Review: [untitled] Author(s): Babette E.

Babich Reviewed work(s): The Other Nietzsche by Joan Stambaugh Source: The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 53, No. 3, (Summer, 1995), pp. 325326 Published by: Blackwell Publishing on behalf of The American Society for Aesthetics Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/431362 Accessed: 25/06/2008 12:29
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Book Reviews
STAMBAUGH, JOAN. The Other Nietzsche.

325 study of pity and revenge. Stambaugh underlines Nietzsche's critique of "man's best thinking" as the embodimentof the spiritof revenge itself. This "best thinking" constitutes the inventive thought of metaphysics, but includes Westernphysics or science and ethics or moral thinking. Beyond such "best thinking" born of the spiritof revenge until now, the artist of power more than the metaphysical thinker of revenge can transfigurehimself and is thus "able to experience and shape a higher dimension of reality" (p. 10). This is the difference between the inventive or projective wishfulness born out of the lack of or power and the will born of creativetransfiguration affirmation.In the studymentionedabove, "Thoughts on Pity and Revenge" (Chapter Four), Stambaugh articulatesa paradoxicaltension between affirmation and transformationand the quietistic understanding usually associated with affirmation:"it is only when I can affirm existence just as it is that I become free to transformit" (p. 55). This reflection is the heart of Stambaugh'sinterpretationof Nietzsche on time and the thoughtof the eternalreturn.Nietzsche offers a redemptionfrom time in advocating will (willingness) over against (one is temptedto say: mere) wishful thinking. For, in wishful thinking,one is yoked to the past and what was in wishing it were otherwise. Thus one is not free to transform one's life but merely to wish against it, to resent the past and to seek to take revengeon it, holding the futurein bondage to the same. This is not a transfigurative attitude toward the future, it is not a willing backwardbut is much rathercaught in a metaphysical "backworld" of regret that is transcendence.Opposed to transcendence understoodas such an ill will towardtime and what was, the thought of the eternal returnteaches the redemption of the past. This redemption can work for Stambaughas the affirmationin essence of eternalreturn:"I am able to affirm my life exactly as it is by my willingness, far ratherby my wanting nothing more with my whole being than to live it again." This "is the condition of the possibility of willing an increase in the fullness and power of
things, willing them to become more" (p. 8). High-

SUNY Press, 1994, 160 pp., $14.95 paper. Joan Stambaughwrites for those who are able to read both-or perhapsbetter said, for those who are capable of reading between-both Nietzsche and Heidegger. The Other Nietzsche presents Nietzsche as "poet mystic" apartfrom the "French"Nietzsche of Derrida and the pious Heideggerian's reading of Nietzsche as the last metaphysician. Stambaugh's stance "between" Nietzsche and Heidegger corresponds to a classical hermeneutictension ratherthan the predictabilities of current intellectual fashion. Indeed the poetic mysticism she unpacksas constituting the "otherness"of Nietzsche is hardly a novelty. In literary circles, Nietzsche has been received as a poet mystic since the first publicationof his works, a view enthusiastically endorsed in the early part of this century, most especially by Stefan George and his followers. The title essay, appositely featured as the final chapter in this collection, was first published in Nietzsche and Asian Thought.Those who are interested in finding connectionsbetween Easternthought and Nietzsche's thinking will likely not be disappointed, but the volume has advantagesbeyond this association. Again, these advantages are not to be found in linking Nietzsche to the many interpretations of his thinking now available. Stambaugh attends to the etymology of a few key words from Nietzsche's text in sparingly parsed but certifiably Heideggerianfashion, focuses on longer select Nietzsche quotations(largely from the Nachlass) to which she returnsagain and again in different essays; but, although she mentions Derridaand others obliquely, overall she engages with no commentators.Thus the book might equally have been titled Nietzsche Apart. Stambaugh'svoice is worth hearing in its own right, so such self-sufficiency is hardly a flaw if it does render the book a bit more essayistic and a bit less scholarly on the terms of the over- and cross-referenced format that is characteristic of scholarly essays. Indeed most Nietzsche studies share Stambaugh'sself-reliance (with or without her magisterial prescience) and read Nietzsche non-dialogically.But such insularitywas not characteristicof Nietzsche's own writing. Reference and quotation, both direct and indirect, of contemporaryand past scholars, of central as of marginal authors, was not only prototypical but the very engaged substanceof Nietzsche's own evocative and provocative style. In additionto gatheringtogethera numberof Stambaugh's essays published elsewhere, the collection includes three new studies. One, "Nietzsche Today" (ChapterOne), offers a developmentof Stambaugh's reading of Nietzsche's thought on the eternal return, particularly taken with respect to her important

lighted against such a vision of life-affirmation, the wishful thinking of transcendenceis inherentlyimpotent and focused on dominion beyond its powers. Stambaugh links this impotent definition of transcendence to Nietzsche's express philosophy of "immanence"that is, in other words, a philosophyof what can be. Transcendence, however,wishes exactly for what is not, or that what might be otherwise than it is-as "a powerless wishing for the Otherin every form, whether for God as the epitome of otherness (differentfrom the finite world and the humancondition in every respect) or for a being otherwise of life itself" (p. 8). The key, as Stambaugh sees it, for Nietzsche is to be able to experiencedifferently.This

