But where, we might ask, does all of this ultimately leave Nietzsche with respect to Wagner? And where, moreover, does it leave us with respect to the question of decadence? Important questions. And though any attempts at forging, or even attempting to suggest, a naive and uncritical identification between the two works must, it seems, be strenuously avoided – there can simply be no doubting, on the basis of the preceding account, that Nietzsche‟s Zarathustra may rightfully be understood to comprise, in so many respects, a rather knowing re-enactment, or even restaging, of Wagner‟s Tristan.
For what both of these works come to offer us is nothing less than erotic scenographies thoroughly pervaded by inexorable breath-holding, hesitation, and deferral. Both works, moreover, seem to lead us, through the unrelenting pathos of postponement and separation, to the threshold of an ostensibly supreme
moment. – A moment of supreme crisis, perhaps, but also of supreme invitation.
The moment of an intimacy that never gives itself once and for all.
And yet, if there remains, when all is said and done, a single most unmistakable and riveting point of contact and divergence between these two works, a point which seems to encapsulate, more evocatively than any other, the meaning of Nietzsche‟s rehabilitation of erotic distance in its relation to Wagner‟s opera – then this point must be understood to arise nowhere other than in these works‟ respective, final scenes, those moments of presumptive culmination and finality, in which everything seems to end, only to begin again.
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Of the two scenes in question, Wagner‟s is, of course, by far the more famous one. Indeed, much more has been written of it than we could ever hope to encapsulate or summarise here.79 We know, for instance, about its “unresolved
chromaticism,” just as we know of its unparalleled emotional tumult, and its deeply affecting symphonic swoon. But what concerns us in the present case is something much more basic, something much more simple. What concerns us are the words themselves. –Words which, despite their uncontested notoriety, nevertheless seem to bear examining more closely.
For it is within Isolde‟s rapturous exclamation, as one senses, that the entire tradition of German romanticism, from Novalis to Schopenhauer and beyond, seems to receive arguably its most fitting, apotheotic enunciation. When Wagner‟s Isolde – cresting volubly in the midst of an ecstatic rapture – stands over Tristan‟s fallen body, and intones that phrase: “Unbewußt, höchste Lust,” it is not simply the opera‟s heroine who has spoken her defining word, but the entire tradition of consummatory eroticism, from Anaximander to Schopenhauer, as well.
But what, exactly, does this phrase – ostensibly so singular, and yet remarkably paradigmatic – ultimately signify? For Wagner, it seems, the phrase‟s precise meaning must be understood as not only utterly apodictic in nature, but also, as metaphysically absolute. This is because what it expresses is nothing less than the final, eternal truth itself. Operating, as we know, within the confines of a post-Kantian, dualist metaphysic, Wagner had come to understand, precisely like Schopenhauer, all conscious existence to be fundamentally circumscribed by the
principium individuationis, the laws of temporal and spatial distance – and therefore, essentially divorced from the eternal and abiding truth of the
noumenal realm, that undifferentiated Oneness in which all distance is
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annulled.80
Considered in this light, Isolde‟s parting words may rightly be interpreted as a statement of profound and unwavering optimism – a naive optimism, perhaps, that the possibility of a most supreme and incomparable of joys now awaited her: the joy of absolute and unending night. For this, as we know, is precisely what the notion of “unconsciousness,” here, is so carefully coded to entail. It is coded to entail nothing less than a deepest immersion within reconciliatory fusion, “a long-awaited restoration [selige Rückkehr]”81 with one‟s beloved. Here, in the
darkness of this absolute Verklärung, there will no longer be anything to separate Tristan and Isolde. The consummatory fantasy par excellence will finally be realised: two lovers, “heart to heart [Herz an Herz], lip to lip…bound together in a single breath.”82
This, in short, is the precise manner in which Wagner‟s scenography seeks to conclude itself, namely, by invoking nothing less than a world-suppressing twilight and the joy of eternal reconciliation. It concludes itself by conjuring, in other words, an ecstatic vision of the consummatory fantasy becoming reality: an unmistakable exaltation of the single, unified heart, beating silently and contentedly, amidst the satiety of supreme repose.
