Living forever is actually pretty simple. You just have to continually redefine your "self" as something alive. If you cling to your given identity, you are bound to perish. If "you" are instead just a difference in the world that's capable of producing even more difference, you continue to circulate ad infinitum, albeit at the price of continually transforming into something else. In business, we would call this "moving the goalpost".
I take this to be the general gist of the discussion of affirmation and negation in Nietzsche's Zarathustra that occurs on pg. 53-55. It begins with:
No one passes less for a beautiful soul than Nietzsche. His soul is extremely beautiful, but not in the sense of the beautiful soul: no one is more endowed than he with a sense for cruelty or a taste for destruction. Moreover, throughout his work he never ceases to contrast two conceptions of the affirmation-negation relation.
and ends with:
Nietzsche announces only a light punishment for those who do not 'believe' in eternal return: they will have, and be aware of, only an ephemeral life! They will be aware of themselves and know themselves for what they are: epiphenomena. This will be their absolute Knowledge. In this manner, negation as a consequence, as the result of full affirmation, consumes all that is negative, and consumes itself at the mobile centre of eternal return.
In between, Deleuze explains how Zarathustra and his own personal Ass both use both affirmation and negation, though in opposite ways. The role of the Ass at first appears completely affirmative, as it is willing to carry the weight of any burden. This affirmation is only secondary though, because it stems from the Ass's constant acceptance that there must be limits that define the identity of every form only by distinguishing itself from everything which it is not. Negation is the first principle of the Ass, and, like the Hegelian dialectic (amusingly depicted as an Ox chewing the cud and regurgitating the same stuff over and over again), it can only produce affirmation as the by product of a double negation. The motor of dialectical change is supposed to be a form defined by what it is not, which is then negated and overcome. The positive production of movement is just a double negative, a circle with one center that gets us nowhere.
It is said that there were thinkers who explained that movement was impossible, but that this did not prevent movement from occurring. With Hegel it is the other way round: he creates movement, even the movement of the infinite, but because he creates it with words and representations it is a false movement, and nothing follows.
Zarathustra though starts with affirmation. Instead of the weight of necessity, he starts with the lightness of possibility, the genuine movement of dance, and the chance discharge of electricity (Deleuze's lightning bolt of thought). There is also negation and destruction with Zarathustra, but it occurs only as a secondary principle.
Difference is light, aerial and affirmative. To affirm is not to bear but, on the contrary, to discharge and to lighten. It is no longer the negative which produces a phantom of affirmation like an ersatz, but rather a No which results from affirmation. This is also in turn a shadow, but rather in the sense of a consequence - one could say a Nachfolge. The negative is an epiphenomenon. Negation, like the ripples in a pond, is the effect of an affirmation which is too strong or too different. Perhaps two affirmations are necessary in order to produce the shadow of negation as a Nachfolge.
This is a bit tangential, but, as I read about this "double affirmative" I was reminded of Deleuze's discussion of Spinoza's letters on the problem of evil. Instead of talking about masters and slaves, or affirmation and negation, Spinoza divided things into good encounters and bad encounters, composition and decomposition. This passage is from Spinoza: Practical Philosophy
"Thou shalt not eat of the fruit ... ": the anxious, ignorant Adam understands these words as the expression of a prohibition. And yet, what do they refer to? To a fruit that, as such, will poison Adam if he eats it. This is an instance of an encounter between two bodies whose characteristic relations are not compatible: the fruit will act as a poison; that is, it will determine the parts ofAdam's body (and paralleling this, the idea of the fruit will determine the parts of his mind) to enter into new relations that no longer accord with his own essence. But because Adam is ignorant of causes, he thinks that God morally forbids him something, whereas God only reveals the natural consequence of ingesting the fruit. Spinoza is categorical on this point: all the phenomena that we group under the heading of Evil, illness, and death, are of this type: bad encounters, poisoning, intoxication, relational decomposition.
