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Nietzsche’S “Gay” Science, Babette Babich

Articles and Chapters in Academic Book Collections

Offers a reading of the allusion to the 'Provencal' in Nietzsche’s The Gay Science, including the troubadour’s art (or 'technic') of poetic song, an art at once secret, anonymous and thus nonsubjective, but also including logical disputation, for which it is the model, and comprising, perhaps above all, the important ideal of action (and pathos) at a distance: l’amour lointain. But beyond the Provençal character and atmosphere of the troubadour, Nietzsche’s conception of a joyful science, Nietzsche's 'gay' science also adumbrates a critique of science understood as the collective ideal of scholarship, and including classical philology as much as logic, …