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And is it not fascinating, in light of all this, that no one, until now, has seemingly noticed the rather striking manner in which Nietzsche‟s concluding stanzas to “The Drunken Song,” that final, major discourse of Zarathustra IV, appear to be
80 The question of the relationship between Kant and Schopenhauer, as well as the question of Wagner‟s metaphysical investments is likewise dealt with in considerable length, in Chapter 1, and referred to broadly within the Chapter 2 as well.
81 “Hymns to the Night.” 14. 82 Act II, Scene 2.
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composed almost in direct response to this very vision – the ecstatic vision of a death-devoted Isolde? Just as in Wagner‟s paradigmatic and unforgettable
Liebestod, we find Nietzsche, particularly in the tenth and eleventh stanzas, coming to emphasise, above all, the notion of joy, or Lust – at the very same time that he exhorts his audience: “The hour is here, let us wander into the night!”83
A remarkable point of rhetorical and thematic confluence.
Of course, as we might have expected, these points of unmistakable similarity, for all their suggestive force, only serve to render, all the more noticeable and significant, the deep-seated antagonisms which exist between the two scenes in question. For in direct contrast to the Wagnerian Liebestod, there is absolutely no image, here, of a unified and sated heart to serve as a rhetorical and thematic exemplification for Nietzsche‟s erotic fantasies. Nor is there any intimation of an eternal and abiding amorous reconciliation – a moment of ultimate fusion. Rather, what we encounter is something is very different, something which proceeds to mark, in a most deeply provocative manner, the exigency of an eroticism given over to the affirmation of distance itself, the affirmation of endless forbearance. “Did you ever say Yes to a single joy [Lust]? Oh, my friends, then you said Yes to all woe as well.”84
It with these lines, and the ones which immediately follow them, that Nietzsche comes to offer us nothing less than a rather telling rejoinder to Wagner‟s own, closing invocation of a “höchste Lust.” For in direct contrast to the Wagnerian joy, which decisively consummates itself in an instant of death and transfiguration – Nietzsche‟s Lust remains, at all times, irreconcilable with consummatory fulfilment. It is a joy which comes to be linked, instead, to an unconditional affirmation of the circuit of circuits, the ring of eternity, in its unmasterable distances. –And thus, by the very same logic, necessarily linked to the prospect of an endless dissatisfaction. This is because, as Nietzsche reminds us, to desire the return of every highest joy, every höchste Lust, is also necessarily
83 Thus Spoke Zarathustra. 279. 84 Ibid. 283.
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to affirm the very grief which inextricably accompanies it (“For joys all want themselves, therefore, do they also want grief!”)85
And what word, we might ask, does Nietzsche elect to make use of, here, in speaking of this inescapable and utterly compulsory grief – this sorrow linked to the notion of an eternal and undying Lust? His word choice, as it turns out, could not possibly be more significant. For it is none other than the notion of Herzeleid
which Nietzsche comes to evoke here. – A word which means, quite literally, “heart suffering,” or perhaps more colloquially, “heartbreak.” It is a term which rather plainly seems to evoke a torment, or a grief, of a quintessentially amorous, or erotic, nature.
This, and nothing other, is what Nietzsche, in those crucial, final stanzas of Zarathustra‟s penultimate discourse elects to emphasise and affirm. “Oh happiness, Oh pain! Oh break, thou heart [O brich, Herz]!”86 he goes on to write,
as if to render all the more unmistakable the stark juxtaposition with Wagner‟s own, earlier evocation of a consummated, unbroken heart. Indeed, of all the figurative, or symbolic, tropes which Nietzsche could have chosen to call upon, it cannot help but strike us as profoundly fascinating that it is the figure of the heart which happens to assert itself, here, at this culminating moment of his discourse.
