Before
Rereading The Birth of Tragedy
Jason Kemp Winfree
Wenn es 'nur Ein Sein gibt, das Ich' und nach seinem Bild alle anderen 'Seienden' gemacht sind,—wenn schließlich der Glaube an das 'Ich' mit dem Glauben an die Logik, d.h. metaphysische Wahrheit der Vernunft-Kategorie steht und fällt: wenn andrerseits das Ich sich als etwas Werdendes erweist: so—Nietzsche 1
Let us begin with this question: What would it mean to forget The Birth of Tragedy?
Nietzsche calls on us on more than one occasion to do just this, a request that is most often tied to a claim concerning the book's untimeliness, and this in two senses.
First, in what is chronologically the last such request, which comes from Ecce Homo, the first section of that part that treats the Birth, Nietzsche suggests that the book sounds as if it were written fifty years earlier than it in fact was.
More precisely, 'it smells offensively Hegelian,' and this due most immediately to the language of 'Idee,' Gegensatz, and Aufheben, its most apparent sense, therefore, dialectical. 2
Let us note, then, that in spite of the fact that Nietzsche credits The Birth of Tragedy with the discovery of the Dionysian, this 'principle' is communicated through a speech that stammers and, indeed, falters under the weight of reconciliation (Versöhnung) and metaphysical comfort—Dionysus 'concealed under a scholar's hood,' not yet cruel enough. 3 And yet the text is untimely in still another manner, for according to Nietzsche it poses for the first time the question of 'cheerfulness' (Heiterkeit), which is also, according to the Genealogy, the reward of the question of morality (BT ASC 1). 4
The Birth of Tragedy is thus untimely not only because it dares to raise the question of Greek art in the midst of the Franco-Prussian War, but because in doing so, perhaps even in spite of itself, it also poses for the first time the gravest of all questions—morality the danger of all dangers? (BT ASC 5; GM P 7)—and so because it is already to a certain extent genealogical. Thus, if the first sense of the text's untimeliness concerns its communication, the second sense of its untimeliness [End Page 58] provides the mode of access to the first. To forget The Birth of Tragedy would therefore be to remember the selective principle of the genealogical work that it initiates with the question of cheerfulness and the chain of implication that follows from it, and to practice this question and all it entails vis-à-vis the Birth itself, to trace the emergence of this selection in a selective manner. And this requires experiencing the failure of The Birth of Tragedy, not simply in order that what is to be forgotten first be remembered, but rather, so as to recall that what is to be re-membered always already suffers oblivion, that genealogy everywhere upsets the order of origins, especially its own. An 'impossible book,' therefore, not in spite of its fundamental discoveries, but because of them.
All of this is indicated obliquely at the outset by a change in the appearance of the text itself, announced by a modification in the title that occurs in the 1886 edition, where the "Attempt at Self-Criticism" also first appears. Still The Birth of Tragedy, but no longer out of the Spirit of Music. Instead, we now have a subtitle that obliquely reflects the discovery of genealogy. It reads: Or, Hellenism and Pessimism. To be sure, the Birth concerns the struggle and relation between these two forces, and it traces the emergence of tragedy out of a transformation of pessimism that is secured by the triumph of illusion and total immersion in the delight in appearance (Schein). 5 Yet it is important to note that when Nietzsche writes of this, he continues to hold the 'cheerfulness' of this people in quotation marks. Consequently, although the question of 'Greek cheerfulness' opens onto the transformation of the wisdom of Silenus into joy, as we will see, it is nevertheless not at all clear that this joy is synonymous with cheerfulness. Nietzsche is thus careful to protect the transfiguration of Greek pessimism from what would otherwise be its opposite, optimism, and in this way he interprets tragedy in terms of a refusal of the binary logic that such a reversal would presuppose—this in spite of the fact that he also articulates the birth of tragedy in terms of the reconciliation (Versöhnung) of the Apollinian and Dionysian.
The philosophico-genealogical practice of the text is therefore in this way out of sync with its expression. On the other hand, and in contrast to this, Nietzsche no longer suspends this trait when he speaks of Socrates or the culture to which he gives rise. 6 "The noblest manifestation of that other form of 'Greek cheerfulness,'" he writes, "the Alexandrian, is the cheerfulness of the theoretical man" (BT 109). Nor does he hesitate to determine this cheerfulness in terms of optimism. Thus, if 'cheerfulness' itself undergoes transformation, if we may at least say that as a problem it is lost or displaced by that naked or unmarked cheerfulness that is synonymous with the triumph of the theoretical man and its respective optimism (to which we will turn in the second section of this study), it remains to be seen in what relation this optimism stands to the question that Nietzsche broadly and perhaps misleadingly designates as that of pessimism. For if we heed Nietzsche's caution concerning [End Page 59] the manner in which the problematic of 'Greek cheerfulness' is posed, it is at least clear that the question of pessimism must account for the emergence of this optimism, while this accounting must in no way be cast in terms of the logic that such optimism would presuppose. It must, in other words, overcome, avoid, displace, or function outside the dialectic that moves according to such oppositions, and which undoubtedly affects, effects, and infects the expression of the text. The new subtitle therefore indicates above all how we are to understand the Birth—genealogically and not metaphysically. In what follows, we will endeavor to read The Birth of Tragedy in the space of this transformation, no longer out of the spirit of music, but in terms of that counter-movement first indicated by the new subtitle, which in the end will also come to suffer the displacement of the genealogical question. 7
Whatever else may be said, then, the question of 'Greek cheerfulness' is for Nietzsche not merely one question among others; indeed, it is not even one question, and perhaps ultimately not even a question about the Greeks. At any rate, this cheerfulness does not belong to the pallor of history (Historie) and the sepulcher of its books. 8 For the Greeks wrote no such books, least of all those tragic Greeks who appear to be the central concern of The Birth of Tragedy—an appearance that we will have occasion to question, or rather, that perhaps questions us even before we are born—those Greeks who are to be distinguished from the decline of Socratism, the second great discovery of the Birth. No, the Greeks that appear here as the focus of the investigation wrote tragedies, birthed the Olympian pantheon, unleashed the cruelty of the Dionysian under what were also the cruelest of constraints. To the extent that the question of cheerfulness concerns what lay behind these tragedies, it will also concern what we may provisionally call the loss of tragedy—both that loss that belongs to tragedy, which tragedy plays out and repeats, and the loss of tragedy that is commensurate with the emergence of the book or novel (Roman), which has perhaps not only forgotten how to forget but has also forgotten this forgetting. 9 What is to be remembered in The Birth of Tragedy is then, in the first place, what would be forgotten with the loss of tragedy in this second sense. The Birth, in other words, sets out to recall the loss of tragedy before it is lost to what Nietzsche will designate as Socratism. Here it is a matter of remembering that forgetting which is constitutive of the Apollinian, and which is forgotten with the advent of dialectic. And yet in this way, the Birth is also required to remember its own origins.
