Barbara Straka's newly published book Nietzsche Forever? explores the question of how Nietzsche is received in 20th century art, in particular that after 1945. But the reception of Nietzsche's reception raises the question of whether the philosopher's monumentality is lost sight of. Does this reveal a fundamental problem of our age with monumentality? In any case, starting from Nietzsche, Michael Meyer-Albert argues against Straka for a “post-monumental monumentality” as an alternative to aesthetic postmodernism. In the first part of the two-part series, he dedicated himself to her book, and now he is accentuating his opposite position.

The fact that Nietzsche is a philosopher who speaks particularly to artists, even an “artist-philosopher,” is almost commonplace. In Barbara Straka's newly published book Nietzsche Forever?, the question is explored how exactly Nietzsche has been received in 20th century art, in particular that after 1945. The author has created a standard work that clearly and competently conveys the topic in plausible overviews. In this first part of this two-part article, Michael Meyer-Albert dedicates himself to her book and will then accentuate his own position in the upcoming second part.

Last week, Emma Schunack reported on this year's annual meeting of the Nietzsche Society on the topic Nietzsche's technologies (link). In addition, in his article this week, Paul Stephan explores how Nietzsche uses the machine as a metaphor. The findings of his philological deep drilling through Nietzsche's writings: While in his early writings he builds on Romantic machine criticism and describes the machine as a threat to humanity and authenticity, from 1875, initially in his letters, a surprising turn takes place. Even though Nietzsche still occasionally builds on the old opposition of man and machine, he now initially describes himself as a machine and finally even advocates a fusion up to the identification of subject and apparatus, thinks becoming oneself as becoming a machine. This is due to Nietzsche's gradual general departure from the humanist ideals of his early and middle creative period and the increasing “obscuration” of his thinking — not least the discovery of the idea of “eternal return.” A critique of the capitalist social machine becomes its radical affirmation — amor fati as amor machinae.

Like a year ago (link), our author Paul Stephan is also adding a commentary to this year's “dialogue” (link) with ChatGPT on the current state of thedevelopment of “artificial intelligence.” His assessment is somewhat more sober — but he does not want to be denied his fundamental optimism in technology. He also wants to avoid pessimism and naive hype, which is obviously being fueled right now to ensure that billions of dollars invested in AI are amortized.

We had various AI tools generate the images for this article at the following prompt: “Please give me a picture of the aphorism 'You still have to have chaos in yourself to be able to give birth to a dancing star' by Nietzsche,” one of ChatGPT's “favorite quotes” by the philosopher from Thus Spoke Zarathustra (link). The article image is from Microsoft AI.

The almost complete Freiburg Nietzsche commentary has now become an indispensable tool for Nietzsche research. In meticulous detail work, the authors compiled useful information on almost all aspects of Nietzsche's works (history of origin, sources, allusions, receptions, interpretations...) and commented on them passage by passage, sometimes sentence by sentence and word by word. Almost all of the volumes published so far are available free of charge on the de Gruyter Verlag website (link). Even laymen will find a real treasure trove of background information and explanations here. The three leading employees of the project — its long-time manager Andreas Urs Sommer, Katharina Grätz and Sebastian Kaufmann — took the opportunity to dedicate this year's annual meeting of the Nietzsche Society to the topic of “Commenting on Nietzsche.” They were not only looking back, but also looking ahead.

From October 7 to 11, 2024, the event organized by the Klassik Stiftung Weimar took place in Weimar Nietzsche's futures. Global Conference on the Futures of Nietzsche instead of. Our regular author Paul Stephan was on site on the first day and gives an insight into the current state of academic discussions about Nietzsche. His question: What is the future of Nietzsche academic research when viewed from the perspective of Nietzsche's own radical understanding of the future?

‍

After Natalie Schulte reported on the echo of Nietzsche's “superman” idea in the start-up scene last week (Link), Swiss art scholar Jörg Scheller is dedicating this week to her continued existence in extropianism, a subtype of transhumanism that aims to artificially accelerate human evolution on both individual and genre levels using modern technology. The physical law of “entropy,” according to which there is a tendency in closed systems to equalize all energy differences until a state of equilibrium has been established — a state of complete cooling in terms of the universe — is opposed by the proponents of this flow with the principle of “extropy,” the increasing vitality of a system.