MARTIN (1961)
Repentance is for little children, right? However, in my Nietzsche this year, some selective reshuffling will indeed be necessary, so that when I move from the Cartesian "mens" to the Nietzschean "Match," I won't be accused of metaphysically interpreting the German invasion of France in 1940. Even so, "Betrage Zur Philosophie" and "Besinnung" should only be published posthumously, to avoid another scandal --- "Ereignis" will bring in a good amount of royalties. As unoriginal as it may be, Sartre's "Being and Nothingness" helped popularize my "Mitsen," or "being-with," throughout Europe. Replacing, or watering down, the theme of the Nazi Opfer (sacrifice to the community); writing "team" instead of "combat"; and exchanging the "force of destiny" for pale concepts of freedom and commitment --- the path to the magical rebirth of my work in the world after the war and the inquiries was assured: Althusser, Foucault, and soon, I am sure, Derrida will help to correct Sartre's humanism. After he declined my invitation to meet me in Todtnauberg, at the time when I was praising some points of his book, I began to attack him publicly, as a matter of strategy. I thus assured the philosophical glory of my 1939-1942 courses; the end of metaphysics and its overcoming now return to impose insistent and arid readings on the new generation of French thinkers, cleansed of any trace of bohemian existentialism. The case of Raymond Aron explaining Husserl à Sarte and Simone de Beauvoir in a Paris bistro, over a glass of vermouth, is illustrative of the communist mediocrity that tried to take over my thought, when Sein und Zeit (Being and Time) had already been written long ago. I THE ONLY WAY TO THINK --- I think so too, Foucault. "The profound boredom, which like a silent mist slides back and forth in the abysses of existence, levels all things, men and ourselves along with them, in a strange indifference. This boredom is what manifests the being in its totality." By the way, it's six in the morning and I just left the house with a bucket to go get water from the well. NEBEL! Good thing I put the black cap on my head. NEBEL! NEBEL! NEBEL! "Pure being-there in the trembling of this suspended being where there is nothing to support it." NEBEL!
Good thing I put the black cap on my head. NEBEL! NEBEL! NEBEL! "Pure being-there in the trembling of this suspended being where there is nothing to support it." NEBEL! A wall of fog, a visible, tactile, audible mist, thick yet indeterminable, clinging to some dreamlike substance, something that opens and closes, condenses, evaporates, that puts the being in its entirety to flight. Something as indeterminate as today's play-off between Barcelona and Hamburg, the most agonizing semifinal in recent times in Europe. The naive objectivism here, the logic of understanding, the calculation, either disappear or become residue of a ridiculous confusion between Being and being. I stop for a moment, trying to orient myself on the path. Something inside me moves, is sensitive, until it reaches a certain depth. For an instant, the world dissolves. An abyss opens between my senses and the solidity of the objects around me. I freeze in a fascinated stillness within the NEBEL. "The world ex-world." The NEBEL seems to have hidden all the galaxies of the universe in its pocket, placing itself in parentheses. I silently spell out "para-ente-isis." Do I perhaps exceed my nothingness, naming the desert I have reached by emptying its objects? What other exorcism besides this?
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ResponderExcluir"Without raising my arms in response," I move forward. The concrete world has been replaced by quick, gyrovagal, prying signals; spirited-odd NOW, I search for the drinkable word within the NEBEL, the well, its liquid skeleton of sounds, now dismembered by a Medusaean eye that, enlarged, could reject even Heraclitus's worn-out river. But let's leave the theater its fecal matter. If I could free my body at this moment, with its procession of armchairs and chalets (I have no doubt): I WOULD FLY TO THE ENDS OF THE COSMIC ORIGIN OF EVERYTHING! I would merge into the magmatic conscious amalgam of Holderlin's absent god, AND I WOULD RETURN! I would return and, in possession of the word bacchante, I would project myself forward, into combat, fundamental as the oracle of Delphi. AUSRICHTEN! ‘’The anguish of the bold does not tolerate any opposition to the joy or even the pleasant amusement of the tranquil abandonment of oneself adrift ---- SECRET AUSRICHTEN WITH SERENITY AND THE CREATIVE YEARNING’’. A severe ALIGNMENT that I ponder here: because perhaps clinging to Mallarmé here becomes a hopeless struggle with the incarnate Word, the Logos.
