“Postponements”
Not everything will have been said when it is recalled that Nietzsche never forgot what was, for him, that strange, lost paradise of a Protestant presbytery filled with feminine presences. Nietzsche’s femininity is deeper for being more hidden. Who is there under the super-masculine mask of Zarathustra? With regard to women, there are in Nietzsche’s work petty shows of disdain, in bad taste. Beneath all these coverings and compensations, who will discover the feminine Nietzsche for us? And who will found the Nietzscheism of the feminine?
He turned his face over a shoulder, rere regardant. Moving through the air high spars of a three master, her sails brailed up on the crosstrees, homing, upstream, silently moving, a silent ship.
NIETZSCHE ON WOMAN: a dreary catalogue of alternately droll and scathing remarks, foreshadowing Shaw or reminiscent of Schopenhauer. Surely there is no need today, if there ever was one, to take these remarks seriously? May we not reduce them all to one (MA, 380) which says that the admiration or contempt a man feels toward woman derives from the image of womankind which his mother has fashioned in him? If we recall those recently discovered pages of Ecce Homo (6, 267–69) in which Nietzsche suggests that his mother and sister were the two irrefutable objections to the eternal recurrence of the same, then the case seems closed. Everything that Nietzsche or Nietzsche’s Zarathustra celebrates in or about the female—as a symbol of life, truth, creativity, and eternity—we can accordingly reduce to overcompensation. Such romanticism does not banish misogyny but decorates and confirms its rule, so that the case seems indeed closed. “Nietzsche did not see altogether clearly. . . . Nietzsche is a bit lost here,” writes Jacques Derrida apropos of Nietzsche’s relation to woman.1 Have we not already decided that in matters touching woman and sensuality—leaving death aside for a moment—we have come a long way since Nietzsche, so that he no longer has anything to tell us? And can it be anything more than a typically Derridean provocation when the book Spurs brings the questions of style, interpretation, and philosophical truth to converge on “the woman question”?
In a section entitled “The Gaze of Oedipus,” Derrida’s book points us toward a passage in Beyond Good and Evil that shows us how clearly Nietzsche anticipated our own reduction of his “views” on woman. The passage also takes us to the heart of Derrida’s provocation, so that it may be a good place to initiate the postponements the present book is about. Section 231 of Beyond Good and Evil (5, 170) introduces a series of remarks on woman as follows:2
Learning transforms us. It does what all nourishment that more than merely “preserves” us does—as the physiologist knows. Yet in our very foundations, ’way “down there,” there is surely something that cannot be taught, some granite of spiritual fate, of predetermined decision and answer to predetermined, selected questions. In every cardinal problem there speaks an immutable “That is what I am.” Concerning man and woman, for example, a thinker cannot revise what he has learned but can only learn it fully, can only uncover to the ultimate end whatever “has been settled” in him with regard to these things. Occasionally we find certain solutions to problems, solutions that compel precisely our belief; perhaps we go on to call them our “convictions.” Later—we see in them steps toward self-knowledge, signposts to the problem that we are—better, to the grand obtuseness that we are; signposts to our spiritual fate, to what is unteachable, ’way “down there.”—Because I have behaved so very well toward myself just now, I may perhaps be permitted to proclaim a few truths about “woman in itself”: granted that one realizes from the outset how very much these are merely—my truths.—
Derrida takes the ironic reference to a Kantian or Hegelian woman an sich (rendered here as the neuter “in itself,” in accord with the word das Weib) as Nietzsche’s rejection of truth as such and “in itself,” a truth that would not be irreducibly plural and in dispersion. “Thus there is no truth in itself of the sexual difference in itself, of man or woman in itself” (84/102–03). Yet we are hardly prepared for the heart of the Derridean provocation. Let us therefore follow the argument and the fable of the beginning of Spurs quite closely—though only as an introduction to our own postponements.
The book shows thirteen sections. The movement of its thought may be telescoped into three stages: first, an introduction to the questions of truth, writing, style, and woman (roughly, sections 1–6); second, an attempt to pierce the horizon of Heidegger’s reading of Nietzsche and Heidegger’s own thinking of proximation and propriation (roughly, sections 7–12); and third, a conclusion and two postscripts which reassert the recalcitrance of Nietzsche’s styles vis-à-vis any given hermeneutic code.
