Leonardo Raggo and Correa&Correa wrote:
LR:
>> > but rather the distension of a being yet to be defined
CC:
>> What being to be defined? Being is defined at every moment of life, as the
>> being of becoming which is to recur in alterity. Tension, distension
(evoking
>> Reich's formula for "orgonotic pulsation"), isn't that the rhythm of breath,
>> the rhythm of life, the cycle of the eternal recurrence at the level of the
>> micro-cosmos? What distension is there to be defined that is not already
here
>> and now, and there and then?
LR:
> Nietzsche wrote (lost reference) "Man is the unfinished animal"; that's
>my take on the modality of the "as yet to be" in terms of the advent of
>the future, the "to come" or the French "venir" which makes sense in terms
>of a "philosophy of the future". However I wouldn't say distension (that
>quite rightly resonates with me) is "already here and now"; how now?
SC:
This whole line of thought at least goes back to Hegel, who postulated
Becoming as the synthesis of Being (thesis) and Non-Being (antithesis).
Becoming, or the Flux, is both coming to be and passing away. Nietzsche does
not, it seems to me, so much contradict Hegel here as attempting to correct
him, by abolishing (and demolishing) the prospect of an ideal future. The
temptation, of course, is to say that this simply means that the future is
what we make of it, which is the Sartrean position (and perhaps the
Deconstructionist position as well?), I suppose, except that Nietzsche
continues to question here, throwing out the suggestion here, for instance,
that the future is perhaps not so much what we make of it as we are what the
future makes of us: "The follies of mankind are just as much a piece of fate
as are its acts of intelligence: that fear in face of a belief in fate is
also fate" (HH, "The Wanderer and His Shadow," 61). Determined by that which
must, itself, always remain indeterminate. That we are masters of our own
fate, whether we like it or not, is also merely fated, for what we term
"mastering," or _will_, here is only a surface phenomenon, a predudice, an
after-thought. To say that, as Nietzsche does, that there is neither a free
nor an unfree will is to say that "will" here is only the outward sign of an
ineluctible precedence which is the indeterminate and ceaseless futuring of
itself.
LR:
>[...]However, to reject deconstruction (as well as Lacan,
>Marx, etc.) out of hand is to play into the neoconservative camp, no
>matter how radical or anti-fashion you may think you are. What I would
>reject is the facile, distorting, shallow interpretation of these
>movements. To attack deconstruction is just the latest bloodsport of the
>highly reactive, defensive academia.
Nietzsche, it seems to me, allows us to entertain the notion of an
anti-politics of the future that is beyond left and right. It is the notion
that the deconstructionist deconstructs for the sake of deconstruction that
is seductive here. The criticism, in other words, is that the
deconstructionists are closet moralists. Or why such disdain? That doesn't
mean that one need be a neoconservative (or a plain old-fashioned
conservative, for that matter) to stand in opposition here--one may simply
be a Nietzschean. One rather suspects, in other words, that
deconstructionism is carried out with an unacknowledged ideal in the back of
the mind, that of Rousseau's idealized Nature and the Noble Savage, which is
what all this deconstruction is _really_ trying to get back to, and which
has never been entirely sloughed off, and certainly not critiqued to any
real depth. What is truly being deconstructed here, in other words, if not
the assumed "evil" of Civilization. (Or inequality.) Nietzsche's destructive
critique here, on the other hand, is to oppose the Noble Savage with the
Savage Noble, a confounding...
LR:
>[...]hence, the
>importance of the interpretive process that seems more obvious to us than
>it did at the time of Nietzsche. That is, he understood very well that the
>sciences were biased, that psychology or the history of morals had the
>heart against it and was not hard enough to find the active impulses of
>life in aggression, domination, lust, etc., all disdained as moral
>abberations.
We can gain an estimate of the value of aggression, domination, lust, etc.,
only by imagining their complete banishment, their extirpation. Kill all the
pirates and the police will take over. Not that we want the pirates to take
over, mind you, but perhaps better that than the police, after all.
LR:
> Ah, misreadings! There is no "truth", but (and I emphasize BUT) the
>"temporality of interpretation" or (which is to say) "becoming"; there is
>only the becoming truth of becoming. The difference and play of forces are
>by all means "what is."
Rather there are truths upon truths, it seems to me, just not _the_ truth in
the name of which all other truths may be rendered untrue (even if that
truth be that there are no truths). The truth is whatever happens to be the
case, but the case is open to endless redefinition and qualification, is at
best only momentary, a flux, as changeable as the weather, making what is
true one moment false the next. But where there is no case, there can be no
truth, or falsity. A case is necessarily a circumscription, an encirclement,
but to encircle is also to exclude, to leave out, to omit. Other metaphors,
of course, come to mind, for before there can be a case, if you will, a case
must be made (and always already has been made). We cannot argue against
meaning, for even meaninglessness is a meaning...
LR:
>> >The supreme act of will to
>> >power seems to posit this becoming as the only form of being which itself
>> >implies that being is no more than a vanishing vapor or a trace, a
>> >differentiality, rather than something that can be opposed to the world as
>> >it is, i.e. as its depiction or truth.
Or Representation. But it is for Nietzsche exactly Representation, in being
united with and rendered indistinguishable from Appearance (and no longer
thought of as being in any sense whatsoever the opposite of Appearance),
which becomes Interpretation, if you will. If there are only
representations, and not that which is represented (the mythical Will, free
or unfree, or the equally mythical Ego), then they are not representations
at all, but, for lack of a better word, only interpretations. Truth here, in
other words, is not merely an interpretation. Truth is interpretation.
CC:
>> [...]
>> There is no doubt that metaphors displease us. When is the last time we
>> clamored for something as opposed to the world as truth?
>>[...]And then the ellipse - but not as a
>> physical reality, a corpo-reality of motion, no. As a figure of speech.
>>[...]But figures of speech and
>> metaphors...ce sont les femmes qui s'en vont.
There is definitely in Nietzsche, it seems to me, the sense that speech is a
reduction of experience. The fixation on the trope can only trip us up, it
seems. Real poets know better. Metaphors are expansive. Life speaks in
metaphors.
Steve C.
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