326 ability is the meaning of art in life. Thus Stambaugh notes the "Germanword for art (Kunst)is related to the verb to be able (koiinnen)" (p. 11).Regardedas an artist of life in this way, "Man,the still undetermined animal, takes up a stance that becomes his center of experience, his attitude from which he shapes his experience" (p. 56). In "Life Without Music" (ChapterThree), "wishfulness" is opposed to a self-transfiguringwillingness as evidencing "a weakness that would make demands"(p. 34). Such a "weaknessthatwouldmake demands" is distinguished from willingness conceived as the grand style. The elusive concept of the grand style is capturedin the very spiritof its grandiosity and is strikinglyreminiscentof the artist's representation of the sun's Gloria. Stambaugh quotes Nietzsche's pregnant distinction between reactive (romantic) art as "a consequence of dissatisfaction with reality" (romanticism is thus the very art of "wishfulness"in Stambaugh'ssense of the term) and creative art as "aureole,dithyramb(in short, the art of apotheosis)" (p. 35). As the kind of glorification manifest in the Gloria, creative (classical) art, in Nietzsche's own words again: "sheds a Homeric aureole over all things." But if the style of creative art is thus classical in Nietzsche's sense, Stambaugh draws attention to the disquieting question of the virtuosity of music in art and life. If "beauty,power, and the grand style all have to do with the taming of or mastery over opposites, with gatheringthem into a higher unity" (p. 37), such a definition leaves Nietzsche with the problem that the "grand style might be incompatiblewith the very natureof music" (p. 37). Stambaughdoes not resolve the issue (in her own words, she is often happy, and this is a peak of grace, simply "to stop rather than to conclude" [p. 11]), but puts the question of the place of the classical in music togetherwith the absence of paradigms. Thus in passing, and not in conclusion, Stambaugh suggests that Nietzsche's candidates, Bizet, Offenbach,and Peter Gast, must be accounted"inappropriate"alternativesto Wagner.The suggestion is not limpid, but it is Nietzschean in its provocative brevity.Ending with this mild rebuke to Nietzsche's musical scholarship, she invokes the metaphorical dimensionin Nietzsche's own referenceto "themusic in tragedy; ... the music in the tragedyof existence" (p. 40). The last, previously unpublished,essay, "Appearance: Nihilism or Affirmation," continues Stambaugh's reflection on the difference between wish and will conceived as posture or attitude or stance. Thus will is "a kind of activity that springs from a response to the real" (p. 133). Such a response takes place apart from any passive/active dichotomy as an unforcedor free liberationand is thus an affirmation of the mystical kind Keiji Nishitani implies when he

The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism calls Thus Spoke Zarathustra "scripture."This responsible/responsivemysticism recalls Stambaugh's earlier reflection on affirmation:"If I can affirm out of the fullness of my existence instead of revenging myself for what I lack or have lost or could lose I am freed from the bonds of reaction." It is in this way that Stambaughbrings Nietzsche into concord with Buddhism while at the end finding Nietzsche "temperamentally closest to Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu with his rejection of metaphysical backworlds and his understandingof the world as play" (p. 151).
BABETTE E. BABICH

Departmentof Philosophy FordhamUniversity-Lincoln Center CARRIER, DAVID. Poussin'sPaintings:A Study in Art-HistoricalMethodology.PennsylvaniaState University Press, 1993, 276 pp., $35.00 cloth. David Carrierends his serious, erudite, and somewhat arcane book on Poussin and the natureof artwritingby claiming a likeness to Poussin. Arguing as a generaltheme that interpretation is not only historically situated but also irreduciblypersonal, he suggests that it is partly his particularfeel for certain aspects of Poussin's work that affords him epistemological access to those aspects of the work. For one writing on a painter who is widely consideredto be a difficult, recalcitrantgenius, a painter of brilliant classicism and astringent,spare lyricism whose unremittent darknessturnsthe lightness of Italian art into Gallicized gravity,such an affinity may well be required.For to enter into the space of an hermetic painterlike Poussin-a pictorialspace which Carrier nicely argues positions the viewer outside at a great distance from what is happening inside it-may in part require one to be so taken by this painter's recondite gravity that one finds oneself absorbedin his pictures without, as it were, trying. There is little overt joy in Poussin's work, little unadulterated presentation of sensuous pleasure or unrestrainedlyricism. Instead, Poussin's attitude is that ecstasy and mortality, pleasure and morbidity, touch and transience, are nearly the same thing. Poussin seems to be painting out of the older Freud'sthoughtthat sex and death are drives which are everywhereinterconnected. This is hard to take, for Et in Arcadia Ego: I too was in paradise,only to find myself entombedin a mausoleum. Carrier'saffinity for Poussin has, I think, a lot to do with the chief virtues of this book, and also with its significant defects. As an extended reading of Poussin, Carrier's book is scholarly and involved. There is much to learn here about how to read Poussin's visual twists, stylistic tendencies, and elaborate