"The person can decide to laugh, or to abandon itself to the reflex of laughter, or to the reflex of pain or fatigue. But in 'every such case, the decisions are only the result of an excited or excitable state; they are thus subsequent to the excitation rather than prior to it. In the intensity of pain or pleasure, and especially in voluptuousness, the ‘person’ disappears for a moment, and what remains of consciousness at that point is strictly limited to the corporeal symptom that its very structure inverts. The notion of the unconsciousis here nothing more than an image of forgetfulness- the forgetfulnessof everything that owes its origin to the upright position.
Every human being can lie down, but it lies down because it is certain that it will always remain the same, and that it will be able to get back up or change position. It always believes itself to be in its own body. But its own body is only the fortuitous encounter of contradictory impulses, temporarily reconciled.
I am sick in a body that does not belong to me. My suffering is only an interpretation of the struggle between
certain hnctions or impulses that have been subjugated by the organism, and are now rivals: those which depend on me and those which escape my control. Conversely, the physical agent of my self seems to reject any thoughts I have that no longer ensure its own cohesion, thoughts that proceed fiom a state that is ~ foreign or contrary to that required by the physical agent, which is nonetheless identical to myself But what then is the identity of the self? It seems to depend on the irreversible history of the body, a linkage of causes and effects. But this linkage is pure appearance. The body is constantly being modified so as to form one and the same physiognomy; and it is only when the resources for the body’s rejuvenation are impoverished that the person becomes fixed, and its ‘character’ hardens.
But the different ages of the body are all so many different states, each giving birth to the next. The body is the same body only insofar as a single seLfis able to and wills to be merged with it, with all its vicissitudes. The cohesion of the body is that of the self; the body produces this self, and hence its own cohesion. But for itself, this body dies and is reborn numerous times - deaths and rebirths that the self pretends to survive in its illusory cohesion. In reality, the ages of the body are simply the impulsive movements that form and deform it, and finally tend to abandon it. But just as these impulses are resources for the body, they are also threats to its cohesion. The purely functional cohesion of the body, in the service of the self s identity, is in this sense irreversible. The ages of the self are those of the body’s cohesion, which means that the more this self begns to age in and with the body, and the more it aspires to cohesion, the more it also seeks to return to its starting-point - and thus to recapitulate itself The dread of physical dissolution requires a retrospective vision of its own cohesion. Thus, because the seEf; as a product of the body, attributes this body to itself as its own, and is unable to create another, the self too has its own irreversible history.
The identity of the self, along with that of its ‘own body’, is inseparable from a direction or meaning [sens] formed by the irreversible course of a human life. It experiences this hrection or meaning as its own accom- plishment - whence the eternity of meaning once and for all.
There is, in Nietzsche, an initial conception of fatality that implies this irreversible course, insofar as the self cannot escape from it. At first sight, this love for the fatum, and hence for the irreversible, seemed to have been Nietzsche’s primary imperative.
But beginning with the experience of the Eternal Return, which announced a break with this irreversible once and for all, Nietzsche also developed a new version of fatality - that of the Vicious Circle, which suppresses every goal and meaning, since the begnning and the end always merge with each other.
From this point on, Nietzsche would no longer be concerned with the body as a property of the seg but with the body as the locus of impulses, the locus of their confrontation. Since it is a product of the impulses, the body becomes fortuitous; it is neither irreversible nor reversible, because its only history is that of the impulses. These impulses come and go, and the circular movement they describe is made manifest as much in moods as in thought, as much in the tonalities of the soul as in corporeal depressions - which are moral only insofar as the declarations and judgements of the self re-create in language a property that is in itself inconsistent, and hence empty.
But despite all this, Nietzsche would not forgo cohesion. He struggled at one and the same time with the to-and-fro movement of the impulses, and for a new cohesion between his thought and the body as a corporealizing thought. To do this, he followed what he called, in several places, the guiding thread of the body. By examining the alternations in his own valetudinary states, he sought to follow this Ariadne’s thread through the labyrinth of the impulses.
