force and form: nietzsche and the concept of dance

Force and Form:

Nietzsche and the Concept of Dance

By Monique Lyle

School of Humanities and Communication Arts; Master of Research, 2017.

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Monique Lyle, Force and Form: Nietzsche and the Concept of Dance

Contents

Abbreviations…………………………………………………………………………….3

Introduction………………………………………………………………………………4

1. The Sober Bacchae…………………………………………………………………....17

2. The Mechanics of the Will to Power…………………………………………………..34

3. Dance and Representation……………………………………………………………..46

4. Rhythm………………………………………………………………………………...56

Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………….71

Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………...73

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Abbreviations

BGE: Beyond Good and Evil

BT: The Birth of Tragedy

DWV: The Dionysiac World View

GMD: The Greek Music Drama

GS: The Gay Science

NCW: Nietzsche Contra Wagner

PTG: Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks

UM: Untimely Meditations

WEN: Writings from the Early Notebooks

WP: The Will to Power

Z: Thus Spoke Zarathustra

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Introduction

The objective pursued by modern music in what is now, in a strong but nonetheless

obscure phrase, designated 'endless melody' can be made clear by imagining that one is

going into the sea, gradually relinquishing a firm tread on the bottom and finally

surrendering unconditionally to the watery element: one is supposed to swim. Earlier music

constrained one - with a delicate or solemn or fiery movement back and forth, faster and

slower - to do something quite different, to dance: in pursuit of which the needful

preservation of orderly measure compelled the soul of the listener to a continual

self-possession: the charm of all good music rested upon the reflection of the cooler air

produced by this self-possession and warm breath of musical enthusiasm. - Richard

Wagner desired a different type of movement, - he overthrew the physiological

presupposition of previous music. Swimming, floating - no longer walking, dancing . . .

Perhaps this is the decisive thing. The 'endless melody' - wants to break up all evenness of

tempo and force and sometimes even to mock it; and it is abundantly inventive in what, to

the ear of earlier times, sounds like rhythmic paradoxes and blasphemies. Imitating,

mastering a taste like this would involve music in the greatest danger conceivable - the

complete degeneration of the feeling for rhythm, chaos in place of rhythm ... This danger

is especially great when such music leans more and more on a wholly naturalistic art of

acting and language of gesture uninfluenced and uncontrolled by any rule of plastic art,

and wants nothing other than effects ... Espressivo at any price and music in the service of,

enslaved to, gesture - that is the end ...

(Nietzsche, “Wagner as a Danger” in Nietzsche Contra Wagner, 269)

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Nietzsche relies on the concept of dance in the characterization of all his major thoughts. It

is integral to the economy of the Dionysian and the Apollonian, and to the theory of the will to

power. Despite a small number of studies of the concept, which we will address in a moment,

there is no explicit question in the literature regarding the motivation for this term, or the

significance of its appearance in Nietzsche’s work. How does this concept function in Nietzsche’s

texts? What does its appearance tell us about the deepest content of Nietzsche’s philosophy as

well as certain ambiguities in his thought?

The association of dance with the wild Dionysian festivals of The Birth of Tragedy (BT) 1

has overwhelmed interpretations of the meaning of dance in Nietzsche’s oeuvre. Alain Badiou, in

the opening of “Dance as a Metaphor for Thought” in his Handbook of Inaesthetics, explicitly

confronts such interpretations. In strict correspondence to Nietzsche (Badiou pursues what he calls

“the metaphor of dance” in relation to both Nietzsche and Mallarmé, and then also in terms of his

own “doctrine”) Badiou tells us that “dance is in no way the liberated bodily impulse, the wild

energy of the body…[Nietzsche is] miles away from any doctrine of dance as a primitive ecstasy

or as the forgetful pulsation of the body. Dance offers a metaphor for a light and subtle thought

precisely because it shows the restraint immanent to movement and thereby opposes itself to the

spontaneous vulgarity of the body” (Badiou, 60). Dance is precisely not, in other words, an

obedience to the body’s every impulse. Badiou summarizes entrenched literary opinion: “Yes,

dance is opposed to the spirit of gravity. Yes, it is what gives the earth its new name (‘the light

one’) - but, in the end, what is lightness?” (Badiou, 60). To which Badiou responds: lightness is 2

slowness, which is to say that it is the enactment of restraint and self-possession. While Badiou

doesn’t pursue this thought in relation to Nietzsche further (“turning now to my own doctrine…”),

this thesis will pursue in its own way the determination of dance as representative of restraint in

Nietzsche’s oeuvre.

1 All of Nietzsche’s texts in this thesis will be cited in full upon first mention, followed by an abbreviation. The abbreviation will be referred to from there on. This stylistic choice has resulted from the frequency of reference to individual texts. 2 In relation to how the significance of lightness and dance for Nietzsche has gone unquestioned, see Claudia Crawford’s essay, “Nietzsche’s Dionysian Arts” in Nietzsche, Philosophy and the Arts: “When do we...dance? When we are intoxicated, in love, happy, light” (317). Crawford goes on to say that “all the forms of dancing” Nietzsche suggests represent dancing in this way, i.e. light and “with the heart” (317).

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What we do have in terms of studies of the concept of dance in Nietzsche’s oeuvre make

up a series of lacunae. One monograph and a few essays would perhaps constitute good 3 4

examples of the kind of texts Badiou has in mind when he rejects the notion that dance for

Nietzsche is the wild liberation of bodily impulse. Badiou’s rebuff, however, appears to come in

the context of a larger and more general sweep of entrenched critical opinion: Badiou is pointing

out the popular and popular philosophic interpretation of the orgiastic image of dance in

Nietzschean philosophy. Yes, dance has to do with ecstasy, but as this thesis will show, it

concerns the ecstasy of Apollonian vision.

The primary cause of what has remained a somewhat superficial interpretation of dance is

the absence of a study that demonstrates dance’s relation to both Dionysus and Apollo in

Nietzsche’s oeuvre. Here lies the task of this thesis, which begins by seeking to prove that the

association of dance in Nietzsche’s thought with primitive ecstasy can only be the result of a

reading which does not advance far enough through Nietzsche’s theory of the development of art

in BT and, in a parallel way, The Will to Power (WP). Above all, this thesis promotes The

3 Nietzsche’s Dancers by Kimerer LaMothe is book-length. While LaMothe is the first to comprehensively overview and point out the lack of studies on dance in Nietzsche’s oeuvre (see notes, p.233), her inclusion of studies of ‘Nietzsche’s modern dance interpreters’ (Martha Graham and Isadora Duncan) that are equal in length to the study of Nietzsche himself only exacerbates the overidentification of dance with ecstatic freedom in Nietzschean philosophy. Georges Liébert asserts that Nietzsche would have been horrified at the fact that Duncan in particular openly grounded her dance techniques in Nietzschean doctrine. Liébert cites Duncan’s favourite movement in testifying to Nietzsche’s horror: “to throw her head back - the very movement of trance in Dionysian rites” (84). It is interesting to note that Duncan didn’t only declare Nietzsche’s influence on her dance technique but included Rousseau’s text Émile (Émile exclusively, that is in exclusion of Rousseau’s other texts, for instance his political ones) and Walt Whitman in the category of her “dance teachers” (84). Émile would be an obvious choice for the book’s admonition against restrictive modes of education (including things which literally inhibit free physical movement, like swaddling babies) while Duncan may have found lines such as these from Whitman influential: “I celebrate myself, and sing myself”; “I am satisfied...I see, dance, laugh, sing”; and “admitting they were alive...have now to rise and fly and sing for themselves” (See Whitman’s poem, Song of Myself). 4 See Crawford, “Nietzsche’s Dionysian Arts” and its interpretation of dance in terms of the wild cult festivals of Dionysus. According to Crawford, the song of Zarathustra’s shadow “is about...dancing freely. If we learn to do this, we, too will join the Dionysian throng”; and to become a “votary of Dionysus” is to “become his peers in Dionysian ecstasy” i.e. to actually participate in the activity of dancing (and singing) (p.327 and p.312 respectively).

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Dionysiac World View (DWV) for the specificity which it offers to a study of the function of

dance according to Nietzsche. Nowhere in the current body of literature is DWV analysed for its

presentation of the most fundamental and thoroughgoing theory of dance. We will be interested in

how the conclusion of DWV in particular asks for BT to be reconsidered on the earlier work’s

terms. We will argue that the function of dance in Nietzsche’s early texts maintains a certain 5

continuity throughout the later works and that it is only possible to understand dance’s function in

these by starting from the context of its early determinations.

DWV in particular sees Nietzsche’s first exposition of his philosophical motivations for

the use of dance which spares it from vague and incongruous assumptions about the

straightforward relationship between dance and ideas of freedom, exaltation, creativity and

embodiment. The greater portion of the current body of literature hasn’t acknowledged the strictly

philosophical nature of such ideas - ideas that are at stake within both Nietzsche’s oeuvre and the

history of aesthetics. This thesis instead seeks to understand the function of dance in the context of

the expansion of classical aesthetics enacted by Nietzsche: that is to say, through the collapse of

the differentiation between human subjective perception and the object of the beautiful. This

thesis finds that intensification is an aesthetic state in Nietzsche’s philosophy of art and that

Nietzsche theorizes this intensification in relation to dance. It also argues that dance constitutes

the feeling of victory in Nietzsche’s theory of the will to power but that such victory, through its

relation to the structure of the aesthetic state, is thought by Nietzsche in terms of the lawfulness of

form. The representation of dance in Nietzsche’s writings is, in this way, above all related to

measure and pace as opposed to the formlessness of chaotic and orgiastic frenzy. It is for this

reason that Nietzsche sees in dance the demonstration of the principle of difference in the

mechanics of the will to power. Chapter two of this thesis will carefully unpack Nietzsche’s

specific notion of “the body” in relation to the theory of form before pursuing any further

discussion of this highly complex term and its relationship to dance in Nietzsche’s thought. As

always, it is important in analyzing Nietzsche’s work not to take over the seemingly self-evident

relation between concepts like dance, body, ecstasy etc. Likewise, it is important to question the

5 DWV was of course written in 1870, two years prior to BT, and would thereby influence a reading of BT anyway - in a chronological sense at least. However, it is DWV that hasn’t received as much popularity; BT is therefore often read without DWV in mind.

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specific function of the term dance in Nietzsche’s texts - is dance an empirical practice, a

metaphor, a symbol, an art form, or an image? All of these possible titles are highly ramified in 6

Nietzsche’s texts: in chapter three we will discover that dance is intimately tied to the notion of

the symbol for Nietzsche; this will be in opposition to the metaphor. We will also find that dance

is fundamentally connected to a specific idea of the image and that dance is linked to Nietzsche’s

reformulation of the notion of ‘art forms.’ It is for these reasons that we have chosen to use the

somewhat colourless description of the concept of dance in Nietzsche’s work. Nietzsche uses the

term ‘concept’ loosely across his oeuvre: he refers to the concept of discipline, the concept of

form, the concept of man, the concept of purpose etc.

Another difficulty in attempting to thematize dance in Nietzsche’s writings concerns the

way dance occurs within different ‘economies’ at different times. What we will refer to as

economies of dance consist of enchainments of terms that surround dance and which make dance

meaningful in different ways across Nietzsche’s texts. Zarathustra describes learning how to

“stand and walk and run and leap and climb and dance” (Z, 156) and in The Gay Science (GS)

there is “walking, jumping, climbing, dancing” (GS, 230). Badiou presents what he calls a

“metaphorical network” around dance in Nietzsche’s thought in the following couplets: the

bird/flight; the child/innocence; play/the prime mover; fountains/leaping; and air/verticality

(Badiou, 57-8). Gilles Deleuze addresses dance for the way that it features in two specific

economies: dance is one symbol amidst three (dance, laughter and play) in Nietzsche’s theory of

affirmation and dance enacts irresponsibility in particular amidst a cluster of terms associated with

the negation of dialectics. This thesis maintains that it is only from within Nietzsche’s economies

that dance becomes meaningful in various ways. We will therefore be precise in delineating how

the function of dance for Nietzsche emerges in its difference. This thesis does not seek to

vindicate dance in Nietzsche’s texts, unless, of course, we find that Nietzsche vindicates it

himself. Both Deleuze and Badiou harvest their economies of dance solely from Thus Spoke

Zarathustra (Z). Sticking to Badiou for now, the result is a compilation of “images that dissolve

6 As we will see, Frédéric Pouillaude wants to refer to dance as a strictly empirical practice; Badiou calls dance a metaphor; as we will see, John Atwell calls dance a symbol; Crawford refers to dance as an art form (cited in footnotes 2 and 4 of this thesis); and LaMothe asserts that dance is an image (LaMothe mourns: nowhere is there a “sustained analysis of Nietzsche’s dance imagery” p.233).

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the spirit of heaviness” (Badiou, 58). But in order to get a fuller sense of the functioning of the

concept of dance, for example in the dissolution of heaviness, it is necessary to understand how it

sits alongside music in Nietzsche’s early theory of art. It is here that Nietzsche first explicates the

role dance plays in relation to the heaviness of the phenomenal world versus metaphysical

lightness. In the context of the accomplishment of art as music, dance will present itself in an

economy that includes poetry and music. Here dance will be seen to overcome what are also 7

classified as gestures for Nietzsche - those of the mouth, face and word.

In the first systematic study of the relationship between dance and philosophy at large,

Frédéric Pouillaude sees an absence of dance from philosophical aesthetics beginning with Kant’s

Critique of the Power of Judgement and consolidated by Hegel’s Lectures on Fine Art and

Schelling’s Philosophy of Art (Pouillaude, 4). Pouillaude tells us that dance was an acceptable

object of study prior to the regulation of the arts through the aesthetic regimes of German

Idealism, pointing out its presence in the French philosophical texts of Condillac, Diderot and

Rousseau. It is indeed a decisive moment for dance when it appears again philosophically in the

work of Nietzsche, however it is not here that Pouillaude finds dance, as he would very much like

to, justified at last! For Nietzsche is far from attempting an emendation of the hierarchy of the arts

established in the development of Hegelian spirit - where, famously, dance is the quintessential

minor art, or “imperfect art”, alongside gardening (Hegel, 627). In order to introduce our 8

particular approach to the function of dance in Nietzsche’s texts, we will attempt to demonstrate

how Pouillaude seeks to find a particular concept of the work of art in Nietzsche’s thought which

doesn’t belong there or which Nietzsche does not subscribe to.

In Nietzsche’s early work, the multiple arts, which include architecture, sculpture,

painting, music and poetry for Hegel, are “only ways to the creation of art” and as such are not

arts themselves because “true art is the ability to create images...in advance or in retrospect”

(DWV, 128, my italics). At this particular moment in one of Nietzsche’s early texts, he is arguing

that poetry, painting and sculpture in particular are not arts in themselves but only means or ways

7 This economy is sometimes referred to by Nietzsche as gesture, word and tone. We will discuss the difficulties associated with Nietzsche’s fluctuating terminology and demonstrate a methodology for mapping across Nietzsche’s language in chapters one and two of this thesis. 8 See volume II of Hegel’s Aesthetics.

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towards either plastic art or music: the Apollonian and Dionysiac powers of art respectively (BT,

76). Nietzsche does not find the “cultural significance of art” (DWV, 128) in works because his

relationship to the idea of form breaks with Hegel. For Nietzsche, there is no final moment of 9

absorption of artistic activity in an artform because the truth of art, defined by Nietzsche as the

capacity for image creation, is “a general human quality” (DWV, 128). The Apollonian and the

Dionysian are forces by which art appears in man and cannot be understood in terms of works,

that is, as products with the possibility of transmission. The only thing which gets transferred,

passed on and conveyed in Nietzsche’s doctrine of art is “enchantment.” True art as the capacity

for image making is at its highest in the Dionysian Greek who “sees himself transformed by magic

into a satyr” (BT, 42).

It is unavoidably in relation to music that any examination of art in Nietzsche’s oeuvre

must occur. In fact it would seem to make more sense to analyze not dance but the meaning of

music for Nietzsche due to the domination it enacts in his oeuvre. The unification of art takes

place for Nietzsche under music. However, the nature of such domination must not go

unquestioned. While it may seem possible to argue that music constitutes the highest form of art

for Nietzsche, to do so would be to equate the significance of music within Nietzsche’s thinking

about art with that of Hegel. While Nietzsche often discusses the status of musical works

contemporary to him (those by Richard Wagner being the most obvious, but also including

compositions by composers including Beethoven and Bizet) he never opposes works of music to

the manifold arts because Nietzsche doesn’t have a regime of art by which multiple arts could be

differentiated and ranked. Nietzsche’s aesthetics breaks decisively with the idea of a regime of art

when it instead seeks to uncover the festival, with its emphasis on participation, at the origin of all

art.

9 This is by no means to say that the notion of the work of art in Hegel’s aesthetics lacks its own complex formulation. We are only trying to describe the thoroughgoing presence of the art object in Hegel’s doctrine of art: see for example “the work of art stands in the middle between immediate sensuousness and ideal thought” (volume I, 38); “every work of art belongs to its own time, its own people...and depends on particular historical...ideas and purposes...scholarship in the field of art demands a vast wealth of historical...facts (ibid. 14); and “the work of art...as an actual single object...exists not for itself, but for us, for a public which sees and enjoys the work of art” (ibid. 263-4).

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How then are we to understand this unification of the arts in music? Martin Heidegger

understands the role of music in Nietzsche’s thought in relation to the collective artwork

(Gesamtkunstwerk) of the nineteenth century. Nietzsche is of course writing his early

philosophical treatises at the same moment that Richard Wagner, Nietzsche’s friend and foe, takes

on the idea of the collective artwork in a powerful way (Heidegger, 85). As the fifth significant 10

development in the history of Western art as delineated by Heidegger, we are told that the

collective artwork is more than a quantitative unity of the multiple arts. Heidegger says that the

collective artwork stands for the celebration of the national community through the “domination

of art as music, and thereby the domination of the pure state of feeling” (Heidegger, 86, my

italics). Heidegger goes on to describe this pure state of feeling as the disintegration of form and

solidity into a measureless and lawless state which found its peak in Wagner’s reckless

theatricality. The collective artwork as the domination of music is “the very opposite of great art”

and as such does not enunciate music above the manifold arts because in a certain sense there is

only music in the category of art (Heidegger, 87). “The absolute is experienced as sheer

indeterminacy” (Heidegger, 87) when music dominates, which places the collective artwork into a

different relationship to aesthetics when compared to Hegel’s doctrine of the progression of spirit

through works. The domination of music unifies rather than splits apart the arts and, what is more,

the reference to music here does not engender it as an art above all others because it does the very

opposite, dissolving art into sheer feeling. “The lived experience” (Heidegger, 86) becomes

decisive for art in this conception of music. While Nietzsche’s opposition to Wagner means that

he rejects this ebullition of feeling, Nietzsche does not reinstitute the law of form in order to put

the arts back together again. We could instead say that Nietzsche transforms art from out of this

state of ebullition, establishing for it a self-imposed law.

