otobiographies

Among the things I ought to know and don't... as 'spurs' is Derrida largely reacting to Heidegger's book on Nietzsche, and taking as his central subject Nietzsche's conception of truth or the philosopher's relation to truth, 'otobiographies' is mainly a reaction to Ecce Homo, and takes as its main topic Nietzsche's relation to the proper name (sort of). What I don't know and should is how, exactly, Derrida reads the eternal return. The lecture was first prepared for a bicentennial conference in Virginia, and the organizer would have liked for him to talk about the declaration of independence in relation to the French declaration of the rights of Man. Derrida declared himself unqualified and unprepared to do so. He does look over the beginning of the declaration, written by Jefferson and signed exclusively by people who weren't Jefferson, and he opens a questioning of signatures - signing in whose name and under whose authority... is this a performative or a constatative act - is it through the act of signing that independence is declared or is this officially acknowledging a declaration that has already been made? The civil authority that guarantees that signature comes into being through that signature, it is the 'good people' of America who are represented, etc. Ultimately authorization is passed back through the people to nature and natural law, which is referred back to the God who created nature, who is in the last instance the guarantor of the signatures in the constitution. All this is a preamble to a discussion of Nietzsche, which is a discussion of signatures, of biography, of education and of the co-opting of Nietzsche's name by the Nazis. Derrida makes a good deal of Nietzsche claiming to be the dead father and the living mother, alive and dead simultaneously... under mention of the living feminine, there are echoes of 'spurs', or all the positive feminine associations that Derrida has previously emphasized in talking about Nietzsche's misogyny and non-misogyny (Nietzsche is himself pregnant with thought - positive and negative images of femininity and of masculinity co-exist in Derrida's reading, but when woman is denounced, it is usually as a man-woman, negative insofar as imperfectly woman... though there is no essential femininity or masculinity, no eternal principal for either gender, etc. etc.) If I remember Ecce Homo correctly, Nietzsche has mostly praise for his gentle father and mostly condemnation for his shrewish mother, but there is none of this in otobiographies, and I'll have to go back and check whenever I get a chance (which won't be before this exam). Anyone, there's a Blanchotian death inscribed in life inscribed in death dynamic. Te line from Zarathustra is brought up about the reverse cripple, the tiny, feeble little stalk of a man attached to a giant ear, who the crowd hails as a genius. Derrida brings this together with a lot of the passages where Nietzsche talks about 'those who have the right ears to hear me' to open the theme of reception, and to the line in Ecce Homo where Nietzsche states "I am telling myself my life story' to open up a split between Nietzsche recounting and Nietzsche listening, the man/ life and his name. There are passages where Nietzsche separates his name from himself and recognizes that the two do not necessarily have the same destiny, the same future to look forward to. (The ear passage has quite a lot of ideas attached to it actually, not all of which Derrida develops or even references - the giant ear represents both an imbalance between the faculties - one being overdeveloped, but in the overdeveloped faculty it also represents a lack of subtlety. Derrida is, of course, attracted to the labyrinthine structure of the ear, and at the end of the book he presents Nietzsche's critique of the university system, pretend autonomy in the service of the state, with the image of many ears attached by umbilical cord to a single mouth, and half as many hands... lecturer and listeners. Most important in his reading through ears, quite apart from rough or nuanced big or small is simply the idea of the right ears, very few being properly attuned to the particular harmony of the body of work in question). Anyhow, the passage in the book that would be most worth understanding, and which I can't really claim to understand, leads back to who the guarantor is behind Nietzsche's signature, and the answer beyond Nietzsche's own statement "I live on my own credit, and perhaps it is only a prejudice that I live", is that the signature is guaranteed by the eternal return of the same - which is not the same. The dead father and living mother, decadence and rebirth, are combined in the image of the phoenix. What returns is affirmation, is only that which is capable of being affirmed, which is active and not reactive (this is a theme that runs throughout the French reading of Nietzsche, and if there is one idea I absolutely have to have a strong mastery of this, it is this... but I can't say I do have a strong mastery of it). Nietzsche begins Ecce Homo explaining that it is his 45th birthday "it is not for nothing that I have just buried my 44th year, that which in it was life is saved."

Wolf man

One would be entirely justified in asking why I waste my time with books like this. It would have been better spent on any number of other texts I'm supposed to be familiar with. The book has a pretty well-known introduction by Derrida that I expected to write on, but I don't really have anything to say about it. I should probably try to find something to say about it, but I feel a strong need to move on to other things.

