The Rhythm of Thought and Becoming in Nietzsche's Eternal Return Emily Harding Royal Holloway, University of London PhD in Philosophy 1 Declaration of Authorship I, Emily Harding, hereby declare that this thesis and the work presented in it is entirely my own. Where I have consulted the work of others, this is always clearly stated. Signed: _______________________________ Date: 19/09/2019 2 Acknowledgements Firstly, massive thanks to my supervisors Nathan and Henry for all their help, patience, and resolute endurance in the face of my random drafts. To TECHNE for providing the funding and Royal Holloway for providing the gingerbread castle. To the assorted cool kids Tom and Naomi for support while we put beaks on our chicken dragons, and to David for support and coffee in times of both stress and destressing. To Chris, Sharon, and Siobhan for loveliness and sterling writing advice. To Trisha, Chris, and Jane for encouragement, debates while pacing the living room, and joy in thinking about things. To Steve for understanding co-parentingness and excellent dual monitor provision in the time of fleas. To Darren for long conversations and friendship. To Tracy for thinking, and dancing, and bubbles. To Rhys for adventures in tea. To Amber for the squirrels. To Ish for font suggestions, and general brilliance. To all these, and others who have co-created magic in the everyday and transmuted vegetable matter into the bubbling wine of thought. 3 Abstract This thesis develops the concept of a rhythmic ontology that emerges from Nietzsche’s thought, and argues that eternal return functions as a rhythmic disruption to our current understanding of the relationship between thought and becoming. By exploring the role of rhythm in Nietzsche’s work, both in his early unpublished notes and in The Gay Science leading up to the introduction of eternal return, I argue that we need to understand eternal return as a rhythmic theory of time if it is to offer a convincing challenge to nihilistic thought, and that we find the most effective mobilisation of this approach in the work of Deleuze and Guattari. The first chapter of this thesis explores the breakdown in the relationship between thought and becoming through the motif of love that Nietzsche draws on in The Gay Science. I introduce the thought of eternal return as Nietzsche’s attempt to address this problem and usher in amor fati as a new way of thinking, but show that we must affirm the rhythmic process of thought if we are to achieve this. The following two chapters examine the role of rhythm within Nietzsche’s work, arguing that he develops an understanding of rhythm as the structure through which becoming appears to us. This allows us to understand the creative and nihilistic tendencies of thought as different aspects of our relationship with time. In the final two chapters of the thesis I reconsider eternal return as a rhythmical theory of the relationship between thought and becoming in a manner that goes beyond Nietzsche’s published work, arguing that its development within the thought of Deleuze and Guattari is ultimately the most successful at countering the nihilistic problem that Nietzsche wishes to address. 4 Table of Contents Introduction..........................................................................................................................6 1. Exposition: Eternal return as an intervention into thought as love..................................15 The creativity of thought as love...................................................................................18 The selective aspect of thought....................................................................................26 Amor fati: the love of what is necessary........................................................................34 The anthropological reading of eternal return as a test of affirmation............................52 2. Development: Rhythm as the form of time.....................................................................60 Nietzsche's early rhythmical theory of time...................................................................61 The metaphysical division of appearance and reality....................................................73 Time and force in rhythm..............................................................................................81 3. Modulation: Rhythm as the seduction of the future........................................................94 The rhythmic wavebeat of becoming.............................................................................94 Rhythm as a creative force...........................................................................................99 Rhythm as seduction..................................................................................................105 De-deifying the universe.............................................................................................110 Rhythm as binding the future......................................................................................117 Eternal return as a new disruptive rhythm...................................................................124 4. Recapitulation: Eternal return as the confrontation of time in the moment...................130 Zarathustra and the gateway Moment.........................................................................131 The cosmological reading of eternal return as cyclical time........................................142 Time as the discontinuous moment.............................................................................152 Time flies away: a criticism of Nietzsche’s presentation of eternal return....................159 5. Coda: the fabrication of time in the refrain...................................................................167 The eternal return of the dice in Nietzsche and Philosophy........................................168 Univocal being and the three syntheses of time in Difference and Repetition.............181 One or several rhythms: the refrain in A Thousand Plateaus......................................195 Conclusion.......................................................................................................................209 Bibliography.....................................................................................................................213 5 Introduction This thesis develops the concept of a rhythmic ontology that emerges from Nietzsche’s thought, and argues that eternal return functions as a rhythmic disruption to our current understanding of the relationship between thought and becoming. By exploring the role of rhythm in Nietzsche’s work, both in his early unpublished notes and in The Gay Science leading up to the introduction of eternal return, I argue that we need to understand eternal return as a rhythmic theory of time if it is to offer a convincing challenge to nihilistic thought, and that we find the most effective mobilisation of this approach in the work of Deleuze and Guattari. This thesis takes up the problem of how we think our relationship to becoming, in particular how we can understand thought as the creation of something new, that nonetheless emerges from what has gone before. This problem unites two predominant themes within Nietzsche’s work. On the one hand, Nietzsche understands our thought as suffused with the values of the past. "I" am not a separate soul or subject who performs certain actions or thinks certain thoughts. Instead "I" am no more than this activity. The actions and thoughts that I think of as mine are not the result of the decision of a subject, but are that which emerges from all the past activity of the world. Were I to wish for myself to be different, I would therefore need to rewrite the past – while to wish for the past to be different would equally be to unwittingly seek my own annihilation.1 My identity, and the past that makes it up, are inextricably entwined. But Nietzsche also demands that we learn to think in a new way. In the post- Enlightenment modern period, our understanding of who and what we as thinking beings are has been fundamentally called into question. Bound up with this doubt is a sense of our discomfortingly uncertain relationship with the future. Previously we lived with a sense of travelling towards a “better” state, whether this futural heaven be founded on a knowledge of God or an earthly confidence in the progress of human reason. Now both of 1 "The individual is a piece of fate from top to bottom, one more law, one more necessity for all that is to come and will be. Telling him to change means demanding that everything should change, even backwards..." (TI 'Morality as Anti-Nature' §6) 6 these former certainties are lost to us, and we are caught in a situation in which we do not know how to construct the new relationship with the future that we so desperately need. The critical effort Nietzsche directs towards uncovering the origins of our thought is intended to give us the tools with which to question the way we think, learning to view it as something changeable rather than eternal fact, and in so doing offering the possibility that we may actively guide this change. The problem Nietzsche raises is therefore how there can be difference (a "new" kind of thought) that is at the same time identifiably connected to the past. The problem of how an identity can be said to change in time is one that has a long history within Western philosophy.2 But Nietzsche approaches this problem from the opposite direction. Rather