Nietzsche Contra Bacon
The best pictorial exemplar of Nietzsche’s thought is to be found in Francis Bacon’s work; the deconstruction of the corporeal, the Yes of the bodily No, the Zarathustran burst of laughter that shatters all illusions of renewal or return. Bacon painted with a syphilitic brush, the castration of rebirth; the prepuce re-stitched to the phallus by the mohem-artificer. Nietzsche gelded the ‘this is’ of thought, the canonical nay saying of pedagogical prejudice and monotheist imperishability. The body dies, and with it the notion of the body, the material imagining of the body, the body disembodied, the disembodied body. Bacon re-embodied the disembodied body, the imagining of the body, the corporeal not-body, the no-body. This no-body, however, is a Nietzschean Yes, a Yes to the No of the body, the imperishable body, the gelding body. Figures in a Garden, Figure Study 1, Triptych Inspired by the Oresteia of Aeschylus, Self-portrait, Head V1. The Gay Science, the Twilight of the Idols, Beyond Good and Evil, Human, All Too Human, Ecce Homo.
The Eternal Return
give me a biscuit
and a mouthful of blood
or I will return
The best pictorial exemplar of Nietzsche’s thought is to be found in Francis Bacon’s work; the deconstruction of the corporeal, the Yes of the bodily No, the Zarathustran burst of laughter that shatters all illusions of renewal or return. Bacon painted with a syphilitic brush, the castration of rebirth; the prepuce re-stitched to the phallus by the mohem-artificer. Nietzsche gelded the ‘this is’ of thought, the canonical nay saying of pedagogical prejudice and monotheist imperishability. The body dies, and with it the notion of the body, the material imagining of the body, the body disembodied, the disembodied body. Bacon re-embodied the disembodied body, the imagining of the body, the corporeal not-body, the no-body. This no-body, however, is a Nietzschean Yes, a Yes to the No of the body, the imperishable body, the gelding body. Figures in a Garden, Figure Study 1, Triptych Inspired by the Oresteia of Aeschylus, Self-portrait, Head V1. The Gay Science, the Twilight of the Idols, Beyond Good and Evil, Human, All Too Human, Ecce Homo.
The Eternal Return
give me a biscuit
and a mouthful of blood
or I will return
unendingly
