An Experience at Heart

Let us not discuss Nietzsche here, nor even a theme from his thought; instead, let us answer the question “What does Nietzsche tell us today?”

To respond to this, I would like to take the attitude that Bataille wanted to have toward Nietzsche and that I, in turn, want to adopt toward both Nietzsche and Bataille himself (from whom I will not separate Blanchot: perhaps you will be able to discern why). Nothing other than the attitude of thought toward each thinker: neither citing him, nor studying him, but rather learning him by heart, that is to say, by the organ that, in order to comprehend, must take and must be passionately taken. This is a platitude, but it is this that asks to be revived: such is also, and firstly, the sense that lies in naming “Nietzsche” today, without naming, for all that, a rubric from the history of philosophy. (Yet, to put it precisely: this is not simply philosophy.)

Nietzsche tells me nothing without also communicating an experience to me. This contagion between the discourse and the ordeal thoroughly marks an oeuvre that, for this reason, does not cease to exasperate, to be exalted, and to vacillate, uncertain, between outrageousness and suffering.

The experience is always that of the death of God. The death of God is always the fact of this immense destitution of the representation of the premise, and with that destitution, of representation in general: for, once the premise has crumbled, there can no longer be a question of representing anything. From then on, everything throws presence directly into question, directly into play. And everything makes a game of presence and plays it out. The evil genius.

1

Nietzsche knew, first, the agitation that takes hold when presence comes to tremble as the premise withdraws. (In a sense, it is too much to say “Nietzsche … first”: he was the second after Plato, or the fourth after Plato, Augustine, and Kant. But our entire history has had no stronger jolts than these, and we are still trembling.) Presence no longer breaks free from its ground; it does not disappear into it either: presence stands, vacillating, at the edge of appearing in a world where there is no longer a rupture or opening between being and appearing. It has itself become presence, this rupture. (There is no longer a rupture between being and appearing, or again: there is no longer anything but rupture between them.)

Presence torn, wrenching presence. Presence is to the world in not being in that world. It stands before and in withdrawal from itself. What thus occurs to presence is what occurs to the order of the world itself. Without a principle, the world no longer provides justification to the order that organized its significations (what is above, what is below, the known, the unknown). Authority, virtue, value are given over to anarchy. They no longer have their -archy but are in play beneath and inside the archy. The anarchy in question is not some muddled grandiloquence directed against any type of constraint, it is the power that ought to begin all things, to signify all things, without any given sense.

2

We should understand Nietzsche’s Umwerten in this sense. It is necessary to um-werten [“re-value”] the Werte [“values”]: “um” always has a valence of “making a turn around or through” and, as a prefix, it frequently indicates the reversal, revival, or recapitulation that returns. We must transvaluate, reevaluate, counterevaluate the values. It is not at all necessary to overthrow them (i.e., devalorize them), rather, it is necessary to reevaluate value itself. It is necessary to reform value (in the two senses of the word) or revolutionize it (likewise in all of its senses). That means: we must rethink value’s price, considering it as an absolute price and one no longer dependent on a principle that sets it fast, fixes it.

Value must have value without measure. Bataille expressed this in calling value “heterogeneous”: The “homogeneous” is the exchange of values, a general equivalence. In order to have value properly, it is necessary that value be heterogeneous to that equivalence. (In so speaking, we pass from Nietzsche to Marx via Bataille, but we also do justice to the contemporaneousness of Marx and Nietzsche, which is, not accidentally, a contemporaneousness of philosophies of value, even if they were unaware of one another.) The heterogeneous is not a matter of usage or of exchange: it is a matter of experience.

3

Who, then, has had the experience of absolute value (that is to say, value detached from a measure) and absolutely foreign to the fettered order of the world (of use and exchange)? Who, then, introduces into the world this withdrawal that is the heterogeneous—in the place of the principle that founded and provided measure?

It is he who saves the world in its absence of value, of that generalized equivalence into which the world appears to have sunk. Nietzsche calls him the redeemer.1 Nietzsche gives him the title of Christ, and it is thus that he makes the Antechrist² the very sign of salvation: for Nietzsche, antechrist is he who overturns Christianity to make what he calls “the redeemer type” arise out of this overturning.

This type is that of the “sole Christian that ever was,” he who “died on the cross.” Nietzsche is alone in knowing him; the only one who knows how to recognize, behind the interested deformations of the first disciples themselves and of the evangelists. Assuredly, this is a “decadence type”: but it is also from decadence that he will save. The redeemer presents a form of departure from nihilism: not the most active form, but a departure, and perhaps this departure—as I would suggest—is the weak, bloodless departure that nevertheless comes into contact with an affirmative and vigorous departure. (The entire question of getting out of nihilism is suspended between a weakness and vigor, both of which are necessary, and both perilous.)

This redeemer is he who founds no religion, who does not proclaim a god, who demands no belief in a doctrine or in any type of belief. He is the one whose faith is a behavior, not the adherence to a message. He is in the act and not in the significance, or again, his significance, his sense is wholly in his act. He effectuates pardon; he is pardon given and received, redemption effected here as coming from elsewhere, for redemption, or pardon, consists precisely in inscribing elsewhere in here. He erases sin, which is to say that he no longer makes of existence a fault or a lapse. On the contrary, existence consists in having, in the world, the experience of what is not of this world, without being another world for all that.

