But if the story of Hyperion‟s courtship, in this manner, ultimately comes to comprise nothing less than a stirring and provocative anticipatory rejoinder to the impasse of Tristanian nihilism, then it must nevertheless be said to leave seemingly unresolved that most crucial and pressing of questions: under what conditions is this love of life, this love of eternity, ultimately possible for us? Under what conditions, in other words, might one arrive at the veritable crossroads, the infamous Augenblick, and choose not to follow the Tristanian example of lunging lustfully into the arms of blessed release? Under what conditions, might one elect, instead, to affirm life and even to love it – in spite of everything?
These, it seems, are the decisive questions bequeathed unto Nietzsche by the tradition of German romanticism; the very questions, moreover, which render utterly unmistakable both the necessity of the project of rehabilitation, as well as the specific nature of its aims and goals. Indeed, it is seemingly in the form of a response to this very impasse, that Nietzsche – in a late work from 1888 – comes to assure his readers that even in spite of everything, the love of life remains “still possible.”53 Even in the midst of excessive suffering, it is not beyond our capacity to love. What it demands of us, however, is nothing less than a fundamental
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reorientation of erotic life; it demands of us that we learn “to love differently.”54 It requires of us, as Nietzsche writes, that we learn to love life in the same manner that one loves “a woman who gives us doubts.”55
A fascinating statement. But what, exactly, does all this mean? –It means, as Nietzsche goes on to tell us, that we must attempt to surmount, first and foremost, our prodigious and nearly irrepressible longing to remove the veil, to pierce every surface. We must cease wishing “to see everything naked,”56 Nietzsche writes. We must cease, moreover, wishing “to be present everywhere, to understand and „know‟ everything.”57 Indeed, rather than desiring and expecting, at every moment, the imminent arrival of consummatory satisfaction, discharge, or release – we must learn, instead, “to stop bravely at the surface, the fold, the skin.”58
We must come to carry out, in other words, a fundamental rehabilitation of erotic distance whereby it is separation itself, mediation itself, and even the unending perseverance of detour and deferral, which are eternally affirmed and even
sought. Then, and only then, will the unceasing futility of erotic relations no longer be considered an objection against life; then, and only then, will the interminable beating of a scorched heart no longer manifest itself in a curse against existence.
Could it be, therefore, that what Nietzsche is ultimately proposing, here, amounts to nothing less than a new law of amorous relations, a new erotic ideal? Indeed, such a thought would hardly be inconsistent with the letter of Nietzsche‟s text.59 But if the project of rehabilitation is indeed to be translated, here, into nothing
54 Ibid. 55 Ibid. 56 Ibid. 282. 57 Ibid. 58 Ibid.
59 We have already mentioned, for instance, how Nietzsche, in Beyond Good and Evil §120, had come to appropriate as his own the Stendhalian transcription of a famed medieval love code. Cf. Stendhal. Love. Translated by Gilbert and Suzanna Sale. London: Penguin Books, 1975. 278.
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less than a new erotic ideal, linked to an exigency perhaps more rigorous and unwavering than anything since the late 12th century, then how, precisely, are we
to characterise the nature of its prescriptive force? How are we to characterise, moreover, the very eroticism which it comes to recommend to us?
On this point, Nietzsche does not equivocate. He tells us, as we have just seen, that it would require of us a truly unprecedented affirmation, namely, an affirmation of endlessness itself, of sheer interminability. But this is not all. For even beyond the willing acceptance of continual recommencement, it would also require something further, an additional, incomparably provocative step – arguably unmatched in the history of Western eroticism. It would require of us nothing less than a fundamental overturning and displacement of the age-old privilege accorded to fulfilment, fusion, and consummation within erotic life. It would demand of us that we dethrone the very principle which has implicitly dominated and circumscribed eroticism in the West ever since the speech of Aristophanes, and probably long before: the principle of redemption through reconciliation [Versöhnung].
For what, we might ask, has our overbearing, lingering awareness of our own incompletion and our nostalgia for lost unity made us, for all these many years, desire so ardently and with such maddening perspicacity? Nothing other than “to melt together with the one [we] love, so that one person might re-emerge from the two.”60 But what if all this should prove impossible? – Well, then, we must come to desire a reconciliation, a redemption by whatever means available to us. We must endeavour to suppress and overcome, however we can, the temporal and spatial distance which so perniciously keeps us apart. So says the traditional wisdom; so says “the Logos of gratification.”61 Indeed, it is precisely in this
manner that death, through the ages, becomes the central and abiding focus of erotic life – and the legend of Tristan (as Rougemont tells us) its paradigmatic
60 Symposium. 29.
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exemplification.62
It is nothing less, in other words, than our spirit of revenge against the abiding incontrovertibility of spatio-temporal distance which has ultimately led us to prefer even death to the incurable malady of hopeless love.63 It is nothing less than our ill-will against erotic separation which leads us to seek, in the end, a blissful redemption from earthly existence. The lesson, therefore, is clear. As long as consummation and fulfilment remain the standard, the measure, of all erotic life, we will not cease to be confronted, invariably, by a sensation of perpetually falling-short, of ongoing deprivation. As long as the desire for absolute presence is allowed to dominate and circumscribe our erotic scenographies, we will not cease to curse our desire on account of its perennial futility and eventually seek to silence it.