Convalescence was the signal of a new offensive of the ‘body’ - this rethought body - against the 'thinking Nietzsche self. This in turn paved the way for a new relapse. For Nietzsche, each of these relapses, up until the final relapse, heralded a new inquiry and a new investment in the world of the impulses, and in each case he paid the price of an ever-worsening illness. In each case the body liberated itself a little more from its own agent, and in each case this agent was weakened a little more. Little by little, the brain was forced to approach the boundaries that separated it from these somatic forces, in that the reawakening of the self in the brain was brought about ever more slowly. And even when it occurred, it was these same forces that seized hold of the functional mechanism. The self was broken down into a lucidity that was more vast but more brief. The equilibrium of the functions was reversed: the seljlay dormant in words, in the fixity of signs; and the forces were awakened all the more in that they still remained silent; and memory, finally, was detached from the cerebral self, a memory that could no longer desknate itself except in accordance with its most distant motifs.
How can the body subtract the cerebral activity from what we call the self? And first of all: how is the self re-established by the brain? There is no other way than by passing through the limit that is constantly redrawn in and by the waking state. But the walung state never lasts more than a few seconds. At every instant, the brain is flooded by excitations of greater or lesser intensity, excitations whose overwhelming reception must constantly be filtered. The new excitations are filtered through the traces of prior excitations, which have already been absorbed. But the new excitations can be co-ordinated with prior ones only through assimilation, namely, by comparing what is ‘habitual’ with what is foreign.
As a result, the limit cannot help but be effaced; after a few seconds, a large part of the brain is already dormant. Any decision or resolution made to not think an action so as to be able to execute it, presumes that only the trace of prior excitations is admitted, which assures the permanence of the selfs identity. Thanks to the body’s muteness, we appropriate the body for ourselves in order to remain upright. W e create for ourselves an image of a meaning or a goal that we pursue in our thoughts and actions, namely, to remain the same as what we believe ourselves to be.
To restore these ‘corporealizing’ forces (impulses) to thought amounts to an expropriation of the agent, of the self. Yet Nietzsche brought abbut this restoration and expropriation through his brain. He used his lucidity to penetrate the shadows. But how can one remain lucid if one destroys the locus of lucidity, namely, the self? What would this consciousnessbe without an agent? How can memory subsist if it has to deal with things that no longer belong to the self? How can we remember as a being that can remember everything except itsev
Nietzsche’s researches in the biological and physiological sciences stemmed from a double preoccupation: first, to find a mode of behaviour, in the organic and inorganic world, that was analogous to his own valetudinary state; and second, based on this mode of behaviour, to find the arguments and resources that would allow him to re-create himself, beyond his own self. Physiology, as he understood it, would thus provide him with the premises of a liberatory conception of the forces that lay subjacent
not only to his own condition, but also to the various situations he was living through in the context of his epoch. Nietzsche’s investigationsinto science had the same aim as his investigationsinto art, or into contemporary and past political events. This is why he resorted to various terminologies, to which he gave increasingly equivocal turns of phrase. When borrowing from the various disciplines, he gave them h s own emphases, and pursued a vision that escaped them - a vision which, because of its experimental character, lacked any ‘objective’ consideration.
Since the body is the Self resides in the midst of the body and expresses itself through the body - for Nietzsche, this was already a fundamental position. Everything his brain had refused him lay hidden in his corporeal life, this intelligence that was larger than the seat of the intelligence.Alevil and suffering are the result of the quarrel between the body’s multiplicity, with its millions of vague impulses, and the interpretive stubbornness of the meaning bestowed on it by the brain. It is from the body, from the self that every creative force and every evaluation arises. And it is from their cerebral inversion that mortal spectres are born, starting with a voluntary ego, a mind 'deprived of itself. Likewise, the other person, the neighbour, is nothing but a projection of the Self through the inversions of the mind: the you [tot] has no more reality than the me [moi], except as a pure modification of the Self finally, exists in the body only as a prolonged extremity of Chaos - impulses take on an organic and individualized form only when delegated by Chaos. It was this delegation that now became Nietzsche’s interlocutor. From high in the cerebral citadel, besieged, it is called madness.