Without a doubt, Mallarmé contains the idea of several concrete realities that sustain and evoke each other simultaneously, seeking an AUSRICHTEN, an ALIGNMENT. And without a doubt, there are these flickerings within the NEBEL. Above, a gigantic dome of white light, like a virgin page, licks the NEBEL with trembling flames. I encircle. I encircle. NEBEL designated. NEBEL absorbed by NEBEL generated by the non-time of NEBEL. NEBEL circum-adjacent. No brother here, unhonored, unfinished, unplaced. NEBEL vitrescible, undulating. Of me, only this concentrated obstinacy remains, all my energy fixed on the NEBEL, an eye that shines and fades, as my legs take one step, then another, and my lips murmur imperceptible words. On the surface, I am calm, but my hands reveal a certain tremor in my fingers. If I try to rearrange myself, body and mind, within the NEBEL, I find myself tormented by a combination of trifles, tiring me into bits and pieces. For this reason, I prefer to SEE IT, simply, the traditional and ordinary NEBEL. And yet, planted partout, enclosed in its glassy para-ente-isis, I ignore its meaning; if I let myself be carried away, there stretches before me, on the surface of the NEBEL, a desert of endless dunes.
ResponderExcluirContinue in one minute
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ResponderExcluir"The original anguish lurking (...) the silent voice that predisposes us to the astonishment of the abyss" is there, or rather, HERE. Excessive attention? Perhaps surprise. If I had a mirror here with me, I would see in my face two severe bulges, perceiving in the invisible the slow and croaking creak of the light monotonously beckoning the Being. Shepherding of the Being versus Policing of the being. "The star, devised, calculated, painted, photographed, hated, hated, loved, bullfighted, disembarked, registered, even so bleeding, beckons you throughout your scene, Delphi." The being, which NEBEL makes flee in its totality, is the figure that makes itself, that presents itself as an image; the moaning and petty figure, the fabricated minutiae of the world, which NEBEL touches until it dissolves. Elegance and white owe much to NEBEL, to the clarification of its open-closed realm, within which we move beyond the historical incubus, for we have "made the newspaper our daily landscape" and now we are equally unfamiliar with ourselves, in several different languages. Enormous astonishment. Thaumadzen. TAOmAD-ZEN. What lashes the bare earth of the ground is now a furious Being, whirling sticks and snapping branches.
My gesture is still my step, slow, grave, silent, accumulating energy, with little authority to support me on the ground. Am I that old? Fifteen years ago, I was carrying a rifle, after emergency enlistment, shortly before the Reich fell. Here, my former left-winger's tantrum on the soccer field becomes reasonable and advantageous. Then, I remember the game again, this afternoon. Suddenly, the NEBEL dissolves, I see the well of water in front of me. I remember the bucket in my hand. I release again the hyper-concentrated anger of being a man—deep despondency! Hands inert, pale—a rough man, a cold peasant, murmuring a mournful confession to himself. I see myself arrogant, then submissive, then agitated and apprehensive. I recall a vast period of life in which I was blinded by violence and obedient to the political leader. Everything so nebulous. It was the same NEBEL, a perceptual gap within which it becomes possible to concentrate so deeply as to bring together a totally different world, capable of producing an alternative destiny and history to the everyday entity infinitely worn out by its excessive propagation.
