Nietzsche Calls Research Articles

Open Letter to Bret Davis: Letter on Egoism: Will to Power as Interpretation

Open Letter to Bret Davis: Letter on Egoism: Will to Power as Interpretation

EXPERIMENTAL ENGAGEMENTS AND METACODES

This essay is one of three published in response to Casper Bruun Jensen's article “Experiments in Good Faith and Hopefulness: Toward a Postcritical Social Science” (Common Knowledge 20, no. 2 [Spring 2014]: 337 – 62), which concerns the “postcritical” work of Richard Rottenburg, Hirokazu Miyazaki, and Helen Verran. Rottenburg's response clarifies the key argument of his book Far-Fetched Facts (2002 in German, 2009 in English), situates it in a biographical and political context of despair and hope, and extends it in ways stimulated by Jensen's article and by reading in the sociology of critique that Rottenburg has done since writing the book. He here reformulates the main argument of his book as concerning the indispensable necessity of what Nietzsche calls “legislated language,” along with its performative effects and insurmountable fallibility. By situating that argument in a biographical and political context that the book does not emphasize, and by explaining the “plot” of the book, Rottenburg emphasizes that Far-Fetched Facts was intentionally and principally written from a perspective that does not allow the maintenance of a clear-cut distinction between fact and value and that, therefore, is a contribution toward a methodology of hope. This essay moreover indicates ways in which Far-Fetched Facts is linked to developments in the French pragmatist sociology of critique, which offers a compatible and, at the same time, well-established language to make similar points. This sociology starts from the assumption that practices of ordering depend on the establishment of forms for commensuration, classification, qualification, valuation, and calculation of equivalence that imply reference to realities “out there” and to perceived common goods. A convention (or the element of a “metacode”) is a temporarily established, dynamic, and reflexive material-semantic form that enables interpretation and evaluation. By raising expectations of how things must be done in order to pass as appropriate, valid, and legitimate, conventions facilitate cooperation, yet at some stage in their lives conventions become controversial and need to be replaced. In order to communicate and to coordinate actions, conventions and metacodes are as indispensable as they are fallible, Rottenburg argues, and instead of being replaced by “good faith” and “hope,” conventions and metacodes actually depend on them.

Strange Freedom in Nietzsche and Beauvoir

This essay explores the surprising relationship between what Simone de Beauvoir calls the will to disclose being and what Friedrich Nietzsche calls the will to power. I argue that the will to disclose being is an appropriation of the will to power in Nietzsche. Both terms suggest an image of the ethical, the irreducible and unpredictable element of valuation necessary to all life, which does not require a concept of the human. Both the will to disclose being and the will to power affirm that bodies are subject to the power of non-volitional valuation, and this is what motivates the critique in both Beauvoir and Nietzsche of the will to morality as social critique. The essay proceeds in three parts. In the first part I demonstrate that it is unclear whether Beauvoir intended the will to disclose being as an appropriation of the will to power. The second part articulates the will to disclose being as the mutual disclosure of inherently relational singularities. The relational nature of the will to disclose being is a response to what Beauvoir calls the “bare will to power.” However, as I discuss in part three, this bare will to power in fact resembles what Nietzsche himself deplores. My conclusion is thus that Beauvoir’s will to disclose being forwards the relational nature of the will to disclose being/will to power but is too strongly an implicit appropriation of the will to power to be considered a rejection of the will to power itself.

How the Free Spirit Became Free: Sickness and Romanticism in Nietzsche's 1886 Prefaces

This paper explores Nietzsche's account of the free spirit's genesis, as primarily given in the 1886 prefaces written for the works of his ‘free spirit trilogy’. In particular, it will focus on how what will be argued is the free spirit's distinguishing capacity for radical questioning is created out of the process described there. That is, it will examine how what Nietzsche calls, ‘the experience of sickness’, in enabling the free spirit's liberation, helps forge a mode of philosophical awareness which is not otherwise attainable. However, the second half of this paper goes on to explore how the success of this process is endangered by a certain psychological tendency to which free spirits are susceptible. In other words, the free spirit's chance of enduring those painful depths of sickness necessary for liberation is threatened by the appeal of ‘romantic pessimism’; a perspective which offers consolation by idealizing the sufferer's state. As such, then, in our final section, we will examine Nietzsche's efforts to combat this phenomenon. In particular, we will look at his advocacy of a specific kind of asceticism for this purpose, and with it his attempt to show how a true liberation of the spirit can be achieved.