"Listen to me a moment, O Zarathustra - a disciple said to him one day - something is turning around in my head: or rather I would be prepared to believe that my head is turning around something, and thus that it describes a circle.
What then is our neighbour? Something within us, some modifications of ourselves that have become con- scious: an image, this is what our neighbour is.
What are we ourselves? Are we not also nothing but an image? A something within us, modifications of ourselves that have become conscious?
Our Self ofwhich we are conscious: is it not an image as well, something outside of us, something external, on the outside? W e never touch anything but an image, and not ourselves, not our Self.
Are we not strangers to ourselves and also as close to ourselves as our neighbour?
In truth, we have an image of humanity - which we have made out of ourselves. And then we apply it to ourselves- in order to understand ourselves! Ah yes, to understand!
Our understandng of ourselves goes from bad to worse!
Our strongest feelings, inasmuch as they are feelings, are only somethng external, outside us, imagistic: similitudes, that’s what they are.
And what we habitually call the inner world: alas, for the most part it is poor and deceptive and invented and hollow."
Once the body is recognized as the product of the impulses (subjected, organized, hierarchized), its cohesion with the self becomes fortuitous. The impulses can be put to use by a new body, and are presupposed in the search for new conditions. Starting fiom these impulses, Nietzsche suspected that beyond the (cerebral) intellect there lies an intellect that is infinitely more vast than the one that merges with our consciousness.
Perhaps the entire evolution of the spirit is a question of the body; it is the history of the development of a higher body that emerges into our sensibility. The organic is rising to yet higher levels. Our lust for knowledge of nature is a means through which the body desires to perfect itself. Or rather: hundreds of thousands of experiments are made to change the nourishment, the mode of living and the dwelling of the body; consciousness and evaluations of the body, all kinds of pleasure and displeasure, are signs of these changes and experiments. In the long run, it is not a question of man at all: he is to be 0vercome.
Clear out the inner world! There are as many false beings in it! Sensation and thought are enough for me. The ‘will’ as a third reality is imaginary. Moreover, all the impulses, desire, repulsion, etc., are not ‘unities’, but apparent ‘simple states’. Hunger: it is a feeling of discomfort and a knowledge of the means to suppress it. Similarly, without any knowledge, a series of movements can take place in the organism whose aim is to suppress hunger: the stimulation of this mechanism isfelt at the same time as the hunger.
What then is it that requires even the most lucid agent to remain unconscious of what is going on within itself? Nietzsche knows, for example, as he writes his notes on the impulses, that such impulses are acting in him, but that there is no accord between the observations he is transcribing and the impulses that have compelled him to write them. But if he is conscious of what he is writing, as the agent named Nietzsche, it is because he knows not only that he is ignorant of what has just occurred in order for him write, but also that he must be ignorant of it (if he wants to write and think). A t that very moment he is necessarily ignorant of what he is about to call the combat ofthe impulses among themselves. Even if he stops writing, even if he tries to stop thinking - could we say that he is therefore abandoning himself to the unconscious (in the form of an extravagant reverie)?
This is one aspect of the phenomenon that would lead Nietzsche to try to specify the relationship between the ‘conscious’ agent and the so-called ‘unconscious’ activity of the impulses in relation to this agent - for it is the agent that is ‘unconscious’ of this ‘subterranean’ activity. His inquiry would be undertaken in the hope of demonstrating that morality, which lies at the origin of every investigation, will be arrested only when it destroys its own foundation. Nietzsche pursues his inquiry in order to make himself finally admit that there is neither subject, nor object, nor will, nor aim, nor meaning - not only at the origin, but for now and always.
The notions of consciousness and unconsciousness, which are derived from what is responsible or irresponsible, always presuppose the unity of the person of the ego, of the subject - a purely institutional distinction, which is why it plays such an important role in psychiatric considerations. From the outset, this unity appears as little more than a Jickering memory, maintained exclusively by the designations of the everyday code - w h c h intervene in accordance with changing excitations, upon which they impose their own linkages in order to conceal the total discontinuity of our state.
