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About Agonist



The Agonist is a peer review refereed journal that features essays, interviews, and reviews as well as current translations of heretofore unavailable Nietzsche texts and rare, obscure, or overlooked studies on Nietzsche’s thought or aspects of it that have received scant attention or been deemed marginal by the philosophical establishment.

The primary concern of The Agonist is with critical interrogations of Nietzsche’s aesthetics, which remain in demand of more significant attention. If art to Nietzsche “is the great stimulus to life,” there is no total valorization of it in his work. As Philip Pothen noted in Nietzsche and the Fate of Art, “Nietzsche’s suspicion concerning art is perhaps the greatest of any since Plato’s, and even, it might be said, including Plato’s.” If this is true, a revaluation of Nietzsche’s aesthetics is duly in order.

In the Nachlass, Nietzsche stated that his general task was “to show how life, philosophy, and art can have a deeper and familial relationship to each other, without philosophy becoming shallow and the life of the philosopher becoming untruthful” [KSA 8: 104]. Thus, although our principal concern is the aesthetic, the aesthetic is inseparable from the philosophic therefore from life. All dimensions of Nietzsche’s thought—classical, mythic, literary, poetic, sacred, ecstatic, etc.—are, we attest, interwoven in the most complex manner and therefore pertinent to our vision.

A further intention of The Agonist is to instigate and spur new modes of writing on Nietzsche in order to embrace and develop different methods of examining his thought, methods that incorporate notions of experimentation and riddling—to write, for instance, on Nietzsche as rabbinical scholars write on The Torah, surrounding a text with numerous conflicting interpretations that come to no resolution, reflecting a radical perspectivism that refuses to offer definitive conclusions. The ‘dangerous maybe’ and the ‘questionable question’ that Nietzsche brings to bear in his agons must, too, be brought to bear against his thought.

In order to enact one of the practices of writing that Nietzsche engaged in, The Agonist will include a section strictly devoted to exegesis. No journal on Nietzsche currently features such writing. This unique section will contain ruminative reflections on passages from Nietzsche’s oeuvre in the manner of the third essay of On the Genealogy of Morals: A Polemic. Its purpose is to foster the art of reading like a cow and writing with blood that Nietzsche struggled to instigate and that his work demands.

The Agonist will also publish reviews of works not directly concerned with Nietzsche that it considers relevant or of particular importance to its overall aesthetico-philosophic concerns. In the Archive section of essays, all previously published essays can be found.

The Agonist: A Nietzsche Circle Journal is seeking submissions. To submit work for The Agonist, please follow the Contributor's Guidelines for this site, and also read our Submission Policy. The Agonist is refereed peer review journal. If there is a book you wish to review, send us full details on the book (link to publisher’s page on the book, etc.) and one sample of a published book review you have written. Any work received that does not follow the appropriate guidelines will not be read. If you have any questions with regard to our guidelines or submission policy, contact us at nceditors@ietzschecircle.com.

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