A Wave in the Stream of Chaos

Abstract

Life beyond the body? It should go without saying that the word "beyond" is here not meant to indicate some problematic transcendence of the body that would lead us to a disembodied realm of life, in good Cartesian fashion, such as the "life of the mind," for instance. What is at stake, rather, in Heidegger's Nietzsche lectures is above all an attempt to think along with Nietzsche, to explore "the new interpretation of sensuousness,'" of embodied thinking and of thoughtful embodiment that arises as the most pressing task in the wake of nihilism and of Nietzsche's overcoming of Platonism and the latter's positing of a nonsensuous or supersensuous "beyond." The "beyond" in our title "Life Beyond the Body" refers, rather, to what lies concealed within, behind, beneath, and around what we (in our proud affinity with medical science) normally take to be the body: a nexus of material, living tissue, with its own arche and telos, enclosed by the contours of the skin that at once encapsulates and exposes it, insulating and setting it off against a surrounding world that constitutes its environment, an environment that at once threatens and nurtures, one that it strives to know as it strives to know itself in its most concealed corners. A body that, for all its exposure, stands-despite its continual growth and atrophy-as a relatively stable and independent entity over against an objective world that it seeks to master as it would master itself. How different Heidegger's Nietzschean conception of the body as a "bodying forth" of chaos, of what Heidegger calls "the concealed, self-overflowing, unmastered superabundance of life," "the concealment of unmastered richness in the becoming and streaming of the world as a whole"!2 In what follows, I want to examine in greater detail the conception of the body as a "bodying forth" (Leiben) that emerges in just two brief, but extraordinarily rich sections of Heidegger's 1939 lecture course "The Will to Power as Knowledge." In particular, I shall focus on sections 12 and 13 of that course, dealing with the concept of chaos in relation to the body, and with the horizonal schematization of such chaos as the securing of stability amid the streaming of life. Heidegger's Nietzschean interpretation of the body in the 1939 lecture course takes its most immediate point of departure from aphorism 515 of The Will to Power, where Nietzsche writes: "Not 'to know,' but to schematize-to impose upon chaos as much regularity and as many forms as our practical needs require." This statement, Heidegger asserts, contains what is decisive about Nietzsche's conception of knowledge. Two points immediately emerge from this claim: First, in opposing "knowing" to schematization, Nietzsche is arguing against the traditional conception of knowing as an imitative copying of (an "objective" or independently given) reality. Knowledge properly understood is schematizing: an imposing of regularities and forms upon that which comes toward us, that which knowing originally encounters: namely, chaos. Second, the standard according to which schematization proceeds is determined by what Nietzsche calls our "practical needs." This, as Heidegger will go on to argue, refers not to particular, individual needs, but to life itself as such, understood as praxis: knowledge is a product not of theoretical re-presentation (Vor-stellen: setting explicitly before us beings that are already present as such), but of the very accomplishment or momentum of life. Yet what does Nietzsche mean by "chaos"? Chaos in Nietzsche's sense, Heidegger emphasizes, does not carry its original sense that we find in Hesiod's Theogony: that of a gaping or yawning, measureless abyss. Nietzsche's understanding of the word proceeds from its modern sense of that which is disordered, but also confused, the perpetual onslaught of one thing after another in constant succession; "chaos" thus also always implies some kind of motion. Yet can that which we initially and originally encounter really be understood as chaos in this sense? …