ResponderExcluirAnxiously, I remember myself fixated on a hope that, incapable of conversation or defense, grew increasingly fragile, until in the end, it despaired of everything, devoid of meaning. I was probably shaken. Once again, astonishment froze my blood. After that piano concert in the castle, my final public lecture, and that was it: The Reich fell. The entire German people, from one moment to the next, walking the streets with their heads bowed. Famine threatened, my properties were requisitioned, and my private library was threatened with seizure. The French occupation and the denunciations of my own compatriots led me to the German purge commission in July 1945 --- soon, I was excluded from the university where I was rector, forever. Never have I longed so much as in that moment for the "white deserts of the soul's immortality," for the NEBEL again. And certainly, all I had to do was fix my eyes for a moment on the void, and there was that same NEBEL, exactly the same as just now, making me believe that SOMETHING could still be achieved in the apprehension of the "landscape behind the landscape," that a new world could still be brought together. Incurable muteness, regret is for little children. HOLD ON!
ResponderExcluir"The long-kept silence" could indeed be "ACCUMULATED." The primordial water, reached through the NEBEL, "does not provoke successes because it does not need repercussion." "GUARANTEE OF THE SILENT VOICE FROM A HIDDEN SOURCE." "Direct rite. The touch of the bittern on the finger bone." From Being and Time, up to this point, the painful learning, against subject-centered reason. No difference between reason and enlightenment, which Hegel still wanted to make dialectical. From self-consciousness, it is only possible to extract decisions, orders, projects. I Do, I Undo, I Am Reborn. "I regulate the rotation of space - vector arm - any and all normative orientation is a subjective claim to power committed to self-aggrandizement - Spengler's typology, after so much time, does not even seem retrograde to me here and now - and Nietzsche's radicalization of the understanding of Being constellates an entire archetype of the modern crisis, which remains the same, with or without Reich -
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ResponderExcluir– no new beginning – a shifting West – maintenance and promotion of commercial internecine relations – apocalyptic expectation of entry into the New Century – the end of metaphysics as consummation – “Time, turning its scythe, cuts my garment. It attracts the scissors of Atropos” – the absent god, from afar, threatens – “does the unknown god operate in the matrix of ideas? “—yes, to throw oneself back, from Nietzsche, from the Will to Power, to the pre-Socratic origins of metaphysics—Holderlin’s absent god implies, through extreme distancing, that Being has been forgotten by the entity, that modernity, abandoned by the gods, has been deprived of energy and cohesion for its progress, that the ANTHROPOLOGICAL MACHINE OF THE WORLD IS TURNING WRONG—the god does not come near, he remains far away, prowling, restless, his hard gaze magnetizing in the imageless darkness—threatening eyes, his hoarse voice chewing a terribly original question—with the POETIC TURN, I believe I have become the magnetophonic transcription of this question, faced with the stagnant stains of so many close and dominating entities—
ResponderExcluir"I hold the landscape in my fingers, an open passage" to the illuminated instant "How many islands inhabit us! In the microcosm, still typographic, of the topographic macrocosm" - ANAMNESIS - cognitive capacity beyond self-reflection and discursive thought - internal dialogue vs. internal silence - DIRECT KNOWLEDGE - "Infinitesimal landscape. Silence: wheel in motion. Shadow of a man or a garden INHABITING itself’’ – ‘’The lacerated Parthenon: a collage, an ontology of the Parthenon, a photomontage of Greece, the remains of a pure skeleton galvanized by this light that raised gods, statues and new men from the ground’’ – in modernity, however, the sources of social integration are exhausted, under the pressure of capital – two difficult entities that no longer fit together, inflating a strange global inflection of which violence is only the most obvious tone in the multifaceted brilliance of its madness – absurd daily bread in its cybernetic robot version’’.
