Interpreting Signatures (Nietzsche/Heidegger): Two Questions

Abstract

thinking a feast? highest form of human existence? Indeed. But at the same time we must observe how Nietzsche views the essence of the feast, in such a way that he can diink of it only on die basis of his fundamental conception of all being, will to power. The feast implies: pride, exuberance, frivolity; mockery of all earnestness and respectability; a divine affirmation of oneself, out of animal plenitude and perfection— all obvious states to which the Christian may not honestly say Yes. The feast is paganism par excellence ( Will to Power, § 916). For diat reason, we might add, the feast of thinking never takes place in Christianity. That is to say, there is no Christian philosophy. There is no true philosophy that could be determined anywhere else than from within itself. For the same reason there is no philosophy, inasmuch as anydiing pagan is always still something Christian — die counter-Christian. Greek poets and thinkers can hardly be designated as pagan. Feasts require long and painstaking preparation. This semester we want to prepare ourselves for the feast, even if we do not make it as far as die celebration, 258Philosophy and Literature even if we only catch a glimpse of the preliminary festivities at the feast of thinking — experiencing what meditative thought is and what it means to be at home in genuine questioning. (N, I, pp. 14-15; Eng. I, pp. 5-6) What happens in the course of the feast to the legan of this logos, which demands of the thinking-saying of the thinker that it be a thinking-saying of die one and the unique? Nietzsches' feast risks tearing it into pieces or of dispersing it in its masks. Certainly it would protect it from any kind of biologism, but because the logism in it would lose its hold from the start. And another style of autobiography would come into being, bursting open (in every sense of the expression faire sauter) the unity of the name and the signature, disturbing both biologism and its critique, so far as it operates, in Heidegger, in the name of essential thinking. These are die preliminary remarks that I wanted to suggest for a future reading of Heidegger's Nietzsche — for this ambiguous life-saving act, in the course of which one stretches out the net for the tightrope walker, the one who runs the greatest risk overhead on the narrow rope, only insofar as one has made sure mat he — unmasked and protected by the unity of his name, which in turn will be sealed by the unity of metaphysics — will not be taking any risks. In other words: he was dead before he landed in the