Continued from second page...

Nietzsche and Eros

between the devil and God’s deep blue sea

The problem of the artist as actor—Jew—woman

By Babette E. Babich

Department of Philosophy, Fordham University, NYC, NY 10023, USA

Once again, the clue is found in the problem itself as our culture is a culture of vulgar, slave morality. Thus Nietzsche asks whether “falsity, indifference to truth and utility may be signs of youth” as symptoms of “childishness” in an artist? Asking this of artists (actors, Jews, women) he refers to “their habitual manner, their unreasonableness, their ignorance about themselves, their indifference to ‘eternal values,’ their seriousness in ‘play’—their lack of dignity; buffoon and god side by side; saint and canaille”(WP §816).

In the artist as in the ascetic priest, problem and redemption are yoked. But therewith we have again no more than a clue; we have neither the answer much less the cure. Nietzsche’s approach to this puzzle seeks to make a distinction between art as “a consequence of dissatisfaction with reality? Or an expression of gratitude for happiness enjoyed.” In this contrast, we speaking of the art of passionate love only in the latter thankful or loving case: this is what Nietzsche classifies as “aureole and dithyramb (in short, art of apotheosis)” (WP §845). Nietzsche, like Schiller, is always and everywhere speaking to (or of) the artist not the appeal to the crowd, thus he can observe that art in the grand style has that rhetorical diffidence “in common with great passion, that it disdains to please; that it forgets to persuade; that it commands, that it wills” (ibid.). If the soul of music seems opposed to this same grand distance that is also because, as a sign of its own consummate decadence, it has been limited to the play of one sense alone and no longer the dance of the senses. Music is more than two long millennia separated from its equally long degenerate progeny: the complete work of tragic art.

The slave morality of the Jew, as the vulgar morality embodied in the image ideal of woman, may never be able to emerge from the circle it builds for itself, even if it learns to survive the wound of its weak existence by continually reinflicting the wound upon itself. The standing problem is that if your life is a lie, you cannot be spared that lie in yourself.(41) And yet: exactly in this violent and self-delusory illusion, we are, exactly as artists—as actors, Jews, women—those beings who play with stars: “Wesen die mit Stirnen spielen.”

This is tragedy not science, not logic: the paradox of the Cretan, the paradox of Freud’s truth-telling Jew insulting his interlocutor with the lying insinuation of truth between Cracow and Lemberg, exceeds the opposition between good and evil or truth and lie with the remainder that Lacan calls the Real.(42) Once again, we review the odd cadence of Nietzsche’s rendered relationship between the problems Artist-Actor-Jew-Woman. The most interesting of these cultural problems, to use Nietzsche’s words, is the problem of the Jew which is the same problem of the actor precisely resonant in the metaphor of erotic music. In “Peoples and Fatherlands” in Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche offers a sustained reflection on the political history of nothing but European music. Yet we can hardly recall this thematic focus without adverting to the then contemporary sense of the title (and apart from the now-dangerously misleading ahistorical resonance) to clarify the contextual meaning of the section title. It is after noting “What Europe owes to the Jews?” and because Nietzsche’s context has precisely nothing to do with Hitler, but everything to do with the complex artist-actor-woman, that Nietzsche defines the Jew in terms of a racial or scientific metaphor if also in terms precisely opposed to the biologism that ended in National Socialism. For Nietzsche, the Jews “are beyond all doubt the strongest, toughest and purest race at present living in Europe; they know how to prevail even under the worst conditions (better even than under favourable ones)” (BGE §251).

The context is a metaphorical one and it is all about music. This is the erotic music Nietzsche prescribes, that is: like the Jew or the actor or the woman—or the Mediterranean-Adriatic-Aegean—in music. This erotic music could be poised “against German music” as “the redemption of music from the north,” as “prelude to a deeper, mightier, perhaps wickeder and more mysterious music.” This potential music not yet sung, certainly not yet heard, where we would have more than mere hearing to do with it, would have to be a “supra-European music which holds its own even before the brown sunsets of the desert, whose soul is kindred to the palm-tree and knows how to roam and be at home among great beautiful solitary beast of prey.” For Nietzsche claims that he, at least, is able to “imagine a music whose rarest magic would consist in this, that it no longer knew anything of good and evil, except perhaps some sailor’s homesickness, some golden shadow and delicate weakness would now and then flit across it” (BGE §255).

