Nietzsche and Levinas : ‘after the death of a certain God’s

ETHICS OR the anti-moralist. What more is there to say? Either moral consciousness reflects the degeneration and death of a dancing star or ethics is first philosophy. That is, there is either Nietzsche or Levinas.

Yet there is always more to say. How are we to say more? To what end? Where might we locate a conversation between Nietzsche and Levinas? These are our first and most crucial questions. Location is of course everything, and location is especially difficult in this conversation. Levinas has had little to say about Nietzsche; even treating those scattered evocative and provocative statements, a reader of Levinas has little with which to work. If there is little with which to work, then any conversation is imaginary—and therefore bears within it so much possibility. This contested and conjoined space of philosophical imagination can no doubt say more than any text, which is especially important given that Levinas is typically a poor reader of historical figures. That is to say, if we are not simply bound by Levinas’s comments on Nietzsche, few as they are, then a conversation must root itself in and depart from die Sachen of philosophy. This root is all the more potent given each thinker’s insistence that die Sachen of philosophy are the fractured expanse of life at the moment of its break with history. That is, and this is my central claim here, each is engaged in a certain kind of phenomenology conceived at the limit of historical experience. Life, even in its separation(s) from history, gives itself to thinking. The conversation, then, must address itself to what is given to thinking rather than to what is said first (in this case, by Levinas) and then said again in commentary on that. The location of thinking Nietzsche and Levinas together, that site in which philosophy begins as a mutual saying, motivates conversation. What, then, is the philosophical motivation for putting Levinas before Nietzsche, Nietzsche before Levinas?

I would like to begin my reflections with a slightly different motif in order to attend again to die Sachen of the present inquiry. I am struck by an initially rhetorical location: at the very moment that everything is evacuated, and so the moment in which everything is at stake, both Nietzsche and Levinas produce a melancholic discourse. It is melancholic insofar as it lacks an object to mourn, lacks an attachment or alternative catharsis and is at the same time affectively saturated with pain and loss. The evacuation for both Nietzsche and Levinas is the vacating of an illusion, a lie that has come to dominate the West. Nietzsche and Levinas lose that illusion and are left with nothing. All idols are dead. Whatever the pleasures in what is possible after the illusion vacates, there is also pain. First and irreducibly, there is pain.

Now, one might immediately (and not unjustifiably) object that Nietzsche’s work is playful and animated by that spirit throughout and that Levinas’s work—especially in Totality and Infinity—is full of a voluptuousness that exceeds any pull of the melancholic. There is real justification in this claim, especially in the case of Nietzsche. Zarathustra’s playfulness, nearly to the point of suggesting that the task of self-overcoming is a game, hardly seems melancholic. Levinas’s identification of the ethical break with history in the prophetic ought to celebrate the death of the tyranny of politics. Are Nietzsche and Levinas not plainly ecstatic, albeit in structurally opposite directions, in this evacuation of the tradition? Without a doubt. Yet I want to insist that melancholy is also always central to how each engages philosophy in its rhetorical dimension. Nietzsche and Levinas suffer losses as the precondition of their work. Nietzsche’s Zarathustra is drenched in lonely sadness, Dionysus writhes in pain, and the Madman is mad with anxious despair. The frantic, shifting character of each figure suggests as much misery as joy. In his 1881 postcard to Overbeck, Nietzsche identifies with Spinoza (who is “closest to me”) as the “most unusual and loneliest thinker.”¹ Indeed, at the very moment that self-overcoming is glimpsed as an opening to ecstasy, there is the despondency of loss. Ecstasy is wrenched from pain. Whatever his pleasures, Zarathustra (like Dionysus) is born of pain and loss, betrayal and fragmentation. This bears out in Nietzsche’s opening narrative to all four parts of Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Zarathustra is lonely and restless. While this may be read as a literary device employed to motivate Zarathustra’s coming failures, such a reading misses the melancholy of his journey—one already fated to failure. Zarathustra’s departure from solitude collapses the ground underneath him. “Yesterday, in the stillest hour,” Zarathustra tells us, “the ground gave under me, the dream began. The hand moved, the clock of my life drew a breath; never had I heard such stillness around me: my heart took fright” (TZ 257): fear as the groundlessness of life, which is, at the same time, life’s liberation from the tradition.