For even when we are alone, silent, speakinginternally to ourselves, it is still the outside that
is speaking to us - thanks to these signs from the exterior that invade and occupy us, and whose murmuring totally covers over our impulsive life. Even our innermost recesses, even our so-called inner lije,is stdl the residue of signs institutedfrom the outside under the pretext of signifjmg us in an ‘objective’ and ‘impartial’ manner - a residue that no doubt takes on the conzguration of the impulsive movement characteristic of each person, and follows the contours of our ways of reacting to this invasion of signs, which we have not invented ourselves. This then is our ‘consciousness’. Where does that leave our ‘unconscious’? W e cannot even look for it in our dreams. For here again, if everything on the other side of the waking state were reconstructed, this would simply be the same system of signs of the everyday code being put to a different use. It is because of the difference between this use and the use that prevails in the walung state that we can more or less recall our dreams afterwards, and relate the strange words, or the words of a strange banality, that are offered there, through us or through other figures. Moreover, in the waking state we are capable of uttering things of the same type - whether in jest, or through fatigue, or through some other disturbance. When someone tells us that we are ‘dreaming out loud’, it means that something impulsive has shaken or upset the code of everyday signs: we have been surprised by our ‘unconscious’. But this is nothing: even for someone to say this to us, the use of everyday signs is required - by the interlocutor, even if it is a psychiatrist. This implies that we are totally dependent on the everyday code, even when we let ourselves be surprised by our ‘unconscious’ - which, at the very least, will learn how to use the code in order to play with it and twist it around, as it pleases, even when we make fun of the psychiatrist and conceal our ‘desire’ to be ‘cured’. This is why the strange behaviour that would result would be, in most cases, nothing but a ruse. But a ruse of what?
The ruse consists in making us believe in the coexistence of a consciousness and an unconsciousness;for if the latter survives in us, our consciousness would merely be a capacity to enter into an exchange with the exteriority of the code of everyday signs, and this capacity would amount to little more than receiving as much as possible while gving as little as possible. But we have no need to retain the greater part of this code - for the simple reason that we will never give up anything whatsoever of our own depth.
The more we hold our depth in reserve for use at the proper moment, the less we penetrate into our depth. A superfluous precaution: in effect, our depth is unexchangeable because it does not signijjy anything. Because of this unexchangability,we cover ourselves with the blanket we call understanding, culture, morality - all of which are based on the code of everyday signs. Beneath this cover, there would be only this nothingness, or this depth, or this Chaos, or any other unnameable thing that Nietzsche might dare to utter.
Why then did Nietzsche so insist on the unconscious that he sought an aim and a meaning in it? And why, on the other hand, did he reduce consciousness to nothing more than a means to this end, to this ‘unconscious’ meaning?Once again, he did so in order to make use of language (the language of science and culture), to answer for what he had received, or thought he had received, as the last link in a long tradition. The suppression of the true world was also the suppression of the apparent world - and also entailed the suppression of the notions of consciousness and unconsciousness - the outside and the inside. We are only a succession of discontinuous states in relation to the code of everyday signs, and about which thejxity of language deceives us. As long as we depend on this code, we can conceive our continuity, even though we live discontinuously. But these discontinuous states merely concern the way we use, or do not use, the fixity of language: to be conscious is to make use of it. But how could we ever know what we are when we fall silent?
