Member-only story
Decadence: Nietzsche, Bataille & Huysmans
‘Nothing has occupied me more profoundly than the problem of decadence’
— Friedrich Nietzsche
Nietzsche, for whom Decadence was a sort of ‘shadow concept haunting his thought’, was torn between critiquing Decadence and seeing it as a ‘natural consequence of life and growth’: ‘Degeneration, decay and waste are not to be condemned per se’, he writes, ‘the phenomenon of décadence is just as necessary to life as its progress and ascent, and we are in no position to eliminate it’.
Decadence, in the form of moral decline and excessive self-indulgence, occurs in the late phase of all civilizations, and arguably all (successful) life-cycles. In art, for instance, Romanticism grew into Decadence, which Camille Paglia calls the ‘Mannerist late phase of the Romantic style’. First progress and ascent, then decadence and decline:
Romantic imagination broke through all limits. Decadence, burdened by freedom, invents harsh new limits, psychosexual and artistic. It is a process of objectification and fixation, disciplining and intensifying the rogue western eye. High Romanticism valued energy, room to breathe. Decadent Late Romanticism shuts the doors and locks self and eye in pagan cultism
Decadence, as Paglia rightly points out, is not simply excessive self-indulgence. It’s also characterised by ritual limitations intended to intensify one’s indulgences. A hedonist turning to the church is a typical Decadent pattern, ‘stepping easily from perversion to celibacy, simply exchanging one ritualized excess for another’.
Decadence intensifies the ‘western eye’, which went ‘rogue’ with Romanticism. Or, perhaps more accurately, Decadence must intensify in order to perceive anything at all. Its energy has been spent, its senses have atrophied, it requires an intense level of luxury for very minimal satisfaction.
Decadence is thus ‘a disease of the eye’ — which is inflamed from relentless intensification.
