Dionysus in the cities. The return of the tragic God in Euripides, Nietzsche and Lefebvre

Abstract

Greek classical mythology and ritual order gather the episode where Dionysus, as a traveller or exiled god, comes back to city to inject into it the creative force of frenzied life. Euripides takes the subject in The Bacchae, the tragedy where the god of delirium and inebriation returns to Tebas to demonstrate the fragility of the order that seems to govern the polis. This image of Dionysus as a god to come reappears in the first Romanticism as the divine incarnation of the promise to overcome the Enlightenment rationality as a killer of gods and myths. From there comes part of Nietzsche’s vindication of Bacchus to unmask the modern logos and its role in the new urban organization, regarded both as a disaster and a promise. But this acquittal of Dionysus comes back again in the 20th by Lefebvre’s hands and his critics to the capitalist reappropriation of cities, describing the urban as the updating of the god’s liberating defiance. With all that, the aim of this paper is to bring to light the not always highlighted active presence of Nietzsche int the work of the author of The right to the city.