“…the impossibility of being done with it…” (MB, 149)

“Has anyone done research…” (FN, p 34, s 7)

“Sigh – “ (FN, p 169, s )

***

“When we say that one interpretation is more powerful than another, it is vitally important what counts as ‘power’” (BW, ix).

“If you still want more – I’ll make it, from past inspiration take it, turning food for thought to food.” (FN, p11, h1) - The hymn of the Battleship Potempkin? What would the mouthpieces of Eisenstein say of Nietzsche?

“If I read me, then I read into me: I can’t construe myself objectively.” (p15, h23)

Digestion – This common theme could bring us to memory, to the middle ages of memory actually. Digestion or, for the animals that we are, rumination, was a way of explaining the memorization of central texts by church officials in those dark ages. This rumination destroying objectivity through absorption. FN: “If you had much for digesting” (18), “Strong teeth and good digestion too – ” (21).

“…to do what benefits the preservation of the human race. … this instinct constitutes the essence of our species and herd” (p27, s1). I must wonder what Nietzsche would have done with a term like ‘sheeple’!

“What is new, however, is under all circumstances evil, being that which wants to conquer, to overthrow the old boundary stones and pieties; and only what is old is good!” (p32, s4). How do objects, practices, etc. pass between these classifications? It cannot only be time.

“…that a sacrifice was made and the ethos of the sacrificial animal once again vindicated for all to see” (p44, s21). How can one move from this ethos of the animal (many humans for FN) to the rhetor? Can only the overman have the power to establish their own ethos? Is this not the ethos of the executioner instead of the animal itself? “What is ‘appearance’ to me now! Certainly not the opposite of some essence – what could I say about any essence except name the predicates of its appearance!” (p63, s54)

“Let us beware of thinking that the world is a living being. Let us beware even of believing that the universe is a machine; it is certainly not constructed to one end, and the word ‘machine’ pays it far too high an honor” (p109, s109). - Is Nietzsche’s aim here to dissuade one from using metaphors for the earth? Would he prefer the avoidance of metaphor altogether? It would be hard to say yes, but imagine the possibilities if metaphor was stricken from our reading of Freddy.

“He, for instance, who did not know how to find ‘identity’ often enough, both with regard to nourishment and to hostile animals – that is, he who subsumed too slowly and was too cautious in subsumption – had a slighter probability of survival than he who in all cases of similarity immediately guessed that they were identical” (p 112, s 111). - But aren’t all of the Nietzsche’s identical in the eyes of Amazon.com?

“An intellect that saw cause and effect as a continuum, not, as we do, as arbitrary division and dismemberment – that saw the stream of the event – would reject the concept of cause and effect and deny all determinedness” (p113, s112)

“In many people I see a surplus strength and pleasure in wanting to become a function” (p116, s119). - With abstraction we all slowly morph into functions. Even you.

“A dangerous decision. – The Christian decision to find the world ugly and bad has made the world ugly and bad” (p123, s130). - Take out the word “Christian” and this all of a sudden is an aphorism put forward by the Huffington Post’s “Ten Ways to Destroy Negativity in Your Life.” Something tells me that Nietzsche would be disgusted with the Huffington Post. It might not even be digested.

“Even one’s thoughts one cannot entirely reproduce in words” (p148, s244) - Slippage, slippage, spillage….spoil.

“But the ability to contradict, the acquired good conscience accompanying hostility towards what is familiar, traditional, hallowed – that is better yet than both those abilities, and constitutes what is really great, new, and amazing in our culture” (p169, s297).

“…the thought that life could be an experiment for the knowledge-seeker…” (p181, s324). - Raymond Williams sets up a science/conscience dichotomy within his Keywords definition of “science,” where experiment/experience is used as well. What would the ‘gay conscience’ be? What is life as just experience?

“’What do you matter? What do you matter?’”

“What we must deeply and most personally suffer from is incomprehensible and inaccessible to nearly everyone else; here we are hidden from our nearest, even if we eat from the same pot” (p191, s338). - Let us all taste it differently!

