PresentaciónKristóf Fenyvesi
Jyväskylän Yliopisto, Finlandia
Doctoral Student
Doctoral Student, Doctoral School of Hungarian Studies, University of Jyväskylä. The influence and reception of Nietzsche’s works in the context of 20th century Hungarian philosophy and literature is his main research field. Editor and translator of the first Hungarian language reader on new media and game studies (Narratives, Games and Simulation in the Digital Media, Kijarat Publishing House, Hungary, 2008). Coordinator of two international and interdisciplinary conference series: www.pecsikult.hu/page2009, www.keletnyugati.hu
Web Site: www.kristoffenyvesi.hu
Abstract
Body, Epistemology and Interpretation: The «Corporeal Unity» of Friedrich Nietzsche’s Philological, Philosophical and Physiological Investigations
Friedrich Nietzsche’s investigations are inseparable from his reflections on the human body as the basic organic unit of cognition shaped in different disciplinary, discursive and narrative registers. In the foreword to his book Die Fröhliche Wissenschaft written subsequently in 1886 he declares the entire history of philosophical thinking to be the interpretation of the body; what is more, to be the result of the interpretations that arise from the misunderstanding of the body. In this presentation I will analyse three great, closely related tendencies in Nietzsche’s oeuvre, those of 1. the philologist, 2. the philosopher, and 3. the poet-autobiographer in terms of the different interpretations of the body as 1. a mythical, 2. a philosophical-physiological, and 3. a subjectivephenomenal entity by taking into consideration how the different Nietzschean stages of transfiguration (Verwandlung) evolve in the examples provided in Also sprach Zarathustra (1. camel, 2. lion, 3. child —cf. Von den drei Verwandlungen). My thesis is that the symbolic figures that appear in the different phases of his oeuvre embedded in one another—such as 1. Dionysos, 2. Zarathustra and 3. the prosopopeic Nietzsche of Ecce Homo (prepared in his private correspondence, personal commentaries, autobiography and memoir attempts)—get across as figures with central importance and meaning which play a primary role in the rise of the Nietzschean discourse of the body. These figures shape the unique character of the Nietzschean philosophy as the interpretation of the body and are responsible for the epistemological consequences of the Nietzschean body-discourse, that is, for the characteristic Nietzschean position concerning Mind and Nature. It is these corporeal figures designated by the names Dionysos-Zarathustra-Nietzsche and operated in their total symbolic potential that connect mythology with semiology and symptomatology, and it is these figures as metaphor-generating «machines» that flood the Nietzschean context with concepts of «torn» bodies or bodies made subject to the training of culture or with terminological elements of physiology or medicine. This process reaches its culmination when the collapse of the Nietzschean textual corpus literally coincides with the collapse of Friedrich Nietzsche as a physical-mental corporeality. In a presentation dealing with Nietzsche’s relationship with the biological entity and the psyche or Nietzsche’s theory of the self, one should not forget that the figurative-metaphoric evolution of Nietzsche’s body-discourse does not take place in the institutionalised, normative space of western philosophy but—using Maurice Blanchot’s term—in some kind of a «literary space» (l’espace littéraire). All this entails that any research into the above issues conducted in the borderland of the philosophy of mind and physiology should also rely on the tools of contemporary literary theories and narratology.