Could it be, we might ask, that after the shattered intimacy of Tribschen, the disappointments of Bayreuth, and the coldness and abandonment which followed that final, shared sunset in Sorrento – it were somehow in this very figure, the figure of the heart, broken and yet unceasingly resilient, that Nietzsche had perhaps come to discover his most poignant image for expressing the painful ambivalence of his relation to Wagner, and the tradition of German romanticism, more broadly?
–A possibility which would allow us to ascribe, it seems, a more prescient and
85 Ibid. 282-3. 86 Ibid. 283.
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decisive importance to those already unquestionably moving words from 1883: “Many a leave have I taken already…I know the heart-rending final hours [Ich kenne die herzbrechenden Stunden].”87 For what this statement, as we can see,
simply cannot help but reinscribe, once more, is a rather stark and telling contrast with the paradigmatically Tristanian image of two lovers “heart to heart [Herz an Herz], lip to lip…bound together in a single breath.”88
But to juxtapose the Wagnerian heart to the Nietzschean heart, in this manner, is never as simple, or straightforward, a task as it might initially appear. For what it requires of us is nothing less than a truly incomparable appreciation for the very
nuanced tension which holds these two images in equipoise. A tension, a cleavage, which marks nothing less than the point of silent rupture between two discontinuous planes, two traditions, two visions of what it means to desire and to love, in the wake of eternal unfulfilment.
To undertake such a comparison is never simply to oppose a consolidated unity, to a fractured whole. Nor is it to oppose presence to absence, proximity to separation, or even identity to difference. For the imposition of such dualities and divisions can only work to obscure, ever more perniciously, that deepest, most mysterious, secret of the real wounding at stake.
This is because to evoke the Nietzschean Herzeleid, is to speak, above all, of a most profound and imperceptible fracture – one which precedes the very heart it shatters, much as the movement of eternal recurrence precedes every possible beginning, every possible origin. To speak of such a breaking, is to speak of a wounding which remains both always already accomplished – and yet, at the very same time, always still to be inflicted, always for the very first time. It is a breaking, in other words, which can never be decisively completed, just as it can never be decisively mended.
87 Ibid. 74. 88 Act II, Scene 2.
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Indeed, this is what the story of Zarathustra‟s courtship, more than anything else, seems to teach us. And it is precisely this notion whose transference and reinscription within the pages of Blanchot‟s own texts will later comprise arguably one the most significant, hitherto unrecognised, points of contact between the two writers in question. A point of contact in which the entire project of the rehabilitation of erotic distance will find itself confirmed and carried to its furthest limit.
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But before any of this can be further addressed, or elaborated – a number of earlier questions still remain to be resolved. First and foremost, there is the lingering consideration of Nietzsche‟s precise relation to German romanticism, as well as the question of his on-going polemic against nihilism.
Where is one to stand on these issues? Does Nietzsche remain a nihilist, a decadent? Or does he surmount, at long last, these traditions which had both provoked and distressed him, in equal measure?
These are clearly important questions. – Questions which seem to preclude us, almost from the very beginning, of responding, with any confidence whatsoever, in either the affirmative or negative voice. For if, as we have already shown, over the course of the preceding chapters, Nietzsche‟s Zarathustra is indeed a text which simply cannot be understood, in any depth whatsoever, without taking into careful consideration the profound and inimitable influence of Wagner‟s Tristan
– then the inextricable ties linking not only this most crucial of texts, but also this
most provocative of thoughts, the thought of eternal return, to the heritage of German romanticism, must be recognised as utterly irremissible.
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And yet, one might also say, by the very same token, that in coming to reinscribe the thought of eternal return, as he does, within an unprecedented, and wholly affirmative context, Nietzsche is simultaneously opening a future for thought which romanticism had prematurely closed. If Wagner, in other words, had already faced the exigency of eternal return, decades prior to Nietzsche, and had seen in it a terrifying manifestation of humanity‟s most accursed damnation – then for Nietzsche, it is never really a question of “introducing” this thought of thoughts, or even of explicating it – but rather, of coming to affirm it in the precise manner that Tristan was unable to. It is never, in other words, a matter of naively seeking to contradict Wagner‟s scenography with an opposing construction of his own. It is never a matter of mere dialectics.
