Nietzsche writes a preface to _The Gay Science_ in 1886, four years after its first four books were in print. In this address, he explains that he has _been ill_ and is _in recovery_. He diagnoses himself as having suffered from “romanticism.” Nietzsche warns that he will henceforth vent his malice on the sort of lyrical romantic sentimentalism from which he suffered. Nietzsche then undertakes to write an additional fifth book to the corpus, which he added in 1887—a year after (...) the above-referenced preface, thereby providing a _new_ end in departure from his previous romantic excursions of the initial four books of _GS_. I wish to trace how these claims—of illness and convalescence are related to what I argue is a major philosophical turn in Nietzsche’s thinking on the nature of reality and how reality matters to us—as value. In this essay, I will locate Nietzsche’s turn. To do so, I explain (1) what Nietzsche describes as “romantic pessimism,” that is, an epistemological dualism (i.e., assertion of an irresolvable appearance versus reality distinction). I will first explain and then show how Nietzsche suffers from this illness in the early books of _GS_, using textual examples to demonstrate his epistemological presuppositions and romantic-pessimistic preferences (which manifest as a defiant claim that fictions are preferred to reality, thereby still crediting an appearance-reality distinction); (2) how by his later book five of _GS_ Nietzsche plays a different tune by which prior dualisms dissolve in his affirmation of a co-implication of fiction and truth, such that (a) neither are wholly separate from the other, and (b) it becomes difficult if not impossible to distinguish between them. (shrink)

A ‘glitch’, the parallax gap brokered by communication technologies, is a hiccough in smooth technological operation, one that is both undeniable and unresolvable. The glitch draws attention to the inherent contradictions of the technological proffer to seamlessly augment and enhance a life unaided by technology. There is no life unaided by technology, and the glitch is what introduces to life the gap between failure and fantasy, self and other, individual and community, inside and outside, representation and nature. Communication technologies attempt (...) to dub these glitches an error in their pretense of connection. But the glitch is unavoidable. As a multi-media installation, 'glitch' draws attention to this confusion over connection and, as a mode of resistance, proffer spaces of tension--between technologies and the environments they condition. (shrink)

Nietzsche is not a nihilist as Heidegger interprets Nietzsche to be.