ABOUT MY SUBAHIBI ARTICLES: PRESENTATION

 

With this text, I would like to introduce my project of interpretive criticism devoted to Subahibi, explaining its focus and purpose, conceived as a series of philosophical, essayistic, and not strictly hermeneutical articles. Its starting point can be found in The Aesthetic Justification of the World: Nietzsche and Subahibi, a text which, although it originally arose as a relatively delimited reflection on Nietzsche, ultimately encouraged me to continue writing and publishing my perspective.

The series does not aspire so much to offer a definitive interpretation of Subahibi as to specialize in what I consider distinctive about the work in contrast to the readings that have most frequently been established around it.

This also entails a certain desire for exhaustiveness. Not in the sense of systematically commenting on every scene or exhausting the work through a meticulous exegesis, but rather in attempting, throughout the series, to accommodate as many elements as possible that prove necessary for understanding my overall perspective on Subahibi. Some articles may begin from a specific philosophical problem; others, from a particular aesthetic structure, a figure, a recurring motif, or a relationship with another tradition. Their unity will therefore not depend on a single method or on a strictly thematic progression, but on their belonging to the same attempt at understanding. In this sense, the project will be deliberately non-hermeneutical in a precise sense.

It is important to point out from the outset a matter concerning Sakurano. Subahibi and Sakurano constitute, for me, a totality whose ultimate understanding cannot be established while ignoring the relationship between the two works. It would therefore be artificial to pretend that such a relationship does not exist. Even so, this project does not intend to address Sakurano. Whenever it proves necessary to draw upon it, this will be solely in order to illuminate some aspect of Subahibi, and such references may inevitably reveal certain elements of the second work. Its proper study is reserved for a later project, on a considerably larger scale, which will require the time and dedication that I cannot currently devote to it.

For this reason, what is presented here should be understood as an exploration of the first piece of that totality: an attempt to remain within Subahibi, to traverse it from different angles, and to make explicit a reading that could hardly be contained within a single essay. The first text in this series, The Aesthetic Justification of the World: Nietzsche and Subahibi, thus constitutes its starting point, but not its conclusion.