Jessica Elkayam

In this chapter, I argue that Nietzsche’s diagnosis of ailing modernity is especially relevant to our present-day predicament, particularly when it is clear what he means by (the science of) “history.” To demonstrate the force of this claim, I first consider how Nietzsche wishes his prescription to be understood with a view to his evolving sense of the relationship between art, science, and life. Though HL is typically situated as an “early” work, I complicate that placement by showing how HL does not, like its usual companions in the category, suffer from too romantic an orientation to the past, and thus to art. On the contrary, HL is a threshold text that—though it betrays similar worries about science as The Birth of Tragedy (BT) with which it is often grouped—nonetheless anticipates Nietzsche’s more critical position on science to return on the nether side of his free-spirit experimental period sans the sentimentalism with which he retrospectively charges his early writings. Finally, once we are in a position to take Nietzsche’s 1874 analysis seriously, then we can seriously consider the poisonous postmodern fruit born of the modern tree. I conclude by speculating on connections between Nietzsche’s insights and contemporary forms of what I call “memorial torture.”

This essay ventures a dialogue between Julia Kristeva’s Black Sun and Lars Von Trier’s film, Melancholia on the grounds that in each, melancholia (or narcissistic depression) is figured through planetary compulsion. Utilizing Kristeva’s singular approach to Freud’s distinction between mourning and melancholia to read the film, I argue that a particular form of depression characterizes the style of living (and dying) embodied in each of the two sisters who together form the film’s emotional center. Consideration of philosophy and film in dialogue yields a final insight into the phenomenon of melancholia as it relates to human temporality and lived finitude: melancholia demonstrates an extremity of psychic loss, underscoring that death is not merely the end; it is there in the beginning.

ABSTRACT Recent efforts to engage with Heidegger’s Origin of the Work of Art have focused on its development in the context of Heidegger’s corpus at a key interval in his political ascendancy to, and subsequent decline from, the Rectorship. This article explores the ambiguous role Nietzsche plays in delimiting Heidegger’s engagement with art by tracking the relation between art and truth in two of the four lecture courses Heidegger offered on Nietzsche between 1936 and 1940. Having tracked the shift in this relation, I turn to the 1956 Addendum to Heidegger’s Origin to bring his retrospective reflections on the human to bear on the congruence between his diagnosis of Nietzsche and his own efforts to pose the question of art in terms of the evental happening of truth.

In the following paper, pursuing a lead from Heidegger’s 1937 reading of Nietzsche’s Also Sprach Zarathustra (ASZ), I first claim that the Nietzschean emphasis on awakening the thought and the thinker of eternal return should be read as analogous to Heidegger’s own call to awaken a fundamental attunement in the 1929/30 lecture course, Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik (GDM). I bolster this claim by insisting on a Nietzschean inspiration in the very call to awaken a fundamental attunement, which can be identified on both implicit and explicit levels of the text. Initially exploring these levels, I argue that their commonality announces in part Heidegger’s effort to digest a debt of gratitude to the Nietzschean concept of horizon, and the task of the paper becomes to locate and articulate the connection between Nietzschean horizonality and the Heideggerian phenomenon of attunement. This is achieved through the dynamics of sleep and awakening as Heidegger contends with them thematically in GDM. By enumerating key steps of Heidegger’s argument, I show how attunement demonstrates the force of the problem of horizon and with it, the extent to which Heidegger’s thinking can be said to be intimate with that of Nietzsche.