The Journal of Nietzsche Studies

The Journal of Nietzsche Studies 27 (2004) 85-86

Alexandre Kostka and Irving Wohlfarth, eds. Nietzsche and "An Architecture of Our Minds," vol. 6 of Issues and Debates, ed. Julia Bloomfield, Michael S. Roth, and Salvatore Settis (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1999). ISBN: 0-89236-485-8. Paperback: $45.00

In a passage from Daybreak (§169), Nietzsche dares us to conceive of architecture in terms of a labyrinth—the only structure, in his view, that would be consistent with our all-too-modern souls. Alexandre Kostka and Irving Wohlfarth's edited book, Nietzsche and "An Architecture of Our Minds," takes on this challenge with an ambitious sweep of essays, whose connections are labyrinthine rather than linear. The approaches used are principally from aesthetics and art history, and among the questions it seeks to grapple with are: What did Nietzsche know of historical and contemporary architecture? What was the significance of architectural metaphors in his language? Which architects, painters, writers, and scientists are we entitled to describe as "Nietzscheans" and to what degree?

The book is tripartite, moving from an examination of the metaphors of architecture that abound in Nietzsche's writings, to reflections on Nietzschean resonances/influences in art, literature, and architecture, and finally to a more specific focus on Nietzschean biographical and conceptual influences on various modern architects. After Tilmann Buddensieg's introduction, Claudia Brodsky Lacour does a genealogy of architectural metaphors in Western philosophy, including Plato, Descartes, Kant, Hegel, and finally Nietzsche. She argues that Nietzsche's "conceptual construction" (der Bau der Begriffe), "a process by which man-made metaphors for sensations are rigidified into concepts, their anthropomorphic origins forgotten" (21), was consonant with the modern search for a "technique" or methodology for going beyond "all-too-human" representations. Karsten Harries and Anthony Viddler then examine the metaphors of the labyrinth and the mask in Nietzsche's work. Harries argues that "the stony, mute hardness of our modern architecture and of our modern world lets us long for life, even at the price of architectural order, lets us dream of antiarchitectures, of ruins and labyrinths" (47). Vidler analyzes the recurring motif of the mask, the feminine aspect of the "uncanny," and the theme of horror as the space "behind" the mask alongside the "authenticity" of the labyrinth in its lack of facades (61) as quintessentially Nietzschean and modern architectural tropes that get at the heart of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century debates over meaning, authenticity, and materiality, and late twentieth-century discussions of postsemiotic and posthistorical signification.

The second section of the book, which is the most sprawling and ambitious in its examination of Nietzsche's influence on art and aesthetics, begins with Werner Hofmann's essay. Though it remains an open question whether Gustav Klimt ever actually read Nietzsche, or whether Nietzsche's ability to "reverse perspectives" reached him as part of the climate of Vienna in his day, Hofmann presents a compelling case for the preponderance of Nietzschean themes, such as the "Pessimismus der Stärke" (Pessimism of Strength) and the coexistence of the Apollonian and the Dionysian, derived mainly from The Birth of Tragedy in many of Klimt's works (76). In turn, Paolo Baldacci argues that Giorgio de Chirico "was a Nietzschean to the very core" (91). De Chirico envisaged himself as a creator of mythical metaphors in which elements of private [End Page 85] memory fuse into and exchange places with symbolic cultural elements. By "eliminating" (wegthun, Nietzsche's word) the conventionally unambiguous nature of things, de Chirico forges the multiple ambiguity of the "void" and thus transplants Nietzsche's influence onto the visual arts. Similarly, Hanne Bergius uncovers Nietzsche's pivotal role in all three centers of Dadaism—Zurich, Paris, and Berlin—as evidenced in the Dadaist celebration of the dance and montage as representing a polar "new unity" (123) and ultimately focuses on the Berlin Dadaists, such as Baader and Finsterlin. In turn, Irving Wohlfarth examines various reactions to, and appropriations of, Nietzsche's critique of the disintegration of master builders...