Introduction: Nietzsche and the Passions

Introduction: Nietzsche and the Passions

Heidegger’s Heimat

Nietzsche calls the philosopher the ‘physician of culture’. Heidegger implies something similar when he points out that philosophy of art only began (with Plato) when art (and so life) began to decline.1 Both are making the point that it is the task of authentic philosophy to respond to the needs of the times. The condition Heidegger responds to, it seems to me, is first and foremost the loss of place in the age of modern technology: place not in the sense, merely, of a bounded region of space but in the sense of dwelling- place; Heimat or ‘homeland’. Homeland, says Heidegger, that which is ‘near’ to us. Yet nearness implies farness, fails to appear if ‘remoteness ... remains absent’. In the age of jet travel, television, the internet and the cell- phone, however, everything is being reduced to a ‘uniform distanceless- ness’2 in which nothing is ‘remote’, and so nothing ‘near’, and so nothing a dwelling-place.

Affirmation and Mortal Life

NIETZSCHE'S ETERNAL RETURN AND THE DEATH OF ZARATHUSTRA In Ecce Homo, Nietzsche calls the eternal recurrence the highest formula of affirmation that is at all attainable (EH Z, I).1 However, it has been widely acknowledged that Nietzsche never presents the eternal return as a single formula or unified doctrine, and this complicates considerably efforts to understand its affirmative potential. Instead of a formula, we find, as Heidegger says, various of the thought,2 and these communications come from a wide range of voices.3 A majority of eternal return scholarship has consolidated these voices and found in them two trajectories for interpretation: the cosmological and the ethical/practical. The cosmological interpretation is often rejected,4 for reasons ranging from Nietzsche's failure to publish his cosmological proofs to the insubstantiality of those proofs to the irrelevance of cosmology for Nietzsche's meaning to some combination of these.5 Thus, a common interpretive strategy is a rejection or a dismissal of the cosmological interpretation followed by a development of an ethical/practical reading.6 The result has been a presentation of the thought as a single question or test that individuals can engage existentially, making affirmation either an agent's ability to will infinite repetitions of an action, or the ability to develop an attitude of amor fati7 These ethical/practical readings give us, as Clark puts it, a game that we can play,8 using our response to the test to gauge our attitude toward life. Alternatively, Gilles Deleuze's interpretation of the eternal return as selective test largely defies the sharp distinction between the cosmological and the ethico-practical readings, and this selective test makes of affirmation the ability to will becoming at the expense of oneself. According to Deleuze, Nietzsche's eternal return is a criterion of selection for active and reactive forces. Active forces are forces that will constant and increasing power, and reactive forces are those which decompose and separate active force from what it can do.9 The affirmative spirit in this case is one who submits to the destruction of the reactive in itself and thus to the dissolution of its own identity. These radically different understandings of the eternal return all have grounding in Nietzsche's texts, but each unifies the thought into a formula in a way that risks overlooking the variety of ways in which it is presented. I will therefore re-examine several of these presentations, with special attention to GS 341 and Zarathustra. Both of these texts present the eternal return as a thought that in its weight reveals something about affirmation, but neither indicates any straightforward formula by which the thought might be tested on a will. Instead, they narrate the return as an event that is experienced.10 It is therefore curious that Pierre Klossowski's interpretation of the eternal which describes the experienced event of the eternal return for Nietzsche, is so ubiquitously footnoted, but so seldom used as a resource for working through the thought.12 In what follows, I will draw on Klossowski's work in order to distinguish between the eternal return as experienced event and the eternal return as an articulated thought. I will make a distinction between affirmative willing and affirmative thinking, and I will argue that the eternal return is best understood as an intensified translation of a tension encountered in Nietzsche's self-overcoming thought - a tension reflecting the challenge of living a mortal life affirmatively.13 The Thought as Physiological Event Looking to Nietzsche's letters and his early formulations of the eternal return, Klossowski describes it as an event befalling Nietzsche that gradually began to translate itself into an intelligible thought.14 Klossowski's account of this event and its eventual articulation is important because it creates a way of explaining the thought in Nietzsche's own terms - namely, physiologically. …

