This paper explores the question of the relationship between art, rhythm, and life through a mobilisation of Giorgio Agamben’s discussion, first, of Nietzsche and the active nihilist’s relationship to art, and second, on his diagnosis of rhythm as pertaining to the “original structure” of the work of art in The Man Without Content. Agamben’s notion of the “rhythmic” and “poietic” encounter is one which situates the experience of rhythm as the experience of the originary dimension of temporality and of the (...) human’s relationship to the world. Turning to Nietzsche, this paper seeks to complicate Agamben’s picture by discussing Nietzsche’s under-discussed explorations of rhythm and its connection to art. Three distinct rhythms will be identified: Apollonian, Dionysian, and the tragic or joyful rhythms of the Apollo-Dionysus relation. Reading Agamben through Nietzsche, it will be discussed how Agamben’s notion of rhythm blends Apollonian and Dionysian elements; does not through this blending however offer a tragic or joyful notion of rhythm, which, for Nietzsche, follows from their double affirmative rhythmisation. Instead of a rhythmic-poietic encounter opening an originary and authentic experience of temporality and dwelling, Nietzsche offers an account of tragic and joyful rhythms which continually create new worlds. (shrink)

By considering the way in which the mechanism of the scapegoat in René Girard's work is predicated on a phenomenal and anthropic understanding of violence, the following shows how Girard's anthropological conception of religion determines and limits from the beginning relations between the violent and the nonviolent and the phenomenal and the nonphenornenal. This conception is then inscribed within a larger economy of violence that opens up Girard's account of victimization and sacrifice to wider determinations. Important distinctions are made along (...) the way between the human sciences, religion, ethics and philosophy. If the work of Jacques Derrida in particular and deconstruction in general permit this widening in this article, I then argue however that such concepts as originary violence also short‐circuit the differentiations, with which we are concerned, to address, with and beyond Girard, a radical ethics of the lesser violence. (shrink)