Graduation Date
11-2023
Document Type
Dissertation
Department/Program Conferring Degree
Philosophy
Keywords
Nietzsche, Ariadne, eternal recurrence, reevaluation, will to power
Abstract
It is my contention that Nietzsche undertakes Ariadne as a solution to the inadequacies of Dionysus (the loneliness of what assimilates in the enaction of its values, what negates in alignment towards itself) precisely because she is a woman—and hence most capable of inverting the philosophical concept Woman as a synecdoche of all marginalized groups within structures of dominant thought: the disabled, the stateless, the queer, the dispossessed. In order to fully explore the potential capacities of this perspective, I piece together Nietzsche's sense of Ariadne through his every extant reference to her—from his Empedocles outline to "Ariadne's Lament" and his January 1889 letters—unfolding her as a critique of Woman and as a parodic rejection of Wagnerian Romantic nationalism (as a counter-Brünhilde) in order to arrive, finally, at the point of constructing an Ariadneac perspective and set of questions, principally a reevaluation of the Übermensch and the Wille zur Macht (Will to Power) away from their conceptual baggage as piled on by generations of Nietzschean commentators, in order to arrive at a position where language itself can be approached non-conceptually, non-metaphysically, and non-representationally, so that we can undertake a new poetry
Recommended Citation
Jessen, Jessica, "Nietzsche's Ariadne: a new perspective on the eternal recurrence" (2023). College of Liberal Arts & Social Sciences Theses and Dissertations. 373.
https://via.library.depaul.edu/etd/373