imposing image of Apollo, who in

holding up the head of the Gorgon to those brutal and grotesque Dionysiac forces subdued them. […]

Apollonian consciousness was but a thin veil hiding [the Apollonian Greek] from the whole Dionysiac

realm. […] His entire existence, with its temperate beauty, rested upon a substratum of suffering and

knowledge revealed to him by the Dionysian.”11 The Dionysian incarnates the powers of instinct, the

Apollonian represented in the faculty of reason and consciousness: ultimately, the Apollonian can be seen

to emerge out of the Dionysian, and only retroactively constitute a limiting power, in the manner of the

self-denying ascetic, for example. The death of tragedy comes when the limiting, negating effort of the

Apollonian drive comes to forget its Dionysian source; this ‘slow death’ is seen in the plays of Euripides,

where the psychological becomes the guiding principle, the logical Socratic drive the source of intrigue.

The fact that Nietzsche, at the time of writing The Birth of Tragedy12 , still considers a limiting factor

necessary perhaps reveals a certain reluctance to break entirely from the structures of representation, a

problem that Artaud surpasses by dismissing entirely the individuated, conscious aspect of art.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!11 F. Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy p.26-28-34 12 In later works, namely in a postscript written for BT in 1886, Nietzsche rejects the emphasis placed on the Apollonian aspect of art in his earlier work.

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Indeed for Artaud, true art is in fact metaphysical, not so much the product of metaphysical

oppositions but the materialization of the violence of Chaos itself. The ‘cruelty’ of the theatre is only the

‘raw’ 13 expression of the brutal metaphysical domain, unmediated by any limiting force such as

consciousness or representation. The true theatre takes place in the metaphysical: “if the theatre is the

double of life, life is the double of the true theatre. […] And by double I mean the great magic element of

which the theatre, in its forms, is only the figuration while we wait for the theatre to become that

element’s transfiguration.” 14 Chaos, metaphysics, these are other words or doubles of the Primitive

theatre. But if the true theatre marks a real event, an eruption of the metaphysical in the world of life, this

must describe a moment in which the Double disappears or unifies with its metaphysical source. Whether

this is a real possibility or an impossibility toward which the artist must tend is not perfectly clear: in some

cases, Artaud seems to think it is, in others, the draw of Chaos appears more as a direction, an aim

erected in order to escape the trap of social, moral, psychological theatre. In the first manifesto of the

Theatre of Cruelty he writes, “The question, then, for the theatre, is to create a metaphysics of speech,

gesture, and expression, in order to rescue it from its servitude to psychology and ‘human interest’. […] It

is not, moreover, a question of bringing metaphysical ideas directly onto the stage, but of creating what

you might call temptations, indraughts of air around these ideas.”15 Where the polarity in Nietzsche’s

metaphysics occurs in the metaphysical domain and gives ‘birth’ to tragedy and the real through a

productive resolution, in Artaud’s metaphysics, the polarity exists within bodies themselves, which are

divided between “the obscene body on one end—the body in which we live; the abject or pure body on

the other—the ‘body without organs’ (body of the true theatre).”16 To think of the metaphysical as a

potential of actual bodies, as a point of utter dispersal in a scale of progressive condensation helps to

understand the sense in which Artaud can say that true theatre is metaphysics: the theatre must strive to

achieve this absolute disorganisation by avoiding the use of individuating processes, such as verbal

language and classical narrative structures centred around personality and moral conflict. In Artaud as in

Nietzsche, the artistic tendency is one of dispersal that aims not at the intrigue of interpersonal tension

but toward the dissolution of the individual, an art of the masses. The theatre of cruelty relates to the

Dionysian in this attraction to the atmosphere of the festival, where in collective rituals, dance, peyotl

induced trances and the experience of ‘ego-loss’ “it is as though a sentimental trait of nature were coming

to the fore, as though nature were bemoaning the fact of her fragmentation, her decomposition into

separate individuals.”17

The effect of the work of art on the spectator is an important aspect of an aesthetic theory: the

effort to overturn Platonism engenders a shift of the conceptual apparatus, which modifies the sense of

key notions, such as that of artistic purification or healing. Both Nietzsche and Artaud consider

