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Licensed Unlicensed Requires Authentication Published by De Gruyter January 19, 2018

Female Creativity and Temporal Discontinuity: Slips and Skips of Remembrance in Nietzsche and Freud

  • Christine Battersby
From the journal Nietzsche-Studien

Abstract

Both Nietzsche and Freud offer accounts of temporal disturbances in the processes of cognition, whilst also “forgetting” to notice women’s contributions to the history of culture. Both writers link women’s creative incapacity to their reproductive physiology and also to bodily shame. This paper argues, however, that Nietzsche’s descriptions of cognitive delay and collective forgetfulness are useful to feminist historians and theorists, providing a resource for theorising the belated recognition of women’s forgotten cultural achievements which the Freudian account lacks. The paper distinguishes between two contrasting modes of delayed recognition in Nietzsche, and compares Nietzsche on the temporal discontinuities of the nachträglich with Freud on the slips and skips in memory that derive from trauma, Nachträglichkeit and psychoneurotic repression. Another mode of temporal slippage - that of the Hopsasa - found in Nietzsche is also considered, as is also the potential of “the filigree art” of focusing as a remedy for cultural disappearances.

Published Online: 2018-1-19
Published in Print: 2017-12-20

© 2018 by Walter de Gruyter Berlin/Boston

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