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HIGGINS Kathleen Marie. Comic Relief.- Nietzsche's Gay Science. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. xiv + 249 pp. Cloth, $45.00-In his "Translator's Introduction" to The Gay Science, Walter Kaufmann writes: "This book ... mirrors all of Nietzsche's thought and could be related in a hundred ways to his other books, his notes and his letters. And yet it is complete in itself. For it is a work of art." Judging by their actual treatment of The Gay Science, few commentators have taken this claim to artistic completeness seriously. Instead, the usual practice has been to abstract passages from the book, treating them either as initial statements of key Nietzschean doctrines (for example, the death of God, eternal return) or as casting light on general issues (for example, perspectivism, naturalism) raised throughout Nietzsche's works. Until now, no commentator of note has attempted an interpretation of The Gay Science as a unified whole. It is to this end that Higgins has written Comic Relief.
Concerning herself mainly with the book's first incarnation (that is, the 1882 edition, which begins with the "Prelude in German Rhymes" and ends with 342, "Incipit tragoedia"), Higgins analyzes "the shape of the book" in order to elucidate its unifying theatrical/philosophical "vision" (p. 5). Her thesis is...