It is no doubt at this point that the "Attempt at Self-Criticism" intervenes, recalling the manner in which the Birth first gets hold of the new problem of science. For in doing so, the "Attempt" specifies what the Birth itself forgets prior to the genealogical reading, namely, the fact that it opens with a concern, or rather, a hope for the 'science of aesthetics,' that it belongs to a discourse that would prohibit not only its singing, but perhaps even its sputtering. In this way, the "Attempt at Self-Criticism" undertakes a recovery of its own [End Page 60] forgetting by recalling the complexity of its line(s) of descent, and it opens itself to the loss that demands of the attempt that it remain just that—namely, an attempt. Otherwise put, through the recollection of what the Birth initially forgets, the "Attempt" endeavors to keep that forgetting from slipping into oblivion, and thus make possible the question concerning its placement within the lineage it recalls. And this may be further understood in terms of the movement of self-overcoming, by which genealogy opens itself to the question of its own formation and loss, and perhaps makes possible another sense of forgetting altogether. Let us say, then, that already with The Birth of Tragedy it is above all a question of suffering loss, of how and from what this suffering is born—innocence or guilt, naiveté or perfidy, overabundance or wretchedness—a question of transition, undergoing, transformation, which will eventually come to transform the question itself, returning to it the loss that it demands and presupposes.
Apollinian Excess and the Transformation of the Aesthetic Problematic
From the outset, it is as if the 'ground' of the Birth is always shifting. Eventually, it will open onto the question of the constitution of the text itself. An "effect" of this shifting 'ground,' almost nothing in The Birth of Tragedy is as it seems, not even Apollo, who may be understood provisionally as the very principle of appearance. In this text, even the delimitation of form is eventually de-formed, its delimitation de-limited, never to be fully restored. For if the Birth's first innovation consists in the discovery of the Dionysian, this must likewise be understood in terms of a transformation of the Apollinian—the Apollinian itself, therefore, a mark of excess, form always marked by what it would need to exclude, the excluded itself that which would force the de-limiting of the delimitation that would hold it at bay. Thus, Apollo sets to work only where "no comfort avails any more . . . [as] the artistic taming of the horrible" (BT 60). And "wherever the first Dionysian onslaught was successfully withstood, the authority and majesty of the Delphic god exhibited itself as more rigid and threatening [drohender] than ever" (BT 47, translation modified). God of form and principle of individuation, Apollo can no longer simply be understood in terms of the pronouncements of the Delphic oracle as interpreted by the philosophical life that would take from it its principles of moderation and self-knowledge, those principles that were understood by the post-Kantian aesthetic problematic in terms of the production of the system-subject. 10 Rather, the principle of individuation, delimitation, form, moderation—in a word, measure—becomes threatening (drohend), the demands for moderation and self-knowledge the marks of excess, excessive [End Page 61] de-marcations. Apollo becomes dangerous, the sign of a perpetual wound. So much so that a certain self-knowledge is even to be avoided.
Not the philosopher, but rather the Homeric poet would be the first disciple of Apollo, the god's pronouncements opening onto the necessity of deception, which philosophy inherits in spite of its self-understanding. Although the Homeric poet indicates the complete triumph of the Apollinian world, that such a victory would be required at all is indicative of the greatest need—the need to live. Indeed, the art by which this life would be secured and through which it would be manifested acquires its significance only in this way. The beauty of the Greek pantheon, the demand for moderation that defines the Apollinian life, the 'cheerfulness' of this people all indicate the greatest suffering; that it not immediately appear so is but the mark of the naive artist's success, the occlusion of suffering due to the appearance or illusion of Greek art. Yet were it not so masked, this suffering would perhaps not even appear, which is to say, if it appears at all, it does so only insofar as it appears as other, and so in a certain respect not at all. 11 Thus Nietzsche writes not only that "[t]here is only one life: where this appears (erscheint), it does so as pain and contradiction." But also: "Pure immersion in appearance (Schein)—the highest point of existence, wherein pain and contradiction do not appear as present (nicht vorhanden erscheint)." 12 And this is the first sense in which things in this text are not as they appear: the beauty and naiveté of the Apollinian artist is above all not an indication of the happy Greeks, as Hegel would have it, but the appearance of pain and contradiction in its withdrawal, the appearance of that suffering that necessarily suffers itself, what Nietzsche will eventually come to designate as "the shine (Schein) of appearance (Schein)." 'Greek cheerfulness' must accordingly be understood against this horizon. It was in order to live that the Apollinian artist had to have recourse to "the most forceful and pleasurable appearances" (BT 43, translation modified). Not only the Dionysian, then, but the Apollinian itself reminds (errinert an) "of the phenomenon [Erscheinung] that pain begets joy," although we have yet to see how it is "that ecstasy may wring sounds of agony from us" (BT 40). Thus we begin to remember what is at stake in Apollinian forgetting, which plays itself out in the incessant establishment and securing of that veil which would protect its life against the pain and contradiction from which it emerges and in the midst of which it sustains itself. The disciple of Apollo would thus know himself only in forgetting the very 'ground' of his existence, self-knowledge constituted through what we may provisionally call the illusion of the subject, and in this sense fundamentally deceptive. For "the Apollinian individual is guarded against nothing so much as the terrifying knowledge that that confusion of suffering and self-dismembering essence has in him its goal and purpose" (KSA, 7:175-76). [End Page 62]
If it is the case that the aesthetic problematic as it emerges in Kantian and post-Kantian philosophy is controlled by a particular interpretation of the pronouncements of the Delphic oracle, then the determination of this problematic will undergo transformation as the Apollinian gives way to the suffering that requires it in the first place. And the significance of the lyric poet is for Nietzsche located at precisely this point. For the very fact of the poet's existence contests the 'categories' and values that would govern the earlier constitution of the problem: the demand that aesthetic judgment be disinterested, carrying with it universal communicability. Yet here we must note that it is not the case that Kant's configuration of the aesthetic problematic could simply offer no account of this poet; indeed, Kant's treatment of genius, with its emphasis on the art of genius as a product of nature, is to a certain extent a harbinger of the questions that Nietzsche will pose, including, as we will see, the strictures that to a certain extent govern these earliest formulations. It is rather that the account of genius remains at the very least subordinate to the