Grounds for confusion

Nietzsche, theory, and the political potential of anti-realism

pp. 63-95

in: Geoffrey A. Baker, The aesthetics of clarity and confusion, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016

Abstract

Nietzsche and some of his most influential heirs in the avant-garde—such as André Breton and Antonin Artaud—operate within the possibilities of an aesthetic of confusion, which demeans the worth of scientific knowledge and literary realism. This third chapter first illustrates the anti-logical aesthetic promoted by Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy in the early 1870s, and demonstrates that Nietzsche conceived of this aesthetic as capable of necessary social, even explicitly political, change. Moreover, Nietzsche's particular framing of this history suggests that one must also read it as a condemnation of the penchant for realism and clarity in his own century, especially the kind that would reach its scientific extreme in Zola, whom Nietzsche vilifies in a number of his unpublished writings.