nietzsche's secret



featureless netizens,


I have been reading Beyond Good and Evil trying to shake loose again Nietzsche's propensity as I read it without imposing too much of a forced structure like Heidegger does. There is no systematic philosophy in Nietzsche but rules of thumb and a spur to a way of life that he always imagined as the future of new philosophers. This spur to some extent makes up what I will call a rhetoric of secrecy, an exilic withdrawal and detachment that gives him the ability to connect with odd readers on an intimate level. Odd readers are like those who find themselves outside the norms of what it means and how to go about becoming a member of society. He addresses himself to the mavericks, eccentrics, outsider geeks, women, multicolored wierdo's, fags, clowns, tricksters and other beings of the border between the human and the inhuman. It's oppressive situations that drive one to becoming refined, crafty in creating masks that conceal. As you know for me the issue here is understanding the basis for being innovative. Here it is finding oneself as not being fit or cut to the measure of what constitute the governing standards of normality. We are monsters in the eyes of society, beasts of prey who cannot be fathomed and understood who are constantly under going change and proliferating all kinds of masks and appearances as a cloud of obscurity that is always unstable and impermanent, not easy to get a hold off. It's a mistake to see in Nietzsche's beast of prey the strong. No, it's the 'position' that is weak, a minoritarian 'point of view' that is fragile. It's the worst possible way to be;-- make no mistake about it. It is making this weak position into the strong one that makes up the know-how of a great rhetorical strategist. In this case the hunter then would become interchangeable with the hunter and that's one of things that is shown by V&D in their book on Greek metis or craftiness. It's clearly not an offensive philosophy but a defensive one involving something like the ability to take on the markings of one's surroundings as comouflage and in this way dissappear, become invisible and hidden in the shadows. The result as you can see is also the projection of of an illusory object of fear, a scarecrow: "Flee into concealment. And have your masks and subtlety, that you may be mistaken for what you are not, or feared a little. And don't forget the garden with golden trelliswork And have people around you who are as a garden -- or as the music in the waters in the evening, when the day is turning into memories. Choose the GOOD solitutude, the free, playful, light solitude that gives you, too, the right to remain good in some sense" (section 25, BGE). The last thing one becomes in this will to the invisible, unknown and hidden, to the virtual; is easy to understand. There is a jamming of communicative signals but the noise of that which impossible to comprehend. A limit of understanding and krisis of the idea of reason is brought into play. The frontier of border cultures makes thinking stop in its tracks and ponder things very very slowly and this is how Dasein comes to its ownmost posibility, how we go from the ordinary operation of the understanding to a limit hermeneutics of the exceptions, of those choice flowers that are unique and singular. Thinking becomes an incubator out of which emerges that which is surprising and unexpected with the breakdown and spliting apart of a very fertile and phat idea of reason which Schelling 'understood' as the absolute A=A, Orphic egg and esoteric BWO. How the krisis happens is through a intensification that Schelling calls CONTRACTION, a tightening up of a hard unit which then as identity breaks apart and in that breaking apart there is the relation that then bonds together a multitude. It's no accident that for a new generation of radicals it is Nietszche who is our Marx. Dionysus is a shapeshifting multitude that always operates in secrecy like the weak position always has, like the fox or octopus or D&V's Greek intelligence. These are books working out the strategic avenues of a new age politics. There is a kind of encryption that obscures the possiblility of legibility or a hermeneutics to take place or work out a stable position and point of view. For instance in their Treatise on Nomadology D&G in Proposition VI are discussing the nimadic numbering number of their war machines. It doesn't represent a measure but a stretegy of becoming X... : "In the war machine and nomadic existence , the number is no longer numbered, but becomes a Cipher (Chiffre), and it is in this capacity that it constitutes the "esprit de corps" and invents the secret and its outgrowths (strategy, espionage, war ruses, ambush, diplomacy, etc." As an example of highly nuanced quantities near impossible to discern of war machines D&G quote the _Desert Children of Dune_ by Frank Herbert, "He moved with the random walk which made only those sounds natural to the desert. Nothing in his passage would indicate that human flesh moved there. It was a way of walking so deeply conditioned in him that he didn't need to think about it. the feet moved of themselves, no measurable rhythm to their pacing." It the strategy of a thief like Hermes when he steals Apollo's cows in one of the Homeric Hymns, cloud of ink of an octopus.


tympan

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