position of the critique as a whole, which strictly speaking is a Critique of judgment, not artistic production, the latter always in the service of the former. And it is precisely this configuration of the problem that is contested by the position of the lyrist, who with regard to the aesthetic problematic indicates a shift from the justification of aesthetic judgment to the field of production, or at least generation. From this point on Nietzsche will pose another question altogether to those who would inquire into the universality of aesthetic judgments. Like the question concerning 'Greek cheerfulness,' the question of aesthetic judgment is now cast in terms of need. As we will see, this concerns the question of science, and not only incidentally. For now, however, let us simply note that with the question of the lyrist arises a new determination of the aesthetic problematic, one that eventually makes possible a revaluation of all that is presupposed by the Kantian and post-Kantian formulations thereof, above all the value of self-identity. Accordingly, the subjective-objective schema that organizes the question of aesthetic judgment as found in Kant cannot handle the lyrist's subjectivity, the one who "is continually saying 'I' and running through the entire chromatic scale of his passions and desires" (BT 48), and whose interest concerns the disinterest of aesthetic judgment as little as it does the morality that would ultimately be served thereby. Rather, the problem posed by the lyrist opens instead onto the very question of the subject who would continually say 'I,' the question that Kant no doubt must pose, but before which he is forced to retreat. 13 That is, it concerns above all what we may call the appearance (Schein) of the speaking subject. And it is in this sense that the work of the Birth first stands before the subject, inquiring into that which would be presupposed by anything like the unity of the subject of aesthetic judgment.
And yet the lyrist is first of all the musician, the one who in a certain sense [End Page 63] does not speak. Dionysian child, he is born of that ecstasis which has forgotten how to speak and to walk (BT 37), which is therefore no longer properly human, which dances and cries in orgiastic rhythms. His aphasia does not indicate a lost ability, something once possessed but now gone, but rather a loss of memory, a sort of immemorial forgetfulness that is commensurate with what Nietzsche calls in this text the "primal unity [Ur-Einen], its pain and contradiction" (BT 49). The song of the lyrist expresses the repetition of that loss which would voice itself only through repetition, music an indication of the necessity of the always already double loss, an indication by which this loss would (itself) be repeated and by which alone it would be guaranteed, an echo, or rather a primal re-echoing (Ur-wiederklang) of the pain of the world. (And here it is helpful to recall that the figure of Echo, as in Ovid's work, indicates above all the necessity of repetition and the failure of an original speech.) The lyrist is thus identified with this very pain and contradiction, and the repetition of this loss is reflected in music. But this is to say that the activity of the lyrist is but the iteration of his (own) abysmal ground, or that this 'ground' 'is' only in its iteration, that strictly speaking it is no ground at all, but the eruption and repetition of Abgrunde, the abysmal itself. 14 And here we must not be misled either by the definite article or by the grammatical reflexivity of our articulation. For Nietzsche consistently designates this movement with the German word 'Abgrunde'—not only strangely plural, awkwardly translated as abysses, but the prefix ab- also indicative of the movement away from grounds, a sort of departure (Abfahrt) from the position that would be grounded in the identity of the judging subject, a torsion in whose wake no ground will again be possible. Only when we have emphasized this point may we begin to interpret the sense of the primal unity (Ur-Einen) upon which Nietzsche insists, since the identification of the lyrist with this primal unity expresses just this torsion, the re-echoing of this ab- movement. The lyrist's activity is but the mark of the passivity of suffering—the lyrist constituted by nothing other than this very passing: the passing of Abgrunde into music, and the passing of music into Abgrunde, therefore, the passing of passing, the lyrist the mere index of this movement. And so, Nietzsche writes, "[t]he 'I' of the lyrist . . . sounds from the abysses [Abgrunde] of his being: its 'subjectivity,' in the sense of modern aestheticians is a fiction" (BT 49). The Birth of Tragedy therefore stands before the subject in the sense that it moves away from the ground of the subject's identity toward that abyss whose disappearance and withdrawal echoes not only in the subjectivity of the lyrist, but in its collapse. Insofar as it diagnoses the loss of the subject in this way, the Birth is in the strictest sense an abyssal text.
This is no doubt because the problem of subjectivity vis-à-vis artistic production cannot even be posed here, since it presupposes a subject who would fail to be disinterested, as well as an implicit doctrine of the faculties. It presupposes, in other words, an interest in the subject and the economy of a certain [End Page 64] circulation whereby the aesthetic always finds itself in moral arrears. 15 Or, to put the matter in terms of the organizing principles of the Birth—principles that will later be contested, and which are no doubt understood retrospectively by Nietzsche as indicative of the failure of the text to communicate its fundamental insight—the question of the subjectivity of the artist can be posed only on this side of the Apollinian, and that construed in a particularly modern fashion. To the extent that Nietzsche rejects the question—even if he does so only by way of a new "metaphysics" of nature or music, what he calls the influence of Wagnerism, but whose inheritance is likewise Kantian—he already confronts the excess of his own text, the manner in which it stands outside the economy of the subject, or at least contests its authority. Thus, to be more precise, The Birth of Tragedy stands before the subject, somewhat as Kafka's nameless man stands before the law. 16 For just as it finds itself obligated to address the question of subjectivity (even if in the mode of contestation), on the one hand, its work attempts to give expression to that movement that would precede the formation of the subject, on the other, hence the interest in individuation. Thus, even if it sputters and does not sing, even if it too remains this side of the Apollinian, so to speak, we must therefore nevertheless emphasize that the 'I' which the lyrist carries along throughout the "chromatic scale of passions and desires" is understood as little more than the effect of the re-echoing of an abysmal pain, a mark of the dis-appearance of suffering. It is thus stripped of both its primacy and its substantiality. It is no longer the ground of thought, but a mere surface effect. And it is for this reason that here, already in The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche suspends the 'I' in quotation marks—not yet determined as a residue of the metaphysics of grammar, but suspended nonetheless. The subject is neither the artist nor the one who judges—and so not the ground of a doctrine of the faculties—but rather a work of art, the appearance (Schein) or phantasm (Einbildung) of suffering itself. Pain destroys everything except its repetition and dis-appearance. Before the subject, therefore, the dismemberment of individuation.