Yet the book involves the movement of an image or fable as well, initially in the form of the classic Quintilian metonymy, to wit, “sails” (voiles) for sailing ships.3 The same French word also means “veils,” hence covering and concealing. Thus, so far: the sails and veils of sailing ships, whose spars or spurs project from the deck and prow. The sailing ship is the ambiguously female-male image Nietzsche so often invokes in order to suggest both the mystery of woman and the mastery of an emphatically masculine “free spirit.” Recall the brave ships of Daybreak and The Gay Science (3, 331; 480), or the staunch Genoese vessel of “Toward New Seas” (3, 649). The equivocal imagery looms also in passages from Thus Spoke Zarathustra (4, 134; 235):
Have you never seen a sail gliding over the sea, bellied and swollen, trembling with the wind’s impetuosity?
Like a sail, trembling with the spirit’s impetuosity, my wisdom glides over the sea—my wild wisdom!
My dream: a bold frigate, half ship, half “Mariah” [Windsbraut, a gale; literally, “bride of the wind”], silent as a butterfly, impatient as a falcon. . . .
Spar and sail contract abruptly in Derrida’s second and thirteenth sections, assuming the shape(s) of an umbrella. Opened, the umbrella fends off weather; closed, it fends off anyone who gets in the way. Derrida identifies it as the umbrella that Nietzsche “lost” in 1881, an umbrella no hermeneutics can recover.4 The closed umbrella is reminiscent of a stylet or stylo, and expresses the relationship of style to writing: the pointed object incises or inscribes a matrix, leaving in its wake a trace—the German Spur—that constitutes a line of text.
Finally, the negative of veiling, “unveiling” or “revealing,” suggests Heidegger’s notion of truth as uncovering and disclosing: Entdecken, Entbergen, Unverborgenheit. Derrida allows the figures of sail and veil, spar, spur, and stiletto, parasol and paragua open and shut, to tease an entire range of questions from his readers. Some of these questions will, in a moment, bring us to our own postponements—woman, sensuality, and death.
Derrida selects woman, la femme, as his subject for a symposium on Nietzsche’s styles. Yet he does so in order to show that these do not amount to the same. They are different, they are other, indeed in such a way that alterity invades both terms: there is, as Nietzsche insists (6, 304–05), a multiplicity of styles but no style an sich; and, while there are women, there is no la femme, no definite article. Derrida spurs his writing to defend against pure presence, univocal content, “the thing itself, the meaning, the truth,” insofar as these things are conjured without differentiation (30/38) and manipulated as “essentializing fetishes” (43/54).5
The principal Nietzschean text of Spurs is aphorism 60 of The Gay Science, “Women and Their Action at a Distance.” Derrida inserts into this passage a number of lines from the preceding aphorism (FW, 59, “We Artificers!”). Let us first read the principal aphorism (3, 424–25) without Derrida’s interventions and commentary, interrupting solely in order to introduce one or other of Nietzsche’s own terms:
Women [Die Frauen] and Their Action at a Distance.—Do I still have ears? Am I now but an ear, nothing else besides? Here I stand in the midst of the surging surf [inmitten des Brandes der Brandung], its white flames licking their way to my foot:—from every side it threatens, howls, cries, and screams to me, while in the deepest depths the old earthshaker sings his aria, the muffled sounds of a bellowing bull: he beats out such an earthshaker’s measure that the very hearts of these monstrous, weathered rocks tremble in their bodies. Then, suddenly, as though born of nothing, there appears beyond the doorway of this hellish labyrinth, only a few leagues removed,—a great sailing ship, gliding along silent as a ghost. Oh, what ghostly beauty! With what enchantment it grips me! Could it be? Has all the tranquillity and silence in the world embarked on this ship [sich hier eingeschifft]? Does my happiness itself have its seat there in that quiet place, my happier “I,” my second, dearly departed [verewigtes] self? To be, not dead, yet no longer alive? As a ghostlike, silent, gazing, gliding, hovering daimon [Mittelwesen]? To be like the ship which with its white sails skims like a huge butterfly over the dark sea! Yes! To skim over existence! That’s it! That would be it!— —It seems the noise here has made me a visionary? All great noise causes us to posit our happiness in tranquillity and remoteness [Ferne]. When a man stands in the midst of his noise, in his surf of ploys and plans [Würfen und Entwürfen], he too will see tranquil, enchanting creatures gliding by him: he yearns for the happiness and seclusion of them—it’s the women [es sind die Frauen]. He almost imagines that his better self dwells among the women: at these quiet places even the loudest surf would grow still as death and life itself become the dream about life. And yet! And yet! My noble enthusiast, even on the loveliest sailing ship there is so much hubbub, so much noise, and alas, such petty, miserable noise! The magic, the most powerful impact of women is, to speak the language of the philosophers, an action at a distance, actio in distans: to it pertains, in the first place and above all else—distance!
