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Notes
notes
1 Above all in Différence et Répétition.
2 “Différance” in Margins of Philosophy 17.
3 Deleuze, Nietzsche et la philosophie, section 1, subsection 2. Hereafter NP. In citations from this text Roman numerals refer to the five large sections into which the book is divided, Arabic numerals to the subdivisions within these sections.
4 Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals. In citations from this text Roman numerals refer to the three essays which comprise the main text, Arabic numerals to the sections into which these are subdivided.
5 For a good example of this procedure see NP II 2.
6 Nietzsche, The Will to Power, section 1066. Hereafter WP, with section number.
7 “That everything recurs” is, according to Nietzsche, “the closest approximation of a world of becoming to a world of being” (WP 617).
8 “[d]ans l’éternel retour, ce n’est pas le même ou l’un qui reviennent, mais le retour est lui-même l’un qui se dit seulement du divers et de ce qui diffère.”
9 And derive entirely from the Nachlass; see my discussion of this a little further on in the text.
10 I have decapitalized the section heading in Tomlinson's translation to better parallel the original.
11 “Si, dans tout ce que tu veux faire, tu commences par demander: est-il sûr que je veuille le faire un nombre infini de fois, ce sera pour toi le centre de gravité le plus solide.”
12 “les forces réactives ne reviennent pas.”
13 “Das grösste Schwergewicht.” Nietzsche, The Gay Science, section 341.
14 Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, part 3, “Of the vision and the Riddle,” section 2. Hereafter TSZ. In further citations from this text Roman numerals refer to the five main sections into which the text is divided and are followed by the titles of the subdivisions and Arabic numerals for any further subdivisions.
15 Deleuze, Pure Immanence 87.
16 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition 371. Hereafter DR.
17 Deleuze's avowed closeness to Nietzsche, which probably motivates the rhetoric of his appropriation of eternal return, is seen by at least one commentator as weakening Deleuze's philosophy by tying it to the failure of the Nietzschean project: see Conway.
18 In Difference and Repetition Deleuze clearly links his rejection of the wrong conception of eternal return with the first of the passages I am about to quote from Zarathustra: “Zarathustra denies that time is a circle [ … ] By contrast he holds that time is a straight line in two opposing directions. If a strangely decentred circle should form, this will only be ‘at the end’ of the straight line [ … ]” (371).
19 Heidegger 43–44.
20 Ibid. 54–55.
21 In fact there are grounds for believing the opposite. When Nietzsche entitles the first exposition of eternal return in The Gay Science “Das grösste Schwergewicht,” “The greatest weight,” one of the possible translations of the German “Schwergewicht” is “emphasis” or “stress.” If Nietzsche even partially has this connotation in mind then it seems that what is horrifying about the eternal return is not that it makes every act of will a matter of indifference but rather that it makes it so overwhelmingly significant, since it will be repeated for all time. This is approximately the interpretation of the eternal return proposed by Milan Kundera in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, as conferring a requisite weight and heaviness on being in order to counter its tendency to lightness and insignificance. But it will be recalled that Deleuze, too, emphasizes the aspect of eternal return which gives to the will a rule which prevents it from any half-hearted willing: everything you do must be willed for all time. Deleuze is right to bring out this point, but Heidegger's unwarranted interpolation here does not count against the general thrust of his interpretation of the passages in question; it is just that the “cry of distress” may arise for different reasons and the consequences of thinking oneself within the eternal return may be different from those Heidegger adduces.
22 The interpretation of eternal return given by Pierre Klossowski in Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle, which is highly complex but which revolves principally around a kind of rupture in identity which the eternal return implies, also seems to me consonant with these passages in Zarathustra and with what Nietzsche says about eternal return elsewhere; thus it provides an alternative account to the Heideggerian one I have evoked here. Nietzsche writes so little about the eternal return that there must necessarily be quite a number of interpretations of it which would count as reasonable. But to reiterate: I just do not think that Deleuze's reading is one of these interpretations.
23 There is a trend in analytic readings of Nietzsche from the past twenty years or so to emphasize the aspect of “eternal return” as a test for one's attitude to one's own life. See Nehamas; Clarke; Loeb; and Janaway. For a more “existential” reading of Nietzsche sharing this same basic orientation, see Hatab. Such readings have much to recommend them but this emphasis tends to obscure an aspect of eternal return with which Nietzsche became more and more preoccupied and of which Deleuze reminds us: the possible historical impact of this thought on Western culture as a whole.