It would be possible to conduct an analysis of the significance of music in Nietzsche’s

oeuvre based on the influence contemporary music has on his thinking. This would be thanks to

the kind of attention Nietzsche dedicates to the naming of composers and discussion around

10 While there has been critical debate over the frequency of Wagner’s own use of the term Gesamtkunstwerk, J. J. Kockelmans’ monograph Heidegger on Art and Art Works argues that Wagner developed the idea of the collective artwork across dissertations including Art and Revolution (1849); The Artwork of the Future (1850); and Opera and Drama (1851) (47).

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technical compositional problems, often to do with pacing. However, there is another ultimate

meaning of music apart from its works or compositions for Nietzsche. The delineation of a

distinction between what could be treated as two apparently different types of music, those of

actual musical works (empirical/historical) versus music as something like a category or an ideal,

would be somewhat fruitless, not to mention very difficult. Such a differentiation has almost no

relevance to Nietzsche himself. This is precisely the type of problem Pouillaude is unable to

acknowledge in relation to the supposed absence of dance from aesthetics.

Only once does Nietzsche make clear reference to the status of contemporary dance

performances, that is to say in a way that treats dance as properly empirical: in BT he writes “of

all the theatrical arts only farce and ballet are growing rampant and bearing blooms which perhaps

do not smell sweet to everyone” (BT, 76). Here, Nietzsche says that theatrical ballet is a “hostile

drive” against art and more specifically against tragedy (BT, 76). The clarity of this reference to

empirical dance is only thanks to the qualification of it as a “theatrical” art: otherwise, and where

there are occasional references, it usually appears that Nietzsche is most probably referencing

ballet as a music form (ballet-music). While Georges Liébert records Nietzsche asking himself in

1881, “who will invent the tragic ballet with music for us?”, it is uncertain that Nietzsche would

have something like the Parisian ballet company the Ballets Russes in mind - which evolved after

Nietzsche’s death but which Liébert discusses as a response to Nietzsche’s oeuvre (Liébert, 85,

my italics).

The alleged absence of a rationale for dance in Nietzsche’s texts resides primarily in a

problem set up by Pouillaude and to which he falls victim himself. Pouillaude argues that from the

point of The Gay Science (GS) onwards, dance loses its materiality and reality in the oeuvre of

Nietzsche. For Pouillaude, this is due to its “transcendental” elevation to the condition of

possibility for the empirical reality of all art, which thereby entails the exclusion of dance from

“the empirical reality of the artistic” (Pouillaude, 10). We should remember that for Kant the

transcendental schema is what makes empirical experience possible to the extent that the schema

is the form of experience and is not opposed to empiricism as such - Kant rigorously distinguishes

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between the transcendent and the transcendental. Fundamentally, however, Pouillaude’s thesis 11

implicitly expects to find the Hegelian work in Nietzsche, which we have said does not belong to

Nietzsche’s aesthetics. Above all, such a work is not at the centre of the dominance of music,

which we have made clear doesn’t dominate in the sense of being above other arts but rather as

that which lets the pure state of feeling or the power of the Dionysian dominate. The idea of the

total work bars from the start the very capacity for the multiple arts to express themselves

individually, which then necessarily excludes the possibility of hierarchy in the Hegelian sense.

A difficulty exists nonetheless in the situation of music in Nietzsche’s thinking because

Nietzsche does have what Pouillaude would classify as an empirically real idea of it. However,

despite the fact that even Nietzsche himself wrote and improvised compositions for piano, the 12

division Pouillaude enacts between the empirical and a spiritual or cognitive ideal of art does not

belong to Nietzsche. Pouillaude seems to lament the absence of dance in Nietzsche’s oeuvre

because he did not choreograph pieces of it, nor did he ever even bother to document any that he

had seen, even if he didn’t like them - as we know he did in the case of music. The question of 13

the status of dance in Nietzsche’s philosophy of art situates us precisely where Pouillaude finds

himself: entangled in that problem which receives its most compelling formulation in the work of

Derrida and Heidegger, that of “presence.” While it is possible to understand why Pouillaude 14

11 “Transcendental and transcendent are not interchangeable terms. The principles of pure understanding...allow only of empirical and not of transcendental employment, that is, employment extending beyond the limits of experience” (Critique of Pure Reason, p.299). 12 See Liébert p.20 where Nietzsche is cited as being a virtuoso in improvisation on piano. It is also possible to hear a collection of Nietzsche’s piano works on Open Culture. 13 See also John Atwell’s essay “The Significance of Dance in Nietzsche’s Thought” in Illuminating Dance, Philosophical Explorations: “Nietzsche viewed dance in a very different way; no more than Plato did he approach dance as primarily a performing art to which one might apply standards of aesthetic evaluation. Nor did he speak of an individual dance or rather dance-type (say Swan Lake)...he did not write anything about the problems of dance notation...and he did not deal with the particular sort of movement or pantomime one encounters in most dances. Instead, for Nietzsche, dance is fundamentally a human activity symbolizing a specific ethico-metaphysical stance” (20). 14 Derrida describes a certain necessity in the analogical and metaphoric status of dance in Nietzsche’s oeuvre without mentioning any change in this status from the early ‘literal’ to the late ‘analogical’ writings. He instead universalizes the status, designating the metaphoric treatment of dance to an epoch of writers including Nietzsche: “from Hölderlin to Nietzsche, standing upright

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finds something more like the presence of dance in the early texts of Nietzsche as opposed to the

later works, this is only thanks to Nietzsche’s early style of historical analysis.

DWV, BT, together with an essay on early Greek philosophy and a series of lectures on

Greek drama were composed during Nietzsche’s appointment in classical philology at Basle and

thus preoccupy themselves with the historical development of art in ancient Greece. However, the

relationship Nietzsche maintains in his early work to traditional historical explication can only be

deceptively obvious. The accuracy of Nietzsche’s interpretation of ancient Greek culture has been

far from undisputed, not to mention that Nietzsche’s lifelong project (of which we have what we

have: a body of work largely published posthumously from sketches in notebooks and aphorisms

which easily fall out of order) was taken up by the problem of interpretation. In chapter one we

will argue that the historical style of the early texts serves a specific purpose. We will argue that

the Apollonian and Dionysian can only be understood as metaphysico-artistic functions and not

cultural artifacts: in this sense Nietzsche uses the “myth” in order to develop a theory of art which

is philosophical and not simply philological.

This is as far as the conversation with Pouillaude will go in this thesis. We will instead

focus on Nietzsche’s reinterpretation of aesthetics, where the work of art, as Nietzsche sees it,

comes into a unique and distinct relationship with the overcoming of man. We will see how dance

for Nietzsche is the index of an aesthetic state that seeks to preserve the life of the work. Four

major philosophical texts will be of importance to the accomplishment of this analysis. While

these four resources in no way demonstrate the explicit argument of this thesis, they nevertheless

contribute significantly to the interpretation and contextualization of dance here. Gilles Deleuze’s

book Nietzsche and Philosophy and Didier Franck’s Nietzsche and The Shadow of God offer

decisive statements about the meaning of dance in Nietzsche’s oeuvre, with which this thesis will

engage: Deleuze interprets dance as the affirmation of becoming; and Franck finds that dance is

the highest form of victory of the will to power. However, due to the fact that neither Deleuze nor

Franck pursue any study of dance at length, we will seek to uncover the implications of such

statements for ourselves. While Deleuze’s book in particular, Nietzsche and Philosophy, mentions

and the dance remain metaphorical, perhaps” (See “La Parole Soufflée” in Writing and Difference p.231).

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dance a number of times, it is always in a manner that maintains the original shock of the term and

usually in concluding a thought. In this way, there is an implicit reliance on the supposed

self-evidence of the concept and as a result, dance doesn’t seem to warrant any analysis of its

own. This thesis maintains that Nietzsche is indeed playing on the term ‘dance’ in relation to its 15

unique history of philosophical presences and absences.

Martin Heidegger’s lecture series on Nietzsche also provides some of the most

consequential material for the study of dance this thesis conducts, specifically for its illumination

of the Nietzschean emphasis on lawfulness and form. Heidegger associates dance with

Nietzsche’s enthusiasm for measure and pace: this enthusiasm is opposed to the Wagnerian

dissolution of the clarity of form. These ideas will be important to this thesis, despite the fact that

Heidegger is not concerned specifically with the concept of dance in Nietzsche’s oeuvre.

Finally, it should be remarked that this thesis has been sparked by Derrida’s significant, if

minimal, discussion of dance in Nietzsche’s work in concluding Force and Signification. While

Badiou may have indicated the triumph of form over force in the figure of dance for Nietzsche,

Derrida perhaps sees things in the inverse. From out of a desire not to simplify the

Apollonian/Dionysian dichotomy, nor Derrida’s argument (which takes place through an

endorsement of the Apollonian nature of ecstasy despite Derrida’s appraisal of dance in

Nietzsche’s thought as the accentuation of force over form), we will offer a reading of Derrida’s

potentially enigmatic presentation of dance in Nietzsche’s work in concluding the thesis. This will

allow us to consolidate our major arguments in light of their philosophical implications.

Through a very close reading of Nietzsche, this thesis will culminate in a decision about

where and how Apollonian ecstasy takes place in relation to Dionysus. The expression of

Dionysus, as pure force, will be seen to be allocated by Nietzsche strictly to music, in relation to

which we will seek to decipher the specific role of dance. We will begin by untying the

15 LaMothe says that “it is not immediately evident why Nietzsche would choose dance to play such a prominent role in his project of revaluing all values”, however she then queries where Nietzsche would have first come across the existence of a thing called dance as though he needed to discover it by going to a ballet class or a folk dance himself, or through hearing about his sister’s dancing lessons (19). It is interesting that Nietzsche’s having read about the dance of classical Greece doesn’t enter into LaMothe’s strictly empirical account.

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entrenched association of Nietzsche’s concept of dance from the dancing familiar to the cult

festivals of Dionysus. The activity of dance as it appears in Nietzsche’s later work will be found to

be originally configured in the event of the Apollonian taming of Dionysus (as it occurs in DWV

and BT). We will find Nietzsche’s concept of dance embedded in the subsequent harmony

between the two powers of art, which thereby establishes the involvement of dance in the

achievement of the aesthetic state as it is imagined by Nietzsche. Any emphasis on the affiliation

between Apollo and dance in this thesis will be for the sake of dispelling the common impression

that dance is representative in any simple sense of pure force alone, or that dance is the sign of

wild Dionysian freedom. Dance as the highest victory of the will to power for Nietzsche is in the

end the expression of force through the victory of form - a moment characterized by flow and a

corresponding decline in force as is necessary to achieve that quality.

16


1. The Sober Bacchae

It was the frenzied plunge into the whole of things in Richard Wagner’s person and work

that captivated the young Nietzsche; yet his captivation was possible only because

something correlative came from him, what he then called the Dionysian. But since

Wagner sought sheer upsurgence of the Dionysian upon which one might ride, while

Nietzsche sought to leash its force and give it form, the breach between the two was

already predetermined...[Nietzsche’s] opposition to Wagner involved two things. First,

Wagner’s neglect of inner feeling and proper style. Nietzsche expressed it once this way:

with Wagner it is all “floating and swimming” instead of “striding and dancing”, which is

to say it is a floundering devoid of measure and pace.

(Heidegger, Nietzsche, 88)

This day I had strong and elevated feelings again, and if on its eve I could have music and

art, I know very well what music and art I would not like to have, namely, the kind that

tries to intoxicate its audience and drive it to the height of a moment of strong and elevated

feelings - an art for those everyday souls who in the evening look not like victors on

triumphant chariots but rather like tired mules who have been whipped somewhat too often

by life.

(Nietzsche, The Gay Science, “On Theatre”, 86)

17


This chapter will consist of a reading of Nietzsche’s most systematic treatment of dance;

this occurs in DWV and BT. We will leave the question as to how dance functions (whether for

instance as a metaphor or symbol) until chapter two in order to analyse where dance sits in

relation to the developmental narrative of art as it unfolds across these two early texts of

Nietzsche’s. This narrative of art is only historical for Nietzsche in its reference to Dionysus and

Apollo, the fundamental powers of art. While we will find that the unfolding of art according to

Nietzsche carries a sense of development, progress and evolution, Nietzsche does not present his

texts in a chronological style. The sense of progress and development we experience in these texts

results from the presence of a lower and a higher moment of art in Nietzsche’s thought. However,

these moments are scattered throughout the writing; Nietzsche’s terminology sees phases of

development and reversion that are not necessarily in linear sequence. The lower phase of art can

also be divided into two moments on its own terms: it expresses the segregation of Apollo and

Dionysus and therefore entails the description of them in their separate states. While we will come

to learn that victory is a term belonging especially to WP, it also has relevance here in Nietzsche’s

early work. When we reach the higher phase of art, it is indeed a victorious moment and what is

accomplished in its event, as we will see, is the aesthetic according to Nietzsche - that is to say,

the total domination of feeling. This high point of art, however, does not necessarily come at the

conclusion of DWV or BT.

The style Nietzsche takes up in his treatment of the history of art could be understood to be

symptomatic of his theory of the Apollo-Dionysus dichotomy. In line with Derrida’s reading of

Nietzsche in Force and Signification, the Apollonian and the Dionysian powers of art are not

figures in history, for it is through their very difference that they open history itself (Derrida, 34).

Nietzsche’s fragmentary style could perhaps be interpreted in light of the fact that there is no

instance in the history of art that does not involve the work of both Dionysus and Apollo. It is

hence in light of an impossible separation of the pair that Nietzsche attempts to tell the story of

their separation and subsequent unison. We will argue that this unison is always characterized as

an incorporation of Dionysus by Apollo. This narrative, in its entirety, is what plays out as art

(every time) for Nietzsche. His descriptions of the en masse Dionysian rapture and excitement

18


which give birth to the image of Dionysus (WEN, 50) isn’t something which occurred in history,

i.e. back in ancient Greece. It is the fundamental event of art and it happens with every upsurgence

of art. The dithyrambic chorus, the symbol of the Dionysiacally excited mass (BT, 44) is

wrenched out of “orgiastic self-destruction” by the “enormous force” of the Apollonian/the image

- every time art occurs (BT, 102). It is in this sense that we are speaking of the history of art: it has

to achieve itself again and again.

Due to the scattered nature of Nietzsche’s writing in BT and DWV, we will need to

develop a way of deciphering at what point in the progression of art we stand at any particular

moment in the text. This will allow us to differentiate between the functions of dance at the

preliminary and high phases of art. Chapter one also opens the discussion to a much later and

controversially coordinated text of Nietzsche’s, WP, for its consolidation of the involvement of 16

dance in the final state of art. It is in WP that we find an important recurrence of a phrase

introduced by Nietzsche in DWV: “play with intoxication.” This concept will be crucial to an

understanding of the place dance takes up within Nietzsche’s thought in his interpretation of the

aesthetic. In WP, as it does in DWV, the notion of play with intoxication marks the uppermost

accomplishment of the aesthetic state, bringing it into relation with Nietzsche’s destruction of the

subject-object differentiation of aesthetics hitherto. In DWV Nietzsche calls play with intoxication

the state of ecstasy (DWV, 120) and in BT he alludes to it: the justification of phenomenal

existence occurs through the “artistic game of the will” - described as the delight of the will when

it “plays with itself” (BT, 113). How can the will, which is inherently un-aesthetic for Nietzsche

(BT, 35) - for the will is truth - be considered in terms of art, as it is when it is said to play an

artistic game?

We will eventually be able to show how dance solves this problem, beginning with a

delineation of the presence of three different scenes with particular associations which recur

throughout both DWV and BT. Chapter one will organize the recurrence of these scenes in order

to understand dance’s place in relation to them. It is through the delineation of what remains a

very peculiar and ambiguous feature of Nietzsche’s early texts - three different dances - that we

16 Heidegger treats WP as Nietzsche’s magnum opus in his Nietzsche lectures, even after describing at length the textual problems subsequent to its posthumous organization and publication (see p.7; 23; and “The Structure of the “Major Work”” pp.25-33).

19


will begin to understand in what way the popular philosophic interpretation of dance comes with a

certain justification. This chapter will begin to demonstrate how the association of dance with

wild Dionysian ecstasy is only treated lightly by Nietzsche and doesn’t constitute his major theory

of dance. We will uncover the fact that Nietzsche seeks the overcoming of wild Dionysian ecstasy

in order for the final accomplishment of the aesthetic state as play to take place. At this point,

Nietzsche’s concept of dance (which we will align with a third dance “style” and a certain kind of

absorption of the other two dance techniques) will be seen to rely upon its duplicity. Such

duplicity, ultimately of force and form, is maintained in a particular way in Nietzsche’s concept of

dance in the later work - the doubleness of dance explicitly outlined in our early texts never

disappears. In fact, this thesis argues that such duplicity constitutes a significant part of

Nietzsche’s reason for his use of the concept of dance. DWV and BT are valuable for the manner

in which Nietzsche explicates the duplicity of dance in these texts - he delineates different dance

techniques (literally) through the characterization of different qualities of movement. Dance in

these early texts is often highly vivid. There is a noticeable change in the later work, wherein

dance is only ever referenced wholesale. Where does this ‘totalized’ reference to dance come from

and what does it mean?

*

The thematic which occupies BT is foreshadowed in DWV. Both delineate the

development of art in ancient Greece through the elaboration of the familiar dichotomy of the

Apollonian and the Dionysian powers of art featured in the antinomies of sculpture/music,

individuation/unification, tranquility/bacchanal. DWV in particular, however, stands as

Nietzsche’s treaty on aesthetics - it is here that a theory of feeling is first delineated, grounded as 17

17 There is an alternate version of the participation of dance in the aesthetic state published in Writings from the Early Notebooks (WEN, 83-91). In regards to Nietzsche’s use of the term mime here, see the relationship between dance and pantomime in ancient Greece in Plotinus: Myth, Metaphor, and Philosophical Practice by Stephen R. L. Clark. While we do not treat pantomime here in this thesis, it is not in order to avoid a potential complication of the project, but rather in

20


it is for Nietzsche in the problem of representation and a longing for it to be absolutely direct. It is

out of this desire that Nietzsche establishes the recurring motif of art as play with intoxication.

This motif can be understood as Nietzsche’s literal replacement of the work of art as it is

constituted in traditional aesthetics.

