Nuanced excesses. Fullness of life and illness in Nietzsche’s aesthetics

Abstract

The aim of our paper is to question the problem of artistic creation as a transfiguration of suffering. We will point out that health is always a state to be looked at with the eyes of a convalescent, and how in particular there can be no artistic creation that is not accompanied by a condition of suffering. Our interpretive key will be the faculty of perceiving nuances, a topic that often appears in Nietzsche’s later writings, and the relationship between the nuance and the affirmative power of art. Finally, we will consider whether the taste for nuance is not itself a sign of a profoundly suffering nature, aristocratically devoted to detachment from all that is grossly general.