Nature vision: the well water is freezing; I can watch from up high, still as a mirror. I lower the bucket to it, while I turn off my internal dialogue. After I collect the bucket, I am empty of thoughts, staring at myself in the mirror of the bucket's water like a monkey on the first day of the world. I look carefully. My face is slightly disfigured on the liquid surface. The water mirror now seems larger. I hesitate for a minute, searching within myself for the exact form of what I see. Am I wandering, or is some impertinence creeping into my mind, into my vision? I see Wulf and Seeler at the Volksparkstadion, where each scored a goal in the 2-1 victory over Barcelona on April 26th; and also Evaristo de Macedo, who scored in Barcelona's 1-0 victory at Camp Nou on April 12th. Today is May 3rd, the day of the decisive playoff between Hamburg and Barcelona, which will be broadcast live on TV, direct from the King Baudouin Stadium in Brussels. I'll be watching the game at the home of some old friends.
ResponderExcluirIt's not exactly a slow life, is it? This one that now flows into an unnerving afternoon in the tedious center of industrial society. A fluid, liquid limbo contouring the strange language of time. And what is this trail I see in action on the field, a trail-face displaying energy and ferocity inside Hamburg's penalty area? Is it possible, Evaristo again? To understand the vision, it would be necessary to see it from a less chronological distance. I realize that as I let my eyes glide unfocused over the water, a self-drawn, unqualified shape emerges, oscillating from left to right, as if at any moment it wanted to leap from within my vision to my side. It's looking at me, without a doubt. My heart pounds now. The water seems more a vehicle than a habitat for this. There, within the inside, is a black stone light, a baroque world appearing and disappearing. When the surface comes back into focus, I perceive a moving image of the depths, a solitary and dazzling landscape, which seems to pull me into it, inscribing me within it.
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ResponderExcluirI see the face of a teenager, beckoning to me from far away, in time and space. It's an entire suburb of gothic galaxies. "Delphi. Will the great eye-grove see? The great eye-grove pastures its theorems—Delphi, where (circumscribed) perfection is inserted into the normal everyday, into the demands of the everyday." I realize now that it will try to emerge from the water at any moment. HERE IT COMES! The image rises, scanning the atonal or bizarre—"Unatotal directed economy"—"Eternity is electrified"—"my eye is armed with a million volts"—corporeal yes, why not?, neither sacred nor secular—Orpheus.
Post script
ResponderExcluirThe embedded depths seem to Nietzsche to be the true orientation of philosophy, the PRE-SOCRATIC INITIATIC SNAP to be RETURNED IN A PHILOSOPHY OF THE FUTURE, with all the forces of a life that is also a thought or of a language that is also a body.
ExcluirDeleuze (idem)
Here I will follow Nietzsche's trail to the origins of his thought.
"In the beginning, schizophrenia: pre-Socratism is the properly philosophical schizophrenia, the absolute depth dug into bodies and thought that leads Holderlin, before Nietzsche, to address the pre-Socratics, in particular Empedocles. In the famous Empedoclean alternation, in the complementarity of hate and love, we find on one side the BODY OF HATE, THE STRAWBER BODY and, in pieces, on the other side, THE GLORIOUS BODY WITHOUT ORGANS...................................in the same way, Dionysus shows us two faces, his open and lacerated body, his impassive head without organs, dismembered Dionysus, but also the impenetrable Dionysus''
Nietzsche's encounter with the depth of the pre-Socratics was only achieved through what Deleuze calls Nietzsche's "conquest of surfaces": "But Nietzsche does not remain on the surface; this seems to him rather to be what must be judged from the renewed perspective of the eye of the depths. Nietzsche has little interest in what happens after Plato, considering it to be pure decadence. However, here we perceive the RISING of a third race of philosophers (in accordance with the same method), and it is to THEM that Nietzsche's words particularly apply: as superficial as they were, these Greeks were profound!"
ExcluirRoman Theater of Hierapolis
"These third Greeks, however, are not completely Greek. With the Megarians, the Cynics, and the Stoics begins a new type of philosopher and a new type of anecdote. AND A CURIOUS SYSTEM OF PROVOCATIONS. The Stoic anecdotes are no longer Platonic or pre-Socratic.
Deleuze, idem.
Cynic and Stoic mockery of Plato
Excluir"It is always a matter of deposing Ideas and showing that the INCORPORAL is not at the height, but on the surface, that it is not the highest cause, but rather the superficial effect par excellence, that it is not ESSENCE, but rather EVENT."
Deleuze, Logic of Sense
Stoicism is not a return to the pre-Socratics, to the Heraclitean world of Fire (although for the Stoics, at the limit of extrasensory exploration or the cultivation of consciousness, there is a unity of all bodies in function of a PRIMORDIAL FIRE in which they are absorbed and from which they develop according to their respective TENSION (apud Deleuze). A cosmic present envelops the entire universe: only bodies exist in space and only the present in time - it is rather a TOTAL RE-EVALUATION of the pre-Socratic world, interpreting it according to a physics of MIXTURES IN DEPTH, the Cynics and Stoics abandon pre-Socratism to all LOCAL DISORDERS that are reconciled only in the GREAT MIXTURE, the UNITY OF CAUSES IN THEMSELVES.
When Nietzsche makes his Bottomless Dionysus speak (opposing the divine individuation of Apollo and the person of Socrates), he poses the fundamental problem of "Who speaks in philosophy?" Who is the subject of philosophical discourse?
Excluir(Outside the person and the individual... you will not distinguish anything?)
So, freeing himself from Schopenhauer and Wagner, Nietzsche begins to explore a WORLD OF IMPERSONAL AND PRE-INDIVIDUAL SINGULARITIES, a world he now calls the Dionysian world or the world of the WILL TO POWER, FREE AND UNBOUND ENERGY.
"Nomadic singularities that are no longer bound, imprisoned, by the fixed individuality of infinite Being (the famous immutability of God), nor by the sedentary limits of the finite subject (the famous limits of knowledge)."
Idem
Excluir"A Dionysian machine for producing meaning, in which nonsense and meaning are no longer in simple opposition, but rather co-present in a new type of discourse. This new discourse is no longer that of FORM, much less that of the FORMLESS: IT IS RATHER THE PURE INFORMAL: 'You will be a monster and a chaos.'"
"The subject of the new discourse is neither man nor God; there is no longer a subject. It is this new, free, nomadic, and nomadic singularity that permeates men, plants, animals, and the elements, independently of the materials of their individuation and the forms of their personality."
Deleuze, Logic of Sense
Nietzsche's work stems from a certain feeling of LOSS OF MYTH, of the MYTHICAL HOMELAND, a current that predates him in Germany, it must be said: a utopian attitude oriented toward the GOD WHO IS TO COME --- it is in this reactionary enterprise of RETURN TO THE ORIGINS that Nietzsche prepares his WAR MACHINE --- he begins to present modern art as a medium in which modernity and the archaic meet: "Only the SUPRA-HISTORICAL power of an art that is consumed in the present can bring SALVATION to the true need and inner misery of modern man." --- he believes that a renewed mythology can FREE FORCES of social integration trapped in the gears of competitive society --- decentralize modern consciousness and open the doors of perception to archaic experiences --- etc...............................................................................
ExcluirSo we can ask: WHAT DIFFERENTIATES THE Nietzsche's DIONYSIAC of ROMANTICISM?
Schlegel, in his DISCOURSE ON MYTHOLOGY, already said that German poetry lacked a center, just as mythology did for the ancients: "We have no mythology."
ExcluirThis systematic German program also contained a very Nietzschean point: the idea that with the new mythology, art would replace philosophy, since aesthetic intuition is the SUPREME ACT OF REASON.
And in Schelling's aesthetic intuition (his System of 1800) lies the solution to the enigma of how to bring to the consciousness of the self, in a product of his own creation, the identity of freedom and necessity, spirit and nature, the activity of flux between the conscious and the unconscious.
In Schlegel's hands, however, the search for a new mythology transforms from a philosophically grounded expectation into a MESSIANIC HOPE for the first time.
Certainly, in Schelling, reason could no longer take possession of itself in the very medium of self-reflection; it could only rediscover itself in ART, in the DIVINATORY GIFT OF POETRY.
ExcluirSchlegel writes:
"Since the principle of all poetry is to suspend the course and laws of rationally thinking reason, and to transport us to the beautiful confusion of fantasy, to the original chaos of human nature, of which I know no more beautiful symbol than the disordered tumult of the ancient gods."
The new mythology here demands that the split modernity relate to the ORIGINAL CHAOS as the OTHER OF REASON.
In this context, it is worth noting that DIONYSU, the conspiratorial god of ecstasy, madness, and incessant metamorphoses, underwent a surprising revaluation in early German Romanticism.
ExcluirThe cult of DIONYSU, in the Greece of Euripides and sophistic criticism, had kept alive old initiatory traditions, especially Orphic ones. Dionysus as THE GOD WHO IS TO COME.
Driven mad by Hera, he wanders with satyrs and bacchantes through Asia Minor and Africa, a FOREIGN GOD, as Holderlin says, plunging the entire West into the night of the gods and leaving a trail of ecstasy.
Dionysus will one day return, reborn through the mysteries and free from madness.
Dionysus distinguishes himself from all other gods as the ABSENT GOD, whose return is awaited.
Holderlin, in turn, associates the myth of Dionysus with that peculiar figure of historical interpretation that would bring a messianic expectation, remaining highly influential until the LAST HEIDEGGER (who wrote his famous THE LAST GOD, continuing the tradition).
ExcluirFor Heidegger, the West has, since the beginning, persevered in the night of the absence of the gods, or the FORGETFULNESS OF BEING; THE GOD OF THE FUTURE WILL RENEW THE LOST FORCES OF THE ORIGIN, OF THE PRIMORDIAL HERACLITIAN FIRE (and the imminent god makes his arrival perceptible through the awareness of his painful absence, through absolute distance).
We realize how unoriginal Nietzsche was in his Dionysian consideration of history. What differentiates him from early Romanticism is the comparison between Dionysus and Christ, made by Holderlin, Novalis, Schelling, and Creuzer. Wagner, for example, remained attached to the romantic link between the Dionysian and the Christian. Nietzsche, however, was not only a disciple of Schopenhauer, but also a contemporary of Mallarmé and the Symbolists, a defender of ART FOR ART'S SAKE. Thus, the description of the Dionysian—as an intensification of the subjective to the point of complete self-forgetfulness—contains the experience (radicalized in the face of Romanticism) of contemporary art.
ONLY SURFACE
ExcluirTHE SPHERE OF AESTHETIC APPEARANCE
FREE FROM THE PRACTICAL-INERTIQUE
FREE FROM SPACE-TIME
FREE FROM THE ILLUSIONS OF NORMALITY
AGAINST THE EVERYDAY
LOST, CONSUMES IN THE INSTANT
How stoic THIS is!
As an instance contrary to reason, Nietzsche invokes the experiences of self-disclosure (a-letheia), transferred to the archaic, of a decentered subjectivity freed from all limitations of cognition and activity with respect to ends, from all imperatives of utility and morality.
Stoically, the world appears to Nietzsche as a fabric of dissimulations and interpretations, unsupported by any intention or text. The aesthetic core of the will to power is a will to appearance, to mask, to surface, to optics, and to deception.
ExcluirHeidegger would project this Dionysiac Event onto the canvas of a critique of metaphysics that would be invested with a historical-universal meaning. "Certainly, it is necessary to remove the layers beneath which Being is buried" (writes H).
Heidegger was hardly influenced by the avant-garde art of his time, so in Bataille, the search for an ORIGINAL FORCE would take a different direction. Nietzsche's aesthetic experience would follow Surrealism and, later, Benjamin's "profane illumination."
Direct and genuine access to aesthetic experience is what separates Bataille from Heidegger, who seeks to place philosophy in the place that art occupies in Nietzsche. Heidegger cultivates an originary and Dionysian way of thinking.
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