Using the language of Kant’s aesthetics, judgements of beauty for Nietzsche are conceived

of pluralistically and solely in terms of strength - the rose is beautiful simply when it has “satisfied

its Will” (DWV, 135). Despite Nietzsche’s own claims of opposition to Kant’s formulation of 18

judgements of beauty, Heidegger finds that both Kant and Nietzsche alike accomplish an

unforeseen level of intimacy with the object of beauty in their aesthetic philosophies (Heidegger,

113). Heidegger says that Nietzsche, in the midst of common (Schopenhauerian) opinion,

subscribed to an erroneous interpretation of Kant’s conception of aesthetic judgements. According

to Heidegger, this misinterpretation was the direct result of a nineteenth century reading of Kant’s

characterization of the aesthetic state as “disinterested”. Nietzsche took the disinterested nature of

judgements of beauty to be a state of “sheer apathetic drift” (Heidegger, 108). The interpretation

of disinterested delight as a state of oceanic-like drift recalls Nietzsche’s later accusations against

Wagner’s music. In the context of a discussion on Kant, Heidegger indeed says that the aesthetic 19

state for Nietzsche, even when it might seem to coincide with Wagner’s “turmoil of feelings”, is

an “attunement in the sense of the...most measured determinateness” (Heidegger, 113). Possible

misconceptions about Nietzsche’s theorization of the state of feeling have perhaps resulted from

Nietzsche’s emphasis on experience in his aesthetic. But aesthetic experience, for both Kant and

acknowledgment of the way that mime is consumed within dance, at least for Nietzsche. This seems to be a constant trait in philosophical treatments of dance and its anti-philosophic power as non-dialectizable force. In relation to mime, see also Wagner’s The Art-Work of the Future where he calls mimicry the height of dance (104). 18 Using Nietzsche’s later terminology we could elaborate: the rose is beautiful when it has accomplished its will to power. As we will see, Nietzsche sees the will to power as a physiological process - this formulation withstands here in the very early dissertation of DWV: “‘the rose is beautiful’ means only that the rose has a good appearance...there is no intention to say anything about its essence...the Will is satisfied by the way it appears, pleasure in existence is promoted thereby. The rose is, in its appearance, a faithful copy of its Will, which is identical with this form; in its appearance it corresponds to the purpose intended for its species” (DWV, 135). 19 See the epilogues to the introduction and chapter one of this thesis. We will dedicate analyses to this Wagnerian state on multiple occasions throughout the thesis in relation to Nietzsche’s emphasis on form and lawfulness in both the early and late periods.

21


Nietzsche alike, according to Heidegger, concerns letting the beautiful object come forward so

that it shines or appears (Heidegger, 109). And letting the object appear, to use Kant’s

terminology, implies a state of disinterestedness in the object. This in turn means that the object

hasn’t been represented as a “possession” (Heidegger, 109). For Heidegger, letting the object

appear without wanting to have it as our possession, “propels us toward a basic state of human

being” in the case of Kant, and sees us “ascend beyond ourselves” to our full capabilities in

Nietzsche’s terms (Heidegger, 113). It is at this point that this thesis would like to point out an

important difference between Kant and Nietzsche’s theories of the beautiful. “Ascent beyond

ourselves” for Nietzsche involves the strength of the muscles. As Heidegger says, “not as sheer

muscle power” but strength as the capacity for self perfection (Heidegger, 114). The mechanics of

self perfection and its relation to dance will be discussed in chapter two of this thesis. For now, let

us simply point out that Kant does not thematize muscles in his aesthetic. For Kant, aesthetic 20

judgement still equates to a cognitive state, even though that state is pushed to its greatest limits

(where it functions without conceptual interestedness). In Nietzsche’s case, on the other hand,

judgements of beauty are centred on muscularity and a certain interpretation of the body. Muscles

and the body, in turn, have much to do with dance in Nietzsche’s thought. It comes as a surprise

that the contemporary interpretation of dance as the site of the essential expression of “the body”

has not been aligned with Nietzsche’s delineations of muscularity, expressivity, corporeality and

20 Kant does describe a “pleasant exhaustion” in the muscles which results in “Eastern voluptuaries” when they have just been massaged (Kant, 85). This, however, only concerns the play of our affectations in regards to our well-being, which merely demonstrates an “external principle” (Kant, 85).

22


dance in WP. As this thesis seeks to show, such an alignment would necessitate a total 21

reconsideration of the meaning and significance of the body.

In order to introduce dance’s function in the aesthetic state for Nietzsche - including its

relation to the terms body, feeling and muscularity - it will be necessary to first carefully follow

the progress of dance in Nietzsche’s early theory of art. This is in order to see why dance becomes

tied to these terms and why all of this language must not be read in relation to Dionysian

exuberance or even, as we will see, straightforward biologism.

In DWV and BT, the association of dance with Dionysiac intoxication can only be

justified if it is kept within the confines of the intermediate phase in the accomplishment of art.

The manner of dancing depicted by the wild Dionysian revelries of Nietzsche’s early texts mark

what is to be overcome, absorbed and thereby made stronger through the Apollonian

comprehension of truth. This comprehension is “painful” in the sense that Apollo “suffers” the

truth, actually incorporating the foreigner Dionysus, i.e. Apollo’s own death, or the total genocide

of the ancient Greek Hellenes: “the Hellene [is thus] by nature profound and uniquely capable of

the most exquisite and most severe suffering” (BT, 39). It is through this establishment of

marvelous “pathos” that Nietzsche conceives of the state of harmony, characterised by 22

Nietzsche much later in WP as geometrical simplification, deceleration and serenity. A few pages

into DWV, Nietzsche counters commonly held philological opinion: “anyone who wants to see

clearly just how powerfully the Appoline element held down the irrational, supernatural quality of

the Dionysiac element should consider that in the older period of music the genos dithyrambikon

21 A most fruitful study in relation to these themes (which will be explicated further in this thesis albeit in a different direction than the one suggested in this note) would be that of the relationship between the contemporary interpretation of dance on the basis of ‘the physical body’ and Nietzsche’s alleged biologism. While Heidegger will both defend Nietzsche against the biologism of the nineteenth century and sacrifice him to it elsewhere (compare the Nietzsche lectures to those entitled Parmenides - the latter especially in terms of how Heidegger rebuffs Nietzsche’s notion of the Dionysian despite its apparent alignment with Heidegger’s thesis on a kind of ‘embodied’ envisionment here), Heidegger maintains opposition to biologism (a biologism that is arguably present in WP especially in relation to dance). Such research should be read in line with Heidegger’s agenda at this time: the deconstruction of the National Socialist reading of Nietzsche with which biologism is aligned. 22 “Occasion, event, passion, suffering, destiny” are among the meanings of Greek pathos (trans. WP, 339).

23


was also the hesuchastikon”, in other words, dithyrambic poetry is restful and calming (DWV,

122).

Nietzsche concludes that the nature of the Hellene is “expressed in dance because in dance

the greatest strength is still only potential, although it is betrayed by the suppleness and luxuriance

of movement” (BT, 46). Nietzsche closes BT with a congruent description, depicting a scene of

Hellenic beauty achieved through suffering: the Hellenes are “moving delicately, with harmonious

sounds and a rhythmical language of gestures” and Apollo is honoured as the God of Delos who

has healed “dithyrambic madness” (BT, 116). It is only through the incorporation of this act of

healing that the Hellene, as Apollonian, finds “simple, transparent, beautiful” expression - which

is to emphasize that the Hellene is not a figure of “unendangered ease and comfort” (BT, 46, my

italics). Deleuze’s statement about dance becomes relevant here: “to dance is to affirm becoming

and the being of becoming” (Deleuze, 170). As we will see, the Hellene is expressed in dance

because its strength is potential - it only ever demonstrates the capacity to develop into something

in the future. What is potential is only ever “betrayed” (accidentally revealed, exposed to danger)

through the supple, easeful flexibility of a lithe and limber dance. This is how art appears at the

moment the will is in “supreme danger” - art saves the will (BT, 40). The will, Dionysus, pure

force, is betrayed by dance (dance exposes force to danger by treacherously giving knowledge

away about it) but also saved by dance. And dance is akin to the appearance of art for Nietzsche

because it has direct access to the metaphysical truth of becoming. This is to say that dance is not

itself this truth, but rather affirms the being of truth.

Thus, Nietzsche’s theory of art must be thought in terms of progression towards victory.

Such victory equals freedom for Nietzsche - every event in the progression of art is towards the

elimination of the violence and struggle of individual willing. It is under this condition of

evolution that we are able to argue that there are three unique moments of dance present in

Nietzsche’s early thought. Dancing during the cult festivals of Dionysus marks a preliminary

phase in the achievement of art. It is still a sign of individual willing or labour. We will argue that

dance as the accomplishment of victory in the later theory of the will to power cannot find its

significance in the Dionysian state of intoxication. Nietzsche’s later concept of dance instead

derives from a second event of dance, wherein Apollo holds the Dionysian down, taming it,

24


controlling it and thereby granting force any actual expression at all. It is important to remember

that for Nietzsche pure force could never appear by itself.

The inaugural scene of the development of art in ancient Greece as presented by Nietzsche

takes place with Dionysus storming into Apollonian territory and it is at this moment of Dionysus’

entry into Greece that the association of dance with rapture has occurred. The events following

this first scene somehow haven’t been taken into account. The association of dance with a kind of

freedom that is easily won does not line up with the contribution dance makes to harmony for

Nietzsche. Nietzsche’s aesthetics revolve around not only a state of pure intoxication but a

corresponding capacity to play with such a state, which has meaning for Nietzsche in the

momentariness of forming. In DWV Nietzsche alludes to a “middle world” wherein Dionysus 23

and Apollo are “denied”: “this world reveals itself in a playing with intoxication, not in complete

entrapment by it” (DWV, 130, original italics).

The scene of the festival of Dionysus does not dominate or complete Nietzsche’s theory of

dance: Nietzsche cleanses and shapes the cult of Dionysus by having Apollo enact a

“spiritualization” of its “five-day-long festivals” centred on the “absence of all sexual

discipline...the destruction of all family life” and “unrestrained hetaerism” (DWV, 123). Nietzsche

says that “the very antithesis of this [cult] is to be found in the image of the Greek festivals of

Dionysus, as drawn by Euripides in his Bacchae, an image which radiates...loveliness” (DWV,

123, my italics). The description of the festivals as Greek means that they no longer represent the

Asian power of Dionysus but rather the incorporation of this foreigner by the Hellenes. Here in the

text, Nietzsche replaces the hetaera of the cult with what we could call maidens or virgins. This

second Greek scene, which sees the cult of Dionysus repressed, is described by Nietzsche in

consonance with how he imagines it would take place in Euripides’ The Bacchae: a messenger

23 It is perhaps symptomatic of the association of dance with release and with a certain idea of freedom that the only evidence we have of Nietzsche himself dancing, other than the fact that he attended social dances in his university days, is a supposed demonstration of orgiastic freedom. Nietzsche was apparently seen in his room through the keyhole dancing around his bedroom naked and in wild disarray, possibly with an erection. Julian Young, who includes an account of this in his biography on Nietzsche, of course describes it as “a one-man re-creation of a Dionysian orgy” (Young, 531). We should add skeptically to such a fable that Nietzsche’s room, very plain and equipped with only a few pieces of furniture suitable for writing and a single bed, doesn’t quite fit the mood. See plate 22 in Friedrich Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography by J. Young.

25


withdraws into the mountaintops during the midday heat and “on an alpine meadow notices three

choruses of women lying in scattered groups on the ground and in decorous pose” (DWV, 123).

The scene centres on harmonious and peaceful imagery - this is Nietzsche’s Bacchae. Some of the

women are also standing against pine trees, leaning on them and dozing. When the mother of

Pentheus, possessed by Dionysian ecstasy, suddenly breaks out in joy, all the women are stirred

and correspondingly leap to their feet in “noble comportment” (DWV, 124, my italics).

This harmonious Bacchae is mirrored in BT, wherein man has replaced walking and

talking with singing and dancing. The overall effect is consolidated through a summary

description: “flying and dancing” (BT, 18). The animals talk, “the earth gives milk and honey”

and man “moves in such ecstasy and sublimity as once he saw the gods move in his dreams”; “his

gestures speak of his enchantment” (BT, 18). Here, Apollo has come to life - the dream, the

vision, is “spoken” of gesturally through flight and dance. It is worth noting that at this instance in

the text, neither music nor poetry (the other arts related to the accomplishment of the aesthetic

state) are not mentioned: “enchantment” and the enactment of a new covenant is expressed by 24

dance and not music or poetry. As in DWV, the images are symbolic of harmony: milk and honey

mark the sweetness and prosperity of the earth. The women put on garlands, tidy their ribbons

dishevelled from sleep and suckle wolves and deer. A rock is struck so that “water bubbles forth”,

honey drips from twigs and “snow-white milk” springs from the earth at a touch (DWV, 124).

Here, dance, characterized as moving with the ecstasy of a god, marks the cessation of artistic

labour, indeed of the subjective or “bad artist” altogether (BT, 29), so that man himself “becomes

a work of art” (BT, 18). As we will see, the work of art only has meaning as “play with

intoxication.”

Nietzsche’s description of a structural change in rhythm in DWV corresponds to the

Dionysian overcoming of the maidens’ dozing state (the mark of their enfeeblement and

24 Nietzsche uses Bund (bond, covenant). The translator suggests the association of Bund with the biblical sense of the New Covenant (BT, 18). The imagery in these passages is likewise heavily biblical: milk and honey are symbols of the promised land in the old testament. However, the striking of a rock so that it gives forth water (cited in a moment) is an ambiguous theological reference - Moses grants water to the Israelites on one occasion in this way and is condemned to death in the desert for the same act later on. There is also, perhaps, an admixture of pagan imagery here: women are suckling wolves...

26


devitalization): “rhythm, which had previously moved only in the simplest zig-zag pattern, now

loosened its limbs for a Bacchanalian dance; musical sound rang out” (DWV, 129, original 25

italics). The Bacchanalian dance here can only be read in line with Nietzsche’s depiction of the

Bacchic scene as a state of harmony. It would seem that Nietzsche’s emphasis on the “loosening”

of limbs from out of an Apollonian tedium (“simplest zig-zag pattern”) would give some credence

to the association of dance with wild Dionysian revelry. Again, it is important to note that the

Bacchanalian dance, as opposed to the festive events of Dionysus, are associated with freedom for

Nietzsche. The segregation of the Bacchanalian dance from the cult festival is the result of the fact

that this dance has been gained equally from the other state: the Apollonian, here designated by

the zig-zag pattern. It is important to recognize that there are three dance scenes or dance “styles”

here in Nietzsche’s characterization of the development of art. The first, which we have already

encountered, is the Dionysian revelry; the second is the Apollonian zig-zag dance or the simplistic

rhythmic dance; and the third is the Bacchanal, which can only be read as a unification or even as

a “denial” of the two powers of art. 26 27

When the sweet virgins leap from their slumber (having been roused by a Dionysian

enthusiast/a dithyrambic dramatist/a bearer of the mask of Dionysus) they move well, which is to

say nobly, majestically. Such noble comportment cannot be affiliated with the indirect meandering

of the zig-zag in the case of Apollonian rhythm. While the restraint and control of a simple

zig-zag might seem to correspond to nobility, this is far from the case because what is noble for

Nietzsche is what is free. The zig-zag has not yet attained any more freedom than has the state of

Dionysian intoxication. Nietzsche sees the zig-zag as the depleted dance of rhythm and the mark

25 It is important to recognize that it is rhythm which dances here. What does this mean? As we will show in chapters three and four, this is ultimately because music is the one “who” (literally) does the dancing for Nietzsche: “musical sound rang out”. The complex relation between music and dance in the accomplishment of art will be signalled at the end of this chapter in our description of dance as a phenomenal limitation for Nietzsche. 26 See above: Dionysus and Apollo are “denied” in the upsurgence of a world that “reveals itself in a playing with intoxication” (DWV, 130). 27 We do not mean to distinguish between first and second here in a chronological fashion: the purely Dionysian and the purely Apollonian in Nietzsche’s narrative together constitute the preliminary phase of art. The distinction of three scenes of art, however, is useful here because it allows us to show that there is an incorporation of the two separate dance styles into a higher, and later, third.

27


of Apollonian unaccomplishment: Apollo is moving in zig-zag in “ghostlike attenuation” (DWV,

129). Here, Apollo has not yet taken up Dionysus knowingly within himself as the truest form of

his ownmost embodiment: Apollo grants “admission to the Dionysiac elements” and what “had

lain artificially hidden in the Apolline world” becomes “intelligible” (DWV, 129). What has been

acknowledged as measure and limit, i.e. the zig-zag, has been “artificial” (DWV, 128). Apollo has

not known himself nor been himself thus far. He thought he was fine, but he was merely

meandering off course, unable to attain the direct representation of his innermost self that would

give him back to himself: that is, give him body in order to overcome the ghostly. Direct

representation (of Dionysus and thereby of Apollo himself) comes as bacchanalian freedom

through bacchanalian dance.

What exactly is the status or function of dance in Nietzsche’s interpretation of the

bacchanal? What work is the concept of dance doing at this point in the text? What Nietzsche sees

in the bacchanal corresponds to the dance of the immense Dionysian processions and the dances

of St. Vitus and St. John described in The Greek Music Drama (GMD). The Dionysian procession

in this context is not to be confused with the wild cultic festival of the later works. We will 28

follow several references in GMD in order to verify this link and to show its significance. As we

will see, dance brings together a number of complex references within Nietzsche’s corpus in a

singular way.

In Nietzsche’s description of the Dionysian procession in GMD we find “wildly moving

crowds” dressed as satyrs roaming through the woods, experiencing ecstatic conditions and

having visions as expressions of “belief in [their] own enchanted state” (GMD, 16). Nietzsche

says that this immense Dionysian festival “finds its only counterpart in the dances of St. Vitus and

St. John” where “a crowd...sang and danced its way from town to town” (GMD, 14). Importantly,

in BT Nietzsche also suggests that we recognise the bacchic choruses of the Greeks in the dances

of the German Middle Ages, i.e. St. Vitus and St. John (BT, 17). This is to say that these two

28 On why we couldn’t expect the terms to match up between GMD and the later works see Jill Marsden’s preface: “most striking of all is the absence of the Apollonian from any consideration of the origin of Greek art in Nietzsche’s January 1870 lecture. By mid 1870, just a matter of months later, the Apollonian/Dionysian duality is firmly established in the essay “The Dionysian World View,” with this diad already assuming the central features that will be elaborated in the “Birth of Tragedy”” (GMD, III).

28


dances share characteristics with the bacchanal. In what follows we will occasionally move back

and forth between GMD and BT in order to build up a series of cross references. These will in

turn help us understand exactly what is being loaded into the concept of dance across these works.

