hdh-mbembe


 * Achille Mbembe**

what does africa look like to us today? according to google

More Mbembe: [] vids

Interesting tangents: [] -> [] interesting to consider the Mbembe in relation to other marginalized cultures, ones without a defined “place”. I think there are some interesting parallels here as well as differences:

“The Roma arrived in Europe by various means in around 1400. One barrier to their acceptance was the uncertainty regarding their origins. While groups such as the Germans, Gauls, Angels and Saxons had developed national myths of foundation and origin in order to corroborate their arrival in and occupation of a particular territory, the first legends about the Roma told of their mysterious and distant origins and failure to settle.”

“The matter of descent was also directly tied to the – for the period – fundamental question of religious affiliation. Since Roma communities did not practice institutionalized Christianity…”

“Roma social structure was seen as very simple and its rulers' genealogies not worthy of examination”

“The gradual rise in the course of the early modern period of the national territorial principle and the territorialized way of thinking that underpinned it caused the Roma's lifestyle to be perceived as a subversive attempt to disassociate themselves from social, legal, economic and cultural ties. Modern territorialized thinking assumed that everything on the Earth, including the land itself, was someone's property and had an owner.”

“The 'beautiful Gypsy' counts among the most potent images in the European cultural imagination… Cervantes's 1613 novella //La gitanilla// had already evoked the 'Spanish' dress, the singing and dancing as well as the 'wild' femininity untamed by modesty that later became popular.”

“In the last third of the eighteenth century, Enlightenment anthropology and historical linguistics brought, albeit accidentally, new insights into the Roma that dispelled early modern speculations about their origins and language. The discovery of a genuine 'Gypsy language' descended from Sanskrit that clearly indicated the Roma's Indian origins was little short of a sensation. Linguistic research methods made it possible to retrace, on the basis of language levels and loan words from other languages, the Roma's migration routes to Europe geographically, if not chronologically.”

“The forensic sciences viewed Gypsies as 'born' criminals who inherited their criminal characteristics.” ---


 * On the Postcolony**

1. Speaking rationally about Africa is not something that has ever come naturally.

the African human experience constantly appears in the discourse of our times as an experience that can only be understood through a negative interpretation. Africa is never seen as possessing things and attributes properly part of “human nature.” It is this elementariness and primitiveness that makes Africa the world par excellence of all that is incomplete, mutilated, and unfinished, its history reduced to a series of setbacks of nature in its quest for humankind.

discourse on Africa is almost always deployed in the framework (or on the fringes) of a meta-text about the animal**—**to be exact, about the beast: its experience, its world, and its spectacle.

the sign of the strange and the monstrous and the sign of intimacy

2. We can even, through a process of domestication and training, bring the African to where he or she can enjoy a fully human life. Africa is essentially, for us, an object of experimentation

->Africa as absolute otherness not simply part of its imaginary significations, it is one of those significations

3. this alleged inaccessibility (of Africa)… flows from there being hardly ever any discourse about Africa for itself Thus, there is no need to look for the status of this discourse

4. contrary to M. de Certeau’s view, the problem is not that Western thought posits the self (self-identity) as other than the other. Nor does everything come down to a simple opposition between truth and error, or to a confrontation between reason and that form of unreason called fable or even madness. Flying in the face of likelihood or plausibility, these systems of reading the world attempt to exercise an authority of a particular type, assigning Africa to a special unreality such that the continent becomes the very figure of what is null, abolished, and, in its essence, in opposition to what is

5. the extraordinary poverty of the political science and economics literature on Africa

recent historiography, anthropology, and feminist criticism inspired by Foucauldian, neo-Gramscian paradigms or post-structuralism problematize everything in terms of how identities are “invented,” “hybrid,” “fluid,” and “negotiated.” *On the pretext of avoiding single-factor explanations of domination, these disciplines have reduced the complex phenomena of the state and power to “discourses” and “representations,” forgetting that discourses and representations have materiality.

6. (helped by the collapse of Marxism) economic explanations of contemporary social and political phenomena have, with consideration of the draconian character of external constraints, all but disappeared, all struggles have become struggles of representation.

there persists the false dichotomy between the objectivity of structures and the subjectivity of representations—a distinction allowing all that is cultural and symbolic to be put on one side, all that is economic and material to be put on the other

8. But what is missing, far from the dead ends, random observations, and false dilemmas (Afrocentrism vs. Africanism), is any sign of radical questioning.

