Abstract

The thesis analyses the signification of the problem of life in Nietzsche’s philosophy and its importance in Nietzsche’s reflections on politics. The first chapter discusses the distinction in the Birth of Tragedy between the two different principles of the Dionysian and the Apollonian, where the problem of life finds its initial contradictions. The second chapter examines the question of life in Nietzsche’s thought in the 1880s. There, the body is interpreted as a movement of subjectivation and differentiation, for which the utilisation of a completely singular concept of health, in perpetual transition, becomes necessary. The third chapter analyses Nietzsche’s problem of genealogy, understood as an interpretation-practice connected with the process of life itself and therefore different from a pure and objective historical science. The fourth chapter presents and discusses Nietzsche’s critique of his actuality, interpreted as the final result of an historical process of a political dissolution. According to the thesis, Nietzsche criticises a certain kind of social science, where that crisis finds its strongest evidence, and uses on the other hand a genealogical practice to trace the initial point in history that brings us to the present dissolution. The origin of the crisis is the exact place where the dynamics of life is forgotten under its presumed identity. Thus, the explanation of the individual coincides in this origin with the passing-away perpetual movement of a democracy which tends to multiply and intensify the differences