In agon with Nietzsche : studies in modernist creativity

Nietzsche's agon is the multivalent configuration of creativity-as-contest, first formulated in his 1873 essay, "Homers wettkampf," and subsequently resurfacing in the varying practices Harold Bloom, Jean-Fran9ois Lyotard, and Michel Foucault. Agonistics, an assault upon Hegelian sublation, is primarily a disruptive gesture, whatever the contextual field of operation at which it is targeted. As a policy for vitalistic, social engagement, however, the Nietzschean agon has historically provided a crossover-point from creative use to ideological abuse in German modernity. Hence this dissertation receives its impetus from the break between the liberal (post-)modernist, Homeric potential of Nietzsche's agonal philosophy, on the one hand, and the entrapments of reifying, "applied II reception of the same, on the other. A representative cross-section of Nietzsche's involvement with agonistics is delineated in this study: on the levels of language, sexuality, technology, Nazism, and anti-semitism, respectivey. The initial two chapters,. concerning relationali ty in language and Wittgenstein, and the male-female sexual agon and Lou Andreas-Salomé, explore Nietzsche's agonal innovations in semiology and psycho-physiology. The latter three chapters examine whether Nietzsche's agonistic structuration of enquiry inherently inclines -- or was externally inclined -- toward a slip from creative potential to political misappropriation and influence: this thesis is tested by focussing specifically on the historical evolution of a metaphysically oriented -- and ideologically motivated -- mise-en-scène of the Nietzschean creative agon in Imperial, Weimar and fascist Germany. In this scenario of misprized agonistics, the übermensch of technological German modernity was adapted as a national warrior parodied by Musil. by Spengler and Ernst Jünger, an application parodied by Musil. Nietzsche himself was idolized and subsequently loathed as an irrational myth-maker of Germanness and creator of an ineradicably proto-fascistic, re-Hegelianized dialectic, a process "demonstrated" by Thomas Mann in the novel Doktor Faustus. Nietzsche's own attempted transvaluation of the Dühringesque discourse of Jewish parasitism into a creative symbiosis was immediately absorbed by the hegemonic discourses of Imperial German nationalism.