ABSTRACT
This chapter begins from the premise that while the influence of Nietzsche’s nihilist metaphysics on absurdism is well established—notably in Albert Camus’s 1951 The Rebel and Martin Esslin’s 1961 The Theatre of the Absurd—the German philosopher’s aesthetic philosophy is relatively underdiscussed as an absurdist forerunner. The essay underscores Nietzsche’s role in the German classical aesthetic tradition as it reads The Birth of Tragedy as a proto-absurdist work. Nietzsche’s version of tragedy, which takes place in the disordered cosmos of Dionysus but through the formal structures of Apollo, offers a model for absurdist literature that, even as it vehemently disavows the possibility of an ordered universe, still possesses a “nostalgia for unity,” to use Camus’s terminology. The essay then argues that attention to this Nietzschean aesthetics of dissonance not only helps us to better understand plays like Samuel Beckett’s and Eugène Ionesco’s but also shows that Camus’s account of Nietzschean nihilism may be overstated. In this vein, the essay concludes by reading Thus Spoke Zarathustra not as the confident manifesto of an untroubled nihilist but as an absurd drama that seeks a way forward in a post-theistic world.
