Nietzsche, Malerba, and the Aesthetics of Superficiality

Luigi Malerba's book Diario di un sognatore (Diary of a Dreamer)' purports to provide in the main body of the text transcriptions of one year's worth of the author's dreams2 and in its prologue an attempt to reformulate the theory of dreams in nonFreudian or indeed anti-Freudian terms. This attempt is of considerable interest, not only or most importantly for its attack on Freud, but for the theory of reading and indeed the theory of art which underlies it. The book as a whole can profitably be read as an attempt to put into practice an aesthetics of superficiality derived from Nietzsche's conception of the nature of the dream and its connection with art in general. The issues are worth examining, for what is at stake is really the most fundamental of our traditional assumptions about how we are to understand what we read or experience. Early in his prologue, before he begins his critique of the psychoanalytic approach to dreams, Malerba uses a sentence from Nietzsche to support his analysis of the traditional conception of the nature of dreams

Aesthetics · Art · German Literature and Culture Studies · Kierkegaardian Philosophy and Influence · Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and Hegel · Philosophy