Erich Auerbach (1892–1957) and Johan Huizinga (1872–1945) shared an interest in late medieval Burgundian art. My essay reads Auerbach’s famous Mimesis (1946) as addressing one of Huizinga’s most pressing concerns, namely periodization, not only as he articulated them in Autumn of the Middle Ages (1919), but also as they dominated several of his (Huizinga’s) less well-known texts on the Renaissance that challenged the Burckhardt-inflected way both periods were understood at the time. Auerbach’s reception of Huizinga’s understanding in Autumn of late medieval realism in particular in a series of texts beginning in 1921 and running up through 1946 rattled at the foundation of the assumption that periodization was a relevant way of looking at cultural history at all. The alternative represented by his Mimesis focuses, rather, on what Auerbach describes in the “Epilegomena to Mimesis” (1954) as the “existential realism” he finds in texts from across the ages.

This chapter explores Nietzsche’s endorsement of agonal conflict (Wettkampf). I address three points of contention in the critical literature. First, commentators disagree about the relation of agon to physically destructive conflict. While some claim that the Nietzschean agon is distinctly nonviolent, others maintain that it includes physically destructive forms of conflict (such as war, for example). Second, there is disagreement regarding the social inclusivity of Nietzsche’s ideal agon: some claim that he wants agonal relations to be democratically realized across the breadth of society; others, though, maintain that he confines his endorsement to an aristocratic minority. Finally, there is disagreement regarding the means by which Nietzsche thinks that agonal moderation is concretely realized. Some maintain that such conflict merely requires a self-initiated shift of attitude on the part of the individual contestants; others, however, submit that agonal restraint can only be imposed externally, by means of fashioning a balance of powers within which contending parties are too equally matched to domineer over one another. I argue that for Nietzsche (a) agon is categorically nonviolent; (b) all can participate in some form of agonal contest; and (c) agonal restraint is founded upon a combination of self-restraint and externally imposed restraint.