"Le génie, un acharnement désinvolte à devenir soi-même", La Désinvolture de l'art, Figures de L'Art 14, Revue d'Etudes Esthétiques
Abstract
Style and genius are widely recognized as crucial features for greatness in the arts. Intractably difficult to define, essentially complex and contested, these concepts also share the controversial question of whether the key to their much desired possession and use (and hence to artistic greatness) is a matter of intense effort or instead a carefree spontaneity that Nietzsche in the Gay Science describes as divinely désinvolte, cheerful, light, and unknowing. Nietzsche, we shall see, is himself of two minds on this question, perhaps because style and genius paradoxically require both contraries of careful labor and carefree lightness. Before exploring this paradox further, we should note other tensions that richly inhabit these concepts --deploying not only Nietzsche as our guide, but also others, especially Ralph Waldo Emerson who greatly inspired Nietzsche’s thought