The themes developed here will help us establish connections to physiology and representation:

we will explore these themes in other chapters in relation to Nietzsche’s later works. The fact that

these references already come up in the early texts is a confirmation that the function of dance

across Nietzsche’s oeuvre is relatively continuous.

Nietzsche gives an account of how the modern medical institution referred to the medieval

dance processions as a “national epidemic” in German history (GMD, 14). It accrued to itself,

spreading and enlarging as the festival moved from town to town, increasing in strength as it

pulled participants into itself. Contrary to the negative diagnosis of an “epidemic” held by the 29

German medical institution, Nietzsche conceived of the event positively - ironically, for the same

reasons: the procession was seen to be contagious, wide-ranging and transmittable (in the sense

that the procession transmitted itself from person to person like a disease). We find a

29 There are numerous examples of Nietzsche’s theorization of an event in this manner. The activity of “forming” for Nietzsche is always characterized by fluidity and taken to be accomplished in a whirl. See Nietzsche’s characterization of the evolution of nous throughout Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks (PTG): “the impelling nous starts suddenly, with frightful force - so fast, in any event, that we must call its motion a “whirl”...the wider the concentric rings grow, the slower the movement may become...when motion shall have reached the end...it must have attained an infinitely low speed of revolution”, at which point the circle is very large and covers much ground (PTG, 111). As we will see later, this particular way of equating extendedness with a decrease in speed corresponds exactly to Nietzsche’s later theory of the will to power. More specifically, in WP Nietzsche will associate a decrease of force with a certain takeover of vast distances. We should note here that the experience of reading Nietzsche, especially in PTG for example, often includes a kind of build-up towards the mention of dance. Nietzsche refers to the concept of dance when you most expect it, as here in PTG: “at this point we might well ask what notion possessed the nous to impel a random material particle, chosen from that enormous number of points and to revolve it in whirling dance” (PTG, 112, my italics on “dance”).

On Nietzsche’s characterization of the event, see also Nietzsche’s description of the development (a “process”) of tragic art as it occurs “without an artist” in WEN: “in analogy to similar phenomena...the Dionysian rapture of the mass...expresses itself in the individual…[and] from these beginnings the orgiastic frenzy then spreads faster and faster to ever larger circles” - the mass merges into “one immense individual” which engenders the vision of Dionysus through “Apollonian influence” (WEN, 49-50).

29


corresponding description in BT. Nietzsche maintains the sense of bad health which comes with

the term epidemic but couples it instead with a notion of good health: “Dionysian madness”

(which we are likening to the medieval epidemic) is a “neuroses of health” (BT, 7). Here,

Nietzsche equates this “neuroses” with outburst, outbreak and, ultimately, with “superabundance”:

what is superabundant is the Hellenic will, in which Nietzsche sees the capacity for that “immense

suffering” which we encountered earlier (BT, 7). It is this corresponding reference to the suffering

of the Greek Hellenes which tells us that the occurrence of “Dionysian madness” cannot be

equated with the cult festival. As we will see, Nietzsche’s agenda is different here: he isn’t giving

an account of pure Dionysian madness at this point in the text.

Nietzsche’s implicit intention here in BT is to critique popular philological beliefs about

the serenity and “cheerfulness” of the Hellenes (BT, 3). Nietzsche is attempting to assert that the

Greeks had to go through a certain process before attaining their state of happiness (the very

process of art) and that Hellenic “joyfulness” cannot equate to its common meaning as a result of

this process. Nietzsche ultimately proffers a reinterpretation of Hellenic joyfulness: for Nietzsche

joy requires pain. Nietzsche goes about this reinterpretation of joy by highlighting a paradox: the

Greek body in its prime - “in strength, in overbrimming health, in an excess of plenitude” - is

active at the same time as the Hellenic will to “the tragic myth, to affirm the image of all that is

fearsome, wicked, mysterious, annihilating and fateful at the very foundations of existence” (BT,

7). Nietzsche poses the question (essentially to German philologists): “did perhaps endemic fits

exist during those centuries when the Greek body was in its prime…What?” (BT, 7).

The beautiful Greek body is held in a state of constant suffering (BT, 7): i.e. Apollo

incorporates the image of Dionysus (pain) and this equates to joy. For Nietzsche, the state of joy

marks Apollo’s dominance of Dionysus: “the Dionysiac enthusiast...in his transformed state...sees

a new vision outside himself which is the Apolline perfection of his state” (BT, 44, my italics).

“With sublime gestures” it is Apollo who “shows us that the whole world of agony is needed in

order to compel the individual to generate the releasing and redemptive vision” (BT, 26). Chapter

four of this thesis will demonstrate how this state of “constant suffering” occurs for Nietzsche.

This will be through “painful rhythmic obstacles” (WP, 347) that are foreshadowed in BT when

the vision of the Dionysiac enthusiast’s perfected state is suffered repeatedly in rhythmic beats:

30


Dionysian power “discharges itself over and over again in an Apolline world of images” (BT, 44).

We will conclude this chapter by showing that the experience of rhythmic pain is conceived by

Nietzsche as dance, or more specifically as dance rhythm: dance is the “continuous curing of pain

through the joy of pure intuition” (WEN, 54).

Despite what the term intuition might lead one to believe, for Nietzsche the curing of pain

through joy only has relevance in relation to the physical or phenomenal realm. The “joy of pure

intuition” equates to absolute immersion in receptivity and as such concerns how beauty occurs in

the artistic state according to Nietzsche. Heidegger tells us that Nietzsche’s aesthetics is “the

extreme aesthetics” because “the state of creation and enjoyment...is pursued to the farthest

perimeter of the bodily state as such, to what is farthest removed from the spirit, from the

spirituality of what is created, and from its formalistic lawfulness” (Heidegger, 129, my italics).

This is to say that law is instead self-imposed, creative and, we will add, phenomenally bound in

the sense that what is truly creative cannot be predetermined by categories of the understanding.

This is ultimately what Nietzsche intends by describing an affirmation of life: the affirmation of

phenomenal existence. In the preface to BT, Raymond Guess tells us that “if Dionysus and Apollo

are successfully brought into alliance [in a tragedy] the result will be a transformation of

‘pessimism’ - not into optimism, to be sure, but into...affirmation; that is, the Schein [appearance]

that arises will not sap the audience’s strength...but rather will energize the...audience to go on 30

living” (BT, XXV).

The goal of Nietzsche’s affirmation of existence is genuine immersion in appearance.

Heidegger equates Nietzsche’s understanding of form to the Greek definition of appearance: form

corresponds to morphe; form “stands in itself” as a “configuration” (Heidegger, 119). For

Nietzsche, affirmation equates to the love of form “for its own sake” as opposed to “what it [form]

expresses” (Nietzsche in Heidegger, 119). Dance for Nietzsche affirms the love of form, 31

however it does so in a peculiar way: dance is the ultimate handicap because it is restricted to

form. Dance absolutely remains within the limits of the phenomenal world: “when man uses

30 We should qualify that “audience” here would technically count as a “non-audience” according to Nietzsche’s notion of the “ideal spectator” (See BT, 42 and WEN, 50). 31 While it may occasionally seem that this thesis is arguing that ultimately dance “expresses” music in Nietzsche’s aesthetic, we will demonstrate that this is precisely not the case: Nietzsche wants to see music itself dancing.

31


gesture he remains within the limits of the species, which is to say, within the limits of the

phenomenal world” (DWV, 136). As we will continue to see, dance in Nietzsche’s oeuvre

constantly suffers indictments. Yet Nietzsche “values” dance for its very limitedness: 32

progression to the highest point of the taxonomic rank is attained through this phenomenal

handicap. Through dance we climb from species to life. It is through dance (and through its place

on the bottom rung as the subordinate minion) that life becomes the actual living-out of the

“illusion” or “dream” that Nietzsche wants for man. Dance is the aesthetic living of life through

knowledge of the un-aesthetic metaphysical world of the will. Primal pain, the truth of becoming,

is “refracted” through representation and this equates to joy (WEN, 56). Dance is the sign of 33

pain but it is also the curing of pain through the joyful outburst of pain. As we will see, dance

equates to protection for Nietzsche, to the presence of a necessary shield from pain.

In WEN Nietzsche writes: “the will as the supreme pain brings forth from itself an ecstasy

which is identical to the pure intuition and production of the work of art. What is the physiological

process? A condition of painlessness must be created somewhere - but how?” (WEN, 35, original

italics). This “physiological process”, as we will see, is experienced in the later work in the

configuration of the body. Much later, in the subdivision of WP, “The Will to Power as Art”,

Nietzsche will describe “the work of art where it appears without an artist”, that is “as body, as

organization” (WP, 419). Here, individual willing and artistic labour ceases so that a greater

power can express itself through the individual. The next chapter will attempt to demonstrate the

role of dance in this enactment of “the body”. What, with Badiou, was referred to in the

introduction as the restraint or “slowness” of dance for Nietzsche will thus be related to the

interpretation given above of dance’s phenomenal limitedness. We will also begin to explicate

here why we have positioned dance and a notion of restraint in relation to force and form.

32 We must remember that good and bad for Nietzsche are constituted outside of morality and as such what is called ‘good’ only reflects its contribution towards the increase of power. 33 The reading here comes primarily from “Notebook 7, end 1970 - April 1871” in WEN. See also above citation, i.e. WEN, 54.

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2. The Mechanics of the Will to Power

The most obvious economy in which dance partakes in Nietzsche’s later work is

characterized by physical activity. It is from out of the physical economy of climbing, leaping,

33


walking, gymnastics and headstands that dance would need to be plucked in order to be

thematized. It is ultimately dance’s capacity to enact the event of representation in Nietzsche’s

aesthetic that distinguishes it, even from within its physical economy, which, on the whole,

doesn’t appear to have many overt ties to art. While Nietzsche’s idea of representation will occupy

the next chapter, this one will focus on how the notion of representation is tied to the appearance

or upsurgence of the body for Nietzsche, which, in turn, is tied to dance in a very specific way.

This chapter seeks to show how dance bears a fundamental relationship to the configuration of the

body as the work of art. This is to say that it is dance in the texts of Nietzsche, and not running or

gymnastics, which enacts his concept of the body.

The capacity for representation typified by dance ultimately provides a solution to the

problem of knowledge, which, for Nietzsche, fundamentally concerns how knowledge of

Dionysus could be attained in the phenomenal realm of appearances. Nietzsche sees dance, above

all else, stuck in this realm. This chapter will demonstrate how dance operates in a better way than

language when it comes to knowledge, which first and foremost concerns knowledge of motion

for Nietzsche. Nietzsche’s position on language does not change from the early compilation we

have of WEN to the late WP; we will see that Nietzsche critiques the same “sense language of

man” (which, as we will see, is metaphorical in a negative sense for Nietzsche) in both. It is from

out of this critique of language that Nietzsche is prompted to uncover a purer method of

apprehending force. Chapter three will show how such purity is achieved through Nietzsche’s

concept of the symbol as opposed to the metaphor. We will see how dance in Nietzsche’s texts

enacts a form of representation, that is absolutely direct, exclusively through the symbol.

By the time of WP, the presence of dance has almost entirely lost the magic it seemed to

have in the early dissertation, DWV. The state of “magical enchantment” is no longer thematized

by Nietzsche in these terms. The functionality of dance set up in DWV, as a kind of unique

apparatus through which pure force could be accessed, becomes more automatic and routined in

WP. The accomplishment of the aesthetic state (thematized by Nietzsche in WP in terms of the

“victory” of the will to power) is nothing very special at all. This scenario appears to be the result

of Nietzsche’s relegation of the possibilities of the cognition of force/Dionysus/the Will explicitly

to unconsciousness (out of which Nietzsche invents a new consciousness as a “higher” bodily

34


“intelligence” (WP, 421)). This bodily intelligence, however, has nothing to do with the idea that

my body is intelligent. Bodily intelligence instead must be understood in terms of the mechanics 34

of the will to power as a “physiological process,” that is to say, strictly as activity in opposition to

being. It is for this reason that Nietzsche imagines the mechanics of the will to power as dance,

through which Nietzsche ultimately reimagines the idea of form. The will to power as

“form-engendering force” proffers this appearance and then that in a way that climbing, running 35

and walking do not. This chapter will show that, while such activities most certainly surround

dance in Nietzsche’s economy of physical terms, they do not offer fertile enough ground for the

action of the will to power in its formation of the body as a kind of coalescence.

*

In “The Will to Power as Art” Nietzsche presents two conditions in which art appears in

man: the Apollonian condition as the compulsion to have visions and the Dionysian condition as

the compulsion to an orgiastic state. The affiliation of dance with the Dionysian condition could

be seen to be symptomatic of the orgiastic state which exemplifies the Dionysian. Such a state of

orgy seems to speak directly to the body and to its role in the state of release, freedom or ecstasy -

a formulation which takes place over against the supposedly Apollonian/cognitive capacity for

representation in images. However, we will see that it is through dance’s very relation to Apollo

that the body as Nietzsche imagines it comes to the fore. The body as it immediately comes to

mind, as a persisting substance or nutrient medium, does not participate in any way in Nietzsche’s

aesthetic theory. The body is only there orgiastically for Nietzsche. The upsurgence of the body is

nothing other than the activity of the upsurge itself, as a coordinated increase of strength. Instead

of there being the presence of the body in the state of orgy, the state of orgy is what gives rise to a

34 The emergence of therapeutic dance practices like Ideokinesis are most likely linked to a certain interpretation of Nietzschean philosophy. These disciplines maintain the rhetoric of bodily intelligence but take Nietzsche’s theory elsewhere. See Mabel E. Todd, The Thinking Body for an elucidation of Ideokinesis. 35 See Heidegger “Rapture as Form-engendering Force” in Nietzsche pp.115-123

35


body - not once and for all, but as something which has to be maintained. Therefore, the body in

this scenario cannot be taken to be something there beforehand, ready to be transported into the

aesthetic state (by being placed in front of the art object, so to speak). If the orgiastic state itself is

the appearance of body, this body marks the appearance of art for Nietzsche. This is how man is to

be overcome - he is to become the work of art. In WP Nietzsche says that “our lust for knowledge

of nature is a means through which the body desires to perfect itself” and that “in the long run, it

is not a question of man at all: he is to be overcome” - overcome by the body (WP, 358).

Nietzsche initially seems to confirm the connection between the Dionysian power of art

and dance when he tells us how the Dionysian and Apollonian powers of art are rehearsed in

“everyday life”: it is the power of the Dionysian that releases itself in “gesture, passion, song and

dance” during intoxication, as opposed to the Apollonian which brings a different kind of

visibility to the fore - those of association, poetry and vision in general, all during the state of

dream (WP, 420, my italics). Despite the affiliation of the Dionysian with dance, there are two

details which encumber any enduring connection: 1) the type of economy in which Nietzsche

places dance and 2) the fact that it occurs in the everyday or artless rehearsal of the artistic states.

The final configuration Nietzsche provides of the artistic process isn’t a rehearsal - it concerns

original artistic performance. The procedure at this greater stage includes the Dionysian excitation

of the animal functions via images and a corresponding Apollonian overflow of physicality into

images. This is how the double compulsion (towards orgy and vision) interacts in Nietzsche’s

aesthetic and it means that the configuration of the body/the work of art in the state of orgy

involves Apollo too. Nietzsche does say that the sexuality and voluptuousness of Dionysus “are

not lacking” in the Apollonian condition of art (WP, 420).

It is difficult at first to see how the orgiastic state could be involved at the high point of art.

This is because Nietzsche finds art at this point to be “classical” and the “classical style” for

Nietzsche always distinguishes itself against the romantic. Such a differentiation means that art

engenders form and does not remain a chaotic mess of force. “The classical style is essentially a

representation of calm” and a “vision of the calmest gestures” - Nietzsche associates the following

list with this style: “to react slowly; a great consciousness; no feeling of struggle” (WP, 420). This

is what Nietzsche has in mind when he defines the aesthetic state as victorious accomplishment -

36


what accomplishes itself is form to the necessary detriment and preservation of force. He says that

“the highest feeling of power is concentrated in the classical type” (WP, 420). Nietzsche’s

description of the classical style is unavoidably interchangeable with his concept of dance: to align

dance otherwise is to locate it at the heart of the formless Wagnerian style of art, which Nietzsche

deplores vehemently for its very lack of dance, taken as tempo, rhythm, beat, timing, measure,

pace.

The tie between dance and the classical style prompts us to go looking for a kind of dance

that is other than the dancing involved in the everyday rehearsal of the Dionysian power of art.

And Nietzsche confirms that we should indeed do so. Nietzsche finds the highest feeling of power

concentrated in the classical type and, not coincidentally, he also finds dance to be the highest

feeling of power: “strength as a feeling of dominion in the muscles, as suppleness and pleasure in

movement, as dance, as levity and presto” (WP, 421). It is during an analysis which centres on 36

this moment in WP that Franck is prompted to say that the highest form of victory achieved by the

will to power is the form of dance (Franck, 157). The fact that Nietzsche also conceives of the

aesthetic state as a domination of strength brings dance into relation with the aesthetic itself. Here,

strength is simply strength of feeling and not any feeling of strength, as a particular feeling

amongst others; strength is pure feeling. Strength, as such, equates to the presence of the beautiful

object in Nietzsche’s aesthetic. If we put the pieces together, strength as the presence of the

beautiful is typified or ‘embodied’ in dance in the classical style. Against this scenario, the

dancing involved in the everyday enactment of art is only a sign of the possibility of art’s

appearance in man. It does not constitute the actual appearance of art - man is yet to be overcome.

We must emphasize that the work of art as it appears for Nietzsche (as man overcome)

does not mean that man has been hung on the wall as the beautiful object. Man does not become a

36 In the context of this citation, Gregory Moore (see “The Physiology of Art” in Nietzsche, Biology and Metaphor) says that “the highest aesthetic achievement [for Nietzsche] is to shape and form life itself”, quoting Nietzsche directly: “to become master of the chaos that one is; to compel one’s chaos to become form” (109). Here, Moore is outlining the German aesthetic history of the concept of the Kunsttriebe - a term taken up by Nietzsche to describe the two aesthetic drives. Moore describes how the Kunsttriebe originally explained “spontaneously creative behaviour observable in animals” when they do things like build nests (89). Throughout the chapter, Moore accounts for the eighteenth century concept of the Kunsttriebe as a rhythmic principle; an organic artistic process; and also its relationship to the plastic activity of cells.

