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.
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