Nietzsche: Fisiologia dell'arte e decadence (review)

Whereas most recent Nietzsche studies have concentrated on a systematic approach, Italian scholars have privileged a historical approach in the wake of the groundbreaking Colli/Montinari partnership. Chiara Piazzesi's research belongs to this tradition. Nietzsche: Fisiologia dell'arte e decadence focuses on French interpretations of Nietzschean décadence (especially in art) from 1883 onward. Piazzesi traces some key ideas Nietzsche borrowed from Paul Bourget, whose writings he read attentively (she even reproduces the passages Nietzsche underlined in his copies of Bourget's work), as well as from Brunetière and Deprez. Bourget presents a theory of décadence that embraces European culture as a whole, taking French literature as his main object (Baudelaire, Flaubert, Taine, Renan, the brothers Goncourt, and Stendhal, among others). It is particularly interesting to follow Piazzesi's argument showing how Nietzsche immediately applied what he read to Wagner. This points the way to how Nietzsche read the French critics: not passively but, rather, actively. He had already anticipated much of what he found in their books in his Untimely Meditations, a fact to which Piazzesi draws the reader's attention, although Untimely meditations are outside her scope.

In this constellation, two authors create their own force field: Baudelaire and Wagner. They are symptoms of the contemporary condition, and in them, the forces and weaknesses of fin de siècle art become visible: odium vitae, expressivity at all costs, shock effects, autonomy of the parts, hysterical sensuality and spirituality, and so on. These features, condemned by the Right, would be recovered by the Left in the early twentieth century: one only has to think of Benjamin's theory of shock, for instance.

In the end, Piazzesi demonstrates how unmistakably Baudelaire wins over Wagner. In section 8 of the last chapter, "L'arte della 'redenzione': La decadence come misticismo e sensualità," the author points out the main differences in Nietzsche's appraisal of both. Baudelaire has a saner relation to sensuality and sexuality, in spite of his Catholicism, because he recognizes the will to power inherent in them; but Wagner represses sensuality in order to seduce with an irresistible strength. The negation of sensuality, the exaltation of chastity, is more pathological than any kind of sensuality, as Piazzesi demonstrates by citing several of Nietzsche's references to both men in the published works as well as the Nachlaß. She also offers a reading of the concept of the will to power in order to analyze the physiology of art. The will to power, she contends, marks a new understanding of the theories of the French critics, placing décadence in a new light. Nietzsche privileged the metaphors of digestion, nutrition, and nourishment to explain what décadence is—a disharmony of forces in the individual, a pathological condition of the organism—so that judgments proper to the décadent become the dominant values. The same reactions happen in the arts. Immobility, not to react, is the décadent's reaction. He feels how precarious his existence is, and so he cannot afford to waste his last remaining strength trying to configure reality. But art, as the specific vanity of man, requires man to have the power to see reality as perfect, and that necessitates an extreme effort that subjects reality to a simplified vision. In this inebriate condition lies the main difference with respect to The Birth of Tragedy. There, Dionysian intoxication is a static vision of the whole that Apollonian illusion would overcome to make life bearable. In Nietzsche's final aesthetics, intoxication is itself life affirming and life enhancing. Piazzesi's reconstruction is a valuable study, enabling the reader to understand not only Nietzsche's reception of French critics but also his aesthetics as it developed in a "physiological" way.