10. modernity itself as a phenomenon has been primarily understood in the perspective of Western rationalism. In other words, from Max Weber to the deconstructionists, the link between modernity, rationalism, and Westernism was seen as more than merely contingent; it was seen as constitutive of all three, so that it is precisely this interlinking that is the “distinctive feature of the West,” distinguishes it from the rest of the world, means that its developments have not happened anywhere else. This uniqueness would cover, for example, the secularization of culture, the release from the thrall of nature, the end of miracles, the elimination of finalism from religions, and the shattering of primary bonds and loyalties and ancient customs and beliefs—an assertion of which the validity might, if one so wanted, be profoundly questioned.

11. The dispute thus bears not on the Westernness of modernity but on what the Enlightenment bequeathed “us” and on the possibilities of accomplishing in reality the promises of universality contained in the ideals of the Aufklärung. [Enlightenment]

In the following pages I have sought neither to discover traces of European modernity in Africa nor to sketch dubious comparisons between historical trajectories.

12. both the asserted denial and the reaffirmation of that humanity now look like the two sterile sides of the same coin.

13 phallic domination has been all the more strategic in power relationships, not only because it is based on a mobilization of the subjective foundations of masculinity and femininity but also because it has direct, close connections with the general economy of sexuality. In fact, the phallus has been the focus of ways of constructing masculinity and power. Male domination derives in large measure from the power and the spectacle of the phallus—not so much from the threat to life during war as from the individual male’s ability to demonstrate his virility at the expense of a woman and to obtain its validation from the subjugated woman herself.

14 By focusing the discussion on what I have called the “postcolony,” the aim was not to denounce power as such, but rather to rehabilitate the two notions of age and durée. By age is meant not a simple category of time but a number of relationships and a configuration of events— often visible and perceptible, sometimes diffuse, “hydra-headed,” but to which contemporaries could testify since very aware of them. As an age, the postcolony encloses multiple durées made up of discontinuities, reversals, inertias, and swings that overlay one another, interpenetrate one another, and envelope one another: 41 an entanglement. I also wanted to pose the whole question of displacement.

To do so rejecting the nietzschean., post structuralist philosophies that “reduce individuals to mere flows of drives and networks of “desires,” to libidinal machines.”

15 I started from the idea that there is a close relationship between subjectivity and temporality—that, in some way, one can envisage subjectivity itself as temporality

for each time and each age, there exists something distinctive and particular—or, to use the term, a “spirit” (Zeitgeist ).

constituted by a set of material practices, signs, figures, superstitions, images, and fictions that, because they are available to individuals’ imagination and intelligence and actually experienced, form what might be called “languages of life.”

--> how is this different than the discourse?

16 African social formations are not necessarily converging toward a  single point, trend, or cycle. They harbor the possibility of a variety of trajectories neither convergent nor divergent but interlocked, paradoxical.

-->as are most social formations?

This is what this book endeavors to interpret. I felt that what distinguishes the contemporary African experience is that this emerging time is appearing in a context - today—in which the future horizon is apparently closed, while the horizon of the past has apparently receded

17 the subject emerging, acting effectively, withdrawing, or  being removed in the act and context of displacement refers to two things: first, to the forms of “living in the concrete world,” then to the subjective forms that make possible any validation of its contents—that objectify it.

Questions the book attempts to tackle: What are these modes of validation of conscious existence? Which are capable of being re-actualized? What is the share of arbitrariness in that re-actualization? And to what particular figures of reason and violence does that arbitrariness refer?

“It has seemed enough to initiate some thinking about the postcolonial African subject, his/her history and his/her present in the world. Throughout the chapters that follow, I have tried to “write Africa,” not as a fiction, but in the harshness of its destiny, its power, and its eccentricities, without laying any claim to speak in the name of anyone at all.”

18 “As far as possible, I have adopted the attitude that everything remains to be learned about this continent and that, at any moment, things may inflict surprises, even disavowals, on me.”

24. two aims. One is to reflect broadly on the types of rationality used to rule men and ensure the provision of goods and things in sub-Saharan Africa since the end of direct colonization. The second is to ask questions about the circumstances in which the activity of “regulating human behaviour in a state framework and with state instruments” (in other words, the activity of governing) has recently fallen from the hands of those supposed to be exercising it, paving the way not for some sort of revolution but for a situation of extreme material scarcity, uncertainty, and inertia.
 * Ch. 1 **

in Africa both before and after colonization, state power enhanced its value by establishing specific relations of subjection

postcolonial African regimes have not invented what they know of government from scratch.