In the case of Levinas, Otherwise Than Being is noteworthy for its conceptual and rhetorical austerity. Even in Totality and Infinity, though more promising in light of its emphasis on excess and surplus, Levinas’s work presents us with an authentic disconnection. On the one hand, there is the hope and promise of peace against history’s long story of war that commences his reflections. On the other hand, there is the asceticism and even hopelessness of Levinas’s descriptions. Our hands are emptied by the Other, and my voice is always already violence. Otherwise Than Being only repeats this shift, bringing even more rhetorical force to the starkness and sobriety of a life born of absence before absence, a life borne by an exposed subject. From the glory of the Infinite to persecution to obsession. Consider this passage from the fourth chapter of Otherwise Than Being, where Levinas writes of how we are so radically overturned by loss:

Obsession is irreducible to consciousness, even if it overwhelms it. In consciousness it is betrayed, but thematized by a said in which it is manifested. Obsession traverses consciousness countercurrentwise, is inscribed in consciousness as something foreign, a disequilibrium, a delirium.

(OB 101)

Without the tradition, there is the complete disorientation of subjectivity. There is no footing or ground on which subjectivity might gather itself or make sense of the world.

Nietzsche and Levinas evacuate completely not only the closure constitutive of the tradition but also any sense of nostalgia (not all loss is rooted in nostalgia, after all). Still, we are left with a disconnection between what such an evacuation promises—another beginning, another future—and the affect that saturates the life given after the tradition exits: melancholy. Neither Nietzsche nor Levinas mourn the tradition. To do so would repeat the violence against which both labor so intensively. Rather, the parricide—as Levinas famously puts it in Time and the Other—leaves no object in its wake but only the lingering, haunting affects of trembling fear and melancholy.

What are we to make of this disconnection? What happens if we take disconnection seriously, not just as a rhetorical surface but rather as crucial—perhaps even to the point of reading such disconnections as performatives—to the task of understanding Nietzsche and Levinas philosophically? If rhetoric crosses so decisively with philosophical meaning and sense, then we can and must proceed with the melancholic character in Nietzsche’s and Levinas’s work in constant view, reading sensitively for its haunting presence even at moments of transformation and release. Their work is melancholic because of this very disconnection; indeed, what marks melancholia as melancholia is the refusal of a connection between what is lost and what remains. Mourning, on the other hand, is that relation in which what is lost remains connected to the subject. Mourning puts a broken subjectivity back together in the process of working through traumatic events that have wreaked havoc on one’s life. The catastrophic despair of the melancholic, however, begins in the loss of that very connection, and therefore the loss of the possibility of repair. If nowhere else, we encounter Nietzsche and Levinas in that space of non-reparative thinking.

Why this evacuation? What catastrophe empties everything from philosophy? And where are we left after catastrophe, evacuation, and the emptying of what might have given something to thinking? That is, in and through what abyss might we locate a conversation between Nietzsche and Levinas about the problem of beginning? In raising and addressing these questions, I do not hope to discover new connections or obscure passages but rather to open an urgent philosophical space in which these two thinkers might resonate: the abyssal space of beginning.

What does it mean to begin? Beginning is work, a production from a certain kind of labor. I am drawn to Heidegger’s conception of work in “The Origin of the Work of Art,” where he writes that “to work-being, there belongs the setting up of a world [Werksein heißt: eine Welt aufstellen].”² But Heidegger is attentive to how this setting up of a world risks a failure to gather, whether in the moment of manifestation or in a future. Consider what Heidegger famously says about the encounter with the ancient Greek temple: “The temple, in its standing there, first gives to things their look and to men their outlook on themselves. This remains open as long as the work is a work, as long as the god has not fled from it.”³ If the god remains, gathering before the encounter with the temple, then everything is given to thinking. Philosophy is its own kind of work, and so its own kind of gathering with a certain kind of god or gods in the antechamber of thinking. As with the temple, so tragic in Heidegger’s encounter, we can ask: Have the gods fled philosophy? If so, how are we to begin the task of thinking?

The experience of the long twentieth century has been an experience of catastrophe. Whatever our pretensions, this long century has been defined by trauma and loss. Yet philosophy has largely been deaf to this experience—and historical experience in general, one could argue—and so the question remains: What happens to philosophy’s beginning if we take catastrophe seriously?

