The Eroticization of Distance: Nietzsche, Blanchot, and the Legacy of Courtly Love

(Hardback)

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In The Eroticization of Distance: Nietzsche, Blanchot and the Legacy of Courtly Love, Joseph D. Kuzma explores the significance of courtly erotic themes in Friedrich Nietzsches mature philosophy and in Maurice Blanchots writings of the 1940s and early 1950s. Rather than offering an account of erotic relationality that prioritizes reconciliation, fulfillment, or release, Nietzsche attempts to formulate a nonteleological eroticism that aims at nothing but the perpetual intensification of desire. Kuzma suggests that it is Blanchot who carries Nietzsches courtly erotic tendencies to their most provocative point, by highlighting potentials for intimate relationality that might be established through a shared experience of dispossession and loss. This first monograph to engage specifically with the theme of eroticism in Blanchots writings will be of interest not only to students and scholars of Nietzsche, Blanchot, or French philosophy, but also anyone interested in the philosophy of sexuality, the history of love, theories of the emotions, or nineteenth and twentieth-century European thought more generally.

Reviews

During his years spent on the Mediterranean coast in ze, where years earlier Nietzsche had similarly completed some of his most decisive thinking, the critic and novelist Maurice Blanchot would often find himself silently retracing his predecessors footsteps. In this strikingly original exploration of the implicit dialogue between the pair, which touches in turn on the implications of courtly love, the legacy of Tristan and Isolde, Wagnerian myth, the place of erotic intimacy in Blanchots fiction, and much else besides, Joseph Kuzma convincingly demonstrates how Nietzsche and Blanchot were each deeply committed to an experience of desire in which difference took precedence over fusion, distance over proximity, and intensity over finality. This illuminating study not only offers an acutely suggestive rethinking of eternal return, now viewed less as a doctrine than as a deferral of all doctrine, but also gives a fresh and compelling account of Nietzsches importance for postwar French thought in general and of the urgency of Blanchots distinctive response to Nietzsche in particular. -- Leslie Hill, Emeritus Professor of French Studies, University of Warwick

Author Bio

Joseph D. Kuzma is instructor of philosophy at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs.