The Beginning is the End (Chapter 4)

What does it mean for the man we call 'Nietzsche' that he experienced the intense moment he later elaborated as the thought of the Eternal Return?  Klossowski pursues this question in his next two chapters as a natural extension of his interpretation of ER.  If the content of the thought of ER dissolves the subject who thinks it, Nietzsche could not help but wonder what the fact that such a thought occurred to him might mean.  Is this a special insight that can only occur to a singular individual as some sort of culmination of the history of thought?  Or, on the contrary, does the way ER projects its thinker outside himself and into other identities indicate the incipient breakdown of Nietzsche's individual lucidity?  In other words is the thought of ER the beginning of his madness?

Needless to say this question can't get off the ground without a definition of madness.  While Klossowski doesn't tackle this latter directly, he does introduce his discussion of why Nietzsche might have been so keen to find a 'scientific proof' for ER -- in part to prove his own sanity -- by examining a set of dualities related to the definition of lucidity versus madness.  Nietzsche was obsessed with distinguishing between weakness and strength, sickness and health, exhaustion and over-abundance, what is singular and what is common (or as Klossowski calls it, "gregarious").  This last duality gives us a clear point of connection to that between sanity and madness; after all, it is society that decides who is 'mad'.  

How lucid can Nietzsche's singular experience be if he is unable to effectively communicate the intensity and consequences of it?  On the other hand, doesn't communication depend on some shared code of everyday signs and hence certain shared and exchangeable experiences?  You know what I'm talking about because on some level we have both had 'the same' experience in common.  And we need to share not only that experience, but the whole framework of a subject who possesses experiential objects.  Grammar insists on it.  Communication seems to be a standardizing, averaging, 'normalizing' process that relies on some sort of identity of the individuals involved.  But how could the experience of ER, whose centrifugal force tears apart the identity of the subject by hurling it outside itself, ever be communicable?  The felt reality of the experience seems to defy the assumptions that would allow us to communicate it.  Any attempt to do so would appear to require us to falsify the experience by reconstructing a subject.  But if ER is not communicable, was it even a real thought?  In fact, if it can't be woven into Nietzshce's philosophy -- which like all philosophy is most concretely a species of literature -- then does the experience have any consequences or meaning at all?  It's almost as if the content of the thought of ER is trying to prove to Nietzsche himself that the intense experience which gave birth to it was merely a moment of passing madness.  A phantasm.

Similar paradoxes arise if we consider the question of whether Nietzsche should interpret his experience as a symptom of his frequent sickness or a sign of some new health.  If our definition of a healthy organism is one with the ability to maintain its individual identity and integrity in the face of a fluctuating environment, then ER appears to be the worst kind of sickness.  Indeed, no thought could serve to eliminate the barriers between individual and world faster.  The idea that we are merely repeating the same life over and over again robs us of meaning, goal, will and identity all at once.  It might signal a sort of terminal illness. The affirmation of everything that it implies, like the explosion of identity it requires, might simply reflect the death throes of an organism lacking the strength to hold itself together.  Indeed, from the point of view of the thinking subject, the thought of ER is almost a sort of identity suicide.  On the other hand though, Nietzsche constantly reminds us that the deepest power and strength lie not in preserving our self but in overcoming it.  ER feels like an ecstatically affirmative thought that reflects a power so deep it doesn't need to define or protect itself.  Is its thinker helpless to resist his own dissolution, or so strong he can afford to yield to it?