37


spectacle when he becomes beautiful; he endures, or remains, in the state of feeling. The work for

Nietzsche constitutes the presence of the aesthetic state as feeling (strength) and in this state man

feels himself to be a god. This is when man dances: “man feels himself to be a god”, not by

singing and dancing festively, but by “moving as a god moves”. Here, “man is no longer an artist,

he has become a work of art” (BT, 18). In WP Nietzsche sees the appearance of body in this

transformation of man: the work of art without an artist appears as body and organization (WP,

419). Man does not yet take part in a body when he is rehearsing art, which is marked by everyday

gesture, passion, song and dance in WP and, in a parallel way, by artless singing and dancing in

the wild festival of Dionysus in the early texts. What is missing from this rehearsal stage of art is

Apollo’s recognition of the fact that he embodies Dionysus. When Apollo welcomes Dionysus

knowingly, overcoming his blindness to Dionysus (a blindness apparent in rehearsal) so that he

finally “sees” Dionysus, we could say that Apollo dances - nobly, classically, self-possessed, in

control and with a joyfulness that can only be the result of tragic knowledge. Apollo only

experiences this knowledge in embodying it.

The affiliation between the body and dance at the everyday level of art is not really a

possible one for Nietzsche - for the reason that dance at this point in art’s evolution is only a

rehearsal, a dry run before the real one. This fact is emphasized by the economy in which dance

partakes here - gesture, passion and song. None of these are signs of self-imposed lawfulness or

self-control. Nietzsche uses this kind of economy to characterize the Dionysian festival in his

early work which, there too, does not typify the zenith of art as the accomplishment of the

aesthetic state. The economy we are on the lookout for, instead, is that of music and dance. It is

this economy which marks the fulfilment of what Nietzsche describes as man’s state of

“enchantment” - the point at which man “feels himself to be a god” and “moves...as once he saw

the gods move in his dreams” (BT, 18). Dance as it occurs in aesthetic fulfilment is always the

sign of the domination of feeling and of the internal production of such feeling. The achievement

of this state of pure feeling causes Nietzsche to reposition the spectacle. We will turn to

Nietzsche’s theory of appearance in the final chapter of this thesis, where we will find that

Nietzsche is, in the end, more interested in a dance that is produced in me, as opposed to the act of

watching one. Prior to this, it will be necessary to analyse why the aesthetic state becomes

38


synonymous with the body, or with internal production, for Nietzsche. We will find that there is

an intensification in the aesthetic state and that this equates to the configuration of the body for

Nietzsche. Not coincidentally, the aesthetic state is also equated with dance. How, then, do dance

and the body interrelate in the aesthetic state? Does Nietzsche imagine that the body, being a

configuration and not a nutrient medium, takes place as a dance?

Body is synonymous with form for Nietzsche and form means “position, order, grouping,

mixing or separation” (PTG, 91). In BGE, Nietzsche explains that our body is simply the arisal of

life as a phenomenon according to a doctrine of power relations likened to a happy community

where “the ruling class identifies itself with the successes of the community” (BGE, 20). Here,

“all willing is simply a matter of commanding and obeying on the groundwork...of a society

constructed out of many souls” or under-wills. The formation of a body for Nietzsche is best

thought of in terms of grouping, be it the subdivision of an army or any cluster of individuals

engaged in the same activity. Those few bearing a different mood would not be engaged - the

ruling class differentiates itself against these, maybe eventually drawing some in. There is also, of

course, the corps de ballet, the body of the dancers collectively and it is here that we find the most

resemblance to the mechanics of the will. Deleuze tells us that the most remarkable feature of

Nietzsche’s theory of the will is its total lack of struggle (Deleuze, 82). A battalion in action on

the field is the antithesis to the collective body of the dancers (thought of in a similar way to

Nietzsche’s description of the chorus as one giant lung). The body of the army cannot represent

the feeling of ease and calm serenity associated with Nietzsche’s abolition of the toil of individual

willing in the theory of the victory of the will. To fight is to act out of a lack of self-possession - it

concerns individual survival, the very state of toil which is to be overcome. To dance, on the other

hand, is to be controlled - that is, by the whole. In dance the whole expresses itself through the

individual - the individual stops willing and becomes will. The dancer floats. The feeling of ease

at the point of victory means that there is no more need of force - things run smoothly and of their

own accord. In Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle, Pierre Klossowski explains how the body, as that

which fortuitously comes together, selects only those forces which grant it sustenance and

preserve its activity (Klossowski, 21). The will to power engenders form for Nietzsche through the

enactment of a budget: mastery over space is gained via the extension of force in a way that is

39


energy-saving (WP, 340). Even though the will “continually encounters similar efforts on the part

of other bodies...[it] ends by coming to an arrangement (‘union’) with those of them that are

sufficiently related to it: thus they then conspire together for power. And the process goes on - ”

(WP, 340).

This kind of thing happens all the time, in a totally unremarkable way, without our

knowing or having to know very much about it at all. Dancing, for Nietzsche, is an unremarkable

event of motion in this way. Underwhelmed, Nietzsche accomplishes his ontological treatment of

motion, which starts out in line with that of Heidegger: through the critique of kinesis. 37

Heidegger asserts that the definition of movement as kinesis (as the change of place of a being - in

Nietzsche’s terms: “something” enduring, “the fiction of a little clump of atom” (WP, 338), as

opposed to process and activity) is to allow only one kind of movement in Aristotle’s definition to

dominate (Heidegger, 190). This is to say that there are various kinds of movement included in the

Greek interpretation of the essence of phusis and that those made mention of are inconclusive -

they are a list of examples with kinesis being but one of them. The domination of kinesis is

therefore not the expression of its essence. We could here recall, in the same manner as Derrida

does in Force and Signification, the reproach Leibniz made to Descartes; that of having explained

everything in nature according to the language of our perception and of thereby ignoring force by

confusing it with language. Leibniz concludes that “the ideas of size, figure and motion are not so

distinctive as is imagined, and . . . stand for something imaginary relative to our perceptions”

(Derrida, 18). Nietzsche will emphasize: 1) the translation of force into language as a knowledge

of force which falls short of force itself, and 2) the unremarkable nature of force on the basis of

the fact that we are actually fully familiar with it and accustomed to it apart from language. We

will see how dance, for Nietzsche, represents force in a better way than language ever could and

we will also uncover how the faculty of the understanding differs when it comes to dance.

Ultimately for Nietzsche, dance apprehends motion in a special way.

The problem of knowledge for Nietzsche is grounded fundamentally in the problem of the

essence of motion. For Nietzsche, an essence is an interpretation and we experience it as such in

the realm apart from cognition/consciousness. Essences are not universally determined: they

37 See “On the Essence and Concept of Φύσις in Aristotle’s Physics B, I” in Pathmarks pp.183-230 40


occupy a pluralistic regime, rising up where there are enough elements in a similar mood to join

together, cease individual labouring, and float in self-possessed formation as “something that does

not will and is unconscious” (WP, 358). For Nietzsche, the set of qualities that make an entity

what it is (without which it loses its identity) are not necessary but rather fortuitous. But Nietzsche

does not entirely reject the capacity to determine essences - he delineates the power through which

one is come upon in the first place. Deleuze tells us that the question of truth finds its supreme

authority in Dionysus as the will to power. This means that Dionysus is the power through which

essence is organized as such. Nietzsche sets universal essences into the whirl of becoming and

multiplicity: a determined essence is a configuration of sense and value which has found its

instance of configuration in the will (Dionysus). More specifically, Deleuze sees Dionysus oppose

the dialectic through a sophistic art when Dionysus himself replaces the ontological regime of

universal truth. When it comes to dialectical truth, it is dance that opposes dialectical

responsibilities (Deleuze, 9). When Deleuze says that the task of Dionysus is to make us graceful

by teaching us to dance (Deleuze, 18), it is in regards to dance’s affirmation of pluralism and

interpretation. Dance’s innocence to dialectical crimes (dance is dialectically irresponsible - it

does not argue for eternal truths) brings it into relation with Deleuze’s first statement about

innocence. Innocence, as dance, reunites force, which has been split in two with the invention of

“a neutral subject endowed with free will to which we give the capacity to act and refrain from

action” (Deleuze, 23). 38

Belief in universal essences marks an inability to differentiate between an actual action

and the sign of that action (Nietzsche says “image” of an action here) (WP, 358). Such signage

constitutes language for Nietzsche. The cognitive awareness we have of the existence of stimulus

38 Deleuze’s overall emphasis is on Dionysus. Deleuze highlights the domination of Dionysus at the time of Nietzsche’s BT (12); and he sees Apollo replaced in Nietzsche’s later work for Ariadne - in a “complementary” (rather than antithetical) binary, that of Ariadne/Dionysus (n.17 p.201). Deleuze calls the “transmutation of pain into joy” Dionysian (173); and dance is a Dionysian affirmation for Deleuze (170). In chapter four of this thesis, we will find that the law of Apollo rules over the mechanics of force. As we will see, the significance of Apollonian rhythm, as the rule of plastic art, concerns how it governs the periodicity of form. While Deleuze concludes that “the will to power is not force but the...differential element that determines the relation of forces” (197), he does not emphasize the differential work of Apollo, the god of plastic appearance, in the mechanics of force (see Deleuze p.85 on the plasticity of power).

41


and activity (cause and effect, a doer separated from a deed) is already metaphorical, a translation

into the “sense language of man”, to use Nietzsche’s terminology in WP, as we will see. Such

“metaphorical knowledge” is of changes “we ourselves continually experience” (WEN, 149,

original italics). In WP, Nietzsche writes that the comprehension of an event as the changing place

of a being established itself in the functions of language and grammar, and founded the belief in

cause and effect (the segregation between what is put into action and who puts into action). In

WEN he states: “the intention or the volition results in nouns, the doing in verbs” (WEN, 149). As

far as Nietzsche is concerned, lawfulness founded on obedience is not in the nature of motion.

Instead, any sequence of phenomena demonstrates a power relationship between two or more

forces. That a creature acts in a certain way, “in this way rather than that”, does not demonstrate

obedience. The creature behaves in this specific way out of its own constitution (WP, 337), which

is to say without contingency and out of its own fullness and strength. In this particular sense,

Nietzsche effaces the question about freedom altogether. For a creature to act in this certain way

as opposed to that isn’t to act in response to a law under the direction of that law and in a way that

would be different if that law ceased to exist. To act out of a way that is inherent in me means that

“something cannot also be something else” and that something “cannot do now this and now

something else” (WP, 337). The assumption that a creature acts the way it acts under compulsion

is to misunderstand the subject, says Nietzsche (WP, 337). Nietzsche’s thesis states that acts of

willing cannot be separated from motion because willing is not a surfeit.

The reunion of the subject with action does not strengthen the subject in any way other

than in its will to power. And strengthening, for Nietzsche, always concerns the body, which, in

turn, is always characterized by movement. In WP, Nietzsche establishes a “logic of the

perspectivism of consciousness” whereby a “perspective-setting force” which “measures, feels,

forms according to its own force” is centred (WP, 339). When Nietzsche uncovers this

perspectival centre it is by no means in order to ground the doer apart from the deed, for the belief

that bodily motions and changes can be explained by means of “a consciousness that determines

purposes” has been abandoned (WP, 357). Nietzsche sees conscious willing and conscious

purposes as “means through which something essentially different from what appears in

consciousness is to be achieved” (WP, 357). Nietzsche equates the achievements of the will to

42


power (its victories of form) with a desire to strengthen the body, that is, “to achieve something

that lies outside our consciousness” (WP, 357). Even though the emphasis on interpretation in

Nietzsche’s philosophy may appear to hinge on the subject and its willfulness (as that which

causes and masters motion) it is never the subject who powerfully interprets and who creatively

evaluates - rather it is Dionysus aka the will to power. While any of the physical activities

recorded by Nietzsche might seem to act equally as indices for the abandonment of conscious

willing, dance appears to be that which comes to Nietzsche’s mind first. This is because the

virtuosity of dance rests in its capacity to bear pure force directly or to undergo direct

representation of the image. Above all, this capacity affirms dance over language - language being

the comparatively indirect and deficient sign system of action. This medium only provides a

deficient image: representation of images (of pure action) through language fall short of force,

failing to reach force. They are instances of the “spell of particular grammatical functions” that are

actually just “physiological value judgements” (BGE, 20, original italics). The desire to perfect

knowledge is simply the body strengthening itself for Nietzsche, who declares that philosophy has

been “no more than an interpretation of the body and a misunderstanding of the body” -

physiological needs have been unconsciously disguised under “the cloaks” of the ideal and the

purely spiritual (GS, 5).

Dance’s forbearance of force is equatable with the abatement of the will to spiritual/ideal

knowledge. It is perhaps Nietzsche who gives the body to dance (even dance in the contemporary

is seen to maintain exclusive knowledge of the body and to be the chief site of the body - this

hasn’t always been the case). When nobody and nothing puts “arms and legs” into motion in

Nietzsche’s theory of the will, striving towards knowledge has ceased and “arms and legs” are

revealed for what they are: fictions in quotation marks (BGE, 18). Having arms and legs equals

having knowledge of them and this marks the abandonment of feeling for Nietzsche. In this way,

we could say that Nietzsche wants man to remain in the state of the child delineated by Rousseau.

Children only experience pleasure and pain for Rousseau - they have no sense of objects that are

outside of themselves. If a child is tickled with a feather, they know pleasure and not the feather. 39

39 See Emile, p.34 for example. 43


For Nietzsche, “arms” and “legs” equate to theorizing about motion in a way that inherently falls

short of motion.

Ultimately, for Nietzsche, motion is the most familiar thing to us. This means that we

grasp what motion is before we use language. And dance comes before language for Nietzsche in

order to serve this very purpose. While Nietzsche asserts that acts of willing are “unfamiliar” and

disunified in BGE, this is strictly in relation to the representation of the will through language,

which unifies the will merely in a word. Against this specifically “philosophical” inadequacy (the

word and cognitive knowledge falls short of force), acts of willing are complex, multifarious,

disunified and unfamiliar instances (to our knowledge). This is because they consist of a plurality

of feelings that are not teleological: “the feeling of the state away from which, the feeling of the

state towards which, and the feeling of this “away from” and “towards” themselves” (BGE, 18,

original italics and quotations). These feelings are “accompanied by a feeling of the muscles”

(BGE, 18) which, in Nietzsche’s texts, above all signals dance. In WP, Nietzsche describes an

increase in muscular strength when the sexes are in close contact at social dances, which makes

feats of strength possible: “one scarcely believes one's own eyes - or one's watch”. It is here in the

trivial social dance hall that we find the most direct instance, perhaps, of a description of dance in

Nietzsche’s oeuvre: “dancing in itself...brings with it a kind of intoxication of the whole vascular,

nervous, and muscular system” (WP, 425).

The changes which constitute the feeling of motion include the countless events which

occur at every moment and which have nothing to do with consciousness, thought or sensation

(perception through contact with things outside the body). Nietzsche maintains that even the

movement of the rectum is a motion of the will “which would be visible if we could take our eyes

there” (WEN, 27). He argues that “we do not understand a single causality, but we have an

immediate experience of them” and that “time, space and causality are only metaphors of

knowledge by which we interpret things for ourselves” (WEN, 149). In WP Nietzsche declares the

same: kinesis “as a theory of motion is already a translation into the sense language of man” and

the formulation of appearances as consecutive (those which Kant was at pains to explain) are

“judgements relative to the eye and psychology and are therefore semiotic” (WP, 338). While

motion can only be comprehended semiotically, there is a superior handicap through which pure

44


force can be felt. The only method of mediation that is relatively direct is not through the study of

signs given through language, but through the interpretation (as appropriation, which is

everything that learning entails for Nietzsche) of symbols. Dance is a symbol and not a metaphor

according to Nietzsche. In order to explicate the symbol’s role in what we called in chapter one

dance’s phenomenal limitation, or here in this chapter dance’s mediation of pure force, we will

return to an early text of Nietzsche’s, DWV.

3. Dance and Representation

The fact that Nietzsche does not consider dance in terms of an ‘empirical’ body of choreographic

works has caused some writers to interpret dance as a metaphor or symbol across Nietzsche’s

45


texts. What has gone amiss, however, is the delineation of the symbol itself - which has a 40

specific function in relation to dance in Nietzsche’s early dissertation, DWV. It is only through a

reading of the symbol as Nietzsche sees it that the characterization of dance as such can be

properly understood.

The most important economy for Nietzsche throughout both BT and DWV is that of

dance, music and poetry because these constitute the symbols of feeling that are active in the 41

achievement of the aesthetic state. Nietzsche extracts dance in particular from this economy for

the way that it enacts “the symbolism of the entire body” in its overcoming of “the symbolism...of

the mouth, the face and the word” (BT, 21). This is to say that dance overcomes recitation and

that it works alongside music and poetry in doing so. This chapter will demonstrate how dance

enacts representation non-cognitively (and therefore “purely) in the aesthetic state according to

Nietzsche. As we will see, this is thanks to the supreme impediment dance proves to be. In this

way, the shortcoming or hindrance of dance marks its greatest worth for Nietzsche. Dance marks

the absolute limit of proximity or intimacy with the object of beauty.

While we have said that the “value” of dance in this somewhat ironic way is intensified

and made more mechanical in WP, at the point of DWV it still seems possible to justify ignorance

to the superior limitedness of dance - even though this limitation is explicitly set up there. Dance’s

function in the achievement of the aesthetic state in DWV still feels like something grand, special,

40 After describing the absence of a strictly empirical category of analyses of dance in Nietzsche’s oeuvre (see footnote 11 of this thesis), Atwell says that dance for Nietzsche is instead symbolic (20). It is for similar reasons that Crawford finds it necessary to conduct a tiered and progressive interpretation of dance - “dancing pens” advances to “dancing bodies” which then tips into what Crawford calls “mystical dance”, as that which no longer belongs to empirical experience (318). 41 This economy is very difficult to navigate because its terms fluctuate unevenly - sometimes a term or two will take on a title belonging to the lower state of art when Nietzsche is clearly referring to the highest state. At BT 44, the primary economy we have designated comes in the version of “dance, tone and word.” Sometimes dance is referred to as gesture even though, as we will see, gesture in general marks the preliminary phase of art. In a similar way, sometimes music is referred to as musical tone and poetry as word. In the latter case, things become quite confusing because word also belongs to the lower phase of the symbolism of gesture. We will come across an instance of word in the lower phase in just a moment - in relation to the enactment of dance as the overcoming of the word (and the mouth and face). Where word/poetry occurs in reference to the accomplishment of the uppermost phase of art, Nietzsche is referring to the union of imagery (epic poetry) and “the intoxication of sound” (lyric poetry), which had hitherto been separated - strewn between image and sound (DWV, 138).

