ABSTRACT

Throughout Nietzsche’s texts the metaphors of pregnancy proliferate, images of ‘forming, maturing, perfecting’, a ‘secret task’1 most commonly aligned with what Nietzsche terms the ‘ideal selfishness’ of creativity, and hence with the Greek image of the artist or philosopher ‘giving birth’ to an idea or a work. In Plato’s Symposium, Diotima borrows the metaphor of pregnancy to furnish the notion of creativity as immortality, the eternal perpetuation of life as the child, the work.2 Pregnancy is a symbol of eternity. However, given Nietzsche’s suspicion of the transcendental ideal inherent in such a notion, it is clear that Nietzsche could not take up the metaphor unproblematically, despite his nostalgia and admiration for the ‘Ancients’.3 Nietzsche is scornful of the notion of creativity as passive, subordinated production, because it implies a will to ‘go beyond’, a move towards immortality which could-be construed as a denial of the body and the pain at hand. And yet Nietzsche seems to affirm the preoccupation of the potentially creative being with its own care and responsibility as a positive state or mode of behaviour.