Chapter 3 of Klossowski's Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle is called the 'Experience of Eternal Return.' It similarly starts with one of Nietzsche's letters (14th August, 1881). This letter to Peter Gast is about the explosiveness of his feelings and his disconnection from his friends. Nietzsche homeless.

Klossowski quickly moves to forgetting and anamnesis in relation to the eternal return of the same. Now this is tricky territory, since forgetting is a much used weapon in the conservative's political/polemical arsenal. The narrative goes like this. The 20th century is rightly called the "ravaged century", and it has been ravaged by the intellectual." Inebriation with abstract reasoning, with disembodied Platonic ideals, induces intellectuals to forget the real historical conditions under which lofty ideals approach actualization. They are forever comparing history and reality to their lofty ideals, and cursing history and reality for failing to live up their ideals. Discouraged, they then turn with slothful incredulity to projects of utopian design; they subtilize themselves into savages, as Burke put it. The liberal education system foolishly aims at turning everyone into modern intellectuals. Intellectuals have a forgetfulness about historical context.

Klossowski takes a different approach to forgetting. He understands Nietzsche's thought of the eternal return as an abrupt awakening in an ecstatic experience, with the thought having the character of revelation (sudden unveiling). Forgetting is part of the revelation. It conceals the eternal becoming, the absorption of all identities in being and the sudden transformation of the person to whom the thought of eternal return is revealed.

It is a far more psychological or personal understanding of forgetting, as the emphasis is placed on 'experience'--on Nietzsche's lived experience of the death of God and the reformulation of the self.

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