Derrida first intervenes in order to indicate how often Nietzsche appeals in his writings to “the labyrinth of an ear.”6 To be sure, Nietzsche remains fascinated by the ear, as when he stresses the passivity of students in the university who are compelled to be “all ears” (1, 739). Among the fellow-cripples Zarathustra encounters on the bridge to overman, the preeminent figure is, again, “all ear” (see “On Redemption”; 4, 178). And in Ecce Homo (6, 302), proclaiming himself Antichrist and Antidonkey at once, Nietzsche writes:
We all know—indeed, some of us know it from experience—what a long-ear is. Splendid. I dare to assert that I have the smallest ears. This interests the females to no small degree—I believe they feel better understood by me?. . . I am the antijackass par excellence, and am thereby a world-historical beastie—I am, in Greek, and not only in Greek, the Antichrist. . . .
Derrida proceeds (33/42) to draw attention to an “alto voice” heard in The Gay Science (FW, 70), “Mistresses of the Masters,” voices that appear to lend to the female the heroic features usually ascribed to the male;further, to the word-play inmitten des Brandes der Brandung, the latter word suggesting the surf as it breaks on a spur of land, or against a foot, which is here another kind of spur (34/42);7 repeating the words seine Aria singt, Derrida reminds us that Ariadne is not far off. Indeed, Nietzsche’s “Plaint of Ariadne” rises from the shores of Naxos, where Minos’ daughter, she of the Labyrinth, longs for the return of her hero or god: we will hear her plaint in chapter one, below, “Ariadne.”
Derrida’s longest intervention is interposed between the words “the dream about life” and the double interjection “And yet! And yet!” He refers to the following passage from The Gay Science (FW, 59; here, as in Spurs, considerably abridged):
We Artificers!—When we love a woman [Weib] we may well fly into a rage against nature, thinking of all the repulsive naturalnesses [Natürlichkeiten] to which every woman is exposed. . . . Here one stops his ears against all physiology and secretly decrees for himself: “I want to hear nothing about human beings’ consisting of anything more than soul and form!” The human being “under the skin” is for all lovers a horror and an abomination, a blasphemy against God and against Love. . . . It is enough for us to love, hate, desire, sense anything at all—immediately the spirit and force of dream comes over us and we climb the most hazardous winding ways, open-eyed, coolly confronting every danger, up to the rooftops and turrets of fantasy, without a hint of vertigo, as though we were born to clamber—we somnambulists of the day! We artificers! We concealers of naturalness! Moonsick, Godsick! Relentless wanderers, still as death, along heights we do not perceive as heights but as our level plains, our securities!
Here the very highest type of human being, the artist and artificer, der Künstler, is confounded with the fantast and even the decadent, the despiser of the body. In a note from this same period (1 [47] 1882; 10, 23) Nietzsche writes: “In the background of his feelings for a woman, the male still feels contempt for the female sex.”
