Vicious circle

More than usual, i'm going to have to accept a certain level confusion and incoherence talking about a couple of books about Nietzsche. First a couple of words about the book that isn't the subject of this entry - that I don't really mean to talk about, not here, not yet. Earlier in the summer I read Bataille's 'On Nietzsche', which is a baffling book of which Nietzsche is more the theme than the subject. Occasionally in the book Bataille mimics Nietzsche, adopting his style, especially through aphorisms. Occasionally he interprets and explains Nietzsche, sometimes he argues with him, often he develops his own idea at length, ideas that are related to Nietzsche tangentially or not at all (when they aren't in direct opposition to Nietzsche - though Nietzsche is held in reverence above all other thinkers and writers). Parts of the book are a sort of journal, in which he's chronicling his daily life near the end of the second world war, amid strange evacuations and dislocations, much of it focusing around an affair with an unnamed woman, who's probably someone else's wife, an affair that doesn't seem to have a possible future. The books not fresh in my mind, and I'm not sure what the value of it is. I was planning to go back to it once I've read another book of Bataille's that might help me make a little bit more sense of some of his central ideas. I'm not sure why I bring the book up exactly, except to make a distinction between two different sorts of difficulty. Finishing Bataille's book, I would have found it difficult to write much, except, of course, focusing very specifically on certain illuminating passages, because the book is mystical and obscure. I've just finished Klossowski's book 'Nietzsche and the vicious circle', and I know I'm going to be a bit jumbled, and that my understanding isn't quite what it should be just because it is the sort of dense, difficult work that needs to be read through a few times carefully, whereas I only had time for a single quick read-through. It does seem to me to merit all the praise and attention it's received over the years - it is the product of decades of writing on Nietzsche - it influenced and was influenced by just about everyone. I don't know how much you know about Klossowski... Polish... he comes out of the College de sociologie, along with Bataille, Leiris and Certeau. He wrote a couple of well-known and strange novels, and of course his book on Sade. That Bataille actually got Klossowski started on Nietzsche shows through, perhaps, in his interest in embracing chance - making chance necessity and placing that near the heart of the eternal return. A certain closeness to Deleuze comes about in the interest in the relation of forces (I know there was a sort of cross-fertilization there. Deleuze's book on Nietzsche comes out in the early sixties, and the actual book version of the vicious circle comes out near the end of the same decade, though Deleuze had read Klossowski's earlier essays, which were subsumed by the book, and he was heavily influenced by the vicious circle in some of his later writing).
Anyway, at the heart of the book is Nietzsche's revelation of the eternal return at SIls-Maria, and the texts that are most carefully pored over are posthumous fragments (there's also a certain amount of correspondence brought in - the published works are taken into account, but kind of secondary... I think I'm going to jus sort of list off some of the main things that he draws out of Nietzsche's writing:
- the self is a sort of meeting point of a multiplicity of impulses... in previous posts we have begun to touch on thought in relation to language and whether there is anything prior to language... here thought is largely a translation of impulses into language (or codes of everyday communication). Image turns into idea turns into concept. Before language comes a tonality (which is a slightly unexpected translation of Stimmung, though 'mood' does lose some of the musical resonance of the German), or an intensity..
- All that happens and all we do derives from the meeting of and conflict between competing impulses. Impulses and energies have no goal or aim beyond themselves, they mean nothing. They cannot, however, just endure, remain... energy is always in movement and always aims to increase.
- Consciousness needs a goal or an aim, and must interpret its own impulses in such a way that they are given one - one that would correspond to the further excitation and increase of that impulse.
- The various strengths of different impulses determines which ones will win out, the self is not a separate and stronger arbiter that can change this and make decisions about it, it is a result of impulses, that interprets, and can choose to will what is already a necessity.
- The eternal return of the same is an event that stands for everything that can ever happen and ever has happened - it is embracing the entire set of all possibilities (numerous but finite), including those that have led to the formation of the self that recognizes the eternal return. It is the recognition that the eternal ebb and flow of impulses that constantly circles in on itself is without meaning or end, and that life requires it constantly be given a meaning through fabulation... it is possible logically and theoretically to believe in determinism, but in order to live it is necessary to act as though will and choice exist (and on some level to believe it)
- Recognition of the eternal return must be forgotten, and rediscovered. The words, the signs of the experience can persist but the actual experience of recognition can't.
- there are two ways an impulse can develop (here my distortion and confusion is definitely picking up pace and things that don't belong together are getting mixed together)... there's a vertical development of the individual impulse being strengthened... the cultivation of the individual/ the exception, of intensity... or the horizontal gregarious flow that strengthens the group at the expense of the individual (sort of like entropy, except not). Here I really should stop, since I'm aware I'm veering off course. I'm not sure I should be talking about impulses here where all the discussion of the cultivation of the exception at the expense of the norm cuts in, where society should exist for the individual rather than the other way around. To be honest, discussions of Nietzsche's thoughts on health and sickness, on conspiracy, on real masters verse apparent masters, those things are straightforward and easy to follow in Klossowski's book, but what's most important and most interesting really are the most difficult aspects - and I know I'm only starting to unravel the actual explanation of the eternal return - each moment being in a sense the goal of the whole, the need for fabulation, etc. I hoe I get a chance to come back and clarify the whole thing before long... but I'm pretty sure it won't happen before Christmas, and even then, I know there's other stuff I kind of have to read. I'm horribly behind where I'm supposed to be, and I'm stuck in a system that puts a premium on quantity of things touched on rather than depth of understanding (though had I made use of my time this summer, I could have devoted a month to understanding this one thing or something else really well, rather than simply goofing off and not doing anything productive at all - the system maybe a bit perverse, but I guess it does actually aim at both - massive quantities balanced by a few things that it is assumed that you will pay more attention to, which is somewhat sensible. It's my own fault I've spent a lot of time not working in any way shape or form - surface or depth).