Abstract
This article analyses the imprint of Nietzschean philosophy on Picabia's negotiation of embodiment, art and religion in Jesus-Christ Rastaquouere (1920). Presenting this text as a critically neglected masterwork of avant-garde literature, this article demonstrates how Picabia enlisted Dadaist suspicion of organized religion as the vehicle for his disavowal of the official art world. Picabia and Nietzsche were united in their scorn for Christ and the disembodying pieties of Christian morality. However, whereas Nietzsche proffers art as redemptive antithesis to religion, Picabia launches an all-out attack on the sanctity of art and, with it, on the notion of the artist as redeemer. Via close textual and comparative analysis, this innovative reading of Jesus-Christ Rastaquouere exposes its significance as a philosophical treatise which exists in formal and conceptual dialogue with a constellation of Dadaist artworks. It uncovers how Picabia co-opts and, ultimately, exceeds Nietzsche's Anti-Christ rhetoric in his idiosyncratic prose modelling of Dada's Anti-Art revolution.
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