"If we wished to postulate a goal adequate to life, it could not coincide with any category of conscious life; it would rather have to explain all of them as a means to itself - The ‘denial of life’ as an aim of life, an aim of evolution! Existence as a great stupidity! Such a lunatic interpretation is only the product of measuring life by means of consciousness (pleasure and displeasure, good and evil). Here the means are made to stand against the end - the ‘unholy’, absurd, above all unpleasant means
- : how can an end that employs such means be worth anything! But the mistake is that, instead of looking for a purpose that explains the necessity of such means, we presuppose in advance a goal that actually excludes such means; i.e. we take a desideratum in respect of certain means (namely pleasant, rational, and virtuous ones) as a norm, on the basis of which we posit what general purpose would be desirable -
The fundamental mistake is simply that, instead of understanding consciousness as a tool and particular aspect of the total life, we posit it as the standard and the conhtion of life that is of supreme value: it is the erroneous perspective of a parte ad totum- which is why all philosophers are instinctively trying to imagne a total consciousness, a consciousness involved in all life and will, in all that occurs, a ‘spirit’, ‘God’. But one has to tell them that precisely this turns life into a monstrosity; that a ‘God’ and total sensorium would altogether be something on account of which life would have to be condemned - Precisely that we have eliminated the total consciousness that posited ends and means, is our great relief - with that we are no longer compelled to be pessimists - Our greatest reproach against existence was the existence of God." [Nietzsche]
How then can we affirm the authenticity of life in an intelhgble manner? When Nietzsche borrowed the terms means and end from language, he was paying tribute to the valorization of language. For although he knew that meaning and goal are mere fictions, as are the ‘ego’, ‘identity’, ‘duration’ and ‘willing’, it was nonetheless through these same designations that he agreed to speak in favour of an end - (neither Chaos nor the Eternal Return pursue any end other than themselves)- and of the means he was putting forward, which were capable of being willed.
The terms conscious and unconscious are therefore applicable to nothing that is real. If Nietzsche made use of them, it was only as a ‘psychological’ convention, but he nonetheless let us hear what he did not say: namely, that the act of thinking corresponds to a passivity, and that the passivity is grounded in the fixity of the signs of language whose combinations simulate gestures and movements that reduce language to silence.
"- Every movement should be conceived as a gesture, a kind of language in which (impulsive) forces make themselves heard. In the inorganic world there is no misunderstanding, communication seems to be per- fect. Error begins in the organic world. ‘Things’, ‘substances’, ‘qualities’, ‘activities’ - we must guard against their projection into the inorganic world! These are errors of species, through which organ- isms live. The problem of the possibility of ‘error’? The contradiction is not between the ‘false’ and the ‘true’ but between the ‘abbreviations of signs’ and the ‘signs’ themselves. The essential point: the creation of forms, which represent numerous move- ments, the invention of signs for all types of signs.
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All movements are signs of an inner event; and every inner movement is expressed by such modijications offorms. Thought is not yet the inner event itself, but only a semiotic corresponding to the compensation of the power of the afects.
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The humanization of nature - interpretation according to we others."
In the inorganic world, communication seems perfect. Nietzsche means: there is no possible disagreement between what is strong and what is weak. ‘Every power draws its ultimate consequence at every moment’, he says elsewhere.62 Persuasion is immediate.
In the organic world, by contrast, where exchange and assimilation are necessary, misunderstandmg becomes poss- ible, since exchange and assimilation take place only through interpretation: from trial and error to certainty - the certainty of the conditions of existence. The latter can be obtained only after a long experimentation with the similar and the dissdar, and thus with identity. Only then can points of reference, repetition and comparison appear - and finally, comparable signs.
Now in a universe dominated by the inorganic, organic life is itself a fortuitous case - hence a possible ‘error’ in the cosmic economy. It is within this economy that interpretation, grounded in the fear oferror, becomes susceptible to error. Even if the origin of organic life lies in purely random combinations, it can no longer behave randomly once it comes into existence. It must believe in its necessity, and therefore it must maintain the conditions of its existence, and to do so it must avoid chance and not commit any errors. Hence the double aspect of error in Nietzsche: life depends on an illusion (its ‘necessity’) - whence the verhct: 'Truth is the kind oferror without which a certain species of liji could not live.'63
Let us retain this complex in Nietzsche’s thought formed by ‘chance’, ‘error’, and the ‘interpretation of the conditions of existence’: the illusion of their necessity, as well as the necessity of their illusion.
