| This dissertation challenges the predominant idea of Nietzsche's philosophy of power, offering a new account of affirmation and its relationship to "will to power." In contrast to seeing affirmation as a synonym for "saying yes to life," I ask: how affirmation (Bejahung ) functions, what kinds of shifts we find in Nietzsche's works, what is its relationship to the primacy of music, the body and the Dionysian (dionysische), and what models are offered for affirmation? Finally, I examine the extent to which affirmation is attainable. Drawing upon an extensive conceptual, historical and comparative philosophical analysis of Nietzsche's German oeuvre and his early unpublished lessons on rhetoric, I argue that genuine affirmation is a largely unconscious process, best described as a musically inspired bodily resonance that the largely unconscious drives may acquire through creative movement, such as dance and yoga. I challenge three prevailing assumptions: first, that Nietzsche's thought is characterized by contradiction, showing how this view is misplaced. Second, I challenge the idea that affirmation is a cognitive stance and that being described in mutually exclusive terms, it leads to a paradox. I argue that a musical approach to Nietzsche's texts, together with his methodological advice on love as the supreme Macht, show that will to power is the foremost form the drives may acquire through affirmation. Instead of a synonym for "life" or "power," will to power, as the know-how to love, is what Nietzsche's musically inspired bodily resonance and the Dionysian arts may teach us, through creative movement. It is this highest kind of will to power that Nietzsche envisions as the right lived practice. Thus Spoke the Body: The Problem of Affirmation in Nietzsche's Philosophy takes seriously Nietzsche's methodological emphasis on the body as a contest of largely unconscious and creative drives and his aim to compose "music with words, providing an innovative understanding of what affirmation looks like as a bodily process, how Nietzsche advices to acquire it, and how the perplexing paradox is resolved in terms of the Dionysian arts. |
