Karin Patzke We Experiment Response

o Nietzsche, Friedrich. "The gay science, ed. Bernard Williams." Trans. Josefine Nauckhoff and Adrian del Caro (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001) (2001).

#367 The first distinction to draw regarding artworks. – Everything that is thought, written, painted, composed, even built and sculpted, belongs either to monologue art or to art before witnesses. The second category must also include the seemingly monologue are involving faith in God, the entire lyricism of prayer; for solitude does not yet exist to the pious – this invention was first made by us, the godless. I know no deeper distinction in an artist’s entire optics that this: whether he views his budding artwork (‘himself’) from the eye of the witness, or whether he ‘has forgotten the world,’ which is the essential feature of all monologue art – it is based on forgetting; it is the music of forgetting. - First, art is performance - Second, art is performance - Third, artists are performed - Fourth, it’s easy to perform when you forget there is an audience to perform for.

#323 Luck in fate – Fate bestows on us the greatest distinction when it has let us fight for a time on our opponents’ side. Thus we are predestined for a great victory. - Who is the opponent? - Where is his side? - I’m I predestined for failure?

#327 Taking seriously. – For most people, the intellect is an awkward, gloomy, creaking machine that is hard to start: when they want to work with this machine and think well, they call it ‘taking the matter seriously’ [is this how our teachers feel when we speak up in class?] – oh, how taxing good thinking must be for them! [Is this why I feel grumpy after class?] The lovely human beast seems to lose its good mood when it thinks well [oh yes, that is why you feel so grump after class!]; it becomes ‘serious’! And ‘where laughter and gaiety are found, thinking is good for nothing’ [It’s true! We are too serious in those boring classes!]– that is the prejudice of this serious beast against all ‘gay science’[what is the non-serious beast?]. Well then, let us prove it a prejudice! [I’m not sure I can do that....]

#355 The origin of our concepts of ‘knowledge.’ – I take this explanation from the street; I heard one of the common people say ‘he knew me right away’ – and I asked myself: what do the people actually take knowledge to be? What do they want when they want ‘knowledge’? Nothing more than this: something unfamiliar is to be traced back to

On Truth 1 of 3 something familiar. And we philosophers – have we really meant anything more by knowledge? The familiar means that we are used to, so that we no longer marvel at it’ the commonplace’ some rule in which we are stuck’ each and every thing that makes us feel at home: – And isn’t our need for knowledge precisely this need for the familiar, the will to uncover among everything strange, unusual, and doubtful something which no longer unsettles us? Is it not the instint of fear that bids us to know? And isn’t the rejoicing of the person who attains knowledge just rejoicing from a regained sense of security? … Take the philosopher who imagined the world to be ‘known’ when he had reduced it to the ‘idea’; wasn’t is precisely because the ‘idea’ was so familiar to him and he was so used to it? …When

o Blanchot, Maurice. 1993. “Reflections on Nihilism.” Pp. 136-170 in The Infinite Conversation. Translated by S. Hanson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Original edition, L'Entretien infini (Gallimard, 1969)

The final section of this assigned reading assigned text is called “Nietzsche and fragmentary writing.” The subsections are both explanations of Nietzsche’s fragmentary writing and examples of Blanchot’s own fragmentary writing. Below some selections.

Fragments about writing/speech:  "It is difficult to grasp this speech of fragment without altering it" (152)  "Interpreting: the infinite: the world. The world? A text? The text: the movement of writing in its neutrality" (168)

A new phrase I’m working into my everyday vernacular is “no shit, Sherlock.” The fragments below fall into that category:  "The fragmentary speech that is Nietzsche's does not know contradiction. This is strange." (153)  "The fact that Nietzsche takes his leave from the thought of the One God, that is to say, from the god of Unity, must be taken seriously." (154)  "Speech as fragment has a relation with the fact that man disappears;…" (155)  "Man disappears." (157)  "Fragmentary speech is barely speech" (159)  "These questions are latent in Nietzsche…."(163)

Some fragments about the qualities of fragmentary speech:  "This speech that reveals the exigency of the fragmentary-a non-sufficient speech, but not through insufficiency, unfinished, but because foreign to the category of completion—does not contradict the whole," (153)  "Fragmentary speech does not know contradiction, even when it contradicts. Two fragmentary texts may be opposed: they are simply posed one after another,…" (153)  "The plurality of plural speech: a speech that is intermittent, discontinuous; a speech that, without being insignificant, does not speak by reason of its power to Karin Patzke We Experiment Response represent, or even to signify. " (156)  "Fragmentary speech is not a speech in which the site would already be designated,….." (158)

Weird, but maybe not for the sake of weird  "The thought of the overman does not first of all signify the advent of the overman, but rather the disappearance of something called man." (155)  "'"The world is deep: deeper than the day can comprehend." Nietzsche does not content himself here with calling up the Stygian night." (162) what does fragmentary speech do?  "I would note that the philosophy of Nietzsche takes its distance from dialectical philosophy less in contesting it than in repeating it, that is, in repeating the principal concepts or moments that it deflects: i.e., the idea of contradiction, the idea of going beyond, the idea of transvaluation, the idea of totality, and above all the idea of circularity, of truth or of affirmation as circular." (159)  ""How can one understand force, or weakness, in terms of clarity and obscurity?" observes Derrida." (160)  "In thinking the world, Nietzsche thinks it as a text." (165) my favorite:  "One can suppose that if, with Nietzsche, thought had need of force conceived as a "play of forces and waves of forces" in order to think both plurality and difference, even if it entails exposure to all the difficulties of an apparent dogmatism, it is because force supports the presentiment that difference is movement;…." (162)  "Difference: the non-identity of the same, the movement of distance; that which carries, by carrying off, the becoming of interruption. " (170). a surprisingly useful fragment that I worked into a conversation:  ""And do you know what "the world' is to me? Shall I show it to you in my mirror?" Nietzsche thinks…." (164)

On Truth 3 of 3