A Nietzschean Reading of Romanticism: Aesthetics of Loss (Case Study of the Novel Life is Elsewhere by Milan Kundera)

This paper is a critique of Romanticism as aesthetics of Loss. As a case study, thispaper addresses Life is Elsewhere by Milan Kundera. Nietzsche says that an abundantlife is a major cause of the tragic pain (strong pessimism), but a sense of Loss resultsin Romantic aesthetics (week pessimism). A Romantic poet has been chosen as aprophet who has access to a transcendent truth: a truth going far beyond ordinarylimits; he is a person who is immature because he used to live in ideal place (womb).The Lyrical age, according to Kundera, is youth, and this novel is an epic ofimmaturity. The lyric poetry is an ideal form for self-expression, a poetry that praysemotions per se. Actions have been replaced by enthusiasm. In practice this meansthat poetry retreated into the soul. The current study has already described the crisis of Romanticism as an excess of subjective interiority. A poet goes so far as to say Reality is reduced to the aesthetic object. An action is the conditioned domain, but passion aims at the unconditioned. Poetry is always separate from the reality. These inward explorations do not coincide with the external world. This article focuses on a young poet, Jaromil, who aimed at the unconditioned, yet his last attempt ended in failure, falling under the spell of metaphors.