“Nietzsche as Aestheticist”

Megill, Allan.  "Nietzsche as Aestheticist." Philosophy and Literature 5 (1981): 204-225.

Excerpt:

“IF IN modern art the question of the ontological status of art has become

central to art itself, so that in the guise of Duchamp’s urinal
and Warhol’s Brillo boxes art has become philosophical, then surely in
certain quarters something of the opposite movement has also been
occurring. I am thinking here of such writers as Foucault, Derrida, and
(in his “later” phase) Heidegger, with whom philosophy, in a sense that
I shall attempt to specify, becomes aesthetic. And I am thinking too
of those contemporary literary critics who are inclined to valorize “misreading”
as somehow good in itself, or (what is largely the same) good
insofar as it succeeds in generating further misreadings that in their
turn prove to be equally productive. Attached to this valorization is the
notion that literary texts and what they contain change as they are
viewed from the perspectives of different readers with different interpretive
assumptions. It is with this latter notion—the notion that the
object of interpretation is somehow the invention of the act of interpretation
itself—that I propose to start, for it gives us a good point of
entry into the thinker with whom this current in contemporary
thought and criticism begins—Nietzsche. Contrariwise, in Nietzsche we
are able to see—though admittedly in a still tentative way—something
of the structure ofjustification that underlies the writings of these more
recent figures.”

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