We understand somewhat better now Nietzsche’s cry for distance. Indeed, the ship aphorism dramatizes distance by importing no fewer than six caesurae into its text, one of them a double hiatus (“That would be it!— — It seems the noise. . .”). The patronizing and somewhat jaded skeptic who begins, “My noble enthusiast,” has his cue in a doubly distancing “And yet! And yet!” In fact, the entire passage is a measuring of distances, deepest depths, leagues, and thresholds: the oppressive closeness of male noises, muffled, subterranean rumblings; the sudden apparition of silence at a watery remove; the transports of enchantment and ecstasy, the bifurcation of the “I” into two selves, one of them dearly departed to eternity; the opening up of a new space in between, for intermediaries and emissaries, like the hermaphrodites of the mysteries, Mittelwesen; a state or condition somewhere between sinking or swimming, an Ikarian hovering or gliding along the line of horizon. A gulf opens between the apparition that seems fully present—“That’s it!”—and its subjunctive counterpart—“That would be it!” Das wäre es! The long ä takes the wind out of the sails of Das istes! (Cratylus, 427a.) Das wäre es! means as much as “Well, that’s that!” Indeed, at this point the narrator appears to return to himself, presumably to his solitary self, invoking and objectifying his “me”: “It seems the noise has made me a visionary?” In a moment the gulf will open again, however, this time to fracture the narrative frame altogether by introducing a new narrator, a third second-self: “My noble enthusiast,” that third begins. Finally, Derrida himself (37/46) notes the distance effected by the ironic reference to “the language of the philosophers,” the Scholastic actio in distans, the translation of Ferne into Latinate Distanz, and the curious spacing and punctuating of these words themselves by colon, hiatus, spaced type, and exclamation point:
. . . um die Sprache der Philosophen zu reden, eine Wirkung in die Ferne, eine actio in distans: dazu gehört aber, zuerst und vor Allem—Distanz!
Nietzsche’s reference to actio in distans assumes greater significance when we note the appearance of that term elsewhere in his works. A number of remarkable notes from the spring of 1873 (7, 572–79) attribute action ata distance to time. First invoked as a Pythagorean response to Democritean atomism, actio in distans becomes the center of an extended reflection in Nietzsche’s notebooks on motion, space, and time. The interaction among various moments of time can be “explained” only in terms of “actio in distans, that is, by leaping [durch Springen].” Nietzsche even inserts a diagram of such leaps, as though in anticipatory caricature of the Husserlian time-line (7, 579); yet his “dynamic atomism” of time twists on the horns of the ancient dilemma, stigmatic point versus continuous line, without being able to resolve it. “But time is not a continuum at all; there are only totally discrete timepoints, and no line: Actio in distans.”
In “On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life” (UB II, 7; 1, 298) Nietzsche complains that Protestant Christianity has been fatal “to every spirited actio in distans” that occurs in great art and religion, and has been destructive of “the protecting, veiling vapor” that surrounds and nurtures genius. In another note from The Gay Science (FW, 15, “Out of the Distance”; 3, 388) he remarks that the dominant feature of any landscape, for example, a towering mountain, must be viewed from afar; whenever we ascend the mountain, taking it as our vantage-point, we find that the landscape has lost its sublimity and charm. More crucial to our own concerns is a note of 1885 (34 [247]; 11, 504) that identifies actio in distans as the operative mode of will to power in nature:
. . . It is will to power that guides the anorganic world as well; or, rather, . . . there is no anorganic world. “Action at a distance” [“Die Wirkung in die Ferne”] cannot be cast aside: something attracts something else, something feels itself being drawn. This is the fundamental fact: as opposed to the mechanistic notion of pressure and impact. . . .
Most crucial to this issue of distance is the relation—undiscussed by Nietzsche, as far as I am aware—of actio in distans to the central genealogical notion of Pathos der Distanz. The latter Nietzsche defines as the essence of nobility, particularly the manly nobility of heroic Hellenes: ἐσθλός is their word for it (5, 263). In the hierarchy of values to be promulgated by the revaluation, the value of Distanz is always and everywhere supreme (see 6, 200, 218, 243, 294, 299, and 362). One would have to review quite carefully the entire range of remarks on “distance” in Beyond Good and Evil and Toward a Genealogy of Morals; for “distance” is what preserves nobility from infectious ressentiment, interiorized cruelty, and decadence.8 One would also have to contemplate the unsettling fact that Distanz, the aura of the feminine, here invades the very essence of heroic masculinity. While Nietzsche’s genealogical critique tends to identify the female with the interiorized cruelty and rancor of morality (Nietzsche calls the latter Circe), such genealogy can find no purchase on the positive theme of nobility except through Distanz. In short, and to summarize everything we have been saying here, nothing Nietzsche says about time, nature, art, will to power, or the nobility that characterizes the “free spirit” can escape from the ambiguity of the aura of distance. The ambiguity of distance is the proximity of ambiguity in the rigging of doublings, folds, and duplicities. “It’s the women.”
