121 future, which itself will eventually be our own past We can choose which patterns

should become recurrent, and change who we are, as individuals, and once again Klossowski sees the strong internal connection between Eternal Recurrence and identity.

The parallel with the Heideggerian model is all too clear, for Heidegger’s own analysis of authenticity is concerned with the temporal ekstases of Dasein’s Being-in-the-world. Yet despite the surface similarities between the two thinkers, the unity of Eternal Recurrence should not be confused with the unified horizon of the three ekstases of Heideggerian temporality^. Heidegger’s initial treatment of the temporal structure of care stresses the equi-primordial role of past, present and fu­ ture, noting that ‘We therefore call the phenomena of the future, the character of

having been, and the Present, the ekstases of temporality [Zeitlichkeit]. Tem­

porality is not, prior to this, an entity which first emerges from itself ; its essence is #

a process of temporalising in the unity of the eksta ses .In this he would be seen

rightly as working against the common-sense ‘inauthentic’ view of time as an end- i

less linear succession of nows, ‘without beginning and without end’. ^

However Heidegger then reverts to the former model when he asserts that all three ekstases are determined by the future, an understanding of time no doubt governed by the importance of projection, intentionality and ‘anticipatory resolute­

ness’ in the argument of Being and Time . Heidegger writes, for example, that ‘we

have always mentioned the future first . . . to indicate that the future has a prior- $

ity in the ekstatical unity of primordial and authentic temporality’ {Being and Time |

p. 378), adding in a following section that ‘If the term “understanding” is taken in a

way which is primordially existential, it means to be projecting towards a potential-

ity-for-Being for the sake of which any Dasein exists ’ (ibid. p. 385). In The Basic

Problems of Phenomenology Heidegger continues this theme still further, articulat­

ing it ever more explicitly and thoroughly, until he actually equates understanding and futurality when he notes that ‘Understanding is primarily futural, for it comes towards itself from its chosen possibility of itself. In coming-towards-itself the Dasein has also already taken itself over as the being that it in each case already has

been’ {Basic Problems p. 287). With the arc of intentionality governing Dasein’s

relation to the world and the temporal foundations of its Being-in-the-world, both past and present gain their meaning from anticipation of future possibilities of being, what Heidegger terms ‘repetitive self-precedence’. In other words, Dasein is always going out beyond itself, projecting itself onto its own can-be, whence it re­ turns to exercise an authentic gathering up of its own present and past.

The significance of this aspect of Heidegger’s understanding of time lies in the fact that his concern with projection inevitably leads him back to the idea of transcendence, a key term in his existential analysis of Dasein. ^ For

a

122 ‘Transcendence’, as Heidegger notes, denotes a ‘stepping over’, and as such it is

not objects that can be ‘transcendent’ but only ‘subjects’, which, grounded in the temporal structure of Dasein can step beyond themselves, indeed of necessity must, since it is this that facilitates comportment toward the world. Heidegger continues to explicitly reject any notion of immanence, stating that ‘Transcendence is even the pre-supposition for Dasein’s having the character of a self. The selfhood of Dasein is founded on its transcendence, and Dasein is not first an ego-self which then oversteps something or other’ (ibid. p. 300), an understanding which leads Hei­ degger to criticise Leibniz* monadological account of mental substances.

The importance of this excursus on Heidegger is to prise apart the two philosophers’ thoughts on time when they seem so similar. For the significant dif­ ference lies in Nietzsche’s refusal to grant special status to any of the three aspects of temporality. On a superficial level, the individual in Nietzsche, too, steps out be­

yond itself in the mere present, yet it steps out toward its own p a st, fulfilling the

possibility of a selective repetition and re-appropriation of its own past for the future. The individual is caught within the circle of his or her own history, with no possibility of stepping outside itself toward an absolute temporal other. It is this difference, too, with respect to the past, which makes Heidegger so much closer to Kant and metaphysics than Nietzsche. For Heidegger the primordial importance of projection entails that the ultimate act of Dasein’s self-transcendence is its relation to death and annihilation. As such death constitutes a given with the same significance we have seen it have for Kant and Schiller’s theories of the sublime, with the

experience of the sublime providing the sternest test of one’s relation to one’s own |

mortality. Sharing no such morbid interest in death, Nietzsche is concerned with articulating an ethic that does not gain its primary meaning from the fact of human mortality. An ethic that therefore undercuts the claims of all moral and cultural practices devoted to a transcending of the present and the past, and of life itself.

