This book explores the imaginative possibilities for philosophy created by Nietzsche's sustained reflection on the phenomenon of ecstasy. From The Birth of Tragedy to his experimental "physiology of art," Nietzsche examines the aesthetic, erotic, and sacred dimensions of rapture, hinting at how an ecstatic philosophy is realized in his elusive doctrine of Eternal Return. Jill Marsden pursues the implications of this legacy for contemporary Continental thought via analyses of such voyages in ecstasy as Kant, Schopenhauer, Schreber, and Bataille.

When the brother of the poet Anne Carson died she wrote an elegy for him “in the form of an epitaph.” Her 2010 work Nox is a beguiling and beautiful work, as difficult to characterize as the brother it seeks to commemorate. This article explores the sensory experience of reading Nox, a text, which appeals to an elusive awareness at the edge of memory and imagination. In describing her brother, Carson evokes “a certain fundamental opacity of human being, which likes (...) to show the truth by allowing it to be seen hiding.” The aim of this paper is to show how this opacity emerges in the encounter with this captivating work, to pursue what it means to let “night” appear. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Nietzsche's Understanding of the Aphorism How Aphorisms Reconfigure the “Habits of the Senses” The Art of Exegesis.

In this article, I draw connections between Nietzsche's diagnosis of nihilism, his emphasis on the importance of the things “nearest” to us and often overlooked, and methodological issues in contemporary thought. In particular, the connection between “the devaluation of the highest values” and the task of transvaluation gives us a context for addressing nihilism as a crisis of orientation. I argue that Nietzsche's turn toward the “nearest” things as a new direction for philosophical thought seems to resonate with the priorities (...) recently identified by Laura Marcus as the “keywords” of our time: “embodiment, affect, the quotidian, singularity, contingency, intimacy, precarity.” In order to pursue the deeper implications of this affinity, I consider some recent engagement with Nietzsche in new materialist writings. I claim that Nietzsche's ideas about the “nearest things,” properly understood, may provide these theories with resources to contest nihilism at the level of value, without reinstating an uncritical appeal to the authority of “lived experience.”. (shrink)

In this essay I explore what might be meant by the “nearest things” in Nietzsche’s philosophy. In the first part of the essay I contextualise Nietzsche’s concerns with “the closest things of all” in the “free spirit” period (1878–1882) and raise the question of how knowledge of them is possible. This idea is developed in the second part of the paper in relation to the claim that dominant (Platonic/christian) habits of thought impede our understanding of the body. In the third (...) section, I suggest that Nietzsche’s interest in Epicurean thinking in this period enables us to situate the nearest things within the political aesthetics of a transfigured physis. In the final section, I examine how Nietzsche’s 1881 notes on eternal return provide a less-well known locus for his philosophy of the nearest things, one which suggests that to “incorporate” eternal return we need to become “good neighbours” to what is close. (shrink)