Abstract

Rampley's Nietzsche, Aesthetics, and Modernity offers a valuable understanding of Nietzsche's Will to Power as the Will to Form and of the Overman as an artist inspired by the sublime who has overcome the reactive mentality of cultural pessimism by means of "active nihilism." Rampley argues that Nietzsche is a post metaphysical dialectician, building an aesthetic practice based on the productive play of transfigurative immanence that makes and affirms forms. Nietzsche differs from Lyotard and Derrida, Rampley argues, in his commitment to the Dionysian struggle to create. Nevertheless, Rampley's account is based on a problematic derivation, first, of Nietzsche's alleged dialectics from Hegel's and, second, of the Overman's creativity from the limited aestheticism of the sublime.