“We are searching for words, perhaps also for ears” (p203, s346).

“The sign-inventing person is also the one who becomes ever more acutely conscious of himself; for only as a social animal did learn to become conscious of himself – he is still doing it, and he is doing it more and more” (p213, s354).

“A church is above all a structure…” (p223, s358).

“No, my scholarly friends, I bless you even for your hunched backs!” (p231, s366).

“Everything that is thought, written, painted, composed, even built and sculpted, belongs either to monologue art or to art before witnesses” (p231, s367).

“One leaves oneself at home when one goes to the theatre; one relinquishes the right to one’s own tongue and choice, to one’s taste, even to one’s courage as one has it and exercises it within one’s own for walls against god and man” (p233, s368). - Is this specific to the theatre?

“…we are no longer free to do anything individual, to be anything individual…” (p236, s371).

“…have a different digestion…” (p246, s381).

***

“This has caused me the greatest trouble and still does always cause me the greatest trouble: to realize that what things are called is unspeakably more important than what they are. The reputation, name, and appearance, the worth, the usual measure and weight of a thing – originally almost always something mistaken and arbitrary, thrown over things like a dress and quite foreign to their nature and even to their skin – has, through the belief in it and its growth from generation to generation, slowly grown onto and into the thing and has become its very body: what started as appearance in the end nearly always becomes essence and effectively acts as its essence! What kind of a fool would believe that it is enough to point to this origin and this misty shroud of delusion in order to destroy the world that counts as 'real', so-called 'reality'! Only as creators can we destroy!” (p69-70, s68)

“What kind of a fool would believe,” is an obvious reference to “What a Fool Believes,” is it not? Perhaps it isn’t, but it does make me think of Blanchot’s introduction to his section on nihilism. He writes, Nietzsche is no doubt not responsible for the vile content with which his myth has been filled, but in myth content is unimportant; this is precisely what the myth says: the creative feat alone counts, a work without discourse, the imperative language of a violence without language. (142) But if Blanchot and Nietzsche agree with the superficiality of this kind of work and with its representation as solely the name, why is there such a desire to save Nietzsche from Mme. Forster-Nietzsche? It is the name that ties the fragments together and it is the name that drives the myth. Was Nietzsche afraid of this simulacrum-before-Baudrillard? Is this Blanchot-as-McLuhan afraid of losing Nietzsche’s soul?

***

On Fragmentary Writing and Fragmentary Reading -

What does “± ±” even mean? What would a single plus and/or minus symbol even denote to the reader? He writes, “Scarcely does man enter into beginning than he enters into his end, begins to end. Man is always man of the decline, a decline that is not a degeneration but, on the contrary, a lack that one can love; a lack that, in separation and distance, makes "human" truth one with the possibility of perishing” (155). Is this eventual decline pairing with the normative reading of the sign, from top to bottom? What is to happen when we have reading from below? Negative in the last, minus as the inevitability of this possibility?

Rather, let us look at fragmentary speech. “Fragmentary speech is barely speech – speech only at the limit. This does not mean that it speaks only at the end, but that in all times it accompanies and traverses all knowledge and all discourse with another language that interrupts speech by drawing it, in the turn of a redoubling, toward the outside where the uninterrupted speaks, the end that is never done with” (159). Are these fragments that Blanchot puts forward allowed the similar affordance? Are these plus-minus signs denoting the infinities that they encompass? Would it be more appropriate for these to be “±∞ ±∞”? Again, MB writes, “The plurality of forces means that forces are distant, relating to each other through the distance that makes them plural and inhabits each of them as the intensity of their difference” (161). What can we even take to mean from these alternatives? Do they all provide a different feeling? Do they all provide a different myth-medium?

Do any of them even matter? They must to Blanchot, but possibly not! For, if they are nothing but equations, the result will be zero for every one of these possible instantiations. Is this nihilism? The doubling over all positive and negative to only lead to the point of zero? What a thing it would be to replace them all with |x|!

Instead of asking what the signs mean, it becomes more important to ask whether or not there is a single variable within these “equations,” if we can even get to the point of calling them that. Are we simply dealing with x, or are we dealing with x, y, and z? Are we dealing with x ± y ± z, or x ± x ± x, or x ± y + x ± z (or some other version of the same)?

What does this mean for Nietzsche’s classification of his fragments, in continuous, positive counting of passages? Who knew Blanchot was the great French McLuhanist? If fragmentary speech/writing is the message within this, there must be some influence of the form of positive integer numbering on the work of Nietzsche, no? Is The Gay Science worth 383!? Please, excuse the factor(ial)s of my reading of these works.

MB: “Juxtaposed words, but words whose arrangement is entrusted to signs that are modalities of space, and that make space a play of relations wherein time is at stake: we call these signs of punctuation. … Whether they be more indecisive, that is to say, more ambiguous, is not important either” (169). How can this be said?

Perhaps this is all an example of intermittent writing within fragmentary reading. Blanchot sees punctuation as not important, but still productive of an object, of the void. He writes, “To articulate the void by a void, to structure it as a void by drawing from it the strange irregularity that always from the outset specifies it as empty” (169). Later, Not that they serve to translate this void or render it visible in the manner of a musical notation: on the contrary, for from keeping the written at the level of the marks writing leaves or the forms it concretizes, their property is to indicate in it the tearing, the incisive rupture (the invisible tracing of a trait) through which the inside turns eternally back into the outside, while what designates itself there, to the point of giving meaning, and as its origin, is the gap that removes it from meaning. (170) What does he expect the reader to do? Leave the void unsutured, a gaping wound? Even a threadbare patch would be preferable.

***

“History also teaches how to laugh at the solemnities of the origin. … The origin always precedes the Fall” (p143) “From the vantage point of an absolute distance, free from the restraints of positive knowledge, the origin makes possible a field of knowledge whose function is to recover it, but always in a false recognition due to the excesses of its own speech.” (p143)

“…it will be scrupulously attentive to their petty malice…” (p144).

“Similarly, he must be able to diagnose the illnesses of the body, its conditions of weakness and strength, its breakdowns and resistances, to be in a position to judge philosophical discourse” (p145). - See discussion of health within Nietzsche’s 5th book and the preface.

“…the were fooled by simple computation…” (p145).

“Genealogy does not pretend to go back in time…” (p146)

“Finally, descent attaches itself to the body. It inscribes itself in the nervous system, in temperament, in the digestive apparatus…” (p147).

“Emergence is always produced through a particular stage of forces. The analysis… must delineate this interaction, the struggle these forces wage against each other or against adverse circumstances…” (p148-149).

“On the other hand, individual differences emerge at another stage of the relationship of forces, when the species has become victorious and when it is no longer threatened from outside” (p149).

“Humanity does not gradually progress from combat to combat until it arrives at universal reciprocity, where the rule of law finally replaces warfare; humanity installs each of its violences in a system of rules and thus proceeds from domination to domination.” (p151). - From infinity to infinity? From zero to zero?

“The role of genealogy is to record its history; the history of morals, ideals, and metaphysical concepts, the history of the concept of liberty or of the ascetic life; as they stand for the emergence of different interpretations, they must be made to appear as events on the stage of the historical process” (p152).

“The historian’s history finds its support outside of time and pretends to base its judgments on an apocalyptic objectivity.” (p152)

“History becomes ‘effective’ to the degree that it introduces discontinuity into our very being…” (p154). “Effective history, on the other hand, shortens its vision to those things nearest to it…” (p155).

“After all, what right have they to impose their tastes and preferences when they seek to determine what actually occurred in the past?” (p157)

When we move from the subject and texts of Nietzsche to something under the title of “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” are we opening up the subject of closing it off?

***

Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Gay Science: With a Prelude in German Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs. Ed. Bernard Williams. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001.

Blanchot, Maurice. “Reflections on Nihilism.” The Infinite Conversation.” Trans. Susan Hanson. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993. 136-170.

Foucault, Michel. “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History.”