WHAT'S NIETZSCHE TO EURIPIDES? THE AESTHETICS OF SUFFERING IN NIETZSCHE'S BIRTH OF TRAGEDY AND EURIPIDES' TROJAN WOMEN. (December 2021) - Case, Zachary
Abstract : This article reads Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy in dialogue with Euripides' Trojan Women, synthesising a Nietzschean reading of Euripides' tragedy with, as it were, a Euripidean reading of Nietzsche's theorisation of the tragic. It focuses on the way in which both texts confront the threat of nihilism in the face of human suffering and attempt to redeem or transfigure it. This is manifested internally and self- consciously in Euripides' play through the actions of Hecuba and the chorus, who seem both to exhibit what Nietzsche might call a 'pessimism of strength ', and to express Nietzsche's fundamental claim that 'only as an aesthetic phenomenon is existence and the world eternally justified '. Yet Trojan Women ultimately resists Nietzschean theorising – a form of critical resistance which, as it will turn out, is already anticipated by Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy . More than a close study of two texts, this dialogic reading also has some big implications for thinking through the relationship between philosophy and tragedy in general.