Tragic Insight and the Repetition of Genealogy
Such would be the radicality of this early work. With the announcement of the loss of the subject, standing before the subject, The Birth of Tragedy begins to intimate what will later be articulated in terms of the death of God. If the omission of this announcement is the reflection of a profound and hostile silence, as Nietzsche suggests in the "Attempt at Self-Criticism," it is nevertheless also marked by the residual metaphysics of the text, meaning its 'metaphysical comfort' and the way in which this is secured. For the Dionysian is communicated here only by way of a whole host of oppositions, [End Page 65] all of which bear the gravity of a logic of priority and original foundedness, even if this logic must eventually give way: nature and art, the thing-in-itself and culture, music and language, truth and error, and later in the notes and texts that surround the Birth, metaphor and concept. But to draw these formulations along is not necessarily to simply repeat the naive structure they presuppose and reiterate, and which is ultimately expressed in terms of Nietzsche's early desire for a renewal of tragic culture. If it is the case, then, as Lacoue-Labarthe suggests, that it is undeniable that the work that begins with The Birth of Tragedy and continues at least through the course on rhetoric (Winter 1872-73) remains bound to something like a metaphysics of presence, above all in its many reversals, we must also emphasize with him that "it remains to be seen on the basis of what truth exceeding all truth, on the basis of what 'beyond' of truth, truth can acknowledge itself as a lie," 17 that is, the way in which "truth kills—indeed even itself" (TL 92, translation modified). 18 And this means above all that we must trace the way in which the dialectic that gives expression to The Birth of Tragedy itself falls prey to the matter it would carry through, not in order to rescue Nietzsche from it, but in order to show how its deconstruction functions already within the Birth, the specific manner in which this palimpsest exceeds its history. 19 For the force of the structural oppositions that initially organize the text is determined by the extent to which they are capable of opening a space of thinking that will allow for a return to the question of the formation of those principles that make that thought possible. That is, their force consists in their capacity to be destructured, displaced, exceeded.
Here, above all, we must recall that tragedy, like truth, kills itself, that tragedy ends in suicide (BT 76). Dionysian suffering must stop if it is to continue. To say that nature "heaves a sigh of relief" as it is dismembered through the process of individuation is also to say that the Dionysian is satisfied only with its self-effacement and obliteration, that a certain self-destruction is the end of Dionysian ecstasis. According to the movement of the almost incessant opposition that structures the Birth, however, the Dionysian will either call forth or play itself out in a renewal of the Apollinian. Is the Dionysian then simultaneously canceled and preserved? Perhaps lifted up (Aufgehoben)? What of the reconciliation (Versöhnung) of the Dionysian and the Apollinian in Attic tragedy? We cannot deny this, and at any rate, it would not matter if we could. Instead, we must emphasize the implication of this line of questioning in that which erupts even from within and in spite of the 'logic' of this text, initiating an entirely other movement of questioning, forcing this line to recoil upon itself. For in the course of these highly compromised formulas, Nietzsche also begins to give expression to the necessity of dissimulation. And we should not be surprised if this expression is itself dissimulated in a language that it does not control. Nevertheless, according to the 'logic' of the text, the force of the Dionysian can neither appear as such nor fail to [End Page 66] engender an appearance of some sort that would in a certain sense—perhaps in a common sense—cover it over and forget it. Remaining for a moment entirely within the 'categories' of the Birth, we must therefore note the following: if the Apollinian is the mark of this dissimulation, the mark of its appearance (Schein), then 'behind' the reconciliation that gives expression to the final collapse of these two principles in the birth of tragedy, and through the excessively Apollinian character of the structure, movement, and language of this text, we must sense the rumble of the Dionysian, however faint.
This is no doubt provisional and entirely insufficient. It risks a certain reinscription insofar as it appears to rely on the very figuration that would otherwise be in question, and indeed insofar as it appears to do so at the very moment when it would call the structure of this figuration into question. As we recognize this, however, we are already in the heart of the matter, grappling with the reflexivity of that truth which kills itself insofar as it recognizes error as its foundation. The compound lie bears the trace of the Dionysian, the self-effacing movement of ecstatic self-mortification. Certainly, we can ask: Would not truth then reconstitute itself as true precisely insofar as it recognizes this error? And in so doing, would it not therefore repeat the error of its foundation, reconstituting its foundation as error, thereby ruining itself just as it secures its 'ground'? Does the self-mortification (Selbstmord) of truth render truth possible or impossible? Similarly, we may also ask: Would the Dionysian not be reborn in the recognition of the appearance (Schein) of the Apollinian? Would the Dionysian then not require and reconstitute the Apollinian in this very recognition, legitimating it and so ruining itself in the very movement by which its appearance (Schein) would be secured? And finally, does this movement render the Dionysian possible or impossible? Although these questions must be posed, we must also note the manner in which they are already doubled and the extent to which their being posed belongs to the difficulty of the matter here at stake—the manner in which, in other words, these very questions are fundamentally deceptive.