En route to Nietzsche and Levinas, I would like to detour through Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” Benjamin’s theses address the problem of beginning through an other encounter with history. This other encounter both begins and sits patiently with the unredeemed violence constitutive of history’s movement. The master narrative, on Benjamin’s treatment, gives way to trauma and loss, and so those slain on Hegel’s famous slaughter-bench of history recover voice and force. But we cannot register that voice and force if our relation to history is guided by an epic narrative. Such narratives redeem violence in the story of history’s meaning and significance. Redeemed violence is therefore located in and by a citable history. Citability recalls to us Benjamin’s figure of the chronicler. Benjamin writes:

A chronicler who recites events without distinguishing between major and minor ones acts in accordance with the following truth: nothing that has ever happened should be regarded as lost for history. To be sure, only a redeemed mankind receives the fullness of its past—which is to say, only for a redeemed mankind has its past become citable in all its moments.⁴

The citability of history draws on a vision of redemption. Epic narrative overrides and neutralizes loss and trauma in order to make sense of history’s movement. On this rendering, the corpse of Hegel’s slaughter-bench is muted—muted, not mute. Epic narrative acts and intervenes in the very materiality out of which history is formed as citable history. The corpse is acted upon, not described. Muting and muted, then, with the verbal sense in the first position rather than the adjectival or nominal. As victim, the corpse retains its rights to question us.

Citable history assembles a redeemed event or series of events. Yet, the chronicler interrupts his narrative by folding major and minor events into historical significance. The corpse on Hegel’s slaughter-bench here shows its face. What, then, can and must be said about violence as such, this violence here, and so of catastrophe before the neutralizing epic narrative? This question prompts the famous reading of Klee’s Angelus Novus. What does Klee’s angel say to history? Benjamin writes:

This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.⁵

Klee’s angel sees the “materialism” of history, of loss, corpses as the wreckage of history’s catastrophe(s). This is an other encounter with history, made other by way of its interruption of the predominance of epic in conceiving not only historical events, but also our relation to history’s significance. Klee’s angel disconcerts historical experience as the slaughter-bench accuses.

The slaughter-bench of history accuses in the recurrence of the human problematic, a recurrence in which Nietzsche and Levinas have decisive interventions. This problematic counters the cost of catastrophe with the question of beginning. For the angel does not see only catastrophe. He is also propelled into the future. And so historical experience is a movement into the past while that very movement both conditions and is conditioned by a simultaneous move into the future. The angel, then, is a figure of both catastrophe and the interval between past and future. That is, the angel is a figure of beginning.

Benjamin brings us to the historical experience of loss. What is this loss? Toward what beginning? What sort of catastrophe haunts the work of Nietzsche and Levinas?

Klee’s angel puts philosophy’s work in question. The temple fails to gather the gods, but we should not hear the resonance of Heidegger in this. Rather, we should hear Heidegger’s first moment of absence. In the erasure of a lingering origin, we can make a sort of anti-pilgrimage to the abandoned temple with Klee’s angel. No gods gather. Therein lies the force of catastrophe. What sort of catastrophe haunts the work of Nietzsche and Levinas?

Let me begin with Levinas. I do not think that the Shoah functions as a motivation for the melancholic character of Levinas’s work. Whatever the shadow it casts for Levinas, I have always thought his address was to another sort of condition in history: totality as the project of traditional metaphysics and antimetaphysics. The dedication to Otherwise Than Being is to the six million dead, of course, but also and at the same time to victims of the same anti-Semitism, the same hatred of the other man. This sameness of anti-Semitism lodges the specificity of the Shoah within a wider claim about (Western) history. The Shoah is yet another—and exceedingly graphic—upsurge of what has always defined the West’s intellectual and cultural trajectory. Totalitarianism is not a politics. Totalitarianism animates Western thinking, tradition. So, when what animates thought becomes manifest, defining the actual character of a politics, we would be mistaken to identify the genesis of catastrophic violence in the moment of social organization. When Levinas begins Totality and Infinity with the famed juxtaposition of war and the ethical, he does not draw us back into the very immediate disaster. This is not an evocation of the Shoah. Rather, Levinas is drawing us too far back, drowning us in the enormity of his claim. The entirety of the West is a story about totalitarianism and the calculus of war. In a very real sense, then, the West is a theorizing and cultural practice of a voracious, eliminationist subjectivity.

