Cavell on Nietzsche: The Ascetic Ideal, Eternal Recurrence, and “Higher Self”

2019 ◽  
pp. 42-57
Author(s):  
Dan Shaw
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New Zealand ◽  
Friedrich Nietzsche ◽  
Human Spirit ◽  
Eternal Recurrence ◽  
Ascetic Ideal

Cavell saw Friedrich Nietzsche as a fellow devotee of Emerson, and adherent to the notion of self-overcoming. He admired several aspects of Nietzsche’s philosophy, including the notions of Eternal Recurrence, striving for the “Higher Self” and the Three Metamorphoses of the Human Spirit from Thus Spoke Zarathustra. He refers to the conjunction of Emerson and Nietzsche in numerous works, as talismans for some of his deepest insights into film. An interpretation of Jane Campion’s Ada in The Piano depicts this notion of a Higher Self faithfully,as a resolute and self-willed pioneer woman in mid-nineteenth century New Zealand.

A Deceptive Cadence: Nineteenth-Century Property Law and Popular Culture's Perception of The Piano

1995 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 31-54 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne Warner La Forest
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New Zealand ◽  
Property Rights ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Historical Review ◽  
Property Law ◽  
Human Spirit ◽  
Love Story ◽  
Time Period

AbstractThe tale presented in the film The Piano is placed in mid-19th-century New Zealand and has been heralded by critics as a timeless love story, and described as erotic and romantic. A legal historical review of this time period, however, demonstrates that, upon marriage, women had very limited property rights and were entirely dependent upon men, whether their fathers, their husbands, or otherwise. In particular, personal objects such as a piano would become the property of the husband upon marriage. Hence, a married woman's access to the ability to express herself in this manner was not her own. The actions of the characters in this film are consistent with the law applicable to this time period. Ultimately, from this persective, the movie is about the abuses of this kind of culture and its inability to suppress the human spirit—the piano being a symbol of exactly that struggle. This paper compares the “modern” perception of this film to its historical context, with the objective of determining what this says about our present society and culture.

Friedrich Nietzsche

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vanessa Lemm
Keyword(s):  
Friedrich Nietzsche ◽  
Michel Foucault ◽  
Gilles Deleuze ◽  
Georges Bataille ◽  
Giorgio Agamben ◽  
Eternal Recurrence ◽  
German Philosopher ◽  
Point Of Reference

Readers of Giorgio Agamben would agree that the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) is not one of his primary interlocutors. As such, Agamben’s engagement with Nietzsche is different from the French reception of Nietzsche’s philosophy in Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Georges Bataille, as well as in his contemporary Italian colleague Roberto Esposito, for whom Nietzsche’s philosophy is a key point of reference in their thinking of politics beyond sovereignty. Agamben’s stance towards the thought of Nietzsche may seem ambiguous to some readers, in particular with regard to his shifting position on Nietzsche’s much-debated vision of the eternal recurrence of the same.

scholarly journals Rethinking nineteenth-century literary culture: British worlds, southern latitudes and hemispheric methods

2021 ◽  
pp. 002198942098201
Author(s):  
Sarah Comyn ◽  
Porscha Fermanis
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New Zealand ◽  
Literary Culture ◽  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
Indigenous Studies ◽  
Literary Cultures ◽  
History Of ◽  
Literary Canons ◽  
Methodological Position

Drawing on hemispheric, oceanic, and southern theory approaches, this article argues for the value of considering the nineteenth-century literary cultures of the southern settler colonies of Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa from within an interconnected frame of analysis. First, because of their distinctive historical and structural conditions; second, because of the density of their interregional networks and relations across intersecting oceanic spaces; and third, because of the long history of racialized imperialist imaginaries of the south. This methodological position rethinks current approaches to “British world” studies in two important ways: first, by decoupling the southern settler colonies from studies of settler colonialism in North America; and second, by rebalancing its metropolitan and northern locus by considering south-south networks and relations across a complex of southern islands, oceans, and continents. Without suggesting either that imperial intercultural exchanges with Britain are unimportant or that there is a culturally homogenous body of pan-southern writing, we argue that nineteenth-century literary culture from colonial Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa — what we call a “southern archive” — can provide a counterbalance to northern biases and provide new purchase on nation-centred literary paradigms — one that reveals not just south-south transnational exchanges and structural homologies between southern genres, themes, and forms, but also allows us to acknowledge the important challenges to foundational accounts of national literary canons initiated by southern theory and Indigenous studies scholars.

Protecting the Empire's Humanity

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zoë Laidlaw
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New Zealand ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
South Australia ◽  
Indigenous Rights ◽  
British Colonialism

Rooted in the extraordinary archive of Quaker physician and humanitarian activist, Dr Thomas Hodgkin, this book explores the efforts of the Aborigines' Protection Society to expose Britain's hypocrisy and imperial crimes in the mid-nineteenth century. Hodgkin's correspondents stretched from Liberia to Lesotho, New Zealand to Texas, Jamaica to Ontario, and Bombay to South Australia; they included scientists, philanthropists, missionaries, systematic colonizers, politicians and indigenous peoples themselves. Debating the best way to protect and advance indigenous rights in an era of burgeoning settler colonialism, they looked back to the lessons and limitations of anti-slavery, lamented the imperial government's disavowal of responsibility for settler colonies, and laid out elaborate (and patronizing) plans for indigenous 'civilization'. Protecting the Empire's Humanity reminds us of the complexity, contradictions and capacious nature of British colonialism and metropolitan 'humanitarianism', illuminating the broad canvas of empire through a distinctive set of British and Indigenous campaigners.

Two Properties, One Land: Law and Space in Nineteenth-Century New Zealand

1999 ◽  
Vol 24 (04) ◽  
pp. 807-852 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stuart Banner
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New Zealand ◽  
Property Rights ◽  
Market Economy ◽  
Religious Belief ◽  
Balance Of Power ◽  
The Other ◽  
Political Organization ◽  
Property System ◽  
Level Of Consciousness

If we use the word land to refer to the physical substance, and reserve the word property for the intellectual apparatus that organizes rights to use land, we can say that in colonial New Zealand, the British and the Maori overlaid two dissimilar systems of property on the same land. That difference in legal thought structured each side's perception of what the other was doing, in ways that illustrate unusually clearly the power of law to organize our awareness of phenomena before they reach the level of consciousness. Over the course of the nineteenth century, as the balance of power gradually swung to the side of the British, they were largely able to impose their property system on the Maori. The centrality of property within the thought of both peoples, however, meant that the transformation of Maori into English property rights involved much more than land. Religious belief, engagement with the market economy, political organization—all were bound up in the systems by which both peoples organized property rights in land. To anglicize the Maori property system was to revolutionize Maori life.

scholarly journals The Plutarch of Maoriland: James Cowan and Pictures of Old New Zealand

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roger Blackley
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New Zealand ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Full Page ◽  
Late Nineteenth

James Cowan’s Pictures of Old New Zealand (1930) documents the Partridge Collection of paintings by Gottfried Lindauer in full-page, half-tone illustrations accompanied by historical biographies. Lavish by New Zealand’s publishing standards of 1930, the book originated in an earlier, unillustrated guide to the collection overseen by a much younger Cowan in 1901. This essay discusses the genesis of many biographies in manuscripts solicited by Partridge from his friend James Mackay, a “fixer” between Māori and Pākehā worlds in the late nineteenth century who personally knew many of the subjects. It further argues that Cowan’s Pictures of Old New Zealand deserves recognition as the first significant art monograph to be published in New Zealand. 

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