Naturalism and the Genealogy of Moral Institutions

ABSTRACTThis article discusses two general strategies that have been pursued to explain how moral thought and moral institutions might have emerged. The first is found in the tradition of those whom Nietzsche calls “English psychologists”; the second is Nietzsche’s own. I begin by giving an account of the resources of “English” genealogy as represented by Paul Rée and especially Charles Darwin. On the basis of that discussion, I consider Nietzsche’s objections to English genealogy in detail. I argue that as they stand, these objections are inconclusive; while they are, at least to a certain extent, effective against Rée, they fail as objections to the fundamental insights of Darwin. Moreover, I argue that on reflection, the rival genealogy that Nietzsche puts forward is not nearly as well supported and cannot plausibly bear the weight of explanation alone. Finally, I ask what this entails for our conception of ethical emotion.

Reading Power: Hooks, Walls, and Melville

Reading PowerHooks, Walls, and Melville John E. Keats (bio) Perhaps at bottom Jimmy was too thoroughly good and kind to be made from any cause a man-hater. And doubtless it at last seemed irreligious to Jimmy even to shun mankind. —Herman Melville, "Jimmy Rose" (1855) If I said I was mesmerized watching a man realize his life was over, would I sound heartless? What if he were a coward? If he had a wife and a child, would his stock rise? What if he were a soldier for the right side? People value marriage, children, and good causes. I waste time running for health and vanity. When couples walk toward me holding hands, or pushing baby carriages, I'm compelled to veer into oncoming traffic. They command the sidewalk. People value soldiers for their patriotic sacrifice. Apologists for your country's wars can command conversation. If you run against the tide of their argument, you get pushed aside. This dying man I watch has a wife named Mary, and a son, in Nantucket. He is a brave hunter, not a soldier. He is a cautious, moral man. The doom he feels coming belongs to dozens of men. He could have saved them all by murdering his superior. But he has a secret: the "more spiritual [End Page 106] terrors" of powerful men weaken him. Ocean storms and wild beasts do not. He tried to conquer his fear. He'd thought of Mary and his son, and the crew, and moaned for divinity: "Great God, where art thou? Shall I? shall I?" He didn't. God never shows, but pious plebeians don't take his absence as an insult. Leaders won't bother to wait. They might summon God in doubt. They might tell you He's responded. But they generate their own answers. Average people, what Nietzsche calls the "herd," need certainty, fast, from anyone. Those who supply the decisions become great to the masses. I'm still watching the dying subordinate's dilemma. I linger and ruminate because I can. The man is Starbuck, first mate to Captain Ahab on the ship the Pequod, in Herman Melville's 1851 fantasy, Moby-Dick. I'm no monster. I've only witnessed one real death. I was a boy. I couldn't have saved him. Powerful writers provide authentic revelations of character that living people guard or find impossible to express. In the chapter called "The Chase—Third Day," Melville exposes Starbuck's inwardness as Ahab leaves the ship for his last crack at destroying the mysterious white whale: "Future things swim before me, as in empty outlines and skeletons; all the past is somehow grown dim. Mary, girl! thou fadest in pale glories behind me; boy! I seem to see but thy eyes grown wondrous blue. Strangest problems of life seem clearing; but clouds sweep between—Is my journey's end coming?" Jesus, what torment; the dying man's future is a watery dream bordered by bones. His lived life dissipates, as it always does when we're deprived of reminders of the living and the loved. If I'm so entranced, why do I think about running and war, or an earlier passage on the "vast skeleton" of an extinct beast found on a judge's plantation in Alabama, how "awe-stricken credulous slaves … took it for the bones of one of the fallen angels"? Melville's complexity and construction demand that I return to dimming scenes—in my life, in his text—and that I leave Starbuck alone. I'm on my break in a bright lunchroom. River rats, as big as Chihuahuas, are outside. I've seen them. I hear them under the floors. They make me, like nothing else does, believe in evil. I'm reading Moby-Dick. A coworker stops in for a cup of free coffee, asks for the title. He has gray hair; [End Page 107] so do I. He once showed me song lyrics he'd written; I called them promising. I reveal the cover. He laughs, shocked that the story's new to me. I say I've read the book several times. Why, he snickers, would you ever...

