Agamben's Philosophical Lineage by Adam Kotsko Carlo Salzani

Author:Adam Kotsko,Carlo Salzani
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

17 Friedrich Nietzsche

VANESSA LEMM

THE ETERNAL RECURRENCE OF THE SAME

Readers of Giorgio Agamben would agree that the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) is not one of his primary interlocutors. As such, Agamben’s engagement with Nietzsche is different from the French reception of Nietzsche’s philosophy in Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Georges Bataille, as well as in his contemporary Italian colleague Roberto Esposito, for whom Nietzsche’s philosophy is a key point of reference in their thinking of politics beyond sovereignty. Agamben’s stance towards the thought of Nietzsche may seem ambiguous to some readers, in particular with regard to his shifting position on Nietzsche’s much-debated vision of the eternal recurrence of the same.1

Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence finds mention in a great number of Agamben’s books, including Idea of Prose (IP 56), The Coming Community (CC 103), Means Without End (ME 53, 79),2 ‘Bartleby, or On Contingency’ (PO 267–8), Homo Sacer (HS 48) and Remnants of Auschwitz (RA 99); furthermore, Agamben dedicated an entire essay, written in 1986, to Nietzsche’s thought experiment.3 Whereas Agamben fully endorses Nietzsche’s vision of the eternal recurrence as a way of conceiving artistic activity beyond nihilism (MC), as a way of overcoming transcendence (IP), as a redeeming affirmation (CC 103), as a great thinking of repetition,4 as illuminating Guy Debord’s idea of a ‘constructed situation’ (ME 79), and as an example of the idea of potentiality (‘a gesture in which potentiality and act, natural and mannered, contingency and necessity become indistinguishable’ [ME 53]), according to de la Durantaye, with ‘Bartleby, or On Contingency’, ‘the dynamic oscillation that Agamben found in his earlier explorations of the idea come to a grinding halt’.5

In ‘Bartleby, or On Contingency’, Agamben’s critique of Nietzsche concerns his reading of the past as deprived of its potentiality, as foreclosing contingency: ‘Nietzsche completely forgets the laments of what was not or could have been otherwise’ (PO 267). Agamben’s assessment culminates in Remnants of Auschwitz, with the view that the event of Auschwitz ‘refutes it beyond all doubt, excluding the possibility of its even being proposed’ (RA 99). De la Durantaye argues that this is due to Agamben siding with Walter Benjamin contra Nietzsche on eternal recurrence.6 An interview with Agamben seems to confirm this hypothesis: ‘like Benjamin I see eternal recurrence as like having to stay after school, when you have to write the same sentence a thousand times’.7 What does Agamben’s change of position vis-à-vis Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence mean? Is it just a matter of a shifting between his interlocutors from Heidegger to Benjamin? De la Durantaye speculates that Agamben’s changing views on eternal recurrence may not be about Nietzsche but about his singular ambivalence and difficulty in ‘developing a philosophy of potentiality able to come to terms with the past’.8

In her lucid reading of Agamben and Nietzsche, Paula Fleisner comes to a different answer on the question of the changing identity of Agamben’s readings. Relying on Means Without End, she suggests that the idea of the eternal recurrence is like a phantasm that traverses Agamben’s work:

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