Was it necessary to attribute to power the positing of a goal or the interpretation of a meaning? Or on the contrary, was not the very fact of believing in a goal or a meaning a manifestation of pure impotence? Did not the greatest strength lie in living absurdly, in affirming the value of life apart from any signification and goal? (NVC, 95)

Klossowksi suggests that it was Nietzsche's concern with what the experience of ER meant for his own organism that led him to the search for a scientific, or at least systematic, formulation of the idea.  The more personal communication he attempted in Thus Spoke Zarathustra remained filled with the paradoxes we've just discussed.  A "book for all and none" that stars a hero who becomes a buffoon (NVC, 99) hardly resolves any ambiguities.  But then again, neither does Klossowski's discussion of Nietzsche's attempt to give ER a scientific foundation.  In fact, what he discovers in reading Nietzsche's encounter with physics and biology is simply another paradoxical non-duality between spirituality and mechanism.  What seems to have interested Nietzsche most in the natural sciences was the idea that the universe could never come to an equilibrium.  Whether he was talking about the transformations of a finite cosmic energy in an infinite time, or observing that stable self-reproduction cannot be the 'goal' of an organism, what mattered to him was the ceaseless and senseless change that nature always shows us.  It's the unstoppability of this change, combined with the assumption of a finite amount of conserved energy, that leads to the idea of a Return.  

Thinking of ER in terms of the constant unfolding (and necessary re-folding) of energy or will to power illustrates the paradox of the experience of ER in a new way.  The most intense or 'spiritual' moment that appears to be the culmination of everything immediately converts into its opposite, the completely meaningless eternal fluctuation of the same quantity or energy or power.  The highest spirituality converts into the most complete mechanism.  As a result, there's no way to tell whether the intensity of ER is important or meaningless, a sign of power or its absence, a symptom of sickness or health.  All these dualities are constructed from the perspective of an agent that ER liquidates only to rebuild again.  The Return necessarily produces (and destroys) the illusion of an agent that could think it and will it.  But the experience itself is beyond any dualisms we would use to interpret it. 

No Destination, No Traveler, No Journey (Chapter 3)

Imagine if, at the precise moment of the intense revelation of your Spiritual Awakening, you get the sense that this has all happened before, and that you are only returning to relive a moment you have already lived many times.  It's a paradoxical idea; how can this be the second (much less the Nth) time you've become Enlightened?  Surely you would be forever marked by a moment like this in some unforgettable way, no?  How could you have forgotten your own self-transcendence?  It sounds like some sort of New Yorker cartoon guru joke.

This is the simplest formulation of the paradox of the experience of Eternal Return.  Of course, there are many paradoxes built into this idea; we could even argue that it is the single most paradoxical idea in all of philosophy.  But the most interesting thing about Klossowski's treatment of the concept is the way he mixes philosophical with biographical considerations.  What primarily interests him isn't ER as a doctrine, but as a lived experience.  While it oversimplifies a, "brilliant, profound, but extremely taxing" text (per Graham Parkes' description on the back cover), it's mostly fair to say that Klossowski traces all the paradoxes of ER back to this experiential contradiction between the uniquely intense emotional tone of the moment Nietzsche experienced in Sils-Maria in 1881, and the content of the thought that this "peak experience" was something that had already happened before.

The first corollary of this uniquely repetitive experience is that having it means you will necessarily forget it.  The experience doesn't stay with you, but always happens afresh in exactly the same way.  If this experience were about something mundane like where you put you keys, we might simply call this cycle of remembering and forgetting "brain damage".  But the moment of ER does not feel like remembering a fact or a past incident.  It is a transformational moment, a moment that we feel changes us completely -- from one who was asleep to an awake being.  As Nietzsche puts it in the Gay Science #341: "If this thought gained possession of you, it would change you as you are or perhaps crush you."  In other words, it's a moment in which our whole identity shifts, but in such a way that we know we will lose this new identity.

I learn that I was other than I am now for having forgotten this truth, and thus that I have become another by learning it. Will I change again, and once more forget that I will necessarily change during an eternity - until I relearn this revelation anew? (NVC, 57)

What will we become when we lose the awakened identity of the moment of ER?  Well, because we have to return to this very same identity by the exact path we took to arrive at it, our future will have to repeat our past.  We will have to somehow dissolve into the universe, as it were, only to gradually reemerge through the precise chaotic process of cosmic, geophysical, biological, and cultural evolution that we know led up to the moment of our revelation.  In short, we have to become everything. Obviously, this sort of dissolution goes far beyond how we typically think of forgetting.  No normal self identity could persist through such an immense sweep of transformation.  Klossowski suggests that this multiplication or dissolution of identity is the core consequence of the paradox of ER.