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!13 The etymology of ‘cruauté’ is derived from ‘cru’, the French word for ‘raw’. 14 A. Artaud, Oeuvres V p.272-73, (from E. Sellin The Dramatic Concepts of Antonin Artaud.p.54) 15 A. Artaud, The Theatre and its Double p.90 16 C. Dumoulia, Nietzsche et Artaud, p.130 17 F. Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy p.27

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consciousness the symptom of a more primitive disruption, a sub-representative conflict of impulses or

forces. This explains why anti-platonic aesthetics approaches the problem of artistic purification, of

catharsis directly through the body.

The difference between Aristotelian catharsis, which is built upon the structures of

representation and the anti-platonic conception of artistic purification resides in the latter’s focus on the

body, the former’s on psychological purification. Indeed, Aristotelian catharsis is inseparable from a

moral vision of the world in which the passions are accessed and controlled through consciousness. The

platonic structure assures the priority of the intelligible over the sensible; the truth of the mind takes

precedence over the truth of the senses: if art is to conserve any metaphysical value it must become a

moral phenomenon. The decadent reversal is here brought to the fore: making art and life a moral

phenomenon rather than considering the moral as a product of the aesthetic. The tragedy of Aristotle is

strictly psychological, the severing of the Dionysian having been concluded with the victory of the moral

vision over the aesthetic. Apollo as a “moral deity”18, the drive of individuation and consciousness, is the

determining force; the alliance of Apollo and the Socratic drive cannot be thought in terms of opposition

but rather as complementary impulses, Socrates as a product of Apollonian regression, “here philosophic

thought overgrows art and compels it to cling close to the tree of the dialectic. The Apollonian tendency has

withdrawn into the cocoon of logical schematism.”19 The place of the spectator in this schema is that of

the voyeur with “half-moral, half-erudite pretensions, the critic”20; it is against this view of the spectator

as the fearful and pitying patient of moral drama, a theatre of ‘Peeping Toms’, that Nietzsche and Artaud

call for an orgiastic theatre where the line between actor and spectator disappears to the degree that the

theatre is effective in its ‘epidemic’ aims. The stage can no longer be thought of as the place of

representation or fiction, but as the ‘ground zero’ outbreak location of a fast spreading miasma: “What we

see here is the individual effacing himself through entering a strange being. It should be made clear that

this phenomenon is not singular, but epidemic: a whole crowd becomes rapt in this manner.”21

In order to counter this psychological-moral domination, a recasting of the Aristotelian

conception of catharsis must shift the emphasis from psychological purification to the physical effects of

the theatrical event. In view of this effort Artaud attempts to rebuild notions of drama and performance

around physical coordinates, calling for a language of bodies more apt to express metaphysical realities

than words full of psycho-moral intentions: “I am well aware that the language of gestures and postures,

dance and music, is less capable of analysing a character, revealing a man’s thoughts, or elucidating states

of consciousness as clearly and as precisely as is verbal language, but who ever said theatre was created to

analyse a character, to resolve conflicts of love and duty, to wrestle with all the problems of a

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!18 BT, p.34 19 P. Pothen, Nietzsche and the fate of art, p.22 20 G. Deleuze, Nietzsche et la philosophie p.20 21 BT, p.56

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psychological nature that monopolize our contemporary stage.”22 It is in order to escape the grasp of the

moralizing spectator that theatre must avoid the use of verbal language, in order to force the aesthetic

vision upon the modern, theoretical, ‘cultivated’ audience. This is achieved by emphasising the spirit of

music in theatrical performance, where sound and gesture are not signs of psychological realities, but of

chaotic tensions capable of disrupting the body before the mind. Verbal language can only be used insofar

as it has a sub-representative aspect, a use of language that goes beyond its psychological, utilitarian

functions, a language of cries, gasps, laughter and incantation23 which is “felt and echoed in Nietzsche’s

own style, as if language itself were returned to the earth, wrested from its dry, poisonous subordination

to the supersensible, freed from the numbness, slumber and apathy of transcendence or ‘spirit’.”24