In any case, there are always relations that enter into composition in their particular order, according to the eternal laws of nature. There is no Good or Evil, but there is good and bad. "Beyond Good and Evil, at least this does not mean: beyond good and bad." The good is when a body directly compounds its relation with ours, and, with all or part of its power, increases ours. A food, for example. For us, the bad is when a body decomposes our body's relation, although it still combines with our parts, but in ways that do not correspond to our essence, as when a poison breaks down the blood. Hence good and bad have a primary, objective meaning, but one that is relative and partial: that which agrees with our nature or does not agree with it.
And consequently, good and bad have a secondary meaning, which is subjective and modal, qualifying two types, two modes of man's existence. That individual will be called good (or free, or rational or strong) who strives, insofar as he is capable, to organize his encounters, to join with whatever agrees with his nature, to combine his relation with relations that are compatible with his, and thereby to increase his power. For goodness is a matter of dynamism, power, and the composition of powers. That individual will be called bad, or servile, or weak, or foolish, who lives haphazardly, who is content to undergo the effects of his encounters, but wails and accuses every time the effect undergone does not agree with him and reveals his own impotence. For, by lending oneself in this way to whatever encounter in whatever circumstance, believing that with a lot of violence or a little guile, one will always extricate oneself, how can one fail to have more bad encounters than good? How can one keep from destroying oneself through guilt, and others through resentment, spreading one's own powerlessness and enslavement every where, one's own sickness, indigestions, and poisons? In the end, one is unable even to encounter oneself.
Since good and bad are always relative to some agent, there is always a perspective from which anything that happens is "good", in the sense of constructively composing or causing a new state of the world. That new world might not involve our existence, but that simply means that we've got the wrong perspective on it. This means that there's nothing inherently bad in itself, that is, nothing is evil.
Thus Spinoza gives a special meaning to the classical thesis holding that evil is nothing. In his view, in any case, there are always relations that agree with one another (for example, the agreement between a poison and the new relations into which the parts of the blood enter). But relations that agree, according to the natural order, do not necessarily coincide with the preservation of a particular relation, which may be dissolved, that is cease to be realized. In this sense there is no evil (in itself), but there is that which is bad (for me): "Those things are good which bring about the preservation of the relation of motion and rest the human body's parts have to one another; on the other hand, those things are bad which bring it about that the parts of the human body have a different relation of motion and rest to one
another." Every object whose relation agrees with mine (convenientia) will be called good; every object whose relation decomposes mine, even though it agrees with other relations, will be called bad (disconvenientia).
So far, recasting affirmation and negation as composition and decomposition just restates the basic goal of this section, which is to look for the underlying affirmative and productive element that gives rise to (and breaks down) forms of identity. But then it immediately presents us with the question of whether we could find the "good" point of view on the breakdown of our own form. In other words, is there a way to affirm the affirmation that negates us? Is there a way to cheat death?
What happens then in the case of poisoning? Or in the case of allergy (since the individual factors of each relation must be taken into account)? In these cases, it appears that one of the constitutive relations of the body is destroyed, decomposed. And death occurs when the body's characteristic or dominant relation is determined to be destroyed: "I under stand the body to die when its parts are so disposed that they acquire a different relation of motion and rest." Spinoza thus makes clear what is meant by a relation being destroyed or de composed. This occurs when the relation, which is itself an eternal truth, is no longer realized by actual parts. What has
been done away with is not the relation, which is eternally true, but rather the parts between which it was established and which have now assumed another relation.
If we are able to identify ourselves with the relations that characterize "us", with some sort of process or pattern that constitutes us, could we become this part of ourselves that is eternal? I don't completely understand how to think of this. I mean, how is this different from our "immortal soul"? And what even constitutes "a" process? I bring it up here because reading the double affirmative in the context of Spinoza is the only way I know to make sense of some of these passages, especially this one:
Negation is difference, but difference seen from its underside, seen from below. Seen the right way up, from top to bottom, difference is affirmation. This proposition, however, means many things: that difference is an object of affirmation; that affirmation itself is multiple; that it is creation but also that it must be created, as affirming difference, as being difference in itself.
For us to be more than epiphenomena, to know ourselves as more than ephemeral, we're going to need to change our definition.
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