The Transformation of the Laws of War into Humanitarian Law

The articulation of crimes against humanity in positive international law is better understood when situated against the broader transformation of the laws of war into humanitarian law. This re-naming of the laws of war does not take place until the late 1970s with the Additional Protocols to the Geneva Conventions. However, this re-naming is made possible by the prior emergence, in the nineteenth century codification of the laws of war, of the principle of humanity as the ground of the laws of war. Two twin transformations make possible the emergence of humanity as the ground of the laws of war. First, charity, the love of God, is transformed into the sentiment of humanity, the love of man. Aquinas and the scholastics discussed war under the heading of charity. With Grotius and Pufendorf, charity slides into humanity. The transformation is complete with Rousseau. Second, pain is transformed from a potential spiritual good that could bring one closer to God into something unintelligible and unacceptable. For Rousseau, humanity is pity writ large and sympathy, suffering-with, is the “first sentiment of humanity.” Rousseau appears as one of the fathers of the modern laws of war, of humanitarian law. Humanitarian law thus belongs to modern humanitarianism, to what Nietzsche calls “the religion of human suffering.” Whereas the nineteenth century codification of the laws of war used the twin language of humanity and civilization, the transformation of civilization into a dirty word in the twentieth century made it that much easier for humanity to emerge as the ground of the laws of war, and for the laws of war to become “humanitarian.”

A View of Life: Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and the Novel

A View of Life:Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and the Novel Yi-Ping Ong I "My general task," Nietzsche scrawled, in the margins of his own copy of Cervantes's Don Quixote: "to show how life philosophy and art can have a deeper and affinitive relationship with each other."1 This enigmatic inscription commands a second reading not only because it seems to articulate the thread that links many of Nietzsche's philosophical projects together, but also because of the very book in which it appears. The book is not a lofty tome of Schopenhauer's philosophy, as might be expected, but a mere novel: a fact which suggests that the novel itself was the art form that precipitated reflection on the relation of art to what Nietzsche calls here "life philosophy." In this essay, my aim is to deepen critical understanding of the novel's influence on Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, the two philosophers who are widely considered the fathers of existentialism. By means of a comprehensive overview of the novelistic reading and writing of these thinkers, I will show that both Nietzsche and Kierkegaard were profoundly influenced by the literary form of the novel and by its techniques for representing consciousness, subjectivity, and worldview. My focus in the analysis that follows is on the question of why Nietzsche and Kierkegaard read novels, and not on the more specific question of what they gained from particular novels. Isolating form from theme has three main advantages. First, it elucidates an important aspect of the intellectual context for these philosophers that has received little scholarly attention, namely the issue of why Nietzsche and Kierkegaard were drawn to fictional novelistic prose and how this literary form [End Page 167] affected their philosophy. Second, it allows the "deeper . . . affinitive" relationship between existentialist philosophy and the novel form to emerge, revealing the way in which existentialism and realism in the novel share a distinctive stylistic approach to the understanding of lived experience. Finally, it illuminates an intellectual precedent for the work of later existentialist thinkers such as Heidegger, Sartre, Beauvoir, and Camus, who drew increasingly on novelistic forms as both vehicle and inspiration for their philosophy. There are no previous studies devoted entirely to the novels read by Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, despite the fact that Nietzsche lists Stendhal and Dostoevsky as two of the greatest influences upon his thinking and that Kierkegaard's first published work is the review of a novel. Why did Nietzsche read the works not only of "philosophical" novelists like Stendhal, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy, but also of Eliot, Twain, Sterne, and Flaubert? Why did Kierkegaard's interest in the "life-view" of the individual crystallize through his reflections on Hans Christian Andersen's novel Only a Fiddler? How did both of these existentialist thinkers link the task of connecting life and philosophy with their reading of novels, and how is their reading of novels related to their attempt to write philosophy in novel and increasingly novelistic ways? These questions lead us to address anew the issue of how philosophy and literature are related in a way that is not simply thematic or allegorical. Furthermore, they ask us to take into account the importance of the novel to thinkers whose work has primarily been studied in the context of other "serious" philosophical texts, despite the stylistic and formal affinity of their work to the novels they read. As Thomas Brobjer points out in his recently published work on Nietzsche's reading habits and intellectual sources, Nietzsche's Philosophical Context: An Intellectual Biography (2008), none of the standard works on Nietzsche comment on his reading or library despite the fact that his private library has been more or less preserved in its entirety.2 Brobjer's work is the only large-scale study of Nietzsche's reading to date; however, it limits itself to "the philosophical influences on Nietzsche," even as it acknowledges that he "often was influenced by some who cannot conventionally be regarded as philosophers: by authors and literary critics" (NPC, p. 3). Although Brobjer mentions several of these authors and critics, even noting some of the marginalia found in these texts, he places them largely in the context of influences upon Nietzsche...

