Max Statkiewicz - Culture and Cruelty in Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, and Artaud

Culture and Cruelty in
Nietzsche, Dostoevsky,
and Artaud

Culture and Cruelty in
Nietzsche, Dostoevsky,
and Artaud

Max Statkiewicz

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For Grayna Sonia

Everything that aims at attenuating the cruelty of the truth, at attenuating the harshness of the real, has the unavoidable consequence of discrediting the most brilliant of endeavors or the worthiest of causes.Clment Rosset, Joyful Cruelty

Faust:

Nun gut, wer bist du denn ?

Mephistopheles:

Ein Teil von jener Kraft,

Die stets das Bse will und stets das Gute schafft

Goethe Faust

NOTES

Rosset, Joyful Cruelty , 70; Le principe de cruaut , 7: Tout ce qui vise attnuer la cruaut de la vrit, attnuer les asprits du rel, a pour consquence immanquable de discrditer la plus gniale des entreprises comme la plus estimable des causes .

(lines 13351337): (my translation) Faust: Well, who are you then? Mephistopheles: Part of this force that always wants evil, and always works the good.

Contents

I am grateful to my students Regina Chiuminatto, Anna Grelson, Elizavetta Koemets, Jeni Legg, Valerie Reed-Hickman, Anna Redmond, Patricia Ruiz Rivera, Ian Atalla, Michael Becker, Daniel Dooghan, Brent Harlow, Thomas Massnick, Peter Orte, as well as Grayna Sonia Wasilewska Statkiewicz for discussing with me the project of this book.

The word culture has many meanings, but apparently one valuation. Culture is universally praised. Let us consider the possible models of culture by providing the most general cultural background. Others tried to rescue the term by circumscribing more rigorously its semantic field.

Two main clusters of meaning are usually distinguished in the term culture. First, an anthropological notion with scientific claims, often associated with the name of E. B. Tylor, who defined culture, in his Primitive Culture from 1871, as that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society. And what it should reveal most forcefully, according to Geertz, is the essential diversity of cultures as the presupposition of modern anthropology: