Abstract

In this paper, I explore Nietzsche’s account of promising by delving into the problem of a culture of broken promises, which includes the promise of love. I argue that this understanding of culture can be aptly analogized as a nihilistic one and creates a vapid state of promiselessness. I enter this account through the dialectical structure of memory and forgetting and propose the agency of forgetting as a viable renewal of promising. To do so, I first affirm life and history through Nietzsche’s aesthetics, born out of the Apollonian-Dionysian naturalistic duality. Second, I will attempt to forge a dialectics of promising through a responsibility of the impulses. And third, I will redirect the function of active forgetting as renewing broken promises.