In 1889, Friedrich Nietzsche witnessed a horse being flogged. In tears, the philosopher flung his arms around the animal’s neck and collapsed. In accounts of Nietzsche’s life, this act of interspecies solidarity heralds his descent into madness. A decade later, one year before his death, a photographer captures Nietzsche in the grip of stroke-induced paralysis. Visible in this final silence is a defiant animal resonance, wild staring eyes fixated in self-dissolving, intoxicating rapture.