Beyond the Human Condition: An Introduction to Deleuze's Lecture Course

Beyond the Human Condition: An Introduction to Deleuze's Lecture Course1 Keith Ansell Pearson University of Warwick Introduction Deleuze's 1960 lecture course at l'Ecole Supérieure de Saint-Cloud on chapter three of Bergson's Creative Evolution is of interest to us today for a number of reasons. The course can be read in the light of Deleuze's attempt from 1956 to 1966 to demonstrate Bergson's importance for philosophy (what we might call "the Bergsonian Revolution"). But it also provides a set of revealing insights into the development of Deleuze's own philosophical project. Not only does it display Deleuze's tremendous gifts as a pedagogue, it also contains in embryonic and germinal form some of the essential modes of thought that characterize his contribution in the development of philosophy in post-war France. My intention in this introduction is not to provide a commentary on the lecture course. Instead I want to illuminate two topics that occupy an important place in the Bergsonian revolution and which inform and shape Deleuze's interpretation of Bergson, both in the lecture course and in his published writings on Bergson: Bergson's relation to Kant, and the endeavour to think beyond the human condition. Before examining these topics, however, let me note some significant and revealing features of the lecture course. By the time of the lecture course, Deleuze's main publications were his book on Hume published in 1953, an extraordinarily fresh and original study of empiricism and subjectivity, and an article published in 1956 on the concept of difference in Bergson.2 In 1959-60 he had begun to give lecture courses on Nietzsche as well as Bergson, and one of the most interesting aspects of the present lecture course is that it shows there was a brief moment in post-war thought when Bergson was posited alongside Nietzsche as an ally in the overcoming of metaphysics. Bergson, Deleuze notes in the lecture of 28 March 1960, participates in the Nietzschean moment of philosophy. This consists in the abolition of the intelligible world, an abolition that signals the end of metaphysics (the division into real or true and apparent [End Page 57] worlds), or what Nietzsche calls in Twilight of the Idols the moment of "the shortest shadow." However, there are some crucial differences: where Nietzsche tells the history or story of how the "true world" finally became a fable, which is also a story of the devaluation of the highest values and the advent of nihilism, Bergson seeks to reorient metaphysics, to bring science and philosophy into a new rapport, with the ultimate aim of re-connecting human thought and existence to, as Deleuze puts it, the "universal consciousness" of the Whole (le Tout). Perhaps the crucial difference is that while the Nietzschean can only invert Platonism and parody metaphysics, the Bergsonian has found a different path, one that is able to articulate a philosophy of pure becoming that enables thought to think beyond the human condition. As Deleuze points out in the lecture course, for Bergson, metaphysics begins not with Plato but with Zeno.3 As is well known, while Nietzsche's thinking has assumed an extraordinary importance for us today, Bergson's work has fallen into serious neglect. The manner in which Deleuze is able to demonstrate Bergson's importance for the future of philosophy – the lecture course is admirable in this regard – shows the injustice of this neglect. Perhaps the most significant feature of Deleuze's work on Bergson overall is its ability to see with tremendous clarity, and to pinpoint with accuracy, the significance of Bergson's project for philosophy. We see this in the very opening of the lecture course, where Deleuze indicates precisely where Bergson's importance lies, namely in the effort to radicalize the post-Kantian project commenced by Solomon Maimon and J. G. Fichte: the need to pass from a transcendental philosophy to a genetic one (Deleuze spells out the details of this move...