Derrida also emphasizes the word totenstill in these passages from The Gay Science, “deathly still” suggesting both the dream of death and the somnambulant risk of death. His reading moves inevitably toward Freud’s evocation of thanatos in Beyond the Pleasure Principle and the extended Lacanian exegesis of that text. The theme of death-castration (by no means foreign to Nietzsche) becomes central for Derrida. Both the dream and risk of death are engaged to the ascensional movement that psychoanalysis calls genitofugal displacement. Ascent is possible only when the member to which the sensuality of woman speaks is extirpated, excised, or excreted; a deadly nostalgia draws the male upward to eternity, to his dearly departed self, beyond the recesses and rhythms of the flesh. It is this seductive, terrifying butterfly and bird of prey which acts at a distance that Derrida conjures in Spurs.
The question of feminine distance, of the dream and risk of death, encompasses the entire problem of space and time, the problem of proximation as posed in the history of metaphysics, from the “crater” or mixing bowl of Plato’s Timaeus (the “matrix” and “nurse” of all genesis and the source of all madness and disease) to the phenomenology and poetics of Heidegger (the “undistancing” of finite Dasein and the “withdrawal” of Being as propriation).9 Derrida traces the question of space (better, spacing) and proximation back to the question of truth as unveiling and disclosure; yet the unveiling is itself inaccessible, cannot serve as an ultimate origin or source. Again adopting Heidegger’s own words, Derrida invokes the “nontruth of truth”;10 departing from Heidegger’s words and ways, he calls the nontruth of truth not errancy but woman. Yet the aberrant word woman distances itself immediately: “There is no essence of woman, because woman diverts herself and is diverted from herself” (38/48). The distancing, diverting, self-veiling, alluring yet terrifying approach and withdrawal of woman becomes Nietzsche’s most compelling image of life, vita femina (FW, 339; 3, 569). “Yet perhaps this is the most powerful enchantment of life: a gold-embroidered veil of beautiful possibilities lies over it, promising, reticent, demure, taunting, compassionate, seductive. Yes, life is a woman!” “Presupposing that truth is a woman,” begins the famous Preface to Beyond Good and Evil (5, 11), only to have a later passage (5, 171) drive the wedge between truth and life by retorting, “But she doesn’t want truth: what does a woman care about truth!” Her talent, “her great art,” is the lie; “her supreme affair is semblance and radiance, der Schein und die Schönheit.” “Baubo,” exclaims the Foreword to the second edition of The Gay Science, fecund goddess of the profoundly superficial Greeks: truth is a woman who has good reasons for covering her reasons. And so on.
Yet how daunting all this must be for those women who are not la femme but women; who are, that is to say, the only women we know. It is the male philosopher who believes in “woman” and “truth” alike, the male philosopher who, according to both Nietzsche and Derrida, proves credulous, dogmatic, and mistaken. Writing now with the other hand, as it were, both Nietzsche and Derrida record the plaint of women against “the foolishness of the dogmatic philosopher, the impotent artist, or the inexperienced seducer” (43/54):
Because if woman is truth, she knows that the truth is not, that the truth does not take place, and that one does not possess the truth. She is woman insofar as she herself does not believe in the truth, does not believe in what she is, in what one believes she is, which, therefore, she is not (40/52).
Thus divested of her identity, an identity that has been imposed on her from the outside, woman can no longer be taken as the truth. In itself. Such divestiture leads Derrida once again, constrained as it were by the truth itself, to the theme of castration in Lacanian psychoanalysis.11 We shall have to skirt this theme, to which we have now been led for the second time, and from which there would be no escape; so that we would never arrive at our own postponements; skirt it by indicating merely that Derrida employs the same strategy here as in the questions of la femme and la vérité. Woman suspends the truth of castration, which is “men’s affair,” when she realizes “that castration does not take place” (48/60). Except in the project of Christian culture as diagnosed by Nietzsche. Except, that is to say, in the world as we know it.
