I’ll start by taking up per Graham’s suggestion that question of what we get trying to abstract Nietzsche’s arguments from his style—it gets close to the motives of our exercises, which have aspects both of praxis (let’s try this ourselves) and pastiche (let’s see what it does for us, to us, to sound like this thinker/writer). We postmoderns tend to dismiss out of hand the idea that style and substance can be separated, and we’ve got some good reasons for that. Practically speaking, however, the distinction is often a useful heuristic, and White, who rarely if ever sounds like Nietzsche, nonetheless translates his argument into usefully alternative terms; and you can go back to your Nietzsche and find your way around better, even if you do not take White’s account to be comprehensive or always true to its subject. So, White succeeds in being about Nietzsche without being like Nietzsche. Substance yes, style no.
I think it gets interesting when the question is, does a given thinker offer their work to translation; is it written into a preexisting vocabulary, within which it can be received, argued, modified, etc.; or is it written to resist such appropriation, such ready and open commerce? Can you easily criticize it in its own terms, as you can with most academic writing (by producing academic writing in response), or does it encourage or oblige you to refashion your own idiom, even to begin to engage it? One might measure the ambition of a poetics of history (as opposed to a philosophy of history) by its wager on the latter possibility. Nietzsche has certainly been digested into patient argument, but he has also produced many stylistic outliers among his readers, from Derrida to Kristeva to Nehamas.
And another angle on the problem: there are some philosophers for whom the reform of linguistic usage (not just our terms, but how we understand language itself to work for purposes of argument) is basic to the philosophical project. That’s a question I’ve brooded about in my book about style, so forgive me quoting myself briefly:
A philosophy that believes in changing minds by argument, once and for all, need not cultivate a style. (It may, but it need not.) A philosophy, or a theory, that understands itself as a therapy for intransigent habits of mind cannot do without style, may even consist in style.
That’s to say that systematic philosophy could be and certainly wants to be the notation of an abstract structure of argument; translation should not be a problem. Philosophy post-Hegel is no such thing. Style cannot vary across different accounts of the system; rather, it is the way of thinking proposed to the reader. The historical split (and we’re talking Western philosophy here) isn’t clean. Socrates (especially as opposed to Plato) might have to fall on the nineteenth-century side of the divide, if it were. But the difference nonetheless might help us see why something happens to Nietzsche when we try to propositionalize his insights. Not something fatal, but something important, maybe diminished. Contempt is part of his critical energy, part of the work he is doing to jolt us out of our historical malaise; and enthusiasm even more, a human, all-too-human bid for the post-human, a deeply historical yearning to overcome history, or at least, historicism. It is at moments hysterical, as Graham says, but I am partly held in Nietzsche by his humanizing irony, his mighty effort to bring us in on a joke he tells on himself, to be laughing with us and us with him, a laugh which is both triumphant and knowing. (As you can see, Graham is a binary thinker, and I am not.)
Anyhoo, I too enjoyed going in with the exercises, and we’ll do more of that. The second half of the semester will spring us from our philosophers, and make the exercises’ relation to the week’s reading and problems less predictable—application or impersonation of a thinker will still be a possibility, but new variants will arise; and hopefully, provocations to some experiments in medium, too. I think we’re assembling a striking portfolio of cases, which demand a wide range of relations to time and to evidence. A day in Passaic; a time in Maghreb when things must have changed, we know they did, but when, how exactly? An exhibition, a pivotal year, the opening of a particular door. They are coming alive for me as I read and for you all I hope as you, seen so many times and so many ways…
…and then there’s Keene. I thought that toward the end of class, the question we got to of his own sense of historical encumbrance was powerful. On the one hand, why write Counternarratives if you think we already have too much of the past too much with us? Why is it is a book so entailed to fact and record? On the other hand, its freedoms, its departures from and expansions of what the past gives us are equally obvious. Are they superhistorical—that is, are they myth-making? Or does Keene write his stories into gaps in the record, to describe experiences that did not change history, but are nonetheless part of it—a record of epicyclical experiments, against the larger currents of history in a long and unfinished epoch of colonial slavery? Are Keene’s stories too small for Nietzsche? Mere scribbled epiphenomena? (I think again of those “Outtakes,” of Zion who takes advantage of historical disorientation to live a life of musical transgression and racial violence, received and given.) Or are they prophecies, or examples for emulation, a curious genre, which Nietzsche did not quite envisage, but might have, of micro-monumentalism? (A succession not of torches, maybe, but of sparks, from which a great fire might someday be kindled?)
Or do the stories really agree with one another in these matters?—a possibility raised by Jeewon. “The Aeronauts,” for example, gives us the early years of the Civil War from the standpoint of the memory-prodigy Theodore, who sees so much, recalls it all, but understands nothing (from the science to sex to his own desires to the war and so on). Is he a Fabrizio? Is he Keene’s satire of Fabrizio, and of so many other naive heroes who populate the history of the historical novel? What to make of this strategy for doing history, tracking it through a character whose mobility is enabled by his obliviousness? What does that vision of the subject recommend to us, now, as a way to live with the past? This historical consciousness that Keene offers…it clearly has common ground with the contemporary project of writing into the margins, or at least against the existing, big books; and with the longstanding tendency (see Erich Auerbach) of the novel to investigate the lives of ordinary people, to bring the high genres down to earth. What is different about Keene? Does the problem of slavery make that difference? (And what about gay desire, so important in so many stories, so inchoate for many of the men who feel it?) Does White’s dominant question of emplotment help us see Counternarratives? (As a whole, in its parts?) Or is Keene’s book an attempt to escape from the predicaments of emplotment, from the sort of history that participates in the big stories that grind people in their gears? Narratives against the old narratives, or narratives against narrative?
And what a nightmare, the final story. History as a history of rivalry and mutual mutilation, driven by a will to power not to be distinguished from sexual desire—and unlike any of its predecessors, a story with no apparent outside to the postcolonial catastrophe, historical or otherwise. What is it doing at the end? A monitory fable? A bitter allegory? Nietzsche seems implicated in the desire for untimeliness there. Is his strong, creative forgetting a possible antidote to a past that is burned in the minds and written on, or carved out of, the bodies of the two speakers? Or is the only way out the way through, more memory, more context, the sort that might situate the cell and the conversation in it?
I didn’t mean to end so darkly. It was a great class; but I wonder why Keene drops us there and what we can do about it. Tragedy, per White, after all? Or…realism?