This is the music heard by the same heart’s ecstatic genius which has tempted so many seduced and intoxicated commentators to reinvent the conclusion of Beyond Good and Evil: “the tempter god and born pied piper of consciences whose voice knows how to descend into the underworld of every soul” (BGE §295). There the poses of Nietzsche’s seduction take us beyond our routine pettiness (resentments), redeeming in an almost confessedly Christian mode—and, incidentally enough, in the bravest democratic fugue yet heard—nothing less monumental than every vulgar instinct. It is “the genius of the heart, who makes everything loud and self-satisfied fall silent and teaches it to listen, who smooths rough souls and gives them a new desire to savour —”, teaching the agitations of modernity stillness and superficiality out of profundity: “ . . . that the deep sky may mirror itself in them.” Such a genius teaches not the cheap promise of the market and its seduction of still vulgar desire in the curse that is the blessing of the “goods of others” but instead and much rather forms the common man so that he is “richer in himself, newer to himself than before, broken open, blown upon and sounded out by a thawing wind, more uncertain perhaps, more delicate, more fragile, more broken, but full of hopes.” Yet it is important to recall that Nietzsche cannot close with this rarest of sustained lyrical notes. In the end, the human must be brought to teach this genius how to be humane, that is to say, as beings inevitably condemned to art, be it knowingly or not, we will always need a trick to get there. We need artistry, we need the bronzed music that is the soul of the south, the gondola song resonant in the soul singing itself to itself.

Such a music is of course the music of brown and bronzed night, the music of the soul that sings to itself a song a tremble with wild bliss.(43) The colors of this music, which can only be heard in the night, elusive in the morning of their youth are as written words, sketched out, no more than fragrance faded shadows of music, so that what is left to tell barely hints at the tones of what Nietzsche calls his “beloved—wicked thoughts!” painted like a musical poem, in “many many-coloured tendernesses and fifty yellows and browns and greens and reds.”

When Nietzsche speaks of the innocence of the moment it is an innocence that looks hard into the abyss, into the weakness of human vanity, ambition, inadequacy. But at the same time he affirms the only source of transcendent power, glory, and beauty from and on the same humane side of life. It is for this reason that Nietzsche opposes the rhythms of his lived body to the long theatricality of Wagnerian music. Speaking of the body, of “iron, leaden life,” he asks only that it be “gilded by good golden and tender harmonies.” Hence Nietzsche can complain that what he suffers most when he contemplates the fate of music is the loss of the tragic sense: “deprived of its world-transfiguring, affirmative character . . . décadence music and no longer the flute of Dionysus” (EH, “The Wagner Case”). This decadent music redeems neither the heaviness of life nor ameliorates its tragic side. It is a tragic joy or “melancholy” that seeks “to rest in the hiding places and abysses of perfection” (GS §368)

The monological art, an art not made for the theater, for the masses of self-conscious playing affect, would be like Greek art—which “never ‘knew’ what it did” (GS §369).(44) Causality works forwards in this kind of passionate affirmative love only by working backward like the ray of sunlight Nietzsche sees shining on his life at the start of Ecce Homo, “I looked backwards, I looked forwards, never did I see so many and such good things at once.” Nietzsche’s account, telling his life to himself, thus works upon his life as a benediction. And it is this benediction which transfigures the glance, transfiguring what was into what was willed as such, which is the meaning of what it is to will backwards, declaring: “how, could I fail to be thankful to my life?”

The gift of such a benediction is the affirmation of the great and the small, “a yes-saying without reserve: to suffering itself, to guilt itself, to the most questionable and strangest in existence itself,” simply because “nothing that is can be subtracted, nothing is dispensable” (EH, “The Birth of Tragedy” §2). This does not mean that there is or was or will be ‘no suffering,’ no guilt, nothing strange and questionable but—this is the meaning of fate—that everything is necessary: not only one thing is needful. What is required in everything is everything that preceded, accompanies, and succeeds it. Ergo, if in one tremendous or happy moment one affirms or blesses even one joyous fruition, one inevitably wills as well everything that has been as necessary for it to be at all.(45) Echoing the Saitenspiel that is the full soul trembling like a strung chord sounding with happiness, Nietzsche notes that “all eternities were needed to produce this one event—and in just this moment of yes-saying, all eternity was called good, redeemed, justified, and affirmed” (KSA 12, 308).