This first moment of catastrophe haunts Levinas’s work, a catastrophe of nonlocalizable yet constantly present violence. It is a catastrophe that works very much like the vision of Klee’s angel: he sees a series of disasters in the history of thought. For this very reason, the preface to Totality and Infinity begins with such ridiculously high stakes. There is either war or peace. History tells us that there is nothing but war, that violence is the rule, and that the struggle to dominate is inherent in social existence. To this, ethics is posed as a challenge. But herein lies a second catastrophe, one that comes after the angel’s vision. For it is not enough to say that war and violence have dominated Western history in thought and politics. The story is neither so bleak nor so alien, even if it is one from which Levinas will never retreat. We must also say that we have made our home in this particular sense of place. Totality is where I find comforts and the satisfaction of my needs, where desire does not vanish the “I” and always returns the “I” to itself full and content. This is a doubled second catastrophe. First, it is so intimate. My home lies at the center of the logic of violence; Levinas’s repeated appeal to Pascal’s musings about the usurpation of the world should register this real loss. Second, though we are putatively transformed into the possibility of peace, the abandonment of history leaves us with nothing and takes leave of what had defined life: the pleasures of need, knowledge, and so many other forms of autoerotics.

It is in this second sense of catastrophe that we catch sight of Nietzsche. Whatever the wandering character of his work, Nietzsche returns, every time, to the motif of the degeneration of life. The Apollonian motif of bringing to light, reconciliation, and even redemption comes to dominate—even simply define—the West. A certain god stands in for the shifting and varying set of crimes against life, from despising the body to the last temptations of pleasure and happiness. The death of God is therefore never about the passing of a belief or an institution, but rather the vanishing of the very idea of belief, the very idea of an institution. This is why Nietzsche is so blunt in The Gay Science: God’s death provokes us to bid farewell to “all that was built upon it, leaned on it, grew into it; for example, our whole European morality” (GS 279) “Morality” here of course points to the collapse of the very meaning of otherworldly infused worldly life—a meaning that Nietzsche convincingly identified as nihilism.

Again, at the very moment we glimpse our (possible) liberation from the degeneration of life, we must also register the loss of what has for so long been our home: home as what heals and redeems, a site of comfort and contentment. Indeed, insofar as Nietzsche’s moment of beginning again—which is actually a first beginning—leaps over the abyss and into the Dionysian, beginning is possible only as repudiation and slaying of Apollo. John Sallis’s account of Apollo in Crossings establishes precisely what is lost in this murderous repudiation: brilliant radiances, the commanding distance of the god, and, in (the) light of both, the power to heal and redeem pain.⁶ In a word, and to say it directly, with Apollo also goes beauty. With beauty also goes an important series of conceptions, meanings, and roots of life: wisdom, virtue, obligation, consolation, redemption, happiness, contentedness. Nietzsche rightly celebrates the possibilities of a future untethered to such conceptions, meanings, and roots, but there is also the now ever more insistently present ghost of a new abyss. The terror of the new is where the sense of loss resonates—in the intellect, stuttering speech, and trembling hands.

The melancholic thread in Nietzsche and Levinas is therefore to be expected. The degeneration and degradation of what is best about the human—the Dionysian, the ethical—is catastrophic. That we find ourselves at home in that degeneration and degradation only doubles the sense of loss when it becomes clear that it is all just so untenable. When the trajectory of the West is flattened by the wave of excess—be that the excess of the Dionysian or the ethical—we gain something, however little. We gain very little, perhaps only a promise whose fulfillment is indefinitely (infinitely?) postponed, deferred. But we lose everything.

The catastrophic is a twofold moment for both Nietzsche and Levinas. First, it is the cessation of tradition. Tradition is destroyed. In that destruction, out of that nothing, in the burn of erasure (and so not in its ruins) we begin. As we have seen, arrival at this space of conversation is at once a story about pain and loss and relief and ecstasy at the vanishing of our being-at-home in the tradition. Second, and older than this first implication of catastrophe, the burning erasure of the tradition reveals what sustained Western thinking as the anti- and ante-tradition. This sustenance is the root-which-is-not-one, this something before and always an excessive remainder to what had been given to thinking. For Levinas, the face initiates language in the solicitation of response and sociality. The violence of propositions always presupposes this initiation. For Nietzsche, as he has it in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, one must still have chaos in one’s self to give birth to a dancing star (TZ 17). Indeed, we still do have that chaos in us, no matter the millennia of degenerative labor we call “our history.”

