Sickness was a way of making people “interesting”—which is how “romantic” was originally defined. (Schlegel, in his essay “On the Study of Greek Poetry” [1795], offers “the interesting” as the ideal of modern—that is, romantic—poetry.) “The ideal of perfect health,” Novalis wrote in a fragment from the period 1799–1800, “is only scientifically interesting”; what is really interesting is sickness, “which belongs to individualizing.” This idea—of how interesting the sick are—was given its boldest and most ambivalent formulation by Nietzsche in The Will to Power and other writings, and though
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