Volume 55, Number 9 · May 29, 2008
The Mystery of the Ring
By Joyce Carol Oates
Boxing: A Cultural History
by Kasia Boddy
London: Reaktion, 478 pp., $35.00 (distributed in the US byUniversity of Chicago Press)
In the brilliant and unsettling fragment 'Homer's Contest,' found among Nietzsche's unpublished writings after his death in 1900, the phil-osopher returns to obsessive themes originally explored in his first book, The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music (1872): namely, that contrary to the reigning morality of his time—a Protestant-Christian morality, at least officially—it is not 'natural' not to fight; it is not 'natural' not to fight to the death, in the service of allowing 'hatred [to] flow forth fully'; indeed, a 'noble culture' is one that, like the ancient Greek culture, arises from 'the altar of the expiation of murder.'
Review, 4369 words
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