Nietzsche, Wagner, Biopolitics, Race, & Music

“Wagner makes music sick” (Nietzsche Contra Wagner, 664). “Life itself has become a problem” (Nietzsche Contra Wagner, 681). To mark Wagner’s bicentennial, the Guardian published this essay on the connection many of his contemporaries made between his music and mental…

Thoughts on philoSOPHIA 2011 #3: Nietzsche, Beauvoir, and Repetition

Elaine Miller gave a super-interesting paper on repetition in Nietzsche and Beauvoir. She finds in both a contrast between inauthentic, lazy conceptions of repetition (I’ll call this lazy repetition), and rigorous, accurate accounts of repetition (I’ll call this real repetition)….

Jacques Lu Cont, best (if unintentional) living interpreter of Nietzsche?

“I would not know what the spirit of a philosopher might wish more than to be a good dancer. For the dance is his ideal, also his art, and finally also his only piety” (Nietzsche, The Gay Science, section 381,…

“This is why events unnerve me”: Teaching Neitzsche through Joy Division/New Order/Kylie Minogue

My Existentialism class is in the midst of reading Nietzsche’s The Gay Science. The GS deals with a lot of the themes and ideas in Zarathustra, which is what people usually assign in Existentialism classes, but the GS treats them…