International Nietzsche Research Group (INFG)
The International Nietzsche Research Group (INFG), located at the Stuttgart Research Centre for Text Studies, provides a welcoming safe harbor for national and international Nietzsche researchers, who in their works also suspend traditional demarcations between philosophy and literature.
Friedrich Nietzsche's philosophies have been subjected to a multitude of interpretations during the last 125 years since his writing stopped. Most of his interpreters over the years have chosen an associative approach. Indeed, interpreting his texts without respect to their content and form, disregarding the difference between published works and unpublished texts, and systematizing the so-called "aphorisms" in terms of certain doctrines continue to be customary interpretive practices.
The Stuttgart Nietzsche Research Group is united by a common conviction that the text's respective forms of writing is crucial for interpretation and must be considered its own mode of contemplation. The Group's members are therefore anxious to work out the philosophical significance of Nietzsche's modes of writing and to focus on these modes in their studies. In doing so, anti-mythical readings sensitive and sensitising for the artistic modes of design are tested, with interactions between form and philosophical substance taken into account.
The list of forms of writing waiting for separate, comparative analysis is long. On a macro level, there are several genres and text types:
- discourse
- aphorism
- adage
- Epigramma
- proverb
- maxims and reflections
- Lettera
- letter
- essay
- observation
- prose essay
- prose poem
- poem and cycles of poems
- dithyramb
- dialogue and rhetorical conversation
- parable and simile
- autobiography
- (self-)parody and satire
- manifesto
- polemic
- lecture
- speech
- preface and epilogue
- prologue, prelude, overture
- interlude, intermezzo, episode
- epic genre forms like Thus spoke Zarathustra
- index
On a micro level there are various means of depiction:
- intertextuality, citation, montage and collage
- figures of speech und tropes
- narrative modes and persona roles
- punctuation
- typography
and many more.
The INFG therefore dedicates itself to one forms of writing in a series of workshops, evaluating forms of appearance and function in Nietzsche's oeuvre.