A number of questions arise in the wake of the interesting contemplations that took place in the first contribution to our fledgling discussion forum, questions which for the moment I can only address in a preliminary form. Principally the questions that concern me draw from simply considering: What is the relationship between poetry and philosophy? (is it philosophy’s other?) and further, what are the stakes apropos of their respective claims over thinking?
In the context of Nietzsche’s thought, certain possible answers seem to appear: Thus Spake Zarathustra does indeed seize the initiative by generating a “symphony of thought.” However, one wonders whether such metaphors actually resolve the problem or, on the contrary, just defer it. After all, what sense does this metaphor actually draw from us? – Are the operating conditions for thinking in Nietzsche musical? Perhaps we can infer from Schopenhauer’s continued influence over Nietzsche (even during this period) that music, understood as a non-representational art form, in an unresolved consistency, perfectly expresses the movements of an implacable will (music then, as the language of suffering). From hereon in we can perhaps conceive of the operation of thought swaying precisely in the poetical dithyrambic movements of the text, lured into the rhythm of thinking, a thinking which is at once ruptured against the unfolding revelations of the last man, the übermensch, and the eternal recurrence. But to ask again here, what then is the dithyramb? Are we claiming it is the condition of thinking? Has poetry then not taken on a distinctly ontological significance? It is interesting of course to observe that at precisely these points ostensibly Nietzsche becomes a problematic figure for the history of philosophy – that is, a potentially anti-philosophical figure.
Now this claim is made so often that one might wish to reject it immediately on account of its superficial temerity, yet I suspect that to dismiss it in such a manner is to fail to address the very real difficulties in Nietzsche’s work not merely in its assault upon the academy and the challenges that arise thereof, but also for any serious practitioner of philosophy – that is, anyone who wishes to uphold metaphysical discourse. Now Nietzsche can of course himself be labelled a metaphysician, indeed the metaphysician of all metaphysicians if we are to follow Heidegger – one, that is who sees through the history of philosophy but critically, with his investment in the notion of the will to power, fails to draw the right conclusions. Yet Nietzsche is surely closest to slipping the metaphysical web for Heidegger when he announces himself in the form of poetry. However, what becomes clear with Heidegger, and this should be immediately merited for Nietzsche as well (though without the same degree of philosophical rigour), is that poetry is a very particular discourse engaged in only by the few and the rare. To enter into poetry in these terms is to draw into an authentic singular relation, a relation which Nietzsche properly designates as untimely. It is clear at this point that poetry in this sense, that is, as the language beyond metaphysics, is something very different from anything we are normally given to investing in the term.
To consider Nietzsche from a different direction, it is, of course, unquestionably significant to draw attention to the systematic motivations within Nietzsche’s thought (e.g. Time Atom Theory) but more particularly Deleuze’s remarks about the Genealogy. Deleuze’s careful systematic, indeed scholastic, treatment of Nietzsche is indeed welcome. However, there are a number of points apropos of Deleuze’s treatment that are worth recognising here and potentially hazardous oversights which we should be aware of. Firstly, the conflation of the poetical TSZ and the Genealogy is misleading in terms of the development of Nietzsche’s thought, and more precisely, in the way in which Nietzsche’s thought develops as we shall see. It suffices to say here that the systematic operations within Nietzsche’s work during the period of TSZ are entirely distinct from the Genealogy – and subsequently the concerns with “Zarathustrian poeticism” are no longer evident in the Genealogy. Secondly, Deleuze picks up particularly on the Genealogy and his recognition of it as a Kantian style post-Darwinian Critique serves to direct us towards his own metaphysical project. The result of this is that Deleuze overlooks the most distinctive feature of the Genealogy – that Nietzsche drops the transcendence of the eternal recurrence.
Returning to TSZ, the poetical transcendence exhibited in the text is suggestive of a mystical referral or access to being. This movement, “the movement of thinking,” which turns out of the history of metaphysics: does it remain outside of this history? Or are we reined back in? The former case scenario implies that we all effectively give up the metaphysical dialogue and become poets, or philosopher-poets, the latter that we return to Nietzsche as a metaphysician (who makes a pragmatic tool of poetry) as the vitalist thinker of the will to power.
What do we find in the wider reception of Nietzsche in this respect? On the one hand, swathes of contemporary literature praising Nietzsche’s poetic philosophical effusions, his transcendence from the metaphysical sphere in a gleeful aesthetic dance; on the other, the attempts to seriously ground out Nietzsche as a metaphysician (whether in the French Deleuzian tradition, or as a hermeneutical or even neo-Kantian reclamation typical of the German response).
In the wake of this schism one thing is clear: for those who take Nietzsche seriously, for those who take the death of God seriously, we are always left feeling remarkably short changed. Of course, the literary-poetical posturing response to Nietzsche will continue to trade on the interdisciplinary ambiguities between literature and philosophy and process more and more books precisely on the back of this apparently productive void. But who then is this Nietzsche? Every time it is the romantic Nietzsche. How then are we to understand these literary-philosophical responses? Are they not after all failed novel(ist)s?