The creative, artistic response to the conditions of life expresses neediness or abundance, but the articulation of such an expression is inevitably non-exclusive.(46) Nietzsche affirms that both “ascendent artists [and] decadent artists . . . belong to all phases.” (KSA 12, 264).(47) And if artists of ascending and declining life characterize every stage, every excess and destitution of life and history, everything, both hunger and abundance, must also be affirmed. Thus Nietzsche retrospectively describes his own Zarathustra as “yes saying to the point of justifying, of redeeming even the entire past” (EH, “Zarathustra” §8). This Zarathustra does as he composes, singing his own song to his own soul, bringing together into one “what is fragment and riddle and dreadful chance.” The lean time and the wreckage of life, the failures and the humiliations are as necessary as the full and perfect moment of time, as the consummate turning of life.(48) The stumbling move must be caught, not denied or named deception or illusion but blessed and turned into the balance. And all for the sake of affirmation or creative abundance. But—to keep to the claims of ordinary or real life—it is here that it gets hard to hold, hard to ambition, hard to keep. The point is that it cannot be kept: the key is gift, expression, sacrifice. Contra current conservative (i.e., cutting edge, Foucaultian, Deleuzian)(49) readings, Nietzsche’s convalescence has nothing to do with recuperation or reserve or yet another effort but is always all about expenditure. This is the erotic trope par excellence, the organismic, i.e., the orgasmic meaning of what Nietzsche describes as the defining aspect of “the great health—that one does not merely have but also acquires continually and must acquire because one gives it up again and again and must give it up” (GS §382).

At the same moment and drawn into the same breath with which Nietzsche teaches love of life, he underscores every last reason for despair, frustration, impossible desire. This is the tragic condition of life, where life always “presupposes suffering and sufferers.” What is transformed in the possibility of love is the disposition of suffering, a transformation as rare as that same (impossible) possibility. Only lovers fully alive to everything in life, which means those arched not with right feeling but by what I have deliberately been calling ‘wrong feeling,’ commanded by eros beyond themselves (not in imaginative projection) but exactly incarnate in what and how they are. Lovers, bodily, physically representing ‘the over-fullness of life,’ are able to desire the Dionysian, wholly erotic art Nietzsche consecrates as presupposing “a tragic view of life, a tragic insight.” As an erotically charged being, the lover, precisely ecstatic, can “not only afford the sight of the terrible and questionable” as a spectacle to be admired at an aesthetic distance, but such a ‘Dionysian god and man” can also face the actuality of the “terrible deed and every luxury of destruction” (GS §370).

In the genealogy Nietzsche traces between artistic creativity and artistic culture, both abundance and need can give birth, yielding either immortalization or destruction. And Nietzsche wishes to look less at the fruits or works of the artist as a means to understand the psychology of the artist (“I am one thing, my works are another” [EH, “Why I Write Such Good Books” §1]), than the nature of the creative impulse, the expression of overabundance or the product of hunger or need (cf. KSA 7, 440). Thus, for example, a delight in destruction may be the result not of a cheap or vulgar nihilism but “an overflowing energy, pregnant with the future” (GS §370). Commentators, including trend-ambitioning readers like David Krell, typically read every energetic metaphor into pregnancy in its connection with the future save the critically metonymic reference to how one gets that way (this last point is the erotic dimension that is always occluded in Krell’s putatively feminist enthusiasm for couvade or elephantine female envy). It is crucial to catch the specifically erotic tone of the image of pregnancy not only because it could not be more obvious but also because it could be argued that in its time and context (especially for the eternally adolescent Nietzsche): such talk was suggestive enough.(50)