25. Commandement, in a colony, rested on a very specific imaginary of state sovereignty.

27 Through the relation of domestication, the master or mistress led the beast to an experience such that, at the end of the day, the animal, while remaining what he/she was—that is, something other than a human being—nevertheless actually entered into the world for his/her master/mistress.

28 by reason of the sort of life the colonized lived, he/she belonged to those forms of living whose distinctive feature was to remain forever enclosed in the virtual and the contingent.

indigene —that is, a “son or daughter of the soil,” not someone who has settled as a result of immigration or conquest. In colonial political vocabulary, this description was applied to colonial subjects in general, all natives making up no more than what Albert Sarraut spoke of as that “unformed clay of primitive multitudes” from which colonization’s task was to shape “the face of a new humanity.”

31 commandement introduced extensive surveillance machinery and an impressive array of punishments and fines for a host of offenses.

32 Unlike certain Western experiences, the extension of the role of the state and the market was thus not automatically achieved through the disruption of old social ties. In a number of cases, state domination—or the étatisation of society—was achieved through the old hierarchies and old patronage networks.

Commandement itself was simultaneously a tone, an accoutrement, and an attitude. Power was reduced to the right to demand, to force, to ban, to compel, to authorize, to punish, to reward, to be obeyed—in short, to enjoin and to direct

the colonial territory had //qualities//

33 These relations of subjection rested on an imaginary of the native and a set of beliefs regarding his or her identity. 18 From the standpoint of this imaginary, the colonized subject was a simple, unambitious creature who liked to be left alone [expressed //in the language://] It was felt that the extraordinary simplicity of his or her existence was evidenced, first of all, by his/her manner of speaking: “no complicated sentence constructions; no tenses, no moods, no persons in verbs; no gender or number in nouns or adjectives; just what is required to express oneself: infinitives, nouns, adverbs, adjectives that are tacked on to one another in simple direct propositions

the native was free of the rules of humankind

36

the idea of civil society is inseparable from the old discussion of the distinction between private lordship and public lordship, “the affairs of individuals” and “public affairs.”

38 To restore some discriminatory value to its behavior, or even monopolize its symbolic rewards, the aristocracy stepped up the requirements of civility, issued more and more prohibitions, and raised the threshold of disapproval, thereby dramatizing the competition over appropriation of  marks of distinction.

39 It immediately becomes apparent that there can be no civil society without places and spaces where ideas of autonomy, representation, and pluralism can publicly crystallize, and where juridical subjects enjoying rights and capable of freeing themselves from the arbitrariness of both state and primary group (kin, tribe etc.) can come into being.

41 As earlier, precolonial days, it was through revenues extracted from long-distance trade that relations of subjection were financed, shortages avoided, values created, utilities consumed, and, in the last analysis, a process of “indigenization” of the state carried through

44 In short, by partly or wholly replacing the market, the state became a vast machine creating and regulating inequalities.

46 Thanks to these two forms of allocation, economic things were converted into social and political things

55 Such transformations were only possible because, despite the violence of labor struggles—themselves integrative and useful in the formation of collective identities—wage-earners and employers shared what might be  called a common material imaginary, production itself being perceived on both sides as a social good.

On entanglement.
 * Ch. 2 **

66. Taken together, this appropriation of means of livelihood, this allocation of profits, the types of extraction thus required, and concentration of coercion involved will be described here under the general term fiscality.

67. In short, who has the right to live and exist, and who has not, and why?

77. Against those theoretical approaches that would reduce the range of historical choices gestating in Africa to a stark alternative of either “transition” to democracy and the shift to a market economy, or descent into the shadows of war, we must stress again the role of contingency, and reassert the hypothesis that the organizations likely to emerge from current developments will be anything but the result of coherent premeditated plans.

79-80 leaving aside variations from one sub-region to another, one characteristic of the historical sequence unfolding in Africa is the direct link that now exists between, on the one hand, deregulation and the primacy of the market and, on the other, the rise of violence and the creation of private military, paramilitary, or jurisdictional organizations.

