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November 23, 2004
It's been a while since my last post, mostly because I've been writing a paper on Bataille's reading of Nietzsche (Sur Nietzsche), and its relation to Kleinian psychoanalytic theory. Of course, this is a relation that I'm positing, for what it's worth, and doesn't inform us about a lineage of thought so much as (an element that I think is missing from Heidegger's approach to interpreting Nietzsche) the experience of reading, as a bodily experience. What I find interesting about Bataille's commentary is how it allows us to think about what it is that motivates us to read philosophy: what kind of experience one looks for in reading. He avows to have a personal connection to Nietzsche 'the man' through his texts, and claims that the only way to understand Nietzsche is to live as Nietzsche... which seems extreme, doesn't it?
Still, one needs to be able to identify in some way with the text, and the textual entity that is its author. Especially with a figure like Nietzsche, whose texts tend either to seduce or repel us, the question of affect, between reader and text, would seem to be formative for the kind of interpretation that reader can produce. Bataille claims at the beginning of Sur Nietzsche to be motivated by the fear of going crazy, just as Nietzsche had done; and he says elsewhere that Nietzsche addresses him directly when he announces the death of God—thus indicating his own experience of dissillusionment with the Church. For the most part, as I think Trevor has said earlier, the book reads like a log (or blog) of his experience of reading through Nietzsche's texts, and the effect that these texts exert upon him personally. What we find is not so much Bataille 'on' Nietzsche, but perhaps 'after' or 'through' Nietzsche. At least, it is not incidental to the text that we witness Bataille's own transformation within it: rather, this transformation is its object.
This marks a real difference between Bataille's reading and that which we find in Heidegger's volumes: for, in the latter case, it is Heidegger who places Nietzsche in the context of his own philosophy, and not the other way around. Bataille writes in Nietzsche and the Fascists that Nietzsche must always lead, and can never follow... meaning that any attempt to use Nietzsche's philosophy as a tool for one's own purposes cannot remain true to Nietzsche. In Heidegger's case, it is arguable that Nietzsche follows...
With regard to Klossowski's interpretation of Nietzsche, I would say that it bears a closer relation to Bataille's reading than Heidegger's. Klossowski is also interested in the reader's relation to the text, and the kind of experience that reading philosophy involves... Also, what kind of material can be transmitted to the reader through text. Both Bataille and Klossowski are concerned with the text as a medium for corporeal movements, and the question of contagion of bodily forces (will to power?) from author to reader. Bataille's emphasis upon communication reflects this:
"Your life is not limited to that incomprehensible inner stream; it also streams out from itself, incessantly opening to whatever flows out or rushes up to it. The ongoing whirling that composes you collides with similar whirlings, which form a vast figure driven by rhythmic restlessness. Now, for you to live signifies not just the flows and momentary dispositions of light that unite in you but the movements of heat or light moving from one person to another, or from you to another person, or from another to you (even as you now read me, the contagion of my fever reaches you): words, books, monuments, symbols, laughter—all these represent just so many paths to that contagiousness, to those impulses..." (Bataille 1992, 25 - 6, Cited from Inner Experience)
According to Bataille, writing mediates a bodily encounter, or confrontation, between the author and reader: impulses, moods, dispositions, are transmitted from one to the other through text.
I think this is the question that Klossowski also takes up in Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle—albeit in a very different style to Bataille. Namely, how is the singular communicated by means of the completely general, average medium of language? This is also the question he poses in Sade My Neighbour, and so those books are best read alongside one another.
I was going to talk about Klein as well, but perhaps I'll leave it until another post.
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Jo you write:
You are right.
And yet.....
Heidegger is clear about Nietzsche's biological understanding of knowledge and his organic metaphysics through his reading of The Will to Power.