Rather, what is at stake, here, is something altogether different, something altogether more subtle. For Nietzsche, as it turns out, it is above all a question of attempting to bring to light, to excavate and expose, the very notion which Wagner had struggled so persistently to suppress and silence beneath Isolde‟s final, ravishing exclamation – beneath her höchste Lust.
We are referring, of course, to the notion of an endless, objectless, desire – the trauma of eternal recommencement which consigns every yearning to dissatisfaction and every love to failure. This, precisely, is what the dénouement
to Wagner‟s opera attempts, so visibly, to conceal and to subdue. And it is this, precisely, which Nietzsche is then attempting to reassert, so affirmatively, at the very heart of his own text – by coming to inscribe an ending to Zarathustra‟s tale of courtship which so expressly seeks to contest its Tristanian counterpart.
For whereas Wagner‟s opera appears to culminate, as we know, in a moment of unparalleled, teleological grandiosity, a moment of blissful reconciliation – Nietzsche elects to fashion, on the contrary, a conclusion to his Zarathustra
which patently seeks to subvert any possibility of facile recuperation. What exactly are we referring to here? Nothing but that strange and utterly unmistakable tension between Nietzsche infamous “two endings” to Zarathustra
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– that seemingly irresolvable tension between Parts III and IV of his text, which allows the supreme impossibility of determinate culmination to announce itself most remarkably.
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For it is well-known that when the “complete text” of Zarathustra first appeared in published form, in 1886, two years after Nietzsche had completed Part IV – it was nevertheless this latter section which came to be rather conspicuously excluded from the printed manuscript. Rather than electing to publish and release this final chapter alongside his other, earlier sections of the text, Nietzsche had made the unusual decision of having it “privately printed and circulated secretly”89 amongst only a handful of his closest friends. A decision as
fascinating as it is quizzical. But how, exactly, are we to understand its significance? Could it be, we might wonder, that Nietzsche had simply come to recognise, from a stylistic point of view, that the conclusion of Book III, with its evocation of the Seven Seals, served as a more suitable, a more poignant, ending for his text?
Perhaps. But there is also, it seems, another explanation. Namely, that by writing Part IV, distributing it, and then coming to exclude it from the published version of the text, he were somehow attempting to bear witness to the sheer falsity, the duplicity, of every ending, of every resolution. A testimony, moreover, to the impossibility of ever marking a point of definitive closure with relation to the text, the courtship, or even life itself.
Indeed, the more closely we examine the relationship between Parts III and IV of Nietzsche‟s text – the more revelatory, and justified, such a reading begins to
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appear to us. For there can simply be no doubting that the very existence of the fourth part, as Laurence Lampert writes, clearly violates the more natural ending of Part III.90 And yet, it is precisely this violation which Nietzsche not only seems
to authorise, but also to carry out – albeit “in secret.”
In further support of this thesis, it is perhaps indispensable to note that Nietzsche himself, in coming to speak of his Part IV, in later years, almost never speaks of it as a definitive ending or resolution. Rather, as Laurence Lampert reminds us, it is above all under the form of a “transitionary” moment that Nietzsche, throughout the late 1880s, comes to conceive of this ostensibly concluding section. In a pair of letters from 1888, for instance, Nietzsche even proposes an explicit renaming of Part IV. His suggested title? “The Temptation of Zarathustra: An Interlude.”91
The remarkable fact that Nietzsche, by the summer of 1888, had plainly come to consider the concluding section of Zarathustra as merely an “interlude” cannot help but suggest to us, in the clearest of terms, the fundamental aversion to teleological recuperation which must be understood to haunt the text‟s final pages – those very pages in which his allusions to Wagner‟s Tristan become perhaps most discernibly pronounced.
At the very point where Wagner, in his related scenography, had sought to make recourse to the notion of death and reconciliation as a paradigmatic