89. Discussion of the phenomenon of war must not ignore that distinction between a state of war and a state of peace is increasingly illusory.

93. From whatever point examined, what we are witnessing in Africa is  clearly the establishment of a different political economy and the invention of new systems of coercion and exploitation. For the time being, the question is whether these processes will or will not result in emergence of a system of capitalized coercion sufficiently coherent to push through changes in the organization of production and the class structure of African societies, and whether it will prove possible for the submission of Africans required by these processes, and the exclusion and inequalities involved, to acquire legitimacy, and for the violence that goes with them to be tamed to the point of again becoming a public good.

93 - 94 The basic question, of the emergence of a subject with rights, remains unresolved. The history of other regions of the world shows that taxa- tion was what, apart from interpersonal allegiances, defined the bond between ruled and rulers… It was through this process that the state could define itself as a common good, as no longer simply a relationship of domination.

102. In this chapter, I shall examine the banality of power in the postcolony. Banality of power does not simply refer to the way bureaucratic formalities or arbitrary rules, implicit or explicit, have been multiplied, nor am I simply concerned with what has become routine—though certainly “banality” implies the predictability of routine, if only because routine is made up of repeated daily actions and gestures. Instead, I refer here to those elements of the obscene and the grotesque that Mikhail Bakhtin claims to have located in “non-official” cultures but that, in fact, are intrinsic to all systems of domination and to the means by which those systems are confirmed or deconstructed. 1
 * Ch. 3 **

The notion “postcolony” identifies specifically a given historical trajectory—that of societies recently emerging from the experience of colonization and the violence which the colonial relationship involves. To be sure, the postcolony is chaotically pluralistic; it has nonetheless an internal coherence. It is a specific system of signs, a particular way of fabricating simulacra or re-forming stereotypes. It is not, however, just an economy of signs in which power is mirrored and imagined self-reflectively.

103 The basic argument in this chapter is that, to account for both the mind-set and the effectiveness of postcolonial relations of power, we need to go beyond the binary categories used in standard interpretations of domination, such as resistance vs. passivity, autonomy vs. subjection, state vs. civil society, hegemony vs. counter-hegemony, totalization vs. detotalization. These oppositions are not helpful; 6 rather, they cloud our understanding of postcolonial relations. 7

champions of state power invent entire constellations of ideas; they adopt a distinct set of cultural repertoires and powerfully evocative concepts; 10 but they also resort, if necessary, to the systematic application of pain. The basic goal is not just to bring a specific political consciousness into being, but to make it effective.

We therefore need to examine: how the world of meanings thus produced is ordered; the types of institutions, the knowledges, norms, and practices structuring this new “common sense”; the light that the use of visual imagery and discourse throws on the nature of domination and subordination.

the grotesque and the obscene are two essential characteristics that identify postcolonial regimes of domination

104 If there is such a “postcolonial subject,” he/she is publicly visible only where the two activities overlap—in the common daily rituals that ratify the commandement ’s own institutionalization as a fetish to which the subject is bound, and in the subject’s deployment of a talent for play, of a sense of fun, that makes him homo ludens par excellence

105-106 there were avenues of escape from the commandement, and for longer or shorter periods of time, whole areas of social discourse eluded control. Such verbal acts offer good examples, excellent indices, of what could be considered commonplace (and hence banal). When Togolese were called upon to shout the party slogans, many would travesty the metaphors meant to glorify state power; with a simple tonal shift, one metaphor could take on many meanings. Under cover, therefore, of official slogans, people sang about the sudden erection of the “enormous” and “rigid” presidential phallus, of how it remained in this position and of its contact with “vaginal fluids.” “The powerful key of Eyadéma penetrates the keyhole. People, applaud!”

117 in the postcolony the work of power also involves a process of “enchantment” to produce “fables.”

133 obscenity—regarded as more than a moral category— constitutes one modality of power in the postcolony. But it is also one of the arenas in which subordinates reaffirm or subvert that power.

The real inversion takes place when, in their desire for a certain majesty, the masses join in the madness and clothe themselves in cheap imitations of power to reproduce its epistemology, and when power, in its own violent quest for grandeur, makes vulgarity and wrongdoing its main mode of existence. It is here, within the confines of this intimacy, that the forces of tyranny in Africa must be studied. Such research must go beyond institutions, beyond formal positions of power, and beyond the written rules, and examine how the implicit and explicit are interwoven, and how the practices of those who command and those who are assumed to obey are so entangled as to render both powerless. For it is precisely the situations of powerlessness that are the situations of violence par excellence.