46


remarkable. But this is the case only due to the remarkable accomplishment of music in

Nietzsche’s early texts. When it comes to WP, the sentiment around dance, even if it was always

actually “false”, has been completely lost. Dance as the index for the victory of the will to power

isn’t uplifting. While Deleuze tells us that “it is Dionysus’ task to make us graceful, to teach us to

dance [and that] even a historian hostile or indifferent to Nietzschean themes recognizes joy,

buoyant gracefulness, mobility and ubiquity as characteristic of Dionysus” (Deleuze, 18), does he

question the lightness of the figure of dance for Nietzsche when he endorses it as such? It is upon

consideration of DWV and, coextensively, BT, that the association of dance with a misleading

notion of happiness and joyfulness is altered. If dance gives us “the instinct of play” (Deleuze, 18)

it is inasmuch as such play is necessarily and grievously limited to the Apollonian-phenomenal

world of appearances. If dance in Nietzschean philosophy “transmutes heavy into light” (Deleuze,

194), such lightness carries a mournful weight.

*

Nietzsche’s philosophy of feeling (presented in DWV) sees a transformation of man

himself in the aesthetic state. We will see how this involves an absolute reduction of the distance

between man and the beautiful object/the work of art. To begin with, however, the first move

towards art according to Nietzsche takes place when the multiple arts (as artistic “means”) are

“called on jointly to assist” in the overthrow of spectatorial enjoyment in semblance (BT, 133).

Pleasure in semblance means that painted scenery, for example, is enjoyed as something painted

and not as something real (BT, 133).

The overthrow of semblance for Nietzsche is accomplished by the power of music. As

discussed in the introduction to this thesis, Nietzsche does not pool the multiple arts together in

order to dominate them with music. The multiple arts themselves are overthrown with the whole

overthrow of semblance because the very separateness of the individual arts is what makes them

arts of semblance, according to Nietzsche. Above uniting the arts, Nietzsche sees a total collapse

47


in their old functions so that the scene which they constitute comes to life: “the statue now walks

about, the painted scenery moves” (DWV, 133). Nietzsche’s amalgamation of the hitherto strict

separation of artistic means radicalizes the history of aesthetics. According to Nietzsche, it has

been held “that a union of two or more art forms cannot produce an intensification of aesthetic

pleasure” and as such marks a “barbaric error of taste” (GMD, 8). Nietzsche sees ear-men and

eye-men in this principle; it marks the “bad modern way” of not being able to enjoy as “complete

human beings” (GMD, 8). Nietzsche’s idea of the complete human being has been associated 42

with dance on at least two other occasions. In WP, dancing is the mobilization of the whole

muscular system; and in BT dance overcomes recitation with the movement of every limb/the

whole body. This chapter will deepen the association between dance and Nietzsche’s

understanding of completion.

When Nietzsche replaces pleasure in semblance with pleasure in the symbol, he is

correcting what he takes to be an erroneous interpretation of the ideal spectator. Nietzsche

explains how we “had always believed that a proper spectator...always had to remain conscious of

the fact that what he saw before him was a work of art and not empirical reality, whereas the

tragic chorus of the Greeks is required to see in the figures on stage real, physically present living

beings” (BT, 37). Through the symbol and the domination of feeling enacted by it, belief in

semblance is overcome. The replacement, belief in the symbol, is described by Nietzsche as a

mood in which the Dionysian spectator “sees everything as having been enchanted” (DWV, 134).

Nietzsche outlines four events involved in the accomplishment of the state of enchantment and

they all take place in the spectator, a Dionysiac enthusiast. The spectator sees himself as a satyr;

he sees Dionysus; he sees the Apolline perfection of himself in a vision outside himself; and he

speaks through the symbols of dance, tone and word (dance, music and poetry) (BT, 44). In line 43

with what we discovered in chapter two of this thesis, dance alone here marks the cessation of

individual willing and participation in the whole, which is thematized in terms of nature and the

42 We should emphasize that the idea of the “complete human”, which, as this chapter will find, equates to “the body” for Nietzsche, is synonymous with the capacity to enjoy as a whole. Enjoying as a whole primarily means that man is wholly in the aesthetic state of feeling. Nietzsche explains; “the idea that we can no longer enjoy as complete human beings” marks how we have been “torn into little pieces by absolute art forms, and hence enjoy as little pieces” (GMD, 8). 43 See footnote 41.

48


primal One in Nietzsche’s early texts. We also know that this participatory state enacted by dance

is tied to the completion of man. At the crescendo of the aesthetic state in DWV, we find that the

image of “an intensified human being” is represented “with supreme physical energy by the whole

symbolism of the body in the gesture of dance” (DWV, 138).

While the symbolism of the body is fully articulated “in the gesture of dance”, Nietzsche’s

introduction to gesture is somewhat complicated because he doesn’t link gesture to dance right

away, as we might expect. “Painting and sculpture represent human beings through gesture...the

pleasure in looking at them consists in understanding the symbol, despite the fact that it is

semblance” (DWV, 135). Nietzsche’s introduction to gesture begins, instead, with a delineation of

a theory of spectatorship comparable to the German Idealist notion of Einfühlung or aesthetic

empathy: “a spectator feels a sympathetic innervation of the same parts of the face or limbs which

he sees in motion” (DWV, 134). While the notion of Einfühlung has been wholeheartedly adopted

by the contemporary dance studies discipline, it has also been thoroughly translated or recast

through the more familiar term “kinesthetic empathy.” At this point in the thesis, we will not 44

focus on the fact that kinesthetic empathy (or something seemingly akin to it) in Nietzsche’s

thought does not have an obvious link to dance for Nietzsche. We will make this connection in

chapter four, focusing instead, for now, on a delineation of what is lost in the translation of

Einfühlung, as a strictly philosophical term, into kinesthetic empathy. Such an analysis will lead

us through the nature of the problem of force and form in the history of aesthetics. We will also

see how Nietzsche’s early theory of enchantment, as an attempt to preserve the life of the work,

destroys the subject-object relation of aesthetics. As we will see, this ultimately results in a new

theory of vision.

In the introduction to Kinesthetic Empathy in Creative and Cultural Practices, Amelia

Jones acknowledges the philosophical-aesthetic context of Einfühlung during her presentation of

kinesthetic empathy and its etymological roots. But in wanting to take the concept of Einfühlung

over as merely empirical, Jones fails to see the bearing of the history of the term. Kinesthetic

empathy, taken in almost exactly the sense of Nietzsche’s description of sympathetic innervation,

44 See Dee Reynolds (ed.) Kinesthetic Empathy in Creative and Cultural Practices p.224; and Susan Leigh Foster, Choreographing Empathy: Kinesthesia in Performance p.127.

49


is thus reduced to a list of facts about art watching. The estrangement of Einfühlung from

philosophical aesthetics appears to have resulted in the concealment of what is actually at stake in

both Einfühlung and the contemporary rendering of it. Attempting to show the presence of

kinesthetic empathy in the aesthetics of Henri Bergson, Jones emphasizes how the artist, in

composing a work, chooses the “outward signs of his emotions” which “our body is likely to

imitate mechanically, though slightly, as soon as it perceives them” (Jones, 11). Buried beneath

Bergson’s emphasis on the spectatorial recollection of the original artistic state (as a reliving of

the feeling associated with original composition), is the desire to restore the original force of the

work despite its having been weighed down and deadened by form. This tension between force

and form is also present in Nietzsche’s thought. Heidegger confirms that Nietzsche “understands

the aesthetic state on the basis of the state of the creator...thus the effect of the artwork is nothing

else than a reawakening of the creator’s state in the one who enjoys the artwork” (Heidegger,

117). We find an emphasis on the restoration of the original creative force of the work amidst

modern philosophies of art. 45

For Susan Leigh-Foster, it is dance above all else, as a muscular vehicle of meaning

(Foster, 128) that successfully preserves the original force of the work. Foster traces kinesthetic

empathy back to the aesthetic treaty of the German idealist Robert Vischer, who finds that through

kinesthetic sensation the observer moves into the object (Foster, 127). For Nietzsche, the attempt

to restore the life of the work takes place through the total destruction of the Hegelian work of art

itself. The idea of creation is central to his theory of the aesthetic state; through the force of

creation, force is understood from within itself. Nietzsche understands the state of creation as a

state of enchantment and a certain notion of embodiment is active in this state for Nietzsche.

While Jones acknowledges the relation of kinesthetic empathy to a German idealist conception of

art as enchantment, she quickly equates it with an embodied response to art (Jones, 11). But for

Nietzsche at least, enchantment is the very upsurgence of art itself. While we find something that

resembles kinesthetic empathy in Nietzsche’s thought (a spectator feels a sympathetic innervation

45 See for example the somewhat generalized absorption of German Idealism by Ananda Coomaraswamy, who thematizes beauty as internal aesthetic activity which completes an ideal relation between the critic and the original aesthetic intuition (on the part of the artist), of which the critic experiences a reproduction (“That Beauty is a State”, p.41).

50


of the same parts of his body which he sees in motion), his texts are far from endorsing the

subject-object relation of traditional aesthetics. Kinesthetic empathy, if we could say that it is

present in Nietzsche’s writings, enacts the destruction of a traditionalist notion of seeing the work.

“How much more powerful and immediate is a shout, compared with something seen!” (DWV,

137). Yet Nietzsche does point out an innervation that comes after sight (the spectator feels...the

same parts...he sees in motion). As we will see, nothing outside the spectator is seen. If this is the

case, what does sight mean? 46

While Nietzsche’s introduction to gesture begins with a delineation of something

comparable to kinesthetic empathy with its emphasis on “the body”, Nietzsche ultimately

thematizes music and not “the body” as such. In the fourth and final dissertation of UM on the

dithyrambic dramatist, art finds its purpose in music, as is always the case with Nietzsche.

Describing the separate functions of each member of the triad of feeling in the aesthetic state

(dance, music and poetry), Nietzsche says that “music transmits the fundamental impulses in the 47

depths of the persons represented in the drama directly to the soul of the listeners, who now

perceive in these same persons’ gestures the first visible form of those inner events” (UM, 239). 48

Here, it is music that causes empathetic transposition to take place and it is music that is finally

comprehended. The spectator sees music in the performer’s gestures when music gives the

spectator the capacity to directly access the first or primordial form of such music. The spectator

thus grasps this first form (music) before it escapes into the everyday and becomes artless

Apollonian appearance (semblance). But in BT it is through the work of Apollo and the symbol

(that is to say, not through music/Dionysus) that music is comprehended. In BT, an illusion is

awoken in the spectator that music is enlivening the plastic world, which is thereby transformed

46 In a parallel way, Heidegger asks “how, and where, is art?” in his Nietzsche lecture series (105). 47 Note that in UM the threefold expression is rendered by Nietzsche as “gestures, music and word”. See footnote 41. 48 In DWV, the language of gesture is placed in a coupling with musical tone - that is, apart from poetry - due to the fact that poetry is more limited than the others in terms of its relationship with consciousness and its lack of “instinct” (DWV, 134). It is on this account that we often exclude deeper analyses of poetry, focusing instead on music and dance. In relation to this issue, we could think further about the historically and anthropologically entrenched kinship between music and dance; and we could also consider a nineteenth century interpretation of poetry as creation in general, which would thus place music and dance under poetry, as forms of poeticizing.

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into the dream of truth for Nietzsche (BT, 100). How can music (the metaphysical) do the work of

Apollo (the physical)? The final chapter of this thesis will seek to show that it is solely on the

grounds of rhythm for Nietzsche that an exchange between the two powers of art can take place.

For now, we can say that music is seen to come into a relation with the phenomenal world in order

to enliven that world by turning it into a symbol of truth.

Even though force is directly apprehended through the symbol, Nietzsche says that the

symbol is an imperfect copy of truth and that it practices “probability” (DWV, 130). This is

because the symbol must act as a veil over force in order not to be destroyed itself. The symbol

thus conceals force in the same move wherein it accesses force. In this way, the Apollonian world

is protected from the destructive capacity of a power which cannot be withstood and which would

spread everywhere uncontrollably if not “tamed” (DWV, 123). We will find that Nietzsche

ultimately wants the veil itself to be revealed and that dance is associated with this revelation.

Before there is dance in the aesthetic state, protection must be enabled. That which

protects Apollo from Dionysus is Apollo himself - through the power of a deception that is as

blissful as Nietzsche’s sober Bacchae (discussed in chapter one as the unification of the duplicity

of dance). The link between dance and the state of true bliss (as a bliss which can only come from

knowing the painful, tragic truth) is a strong one for Nietzsche. When Zarathustra tells us that “a

dancer has ears in his toes” in “The Other Dance Song” (Z, 181), it signals how the dancer,

through dance, is protected from the pure Dionysian power of music. The state of the dancer,

especially in Nietzsche’s later work, is always one of utopian and heavenly delight. This is

because dance is only symbolic of the power of Dionysus. Without the apparatus of the symbol,

the dancer might not remain upright. Nietzsche remarks in BT, “how could anyone fail to be

shattered immediately, having once put their ear to the heart of the universal Will?” (BT, 100).

This thesis has discovered that music is aligned with pure force to the necessary exclusion

of dance. Dance and music, do, however, come together over the problem of force for Nietzsche.

Chapter two argued that dance was not related to the metaphor for Nietzsche; here we can say that

this is because dance is symbolic of music. In BGE, Nietzsche equates a lack of music with a lack

of dance, disassociating dance from metaphor in the same swoop. Accusing Englishmen of being

unphilosophical due to their lack of music, Nietzsche says: “speaking metaphorically (and without

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metaphors): there is no dance or timing in the movement of his soul and his body, not even a

desire for dance or timing, for “music”” (BGE, 144, original grammatical marks). When the pure

force of music is spoken of metaphorically as dance, this isn’t to speak metaphorically (‘without

metaphors’) because dance, in contact with music like this, is symbolic of music. This equates to

the appearance of art. In BT Nietzsche tells us that “the fact that [the god Dionysus] appears at all

with such epic definiteness and clarity, is the effect of Apollo, the interpreter of dreams, who

interprets to the chorus its Dionysiac condition by means of [a] symbolic appearance” (BT, 52).

Freedom equates to knowledge (of Dionysus) for Nietzsche and dance in particular suffers

this knowledge when it puts its ear (or toe) to the heart of music joyfully. But if dance acts as a

representative of Apollo in Nietzsche’s final aesthetic state, what are we to make of Nietzsche’s

summations of Dionysus’ gains? Nietzsche describes a moment where Dionysus “gains the upper

hand” over Apollo, telling us that the total effect of tragedy “closes with a sound that could never

issue from the realm of Apolline art” (BT, 103). But more than the abolition of Apollo, this close

marks his renewal. “Apolline deception is revealed for what it is: a persistent veiling” (BT, 103).

What becomes visible in the renewal of Apollo is the veil (of Apollo) itself. Nietzsche’s final idea

of dance belongs here: to the recognition of the fact that Dionysus/force remains concealed. But

the necessary concealment of Dionysus is known through dance. We could say, in a particular

way and with great caution, that dance doesn’t equate to real action for Nietzsche - rather, it is

mimetic. But we must tread carefully in making such a claim because what constitutes ‘the real’

as far as Nietzsche is concerned, is actually the illusory world: the mimetic capacity of dance, in

this way, would indeed equate to real action. As we saw in chapter two of this thesis, action or

motion is apprehended by dance in a most unique way. In DWV, Nietzsche uses Tanzgeberde,

“gestures of dance”, and not simply Tanz (DWV, 136). He in turn refers to Tanzgeberde as the

“language of gesture” (DWV, 136). As we saw in chapter two, Nietzsche’s emphasis is on

apprehension through feeling as opposed to metaphorical knowing through language. Here in

DWV, Nietzsche appears to have invented a language of feeling to replace a falsified language of

words.

The final pages of DWV, wherein Nietzsche delineates the concept of Tanzgeberde, are

extremely difficult to follow. This is because there is an initial description of Tanzgeberde (DWV,

53


136) followed by another version of it under the same name (DWV, 138). While the term remains

the same across both explications, Tanzgeberde suffers a collapse in the text prior to its final

elaboration. Nietzsche initially introduces us to three characteristics fundamental to man when he

uses the language of gesture (“the symbolism of the eyes”): 1) “he has ceased to be an individual

human being”; 2) he expresses himself “as the human species”; and 3) he remains within the limit

of the phenomenal world (DWV, 136, original italics). Still in the initial explanatory phase,

Nietzsche says that when man “produces musical sound, however, he dissolves the phenomenal

world” (DWV, 136). Then comes the collapse of Tanzgeberde: “when does natural man attain to

the symbolism of musical sound? When does the language of gesture no longer suffice?” (DWV,

136).

We are hereafter on the lookout for the point where dance associates itself directly with

music, which is in line with Sarah Kofman’s argument that “all true music calls for dance and is

inseparable from it” (Kofman, 8). If dance doesn’t come into some better relation with music, a

good one perhaps, we couldn’t expect dance to reappear at all (as it does in Nietzsche’s final 49

conception of art). This is indeed the context in which Tanzgeberde reappears at the close of

DWV. For a significant portion of the explication here, Nietzsche describes the same

characteristics of gesture as he did earlier. The most significant element missing is the emphasis

on the phenomenal limitation of dance. During Nietzsche’s preliminary delineation of

Tanzgeberde, man “speaks as a satyr” through the gestures of dance (DWV, 136, original). In BT,

Nietzsche affirms the significance of the satyr, half goat and half god (BT, 7), against traditional

philological opinion of that “seemingly distasteful figure” (BT, 45). Nietzsche’s conception of the

satyr is fundamentally tied to dance, perhaps specifically to the preliminary phase of the aesthetic

state. We could liken man to being halfway there when he speaks as a satyr in the

“intensified...gestures of dance” (DWV 136). But halfway towards what?

The satyr is not present in the final delineation of Tanzgeberde; the satyr has been replaced

with an “intensified human being” (DWV, 138). In the same way as the satyr, however, this image

of the human is represented “with supreme physical energy by the whole symbolism of the body,

49 Nietzsche talks about “good dancing” in his later work - we will uncover the deeper significance of this in the next chapter.

54


in the gesture of dance” (Tanzgeberde) (DWV, 138). The absence of the satyr appears to mark the

presence of Dionysus instead, who appears in man at the crescendo of art. But why, then, doesn’t

Nietzsche change the characterization of dance from one phase to the other? Both Dionysus and

the satyr speak through the “intensified language of dance.” If Tanzgeberde really hasn’t changed

at all at the high point of art, does this mean that the physical limitation of dance (described in

relation to the satyr only) also applies to the appearance of Dionysus at the crescendo of art? In the

following chapter of this thesis we will be interested in how the expression of limitedness still

equates to an increase of force or an intensification of the aesthetic state.

