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In the brilliant and unsettling fragment 'Homer's Contest,' found among Nietzsche's unpublished writings after his death in 1900, the philosopher returns to obsessive themes originally explored in his first book, The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of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, 4370 words
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