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19 CHAPTER 2 The Fascination of Friedrich Nietzsche To Look and To Go Beyond Mere Looking We began with Leontius going up from the Pireaus. In his encounter with the corpses he was aware of three things: that he wanted to look at the executed corpses, that he did not want to look, and that neither the looking nor the not looking would leave him fully satisfied. He was seemingly unaware of the executioner, whom he saw but did not address. The scandalous nature of Leontius’s struggle, consisting of both an explicit struggle with his desires to look and not to look on the victims and an implicit rivalry with the executioner , is not rare. Even if we do not come across victims of violence, we all engage, under the cover of the struggle to know and to keep ourselves from knowing, in a struggle with the mediator. Most of the time we choose to concentrate on the former struggle and pretend that the latter does not exist. But it is the latter, and not the former, struggle that defines who we are. It also determines what we will see when we do look at the victim. In the context of rivalry we begin to dissimulate, to say the opposite of what we mean, to deceive in order to get the better of our rival. Words begin to lose their meaning and to occlude reality as we try to build an order on 20 Chapter 2 the sarcophagi of dead victims. Thus, at the root of this phenomenon is our relationship to the mediator and, by extension, to the victim. I turn to Friedrich Nietzsche and his The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music because I am convinced that understanding the origin of the phenomenon gives us a better understanding of ourselves.1 Our present consciousness constitutes and is constituted by our understanding of origins, such that a deepening of the one results in a deepening of the other. The Birth of Tragedy is a perfect example of the phenomenon we seek to understand. Nietzsche, like Leontius, wants to look and resists looking at the victims of violence, all the while pretending that the mediator is not there. Nietzsche fascinates the eye of the reader’s mind with the spectacle of describing the fascination of the eye of the body. Nietzsche is valuable because he is the master of doing precisely what we are trying to explore—drawing the reader in yet not letting her see, saying things in such a beautiful manner that one forgets the sordid reality about which he is actually speaking. He makes one want to be beyond knowing. That is both his genius and his danger. Nietzsche’s work gives us a chance to experience how the truth of violence gets expelled from a text and, in being expelled, forms the text. Specifically, in The Birth of Tragedy he is intent on expelling the ancient Greek playwright Euripides. Relying on Girard’s interpretation of Euripides’s The Bacchae, I make clear that Nietzsche is trying to get rid of that which might allow us to see the victim at the heart of tragedy. AtthesametimeNietzschehelpsustoseehowinaccurateitistodescribe Leontius’s situation as simply involving a conflict between two desires, one positive and the other negative. He demonstrates that something more profound is going on here than our usual calculus of benefit and harm in pursuing or not pursuing a particular action. According to Nietzsche, a dual and duplicitous desire, consisting in both wanting to look and wanting to go beyond mere looking, better captures the reality. The person who is both attracted and repelled—that is, scandalized— wants to transcend the situation. She is aware that neither giving in and looking nor avoiding the sight is going to satisfy. To answer her need for transcendence, Nietzsche calls for art, which he identifies with religion and myth. According to him, the art she is seeking is the tragic art of ancient Greece, which in its purest moments consisted in transforming the spectator into a satyr through the mediation of the chorus. The transformed spectator The Fascination of Friedrich Nietzsche 21 could then look upon the dismemberment of Dionysus with joy because of the beautiful Apollonian illusion of it all. Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy inscribes this theory by attempting to transform the reader into a satyr, a votary of Dionysus, so that he or she can look upon the...

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