A Wave in the Stream of Chaos

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? …

The Dialectic of Perspectivism, II

V. Varieties of Pseudo-Kantianism As we have seen, the crucial step in Nietzsche’s argument for his early doctrine is summed by in the following remark: ‘If we are forced to comprehend all things only under these forms, then it ceases to be amazing that in all things we actually comprehend nothing but these forms’ (1979, pp. 87–8). Before eventually learning to be suspicious of it, Nietzsche spends a good deal of time wondering instead what it would mean to live with the conclusion that (what he calls) “the Kantian philosophy” apparently thus forces upon one, if one allows oneself to take this step. The different ways of living with its implications that Nietzsche goes on to distinguish in his early writings play an important role in his own subsequent retrospective understanding of the stations of the dialectic through which his thought had to traverse in its movement towards his mature perspectivism. Nietzsche contrasts these, in turn, with different possible versions of stage-two perspectivism. It is these finer discriminations that Nietzsche makes among the possible ways of occupying the second and third stages of the dialectic that will briefly concern us in this part of the paper. The prototype, for Nietzsche, of a bold thinker who follows through on the commitments of the (pseudo-)Kantian philosophy – the doctrine of “idealism” (as Nietzsche calls it in the passage quoted on p. 48 of Part I of this paper) – is Schopenhauer. But the early Nietzsche has other pseudo-Kantian heroes. Heinrich von Kleist is an instructive example.34 Here is Kleist (writing his fiance, Wilhelmine von Zenge):

Impulsive Forces In and Against Words

Impulsive Forces in and Against Words Alphonso Lingis (bio) In his lecture "Nietzsche, le polythéisme et la parodie" given at the Collège de Philosophie in 1957 and published in 1963 in his Un si funeste désir, Pierre Klossowski explicated certain radical passages from Nietzsche's The Gay Science, a work he had newly translated into French (two prior translations existed). In the philosophical world of France where perception seemed to have found its definitive elucidation in the phenomenology of perception of Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1945), Nietzsche's exposition of sensory experience, as Klossowski laid it out, was so radically different from that phenomenology that it could not be assimilated. In his Nietzsche et le cercle vicieux, published in 1969, Klossowski worked on texts Nietzsche left unpublished and which date from the years of The Gay Science onward. Philosophers, Nietzsche had written, do not simply coordinate and justify the works and science of society; they break at least in part with the common language by formulating their own aggressivity, tolerance, intimidation, anxieties, need of solitude, or need to forget themselves. And Nietzsche too speaks not of what is common and communicable but of what he experienced inwardly. Now Klossowski presented Nietzsche's exposition of sensory experience as an exposition of the experience peculiar to Nietzsche, in the most troubled period of his life. This experience, moreover, Klossowski aimed to show, was wholly premonitory of Nietzsche's final state, in which he could no longer say what he was experiencing nor who he was. The environment is not simply passively impressed upon our sensory surfaces; we have to awaken, move our eyes, and focus on things and circumscribe their contours with our look, and assume a posture that enables us to advance our look. When we are born, and when we awaken each day, that is, are born again to the world, we are needy and vulnerable, to be sure; the organism is porous and needs to replenish fluids and substance lost. But our organisms are material systems that generate excess energies; it is because excess energies have to be discharged that the organism moves into the environment and depletes its substance, and needs develop. Nietzsche calls these excess energies impulses, also multiple wills to power, that is, not conscious drives to acquire power, but positive forces that expand and exist only in expansion. They seek resistances on which to discharge themselves. They push against one another and become multiple. For the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the movements of perception are intentional; they are from the first correlative with objects, or, for Merleau-Ponty, intersensory things, Gestalten agglomerated by an intrinsic intelligible essence or sensory meaning, arising against a background of potential objects or latent things. Yet every glance around us encompasses innumerable unnamed and unnameable shapes, hues, textures, slidings, illuminations. Do not in fact the excess energies of life open upon an environment of swarming sensory patterns, streamings, scintillations, and shadows which quicken life before or without acquiring meaningful identities? [End Page 60] What in classical epistemology were called sensations were the information bits these forces impressed on our sensory surfaces, resulting also in sensory affects of pleasure or pain, according to the passive conception of our sensibility. For Nietzsche the multiple impulses that confront the forces of the environment are active and not reactive; confronting what is not from the first meaningful but resists or empowers, they laugh and weep, bless and curse. And it is these multiple and conflicting impulses, not a conceptual grasp of the essences of things, that know environmental events, know the forces exerted by the multiple hues, textures, glows, savors, reflections, halos, echos, projections, and shadows scattered about us. The impulses do more than know all that; they exalt and consecrate events of the world, they put over each an azure bell of blessing, they give them a space to stand forth and to dance—"they come and offer their hands and laugh and flee—and come back."1 They give themselves form and multiple forms and dance with all things. They are Apollonian and Dionysian. What is called conscious thought is elaborated in words of the common...

