“Techno” — the show of the same name at the Swiss National Museum in Zurich, with traveling exhibitions by the Goethe-Institut and publications in German-speaking countries is currently honoring a once-subcultural movement that became a mass phenomenon in the 1990s with the Berlin Love Parade and continues to live on in Zurich's Street Parade today. Did techno offer (or offer) the Dionysian cultural experience that Nietzsche celebrated in his writings? Would Nietzsche have been a raver?

Our author Natalie Schulte spent nine months cycling in Southeast Asia and reports on her travel experiences with and without Nietzsche in a short series of essays. This time it's about the vast plain of Cambodia and the temples of Angkor in the middle of the jungle.

(Link to part 1 on Vietnam)

After Christian Saehrendt took a primarily biographical look at Nietzsche's relationship to music on this blog in June last year (link), Paul Stephan focuses in this article on Nietzsche's content statements about music and comes to a somewhat different conclusion: For Nietzsche, music has a liberating power through its subjectivating power. It affirms our sense of self and inspires us to resist repressive norms and morals. However, not all music can do that. With late Nietzsche, this is no longer Richard Wagner's opera, but Georges Bizet's opera carmen. Our author recognizes a similar attitude in Sartre's novel The disgust and in black popular music, which is not about comfort or grief, but affirmation and overcoming.

After explaining in the first part of this article (link) how Nietzsche transformed from an admirer of Schopenhauer to a critic in the course of the 1870s, Tom Bildstein now examines in more detail how the mature Nietzsche sought to overcome Schopenhauer‘s pessimism and counter it with a “life-affirming” philosophy. Schopenhauer‘s “will to life,” which the misanthrope would like to see ascetically denied, is to give way to the “will to power” as the fundamental principle of all life, which cannot be denied without contradiction.

“Resentment” is one of the guiding concepts of Nietzsche's philosophy and perhaps even its most effective. In his new book The cold rage. Resentment theory and practice (Marburg 2024, Büchner-Verlag), Jürgen Grosse argues that since the 18th century, more or less all political or social movements have been those of resentment. Our main author Hans-Martin Schönherr-Mann has read it and presents major theses below.

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This time in confidential Du, Paul Stephan talked to Hans-Martin Schönherr-Mann, our oldest parent author, and our youngest regular author, Estella Walter, about our different generational experiences and about what is actually to be thought of the fashionable discourse about the different “generations.” We talked about post-structuralism, the ecological issue and the diversity of possible connections to Nietzsche.

Nietzsche's criticism of science is perhaps one of the most provocative, but also the most relevant, sub-areas of Nietzsche's comprehensive critique of modern culture. Estella Walter reconstructs her perhaps most important formulation in the third treatise of The genealogy of morality and shows how Nietzsche's science is a form of estrangement Understands. She explains this concept, which is so central to modern philosophy, and bridges it from Nietzsche to (young) Marx: Both are critics of the alienations of the modern way of life, whose critiques we should read together in order to reach a comprehensive understanding of it.