The agent now thinks, or believes it is thinking, depending on whether it feels its persistence to be threatened or assured - and notably the persistence of its intellect. The intellect is nothing more than a repulsion of anything that might destroy the cohesion between the agent and this abbreviating system (as when the adventure of the agent gives way tof.luctuations of intensity, devoid of any intention); or, on the contrary, it is a pure and simple impulse (insofar as it abbreviates these fluctuations in the form of thought). Now how is thought itself possible - if not because the fluctuations of intensity are ceaselessly opposed to their own ‘abbreviation’? Nietzsche says that we have no language to express what is in becoming. Thought is always the result of a momentary relation of power between impulses, principally between those that dominate and those that resist. The fact that one thought succeeds another thought - the second apparently engendered by the first - is the sign, says Nietzsche, of how the situation of power among the impulses is modijed in the interval. And he adds: i ‘the will’ - a fallacious reification. By which he means that all ‘willing’ that starts with ‘consciousness’ is still merely a fiction, due to this abbreviation ofsigns by the signs themselves.
Now it is a condition of existence for the agent to be ignorant of the combat from which its thought is derived: it is not this living unity of the ‘subject’, but 'the combat of the
impulses that wills to maintain it.
'The combat that wills to maintain itself. This was the unintelligible and authentic depth out of which Nietzsche wanted to establish a new cohesion, beyond the agent, between the ‘body’ and ‘Chaos’ - a state of tension between the fortuitous cohesion of the agent and the incoherence of Chaos.
Since perspectivism is the characteristic illusion of this automaton, to provide it with the knowledge of this illusory perspective, the ‘consciousness’ of this ‘unconscious’, is to create the conditions of a new freedom, a creative 'freedom. The ‘consciousness’ of the ‘unconscious’ can consist only in a simulation of forces. It is not a matter of destroying what Nietzsche calls the abbreviation (of signs) by signs themselves - the encoding of movements - but of retranslating the ‘conscious’ semiotic into the semiotic of the impulses.
What the doctrine of the vicious Circle tends to demonstrate is that 'belief in the Return, adherence to the non-sense of life, in itself implies an otherwise impracticable lucidity. W e cannot renounce language, nor our intentions, nor our wding; but we could evaluate this willing and these intentions in a dgerent manner than we have hitherto evaluated them - namely, as subject to the ‘law’ of the vicious Circle.
Moreover, the doctrine of the vicious Circle, which is a sign of forgetfulness, is grounded in’ the fo*grtjulness of what we have been and will be, not only for innumerable times, but for all time and always. We are other than what we are now: others that are not elsewhere, but always in this same l$. Now for Nietzsche, is not lucidity (which means the thought of a total discordance between the hidden reality and the one that is claimed or admitted) the opposite of life? Is it not the inertia of power? Is it not precisely the non-true, the error that permits the human species to survive? Does not the unconsciousness of this ‘physiological conditioning’ correspond to certain indispensable conditions of existence for this animal species? Is this not what Nietzsche has been ceaselessly affirming? However, had he not stated with equal force that the only way we can overcome our servitude is by knowing that we are not free? That as pure mechanisms, pure automatons, we gain in spontaneity by knowing this?
On the one hand, forgefulness and unconsciousness are necessary to life; on the other hand, there is a ‘will to unconsciousness’ which, precisely because it is willed, implies the consciousness of our conditioned state: an irresoluble antinomy.
Now ‘life itself created this grave thought [of the Eternal Return]; life wants to overcome its supreme 0bstacle’.
Thus, in the course of this final message, Nietzsche was dispersed and reassembled at different levels, and at different intervals of time. Whereas the greatest suffering was evoked one last time in order .for Nietzsche to sign h s own name, the greatest delight was made manifest at the level of the impulsive fluctuations: namely, the freedom to designate themselves at last, according to their own interpretation.
Nietzsche’s obsessive thought had always been that events, actions, apparent decisions, and indeed the entire world have a completely different aspect from those they have taken on, from the beginning of time, in the sphere of language. Now he saw the world beyond language: was it the sphere of absolute muteness, or on the contrary the sphere of absolute language?The agent no longer led anything back to itself, but led itself into all things, which all designated themselves with the same swiftness as so many ‘in-themselves’. . . .