The Body in Biography

This paper takes as point of departure current attempts at understanding what the notion of an embodied subjectivity might mean for life writing. It begins by providing a psychoanalytic perspective on how subjectivity is related to the body, describing the processes by which subjectivity emerges out of bodily drives and showing how the emergence of the subject is coterminous with the emergence of language. Having identified the processes by which subjectivity, language and body are related, the paper examines the writing of the body in the poetry of Arthur Nortje, drawing attention to the stylistic means by which bodily drives are configured. It concludes by suggesting that because the body is present in writing not as substance but as a system of articulation, the only way in which the biographer is able to convey the embodied life of the subject is through what Nietzsche calls the ‘felt text’.

Before the Subject: Rereading The Birth of Tragedy

et us begin with this question: What would it mean to forget The Birth M J of Tragedy? Nietzsche calls on us on more than one occasion to do just this, a request that is most often tied to a claim concerning the book's untime liness, and this in two senses. First, in what is chronologically the last such request, which comes from Ecce Homo, the first section of that part that treats the Birth, Nietzsche suggests that the book sounds as if it were written fifty years earlier than it in fact was. More precisely, 'it smells offensively Hegelian,' and this due most immediately to the language of 'Idee,' Gegensatz, and Aufheben, its most apparent sense, therefore, dialectical.2 Let us note, then, that in spite of the fact that Nietzsche credits The Birth of Tragedy with the discovery of the Dionysian, this 'principle' is communicated through a speech that stammers and, indeed, falters under the weight of reconciliation {Vers?hnung) and metaphysical comfort?Dionysus 'concealed under a scholar's hood,' not yet cruel enough.3 And yet the text is untimely in still another manner, for according to Nietzsche it poses for the first time the ques tion of 'cheerfulness' (Heiterkeit), which is also, according to the Genealogy, the reward of the question of morality (BT ASC l).4 The Birth of Tragedy is thus untimely not only because it dares to raise the question of Greek art in the midst of the Franco-Prussian War, but because in doing so, perhaps even in spite of itself, it also poses for the first time the gravest of all questions? morality the danger of all dangers? (BT ASC 5; GM 7)?and so because it is already to a certain extent genealogical. Thus, if the first sense of the text's untimeliness concerns its communication, the second sense of its untimeli

The Angel of History's Forged Signature: The Ruins of Memory and the Task of Mourning in a Brazilian Postdictatorial Novel

