As a pedagogic device for working on NVC the suggestion I made to my students is that a series of ‘themes’ are identified which then provide a backbone for ‘indexing’ some of the content with a view to building up a ground for exegetical work. The idea would be to take each theme – or at least a selection of them – and find relevant passages within the text in order to then have a focused selection from the text to think about. Obviously these themes interlock but the need to ‘ignore’ some things to focus on others is a methodological tool, enabling us to gain some focus before perhaps expanding again. (This is not, by any means, a comprehensive list of the themes that might be extracted from NVC, nor even a list of the themes which might be thought to be the ‘most central’ or ‘most obvious’. It arises from a particular class and discussion and as such is located in that context is intended to be added to and improved through discussion). (more…)
Category: post-structuralism
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NVC Reading notes #4
Klossowski – Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle – Reading notes for Ch.s 3-5(These notes are partially exegetical for students and partially exploratory for myself).
CH3
The ‘Eternal Return’ is the thought experiment from Nietzsche, the central presentation of which is found in ‘The Gay Science’, S.341 and runs as follows:
‘The heaviest weight. – What if some day or night a demon were to steal into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: ‘This life as you now live it and have lived it you will have to live once again and innumerable times again; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unspeakably small or great in your life must return to you, all in the same succession and sequence – even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned over again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!’ Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: ‘You are a god, and never have I heard anything more divine.’ If this thought gained power over you, as you are it would transform and possibly crush you; the question in each and every thing, ‘Do you want this again and innumerable times again?’ would lie on your actions as the heaviest weight! Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to long for nothing more fervently than for this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?’
In the ‘Will to Power’ #1066 Nietzsche makes a more argumentative presentation although it is still in the form of a hypothetical, a thought experiment (note the opening – ‘If the world may be thought…’ which is akin to saying ‘Just suppose for the sake of argument…’ and then setting up an argument of the If…then… format which I have inserted into the text in italics in this case. If we pay attention to this way of arguing we can see that it is both very compressed and contains a chain of implications from a basic ontological model. The paragraph could be unpacked by trying to reconstruct the line or argument – in other words by trying to make explicit all possible suppressed premises.): (more…)
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NVC Reading notes #2
If one of the first impressions on reading NVC is that something like a ‘psycho-analysis’ is being done then it is worth asking why this impression occurs and what relation to Freud exists. That it should be, in a sense, relatively uncontroversial to suggest NVC ‘reads like’ a psycho-analytic text comes from the emphasis of the biological, biographical and historical interpretation of ‘forces at work’ in Nietzsche, an emphasis on these bio-facts rather than on the texts that resulted. The texts are to be read as expressions of something underneath, something which we might encounter a little like we encounter the unconscious. Texts become symptoms to interpret, something with which to diagnose the ‘real’ or ‘important’ forces that are the ‘truth’ of Nietzsche’s work.
This, however, brings us close to one of the first difficulties. If we take a Freudian psycho-analytic interpretation to occur, as it were, from ‘outside’ the subject then close attention to Klossowski would suggest that the exact opposite is the practice of NVC. For example, in psycho-analytic practice / interpretation the relation of the analyst / interpreter to the analysand / interpreted is crucially important. The establishment of transference, the encounter with an ‘Other’ and the centrality of what i would call the ‘relation as revealing’ suggests a prime importance is given to a kind of sociality. We might say that for psychoanalysis, it is in our ‘being-with’ (mitsein) we find our being. The analyst / interpreter justifies their position on the basis that the addition of their position is necessary to establish this being-with which is a precondition of finding the truth of the analysand /interpreted. This sociality, this being-with, however, is a being-with of subjects and subjects are constituted as language speaking, meaning using beings. Being-with reveals being because it is a kind of ‘being with meaningful beings’. If this seems obscure then let me put it in more colloquial terms.
Take being-with to be ‘sociality’. The claim is something like ‘the way we are with others reveals the way we are’. Thus sociality is just this ‘being with others’ but it is in this ‘others’ that the presupposition can slip through, the metaphysical contraband. To see this think of the situation in which the others are animals, not ‘humans’. The distinction is important because it is as meaning using beings that we place ‘humans’ in a privileged and unthought position of social pre-eminence. Why is it, for example, that the dog you talk to or the cat you confess to cannot play the role of an analyst / interpreter? It is because they cannot offer this ‘mirror of meaning’, they cannot play the role of an analyst because they cannot talk. It is not what an analyst says, of course but the fact that they could say which enables them to play the role they do. It is not that the analysand talks which makes analysis the ‘talking cure’ but rather that the analysand talks to someone who can hear, by which we mean someone who can also talk (and talk back).