In their analysis of Freud's old patient the wolf man, Abraham and Torok go to elaborate lengths to decode messages hidden primarily in the Wolf Man's dreams, or the symptoms of his hypochondria. The wolf man, though analyzed in German grew up speaking Russian and had contact with English through his childhood nanny. It is therefore presumed that all three languages played a part in building up the web of associations encoded in his dreams. When he speaks of white wolves sitting in a tree, wolves sitting can be connected to the Russian word goulfik, which means both 'wolfing' and 'fly' (as in the fly of a pair of trousers), and white can be connected to the English and rhymed with 'wide' so that 'white wolves sitting' become 'wide open fly'. There are six wolves (corrected to seven and drawn as five), and a certain Russian word meaning 'group of six' sounds similar to a diminutive form of the word for 'sister'. So the open fly is related to the sister and leads to a traumatic childhood scene of father seducing sister. To give one example that makes use of German, when a dream involves a skyscraper, the beginning of the German Wolkenkratzer, sounds similar to the German word Volk, which can be translated into the Russian Buka, which is a homonym for Wolf. Rhymes also pass between languages, so though the fact that it is nighttime is mentioned in German, the Russian word Notchu should be heard and through its sound should evoke the English 'not you'. The problem with the use of this sort of metonymy of words should be clear. Beyond the fact that two Hungarians writing in French and not fluent in Russian can't possibly be expected to reconstitute the linguistic associations of a native speaker of Russian living in a German speaking environment (to attempt to do this for someone who shares a linguistic community is already impossible), an almost infinite number of associations are possible with every word and image when synonyms and 'rhymes' are available from three languages, and there is no criteria to establish which of those associations are legitimate. The authors do not attempt to hide the fact that they have searched for words that fit a hypothetic narrative they have constructed (granted with the aid of a large amount of already published material, by the wolf man himself, his therapists - including Freud himself, and numerous psychoanalysts responding to the famous case). Though the narrative they have constructed may seem plausible and the linguistic associations at least possible, there is no necessity in either that makes it preferable to countless potential alternative readings. Without strict rules or the authority of the patient analyzing himself (and therefore in some sense able to vouch for a particular reading), the game remains sterile.

spurs

Nietzsche or reveal what he was secretly up to. Derrida proceeds as though this carefully constructed web of loosely connected words and meanings were fortuitous, and just happened to correspond remarkably well with what Derrida wished to say about Nietzsche's style. Technically, his argument doesn't depend on any of these chance associations, and if they cannot be said to be merely ornamental or secondary in the text it is because they are bent into the service of an implicit metaphor of the truth as an ocean and style as that which cuts through and moves along her surface. Though the rock that breaks the waves is the only meaning attached to éperon, Derrida ensures that nautical imagery contaminates the entire lot. The rock is linked to the prow of a ship, which like a spur moves the boat forward, while like the rock it divides the oncoming waves. Derrida sets up an allegorical space that isn't quite Nietzsche's, and when he finally arrives at Nietzsche's metaphor of Truth as a woman truth will necessarily appear as a siren, and it will become both dangerous and foolhardy rushing straight toward her, as is done by philosophers and scientists without style, who lack any appreciation of distance and the play of surfaces. The veil that conceals, which was previously attached to 'sail', and the verb 'to spurn', which was attached to 'spur', have already been used to inscribe ideas of femininity and seduction into the association cluster built around éperon and voile. As new sets of associations are added, the old ones are not abandoned, but become more heavily motivated. The density of connection between the words and images Derrida chooses to bring together (the style/ stiletto that cuts the waves and dances like them, the veiled/ sailing woman truth, who glides along the surface and beckons forward with what she hides and promises, etc) and the astounding correspondence between the entire nexus and the vision of truth and philosophy presented by Nietzsche's writing all seem to belie the idea that their encounter is fortuitous. Through cross contamination and the folding of images into one another, not to mention a choice of objects (woman and ocean) that already present inexhaustible sets of associations, Derrida makes what is arbitrary seem necessary. Though the basic coherence of the image of the philosopher and his relation to truth is never abandoned, and the strong connection to Nietzsche's original texts is never lost, the number of ideas and images present in that one idea of the truth as woman/ siren proliferates to the point that they cannot all be held in mind at the same time, though they are all present in one another and do all work together to create a single tonality. Ideally, as with Kant's sublime, comprehension should break down, not because of the difficulty or obscurity of the ideas involved, but because of the number of parts that need to resonate all at once for the whole to function.