But let us situate this claim and draw its significance by tracing this question of the romantics back to the appropriate point of departure. What we discover of course is that the thought of philosophers becoming poets, or at least philosopher-poets, does not first arise as a serious consideration with Nietzsche, but with the early German Romantics, and hence I would argue with fragmentary discourse (the discourse of finitude) and the birth of modern subjectivity. Thus it is here, with the German Romantics, one should refer to really get to grips with the significance of the relationship between poetry and philosophy.
It is interesting what the stakes are when registered from the early Romantic point of departure. From this outlook we gain an entirely different perspective, a perspective that perhaps fulfils our suspicions: it may surprise us, but we must seriously ask ourselves has not poetry since the Romantics been entirely in the ascendant in the continental tradition? Badiou offers a remarkable insight on this point:
“if one considers the status ascribed to poetry and mathematics by Plato, one sees how, ever since Romanticism, they have swapped places and conditions.” (TW: 25)
Our pleasure at this recognition at first cannot help but sever us from the sneers of the analytic mind who has failed to register the significance of this victory – we might even humour ourselves in this light for a moment as poetic. Isn’t this after all what we wanted? In this respect Nietzsche acts like a mirror to our own desire – perhaps because with him the struggle was most palpable. But what was this struggle against? The answer rings clearly enough: romanticism. What is romanticism for Nietzsche other than the clearest symptom of décadence and decline? – it is in other words, the seedbed of what Nietzsche would later align with nihilism. In the Gay Science aphorism 370, Nietzsche explores the question “What is romanticism?” and plays between various formulae to distinguish the Classical (or rather “Dionysian pessimism”) and the Romantic urge to create (over-fullness versus impoverishment of life). His analysis however, is here only a staging of how he himself bears its burden and more and more clearly traces it back to himself – Epicurus is now a romantic, Wagner and Schopenhauer are now romantics. What is clearly evidenced in this passage is Nietzsche’s developing understanding of the romantic condition – yet it is also clear that from the perspective of the early German Romantic (Schlegel, Novalis) he does not know what a romantic is. Further, his own mode of production is far more drawn into the romantic tradition than he at this time suspects, or dares to acknowledge. As always with Nietzsche, these are masks he is casting aside, projecting distance from these caricatures even as he identifies them more clearly with himself. What then would nihilism be if not the very point at which he has cast aside all masks only to recognise the process of production itself? – it is here that we suspect Nietzsche is thoroughly romantic, a romanticism which unleashes itself most fully in the astonishing folly of Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Zarathustra, following in the wake of the Gay Science is the full-blown ecstacy of romantic production. Once it is recognised it can hardly be denied – Zarathustra is the romantic gesture par excellence to the event of the death of God. The formula: Existence is suffering, the suffering of a finite being in a world divorced of God. The problem to be resolved: How can existence affirm life? In its dithyrambic refrain Zarathustra pursues Nietzsche’s metaphysical preoccupation with the question of finitude and the One – that is, the singular event of the eternal recurrence.
Zarathustra, following on the back of The Gay Science, is thus the thought contusion in which Nietzsche principally works through the problematic of the modern condition, assessing the severity of its symptoms in modern consciousness. The eternal return is the concept he gifts with the weight of an answer to the burden of finitude – the greatest of all weights. It becomes the very heading under which man can still call out “I love you, O Eternity” (Z: 3, ‘Seven Seals’). However, in the winter of 1884, Nietzsche began adding a final part to his work, a part that in terms of its poetic power and inspiration is undoubtedly of lesser power than the others. What then was taking place here? Nietzsche it seemed, had blown a gale, but was now beginning to falter – were the metaphysical cracks beginning to show? The eternal return is once more affirmed at the end of the fourth part, but had this become something of a parody?
Prior to the writing of the Genealogy of Morality, Nietzsche’s evolving response to the eternal recurrence becomes suddenly remarkably ambivalent in a superbly lucid entry in the notebooks entitled “European Nihilism” dated June 10th, 1887. Here, our response to this development and its potential unfolding significance for Nietzsche’s ontological concerns hangs particularly upon the reading we give to the passages 15 and 16:
“Who will prove to be the strongest? The most moderate, those who have no need of extreme articles of faith…who can think of man with a considerable moderation…the richest in health, who are equal to the most misfortunes and therefore less afraid of such misfortunes… (15)
What would such a man think of eternal recurrence? –” (16)
The implication it appears to me, is the recognition of the need of the recurrence being no longer necessary, of it having essentially become acknowledged as precisely an extreme article of faith that to the healthy and the stronger type is unnecessary – indeed, it is a thought that still bears the signature of having been cast in the very same fire that animated the first withdrawal of the Christian God – and thus ultimately fails still to think beyond it. What is remarkable about this passage and the Genealogy that immediately followed is how the desire for metaphysical significance is set aside in favour of a method drawn out of a socio-political analysis via a genealogical method.
