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'An aphorism, properly stamped and molded, has not been "deciphered" when it has simply been read; rather one has then to begin its interpretation, for which is required an art of interpretation.' -- Nietzsche, 'On the Genealogy of Morals'

Bataille: On Nietzsche#4 « Previous | |Next »
December 19, 2003

Trevor,
you wrote the following in an earlier post:


"Perhaps this very Weblog is a scar of subjectivity, a kind of measure of our inability to properly communicate in any other way. It’s all dressed up as disinterest, a scholarly pursuit, but why would we want to engage thus? It lacks intensity. Perhaps philosophy is compensation."

Philosophy and intensity. It is hard to put the two together. Intensity is usually associated with poetics, eg. Bukowski's poems.

The third chapter of Bataille's On Nietzsche has some relevance here. Bataille works off a section of BK 11 of Nietzsche's Will to Power where Nietzsche is getting rid a few common superstitions about philosophers.

In this section Nietzsche is concerned with philosophy as part of a critique of highest values. He advocates a conception philosophers as detroyers of the old and decayed, and celebrators of what is coming and lies in the future. (para417) He opposes this to the scholarly conception of the philosopher, "that herd animal in the field of knowledge----who inquires because he is ordered to and because others have done so before him---" (para. 421)

So what does Bataille do it? He begins with a Nietzsche quote about being a recluse and seeking a friend, then another Nietzsche quote about teaching a philosophy that is dangerous to life.

He then writes a passage about his writings and life. He says that if ever gets the chance to trite out his last words in blood, it would write something like along the lines of his writings, life and loves all being considered as communication. He then asks:


'How could I live my life otherwise? Living this recluse's life, speaking in a desert of isolated readers, accepting the bouyant touch of writing. My accomplishment, its sum total, is to have taken risks and to have sentences fall like the victims of war now lying in fields... True, I live on, even now full of life, though I declare, "If you me find reluctant to take risks in this book, throw it away; if on the other hand, when you read me you find nothing to risk yourself, then listen: Throughout your life up until your death, your reading will only corrupt you...and you 'll sink with corruption.'

A philosophy dangerous to life is taking risks. It is avoiding the emptiness in writing.

That emptiness is so common today, especially in a lot of academic writing. Book after book at absurd prices is offered to us as consumers with each saying very little. These books are marketed with a flourish by the various presses, then they are immediately forgotten and remandered. Often they are found in second hand bookshops. It is how I pick some of them up these days.

Maybe Bataille can show us to link intensity and philosophy instead of philosophy as scholarly compensation for the aching emptiness in our lives.

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| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 11:14 AM | | Comments (0)
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