schaffer_nietzsche

nihilism: "an extreme that cannot be gotten beyond and yet is the only path of a true going beyond, the principle of a new beginning" (Blanchot, // tIC //, 144)

the eternal return: "Nothing ends, everything begins again; the other is still the same." (Blanchot, // tIC //, 149)

The unconscious disguising of physiological requirements under the cloak of the objective, the ideal, the purely spiritual, is carried on to an alarming extent,—and I have often enough asked myself, whether on the whole philosophy hitherto has not generally been merely an interpretation of the body, and a misunderstanding of the body. (FN, TGS, 5)

Five pages in, I find myself slamming this quote into my keyboard and saying “whoa” under my breath. This is going to keep me up all night. All the things I’ve read about embodied cognition, material selves, the physical processes of vision, etc. haven’t grappled so satisfyingly with this concept, with the actually-already-corporeality of all the thinking we do.

Behind the loftiest estimates of value by which the history of thought has hitherto been governed, misunderstandings of the bodily constitution, either of individuals, classes, or entire races are concealed. One may always primarily consider these audacious freaks of metaphysic, and especially its answers to the question of the worth of existence, as symptoms of certain bodily constitutions; and if, on the whole, when scientifically determined, not a particle of significance attaches to such affirmations and denials of the world, they nevertheless furnish the historian and psychologist with hints so much the more valuable (as we have said) as symptoms of the bodily constitution, its good or bad condition, its fullness, powerfulness, and sovereignty in history; or else of its obstructions, exhaustions, and impoverishments, its premonition of the end, its will to the end. (5)

The drive to understand bodies, meaning, metaphysics has always been already just an effect of having a body: simply a symptom. Not simply, because it’s in this concealment of bodily meaning that those “misunderstanding[s] of the body” emerge. I’m drawn to compare this to Stacy Alaimo’s reading of Vicki Kirby:

Le Sueur’s materialism can also be understood as a significant departure from predominant humanisms that employ an “illiterate and unthinking ‘outside’” as the ground for human being (Kirby 5). As Kirby argues, considering the “question of corporeality” can lead us to confronting the “alien within—in the form of a very real possibility that the body of the world is articulate and uncannily thoughtful” (ibid.). (Bodily Natures, 40-1)

Here, Kirby’s assertion is that the body of the world (and elsewhere the human body) has its own forms of cogitation; this respect for embodied cognition is central to many conceptions of material agency, and to Alaimo’s work to queer the divide between thinking persons and their dumb bodies. Nietzsche’s musing goes further, though (or perhaps it’s just more explicit): the body itself does the thinking, and efforts to ignore that simple fact have tended to obscure that fact and be wrong. An interest in bodies continues in Foucault’s work on Nietzsche; he explains how // Herkunft // or descent—that strange chain that connects us to our past—“the accidents, the minute deviations--or conversely, the complete reversals--the errors, the false appraisals, and the faulty calculations” (81) responsible for things that exist—materializes in the body:

Finally, descent attaches itself to the body. It inscribes itself in the nervous system, in temperament, in the digestive apparatus; it appears in faulty respiration, in improper diets, in the debilitated and prostrate bodies of those whose ancestors committed errors. (NGH, 82)

Foucault’s rendering of genealogy treats the body historically; it is

the inscribed surface of events (traced by language and dissolved by ideas), the locus of a dissociated self (adopting the illusion of a substantial unity), and a volume in perpetual disintegration. (83)

And later challenges the independence of the body by social forms:

We believe, in any event, that the body obeys the exclusive laws of physiology and that it escapes the influence of history, but this too is false. The body is molded by a great many distinct regimes; it is broken down by the rhythms of work, rest, and holidays; it is poisoned by food or values, through eating habits or moral laws; it constructs resistances. (87)

It’s this give-and take between the body and history that really got me excited within these readings: the body that thinks and motivates and does philosophy and the body that is intimately informed by power. And I think it’s in this intimacy that I got lost. In an explanation of the brilliance/abstruseness of Nietzsche’s writing, Blanchot, following Jaspers, describes Nietzsche’s efforts to unify thought and existence:

In order to not miss the whole, says Jaspers, one must always maintain thought and existence together: knowledge wants to entrust itself to every possibility, and thus go beyond each of them; but Nietzsche is not content with knowing, he has to become that of which he speaks. (140)

Nietzsche’s fragmented style, which never works to give a whole story, not in any of its combined pieces, which places itself outside the world and after it (152), also does a funny thing when an untrained reader tries to encounter it: it fails to give up meaning easily. It passes through a mind (eye/optic fiber/brain?), nothing snags, clever bits of text fall through the sieve without anything sticking. This was my experience, at least. Nietzsche writes in such a way that each separate aphorism on its own seems to mean very little, so an effort to understand his intentions based on casual reading ends with a frustrating sense of intellectual hunger. Blanchot goes on to explain, though, that it’s through the productive contradictions between these aphorisms that Nietzche communicates his philosophy:

There is philosophic pluralism, very important, of course, since it reminds us that meaning always comes severally and that there is an overabundance of signification; that "One is always wrong," whereas "truth begins at two." Hence the necessity of an interpretation that does not consist in the unveiling of a truth that is unique and hidden, or even ambiguous, but rather entails the reading of a text in several senses at once, with no other meaning than "the process, the becoming" that is interpretation. (154-5)

The text does not hide or contain truths; meanings are there instead at the interstices, constructed in the act of reading.  There is something here that I feel like I’m running towards, leaping to grasp and never quite catching; there’s that connection between the effort to encode existence in a text and to write with a real understanding of the origins of thought in bodies, not minds, and the fragmentation of text so that it’s the reading, not the writing, that is interesting; not the words on the page but the provocation of more thinking. Yes?  I apologize. It’s been a busy week, and the text was surprisingly frustrating. I can only hope that these GIFs make up for that.