The movement and structure of this questioning, the manner in which it recoils upon itself, indicates less a circularity of the question than it does a refusal to be determined in accordance with the law of identity. Thus, the force of the question is inaccessible to that inquiry which would demand an answer, and which would do so by presupposing the legitimacy of a correspondence theory of truth that would be unable to bear the contradiction implicit in the recognition of the failure of correspondence as its very foundation, which is to say, as constitutive of its truth. The question therefore takes the form of a problematic of infinite regress or sterile circularity only for those who would remain bound by a certain interpretation of the structure of the question, and who would fail to heed the displacement of its movement. For interpreted genealogically, what is significant is neither that we have an answer to the questions delineated above, nor the piety of remaining [End Page 67] within their circulation, but rather the performative replication of an always already double movement, the ecstasis of that questioning that constantly recedes, and that in so doing bears its repetition. If a certain circularity must nevertheless be noted, it is more that of an annulus, the site of dehiscence, than a smooth self-enclosed ring. Only in this way is the transformation of the question granted, its shifting ground doubled, its self-effacement protected. It is thus no longer a question of identification: Dionysus or Apollo? Truth or error? Nor is it simply a matter of the unification, mutual restriction, or augmentation of these terms. Rather, as it is doubled, repeated, transformed, the question recoils upon itself and displaces the disjunctive sign by which it would otherwise be organized. The question becomes: Whence this question? And when Nietzsche exclaims in that "secret" text that he withheld from publication, and which we now know as "On Truth or Lie in a Nonmoral Sense"—"Whence in all the world, given this situation [i.e., the need for dissimulation], the drive for truth!" (TL 92, translation modified)—he therefore not only repeats the question of the Dionysian, but he does so genealogically. The question asks about its asking in the very movement of its asking: Whence the drive for truth even in this very question? To be sure, in this repetition, the determination of an origin is still at stake, but this de-termination is transformed, fragmented by the silent grapheme of a hyphen, such that it can now be understood only in terms of the ruination of any simple claim to origin. For if all truth is a compound lie, as Nietzsche later comes to formulate the matter, if truth kills even itself, if it finds itself 'grounded' only upon error, then truth is in no way self-identical, but rather the mere effect of a 'fundamental' contradiction, or rather the echo of 'an' Abgrunde without resolution—'truth' therefore as the play of the Dionysian, the index of ruination, the trace of the destructive element. 20 The genealogical manner of questioning bears the force of this destruction, but only insofar as it finds itself entangled therein.
In order that we may trace the emergence of this thought in the work initiated by The Birth of Tragedy, and in order that this movement may accordingly be doubled, let us return to the tragedy of tragedy, where we must cite Nietzsche's announcement in full: "Greek tragedy met an end different from that of her older sister-arts: she died by suicide, in consequence of an irreconcilable [unlösbaren] conflict; she died tragically, while all the others passed away calmly and beautifully at a ripe age" (BT 76). What is different about tragedy according to this communication, what is other in the conflict that it exhibits and that it is, is its recalcitrance to the logic of reconciliation, solvability (lösbarkeit), or calculation. The problem of its passing is without solution (Lösung). Its death leaves nothing in its stead, a legacy of sheer dispossession. Those arts that do emerge in its wake bear the mark of this poverty, inheriting only the self-obliteration of the 'truly' tragic—not only the loss of tragedy, but the loss of this loss. The dramatic works that immediately [End Page 68] follow the death of tragedy are therefore still understood—or rather, misunderstood—by those who produce them, as well as by their spectators, as continuations of the old form, at least in some sense. Their attentiveness to the passing of tragedy is distorted in proportion to a newly developed self-consciousness, and because of the displacement of the loss that this self-consciousness signifies and perpetuates. For whatever else may be said, the new drama "revered tragedy as its predecessor and mistress," even if in so doing its reflection bore the features of a dying visage (BT 76). In the space of the loss of tragedy, then, the new art occupies a peculiar point of transformation, namely, the transformation of the loss of the loss that is proper to tragedy. On the one hand, this must be understood as a failure to recognize fully that tragedy has died; in spite of the lamentations, the new art perceives itself as standing in the distinct lineage of the Attic tragedians, and in some sense continuing it. The loss of tragic loss is located in this instance in the insistence upon familial descent, identity and name, which operate under the implicit assumption that this heritage in some respect precludes the death of tragedy. Upon its death, tragedy would thus be denied the right to die, its loss lost precisely insofar as it would purportedly be rescued or preserved, its name carried on. Yet just as the loss of tragedy is lost in the tenuous identification of the new form with the old, it is paradoxically re-covered and transformed. For the new form is purblind in the height of its self-awareness. It unknowingly transgresses its parentage precisely insofar as it seeks to make it secure. Disrespectful of tragedy's dying to the extent that it insists on its familial bond, and insofar as its claims of origin do not allow tragedy to rest, it also contributes to this death, and so to the loss of tragedy. We may thus say that the new form is blindly patricidal, and that this very blindness repeats the loss of tragedy. It is for this reason that Nietzsche not only insists that tragedy dies by way of suicide but also that its death is carried through by the emergence of the knowledge-virtue-happiness equation appropriated by the new art (BT 91). For now we need only note that its death is therefore multiple. The sense of its self-mortification (Seblstmord) is accessible only from the perspective of the repetition and transformation of the loss that it is not, that is, insofar as its suicide is marked above all by the termination of what can only provisionally be called its self-identity. Tragedy would even be constituted by this self-mortification, as long as this is understood in terms of the loss of identity that the Dionysian names prior even to the formation of identity. The real work of the Birth consists in tracing the movement and valences of this transformation in accordance with the newly discovered function of genealogy. As will later be the case in the Genealogy, already in the Birth it is a matter of mapping the lineage of the ascendancy of a certain degeneration: "In it [i.e., New Attic Comedy] the degenerate [entartete] form of tragedy lived on as a monument of its exceedingly painful and violent death" (BT 76). [End Page 69]
According to Nietzsche, then, under the auspices of Euripides the dramatic work now excels in the work of clarification, if nothing else. The increased resolution that results from the development and definition of Euripidean characters, on the one hand, and the explanation and summary of the drama's course of events in a prologue (i.e., the strengthening of plot), on the other, are commensurate with a transformation or loss of the chorus, and so a suppression of the Dionysian, even if this very suppression is also the work(lessness) of the Dionysian. Thus, if it is the case that Euripides puts the spectator on the stage for the first time, this in no way indicates an excess of the proper delimitation between the spectator and the drama, and so cannot suggest a reconstitution of the chorus in the primary sense as understood by Nietzsche, where there is only chorus, but rather signals the manner in which tragedy—if we may still designate Euripides as a tragic poet—becomes entrenched in the task of representation. In contradistinction from the loss of individuation that is doubled through the intoxication of music, contrary to the fluidity and decomposition of the individual in the chorus of the tragedies of Aeschylus, the distinction between the spectator and the actor is here collapsed only insofar as the mediocrity of the spectator now also constitutes the proper subject of the drama. Prescient of the power differentials Nietzsche will later trace in the Genealogy, the tragedy of tragedy—which is also to say in this instance the absence of tragedy—is marked by a slave revolt of sorts: "the fifth estate, that of the slaves, now comes to power, at least in sentiment" (BT 78). Ordinary people and the banality of daily life constitute the subject of the new tragedy, and it is against this banality that the spectator now measures and judges the dramatic work. Accordingly, already in the Birth, the triumph of the slaves is understood in terms of the ascendance of the banality of representation, also indicated by the ancillary function of music, which now serves to color the measure of the new subject, "a stimulant for dull and faded nerves" (BT 108). The loss of tragedy is thus marked by the advent of consciousness, everything serving the calculation of its subject: program music and tone-painting, explanatory prologues, the minimalization of the chorus, the placement of the spectator upon the stage, the apparent displacement of mythos by logos.