Was this a matter of that inversion of time ofwhich Nietzsche spoke in a previous fragment? ’ W e believe in the external world as the cause of its action on us - but in fact it is precisely this action, which takes place unconsciously, that we have transfovmed into the external world: our work is whatever the world makes us confront, which will henceforth react upon us. Time is necessary for it to be achieved: but this time is so short.'177
In no time at all: the external world, ‘our work’ - this is what his euphoria recuperated. How can the world again become internalized?How can we again become externalized so that we are ourselves the effective action of the world? Where in us would the world end? Where would it begin? There is no limit to one and the same action.
The euphoria of Turin led Nietzsche to maintain, in a kind of interpretive availability, the residues of everything that constituted the past in the context of his present experience. What everyday life normally holds at a distance, so as to receive only the bare fact of the day after duy - this is what suddenly irrupted in Nietzsche: the horizon of the past crept closer until it merged with the everyday, until they both occupied the same level. In return, everyday things abruptly receded into the distance: yesterday became today, the day before yesterday spilled over into tomorrow. The landscape of Turin, the monumental squares, the promenades along the Po River, were bathed in a kind of ‘Claude Lorraine’ luminosity (Dostoevsky’s golden age), a diaphanousness that removed the weight of things and made them recede into an infinite distance. The stream of liiht here became a stream of laughter - the laughterfrom which truth emerges, the laughter in which all identities explode, including Nietzsche’s. What also exploded was the meaning that things can have or lose for other things, not in terms of a limited linkage or a narrow context, but in terms of variations of light (despite the fict that this light is perceived by the mind before it exists for the eye, or that a reminiscence emanates from its rays).
‘I thank heaven every moment for the old world, for which human beings have not been simple and quiet enough.’*7" The ‘simplicity’ of Nietzsche’s vision at Turin almost had a Holderlinian accent to it - being precisely the irony of the society gossip column.
Because it was a ‘jubilant dissolution’, Nietzsche’s euphoria could not last as long as Holderlin’s contemplative alienation. Holderlin’s desolation elevated him to a high place of peace and forgetfulness where he was constantly visited by silent images, with whch he could dialogue in the same simple, calm and melodious language. The silence of Holderlin’s poems of ‘madness’ has nothing in common with Nietzsche’s menacing silence, the price of the histrionic explosion at Turin. The vision of the world accorded to Nietzsche was not unveiled in a more or less regular succession of landscapes and still lifes, extending over a period of forty years. It was a parody of the recollection of an event. It was mimed by a single actor during one solemn day - because everything was said and then disappeared in the span of a single day, even if this day had to last from 31 December to 6 January, beyond the rational calendar.
Such is the world as it appeared to Nietzsche under the monumental aspect of Turin: a discontinuity of intensities that are given names only through the intetpretation of those who receive his messages; the latter still represent the fixity ofsigns, whereas in Nietzsche this jxity no longer exists. That the fluctuations of intensities were able to assume the opposite name to designate themselves - such is the miraculous irony. W e must believe that this coincidence of the phantasm and the sign has existed for all time, and that the strength required to follow the detour through the intellect was ‘superhuman’. N o w that the agent ‘Nietzsche’ is destroyed, there is a festival for a few days, a few hours, or a few instants - but it is a sacrificial festival:
FIRE AND CONSUMMATION, THIS IS WHAT OUR ENTIRE LIFE MUST BE, OH YOU WIND-BAGS OF TRUTH! AND THE VAPOUR AND INCENSE OF THE SACRIFICES WILL LIVE LONGER THAN THE VICTIMS.'"
But what happens to conceptual coherence when the intellect becomes a mere tool in the service of the unconscious?
Nietzsche’s thought relentlessly examines the competition between the arbitrary constraint imposed by the freedom of the impulses, and the persuasive constraint of the intellect - the latter in turn being defined as an impulse.
But what type of discourse can reconcile ‘coherence’ with thefactoftheimpulses- especiallyiftheimpulsesareinvoked as an end, whereas the producer of the ‘concept’, namely the intellect, is used as a tool by this arbitrary ‘incoherence’? For we can speak of incoherence only in the terms of the intellect.
