Abstract
„Ich trinke die Flammen in mich zurück, die aus mir brechen“: Nietzsche, Carlo Michelstaedter and rhetoric as an (auto-)poietic technique. The metaphor of the flame, which pointedly describes the ‘stellar friendship’ between Friedrich Nietzsche and Carlo Michelstaedter (1887-1910), exemplifies an aporetic principle of language: Enlightenment turns into glare, individual expressions turn into conventional phrases. Both poetic philosophers address this challenge by methods of presentation which aim at coping with the irreducible rhetoricity and deceptiveness of language. Their self-reflective strategies of presentation try to evoke the power of language to intensify sensations. For Nietzsche, the creation of individuals requires rhetorical skills; for Michelstaedter, selfconfidence (“persuasione”) as self-creation can only be achieved by means of “rettorica”. The metaphor of the flame illustrates this retroactive, (self-)destructive capacity of poetic language to self-constitution.