4. Rhythm

The opening chapter to this thesis asked how the will, as truth and thereby strictly

un-aesthetic, could possibly play an “artistic game”. We said that the idea of play for Nietzsche

meant “play with intoxication” more specifically and we identified this as the state of ecstasy. If

intoxication belongs to the festival of Dionysus, Nietzsche wants it to be played with to the extent

that intoxication is overcome in art: “in tragedy the singing and dancing is no longer the

instinctive intoxication of nature” (DWV, 133). This means that ecstasy for Nietzsche does not

belong to wild singing and dancing. On the contrary, Nietzsche finds self-possession in the

aesthetic state of feeling. In PTG, the dramatist’s art alone “closes” the state of self-possession.

This closure is a closure of the gap between artist and art work. Nietzsche opposes the dramatist to

the poet and the philosopher, who grasp for verse and dialectical thinking in order to get a hold on

55


their state of enchantment and perpetuate it. But the enchantment of the poet and philosopher

cannot subsist “in the outside world on its own”, once enchantment has been severed from the

artist (PTG, 44). This is to say that the works they produce do not sustain the force of the creative

act. This is not the case with the dramatist, who can only express what he has seen and lived

directly - through music and gesture. He can transform himself “into alien bodies” and speak with

“their alien tongues”, and “yet can project this transformation into...the outside world” (PTG, 44,

my italics). Speech and gesture alone are incomparable to other artistic works (like verse and

dialectics) because speech and gesture are inextricable from the artist. The dramatist alone

projects enchantment into images (preserving his enchanted state and originary creative force)

because he is forever a part of that image. Pure Dionysus appears; man is overcome; the work of

art reveals itself in the form of a body which only “speaks” about what it knows directly.

Phenomenal existence is justified when the will (the eternally un-aesthetic, truth) plays an artistic

game, “playing with itself”, pretending to be itself, delighting in the simulation of itself. When

Nietzsche defines play as that which “lacks derivation from perception” (PTG, 82), he is referring

to a specific hierarchical order and to a specific metaphysical rule that defines that order. This

final chapter seeks to delineate rule and order (rhythm) according to Nietzsche. Beginning with an

analysis of GMD, we will uncover dance’s specific relation to appearance for Nietzsche.

*

While we have said that the relationship between dance and visibility is not a

straightforward one for Nietzsche, there is a preliminary phase of visibility which is. During

Nietzsche’s presentation of the development of music in GMD, “the movement of dance”

[Tanzbewegung] or “orchestral dancing” is “an external means of expression” in strict separation

from, and in correspondence to, the musical structure (GMD, 36). In other words, music does not

dance (as it will for Nietzsche in the accomplishment of art). Dance and music are separate and

dance is what the spectator sees. Nietzsche emphasizes the fact that dance takes place on the other

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hand, in another way or on the other side [die Tanzbewegung zur Seite] (GMD, 35). Despite the

emphasis on the separation of music from dance, we must ask: is anyone actually dancing here?

Nietzsche goes on to describe “choral dancing,” which, given the classical Greek context here

(Nietzsche is describing a Pindaric or Aeschylean song), appears to refer to the kind of “actual”

dancing we see pictured on classical Greek vases. Nietzsche says: “in the evolution of the choral

dances, which are painted before the eyes of the spectators like arabesques on the broad surfaces

of the orchestra, one perceived that music had, in a sense, become visible...Thus the task emerged

for the poet and composer alike to become a creative choreographer” or produktiver Balletmeister

(GMD, 36). It initially seems impossible to determine whether the notion of dance here is being

used metaphorically or not - is the chorus actually dancing or is music “dancing”?

Nietzsche says that the poet and composer are to become die Balletmeister (translated as

choreographers) and people like Marius Petipa, not Tchaikovsky, are ballet masters in this sense.

We are indeed talking about choreography as the art of dance. The figure of the choreographer

here is intended by Nietzsche to mark a deficiency in music. The choreographer is a sculptor of

phenomena in the Apollonian-plastic realm of appearance: he is limited to the fleshly world and

barred from musical force. As we will see in the context of BT, the choreographer’s art here does

not awaken man’s symbolic powers so that he believes that music is enlivening the physical

world. Instead, there is dance on one side and music on the other.

Following Nietzsche’s description of the Balletmeister, and despite the beauty of this

description, Nietzsche tells us that tragedy is at a point of “decline” when it comes to

choreography (GMD, 38). Ultimately, it isn’t surprising that art is on its way out due to the 50

nature of the exchange between music and dance in this scenario: orchestral dancing expresses

music in the sense that music cannot express itself. This defect is “the Achilles’ heel of the ancient

music drama” and it marks the decline of ancient tragedy - which Nietzsche characterizes using an

idiomatic reference to physical vulnerability (GMD, 38). The value Nietzsche has for dance is at

stake here. Nietzsche is indicting dance for its incapacity to access the greater power of music and

50 Nietzsche’s sense of a decline in art here apparently does not require a corresponding description of “bad art” in the way we might expect. Nietzsche describes the “choreographic” decline in art with as much magnificence as the crescendo of art in BT and DWV. As we saw at the conclusion of chapter three, dance was equated with an intensification in both the preliminary phase of the satyr and in the final phase of art, wherein Dionysus appeared.

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Nietzsche is mourning a lost capacity for art in general through it. The subordination of music to

dance means that art has been lost and that music itself does not dance. This scenario constitutes

“chaos” for Nietzsche, and chaos is the opposite of rhythm. When dance makes music intelligible,

hierarchy has been lost and all is in chaos. Sarah Kofman emphasizes how the image cannot make

music intelligible for Nietzsche, or how music cannot come from images. When the hierarchy and

order of music is defied, it is as though a son were trying to beget his father in a “topsy-turvy”

world (Kofman, 9). 51

The epigraph to this thesis saw Nietzsche testify to the danger of ousting rhythm in favour

of chaos. This occurred when music leant on a “naturalistic” art of acting and gesture without

submitting to the “rule of plastic art.” The rule of plastic art for Nietzsche equates to the rule of

music and of rhythm through music. Chaos, as a topsy-turvy world, is the defiance of the rule of

music through the naturalistic expression of gesture. What comes into appearance through

“creative choreography” is naturalistic expression, i.e. the realistic depiction of the phenomenal

world. Choreography for Nietzsche here remains within this limit. We could say that when dance

appears in arabesques on the surface of the orchestra (in a metaphorical dance) it is as shallow as

the excesses of Baroque accoutrement. This dance is excessively ornamental, aiming to produce

drama through grandeur at any cost: it “wants nothing other than effects...Espressivo at any price”

(NCW, 269). Here, in a baroque dance, music is enslaved to gesture and “that is the end” of 52

art/music (NCW, 269). Yet, while dance is above all else limited to the phenomenal world of

appearance, Nietzsche takes this limitation to be dance’s very virtuosity. Dance indicates that

representation of the metaphysical in the physical world has been direct.

For the most part, Nietzsche complicates the notion of visuality by collapsing the

segregation between the subject (seer) and the object (seen) to the extent that the seer is

synonymous with what comes into appearance. Carol Jacobs emphasizes how Nietzsche’s Greek

chorus, the Schauer, is visionary in a double sense. The Dionysian mass engenders the vision of

51 This is not to say that Kofman thematizes dance in this way - she only goes as far as the image in this regard and is not concerned with an elaboration of how the image occurs (i.e. through dance). Kofman is demonstrating the fact that music cannot be born from the image while we are interested in showing how music should not be subordinate to dance in Nietzsche’s eyes. 52 “Nietzsche Contra Wagner” - see the epigraph to this thesis for the larger citation. We will refer to NCW further in this chapter.

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the scene through the “spasming” of its collective body; and the mass is also the beholder of the

vision. The convulsion of this ‘body’ is the “birth spasm of tragedy [and] therefore the origin of

the vision” but the vision is also seen by the chorus outside itself (Jacobs, 5). How could that

which takes place on the body of the chorus also be seen by the chorus? “The Dionysian

engenderer always runs up against a certain impediment” - “the Dionysian manifestation is never

presented as Dionysian, but rather as Apollonian” (Jacobs, 5). This thesis has called dance the

supreme impediment. While dance falls short of Dionysus, it does so at the absolute limit. Chapter

two delineated how dance was better than language in receiving the life of the work. Despite the

impediment, when it comes to dance the representation of Dionysus does take place and when it

does, it constitutes the blossoming of aesthetics for Nietzsche, which only begins “in any serious

sense” with the “direct copy of the will” (BT, 77). This is achieved by the Apollonian capacity for

the expression of Dionysiac knowledge through symbols (BT, 79) and aesthetics as symbolic

expression finds itself in the gesture of dance (Tanzgeberde).

Nietzsche needs to separate music from dance in order to dispel the reliance of music on

dance. In this way, dance can attain to the level of symbolic expression. Without the rule of plastic

art (music), all would be empty appearance where Nietzsche wants illusion. Apollo awakens such

an illusion: the listener believes that music is enlivening the plastic world. It is music which

moves its limbs in Dionysiac dance and abandons itself “without scruple to an orgiastic feeling 53

of freedom in which it could not dare indulge itself purely as music” (BT, 100). The plastic world

becomes music; the plastic world dances; the art of choreography, limited as we saw to the

phenomenal world, is replaced by the art of music. Nietzsche carefully distinguishes music from

dance in WEN so that this Apollonian illusion can be accomplished. We will see dance suffer an

indictment yet again in WEN. The entry reads: “rhythm did not enter the poetry of the Greeks

from dance. Dance and poetry are independent. Therefore: music and dance must have been

independent for a long time” (WEN, 230, original emphasis). To translate: poetic metre (rhythm)

comes from music and not from dance - music and dance must have been separate for a long time

until they were united. There are two points to be made in interpretation here. The first is that

53 Nietzsche often takes music to be the object of a verb. See Nietzsche’s phraseology in “who defeats the power of semblance? This power is music” (DWV, 134, original italics).

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Nietzsche’s note demonstrates how man “remains within the limits of the species” through dance

(DWV, 136) and the second concerns the territory upon which dance and music are able to meet

or come together at all. In terms of the first concern, Nietzsche says that rhythm comes from

music and not from a dance that is limited to the species and which thereby cannot attain to the

taxonomic height of life (the scenery moves, the statue walks about (DWV, 133) - this is the total

work as all-encompassing life). But dance must come into some better relationship with music in

order for it to participate in the aesthetic state.

The separation of music and dance for Nietzsche only lasts up until a point (when they are

united). Their unison marks the endpoint of their separation and it is on Apollonian territory that

music and dance meet. It is in order to establish rhythm (as the rule of plastic art/music) that

music (the purely metaphysical) comes into contact with dance (the purely phenomenal) at all.

And it is only through rhythm, which belongs solely to Apollo, that Dionysus can safely enter

upon physical soil. Nietzsche says that “if music, too, is Appoline art, this applies, strictly

speaking, only to rhythm” (DWV, 122).

Rhythm originally belongs to Apollo; we have Nietzsche’s confirmation of this in both the

early and late texts. In DWV rhythm is an “image-creating energy” charged with the

representation of Apolline states in order to hold Dionysiac music at a distance (DWV, 122) and

in GS Nietzsche refers to Apollo “as god of rhythm” (GS, 85). In BT, Nietzsche says that the

Apollonian world of the Greeks vaguely knew about music before Dionysus stormed into Hellenic

territory. Nietzsche tells us that the Greeks faintly knew music through a particular rhythm:

“although it seems that music was already familiar to the Greeks as an Apolline art, they only

knew it, strictly speaking, in the form of a wave-like rhythm with an image making power

which...[represented] Apolline states” (as opposed to Dionysian ones) (BT, 21). “Wave-like” here

translates Wellenschlag, which carries the sense of the swell of the sea, the wash of the waves,

swinging and oscillation. The linkages to Nietzsche’s lamentations against Wagner (see the 54

epigraph to this thesis) are strong here. Heidegger summarises Nietzsche’s position: “Nietzsche

expressed it once this way: with Wagner it is all “floating and swimming” instead of “striding and

54 Elsewhere in BT, Nietzsche finds that “the Apolline appearances in which Dionysus objectifies himself are no longer an eternal sea” (BT, 46). This marks the overcoming of Wellenschlag or wave-like rhythm.

60


dancing”, which is to say it is a floundering devoid of measure and pace” (Heidegger 88).

Wellenschlag, this swelling melodic quality that is ultimately devoid of rhythm, has a particular

function in the text: it keeps Dionysiac music at a distance in order to prevent the total

annihilation of Apollo (BT, 21). Nietzsche’s primary philosophical problem, which we have said

concerns the knowledge of motion, poses a practical difficulty; how can the magnificent force of

Dionysus be known without completely destroying the artist? For the creator is only to be

overcome, not destroyed (BT, 101). When the Dionysiac dithyramb “stimulates” man “to the

highest intensification of his symbolic powers”, it is only to the extent that “a new world of

symbols is required” - “firstly”, the symbolism of dance (BT, 21). While the stimulation of man

into an intensified state could be interpreted as a mode of self-destruction, the dithyramb is

actually controlled in the sense that its escalation is limited. Something new bursts forth in

fulfilment of what has been lacking (required): “the symbolism of the entire body, not just of the

mouth, the face, the word [as in recitation] but the full gesture of dance with its rhythmical

movement of every limb” (BT, 21). This rhythmic dance overcomes Wellenschlag when the

Greeks realize that Dionysian music was essential to their Hellenic constitution all along: “their

Apolline consciousness only hid this Dionysiac world from them like a veil” (BT, 21).

Nietzsche’s presentation of the origin of poetry in GS is primarily an aphorism about

dance. This entry sees dance function as a primary means of discharging ferocity in order to

achieve a state of freedom and calm - and this through Apollo (rhythm) (GS, 85). “When one had

lost the proper tension and harmony of the soul, one had to dance to the beat of the singer - that

was the prescription of this healing art” i.e. rhythm (GS 84). Here, at the origin of poetry, the art

of rhythm makes the gods “compliant, unfree and a tool for humans” (GS, 85). As we will see in

the context of WP, this compliance, as a certain flexibility, malleability and flow, “delights the

artist’s will to power.”

It is difficult to identify whether rhythm belongs to music or dance in this aphorism.

“Whenever one acts, one has an occasion to sing”, not only the “song” by which “giddiness and

exuberance” is driven to its peak and where the madman is pushed into further wildness - but also

the “song” of “bailing water...or rowing” (GS, 85). Song here, taken by Nietzsche to signify the

occurrence of a dance, is “the invention of Apollo” who tames and forms wild Dionysus through

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this notion of song. Dionysus becomes compliant, shapeable, formable; and the artist is delighted.

This shaping of force occurs rhythmically and, perhaps, ritualistically in a dance that necessitates

the repetition of things. Rowing and bailing could be thought of as ‘rituals’ in the sense that they

entail the performance of a series of actions according to a prescribed order. As we will see, there

is indeed a connection between dance and ritual for Nietzsche - in both UM and elsewhere in GS,

Nietzsche will refer to dance as an earthly ceremony in honour of existence. But the sacralization

of the physical world doesn’t equate to the affirmation of everyday, mundane, artless existence;

ritual enlivens the world through music, and it does so repetitively. To exceed to music is to

exceed to life.

There are two “dance songs” in Z and both are expressions of the desire for life. This

state of desire is held in repetition, never to be fulfilled. In WP, Nietzsche says: “pleasure [is] not

in satisfaction but in dissatisfaction” as that which “acts as a lure of life and strengthens the will to

power!” (WP, 369, original punctuation). The “everyday dissatisfaction of the sexual drive” thus

enhances rather than depresses strength (WP, 369). In a sketch towards a never written

dissertation on The Physiology of Art (cited by Heidegger), Nietzsche notes how “the dance of the

sexes” equates to “the factual increase of force” and “factual beautification” (in Heidegger, 94).

For Nietzsche, the dance of the sexes is characteristic of the activity of man within the limit of the

species. In the previous chapter, we found the intensification of dance (Tanzgeberde) to be the

expression of man’s phenomenal limitation through species activity (DWV, 136) and the same

kind of dance (Tanzgeberde) was also present in the final state of art (DWV, 138). In Z we find a

dance of the sexes (species limitation) which simultaneously marks the eruption of the

intensification embedded in Nietzsche’s theory of the aesthetic state. What is the status of dance

as the ultimate handicap here? The aesthetic state of intensification must be associated with

fleshly existence somehow, in order to affirm that existence. This occurs through dance as species

activity, where man is held in a state of desire, lusting for the other pole of the taxonomic rank -

that of life. As we will see, it is life “who” Zarathustra chases after in Nietzsche’s second dance

song.

In the first dance song, Zarathustra, looking for a spring, comes across a meadow of

women. The meadow appears to be the same one a messenger stumbled upon in DWV, where

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there were “choruses of women lying in scattered groups on the ground and in decorous pose”

(DWV, 123). This scene represented Nietzsche’s idea of the bacchanal in chapter one of this

thesis. Now Zarathustra comes upon a “green meadow surrounded by tranquil trees” (Z, 93). 55

What is more, our virgins or maidens from chapter one are there; upon the meadow “young

maidens were dancing with each other” (Z, 93). “The Other Dance Song” features only one 56

woman and we could also call her a maiden. Nietzsche establishes an air of sexual mischief in this

ultimately very lusty song, and he does not achieve it through the figure of the hetaira of the wild

Dionysian cult. On the other hand, the figure of the maiden, through restraint and not

gratuitousness, marks absolute longing and desire - the maiden is the ultimate temptress because

one will never get what one wants from her. Desire is maintained through nonsatiation. Speaking

to life/a woman, Zarathustra professes his love: “your leaving spells me, your seeking compels me

- I suffer, but suffer gladly for you any day!...Who would not hate you...temptress...Who would

not love you, you innocent, ardent one, wind-bride and child-eyed sinner!” (Z, 181). Zarathustra

longs to intermingle with life and become one with it. Desire here takes place as a dance: “this is a

dance moving every which way; I am the hunter - are you my hound or my prey?” (Z, 182).

Zarathustra, dancing after this lively woman, slips on his rump - thanks to the “evil little jumper”

whom he is following to “sweet places” (Z, 182). The first part of the song concludes with

Zarathustra getting frustrated: he calls life a witch and says that she will dance to the beat of his

whip, then says that he has forgotten to bring it - “Oh no!” (Z, 182). Part three of the song entails

the performance of twelve lines of verse separated by rhythmic stresses: “the world is deep /

six!...deep is its pain / eight!...joy - deeper still than misery / nine!” (Z, 184).

Nietzsche’s dance songs are about measure, pace, limit and desire. Here, dance marks the 57

phenomenal desire for oneness with the will - which is ultimately a desire for music from out of

an inherent and eternal limitation. Yet, oneness is expressed no less: in DWV, oneness with nature

is expressed in the Dionysian dithyramb, and solely through dance (DWV, 138). This is because

55 This citation comes from the Graham Parker translation. The corresponding Cambridge translation, to which we usually refer, is found on page 83. 56 Ibid. 57 Compare Nietzsche on “what I really want from music” in NCW: “that it be cheerful and profound...that it be distinctive, exuberant, and tender, a sweet little female, full of grace and dirty tricks” (268).