How could Nietzsche translate the arbitrary freedom of the unintelligble depth into a persuasive constraint? W d not discourse simply become arbitrary and devoid of any con- straint? No doubt, if the conceptual form were maintained. It is therefore necessary for this form to reproduce - under the constraint of the impulsive fluctuations and in a completely desultory manner - the discontinuity that intervenes between the coherence of the intellect and the incoherence of the
impulses. Rather than pursuing the birth of the concept at the level of the intellect, it comes to interpret the concept. Such is the form of the aphorism.
“One should not conceal and corrupt the fact that our thoughts come to us in a fortuitous fashion. The profoundest and least exhausted books will probably also have something of the aphoristic and unexpected character of Pascal’s Penskes. The driving forces and the evaluations lay below the surface a long time; what comes out is effect.”
To prevent discourse from being reduced to the level of a fallacious coherence, it must be compelled toward a type of thought that does not refer back to itself (i.e., to the intellect), in a kind of edifice of subsequent thoughts, but is pushed to a limit where thought puts a stop to itself [mette un terme 2 elle-mlme]. Insofar as thought turns out to be efficacious, it is not as an utterance of the intellect but as the premeditation of an action. In the latter case, what thought retains from the intellect is only the representation of a possible event - a (premeditated) action in a double sense. Since thought is the act of the intellect, this act ofpremeditating - which is no longer a new intellectual act but an act that suspends the intellect - seeks to produce (itself in) a fact. It can no longer even be referred to as a thought but as a fact that happens to thought, as an event that brings thought back to its own origin. There is something resistant in thought that drives it forward - toward its point of departure.
Nietzsche, following this process to its source, thus discovers that of which thought is only a shadow: the strength to resist. How then is the intellect constituted so that the agent is capable of producing only representations?
Representations are nothing but the reactualization of a prior event, or the reactualizing preparation for a future event. But in truth, the event in turn is only a moment in a continuum which the agent isolates in relation to itself in its representations, sometimes as a result, sometimes as a beginning. As soon as the agent reflects on it, it is itself only the result or begnning of something else. Every meditation that happens to us is only the trace of something prior, a ‘pre-meditation’ incorporated into ourselves - namely, a premeditation of the now-‘useless’ acts that have constituted us, so much so that our representations only reactualize the prior events of our own organization.
How can the coherence of the agent with a determinate impulse - once this coherence, which in a certain manner is adulterous with respect to the intellect, puts in question the agent as agent - be transmitted as an idea to another intellect? Idea means that the intellect conceives it - reconstructs it - even before judging it true or false. Must it not, at the moment of its transmission, awaken the other intellect as an impulse (adhesion) or a repulsion (negation, disapproval) - and immediately set in motion what, in the other intellect, constitutes its coherence as agent? Must it not bring its own organization back to the level of resistance or non-resistance?
The phantasm - the phantasmic coherence of the agent with a determined impulse - is thus produced at the limit-point where this impulse is turned into a thought (of this impulse) as a repulsion against the adulterous coherence- precisely so that it can appear at the level of the intellect, no longer as a threat to the agent’s coherence with itseK but on the contrary as a legitimate coherence. In this way, it can retain its thinkable character for another intellect. But nothing of the phantasm remains in the idea thus transmitted, or rather created according to totally different dimensions.
If the phantasm is what makes each of us a singular case - in order to defend it against the institutional signification given to it by the gregarious group - the singular case cannot avoid resorting to the simulacrum as something that is equivalent to its phantasm - as much as for a fraudulent exchange between the singular case and the gregarious generality. But if this exchange is fraudulent, it is because it is willed as such by both the generality and the singular case. The singular case disappears as such as soon as it signijes what it is for itselj In the indvidual there is only a particular case ofthe species that assures its intelligibility. Not only does it disappear as such as soon as it formulates its phantasm to itself - for it can never do this except through instituted signs - but it cannot reconstitute itself through these signs without at the same time excluding from itself what has become intelligible or exchangeable in it." [Nietzsche and the Vicious circle]