... by embracing in a single glance the necessity of the Return as a universal law, I deactualize my present self in order to will myself in all the other selves whose entire series must be passed through so that, in accordance with the circular movement, I once again become what I am at the moment I discover the law of the Eternal Return. (NVC, 57)

If the experience of ER implies a dissolution of the everyday conception of the self, we might next ask who exactly is having the experience?  This question starts to carry us into tricky territory because the very nature of the experience eliminates the subject who would allegedly have it.  If we were to try to communicate the experience, to point at 'who' had it, we could only really point at the whole circle created by the Eternal Return.  The experience is not merely our experience of the entire trajectory of the return, but is more like the trajectory's experience of itself.  While the thought of ER tends to reinforce itself, it has the effect of shaking us to pieces; 

For if, in this ineffable moment, I hear myself say, 'You are returning to this moment - you have already returned to it - you return to it innumerable times', no matter how coherent this proposition may seem to be in terms of the sign of the Circle from which it is derived (for it is itself this very proposition), as an actual self in the context of everyday signs, I myself fall into incoherence. (NVC, 64)

Klossowski closes chapter 3 by examining another strange consequence of this idea that only the whole circle is coherent, whereas any particular point on it is 'unstable' in the sense that it immediately implies all the other points.  When Nietzsche goes to communicate his shattering experience of ER in the Gay Science and Zarathustra, he speaks of it not in terms of a proven doctrine or established fact, but in terms of something we must believe in, as if it required religious faith of sorts.  That is, we are supposed to will ER.  But if the content of the idea does away with the subject, who is left around to do any willing at all?  And what exactly would they will anyhow?  The experience of ER feels like a uniquely important moment, as if it were the very purpose of existence, or at least of our lives.  But in fact, this singular moment is any and every moment.  If we attempt to will the return of the heightened self of the moment of ER, we are forced to will our own dissolution, or our transformation into something other than this self.  Trying to will the 'point' of ER just carries us around in endless circles.  We end up willing the forgetfulness of our self and our will, with the goal of returning to this same 'special' moment ... at which we re-will our very lack of will, ad infinitum.  In brief, willing ER is like no-one trying to get back to no-place.

While Klossowski's discussion of these texts is highly compressed (he prefers to work mainly with unpublishd material from the notebooks) he seems to be pointing to the same issue I mulled over in Heidegger's reading of the "On Redemption" chapter.  There, the question was how to overcome the will's ill-will towards the past as a territory it cannot alter.  The answer was that we have to will the past, or to "re-will the non-willed" as Klossowski puts it.  This is more difficult than it sounds, because to will the return of the powerful moment of ER, we must will the return of not only this endpoint, but of all the crippled powerlessness that preceded it.   We gain power only by paradoxically affirming our powerlessness.  We return to our self, only by becoming everything else.  Klossowksi points out that this distinguishes ER from a simple version of fatalism, because it throws into question what exactly our fate is.  We typically interpret fatalism as the idea that everything inexorably leads up to a particular point irrespective of our will.  But fatalism still culminates in a particular point, at some special event that defines us an an individual -- our fate.  With ER, the culminating point is empty, and does nothing except throw us back into circulation.  Thus we can no longer justify the past by means of the present.  The idea that, "it was all worth it because I arrived just here and now," no longer carries any force when here and now immediately spin us out into everywhere and anytime.  Just as Nietzsche created a nihilism so extreme that it overcomes itself, he invented a fatalism so extreme that it overcomes the very problem of whether our will is free or determined; in fact, there's no will at all!

Re-willing is the pure adherence to the Vicious Circle: re-willing the entire series one more time -- re-willing all experiences, and all one's acts, but not as mine: this possessive no longer has any meaning, nor does it represent a goal. Meaning and goal are liquidated by the Circle. (NVC, 70)