However, it is not my purpose now to follow on the heels of Derrida’s Spurs, to take up the role of the feminine in Nietzsche’s conception of art or Heidegger’s circumvention of woman in this respect. Nor shall I turn elsewhere in Derrida’s work to see how the problem of castration and aggressivity leads to the question of bisexuality as such.12 Nor finally will I examine the ways in which the curious sisterhood of truth, style, and woman affects the Heideggerian notions of the truth of Being, Ereignis, and the granting of Time and Being; or the ways in which that sisterhood may well exhaust the possibilities of hermeneutics in general. Except to cite one last tantalizing statement from Spurs (86/106):
From the moment the question of woman suspends the decidable opposition of true and nontrue; inaugurates the epochal regime of scare quotes for all the concepts that pertain to the system of such philosophical decidability; disqualifies the hermeneutical project’s postulation of the true meaning of a text; liberates our reading from the horizon of the meaning of Being or the truth of Being, from the values of the production of the product or the presence of the present; from that moment on, what is unchained is the question of style as a question of writing, the question of a spurring operation more powerful than all content, every thesis, and all meaning.
Not to postpone writing this Introduction any longer. To write it now, spurred on, if only by scare quotes. Two questions: What form does the constellation of woman, sensuality, and tragic death take in Nietzsche? And why does Nietzsche postpone confrontation with this complex throughout the two decades of his life as writer and thinker?
Postponements proceeds in four stages, has four chapters. In chapter two, “Corinna,” I ask the above questions of Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy and the related unpublished writings of 1870–72. Here my principal texts will be plans for a drama entitled Empedocles, plans sketched under the shadow of Hölderlin’s three mighty drafts of The Death of Empedocles, the drama that so moved Nietzsche when he first read it at age sixteen. In Nietzsche’s proj ected play, though not in Hölderlin’s, the leading female character embodies sensual love, plague, and death for the tragic philosopher.
Many elements of Nietzsche’s abortive Empedocles drama emerge a dozen years later in plans surrounding Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Again we find plans for a drama, which now has Zarathustra as its tragic hero. Chapter three, “Pana,” focuses on this second set of drama plans. Here once again Nietzsche’s heroine combines sensuality, pestilence, and death; but now her presence and her function are essential to the communication of Nietzsche’s “thought of thoughts,” the eternal recurrence of the same. Nietzsche fails to integrate this female personage into any of the four parts of Thus Spoke Zarathustra. To integrate her would be to precipitate Zarathustra’s death, to fulfill once and for all his tragic fate. Zarathustra’s woman and Zarathustra’s death are thus postponed from book to book. Yet they do not disappear entirely from the notebooks—as chapter four, “Calina,” will show—until late 1886, and perhaps not until 1888, on the very verge of Nietzsche’s collapse.
The names Corinna, Pana, and Calina are not yet familiar to us. The name Ariadne we have long known.
In 1935 the German classicist Karl Reinhardt published an article entitled “Nietzsche’s ‘Plaint of Ariadne.’ ” His remarkable essay anticipated many of the themes in Derrida’s Spurs, demonstrating in advance, as it were, that Derrida’s is not some far-fetched provocation but a subtle, supple interpretation of an issue that is central to Nietzsche’s philosophy. It is striking that Heidegger, in his 1937 lecture course on “The Eternal Recurrence of the Same,” encouraged his students to study Reinhardt’s piece; highly striking, because no other interpretation so powerfully challenges the Heideggerian reading. There would even be grounds for saying (and in chapter three I shall say it) that Heidegger’s entire lecture course is a prolonged response to Reinhardt’s thesis. Derrida, himself a painstaking reader of Heidegger’s Nietzsche, never refers to “Nietzsche’s ‘Plaint of Ariadne.’ ” Thus I begin these postponements with an account of “Ariadne.”
Chapter one will take us to the end of Nietzsche’s career, inasmuch as Ariadne gains ascendancy during the years 1886–89. Chapter two will then leap back to the period of The Birth of Tragedy. Chapters three and four will work their way forward once again, from Thus Spoke Zarathustra to the eve of Nietzsche’s collapse.
Omega’s Eyes, 1908–09. Lithograph. Courtesy of The Art Institute of Chicago. Kate S. Buckingham Collection.
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