the melancholy of all things done fallacy

It may well be that the 'biographical fallacy' was correct in destroying the assumptive correlations between life and thought, and yet there is an enormous difference between the positivistic reduction of writing through the facts of the life of an author, and interpretive psychoanalytic and historical approaches which seek to understand life-events in light of the writing of an individual, and the writing of that individual in the context of their relation to their culture, the social and media-specific conditions within which they operated.

While the biographical fallacy correctly pointed out that there can be no univocal, one-on-one linkages between a biographical, social or cultural event and the sentences produced by a writer, criticism of the last twenty years has separated the writing of an author so fully from the concrete historical events of the author's life that one wonders if all of the theorizing about 'bodies' and 'materiality' so fashionable in academic critical circles has actually contributed to a false separation of writing and life, of articulation and event, essentially relegating the 'body' to a mere theoretical construct out of touch, literally and figuratively, with the real bodies of individuals in their complex relations with their world and others.

Since the deconstruction of the 'biographical fallacy' in the 60s', it has been almost illegal in critical discourse to write about the events of a writer's or philosopher's life as somehow informing or governing their writing, as though we would be able to isolate the writing from a body that is materially ensconced in history, in time, and in a myriad of complex relationships with others. Finally, when the female is a friend of Nietzsche's friend and is basically installed as the missing component of a love-triangle, the situation becomes even more difficult. When that other person was a female in Nietzsche's life, the matter becomes complex. These quotes from Nietzsche's Tautenberger Aphorismen during the summer of 1882 make clear that Nietzsche was, at the very least, deeply conflicted about his ability to connect with another person. Lou von Salomé (1882) Nietzsche, Kritische Gesamtausgabe, Friedrich Nietzsche, Tautenberger Aphorismen für Prevents the depth of the conversation.') ('In every conversation between three people, one person is superfluous and therefore 'Bei jedem Gespräch zu dreien ist einer überflüssig und verhindert damit die Tiefe des Gesprächs.' ('The human being is too imperfect a thing. Liebe zu einem Menschen würde mich zerstören.' 'Der Mensch ist eine zu unvollkommene Sache. ('In the background of all of his feelings for a woman, a man still has contempt for the female sex.') 'Der Mann hat im Hintergrunde aller seiner Empfindungen für ein Weib immer noch die Verachtung für das weibliche Geschlecht.' Text on other terms, in any medium, requires the written permission of the This text may be shared in accordance with the fair-use Nietzsche's and Nietzsche and Lou Andreas-Salomé Nietzsche and Lou Andreas-Salomé: Chronicle of a Relationship 1882Ĭopyright © 2001 by Robert S.

The melancholy of all things done fallacy