To turn back to the early Romantics at this juncture, what was very particular to Romantic speculation was the introduction of historicism to philosophy, a thought which “established itself as a horizontal structure for the historicity of the finitude of existence” (TW: 24), a thinking which, as a projection of the limit as a horizon and the theme of finitude is entirely alien to mathematics. The stakes of this for Badiou are nothing less than entirely obstructing the significance of the death of God by reversing the Platonic conditions. From the Romantics through Nietzsche, into Heidegger (who gets so far only to reintroduce poetry as the proper, the language of being), poetry issues as the productive ontological site of philosophy and is specifically introduced, and thus tied to, the language of finitude (the language of authenticity, etc). The seriousness of this implicit tie between the introduction of finitude and poetry has potentially grave consequences for Badiou; namely, “that we do not possess the wherewithal to be atheists so long as theme of finitude governs our thinking” (TW: 26). He clarifies this point further:
“In the deployment of the Romantic figure, the infinite, which becomes the Open as the site for the temporalization for the site of finitude, remains beholden to the One because it remains beholden to history. As long as finitude remains the ultimate determination of existence, God abides. He abides as that whose disappearance continues to hold sway over us, in the form of the abandonment, the dereliction, or the leaving-behind of being” (TW: 26).
Our co-extensiveness with time maintains in us a “tacit God” (TW: 26) delivering us over, via the medium of history, to “a new avatar of the One” (TW: 27). What the matheme offers as a productive ontology is the infinite inscribed in terms of a “neutral banality” – by returning mathematics to its proper place within philosophy and simultaneously banishing finitude and historicism, Badiou claims, only then “does it become possible to think within a radically deconsecrated realm” (TW: 27). If the language of infinity is for Badiou properly to be understood as mathematics, then the language of finitude is poetry. Furthermore, the finite, grasped as it is “in the pathos of mortal being” (TW: 27), is “in thrall to an ethical aura” (TW: 27).
What is this ethical aura of finitude? – it is an essential pathos that a finite being communicates in its singular relation. Insofar as romantic philosophy localizes the infinite in the temporalization of the concept as a historical determination of finitude, ethics is limited to a particular configuration of language – a language which in rejecting the metaphysical identification unfolds in a more originary enacting of being. But is its pronouncement necessarily configured in terms of the One? That is to say, must poetry as an ontologically originary operation, emit the singular relation of being as a discourse of the pathos of finitude? As Badiou elucidates:
“On the one hand, the ethical pathos of finitude, which operates under the banner of death, presupposes the infinite through temporalization, and cannot dispense with all those sacred, precarious and defensive representations concerning the promise of a God who would come to cauterize the indifferent wound which the world inflicts on the Romantic trembling of the Open” (TW: 37).
What then is poetry in terms of an ontological determination if not the language in the wake of a mislaid God? By turning to poetry, philosophy continues to breathe the decadent air in the final throes of nihilism – that is, it renounces metaphysics only to continue to passively give in to the intoxicating fumes of the One. In Nietzsche’s beautiful hymn to romanticism, Zarathustra, we witness precisely the confirmation and seal of this tendency – poetry emerges out of, and returns to the singular evental structure of the One in the eternal return. In this moment, Nietzsche commits the romantic error of failing here to properly think multiplicity and of evidencing within his own thought the language of romanticism – finitude. In doing so, in his proselytizing fervour he fails to think through the implications of his own thought and continues to attach himself to the One. In contradistinction, Badiou emphasizes:
“there is nothing but infinite multiplicity, which in turn presents infinite multiplicity, and the one and only halting point in this presentation presents nothing. Ultimately, this halting point is the void, not the One. God is dead at the heart of presentation” (TW: 37)
In romanticism a reconciliation between philosophy and poetry has already taken place. This reconciliation is drawn to its completion with the deposition of mathematics from philosophy in the work of Hegel where a rivalry is set up between it and philosophy with respect of the same concept, the infinite. What Badiou holds to is the termination of the romantic introduction of finitude into the work of philosophy and this implicates a radical caesura of philosophy and poetry – a break true to Book X of Plato’s Republic. Tying philosophy to the language of finitude fails to effect an atemporal break with established discourse the effect of which is to devastate philosophy rendering it “homogenous with the historical power of opinion” (TW: 30).
In his essay “Language, Thought, and Poetry,” Badiou concludes that it is fatal for philosophy to give up the mathematical paradigm, for what lies in its wake is merely the wreckage of a “failed poem” (TW: 241). In contrast he similarly claims that objectivity inflicts a mortal wound to poetry, turning it into “didactic poetry, a poetry lost in philosophy” (TW: 241). In the final analysis, Badiou summons us to celebrate the quarrel that lies in the midst of this schism for ultimately with respect of thinking one can after all recognise a common task:
“Let us struggle then, partitioned, split, unreconciled. Let us struggle for the flash of conflict, we philosophers, always torn between the mathematical norm of literal transparency and the poetic norm of singularity and presence. Let us struggle then, but having recognized the common task, which is to think what was unthinkable, to say what was impossible to say. Or to adopt Mallarmé’s imperative, which I believe is common to philosophy and to poetry: ‘There wherever it may be, deny the unsayable – it lies’”(TW: 241 my italics).
