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October 2, 2003
Gary,
On interpretation, I agree with you and I disagree. Let me explain. I will start with a matter that concerns me:
John Cumming translates a phrase from The Dialectic Of Enlightenment as "through laughter blind nature becomes aware of itself as it is, and thereby surrenders itself to the power of destruction". Hullot-Kentor translates the bit after "...as it is" as "...and thereby forgoes its destructive power". Two different interpretations; is one right and one wrong or are they just different? I would like to be able to say to Cumming, "You misunderstand Adorno." He does misunderstand Adorno. Perhaps Hullot-Kentor doesn't get him right either. Who knows? But I am pretty sure Cumming is wrong.
I think you are also saying this when you demand textual sources for the position on Nietzsche that I have been advocating during the proceeding discussion, advocating and attributing it to Klossowski and Salome.
What is the point of protocols if there is just difference, if there is no truth?
Apart from this worry, I think I agree with you about the diversity of interpretation.
I think it comes down to this: if someone suggests forgetting Adorno because he thinks only destruction, then it becomes important whether or not that is what he thinks. If someone else thinks that there is an aspect of Nietzsche that manifests itself most clearly in his last writings, and that is the drive to self-disintegration, he's not saying forget Nietzsche but let's follow this line of inquiry, let's explore this idea some more. Scepticism towards this approach, hasty judgment, only serves to close off the line.
I think that there is something at stake here and it is the struggle between existentialism and surrealism. I will quote Gombrowicz:
"Existentialism tries to re-establish value, while for me the 'undervalue', 'insufficiency', the 'underdevelopment' closer to man than any value. I believe the formula 'Man wants to be God' expresses very well the nostalgia of existentialism, while I set up another immeasurable formula against it: 'Man wants to be young'".
Gombrowicz's writing is about man's struggle with form. That is why I continually associate it with the ideas of Bataille and Klossowski, and why I associate all three with what I call a broadly surrealist orientation. The approach to Nietzsche as a moralist makes sense in terms of the existentialist project, to find form, value, to become a being of value, a God.
For Sartre we are vacuums seeking existence, for Bataille we are plenitudes seeking oblivion. And Bataille also says that God is a point on the road to oblivion. Perhaps this is why there always seems to be a basic atmosphere of agreement that underlies any disagreements in our discussion so far.
The translator of Nietzsche And The Vicious Circle says:
"Klossowski himself provides no references for the sources of his citations...he simply appends the following note: 'All the citations from Nietzsche are taken from the posthumous fragments---and in particular, from those of his final decade (1880-1888)'"
Klossowski was Nietzsche's translator into French, as he was Heidegger's, Wittgenstein's and Rilke's, so whatever one may think of him it cannot be said that he didn't know Nietzsche well enough. He chose his course with deliberation. I think the whole issue is not a matter of adequacy of Nietzsche interpretation but of the existentialist-surrealist dispute.
I am for surrealism and you are against it. I don't know whether or not you would want to call yourself an existentialist.
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