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."