As will later be the case in the On the Genealogy of Morals, so too in The Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche locates the force of this transformation in terms of a change of values, a shift that is indicated by the discovery of a new opposition. Indeed, the Birth births nothing if not a transformation of its own organizational categories: no longer that of Apollo and Dionysus, but rather that of the Socratic and the Dionysian. In accordance with the demand of consciousness evidenced in the new drama, and which Nietzsche understands as appropriated from Socratism, intelligibility now serves as the measure of the beautiful, even if the banal serves as the measure of this intelligibility insofar as the change it signifies is understood in terms of the new dominance of [End Page 70] the 'fifth estate.' To the extent that this valuation is concomitant with a displacement of the Apollinian, it is also indicative of a devaluation of appearance (Schein) or shine. And this is of the utmost importance. For insofar as existence hitherto is predicated upon just this shine, 'cheerfulness' and love of life the products of artifice and forgetfulness, and to the extent that the demands of intelligibility would be done with this, the ascendancy of the discourse of truth that emerges with Socrates is exercised in terms of a corrective of existence itself. For the sake of that life lived in accordance with the demand for truth without its veils, Socrates requires that appearance appear as such. This, then, is the turning point of the text: a change in appearance for the sake of a life.
In The Birth of Tragedy this question functions on a number of levels and concerns not only the thematics of the text, but the text itself. When it is eventually posed in terms of the devaluation of appearance and the emergence of Socratism, the text reaches its limit, the diagnosis of Socratic decadence opening onto the very conditions that render this critique both possible and necessary. According to this diagnosis, Socrates maintains himself within the dissimulation of truth itself. On the one hand, in accordance with the exaggeration of the logical faculty, everything must be clarified, all appearances recognized as such and cast aside. If unchecked, however, this drive must eventually turn its gaze upon itself, inquire into the status of its own appearance and foundation, whereupon its identity would be compromised by the need to live, and its life compromised by the failure of its identity. The error of its foundation would here consist in the impurity of the logical drive, the fact that it would find as its 'ground' something illogical, a contradictory relation to existence itself. What is peculiar to Socrates is that the contradiction is maintained and not uncovered, that "the logical drive [Trieb] that became manifest in [him] . . . was absolutely prevented from turning against itself; [and that] in its unbridled flood it displays a natural power such as we encounter to our awed amazement only in the very greatest instinctive forces" (BT 88, translation modified). To put it another way, what is significant about the case of Socrates is the manner in which the dissimulation of appearance suffers a rebirth. The illusion of Socratism would thus be located in its very claim to be done with illusion. And in this way, the demand of self-knowledge and the necessity of self-deception comprise the two valences of the Delphic Oracle as interpreted by the philosophical life that emerges with the figure of Socrates: the drive to knowledge, and above all self-knowledge, must always be moderated if it is to avoid self-destruction. Socrates exhibits the triumph of an internal restraint of the very values that constitute his life. In order to live, this life must live at only half-capacity—this is the law of its moderation. It is thus also in this way that Socrates dies, and in dying bequeaths to the dominant philosophical tradition the legacy of self-knowledge, along with its dissimulation. And it is in this sense that Nietzsche writes [End Page 71] of "the image of the dying Socrates," who in the end has recourse to myth as the "necessary consequence, indeed the purpose, of science" (BT 96).
Critique is one of the beneficiaries of this dying life. Like Socratism, it too is understood by Nietzsche as indicative of the supplementary requirements of science and the concomitant drive toward truth. Kant therefore plays a significant role in the Birth not only insofar as the latter would contest the aesthetic categories of the Critique of Judgment, at least implicitly as we have already shown, but also insofar as the discourse of truth is pursued to its very limit in the work of critique, whereupon science begins to give way to art, at least according to the analysis offered in the Birth. Otherwise put, the ends of the discourse of truth and the work of science are diagnosed by Nietzsche as other than truth or science itself, and the cases of Socrates and Kant attest to this: "There would be no science if it were concerned only with that one nude goddess and nothing else" (BT 95), since it would then be incapable of enduring its own demands. If Critique inherits the Socratic maxim concerning self-knowledge, however, this does not mean that it is also bequeathed the means for securing it, or at least not those of its benefactor. After all, according to Nietzsche's reading, it is the inheritor of decline. And this is a genealogical claim that traces the transformation that self-knowledge will undergo in relation to appearance. Thus, while the truth drive must still be tempered if it is not to devour itself, it can nevertheless no longer abide by the dissimulation of appearance that secures Socratic optimism—that apparent demand that appearance be uncovered, and so annihilated. It is therefore with the advent of Critique that the supplementary status of science is first recognized, which is to say, made conscious. And so, in the Nachglaß dated from the summer of 1872 through the beginning of 1873, Nietzsche writes: "To have to be completely truthful—magnificent, heroic desire of men in a deceptive nature! But only possible, relatively speaking! That is tragic. That is Kant's tragic problem! Art now receives an entirely new value" (KSA, 7:453-54). Such is the consequence of the delimitation of that knowledge which recognizes the limits of its extension, rendering "impossible any knowledge of the [innermost and true] essence [of things]" (BT 112). Appearance acquires a new worth—it is not only recognized as such, and maintained nonetheless, but it is now understood as the location of experience itself. And according to the Birth, this new valuation signals a renewal of tragic culture, the force of Critique indicated above all by the reemergence of tragic insight.
