Mourning Philology: Art and Religion at the Margins of the Ottoman Empire

Epilogue. Nietzsche in Armenian Literature at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

The epilogue describes the reception of Nietzsche among the Armenian writers before 1915, within the distorting influence of the aesthetic principle functioning as "national-aestheticism," i.e. the fiction of a people as a work of art. The term is borrowed from Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe's reflections on Heidegger in La Fiction du politique (though it does not appear in the English translation). The emphasis here is on the racialist thought inherited from the philology of the 19th century, and its overtly antisemitic brand in the writings of Constant Zarian.