Claudia Rankine, Friedrich Nietzsche, and the Untimely Present

Abstract

I propose over the course of this essay that Claudia Rankine’s poetry re-envisions Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophy of life, particularly his notion that life emerges from a willful forgetting. For Rankine, 'the condition of black life is one of mourning', a condition in which it becomes impossible to forget. These two thinkers meet most provocatively in their theorizations of the "bounded horizon" within which life, and art, take form. I argue that Rankine's poetry offers a corrective to Nietzsche's early philosophy of life, while also meeting him on the grounds of art, wherein life--including black life--might still find its expression.