In spite of the many problems it poses, Nietzsche's insistence upon this tragic insight must first be understood in terms of the recognition of a recoiling movement of the knowledge drive upon itself. In tracing the transformation of appearance through what Nietzsche designates in the Birth as the three great tragic cultures, he gives expression to the formation and self-overcoming of those configurations of thought and life that have dominated the West. The questions he poses no longer concern whether or not a given position or formation [End Page 72] is true or correct, but rather how it comes into being and how it lives (which is not to say that Nietzsche's position claims to be free of valuation in its questioning). To the extent that this inquiry occupies the space governed by the discourse of truth otherwise than those inquiries that would presuppose the good will of thought and the truth of its telos, Nietzsche is able to diagnose those forms of life that live only at their own expense, what we might call the force of decline. It is a diagnosis that would be prohibited by the very conditions and values that it places into question, and in this way the practice of genealogy contests the dominance of that which it diagnoses. No doubt this one sense of Nietzsche's insistence that "it is the magic of these struggles that those who behold them must also take part and fight" (BT 98). So understood, the genealogy that emerges in The Birth of Tragedy is a complex practice of resistance and vigilance against those values and forms of thought that Nietzsche diagnoses as hazardous to life, even as they make possible new ways of living.
That in beholding these struggles genealogy would also participate in them, however, also means that this practice and the claims it makes remain vulnerable to that which it contests. And its force consists in part in maintaining this vulnerability, in refusing to be done with the question of its own constitution. Pursuant of this point, the "Attempt at Self-Criticism" indicates two threads of reinscription: the dialectical expression of The Birth of Tragedy and the insistence upon metaphysical comfort. In both cases, these movements of reinscription, which constitute a particular force of recoil, can be located along the fault-line of appearance, which of course serves as the guiding thread of the genealogical diagnoses initiated in the text. More specifically, the two come together in the diagnosis of the formation of tragic insight and Nietzsche's affirmation of this in Kant (and Schopenhauer). Above all, we must note here that the change in appearance is at just point all too apparent, and that it dissimulates the force of reinscription in a manner that Nietzsche does not control, and of which he is not aware, at least not in the Birth. Although Nietzsche does not remark upon on it, this change is clearly indicated by the addition of that prefix which designates an achieving, enhancing, or carrying through of that which it modifies: er-. The triumph of tragic insight is therefore expressed in the achievement of appearance as Erscheinung, the manner in which appearance (Schein) is made even more apparent (scheinbar), concealing itself as it comes to manifestation. If both Critique and Socratism indicate the supplementary necessity of science, namely, that in spite its demands it cannot bear to look at the naked goddess, it is Critique alone that can bear to look at this unbearability. The dissimulation of appearance is thus uncovered in proportion to the extent that Critique is clear about its obscurity. The significance of this should not be underestimated, and in a certain respect the movement of genealogical inquiry shares this work. Still, Critique remains moral and to this extent stands opposed to the work initiated [End Page 73] in the Birth, at least provisionally. And the discovery and transformation of appearance that Kant initiates ultimately occurs for the sake of the moral law. Thus, he writes concerning the accomplishment of Critique: "above all, there is the inestimable benefit, that all objections to morality and religion will be forever silenced." 21 Although Nietzsche does not remark upon it—indeed cannot remark upon it—this is the real site of the 'tragic insight' of the Birth, that insight that is withheld from it in the midst of and in spite of its fundamental discoveries: an inability to speak, at least insofar as its speech would contest just the morality that the change in appearance which Nietzsche celebrates as tragic insight secures, and which in its security would deny the genealogical force of the Birth. Such would be the price of its metaphysical comfort and the hope it places in the reemergence of tragic culture.
In the "Attempt at Self-Criticism," Nietzsche not only indicates the failure of the Birth's communication, that it should have sung when it only sputtered, but he also suggests that this failure is due in part to the fact that he spoiled the Greek problem with specifically modern concerns. Rather than indicating an insistence upon the purported purity of the question of the Greeks, however, the remark serves to emphasize the genealogical function that first arises in the Birth. For even if the question of the Greeks were to be posed without the contamination of anachronistic problems, the latter would nevertheless first have to be made clear. And this is to say that in no case could the Greek problem be posed without the aid of genealogy, at least insofar as this questioning would be attentive to its conditions. And it is an inattentiveness to just these conditions that leads the Birth at a certain point to affirm that which it would otherwise contest, the movement of reinscription erupting in the very midst of its contestation.
Such is the duplicity of the participation of The Birth of Tragedy in the struggles that it diagnoses, and which we have located above all in the transformation of appearance that Nietzsche designates as tragic insight. If the self-overcoming of the genealogy initiated in the Birth is to be effected—if genealogy is to be(come) itself, to make a difference, not in the sense of producing a differential, but rather as riding the very fault line that constitutes it—it will therefore entail a reconsideration of those forms of life that Nietzsche understands in the Birth to be tragic and which "actually feel with deep unhappiness [tiefer Unlust] the weight [Last] and burden [Schwer] of existence" (BT 110, translation modified). Only in this way does tragic insight open onto the repetition of genealogy, just as genealogy opens only within the space of this repetition. It too will stand before the subject, but with a different bearing—no longer bearing itself through the problematic of individuation, nor through the question of the judging subject that belongs to the Kantian aesthetic problematic, but instead through the transfiguration of "Zarathustra, the dancer; Zarathustra the light one [der Leichte]," Zarathustra, the one who bears that which can only provisionally be designated as eternal recurrence (BT ASC 7). [End Page 74]
Notes
1. Friedrich Nietzsche, Der Wille zur Macht: Versuch einer Umwertung aller Werte (Stuttgart: Alisfred Kröner Verlag, 1996), § 519.
2. Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), "The Birth of Tragedy," § 1. Hereafter cited as EH.
3. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1967), "Attempt at Self-Criticism," 3, p. 20. Hereafter cited as BT.
4. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), "Preface" 7, p. 21. Hereafter cited as GM.
5. In what follows, 'Schein' is consistently translated as 'appearance' or 'shine,' instead of as 'mere appearance' or 'illusion' as translated by Kaufmann. This is because appearances are never mere appearances for Nietzsche, but always complex. While 'illusion' is a better translation of Schein than 'mere appearance' (at least insofar as something illusory, deceptive, and transitory can be heard in it), it too suggests a binary logic that Nietzsche's emphasis upon Schein ultimately disrupts. For Nietzsche, it is not a matter of illusion and reality, but the way in which what is is constituted only through and as appearance (Schein).