Where Aristotle’s catharsis attempts to bring equilibrium by saving man from the tyranny of his

passions, Artaud’s catharsis seeks to cure a fundamentally modern ailment, a degenerate instinctive life

brought on by the pre-eminence of consciousness in ‘civilized’ life. Indeed, only after a long history of

decadence do definite symptoms appear: the atrophy of the modern man’s impulsive life, the exaggerated

importance of conscious processes engendering paranoia and neurotic tendencies. The theatre seeks to

reawaken the instinctive through a direct effect on bodies; Artaud, like Nietzsche, underlines the

importance of the unconscious. The physical purification of the theatre of cruelty addresses the body

first, but its ultimate effects are seen in consciousness, which is a symptom of the body: “The theatre is the

only place in the world, the last general means we still possess of directly affecting the organism and, in

periods of neurosis and petty sensuality, of attacking this sensuality by physical means it cannot

withstand.”25 It is the rigidity of the excessively conscious, organized body of the modern man which is

the cause of his neurotic symptoms. Through the anarchic force of the theatre of cruelty, what is aimed at

is a disruption of the organism which will bring it closer to its pure or ‘abject’ state of complete

disorganisation, away from the personal, ‘obscene body’ fundamental in contemporary theatre. By

returning art and here more particularly the theatre to its primordial aesthetic function, the classical

notion of catharsis is shifted off its moral axis in order to focus on the physical, properly aesthetic effects

of art. Through the discovery of a metaphysical domain immanent to bodies, distinguished from the

transcendent realm of the Idea, this does not come at the cost of separating art and metaphysics. Having

created a new conceptual framework that avoids the transcending structures of Platonism while

accounting for the metaphysical source of art and the purifying effects of the aesthetic experience, a final

problem remains: evaluation.

The Greek adequation of the Good and the Beautiful, epitomised in the figure of the

καλοκαγαθία, lies at the heart of aesthetic evaluation before the arrival of Nietzsche. Indeed, the notion

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!22 TD p.41 23 A. Artaud, TD: “To make metaphysics out of a spoken language is to make the language express what it does not ordinarily express; […] to reveal its possibilities for producing physical shock; […] to turn language against its basely utilitarian, one could say alimentary, sources; […] and finally, to consider language as the form of Incantation.” 24 M. de Beistegui, The Work and the Idea, Parrhesia, 2011 25 TD, p.81

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of the Beautiful is the key to aesthetic judgment in representative systems of thought. It is in this respect

that Nietzsche considers it problematic, as it is a concept corrupted by the Platonic subordination of the

sensible to the intelligible. Beauty here is solely the object of a discovery, of knowledge; it is a fundamentally

passive conception of the beautiful. Indeed, knowledge of ideal Beauty only ever contributes to inaction:

the ascetic model is precisely a model in which activity (the instinctive) becomes passive (passion),

inaction (moral rectitude, chastity etc…) an activity, a display of power and strength. The overturning of

the classical conception of beauty, following from the modification of the metaphysical structures that

underlie it, depends on 1. Avoiding all reference to the intelligible in the definition of the work of art and

2. Defining the beautiful not from the standpoint of the passive spectator, but from that of the artist or

actor.

The first shift therefore, as in the case of catharsis, is to rid beauty of its moral aspects as well as

its formal character inherited from the doctrine of the Idea. Beauty becomes a property of appearances, it

is the affirmation of the truths of the senses, of lies: “In the main, I agree more with the artists than with

any philosopher hitherto: they have not lost the scent of life, they have loved the things of ‘this world’—

they have loved their senses.”26 This engenders a profound change in what qualifies as beautiful, moral

value is replaced by sensible intensity as the hierarchizing principle between the beautiful and the ugly. Art

is not judged relative to principles of harmony and measure, properties which leave traces of the

Apollonian drive to individuate, but relative to power and intensity, measurements applicable to the

disorganized, chaotic nature of the Dionysian. Here, beauty is not pleasing but overwhelming, “art as

freedom from moral narrowness, [is a] flight into nature, where beauty is coupled with frightfulness.”27