Ch. 4 142  in spite of its claim to represent presence, immediacy, and facticity, what is special about an image is its “likeness”— that is, its ability to annex and mime what it represents, while, in the very act of representation, masking the power of its own arbitrariness, its own potential for opacity, simulacrum, and distortion.

143 Study of figurative expressions in contemporary Cameroon requires not merely putting these in historical context. To judge the political effectiveness of images, it is also necessary, at the outset, to spell out their anthropological status within the cultures giving rise to them

Finally, I shall explain how, through caricature, with its excesses and its principles of proliferation, this immediate present is written in a particular mode, that of hallucination

ch. 5 p. 173 the phenomenology of violence

174 what does it mean to partake of human existence? Who is a human being and who is not, and by what authority is such a distinction made?

188 perhaps the most determining characteristic of colonial violence. On the one hand, it proceeds as if it can produce nothingness from a negation. It operates through annihilation (Nichtung ). It would make it sufficient to deny the Other for him/her not to exist—ready, if need be, to demonstrate her/his nothingness by force. By consigning the native to the most perfect Otherness, this violence not only reveals the native as  radically Other, it annihilates him/her.

212 there are transfigurations of pain, suffering and unhappiness that, by freeing the subject from various kinds of inhibition, allow him or her to achieve a capacity for ecstasy inachievable under ordinary conditions.
 * Ch. 6 god’s phallus **

The problem of the fantasm and its powers, to be explored through the theme of the divine libido, presupposes that there is no religious act not, at the same time and in some respect, also an erotic-sexual act

213 The first case is that of the fantasm of the One, the fantasm in which a  jealous god takes possession, not of a particular individual, but of a collective subject, such that the power infused by the god henceforth circumscribes this collective subject’s connections with itself and with the world. The metaphor best suited to express this will to possession is monotheism

monotheism has at least five important implications for our theme. The first is primacy —the fact that the god signifies only himself.

Second, the metaphor of monotheism entails the idea of totalization. Every monotheistic system is based on a notion of exclusivity and condensation of sovereignty, in contrast to a  plurality of gods, as well as their dispersion into a multiplicity of forms. The third implication is monopoly. Belief in a single god distinct from the world is possible only if accompanied by suppression of other forms of worship. This radicality is what gives the single god part of his jealous, possessive, wrathful, violent, and unconditional character.

215 Finally, the metaphor of monotheism is inseparable from the notion of the ultimate— that is, the first and last principle of things. Speaking of the ultimate is another way of speaking of the truth. In fact, there is no monotheism except in relation to producing a truth that not only determines the foundations and goals of the world but provides the origin of all meaning.

216 the worship of Yahweh as the only god was not established at once. On the contrary, this requirement encountered strong opposition in a culture traditionally polytheistic (as is shown by the various borrowings from pagan models, the importance  of sacrifices to Baal and to the sun, the moon, and the constellations). 17 This religious competition reflected in part the constraints imposed by  foreign policy, in which constant wars, military inferiority, defeat, and exile constituted structuring factors.

219 the distinction between those who were Jews by birth and those who were not and could never become Jews, as well as the laws on ritual purity. Such restrictions were unlikely to launch Judaism on a universalistic trajectory, so implausible for non-Jews were its cultural taboos and particularistic traditions. This closedness is one reason Jewish phantasm of the One must be considered narcissistic.

Christianity sought to transcend this closure, at least theoretically, when it abolished the distinction between Jews and Gentiles, relativized the importance of dietary rules and ritual observances, declared any exclusion based on ethnic origin meaningless, and affirmed the community of humanity that was henceforth supposed to link the master and the slave, the circumcised and the uncircumcised. 22

224 This is the predicate to which Jews and Gentiles can henceforth convert, the notion that death belongs to the realm of appearances, and that at the foundation of life is to be found the principle of immortality. The human shape assumed by the god sheds, through death, the thingness in which it had been enclosed; in an act of unprecedented profanation, it  passes into another form of being, beyond sensuous representation, beyond temporality, entering an infinite and unlimited zone characterized by escape, forever, from the violence of death

225 The Christian idea of the resurrection of the dead was therefore not new. Moreover, it had developed in the cults of Isis and Osiris in ancient Egypt. When Christianity was beginning its expansion, the Hellenization of this cult was already far advanced. In the cult of Osiris, a tale was told of a god’s coming back to life, completely restored as a person

226 biblical monotheism is based on a tribal imaginary characterized by a turning inward upon, and a closing off of, the self.

