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

trembled and broke open and streams of fire snorted forth: for earth is a table of the gods, and trembling with creative new words and the dice throws of the gods: Oh how should I not lust for eternity and for the wedding ring of rings-the Ring of Recurrence!” (Z, III, “The Seven Seals,” 3).

Nietzsche again reminds us that the transfiguration effected on becoming through existential action is not meant to permanently change the character of becoming, for the latter will have to remain a locus of possibilities and thus a field of chance, instability, suffering and dice throwing.# The body as beautiful figuration, through dance, consists in the insight that intoxication temporarily presents the self as a figurative aberration within nihilistic becoming. Nietzsche writes, “affirmation of life even in its strangest and sternest problems, the will to life rejoicing in its own inexhaustibility through the sacrifice of its highest types- that is what I called Dionysian…” (TI, “What I owe to the Ancients,” 5). Because beauty in becoming consists in a transfigured perspective that exalts our being and because beauty in becoming symbolizes our will to affirmation we can say that “the crooked” body that enraptures itself in Dionysian dance affirms a will that embraces the transfigured, beautiful realities of becoming as its content.

One could wonder whether the Dionysian self should be kept in a constant state of intoxication to maintain its affirmative and aesthetical qualities? Clearly it would not be healthy for any human person to subsist in a constant state of rapture. The state of the Dionysian self is temporary, and after the rapturous “metaphysical comfort” has passed, it may express its

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