6. For example: "Conversely, the bright image projections of the Sophoclean hero—in short, the Apollinian aspect of the mask—are necessary effects of a glance into the inside and terrors of nature; as it were, luminous spots to cure eyes damaged by gruesome night. Only in this sense may we believe that we properly comprehend the serious and important concept of 'Greek cheerfulness.' The misunderstanding of this concept as cheerfulness in a state of unendangered comfort is, of course, encountered everywhere today" (BT 67). Significantly, Nietzsche leaves 'Greek cheerfulness' in quotations when he responds to it as a question, and when he interprets this question genealogically, while he removes the quotation marks when he speaks of its being misunderstood. The latter is a performative gesture that indicates that when no longer suspended, when taken for what it is without hesitation, the force of its deception is lost. And insofar as he indicates that this loss is encountered everywhere today, the persistence of his practice concerning the employment of the quotation marks in the Birth proper must be understood as the contestation of all that a naked cheerfulness would imply. Finally, note that this practice is peculiar to The Birth of Tragedy, and that for reasons that cannot be addressed in this study, Nietzsche for the most part abandons it in the later texts where cheerfulness is nevertheless also treated. Cf. BT 78, 97, 109, 118, 138.
7. Here we understand genealogy to a certain extent following Foucault, at least insofar as it will be a matter of tracing the event of The Birth of Tragedy, the reversal of forces by way of which its heterogeneity is opened and maintained. This concerns, first, the way in which the Birth effects a genealogy of the aesthetic subject, especially when read in light of the "Attempt at Self-Criticism"; but it also concerns the way in which the Birth nevertheless remains to some extent bound by the reversal of forces it comes to diagnose in its articulation of the death of tragedy. See Michel Foucault, "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History," trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon, in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984).
8. See Friedrich Nietzsche, "On the Uses and Disadvantages of History [Historie] for Life," in Untimely Meditations, ed. Daniel Breazeale, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). Cf. BT § 10, 75. It is significant to note here the manner in which Nietzsche's treatment of Historie foreshadows Foucault's deployment of genealogy in contradistinction from history. It might even be said that Nietzsche's treatment of Historie in the Untimely Meditations is already genealogical, at least insofar as it is cast in terms of advantages and disadvantages for life, and so to the extent that the purported objectivity of Historie is disclosed as always interested.
9. Among the innovations that Nietzsche attributes to the force of Socratism is the development of a new literary form by Plato: the dialogue or novel (Roman) (BT 91). For our purposes, we may understand this as interpretively synonymous with the 'book,' even though the latter aims more overtly or explicitly at completion, as evidenced by its form. What is significant [End Page 75] in both cases is the dominance of a discursive practice which functions according to principles of exclusion that it neither controls nor recognizes.
10. Two points must be noted here. First, this is the case in post-Kantian aesthetics from Hegel to the Romantics because it already takes place to a certain extent in the Kantian formation of the aesthetic problematic. Viewed architectonically, Kant clearly required that the unity of his 'system'—which is to say the unity of critical philosophy—be secured across the fault-lines of the judging subject. Second, as will be emphasized in what follows, Nietzsche belongs to this post-Kantian legacy, even if it is inherited by way of Schopenhauer. While this does not mean that Nietzsche is interested in producing a philosophical 'system' any more than it does that he is interested in securing something like the position of the subject, the Birth may be understood in part as an account of the failures of just those endeavors.
11. Sarah Kofman treats this problematic in terms of the loss of the 'proper' vis-à-vis the production of metaphor. According to Kofman, metaphor—the art of transposition and self-transposition—is founded on the "ontological unity of life represented by Dionysus. But if there is metaphor it is because this unity is always already in pieces and can only be reconstituted when symbolically transposed into art." See Sarah Kofman, Nietzsche and Metaphor, trans.
12. Friedrich Nietzsche, Nachlaßen Fragmente 1869-1874, in vol. 7 of Kritische Studienausgabe, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag de Gruyter, 1988), 205. Hereafter cited as KSA 7.
13. Note not only that the question of the 'I' is treated in terms of the judging subject in the Critique of Judgement, but that this is understood in turn in terms of sensus communis. When Kant turns toward the question of the sensus communis as the condition of the universal communicability required by aesthetic judgments, he finds that this 'principle' cannot live up to the demands that it presumably serves. Simply put, the principle of universal communicability is incapable of securing its own universal communicability. It remains for Kant a 'deeply hidden basis' required by the architectonic concerns of critique, towards which critique is driven in its questioning, but which cannot be submitted to critique if the latter is to continue to function. It therefore remains posited, a mere presupposition (Voraussetzung). See Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), 160ff.
14. If we understand this as the mere multiplication of a reversal—which we are entitled to do, and which at a certain point we are perhaps even obligated to do—we fail to see the manner in which this formulation contests the metaphysics of the text, the manner in which, for example, the unity 'primal unity' (Ur-Einen) would always already be contested.
15. In fact, prior to the "Attempt," the moral ties of the aesthetic are still evident, and this must be indicated by any genealogical reading. We will pursue this in the second half of this study vis-à-vis a transformation of appearance. For a detailed treatment of the failed function of the aesthetic in the original Birth, see Daniel W. Conway's "Nietzsche's Art of This-Worldly Comfort: Self-Reference and Strategic Self-Parody," in History of Philosophy Quarterly 9, no. 3 (July 1992): esp. 348-52.
16. See Franz Kafka, "Before the Law," trans. Willa and Edwin Muir, in The Complete Stories (New York: Schocken Books, 1971).
17. Philip Lacoue-Labarthe, "The Detour," trans. Gary M. Cole, in The Subject of Philosophy, ed. Thomas Trezise (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1993), esp. 24-31.
18. Friedrich Nietzsche, "On Truth or Lie in a Nonmoral Sense," in Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche's Notebooks of the Early 1870's, ed. and trans. Daniel Breazeale (Amherst, N.Y.: Humanity Books, 1999), 92, translation modified. Hereafter cited as TL.
19. Paul de Man has also traced this double sense of the Birth vis-à-vis the excess of its history in his "Genesis and Genealogy (Nietzsche)," in Allegories of
20. For further development of the relation of truth and abyss vis-à-vis the Dionysian, see also John Sallis, Crossings: Nietzsche and the Space of Tragedy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), esp. 58-60.
21. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: Saint Martin, 1965), 29, my emphasis.
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