Art

If we turn to the question of art and its relation to the problem of time, we encounter a complex set of arguments which link both Nietzsche’s early writing

and his later thought. In The Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche draws much of his

account of beauty from Schopenhauer, where the beautiful is characterised as the permanent, hence the exclamation of the Apollinian dreamer, ‘It is a dream, I want

to continue [my Italics] dreaming.’ Built into the structure of the beautiful is the

will to permanence, and it exemplifies that deepest human drive for stability and ahistoricity, to which goal metaphysical will to power devotes all its interpretative energies. As Zarathustra sings, in the famous poem towards the end of the fourth

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book of Thus Spoke Zarathustra , ‘Pain speaks: Pass into decline ! / Yet all desire

wants eternity - /- wants deep, deep eternity !’ (KSA 4 p. 404).

Yet the significance of the beautiful, and especially the work of art, is not to be derived solely from its tendency to produce permanence within the temporal flow of life or Becoming. This, in its most general form, would be common to art and to all human interpretative activity in general. Additionally, this will to form, this will to permanence at all time must not be confused with the task of antiquarian history, which in its desperate attempt to transcend time and history, seeks to literally bring time to a halt by the unselective preservation of everything past. The significance of art does not lie in this indiscriminate conservation of everything past. Rather, as will to power, as Becoming, in a manner analogous to Monumental

History and Eternal Recurrence, it too represents a selective production of perma- i

nence, engendered by the rapture of the aesthetic state. Heidegger recognises this too when he entitles one of his chapters on Nietzsche ‘Rapture as Form- engendering Force’, and it is an understanding of Nietzsche’s aesthetics, already

present in an embryonic state in The Birth of Tragedy , which accounts for his later

turn to what Adrian del Caro terms ‘Dionysian C la s s i c i s m ’ . 12

Turning to Twilight of the Idols , for example, we find a number of crucial

aphorisms, most notably in the section entitled ‘Skirmishes of an Untimely One’

which make this selective affirmation all the more explicit. In the eighth aphorism *

Nietzsche writes that ‘The essential thing about rapture is the feeling of increased ;•

power and plenitude. From these powers one bestows upon things, one compels them to take from us, one violates them - this process is called Idealising . . . A sweeping emphasis on the main features, so that the others disappear beyond them’ (KSA 6 p. 116). In the following aphorism Nietzsche begins: ‘In this state [i.e. the state of rapture or intoxication] one enriches everything out of one’s own plenitude: one sees what one wants to see, one sees it swollen, pressed, strong, overladen with power’ (ibid. pp. 116-7).

Art, for Nietzsche, affirms not through its symbolic representation of tran­ scendence, or through the transcendent redemption of the aesthetic state. Rather it transfigures through the production of the monumental. In the same way that Niet­

zsche imagines the thought of Eternal Recurrence capable of giving birth to an

ethic of immanentism, so the selective recurrence and repetition of the strong, the great, serves to give birth to an aesthetic affirmative redemption, or better, transfig­ uration of the world. That horizon of ahistoricity required for human agency is brought about in art through its selective permanentising of a temporal world. In his notes from 1888 Nietzsche writes that ‘artists are not to see anything as it is, but more fully, but more simply, but more strongly: for this they must have a manner of eternal youth and spring, a type of permanent rapture in their body’ (KSA 13: 14

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