Abstract

In his review of my book, Le voyage de Nietzsche à Sorrente, Emmanuel Salanskis writes that it is an agreeable read and philologically precise, but that it presents some philosophical difficulties.The first alleged difficulty lies in the conception of “epiphany.” Salanskis asks, “Can we really include Nietzsche among adherents of an aesthetics of the ‘instant’ (170) like Virginia Woolf ?” No, certainly not. On the page cited, I discuss James Joyce’s conception of epiphany (and mention Virginia Woolf only in passing) in order to distinguish Joycean epiphanies and the aesthetics of the instant from Nietzsche’s epiphanies. The latter, I argue shortly thereafter, are “from an epistemological point of view not moments ..