One might be tempted to think this “before” as an origin; the term certainly captures the notion of something that sustains and predates. But “origin” is of course itself a word born of the totalitarian trajectory of the West and so warrants some pause. The measure of what sustained the West, if it is taken as other than and radically outside of that trajectory, cannot be measured in relation. As well, what is given to thought after the catastrophe of the tradition’s collapse is itself the erasure of any arch(a)ic sense of origin: the abyss. Indeed, the very phrase “abyssal origin” collapses into itself. Nietzsche’s famous figuring in the first part of Thus Spoke Zarathustra of the human person as a rope over an abyss, between beast and Overman (TZ 126), is instructive. The abyss is what consumes the beast and the merely human, leaving only the terror of the absolutely groundless and new. An abyssal “origin,” wholly preoriginal, is given to thought as thinking begins again, perhaps for the first time, only after the evacuation of the tradition—and without originating anything other than loss. The temporal fracture here is real; there is no past toward which one might look for grounding. The backward glance submits to the abyss and the losses it initiates and seals, yet we are not this past. We always meet a future, become a(nother) beginning.

Benjamin’s profound meditation on catastrophe attunes us to a different sense of futurity. The angel of history is propelled into the future. The corpses of history compel the angel toward and with the past at the very moment he is blown into a future. Historical experience, in this sense, need not be like the historian in Twilight of the Idols, who, always looking backward in his “searching out origins,” becomes a crab, coming eventually to believe backward (TL 470). The posture of Benjamin’s angel is everything: the pile grows before him, which means the disaster of history fixes and rivets the gaze. Yet we always become a(nother) beginning. The future is therefore a necessity after disaster, rather than a possibility. What is this space of necessity?

The collapse of what was foundational—the vanishing of all that might make life readily intelligible—changes everything. The question of beginning again is therefore not, as it was for Heidegger in relation to the Greeks, a matter of reactivation. The gods have fled the tradition’s temple—or, perhaps better, have all been dissolved as illusions. After this collapse, this dissolution, we are left with the kind of consuming nothing captured in Nietzsche’s notion of abyss. It is important here to remember that the abyss belongs to beginning, forestructuring what it means to begin. That is, the abyss is not produced by my own lack, my melancholy, my disappointment, or my despair. The abyss is not measured as abyssal in my approach, and so not in relation to finitude, which is to say that we’ve moved into that space predating economies of knowing and being. Indeed, this is why it is so difficult to read Nietzsche and Levinas: the abyss belongs to beginning, so the language of philosophy must be transformed into a response to rather than an articulation of the immeasurable chasm from which thinking is born—and which it must always bear. Theirs is a community with nothing in common—to borrow a title from Lingis,⁷ perhaps our most important reader of Nietzsche and Levinas. The nothing in common is this abyssal space of beginning, this location of a conversation without proceeding from community or shared space. At the abyss of beginning, the common is evacuated. Non-site par excellence.

Nietzsche’s operative concept of loss is rooted in exactly this sense of debt to the abyssal. Indeed, much of Nietzsche’s articulation of the process of self-overcoming is suspended over the abyss, which is, perhaps, what maddens the madman. In his account of the rendering of the world as illusion in Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche opens us into the space of beginning. Whatever the rhetorical flourishes of his retelling, the story is fundamentally a sad one. After all, it is a story of how we fell in love with what would slowly kill us, and how we made our home in what was only degeneration. Let’s face it: this is epic self-sabotage. As well, there is Nietzsche’s trepidation before the decision about the future, asking, at the close of “How the ‘True World’ Became a Fable,” “what has remained?” (TL 486) The apparent and the true vanish, of course, and we are left with nothing except the ambiguous though celebratory shout. INCIPIT ZARATHUSTRA.

We begin with Zarathustra. It is here, as well, that Zarathustra can enter and begin to make sense as the one who does not unmake sense but rather, as Sallis puts it, “twists free into the exorbitant, the immeasurable, the boundless—in a word: das Masslose.”⁸ In The Gay Science Nietzsche writes with both anxiety and cheerfulness about the sea lying before us after the death of God.

At last the horizon appears free again to us, even granted that it is not bright; at last our ships may venture out again, venture out to face any danger; all the daring of the lover of knowledge is permitted again; the sea, our sea, lies open again; perhaps there has never yet been such an “open sea.”

