Getting Mimetic Again

Abstract

Although its editor, Giorgio Colli, warns the reader of “a certain abruptness” in its formulations, Nietzsche’s draft essay “On Truth and Lie in the Extra-Moral Sense” has served as a rallying point for those concerned to work out the relation between language and literature.1 It puts a skeptical finger on the psychophysical operations we know as experience, damning them with the faint praise of rhetorical terminology as it names them instances of “translation” and “metaphor”: