Finally I have a spare moment within the Canberra soft shoe shuffle. The political machinery and theatre has wound down, and I have some space from the all too human political dialectic of triumphalism and despair to reconnect to circle back to where I was a week or so ago. I return to my philosophical self that I had stepped out off when I went to Canberra.
In this return to the old I can return to reading Klossowski's chapter on Nietzsche's eternal return in his Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle. If you remember I said that I was going to read this chapter with help from Joanne Faulkner's paper 'Reading Nietzsche's' Sick" Body: Klossowski's Interpretation of Nietzsche.'
Joanne says that Klossowski is interested in the body, its fabrication by language, and the way that Nietzsche put his own life in danger for his experiments in writing. On this reading Klossowski interprets Nietzsche's importance as a philosopher of the body, and highlights the significance of Nietzsche's sick body to the development of the doctrine of eternal recurrence Relive your life innumerable times and will to relive it innumerable times).
In Chapter 3 ('The Experience of Eternal Return') Klossowski's focus is on the lived experience of the loss of a given identity, not on the metaphysics as per Heidegger. So the revelation of eternal return brings about the successive realization of all possible identities.
Klossowski says:
"I deactualize my present self in order to will myself in all the other selves whose entire series must be passed through so that, in accordance with the circular movement, I once again become what I am at the moment I discover the law of the Eternal Return." (p.58).