Nietzsche, Artistic Intoxication, and the Overcoming of Nihilism: the Body as an Ontology of Practice

becoming, for as an underlying reality, it will always remain a “primal unity” of chaos. What the intoxicating self tries to achieve is a “tremendous expulsion” of the figures it finds most authentic about itself. Such a self takes its lead from the multiplicity in the body in a manner that allows us to argue that the latter actually functions as an ontology of practice. The body that transfigures becoming is the body that expresses not what it readily takes to be its own essential features, which often are artificial and oppressive cultural norms, but what Dionysus recognizes as the underlying nature of reality: life as frenzied becoming, a realm in which our socially assigned individuality, which ignores needs that are true to us, is dissolved. Here the multiplicity of the self truly becomes an immanent dimension of the practical possibilities of becoming, as Dionysus tries to secure his “symbolic jubilee” of nature. The Dionysian hero seeks to change our perspectives on the structures of becoming by giving them powerful symbolic expressions.# The main issue that still concerns us is, using the Dionysian model, how do we recognize a body or a self as a symbol of affirmation?

We learn from Zarathustra, the self-proclaimed disciple of Dionysus, that we can symbolically recognize the non-nihilistic, transfigured body in the contorted forms it takes when the subject engages in a dynamic activity like dancing. He declares, “I should believe only in a God who understood how to dance” (Z, I, “Of Reading and Writing“). As much as the tragic hero, the teacher of the superhuman finds Dionysus, the god of music and dance, particularly useful in our effort to overcome nihilism, for through intoxicating dance the normal

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