Paper short abstract:

This paper intends to revisit Nietzsche’s principle of Will to Power in order to recover its potential as a re-vitalising methodology for the analysis of objects – particularly as the engagement is being reshaped through a post-conventional shift that is placing a fresh emphasis on, what Jane Bennett (in her book Vibrant Matter) describes as, ‘the thing-side of affect.’

Paper long abstract:

This paper intends to revisit Friedrich Nietzsche's principle of Will to Power in order to recover its potential as a re-vitalising methodology for the analysis of objects.

Using my own copy of Thus Spoke Zarathustra as a heuristic device, I propose to introduce Nietzsche's idea of a productive interplay between entities, by discussing the book's cover artwork, as it continues the association between Nietzsche and Caspar David Friedrich's iconic picture of The Wanderer above a Sea of Mist.

This poetic painting, which (true to its title) features a solitary figure gazing ambivalently at a landscape, shrouded in a fog, will allow me to discuss subject/object relations, in terms of some enduring 'ways of seeing'. These familiar interpretive possibilities will first be unravelled, and then reconciled, as the discussion moves away from the stasis of Friedrich's rendered scenario, and towards the autopoiesis of Will to Power.

Whilst the paper will lead with a didactic approach to object perception then, it will also tease out the 'thing-side' of affect through some 'presensing' of an image and the book object itself as it supports and appeals to that image. In this sense, the paper might be best understood as a strategic attempt to foreground the latent creativity that shapes all material culture events, through the involvement of, rather than a deferral to, the disciplined variant of imaginative 'expression' that we call art.