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wholeness is represented by dance for Nietzsche: through dance the human is “intensified” and

through dance the “whole” as body becomes active. But oneness with nature, as becoming whole,

is not easily achieved for Nietzsche: “this harmony, which modern men look on with such

longing, this unity of man with nature...is by no means such a simple...inevitable condition which

emerges of its own accord” (BT, 24). People are deluded in thinking that Rousseau’s Émile was

“reared at the heart of nature” (BT, 24) simply by refraining from swaddling him. “Direct,

immediate, spontaneous responses to nature” (Trans. BT, 24) are “the direct result of Apolline

culture” which “first had to overthrow...monsters”, “gain victory”, employ pleasurable and

powerful illusions (BT, 24).

Dance in Nietzsche’s later writing is always the mark of an illusory world. During GS an

anonymous voice says that he is dancing his dance amidst dreamers in the world of illusion which,

as such, has to be won and maintained on earth (GS, 64). The dance takes place in the Apollonian

dream world through the work of the symbol and the dancer functions as “one of the masters of

the ceremony of existence”, sustaining “the universality of dreaming, the mutual comprehension

of all dreamers, and...the duration of the dream” (GS, 64). There is a strong correlation between

this dancer and the dithyrambic dramatist of “Richard Wagner in Bayreuth” (UM). The 58

dramatist (aka Wagner) suffers a contradictory desire for the joy of earthly communion and

Heavenly suspension. Both UM and GS share the same themes of mockery and sleepwalking or

dreaming. The dramatist, like the dancer, finds the dream “more real than waking actuality” to the

extent that he is “the only one awake, the only one aware of the real and true” (UM, 225). What

seems everyday to others is uncanny to him and he wants to mock the others for this. In GS

appearance mocks itself (GS, 63). The dream, the symbol, is what the dramatist takes for reality -

the dream is his physical present. Thus only sleepwalkers and mutual dreamers understand one

another, that is to say as compeers. However, since the goal is the universalization of dreaming, 59

58 This is the final dissertation of Untimely Meditations (UM). 59 Nietzsche’s notion of the “compeer” is a significant one throughout his oeuvre. See WEN for a distinct elaboration of it: “essentially, when I speak I am asking my fellowman if he has the same soul as I…” (WEN, 200). Nietzsche explains here that human interaction (communication) entails an ability to read the soul of another, which amounts to a common language that is the audible expressivity of a common soul. Note too that in WP Nietzsche will tell us that “one never communicates thoughts: one communicates movements, mimic signs, which we then trace back to thoughts” (WP, 428). Despite Nietzsche’s emphasis on a form of communication which takes

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the mocker becomes a lover of the earth: the dramatist descends from the heights “into the depths”

(UM, 226). At this point we uncover an event familiar to DWV, that of the absorption of Dionysus

by Apollo and a corresponding dance. Nietzsche equates the “creative moments” in the

dramatist’s art with “the tension occasioned by this hybrid” (i.e. between the desire for the

metaphysical and the physical). The process of the appearance of art here is as follows. The

dramatist is compelled by nature to reveal nature - a revelation that nature is shameful about

because it means that she has been seen naked. This causes her to conceal herself “by fleeing into

her antitheses” (UM, 226). Nature thereby “reveals the character [Wesen: essence in the original] 60

of her antitheses” (UM, 226). “In an impetuously rhythmic [ungestüm rhythmischen: boisterous,

wildly rhythmic] yet hovering dance [schwebenden Tanz: ethereal dance, which can be associated

with the sense of soaring into higher regions, gliding and indeterminacy], in ecstatic gestures, the

primordial dramatist [i.e. Wagner] speaks of what is now coming to pass within him and within

nature: the dithyramb of his dance is as much dread understanding and exuberant insight...as it is

joyful self-renunciation” (UM, 226). Such is the force of Wagner’s original artistic state. When

Wagner composes, “what has hitherto been invisible escapes into the sphere of the visible and

becomes appearance; what was hitherto only visible [artless, everyday] flees into the dark ocean

of the audible” (UM, 226). But the description of the dance seems contradictory: Nietzsche calls

the dance wild (the mark of Dionysus) and then qualifies it with a certain smoothness (and we

recall Apollo). How can a dance be both wild and smooth? Nietzsche is describing a dance that is

Apollonian despite itself. What is hovering, heavenly, ethereal (as light as a bird) is in the end

earthbound. That which is heavenly grants its gift to the earth and suffers there for it. The

dramatist chooses earth and the dancer of GS commemorates and honours existence.

place through dance-related gesture here, it must be noted that Nietzsche always gives final prominence to music. What takes place as speech between compeers is the sound of a shared soul. When Heidegger says that Nietzsche’s “captivation by Wagner was possible only because something correlative came from him, what he then called the Dionysian” (see the epigraph to chapter one), that which is correlative (the Dionysian) can only be music for Nietzsche, and not dance. It is this ‘not’ which makes dance so unique. 60 This summation almost exactly parallels Derrida’s interpretation of the figure of the woman in Nietzsche’s oeuvre - see Spurs, Nietzsche’s Styles. While we are citing from UM here, Derrida takes his reading primarily from GS.

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Later in UM, Nietzsche describes another dance technique. This one occurs as a

transformation in the gestural apparatus of a performer with the development of art. Using the

same threefold expression of feeling in the aesthetic state of DWV (dance, poetry, music),

Nietzsche specifies a gestural change: “the gestures [now] needed to be only of the gentlest

[kind]...the performer...has to overcome that agitation of movement...he finds himself drawn

towards an ennoblement of his gestures and he does so all the more in that the music has plunged

his feelings into the bath of a purer aether and...made them more beautiful” (UM, 239).

This dance resembles that of the Hellene in BT, whose nature is expressed in dance. In

chapter one, we determined a certain suppleness of movement to be a “betrayal” of Dionysus,

who emanated from Apollo as a power held down in potential, giving Apollo form and body.

During Nietzsche’s introduction to gesture in DWV, he describes how the stirrings of the will

occur rhythmically as a result of being held down. The will tries to escape but only achieves it in a

partial way, and this is “painful.” The Dionysian is produced rhythmically through gestures of

pain: in “‘beats, aches, twitches, stabs, cuts, bites or tickles’” (DWV, 136, original quotes). While

the activity of such stirrings resembles the expression of Dionysus as he pushes through the

Hellene, these painful stirrings of the will do not represent the final accomplishment of gestural

“speech” through dance because they are related to the feeling of “displeasure” for Nietzsche

(DWV, 136). The completed expression of Dionysian force in the aesthetic state/art only occurs

where there is the feeling of pleasure - where dance marks the accomplishment of direct access to

the “first forms” of Dionysian stirrings. This is to say that during the experience of pain, access is

not direct. But the preliminary/everyday experience of Dionysus nevertheless occurs rhythmically.

In WP we see Nietzsche incorporating the experience of rhythmic displeasure into the state of

pleasure: “one could perhaps describe pleasure in general as a rhythm of little unpleasurable

stimuli” (WP, 370) and “small, rhythmic, painful stimuli strengthen the feeling of life” (WP, 369).

Nietzsche establishes two things that withstand departure from the preliminary phase of art

in DWV: rhythm and a new interpretation of visibility. The list of painful Dionysian stirrings are

qualified by Nietzsche as images of representations that have become clear through the symbolism

of gesture (DWV, 136). We experience images gesturally and not visually. This affirms the

having of instinctive knowledge as opposed to cognitive “seeing” or understanding. When we

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experience images gesturally, we experience them unconsciously: the language of gesture does

not pass through “a clear state of consciousness” and is “produced by reflex movements” (DWV,

134).

We begin to realize, upon accruement of the details, that we are facing a certain peculiarity

in the text. The difficulty in reading this section resides in a certain idiosyncrasy manifested by

Nietzsche’s destruction of the aesthetic situation, that of the subject-object relation. While the 61

language of gesture represents that part in the constitution of feeling which concerns the visible

realm or with what is seen, Nietzsche’s emphasis is on how gesture is produced in me. This notion

of what we have referred to as internal production, parallels Nietzsche’s notion of objectivity: it is

only with “objectivity,” with “pure disinterested contemplation” (following Kant’s aesthetics

here) that we are able to believe that “any creation...is genuinely artistic” (BT, 29). Objectivity

equates to the unconscious gestural production of art for Nietzsche. Genuinely artistic creation, as

pure objectivity, is the production of the work of art in me. Genuinely artistic creation is not

constituted by any work of art other than man himself, not as though he has been hung on the wall

to look at but as he is in the aesthetic state.

We have not brought Nietzsche’s images of the painful frequencies of the will into relation

with Nietzsche’s theory of “sympathetic innervation”, discussed in the previous chapter. This is in

order to allow Nietzsche’s understanding of a kind of bodily empathy to resonate apart from the

popular theory of kinesthetic empathy, which, in turn, allows us to emphasize Nietzsche’s

transformation of the aesthetic state against traditional aesthetics. Nietzsche’s theory of gesture

does not really entail a moment where I see something (a sense object) apart from me, which I

would then kinesthetically-mimetically receive. This is to say that Nietzsche eliminates the cause

altogether. In the introduction to gesture, Nietzsche says that “generally intelligible” visible

symbols constitute gesture and that “the eye which sees [the symbols] immediately conveys the

61 This destruction is already going on in Nietzsche’s early work: in BT Nietzsche maintains that “the entire opposition between the subjective and the objective...is absolutely inappropriate in aesthetics since the subject, the willing individual in pursuit of his own, egotistical goals, can only be considered the opponent of art and not its origin. But where the subject is an artist…” (32). Elsewhere Nietzsche calls the subjective artist the bad artist because what we need from art is, on the contrary, “the conquest of subjectivity, release...from the ‘I’ and the falling silent of all individual willing” (29).

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state which gave rise to the gesture and which it symbolizes” (DWV, 134). Here, Nietzsche seems

to account for reception rather than creation and production alone. However, Nietzsche thereafter

qualifies the seeing eye, which initially seems to be seeing something else moving (as would be

necessary for sympathetic innervation to occur), as feeling, or as a feeling eye. Only in this way

does the spectator feel a sympathetic innervation of the same parts of his body that he sees in

motion (DWV, 134).

The idiosyncrasies in Nietzsche’s presentation of the language of gesture become apparent

again much later in “The Will to Power as Art.” Again the peculiarity is related to visibility and

“reflex movements” (DWV, 134). In WP, as in DWV, Nietzsche’s explication emphasizes how

gesture is produced in me through a feeling (or an inside eye) rather than with an eye which sees

something outside itself moving (for mimetic replication to take place). As was the case in DWV,

dance is involved, though not directly at this point. Nietzsche describes the state of the artist in the

form of a kind of list: “the feeling of enhanced power; the inner need to make of things a reflex of

one’s own fullness and perfection; the extreme sharpness of certain senses, so they understand a

quite different sign language - and create one...extreme mobility that turns into an extreme urge to

communicate; the desire to speak on the part of everything that knows how to make signs; a need

to get rid of oneself...through signs and gestures…- an explosive condition...as a compulsion...to

get rid of...inner tension through muscular activity and movements of all kinds; then as an

involuntary co-ordination between this movement and the processes within (images…) - as a kind

of automatism of the whole muscular system impelled by strong stimuli from within; inability to

prevent reaction...every inner movement...is accompanied by vascular changes…the suggestive

power of music, its ‘suggestion mentale’...the compulsion to imitate...a state is divined on the

basis of signs and immediately enacted - an image, rising up within, immediately turns into a

movement of the limbs - a certain suspension of the will...deafness and blindness towards the

external world” (WP, 429).

While it may seem indisputable that dance is what Nietzsche has in mind when he outlines

the explosive condition of the artist, on closer inspection it actually aligns with the painful

frequencies of the will in DWV. The states of the artist correspond to the displeasurable and

painful stirrings of the will. In WP, Nietzsche explicates the ugly (as the condition related to

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displeasure in the language of Kant’s aesthetics, to which Nietzsche subscribes) as the “antithesis

to the divine frivolity of the dancer” (WP, 427). The victory of the will to power as dance cannot

be associated with the reflex functions. In vehement opposition to Wagner in NCW, Nietzsche

tells us that he doesn’t want something like the state of the artist in WP to constitute feeling in the

aesthetic state as music: “what does my whole body actually want from music?...Its own relief, I

believe, as if all animal functions should be quickened by easy, bold, exuberant, self-assured

rhythms...life should be gilded by golden, tender, oil-smooth melodies...to rest in the hiding places

of perfection: that’s what I need music for. But Wagner has a sickening effect” (NCW, 266). To

be more precise, Nietzsche wants the wild Dionysian state of the artist to be relieved through the

“quickening” of that state. When the reflexive capacity for gesture in DWV or in the state of the 62

artist of WP is quickened in the aesthetic state, “easy, bold, self-assured rhythm” results - which 63

is elaborated by Nietzsche as “tempo, dance, march” and “good walking, striding, leaping, and

dancing” (NCW 266, original italics). It is here that we finally enter the territory familiar to

Nietzsche’s ultimate characterization of dance: dance as the victory of the will to power as

“enhanced strength” marked not by wildness, but by “the refinement of the organ

for...apprehension” (WP, 421), coordination, harmony, “geometrical simplification” and

“perpendicular stress” (WP, 420). Strength as the mark of the victory of the will to power “as a 64

feeling of dominion in the muscles, as suppleness and pleasure in movement, as dance, as levity

and presto” (WP, 421) brings it into synonimity with strength as the mark of “becoming more

beautiful” for Nietzsche (WP, 420). The artist, instead of remaining captive to his expressive

states, experiences beauty as the highest sign of power: “moreover, without tension: that violence

62 This term has to do with the animation of the cognitive powers for Kant in the Critique of Judgement. For Nietzsche, it could be understood in direct relation to the speed the term entails: Nietzsche loves Bizet’s Carmen (See “The Case of Wagner”, 234) in the same way that he loves cold baths - quickly in and out (GS, 245). 63 In the same way that Nietzsche described Wagner’s music as having “a sickening effect” (NCW, 266), Nietzsche relates the state of the artist to sickness: “it seems impossible to be an artist and not be sick” (WP, 428). There is also evidence in UM that Nietzsche did in fact originally see the same lawfulness of form in Wagner’s music he later lamented as lacking. The connection between lawlessness/formlessness and sickness is a strong one for Nietzsche. 64 Perpendicularity is associated with equilibrium, focus, and self-assurance in BGE - the Cambridge edition omits the term, substituting it for its definition (BGE, 100).

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is no longer needed; that everything follows, obeys, so easily and so pleasantly - that is what

delights the artist's will to power” (WP, 422).

Conclusion

In BT Nietzsche says that in dance, the greatest strength is only potential and that strength

is betrayed by the suppleness of movement (BT, 46). This thesis has found that dance, for

Nietzsche, is not force itself; dance censors force through form. As opposed to aligning dance

simply with Apollo, however, we have ultimately found Nietzsche’s concept of dance at the heart

of Nietzsche’s dichotomy of art. Dance is joyful and free for Nietzsche in the sense that dance is

the very experience of tragic intuition. Derrida, at the end of Force and Signification, appears to

interpret the concept of dance otherwise, equating it with the triumph of force over form in the

work of Nietzsche. In order to consolidate the weight of this thesis’ argument about dance, we will

conclude by briefly highlighting how Derrida sees writing, as opposed to dance, as the

representation of the victory of form over force: “we would have to choose then, between writing

and dance” (Derrida, 34). Through this brief analysis of Derrida’s essay, we will seek to

consolidate a pivotal argument in this thesis: Nietzsche’s concept of dance is in fact ultimately

representative of the victory of form. This thesis has shown that dance is integral to Nietzsche’s

philosophy due to its articulation of the force/form couple - the concept of dance is embedded in

Nietzsche’s aesthetic theory for the way it enacts the event of representation in the aesthetic state.

We have found that dance is at the core of Nietzsche’s theory of knowledge and that it participates

in Nietzsche’s critique of language.

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Despite our final alignment of dance with Apollo and not with the victory of force as

Derrida has it (in the crudest of terms), Derrida emphasizes the Apollonian nature of ecstasy for

Nietzsche (Derrida, 33) in the same way this thesis did at the conclusion of chapter one. Derrida

explains that the apprehension of pure force takes place necessarily through Apollonian seeing or

knowing; and that this would be to lose pure force by finding it (Derrida, 31). Derrida states:

“Dionysus is worked by difference” when he “lets himself be seen”, which means that Dionysus

maintains a “relationship to his exterior, to visible form, to structure, as he does to his death” -

“this is how [Dionysus] appears (to himself)” (Derrida, 34). It is perhaps as a result of the

impossibility of asserting the victory of pure force alone that Derrida understands the triumph of

force over form to be a dream of Nietzsche’s - and a dream of dance at that. According to

Derrida’s reading, Nietzsche advocates a “dance of the pen” as the dream of a writing that would

be purely Dionysian in the way that dancing is (Derrida, 34). In this way, Derrida does not include

dance within the Nietzschean problem of knowledge, which plays out through the Apollonian

representation of Dionysus. This thesis has found that Dionysus (as music) establishes its place in

the world of appearance through dance specifically. It is for this reason that we have emphasized

the inverse of Derrida’s findings; dance as the triumph of form over force. This is to say that

dance for Nietzsche, as much as writing for Derrida, is fundamentally involved in the activity of

Apollo/the apprehension of force. What Nietzsche accomplishes specifically through dance is not

the imagined abolition of Apollo. Through dance, Nietzsche instead accomplishes the

apprehension of force in a radical way: that is, through the invention of a consciousness that is

above rationalitas - that of animalitas. This is to say that writing and dance for Nietzsche are not 65

differentiable in the way Derrida takes them to be: for Nietzsche, both writing and dance are

problems of form. The possibility of the presence of force, even when it comes to dance, is

grounded in the problem of form. What dance is capable of is the direct representation of force.

Dance too, however, undergoes a first and last indictment by Nietzsche - it represents pure force

65 See Heidegger’s Parmenides, where he will say that, for Nietzsche, “the priority of the unconscious over consciousness corresponds to the priority of the free animal over the imprisoned essence of man” (158). This thesis has indeed found that Nietzsche aligns the essence of man with a strictly Nietzschean concept of ‘the body’. For Heidegger, it is Nietzsche, both prominently and amidst nineteenth century poeticizing, who completes this transformation of the constitution of truth (51).

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directly but, as Derrida also recognizes in this essay, representation is after all constrained to the

phenomenal realm of appearance.

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force and form: nietzsche and the concept of dance

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