After Reading "Nietzsche: A Very Short Introduction" in March 2009

I find Nietzsche riveting, transforming in a way that I have not found in a thinker in a long time. I yearn to read all this books, although this little book has presented, so it seems to be, a great enough summary that I can already begin to feel that I know the man.

What stimulates me about Nietzsche is his awareness and articulation of a particular kind of suffering this is special to the human condition and, particularly, to modernity. That is the suffering of the great philosophical skeptic. The suffering of the one who cannot make meaning, who cannot trust knowledge, who has no metaphysics, who has seen or faced the dark Dionysian truth of existence and its ultimate failure to offer deep or higher meanings. I have always been concerned and interested in this dilemma, but I have never thought of it in terms of suffering before, but it is the suffering that defines Nietzsche’s psyche and informs all his work and ultimately contributed to his insanity (the syphilis surely helped).

There is a necessary corollary that I think would be pertinent to theatre and performance studies, and that is the necessary study of the suffering spectator. It would be useful to reconsider all the studies of audience and spectatorship and consider what kind of spectator is assumed in each of these studies (the Lockean blank-slate spectator? The mass public non-individualistic spectator? Most famously, the feminist spectator?). I wonder if we have considered the role of the theatre for the spectator who is suffering as Nietzsche suffered, the spectator who is undergoing an ontological crisis. For, indeed, isn’t this crisis increasing in magnitude and desperation as 21st century proceeds? That fewer and fewer people are willing to engage the question, to look into the abyss, suggests the growing pandemic of nihilism that threatens, I feel, to engulf us all.

What does the theatre offer the suffering spectator? How does reconsidering the attitude of the audience member force us to rethink our concepts of spectatorship, of performance, of artistic and aesthetic value, of the purpose of the theatre and the responsibilities of the art form?