Alle origini della rappresentazione: La tragedia in Aristotele e Nietzsche by Antonio Valentini (review)

Nietzsche’s relationship to Aristotle has not been sufficiently emphasized and explored by scholars. Several important studies have been undertaken in the past, but the theme has recently been abandoned in favor of a proliferation of essays on the relationship between Nietzsche and Plato. Yet Nietzsche’s relationship with Aristotle is arguably much more profound than that with Plato, since the former served as an essential reference point and a favored source for Nietzsche, especially as regards the Poetics and the Rhetoric. And although scholarly studies have highlighted Nietzsche’s criticisms of Aristotle, in fact many more debts than differences can be found in Nietzsche’s philosophy. A more profound analysis would show how Nietzsche learned much more from Aristotle than he rejected.

In Alle origini della rappresentazione: La tragedia in Aristotele e Nietzsche (At the Origins of Representation: Tragedy in Aristotle and Nietzsche), Antonio Valentini deals with one of the central themes of the Nietzsche-Aristotle relationship, the theory of tragedy. For Valentini, the core of both the Aristotelian and the Nietzschean theory is the concept of representation (in Aristotle’s case, the theory of mimesis), which allows tragedy to be considered not only as an artistic genre, but also and especially as an act of cognition. The spectacle represented by tragedy does not limit itself to mere aesthetic entertainment but rather is an “ontologically fundamental” event (9; my translation), since it can tell us something about the world and about our substantial and cognitive relationship with it.

The book is divided into two distinct parts, with the second much longer than the first. The first part (13–72) is dedicated to Aristotle, the second (73–205) to Nietzsche. The two parts have few points of connection, except where Valentini uses Nietzsche’s several references to Aristotle to make a comparison with the principal points that emerged from his discussion of Nietzsche. Thus, when mentioned in the second part of the volume, Aristotle receives a retrospectively “Nietzschean” interpretation, which criticizes the logocentrism of his aesthetic theory. Even Valentini’s interpretation of Nietzsche’s philosophy is accompanied by reflections that go beyond Nietzsche himself, to Heidegger and Wittgenstein. And Valentini is interested only in the concept of representation in The Birth of Tragedy and other works of that period, such that his theorization of the concept is based only on Schopenhauer’s account in The World as Will and Representation.

For his interpretation of Aristotle in the first part Valentini does not limit himself to an analysis of the Poetics (the traditional focus of studies on the theory of tragedy), but instead tries to inscribe his interpretation in a broader discussion of Aristotle’s entire metaphysics. The famous distinction between poetry and history, made in chapter 9 of the Poetics, makes poetry, and thus also tragedy as one of its forms, a representation of the universal, and therefore more philosophical than history, which concerns only contingent facts. Furthermore, poetry is no more than a part, or a form, of theorein (contemplation); it represents things not as they are, but rather as they should be—that is, it represents them in that form that does not belong to them completely as natural beings, but rather belongs to them as metaphysical entities, as ideas. This “ideal form” is that which can be recognized by the spectator of tragedy, and which can be appropriated through a cognitive act. Valentini concludes that, in some way, poetic mimesis represents that which cannot be represented, and makes knowable what is otherwise unknowable.

If for Aristotle poetic mimesis aims to represent things as they should be once the final form of entelechy is reached, Nietzsche, in contrast, concentrates on the representation of the dynamis, that never manifest process that precedes the act. For Valentini, the figure of Dionysus allows Nietzsche to represent the essence of reality itself, which excludes the act and the ideal, and maintains only the inexhaustible potentiality of dynamis...