"It is not for nothing that one has been a philologist, perhaps one is a philologist still!" - Throughout his work, Nietzsche has paid numerous tributes to philological scholarship. On the basis of a wide variety of sources, this study undertakes to demonstrate the deep impact of the historical-critical philology in which he had been trained. Nietzsche did not abandon philology in favour of philosophy but openly acknowledged his debt to its methods, especially in his later writings. This insight contributes to a reassessment of central concepts like text, genealogy, interpretation, or perspectivism, and it leads to a rejection of standard accounts in the theory of interpretation as well as in the history of scholarship. The book pleads for literary scholarship grounded in sceptical philology.

The work of Li-Wen Kuo (*1980) documents a perpetual measuring of the space of painterly possibility. For her, any achieved position, any accomplished painting, bears in itself the task of being overcome. The logic of form which gives this development a direction, though, is concealed by the paintings' independent existence. For each painting is, at the same time, grown out of itself; it possesses its own centre of force by which it is organised. By virtue of their individuality, these paintings allow a dialogical relationship with the spectator. Li-Wen Kuo's work aspires to the inexhaustibility of this relationship. Text in English and German.