227 the third case of divine libido, the phenomenon of  conversion. At the beginning and at the end of conversion we always find language.

231 We may draw three conclusions. First, all power is based on an originary phantasm. The phantasm of power and the power of the phantasm consist in rubbing the two imaginaries of death and sexuality together, rubbing them constantly until they burst into fire. 34 Domination consists, for the dominators and for all others, in sharing the same phantasms. Second, conversion always presupposes an entry into the time of the other. The converted self is placed such that it can be spoken by the god taking possession of it. To convert is, in this context, to enter into a language learned at the same time that it speaks through the possessed subject. It is in this speaking through the subject that erotic intercourse resides. Third, to produce religious truth, faith and a certain stupefaction must overlap. All religious truth, especially when the latter aspires to universality, is always exposed to being seen as in some way an experience of madness. In this context, “madness” should not be taken in its classical sense, as a form of irrationality and marginality, but rather as the point where discourse on the divine that seeks to explain itself and make itself understood by others is suddenly exhausted, exhausts its meaning, and provokes a kind of astonishment and incredulity, to the point that people laugh.

Conclusion

235 Who is a slave, if not the person who, everywhere and always, possesses life, property, and body as if they were alien things?

“slave” is the forename we must give to a man or woman whose body can be degraded, whose life can be mutilated, and whose work and resources can be squandered—with impunity.

To someone who is a slave we can also give the forename “thing.” By “thing,” we must understand the contrary of the substantive—that is, something that somewhere is nothing.

236 the whole epistemology of colonialism is based on a very simple equation: there is hardly any difference between the native principle and the animal principle. This is what justifies the domestication of the colonized individual.

As an animal, the native is supposed to belong to the family of eminently mechanical, almost physical things, without language, even though endowed with sense organs, veins, muscles, nerves, and arteries through which nature, in its virginal power, manifests itself. Placed at the margins of the human, the native, with the animal, belongs to the register of imperfection, error, deviation, approximation, corruption, and monstrosity. Not having attained the age of maturity, natives and animals cannot stand on their own two feet; this is why they are put firmly in the grasp of another.

237 Colonization as an enterprise of domestication includes at least three factors: the appropriation of the animal (the native) by the human (the colonist); the familiarization of man (the colonist) and the animal (the native); and the utilization of the animal (the native) by the human (the colonist). 3 **

The object of this book has been to see if, in answer to the question “Who are you in the world?” the African of this century could say without qualification, “I am an ex-slave.” It has been a matter of determining if, to such a question, it could suffice for an African to reply, “I was someone else’s property.” Or, “I was the matter on which someone else exercised a right of appropriation, the object that, in the hands and mind of another, once received the form of a thing.” More prosaically, we sought to define the quantitative and qualitative difference, if any, between the colonial period and what followed: have we really entered another period, or do we find the same theater, the same mimetic acting, with different actors and spectators, but with the same convulsions and the same insult? Can we really talk of moving beyond colonialism?

238

(this endeavor) required a return to two major events of the century just closed: on the one hand, the relationship established, in the colony and after the colony, between the exercise of power and the process of becoming savage; on the other hand, the mirror effect resulting from the entrance into the era of unhappiness. In what does the process of becoming savage consist, if not in a way of being an animal?

242 what we designate by the term “Africa” exists only as a series of disconnections, superimpositions, colors, costumes, gestures and appearances, sounds and rhythms, ellipses, hyperboles, parables, misconnections, and imagined, remembered, and forgotten things, bits of spaces, syncopes, intervals, moments of enthusiasm and impetuous vortices—in short, perceptions and phantasms in mutual perpetual pursuit, yet coextensive with each other, each retaining on its margins the possibility of, as Merleau-Ponty puts it, transforming itself into the other.

What is certain is that, when we are confronted by such a work of art, Nietzsche’s words regarding Greek tragedy are appropriate: “We must first learn to enjoy as complete men.” Now, what is learning to enjoy as complete men—and women—unless it is a way of living and existing in uncertainty, chance, irreality, even absurdity?