Ariadna abandonada

"Who knows, except me, what Ariadna is!" With this exclamation Friedrich Nietzsche entered the "enigma of Ariadna" to which this book wants to answer, after Gilles Deleuze in "The mystery of Ariadna". The enigma is constructed on various levels: from the Ariadne as Cosima Wagner's mask, to the one that becomes an effective instrument to develop the philosopher's thought in the last ten years of his life, centered on the superman, the eternal return and the will. of power. Enigma, too, because Nietzsche does not name it in Zarathustra, when he is thinking precisely of it, as is argued here from the preparatory notebooks -the so-called "posthumous fragments"- and the relationship with a sculptural image of great power, as is the sleeping Ariadne in the Vatican Museums, a 2nd century Roman copy of a micro-Asian original. Nietzsche was able to see and admire this sculpture during his stay in Rome in May 1883, precisely when he was working on the second part of Zarathustra: "with the arm resting on the head", abandoned by the hero, "approach it, in dreams, the superhero". The classic myth of the Cretan princess abandoned by Theseus on the beach of Naxos appears worked in the preparatory notebooks and also in the published work. In Dionysus's dithyramb "Ariadna's Lament", Nietzsche performs the greatest transformation of the myth to introduce new meanings. The theme of abandonment runs throughout this book in which it seeks to establish diverse connections between texts and images with the intention of contributing to a renewed reading of Nietzsche's work.