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It is in light of all this, that the necessity of a new ideal becomes plainly apparent to us. And it is likewise in this very same context that Nietzsche‟s own discourse “On Redemption” – likely one of the most important sections in the entirety of
Thus Spoke Zarathustra – should then ultimately be understood. For it is here,
in this very discourse, that Zarathustra not only comes to acknowledge that “loneliest of sorrows,”64 the anguish of our inability to amend the unfulfilments of the past, but also, the irrepressible need for redemption which necessarily accompanies it.
62 As noted earlier, see Rougemont‟s Love in the Western World for claims pertaining to the exemplarity of the Tristan myth. 18-19. 63 This is a point which Nietzsche himself alludes to in the following well-known passage: “This…is what revenge [Rache] itself is: the will‟s ill-will toward time and its it was.” Thus Spoke Zarathustra. 121.
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Indeed, what Nietzsche ultimately comes to suggest to us, here, is that the notion of redemption [Erlösung] come to be extricated, at long last, from the scenographies of death and fusional fantasy – extricated from its association with the consummatory ideal – and reconceived by us as “something higher than any reconciliation [Versöhnung].”65 But how, exactly, is all of this to be achieved?
Indeed, few questions, it seems, were ultimately of a greater, or more pressing, importance to Nietzsche, either philosophically or personally, than the question of redemption. For it was this question, more than any other, that spoke to the very heart of Nietzsche‟s own deepest and most prodigious suffering – his suffering on account of the past. We know that Nietzsche, by the time he composed his discourse “On Redemption,” had found himself haunted, almost incessantly, by the stark and unyielding facticity of the “it was,” its cruel and unrelenting dominion over the present (and the future). At nearly every turn, Nietzsche had found himself “powerless [Ohnmächtig] with respect to what had been done.”66 He had found himself confronted by the “loneliest sorrow,”67 the sorrow of his inability to will backwards, the sorrow of his incapacity to undo the most painful of memories. Bound irrevocably to a chronology pervaded by unmitigated failures and erotic frustrations (Mathilde, Lou, Cosima) – he had come to assume and ultimately embody, as we have already mentioned, the essential unfulfilment, the despondency, of Tristan himself; he had come to live
the drama of Wagnerian decadence at its deepest level, even to the point of contemplating suicide.
For Nietzsche, simply put, the problem of redemption was seemingly indissoluble from the problem of coming to justify his own past, of coming to purge the nihilism and decadence within. The stakes of redemption, in other words, could not possibly have been any higher.
65 Ibid. 122. 66 Ibid. 121. 67 Ibid.
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And it was here, in this very context – a context which could so easily have tilted, slowly but surely, in the direction of consummatory fantasy or even sheer renunciation – that we find Nietzsche coming to tell us, instead, of a redemption even “higher than any reconciliation,” of a redemption even higher than any “Versöhnung.” A truly defining moment, it seems, in the history of Western eroticism. For if anyone, in light of a relentless suffering, had seemingly entitled themselves, in all good faith, to a yearning for satiety and fulfilment, then surely this individual was Nietzsche. And yet, it was precisely the desire for fusional reconciliation which, in the pages of Zarathustra, he elects to eschew, rather remarkably, in favour of a new and unprecedented concept of what it means to be redeemed.
If up until now, in other words, the greatest answer, the only true answer, to human suffering had resided in the notion of eternal reconciliation, in the definitive suppression of all spatio-temporal distance – then what Nietzsche comes to offer us, in the pages of his text, is a notion of Erlösung which could not possibly be further removed from the milieu of consummatory idealism and the lust for blessed release. For rather than coming to link, as Schopenhauer and Wagner had, the notion of redemption to a suppression of spatio-temporal distance, Nietzsche elects to make distance itself the guiding principle of all redemption.
A truly stunning reversal – which turns the tables, not only on his decadent, German romantic predecessors, but on the entire tradition of consummatory idealism, more broadly. Redemption, in the pages of Zarathustra, is no longer to be attained through the pursuit of reconciliation, Nietzsche tells us, or through a pursuit of restoration in death, but only through an affirmation of distance itself – an affirmation of the very separation (the Fernsten-Liebe) which indefinitely extenuates our longing in the absence of all satisfaction.
