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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'

Reading Blanchot on Nietzsche « Previous | |Next »
February 16, 2005

I'm enjoying reading Blanchot on nihilism. He takes it seriously and I can understand what he is saying. He appears to accept that nihilism, as diagnosed by Nietzsche a century ago, had more to do with the state of civilization than with a metaphysical speculation about ulterior reality, or a metaphysics of nothingness. However, I do not think that Blanchot's Nietzsche's is one concerned with the best way to live.

For many academic commentators nihilism is a topic, a dead topic, rather than something that is lived. I understand Blanchot accepts nihilism as something that it lived by us. This takes us beyond the caricatures of Nietzsche having no positive teaching at all as he exposed all moral evaluations as untenable, held that perspectivity is all, and stated that all interpretation is arbitrary. Such readings are at odds with Zarathustra's affirmation of life that is articulated in a literary form.

So what is it that we are living beyond the death of God and the devaluation of our highest values?

Blanchot connects the overman with eternal return in his reading of Nietzsche on nihilism in in his 'Crossing the Line' essay in The Infinite Conversation. He says:

Enthusiastically and with categorical clarity Zarathustra announces the overman; then anxiously, hestatingly, fearfully he announces the thought of the eternal return. Why this difference in tone? Why is the thought of eternal return, a thought of the abyss, a thought that in the very one who pronounces it is unceasingly deferred and turned away as it were the detour of all thought? This is its enigma and, no doubt, its truth.(p.146)

Blanchot says that the thought of eternal return has struck most commentators to be arbitrary, useless, mystical and antiquated, since it had been around since Heraclitus.
Update
Despite the above historical reading of eternal return Blanchot takes the idea seriously:
The thought of the eternal return remains strange in its antiquated absurdity.It represents the logical vertigo that Nietzsche himself could not escape.It is the nihilist thought par exellence, the thought by which nihilism surpasses itself absolutely by making itself unsurpassable.It is therefore the most able to enlighten us as to the kind of trap that nihilism is when the mind decides to approach it head-on.

Blanchot describes this in terms of sentiment becoming ressentiment---is not Zarathustra full of ressentment?---and goes on to connect it to the will to power and suggests that nihilism signifies the defeat of overman as will to power.

Does this make the Overman the tragic hero? Are not the Overman, the children of Zarathustra?


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| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 10:52 PM | | Comments (4)
Comments

Comments

A very precisely chosen passage Gary. Thank you.

Matt,
I could not finish the post as my server was down.

I have that problem too.

finishing the past, that is (no fair fixing typos, Gary)