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October 26, 2004
I've started reading Klossowski's 2nd chapter of Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle this afternoon. The chapter is called 'The Experience of Eternal Return' and I cannot make much of it.
People are advised to read Trevor on this.
In the chapter the eternal return is briefly described in Nietzsche's words as:
"...act as though you had to relive your life innumerable times and will to live it innumerable times---for in one way or another you must recommence and relive it."
Most of the chapter is about the subjectivity of the experience of an isolated individual involving forgetting, identity, intensities rising and falling with no meaning, a moving chaos of intensities without beginning or end, the vertigo of eternal return and reflections on this circular movement from bodily intensity to identity constructed by the codes of everyday language.
I was bored. I kept on looking outside at the trees and the spring rain lightly falling. I watched the waves rolling across the bay and the birds darting here and there. I struggled to return to the text.
I was annoyed with all the soul stuff that turned it into a mystical experience of ecstasy, revelation and renunciation. Zarathustra is a mystic surpassing his own limits, living outside meaning and sense; a mystic caught up in the image of a circle arising out of intense emotional chaos beyond knowledge and communication.
Why is so much fuss made of all this romanticism I kept wondering. It reeks of Bataille and hallucinations.
I bounced out of the literary words that purport to describe Nietzsche's 1881 Sils-Maria experience, that is supposedly unintelligible on Klossowski acccount.
We can contrast Nietzsche with Klossowski.
In Ecce Homo written in the autumn of 1888, Nietzsche writes the following passage:-
"The fundamental idea of my work--namely, the Eternal Recurrence of all things--this highest of all possible formulae of a Yea-saying philosophy, first occurred to me in August 1881. I made a note of the thought on a sheet of paper, with the postscript: 6,000 feet beyond men and time! That day I happened to be wandering through the woods alongside of the lake of Silvaplana, and I halted beside a huge, pyramidal and towering rock not far from Surlei. It was then that the thought struck me. Looking back now, I find that exactly two months previous to this inspiration, I had had an omen of its coming in the form of a sudden and decisive alteration in my tastes--more particularly in music. It would even be possible to consider all `Zarathustra` as a musical composition. At all events, a very necessary condition in its production was a renaissance in myself of the art of hearing."
Zarathustra was written in ecstatic moods of poetic creation. As a nomadic Nietzsche walked over hill and dale ideas would crowd into his mind, and he would note them down hastily in a note-book. He would transcribe them on his return often working late into the night.
In Ecce Homo Nietzsche describes the ecstatic moods of poetic creation thus:
"Has any one at the end of the nineteenth century any distinct notion of what poets of a stronger age understood by the word inspiration? If not, I will describe it. If one had the smallest vestige of superstition in one, it would hardly be possible to set aside completely the idea that one is the mere incarnation, mouthpiece or medium of an almighty power. The idea of revelation in the sense that something becomes suddenly visible and audible with indescribable certainty and accuracy, which profoundly convulses and upsets one--describes simply the matter of fact. One hears-one does not seek; one takes--one does not ask who gives: a thought suddenly flashes up like lightning, it comes with necessity, unhesitatingly--I have never had any choice in the matter. There is an ecstasy such that the immense strain of it is sometimes relaxed by a flood of tears, along with which one`s steps either rush or involuntarily lag, alternately. There is the feeling that one is completely out of hand, with the very distinct consciousness of an endless number of fine thrills and quiverings to the very toes;--there is a depth of happiness in which the painfullest and gloomiest do not operate as antitheses, but as conditioned, as demanded in the sense of necessary shades of colour in such an overflow of light. There is an instinct for rhythmic relations which embraces wide areas of forms (length, the need of a wide-embracing rhythm, is almost the measure of the force of an inspiration, a sort of counterpart to its pressure and tension). Everything happens quite involuntarily, as if in a tempestuous outburst of freedom, of absoluteness, of power and divinity. The involuntariness of the figures and similes is the most remarkable thing; one loses all perception of what constitutes the figure and what constitutes the simile; everything seems to present itself as the readiest, the correctest and the simplest means of expression. It actually seems, to use one of Zarathustra`s own phrases, as if all things came unto one, and would fain be similes: `Here do all things come caressingly to thy talk and flatter thee, for they want to ride upon thy back. On every simile dost thou here ride to every truth. Here fly open unto thee all being`s words and word-cabinets; here all being wanteth to become words, here all becoming wanteth to learn of thee how to talk.` This is MY experience of inspiration. I do not doubt but that one would have to go back thousands of years in order to find some one who could say to me: It is mine also!--"
It is inspired poetic creation that produces a book--not a mystical experience beyond language and meaning.
Oh well, back to my struggles with Klossowski.
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