The fourth part in The Limit-Experience section of Blanchot's The Infinite Conversation consists of three essays on Nietzsche under the heading 'Reflections on Nihilism.'
In the first essay, Nietzsche, Today, we find the standard 1930's French response to Nietzsche: uncovering Nietzsche's texts from the political falsifications of the fascists and the editor's fabrication of the Will to Power as a posthumous book. The short essay then quickly moves on to a concern about how we should read Nietzsche's texts.
Blanchot makes several points:
"Jaspers was the first to advise us of the principles that every interpretation of Nietzsche must respect...The essential movement of Nietzsche's thought consists in self-contradiction; each time it affirms, the affirmation must be put in relation with the one opposing it: the decisive point of each of its certitudes passes through contestation, goes beyond it, and returns to it."
"In Nietzsche's work there is nothing that might be called a centre. There is no central work...Still, when his books are read in chronological order, one becomes aware of an obsessive monotony, despite the variety of preoccupations and changing colour of formulation. Something fundamental is seeking expression .... something like a non-centered centre ... This "whole" is neither a concept or system ...[it is] a non-systematic coherence."
An example of using Nietzsche can be found in the work of Lukacs, which interprets Nietzsche as belonging to a romanticism, which protests the degradation of human beings by capitalism that reduces everything to the mode of a thing. This alteration of the human being by capitalism liberates anarchic feelings without root or use.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at February 6, 2005 04:58 PM | TrackBack