How, then, does NVC differ from psychoanalysis?
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Revision for Nietzsche and Modern European Philosophy
For my 3rd year students in NMEP. (This is just a brief and partial account of the discussion today and students are welcome to continue the discussion here on on the WebCT bulletin board if they want a little more privacy, this is a public site after all.)
Today we discussed the way in which we think the subject by exploring the problems involved in the idea of ‘loving a robot/loving a simulation/loving a simulacrum’ and how these might be teased apart. A large part of our understanding of both Klossowski and Deleuze’s works on Nietzsche involve us in thinking about the way in which there is a problem for them, what exactly it is that motivates them, as it were, to write and think in the way they do, particularly when the initial impression when confronted by these two works (Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle:NVC and Nietzsche and Philosophy:NP) is one of disorientation. As we approach an exam we need to supplement the detailed exegetical work done in the essays and the reading seminars with a ‘step back’ that enables us to get a broad sense of dynamics and lines of thought. To that end it is important to remember, I suggested, that Nietzsche is one of the ‘masters of suspicion’ (along with Marx and Freud – the phrase itself originates form Paul Ricoeur) and that both Klossowski and Deleuze begin form a position congruent with such suspicion in that they begin thinking by distrusting the way we think and speak. We use words and as we use them assume we know what they mean, until we are asked what they mean when we find confusion and disagreement. The words we use are capable of possessing us with the feeling that we know something, they possess a sense (or affect, feeling) of sense that we need to be suspicious of in order to begin to think critically. This doers not mean we simply throw out our intuitive relation to meanings and the sense of things, since such a rejection would also imply that we somehow knew what it was we were meaning and now reject it. Uncritical rejection is no better than uncritical possession. Thus the task is to ask, how might we think about the concepts of subject when the language and sense of the concept already exists, how might we think, as it were, in spite of the possession of sense. To do this, I suggested, both Klossowski and Deleuze attempt something we can think of as a reframing of the questions, a redrawing of the lines of debate. This idea of a reframing of the problem is perhaps simplifying things but for now, as a kind of working device or ‘rule of thumb’ to enable us to develop understanding (what is called a ‘heuristic‘), it will suffice.
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NVC Reading notes #1
(Notes primarily for the use of my 3rd year undergrad students on the Nietzsche and Modern European Philosophy course, terms 2 and 3, in which we’re studying Klossowski’s ‘Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle’ and Deleuze’s ‘Nietzsche and Philosophy’ and exploring the problematic of post-structuralism. Page references to the Continuum impacts edition of NVC).
The intention here is to follow a ‘reading strategy’ in which we acknowledge that the style of thinking that occurs within NVC (and perhaps more widely within post-structuralist thinkers) is that of a weave or tapestry, in which words and concepts are introduced without explicit definition and these words are then employed (used) within a line of thought. The meaning of the terms within the text is to be produced through the work of the text, such that the book will constitute its own context within which key terms can be thought through rather than simply argued about. This is not to say that argument is irrelevant, not at all, but rather to emphasise something like a principle of ‘meaning is use’ that underlies much of NVC. Structuralism itself made use of ‘binaries’ in order to begin its analysis with structures and not elements (employed/employer: man/woman: expert/amateur etc), for the simple methodological fact that a single term would be an element and if we are to begin with structures then this must mean, in terms of language and conceptualisation, beginning from relations between words or concepts (what for ease I will simply refer to as ‘terms’). Post-structuralism, then, will continue its emphasis on structures, and as such will continue to find much of interest in the technique of using binaries or pairings of terms although it will not want to presuppose a final and definite order that can be produced from such an analysis. Our reading strategy, then, works on the basis of trying to identify interesting ‘key-words’ that we then try to understand conceptually by examining their oppositional terms. Concretely this begins from finding something that we can identify as a claim and then working backwards and forwards within the immediate context in which the claim is made to try and clarify the relations at work in a particular space of the text. These ‘partial analyses’ will then enable us to begin to reconstruct something like a ‘line of thought or argument’ that is made by the text (or perhaps, better, one of many lines of argument that will be made by the text).
Beginning at the bottom of page 8 and going onto page 9, we find some of the central questions within the first chapter, ‘The combat against culture’, sitting at the head of a short (3 paragraphs) line of argument. Here, as part of that partial analysis just mentioned, I want to pick out four ‘key-words’: reciprocity, idiosyncracy, culture and objectivation.
razorsmile :: philosophy//magic //revolution 