The opening of the world in the world is the result of a destitution or a deconstruction of Christianity, which goes back or which advances in it all the way to the extremity at which nihilism breaks up the presence and the value of God, breaks up the sense of salvation as an escape from the world, erases all value inscribed upon a heaven, erases heaven itself, and leaves the world intact and touched by a strange gaping that is grace and wound at the same time.

4

In the dissipation of nether-and hinterworlds, with their misty shroudings, lies the secret of salvation. Salvation saves us from other worlds: it restores to the world, it restores us to the world, and it sets (us) into the world anew, as new. It sets (us) into the world,3 according to the novelty of an experience that is not of this world because it is that of value: the values of this world are measured, that is, evaluated, by the necessities and the interests of this world. But he who does not let himself be measured by that evaluation, he who has for himself the experience of value—he withdraws from the world in the very midst of that world. Not at all that he might become the subjective source of a value that would be his own: it is rather that he becomes the site of an experience that, in itself, is or creates value, absolutely.

This experience is “inner” experience, which is not at all the fact of some interiority qua subjectivity. The “inner” or the “interior” is not here some hidden depth that it would be necessary to find afresh or to express, some sense buried and to be interpreted: no, it is without interpretation, the literal and simple text of the retreat of the homogeneity of equivalent, measurable, and exchangeable values.⁴ The same goes for “the one in love, who does not merely displace the sentiment of values, but who has more value and who is stronger.” Love (“even the love of God” [Liebe zu Gott], Nietzsche specifies in the same fragment) is but the increase of value in itself, without available measure.

Inner experience is the experience of what places me outside of the outside of the equivalence of values, even of the valence of values in general, and thus outside of all subjectivity as of all property, whether this be the property of mercantile goods or of spiritual goods (competences or virtues).

This outside of the outside envelopes an “interior” where expectations are disarmed, knowledge disconcerted, as also certitudes and doubts. In place of representations and significations is substituted the affirmation of existence itself. Not speculation over its value, but value in itself as the affirmation and exposition of existing—which is to say, existing qua existing, nothing more, but above all nothing less.

This affirmation that existence is experience: that it does nothing else, cut loose from the goal or the project of the will—does nothing else but expose itself to the unforeseeable, the unheard of of its own event. Experience simply—we should say—“events” [“s’éevenir”], “comes forth of itself”5 This évenir opens within the world an outside that is not a beyond-the-world, but the truth of the world.

5

Truth is value reevaluated: a devaluation of every measurable value, a devaluation of every given by which one evaluates. Value is existence, which, in eventing evaluates itself: it becomes value without equivalence. That is the absolute price of existence without price. The same price that the existent gives itself, when it lets itself be evaluated by nothing. It gives itself a price without price, one that it can neither measure nor pay. It has nothing to pay: neither fault nor debt. It has neither sinned nor borrowed: it is redeemed from and for its being in the world through its withdrawal from the world. However, this withdrawal comes to pass in the midst of the world: it is contemporaneous with existing, it events with existing, as existing.

The redeemer is thus an inimitable “type”: he is not a type; he is the experience of existing—with nothing other than this exposure to being nothing that might take on a price, or weight, or sense through something other than its step within/without the world [son pas dedans/dehors le monde]. This brief beating or pulsing has worth: it is itself evaluation without measure.

The redeemer is thus he who saves man from God, from that death mummified in the mausoleum of sense. The divine, henceforth, is the empty tomb: it is the void of the tomb qua affirmation of an eternal return of that which has no price. Value returns eternally, precisely because it has no price. The absence of price is what is inscribed and excribed with each existence as its eternal presence, immediately in the world out of the world, instantaneously eternal.

This is why the world of the homogeneous presents evaluation now as an equivalence of mercantile value, now as one entailing the sacrifice of existence to a supreme omnipotence. It is always a traffic. It is always one fundamentalism of value against another: one value being valued as a fundamental, a principial measure, God or money, spiritual or stock-market value. Yet heterogeneous value is worth nothing, or it is worth what the “valent” [“valoir”] in itself is worth: an exposure to some measure when that measure is but the other of all measure, or its infinity in act.

6

Nothing other, in this sense, than the Good epekeina ts ousias [“beyond being”]: beyond all being-ness [étance], thus being not, being neither a being nor a nonbeing, but existing nevertheless. Neither God nor humanity, but yet the world as that in which an outside can open itself, and become experience. This experience is an “experience at a heart”—eine Erfahrung an einem Herzen:6 an experience that forms itself right at a heart [à même un coeur], which is that heart itself beating with the beating of the inside/outside through which it exists and, in existing, senses and feels itself within/without the world, senses and feels itself as the interval between the within and the without, like the nonsite of what is its own-most taking place, and like the unevaluatable value of this absolute property, without goods of its own.

According to this redeemer, “the kingdom of God” is nothing one might await; it has neither yesterday nor tomorrow, it will not come “in a thousand years”—this is the experience at a heart: it is everywhere, it is nowhere …⁷

Translated by Bettina Bergo