(GS 280)

The free, the open, the sea, daring, and dangerous—these figures and motifs gather together Nietzsche’s transformation of the Dionysian. If, as Sloterdijk argues, Nietzsche’s break with the Apollonian is a direct break with Enlightenment notions of autonomy,⁹ then our assessment of Nietzsche’s beginning must attend to this “venturing out” as a movement without foundation or return. That is, movement from the abyss into a space unconstrained by the real world or its fables—a space outside metaphysics, otherwise than being, and beyond essence—in which identity itself is submitted to the abyss.¹⁰ Sloterdijk is instructive here when he remarks that the specifically Dionysian break with the Apollonian—Nietzsche’s loss of the tradition and beginning’s abyss—marks an aesthetic of life without redemption of that aesthetic;¹¹ hence the radical break with the (vo)luminous healing power of Apollo noted above. Having gazed into the abyss and refused the seductions of pessimism, beginning is properly Dionysian when it exchanges redemption for danger, becoming this wanderer at this very (historical) moment. Beginning again is always hard.

Just as we say that Zarathustra can only make sense out of the collapse of the apparent and the true into the abyss, we can also say that ethical subjectivity only makes sense after the collapse of totality. Economies and logics of sense making and manifestation pervert, to the point of rendering unrecognizable, the subject subjected to the Other. Thus, responsible subjectivity emerges out of the ruins of a collapsed tradition of knowing and being. In Otherwise Than Being, Levinas’s language is more emphatically attuned to this collapse. That is, it is unclear in Totality and Infinity whether the prophetic character of ethical subjectivity is prior to what eclipses its sense or whether it is, rather, always in an interruptive relation to history, totality, and violence. The meditation on identity in Otherwise Than Being, worked through a newly central notion of diachronic time, is unambiguous, sealing ethical subjectivity in that which was, which, in an important twist, becomes that which could never have been: the immemorial as otherwise than being, where being itself is configured (then punctured) as time. Once subjectivity is sealed in this temporal anti- and ante-sequentiality, we can only understand Levinas after all context for understanding collapses—neither totality nor the interruption of totality.

With what are we left? Again, the abyss belongs to beginning, which in Otherwise Than Being is found in the consequences of eliminating the reciprocity of the saying and the said. Whereas in Totality and Infinity one meets the other with full hands, and so begins in that relation-without- relation with something, Levinas’s retreat from language in Otherwise Than Being is devastating. And therein lies beginning’s abyss, where we begin having already failed, having seen our will and effort consumed by the abyssal distance between the original said and the preoriginal saying. I can only render a said to the Other, yet the Other’s saying initiates my subjectivity. To begin with this Other, to begin as a response to a saying which has already vanished at the moment of its manifestation—“at the price of betrayal” (OB 6), Levinas writes—is to begin, fated to failure. The ground gives, as it did for Zarathustra, and any beginning-as-response is a movement into the finite open of the possible, commanded and structured by the infinity of the necessary.

Here Levinas meets Nietzsche in the space of beginning with nothing, in a space bordered by the abyss, and so at a moment of (in their peculiar sense) the historical experience of catastrophe. The collapse of what, in all of its pretensions, might have promised to give necessity to the open possibility and impose a finitude on the commanding necessary, sets us adrift. That sense of being adrift is a site of conversation, though this is a wholly different kind of conversation for philosophy. Indeed, this is a conversation with the shared resignation to—even embrace of—the fact that there will be no redemption for the aesthetics of life and response. Rather, this is a conversation about how to live with the impossible, how to remember always that the catastrophe has given birth to who and what we are, and that beginning’s abyss twists us free in order that we may wander without a purpose, without a sense of the good or right outside of fidelity to the rights of loss over us and the mixture of sadness and ecstasy that comes with being submitted to those rights as the precondition of an open future. This is a conversation under the watchful, melancholic, and even hopeful eye of their distinctive angel of history.

As abyss belongs to beginning, we are projected by the abyss into a future and given the abyss for thinking. Ecstasy and the ethical, with all of their melancholic shading, emerge nonetheless as a sense of possibility and perhaps even hope. Benjamin’s rendering of Klee’s angel of history is thereby transformed from the one who gazes at corpses—both literal and figurative, in the cases of Nietzsche and Levinas—into the one who imagines the new future. Indeed, beginning and beginning’s abyss attend to the complex folding of the angel’s backward glance at history’s catastrophe into his propulsion forward.

