Affirmation and Mortal Life

NIETZSCHE'S ETERNAL RETURN AND THE DEATH OF ZARATHUSTRA In Ecce Homo, Nietzsche calls the eternal recurrence the highest formula of affirmation that is at all attainable (EH Z, I).1 However, it has been widely acknowledged that Nietzsche never presents the eternal return as a single formula or unified doctrine, and this complicates considerably efforts to understand its affirmative potential. Instead of a formula, we find, as Heidegger says, various of the thought,2 and these communications come from a wide range of voices.3 A majority of eternal return scholarship has consolidated these voices and found in them two trajectories for interpretation: the cosmological and the ethical/practical. The cosmological interpretation is often rejected,4 for reasons ranging from Nietzsche's failure to publish his cosmological proofs to the insubstantiality of those proofs to the irrelevance of cosmology for Nietzsche's meaning to some combination of these.5 Thus, a common interpretive strategy is a rejection or a dismissal of the cosmological interpretation followed by a development of an ethical/practical reading.6 The result has been a presentation of the thought as a single question or test that individuals can engage existentially, making affirmation either an agent's ability to will infinite repetitions of an action, or the ability to develop an attitude of amor fati7 These ethical/practical readings give us, as Clark puts it, a game that we can play,8 using our response to the test to gauge our attitude toward life. Alternatively, Gilles Deleuze's interpretation of the eternal return as selective test largely defies the sharp distinction between the cosmological and the ethico-practical readings, and this selective test makes of affirmation the ability to will becoming at the expense of oneself. According to Deleuze, Nietzsche's eternal return is a criterion of selection for active and reactive forces. Active forces are forces that will constant and increasing power, and reactive forces are those which decompose and separate active force from what it can do.9 The affirmative spirit in this case is one who submits to the destruction of the reactive in itself and thus to the dissolution of its own identity. These radically different understandings of the eternal return all have grounding in Nietzsche's texts, but each unifies the thought into a formula in a way that risks overlooking the variety of ways in which it is presented. I will therefore re-examine several of these presentations, with special attention to GS 341 and Zarathustra. Both of these texts present the eternal return as a thought that in its weight reveals something about affirmation, but neither indicates any straightforward formula by which the thought might be tested on a will. Instead, they narrate the return as an event that is experienced.10 It is therefore curious that Pierre Klossowski's interpretation of the eternal which describes the experienced event of the eternal return for Nietzsche, is so ubiquitously footnoted, but so seldom used as a resource for working through the thought.12 In what follows, I will draw on Klossowski's work in order to distinguish between the eternal return as experienced event and the eternal return as an articulated thought. I will make a distinction between affirmative willing and affirmative thinking, and I will argue that the eternal return is best understood as an intensified translation of a tension encountered in Nietzsche's self-overcoming thought - a tension reflecting the challenge of living a mortal life affirmatively.13 The Thought as Physiological Event Looking to Nietzsche's letters and his early formulations of the eternal return, Klossowski describes it as an event befalling Nietzsche that gradually began to translate itself into an intelligible thought.14 Klossowski's account of this event and its eventual articulation is important because it creates a way of explaining the thought in Nietzsche's own terms - namely, physiologically. …