Pharmaceutics II

Abstract

This second chapter on Kofman’s Nietzsche and the Philosophical Stage (1979) examines two of its constituent essays: ‘The Plot Against Philosophy’ and ‘The Mask of Serenity’. In the first she outlines the trenchant Nietzschean critique of the ways in which tragic experience has been traduced by philosophy, making use of the notion of pharmaceutics. In the second article examined, she delves more deeply into the grounds for this argument, namely that the tragic constitutes an alternative epistemic tradition, a way of looking more squarely at ‘nature’ or ‘life’, even and especially when it involves suffering. In this way, one is able to side-step the complacency of ‘serenity’ and instead follow the path down which the figure of Dionysus invites us.