And, further, it is here that Nietzsche’s and Levinas’s meditations on beginning become important for theorizing what it means for human communities to begin again after historical disasters. This might seem an abrupt shift of focus, from high theory to urgent practice, except that Nietzsche’s and Levinas’s great gift to the problem of beginning lies in thinking from the most disastrous sense of abyss. So this hyperbole prepares the ground for thinking about what it means to respond to the catastrophe of human violence. Traditions collapse for philosophers in the transformation of thought. Traditions also collapse for communities in disastrous internal violence. In cases of overwhelming state violence, for example, a community is left with very little, almost nothing with which to begin claiming meaning. This nothing might be the literal collapse of the prior state or the moment in which the state reckons with an untenable, unworkable model of the past in order to conceive a wholly different future. In both cases, the collapse of political life leaves two options in its ruins: a return to the old order or the forging of something altogether new. While neither Nietzsche nor Levinas pose their work in such complex terms of transformation, the possession of beginning by the abyss catches sight of the same site: beginning as utterly ungrounded, beginning as burdened by memory of pain, beginning as the wholly new and unprecedented.

By way of conclusion, then, I want to ask a question about the gravity of thinking. Whatever Nietzsche’s playfulness and gaming, whatever Levinas’s disinterestedness and earnestness, both are joined in the gravity of the task of beginning. The gravity of the task of beginning initiates the metanarrative against the metanarrative, the grand countertellings that go by the names self-overcoming and the ethical. Everything is at stake, and the discourses of both Nietzsche and Levinas match that sense of stake. In that sense, the lack of a vision of the future is appropriately attuned to the abyss that belongs to beginning: total evacuation, total indeterminacy, indefinite-ness, and perhaps for both, infinity.

At this point, however, I’m drawn back to a pair of scenes from Abbas Kiarostami’s 1991 semi-documentary Life and Nothing More. In this film, the second in his Earthquake Trilogy, Kiarostami explores the aftereffects of a catastrophic earthquake in rural Iran. The lead character, a filmmaker, travels a devastated series of highways and side roads through equally devastated towns. In other words, it is a film about traumatic pain and its aftermath, in this case the traumatic pain of natural catastrophe. We might expect Kiarostami’s lead character to meet with townspeople telling tales of the unspeakable experience of mass destruction. Indeed, the fixed, lingering shots that structure the film suggest just such trauma. The trauma is there, without a doubt. But what is not there is the gravity of thought in response to such devastation. Rather, the filmmaker meets and talks first with a man carrying a toilet seat. Then an extended conversation with a young man who was just married in the ruins—quite literally on top of the rubble—of his community. What are we to make of Kiarostami’s witnesses to catastrophe? Are they inauthentically attuned to what has happened and how nothing can be the same afterward? Or do we theorists (of which Kiarostami may have been one) infuse such catastrophes with a gravity of thought that eclipses the mundanity of life when life not only does go on, but must go on? After all, the evacuation of one’s home and place does not mean one is also alleviated of the need to sit comfortably, in privacy, and, well, “to evacuate” oneself—or marry one’s beloved and begin the mundane domestic life the young male character embodies.

What kind of space of conversation might this mundanity of life open when life goes on? How are we to register the gravity of thinking after the abyss in that mundanity? How, indeed, are we to begin accounting for a conversation between the one who clings to the toilet seat and the one who proclaims the Overman or the ethical? This is an important conversation, for both the mundanity and the gravity of thinking after disaster belong to the same community of those who have nothing. And both belong to beginning’s abyss.

NOTES

1. Friedrich Nietzsche, “Postcard to Overbeck” (1881), in The Portable Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Viking, 1968), 92.

2. Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (New York: HarperCollins, 1993), 171.

3. Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” 168.

4. Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” trans. Harry Zohn, in Illuminations (New York: Schocken, 1991), 254.

5. Benjamin, “Theses,” 258.

6. John Sallis, Crossings: Nietzsche and the Space of Tragedy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 23–25.

7. Alphonso Lingis, The Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994).

8. Sallis, Crossings, 2.

9. See Peter Sloterdijk, Thinker on Stage: Nietzsche’s Materialism, trans. Jamie Owen Daniel (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 83.

10. Sallis, Crossings, 52.

11. Sloterdijk, Thinker on Stage, 79.