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Why, we might ask, is this ultimately such a provocative development? First and foremost, because to make distance the measure of all redemption, is to find the earth itself, and all earthly existence, instantaneously redeemed. – And not only redeemed, but exonerated intrinsically, rendered innocent and utterly beyond reproach. For nothing, as we know, is perhaps more essential, more fundamental, to earthly existence than the regimen of spatio-temporal distanciation which regulates each and every one of our encounters and each and every one of our relationships – erotic or otherwise. To make distance, rather than reconciliation, our measure for redemption, is therefore to find the world itself suddenly revealed for what it already is: utterly perfect. It is to find earthly existence rendered unimpeachable on account of its distances, not in spite of them.68
And this, undoubtedly, is a point of considerable importance. For, if the parallel notions of distance and deferral are indeed allowed to replace, in this manner, consummation and fusion as the guiding principles of redemption, then the partings, the abandonments, the refusals which had so thoroughly haunted Nietzsche‟s own past and personal history, might suddenly become – not unlike the distances and dissonances of nature – fully exonerated. The moments of unfulfilment, of unresolved tension, of amorous irreciprocity, so assiduously chronicled in the letters of the mid-1880s, become transformed, in other words, into the most blessed moments, the most sacred moments of his entire life; the moments which bear witness most eloquently to the highest of all affirmations: the affirmation of desire‟s ceaseless intensification in the absence of all
68 To seek redemption through reconciliation is to seek to enter, in one form or another, “the Kingdom of Heaven.” To make distance the principle of redemption, by contrast, is want nothing other than the sheer heartland of separation itself, “the Kingdom of the Earth.” Cf. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. 277.
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resolution.69
The “tormenting and horrible memories”70 of the past, in other words, come to be
redeemed; and redeemed, moreover, through an affirmation of the very things
that the tradition of consummatory eroticism had so denigrated and disparaged: the abandonments, the refusals, and the unwavering separations of erotic life. Indeed, what Nietzsche is ultimately suggesting to us is not only that we come to affirm and accept all this, but that we learn to love it as well, without succumbing, at any moment, to the desire of putting an end to longing, or seeking a release from the discomforts of amorous dissatisfaction.
For redemption, as Lawrence Lampert tells us, is only achievable, in Nietzsche‟s text, “by a will that would not have the earth be other than it is.”71 To surmount the spirit of vengeance against the past and to redeem all that has been done, is to accept, first and foremost, that “nothing in existence should be excluded, nothing is dispensable.”72 To redeem the past, in other words, requires of us that we take account of every slight, every failure – every moment of heartbreak, every weakness – and to affirm the very necessity of these moments. It means to love eternity on the very basis of the interminable distances and deferrals which she offers us, not in spite of them. It means to treasure, moreover, every breath, every glance, every moment – knowing that they will never lead us to absolute consummation or release, but rather, engender something far more precious: the return of endless separation, the absolute and unwavering distances of the
circulus vitiosus.
For if to love eternity ultimately means, as Zarathustra has shown us, to love that which is most distant – then it is also, by this very same necessity, to love
69 This newly redeemed perspective on the past is clearly evidenced in those words, already cited, from Ecce Homo: “I would not give up my Tribschen days for anything…days of trust, cheerfulness, and sublime chance…of profound moments [der tiefen Augenblicke].” The very cradle of erotic disappointment had become the most blessed place for him. Ecce Homo. 92.
70 Selected Letters of Friedrich Nietzsche. 206.
71 Nietzsche’s Teaching: An Interpretation of Thus Spoke Zarathustra. 149. 72 Ecce Homo. 109.
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everything which makes this distance return.73 It is to love everything that allows
us, through the incalculable play of causality and influence, to see this distance incessantly regenerated and sustained. Indeed, it is along these very lines that Zarathustra, with the same breath that praises the Fernsten-Liebe, also recommends to us, rather importantly, “a love for causes and spectres.”74
This is because, if all things, as Nietzsche tells us, are ultimately “chained together, entwined, in love,”75 then to will the return of even a single moment, is necessarily is “to want it all back.”76 This, and nothing other, is the essential meaning behind Nietzsche‟s amor fati, his formula “for human greatness.”77 To love fate, according to Nietzsche, is to love without exclusion, without complaint. It is to “not want anything to be different, not forwards, not backwards, not for all eternity.”78 – A most provocative of notions, which appears to lead us, solemnly and unmistakably, toward thought‟s most auspicious, most extreme limit. As though everything that Nietzsche‟s discourse had been building towards, throughout the early 1880s, were suddenly to reveal, beyond the precipice of a most prohibitive exigency, the demand of a new and unprecedented relation with the impossible, the incomplete.
73 On this point, see Alexander Nehamas‟ Nietzsche, where the author comes to develop, in considerable detail, this particular aspect of the eternal recurrence. For Nehamas, the immediate consequence of the eternal return would be that “If anything in the world recurred, including an individual life or even a single moment within it, then everything in the world would recur in identical fashion.” Cf. Nietzsche. 156.
74 Thus Spoke Zarathustra. 53 75 Ibid. 283.
76 Ibid. 283. 77 Ecce Homo. 99. 78 Ibid.
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