This effort to redefine beauty seeks to find a criterion of evaluation for non-representative art, a beauty

adequate to music: “a wrongheaded aesthetic based on decadent art has attempted to make music answer

to a criteria of beauty proper only to the plastic arts, expecting it to generate pleasure in beautiful forms.”28

The beauty of the work of art is determined relative to the intensity of its expression or ‘transfiguration’

of Chaos, a quantitative measurement of forces rather than a qualitative judgment of forms. This new art

that seeks to harness energy over pleasing is a test of strength for the artist and the spectator, who is no

longer a passive onlooker, a psychological contemplator, but one forced into a physical reaction by the

power of the work.

Indeed, an active judgment of art must rely on the physical notion of strength: “It is a question of

strength (of an individual or of a people), whether and where the judgment ‘beautiful’ is applied.”29 An

evaluation based on strength is necessarily active, and therefore physical, un-Platonic “(For moral values are

only apparent values compared with physiological values.)” 30 What appears here is an aesthetic of

heroism, where what is beautiful is what is strong and pleases the strong. Contrary to a passive judgment !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!26 F. Nietzsche, Will to Power 820. 27 WP 823. 28 BT p.97. 29 WP 852. 30 WP 710.

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of beauty resting on the object of beauty (the work of art), an active aesthetic judgment is as much a test

of the spectator, who is now an actor in the full sense of the term. For Nietzsche, we all get the beauty we

deserve depending on our power. The hero doesn’t receive the beautiful, but by projecting his abundance

of life into the world, “infuses a transfiguration and fullness into things and poetizes about them until

they reflect back [his] fullness and joy in life. […] The sober, the weary, the exhausted can receive

absolutely nothing from art, because they do not possess the primary artistic force, the pressure of

abundance: whoever cannot give, also receives nothing.”31 By seeing the world on a wider scale, the hero

instinctively feels that what is terrifying is in fact what is best for him, that we are only made stronger by

what puts us in danger, by what makes the weakling shudder32. Only art borne of a confrontation with

Chaos, an affirmation of becoming, is beautiful; art that strives to reveal the security of Being, the static

realm of the Idea, can only please the weak, the moral, the base. Only through a hero’s eyes can cruelty be

beautiful, can the beautiful be suffered, for these heroic spirits “are hard enough to experience suffering

as a pleasure.”33

The effort of reversing Platonism extends beyond aesthetics; the concepts of decadence

characterizes all moralizing thought, the subjugation of the beautiful being but one of its aspects. But by

understanding the radical difference between an aesthetics built into the framework of a static

metaphysics, and the aesthetic theories of Nietzsche and Artaud, emerging from a metaphysics of

Becoming and Chaos, the essential movement can be seen. This new metaphysics pushes the thinker into

the face of danger; art and philosophy are way of confronting chaos itself. This confrontation is not

borne out of a brazen decision, but out of the prophetic vision that another, much greater, danger looms

behind the security of the Idea. The degeneration of the impulses characteristic of the modern man brings

with it new symptoms, those brought on by self-denial: neurosis, paranoia, fascism, nihilism… the

violence of Nietzsche and Artaud’s work reveals the urgency with which they perceived this danger. But

this is a violence that carries the most joyful of messages, a call for laughter in a time when man has

forgotten how to laugh; when we no longer live, it is a vision of the world in which beauty is life itself,

and nothing else.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!31 WP 801. 32 WP 852. 33 Ibid.

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Bibliography

Artaud (A) The Theatre and its Double, Grove Press 1958.

Beistegui (M) The Work and the Idea, Parrhasia 2011.

Deleuze (G) Nietzsche and Philosophy, Athlone Press 1983.

Dumoulie (C) Nietzsche et Artaud: Pour une éthique de la cruaté, PUF 1992.

House (H) Aristotle’s Poetics, Richard Clay and Company Ltd.

Klossowski (P) Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle, Athlone 2000.

Nietzsche (F) The Birth of Tragedy, Doubleday 1956.

Will to Power, Vintage books 1967.

Pothen (P) Nietzsche and the Fate of Art, Ashgate Publishing 2002.