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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'
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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'

On Nietzsche #11 « Previous | |Next »
February 15, 2004

Gary, I guess I understand what you are saying about the experience of flying (On Nietzsche #9) and how it might relate to some things that Bataille has written, but I must say that I don’t have those feelings myself when flying. As far as I’m concerned, I am more likely to die driving to Melbourne than flying there, but I don’t really think about it even when I get into the car. When I get on a plane I read, I eat the shit they pass out, I look out the window. My inner experience is one of boredom if anything. I don’t mind driving. When I’ve driven to Brisbane I feel like I could drive for ever. I want to keep going up the Bruce Highway. It’s as if you could just drive for ever, into an endless land, and at every stop something different, something new. When I get on a plane it’s to go somewhere and I do that to give a paper or see someone. I don’t like going somewhere for any other reason. You and I are pretty weird guys so the great mass of people are probably completely different from both of us, and we’re like black and white, like chalk and cheese, at least in some ways.

On Bataille’s Catholicism (On Nietzsche #10), in The Absence Of Myth: Writings On Surrealism, there are minutes of a discussion between, among others, Bataille and Klossowski. At one point Klossowski is asked if he agrees with what Bataille has just said. He says he does. Bataille is amazed, ‘since Klossowski is a Catholic.’ Klossowski replies, ‘You are a Catholic.’ Bataille: ‘I’m a Catholic? I won’t protest, because I have nothing to say. I can be anything you like.’ The conversation goes on to capitalism and post-capitalism, the efficacy of poetry, et cetera, before Klossowski repeats, ‘I have found you catholic at certain moments.’ Bataille responds, ‘I don’t feel in the mood to protest against being called a Catholic. If you say something completely without foundation, I will not reply.’ Someone else interjects, ‘I don’t consider you a Catholic but, rather, a Buddhist.’ The interjector says that Catholics place too much emphasis on the self whereas Buddhists regard the subject as an illusion. Communism and surrealism converge with Buddhism at this point. “that’s roughly what I’m trying to say, in a rather vague way,’ says Bataille. ‘Then you consider yourself a Buddhist?’ Bataille is adamant in response. ‘I don’t consider myself a Buddhist because Buddhism recognises transcendence… I feel closer to Buddhism than Catholicism.’ He’s not sure that communism and surrealism do converge at this point. With communism ‘there is a will to deny the person,’ he adds.

Bataille then goes on to say something that reminds me very much of the beginning of Franz Rosenzweig’s The Star Of Redemption, where it is stated that all abstract philosophy originates in the fear of death. Indeed it helps us forget this fear or cope with it, characteristically by banishing death from its realm of discussion. Talking about a post communist revolutionary world, Bataille notes that ‘a man like Rimbaud would have had as much reason to flee from a post-revolutionary world as the present world… Clearly the world as it could be after the revolution – the world in which, quite simply, there would no longer be anything to do except observe the world of the abyss, because all problems would be solved… In truth, it seems to me that man is bound by this fear, and to be separated from it is also the gauge of his affliction.’

Communism, as it is conceived here, seems to be rather like abstract philosophy, if it helps us to forget the abyss. What is the good of any such philosophy? The thought of Benjamin and Adorno doesn’t really make sense until it is recognised that this view drives their endeavours, this and the recognition that the radical atheistic subjectivism of people like Kracauer is also wrong. Indeed, this last is equivalent to the critical nihilism that Nietzsche criticises.

If I can just add an aside here, I’d like to add that in relation to Benjamin Foucault et al are regressive and represent a kind of contemporary positivism. No one who properly understood Benjamin could take up Foucault and find anything in it that represented a useful advancement. The French post-modernists as a group demonstrate an inability to understand the philosophy has reached, as it is represented in Benjamin’s writings. They are rather similar to Habermas in relation to Adorno. No one who really understood Adorno could think of Habermas as any kind of advance. Perhaps this is the real reason why Horkheimer was so opposed to Habermas. Of course, he was also suspicious of his role in the student movement of the sixties. Adorno also quite correctly regarded the student movement as fascist. We cannot simply blame the students for the present. They were duped by all the talk of new times and new ways of seeing, such like people in the twenties and thirties.

Back to Bataille (perhaps it should be ‘Bach to Bataille’): as you say, the abyss is other people, the radical other to our subjectivity, the nothingness at the limit of our individual existence. This is why fucking seems like a transcendent activity. It’s a desire and a fear at the same time. I never say to anyone, ‘I don’t want to know you. I don’t care who you are. I just want to strip you naked and fuck you. I want to crawl inside you and disappear.’ If they protested, ‘But you’re not treating me like a person,’ I’d never cry, ‘That’s right! I don’t give a fuck for you as a person. I want your body. I’m not interested in your mind.’ Instead of all this, I’d say, ‘How nice to meet you! What’s that you say? You’re interested in German aesthetic theory. I’d love to talk to you about that…’ In the beginning was the word and the word was with God and the word was God. In the end, no one believes that. In the beginning was the word and I curse it for fucking around with my life. In the end is silence, blessed silence, the silence of existence without the code of everyday signs, the silence of a thousand simulacra that talk to no one.


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