What is telling is abundance, that is: potency or sovereign not slavish desire. Immortalization can be an apotheosis of flux and destruction can be the precondition for creation. Nietzsche’s consciousness of the tragic insight colors both the affirmative and the reactive dispositions of abundance and need. Whatever is replete with overflowing energy cannot be conserved—this is the economy of expenditure or expression: affirmation. The will to power that is a capacity for expression can only be given out without reserve.(51) In contrast with art, knowledge merely seeks to tell itself a story: justifying and enduring its own impotence. Thus Nietzsche speaks of the gap between “know” and “can” (BGE §253) and suggests that what can act must perhaps exclude knowledge. The will lacking power is the will to power that does (and can do) nothing but conserve itself in the power it lacks, already played out, already without reserve. The difference is between the will to expend and the will to save. If no one can spend more than one has, expenditure remains the point at issue. In any case: in the economic dynamic of life as erotic love, power can only be kept if it is continually spent, lost, given out. This is the energetics of eros, the erotic dynamic, as it is an exact economy of discharge. It is the impotence of fear which cannot imagine and can never believe that such power, such great health, “one does not merely have, but also acquires continually, and must acquire because one gives it up again and again, and must give it up” (GS §382). The course of desire sacrificed is the eternal return of the same.

If it is true of everything organic and inorganic that the conditions of life include death, the condition of the artist as the creator of the work of art (as of the condition of everyday life) is also the history of what must be overcome or mastered as what must be brought forward or heightened to produce the work. Not only “mud and chaos” but also “the divine spectator and the seventh day” (BGE §225) are absolutely necessary aspects of a holy yes, a wheel rolling out of itself, which Nietzsche’s Zarathustra compares first to the child’s innocence and poises again with the very same words in the impossible ideal of lovers who promise a life to one another.

As a defining condition of artistic creativity, Nietzsche mused that a Raphael “without hands” be imagined as the rule rather than the exception. Nietzsche also emphasized the tremendous vulnerability of the human capacity for and openness to beauty. And, again and again, he points out that no one can get more out of anything—art or life, even a book—than what one brings to bear on it. In the case of art, life, or, indeed, a text, this limit is that of the interpretive wherewithal at one’s disposal, which includes everything one is and everything one has experienced. The conditions of art for the artist, for artistic perception as for the culture or cultivation of a people are exceedingly rare.

To become what one is, one must take over one’s own life as an invention; even more importantly, at the same time, one must learn love. The need for love, for learning how to love, and an active erotic deed or lived passion or expressed, articulated desire corresponds to the importance of what Nietzsche calls benediction. This is a yes-saying. To learn love is to learn to bless and this love has an extraordinary mien: as human as divine. And from the first moment of creation, benediction is a song of blessing or naming or calling things good.(52)

Nor would Nietzsche ever stop talking about, longing for, arguing love, which he spoke of as amor fati. Dionysus teasing Ariadne. Thus he could charge (as Wittgenstein similarly observed) that “The degree and kind of a man’s sexuality reaches up to the topmost summit of his spirit” (BGE §75). Thus Nietzsche could echo his ideal definition of chastity in love: “Dans le véritable amour, c’est l’âme qui envellope le corps” (BGE §142). The dream of love was always in his mouth, even if as the actor, artist, Jew, or else as the woman “born of a rib of his own ideal” (TI, “Mixed Maxims and Arrows” §13, cf. GS §71, etc.). The Nietzsche who “ventured to paint his ‘happiness’ on the wall” (GS §56) owes much of what made him “dynamite” to a dying era and the insight that the eighteenth and nineteenth century ideal of energy or love was a metaphor for what he always knew better than to reduce to sex without illusion, without erotic artistry.

Acknowledgments

An early draft of this essay, prepared at the invitation of the Friedrich Nietzsche Society for presentation in Manchester, England, 1996, appears as “Nietzsche and the Erotic Valence of Art,” The Journal of Nietzsche Studies, 15 (1998): 15–33 and an intermediate version appears as “Nietzsche et Eros entre le gouffre de Charybde et l’écueil de Dieu: La valence érotique de l’art et l’artiste comme acteur-Juif-femme,” Revue Internationale de Philosophie, 1/211 (2000): 15–55. I note here that a later version of this text is a key chapter in my book, Words in Blood, Like Flowers: Philosophy and Poetry, Music and Eros (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006). I thank Debra Bergoffen, Joanna Hodge, Angèle Kremer-Marietti, and David Owen for encouraging words. For singularly different inspirations, mind, heart, and soul, I am grateful to David B. Allison, Howard Caygill, Alasdair MacIntyre, Holger Schmid, and Tracy B. Strong.

| page up |

To download the complete essay as an Adobe PDF file, right click the link below and select “save target as” to save to your PC.
Nietzsche and Eros between the devil and God’s deep blue sea | |