This article is concerned with what Nietzsche claims about particular kinds of suffering that can emerge in encounters with others. I maintain that, even taking into account statements of Nietzsche’s that contradict or modify his language of solitude, hardness and domination, his acknowledgement of the capacity of witnessing others’ suffering to cause pain does not indicate an intersubjective notion of self-affirmation, but is an instance of a tension he identifies between our inescapable implication in social ways of being, and our (...) need to create ourselves independently to overcome self-alienation. I argue that Nietzsche’s claims about pity are a particular instance of this tension – that is, that while he recognizes that we feel pity, he treats this as an unfortunate affect to be overcome, to be appropriated on an individual basis, rather than as an invitation to be authentically with others – as indicating the possibility of a mutual project of self-affirmation. (shrink)

Theorists have long sought to repress or domesticate the shaggy, obscene, and transgressive satyr that ranges through satire’s long history, lurking in dark corners, and to make it into a model of a moral citizen.Unruly, wayward, frolicsome, critical, parasitic, at times perverse, malicious, cynical, scornful, unstable—it is at once pervasive yet recalcitrant, basic yet impenetrable. Satire is the stranger that lives in the basement.Instead of trying to resolve all the problems that arise from the particular of a given tragic dignification, (...) the dramatist in his satyrplay throws out tragic dignification per se. He thus gets freedom by a flat refusal to accept any of the norms that had caused the .. (shrink)