The Angel of History’s Forged Signature: The Ruins of Memory and the Task of Mourning in a Brazilian Postdictatorial Novel Idelber Avelar (bio) How was it that the devaluation of all higher values and the rejection of everything life-affirming came to constitute the basis for all morality, the paradigm for all “good”? How was it that the negation of life, the negation of the only world there is, came to prevail over the guiltless embrace of life? Whence comes the power, the persuasive strength of what Nietzsche calls “that ghastly paradox of a ‘God on the cross,’ that mystery of an unimaginable ultimate cruelty and self-crucifixion of God for the salvation of man” (Genealogy 35)? Why was it that the thought of the slave, the thought of ressentiment, pity, and compassion in the end triumphed, if triumph is the very thing this thought denies in its ever-deeper flow of self-debasement? How do we explain the paradox of a God who conquers and emerges victorious precisely by surrendering Himself to crucifixion by His own followers? Whence the attraction of the negative? These are, of course, questions familiar enough to any reader of Nietzsche. They are rehearsed here as a way of introducing the thread [End Page 184] that will guide my reading of one of Brazil’s foremost contemporary novelists, Silviano Santiago. I will analyze in detail his Em Liberdade (1981) within a framework delimited by what one might term “the predicament of postdictatorship,” i.e., that myriad of issues related to memory, mourning, and the reconceptualization of the past that has gained so much prominence in the literature produced in the aftermath of the recent Latin American military regimes. 1 In my reading of Santiago’s novel, the reference to Nietzsche will be crucial because, in addition to engaging recent Brazilian history and the tasks it poses to collective memory, Em Liberdade is also the postdictatorial novel that goes furthest in interrogating a certain mythology of the negative within Latin American intelligentsia. Santiago’s starting point can be read as a spin-off of Nietzsche’s reevaluation of all values: what is the process through which the reactive ideology of suffering martyrs becomes the backbone of national imaginaries and identities? In Nietzsche’s genealogy, the origin of a concept of moral superiority can always be referred back to a concept of political superiority, a difference in a relation of power. Only a posteriori does the positive or negative marking acquire moral connotations, invariably as a result of one’s position within a field of force. Morality is parasitic upon politics and economics, not the reverse. In a most fascinating passage of the Genealogy (and one that is strikingly suggestive of early Marx), Nietzsche traces the moral notion of guilt (Schuld) back to the material concept of debts (Schulden), a first step in establishing the genesis of responsibility and memory itself in the contractual relationship between debtor and creditor (58–65). The memorious are the ones in debt, Nietzsche seems to suggest. Guilt and conscience are memory functions that grow on the soil of promises made to a creditor. It is thus memory, not forgetting, which is the reactive, negative category in this dichotomy. In the Nietzschean topology, the superior, victorious force has no need to remember. It is the slave who is condemned to memory. Remembrance and guilt (the two seem inseparable in Nietzsche, as though recollection, by its very nature, already implied the burden of a moral debt) are imposed whenever one faces defeat in a confrontation of forces. The legacy of defeat is then a memory immersed in guilt, incapable of that active forgetting which for Nietzsche characterizes all creative, life-affirming power. In postdictatorial Brazil, where of late the most complicitous [End Page 185] forms of forgetting have thrived to the point of hegemonizing the polis and its institutions—determining, even legislatively, how the past is to be dealt with—to speak of any kind of forgetting, however active, can surely lead to a good deal of misunderstanding. After all, can’t literature contribute to guard national memory, guarantee a mnemonic vigilance that alone will prevent the past from ever repeating itself...

A Missing Boulevard in Versailles: Reading Time in Proust

LINEAR TIME CHARACTERIZES HISTORIES. Not only the anonymous stories of cities and countries, but also individual histories-biographies. In Proust: The Early Years, George Painter describes Proust being driven through Illiers (Combray) with his ageing father. The carriage grates slowly on the cobblestone square. Father points at a small shop front, the store where grandfather sold candles and tapers. Son nods acknowledgment. A twist of smoke diffuses above the roof's single chimney. Father remembers rarely having coal. (3) It is a long way from these store-top rooms to the modern Paris apartment they live in. But the carriage can never be pulled far enough to be away. Departure, teleology, arrival, project, progress; the words surround linear time. Their temporality depends upon an unbroken continuity stretching between beginning and end. Nietzsche calls this cursive time. It is the time of writing. The temporality a sentence pursues in conveying meaning.

Self-deception and the ethics of belief

To ask whether self-deception is an important criterion for the assessment of a person's religious beliefs is to remind ourselves that what Nietzsche calls "schooling in suspicion" is an essential part of the ethics of belief. Like all of Nietzsche's important insights though, this sharp and incisive view is a sword that cuts both ways. On the one hand, he sometimes suggests that our lives are bearable only because we have the capacity to evade the truth, especially at those times in life when too much truth might undermine and erode those basic commitments which enable us to make sense of the world. In the "Preface" to his Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche addresses this theme when he Offers his own somewhat ambivalent confession to rationalize his youthful enthusiasm for Schopenhauer and Wagner. Not surprisingly, he suggests that if there is any excuse for failing to see the failings of our avatars, it is because there is never any reason to ask for the whole truth when a little truth will suffice: "... what do you know, what could you know, of how much cunning in serf-preservation, how much reason and higher safeguarding, is contained in such deception or how much falsity I shall require if I am willing to permit myself the luxury of my truthfulness . . . . Enough, I am still living, and life is, after all, not a product of morality: it wants deception, it lives on deception ...'1 In the world according to Nietzsche then, our lives are livable only because each person has an excuse for their illusions; namely, that a finite and limited perspective is what makes human life possible. And yet Nietzsche offers us a contrasting ideal, what one might call the life of philosophical virtue which is captured by his portrait of the "free spirit," the person who assumes the risks of free inquiry even though it might lead to the erosion of his life-preserving deceptions. Anticipating the meditations