Somatic Archive

This essay concerns one of the strangest exhibits of all time: the display of Friedrich Nietzsche's live body in Villa Silberblick, a house overlooking Weimar, the "City of European Culture" in 1999. Since Weimar's self-representation is organized almost entirely around the glory of a handful of long-dead men and the public spaces devoted to them, the town might as well have declared itself "City of Museum Culture." Indeed, its culture has been strange at times, and its contradictions are not all that badly summed up in the double meaning of Silberblick, which can mean both silver view and cross-eyed vision. In the story of Nietzsche's final years we will encounter both the silvering and the squinting

Aesthetics · Art · Art history · Epistemology · Glory · Literature · Political science · Politics · History · Kierkegaardian Philosophy and Influence · Law · Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and Hegel · Philosophy · Philosophy, Ethics, and Existentialism