The Writing of the Dionysian: A Dithyramb to Writing Sites-For Fellow-Rhapsodizers

This project-”The Writing of the Dionysian”-does not simply mean to write about ”the Dionysian” alone; it also means to write about the notion of ”writing” (écriture) and the sites of writing that ”the Dionysian” initiates or helps shape. However, this project does not attempt to address what ”writing” or ”the Dionysian” essentially is, or to make of it a workable definition or methodology. It proposes to explore writing sites and the ”I” at the writing site through two figures of thought-”the Dionysian” and ”writing”-in the critical writings of Nietzsche, Barthes, Blanchot, Bataille, Derrida, Deleuze and Guattari. This project is about a god, a god who dances to the beat of the heart laid bare and drunk with effervescent wine in a Nietzschean ”bright, glittering, mysterious Southern sky,” not shadowed by any dialectical, idealistic, or nihilistic systems of thought, but quite boldly given over to the affirmation of the dice-throw, of the intransitive event of writing.