The Prodigal Sons - Nietzsche and Dostoevsky (Novitate Conference, Nov 2023)

January 31, 2024

AI Summary

5 min read

In January 1887, Friedrich Nietzsche walked into a bookshop in southern France, exhausted from a day of apartment hunting. He picked up a volume called The Underground Spirit by a Russian author he had never heard of. The very first line of the first story read: “Ordinov had finally decided to change his apartment.” Nietzsche had just written a new preface for his own book Dawn that began with the line: “In this book, you will find an underground man at work.” He was not much of a believer in coincidences anymore. He bought the book, put off his apartment search, and began reading. That decision set in motion a two-year intellectual and psychological confrontation that would end with Nietzsche weeping on a street in Turin, his arms around a horse’s neck, his mind gone.

The Uncanny Mirror

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What you'll learn

1 (02:43) **Opening & Framing** - Darrell Cooper introduces his talk on Nietzsche and Dostoevsky through René Girard's mimetic lens, noting he's condensing a 4-5 hour podcast into this presentation.
2 (05:06) **Parallel Biographies** - The uncannily similar early lives of both men, from childhood trauma to early success and exile.
3 (07:40) **The Discovery** - Nietzsche finds Dostoevsky's "The Underground Spirit" in a French bookstore in 1887, drawn by a chain of uncanny coincidences.
4 (14:06) **The Wagner Triangle** - The story of "The Landlady" mirrors Nietzsche's relationship with Richard and Cosima Wagner, revealing his mimetic desire.
5 (24:22) **The Pattern of Failure** - All three women Nietzsche loved were involved with men he knew, and he never successfully competed.
6 (31:58) **Dostoevsky's Early Pattern** - Girard's insight that Dostoevsky's pre-exilic works are dominated by love triangles where the protagonist loses to a stronger rival.
7 (36:48) **The Rupture** - Dostoevsky's mock execution, prison in Siberia, and the decade of exile that forced him to confront his own lies.

+ Full timestamped outline available in the app

Guests on this episode

Darrell Cooper

Show Notes

Hi everyone. Here is a talk I gave about Nietzsche and Dostoevsky at the first inaugural Novitate Conference in Washington, DC. Novitate was created by Luke Burgis to explore and celebrate the work of French scholar René Girard. Luke is the author of Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life.

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