On Not Democratizing Art: Kant’s Cosmological Sublime versus Nietzsche’s Party of Life and The Negative Aesthetics of Divergence
Querying Kaplama’s Super-sensible Séance and Strong’s Magical Incantation of Transfiguration
Keywords:
Critical Perspectives on Western Modernities, Critique of Western Interpretive Paradigms, Thus Spoke Zarathustra’s Architectural Coherence,, Critique of Posthumanist Fragmentarianism, Materialist Critique of Metaphysics, Kantian AestheticsAbstract
Kaplama (2013, 2016) and Strong (1999) have both written about art in way that seems to be me to be most un-Nietzschean in turning the work of art for Nietzsche into a locus of various mysticisms: in Kaplama, a medium to the supersensible of the Heraclitean cosmos of flux as some kind of tragic wisdom, and in Strong, as the fount of transfiguration by participation in a “world reordering” But Nietzsche is explicit that the works of art just in and by its Dionysian wisdom, is the visible (Sichtbare) presentation of will to power, not a mediation to the supersensible.
Strong’s idea that tragic art brings about a world reordering simply ignores Nietzsche’s own ordering that the tragic age of art is to be ushered in by the great wars of the Great Politics that alone will bring the “excess of life” (Zuviel von Leben) that will make the tragic age of art possible. While Strong recognizes that is the actual textual case as to be found in Ecce Homo, (Strong 1988, 171-173), he regards the later Great Politics as a politics of domination, which he seems to think as being obvious, and it is not. It is a politics of rupture. The idea of the aesthetic in Thus Spoke Zarathustra in Part II, ‘On Those Who Are Sublime’ is already political; the final form of the Great Politics is not a déraison of the later Nietzsche of Ecce Homo, as a glance at ‘On War and Warriors’ from Part I of that work shows. The ideas of aesthetics presented in ‘On Those Who Are Sublime’ present a coherent account of a fully developed theory of art and which is embedded in the overall architecture of Thus Spoke Zarathustra's themes of identifying the locus of rupture in a knowledge of creative willing of divergence. The idea of the great wars of the later Great Politics is a most undemocratic thought. It is a knowledge-enabled divergence of speciation rupture from a lineage of biopolitical ressentiment against will to power. The Great Politics is the politics of speciation and its coordinate concept, extinction. The tragic age of art is the negative aesthetic of rupture. The Great Wars will not be a conflict of suffering for us as a whole and has the meaning of speciation instead. Art becomes the negative aesthetic of rupture—which is not a suffering because it is speciation. This is the idea of aesthetics in Nietzsche from Thus Spoke Zarathustra onwards.
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