Eternal Return: another farkakte idea?

As a form of the acceptance of Heidegger's concept of throwness (or amor fati) it is merely the common sense of those with a modern understanding.  Naturally, this contradicts the main thought of popular Protestant culture, that the individual can at any time will herself into an ontological transformation. As the scientistic notion that given enough time all things recur (what once might have, in the late nineteenth century, passed for a grasp of statistics and probability), it is dated and simplistic.  As for the various mystical conceptions of eternal return, the less said the better.  So in what sense, if any, is eternal return not just another farkakte idea?

Look the images, videos, and texts on this page, and wonder at the way the same old shit constantly recurs, certainly from the first Crusade to this recent lynching of Palenstinians in Israel (Young Israelis Held in Attack on Arabs).  In the context of Nietzsche's concept of ressentiment this makes sense.

Ressentiment emerged as an adaptive response to the discipline imposed by power in the first civilizations (Schmookler).  According to Nietzsche, ressentiment is more than simply a form of adaptation of an otherwise intact organism to power.  Ressentiment is the chief characteristic of “natures that, denied the true reaction, that of deeds, compensate themselves with an imaginary revenge.”  (Bernstein, Bitter Carnival: Ressentiment and the Abject Hero (Princeton University Press, 1992), p. 102)  It is a fundamental reconfiguring of the organism, an alteration of Being, a transformation of Becoming.  It is something new, contrary to the existence of hunter-gatherers.  It is a particular type of Being that is the characteristic element of the age of civilization and the state.

This adaptive response is empirically and clinically developed in psychoanalysis's concept of the mechanisms of defense.  Personalities are in large part constituted by these endlessly repeated mechanisms of defense.  In this sense eternal return is consistent with Nietzsche's other key concepts and with the deepening of Nietzsch's insight in the work of "Freud".

Without this particular way of conceptualizing eternal recurrence contemporary politics makes no sense.  With this concept one is engulfed in a profound darkness as one contemplates the future.  Read the excerpt to the right and observe: today's GOP is still recycling the same old shit.  

A central feature of Urban's doctrine ws the denigration and dehumanization of Islam.  He set out from the start to launch a holy war agasinst what he called 'the savagery of the Saracens', a 'barbarian' people capable of incomprehensible levels of cruelty and brutality. . . .  These accusations had little or no basis in fact, but they did serve [Pope] Urban's purpose.  By expounding upon the alleged crimes of Islam, he sought to ignite an explosiion of vengeful passion among his Latin audience, while his attempts to degrade Muslims as 'sub-human' opened the floodgates of extreme, brutal reciprocity.  This, the Pope agued, was to be no shameful war of equals, between God's children, but a 'just' and 'holy' struggle in which an 'alien' people could be punished without remorse and with utter ruthhlessness.  Urban was activating one of the most potent impulses in human society: the definition of the 'other'.  Across countless generations of human history, tribes, nations and peoples have sought to delineate their own identities through comparison to their neighbours or enemies.  By conditioning Latin Europe to view Islam as a species apart, the  Pope stood to gain not only by facilitating his proposed campaign, but also by propeling the West toward unification.
pp. 33-5

"Two forces seem to have been at work, stimulated by the crusading message that Urban had shaped.  Characterising Muslims, the expedition's projected enemies, as a sub-human species, the pope harnessed society's inclination to define itself in contrast to an alien 'other'.  But tapping into this innate well-pool of discrimination and prejudice was akin to opening Pandora's Box.  A potentiallly uncontrollable torrent of racial and religious intolerance was unleashed." p. 85

Eternal Return: another farkakte idea?

As a form of the acceptance of Heidegger's concept of throwness (or amor fati) it is merely the common sense of those with a modern understanding.  Naturally, this contradicts the main thought of popular Protestant culture, that the individual can at any time will herself into an ontological transformation. As the scientistic notion that given enough time all things recur (what once might have, in the late nineteenth century, passed for a grasp of statistics and probability), it is dated and simplistic.  As for the various mystical conceptions of eternal return, the less said the better.  So in what sense, if any, is eternal return not just another farkakte idea?

Look the images, videos, and texts on this page, and wonder at the way the same old shit constantly recurs, certainly from the first Crusade to this recent lynching of Palenstinians in Israel (Young Israelis Held in Attack on Arabs).  In the context of Nietzsche's concept of ressentiment this makes sense.

Ressentiment emerged as an adaptive response to the discipline imposed by power in the first civilizations (Schmookler).  According to Nietzsche, ressentiment is more than simply a form of adaptation of an otherwise intact organism to power.  Ressentiment is the chief characteristic of “natures that, denied the true reaction, that of deeds, compensate themselves with an imaginary revenge.”  (Bernstein, Bitter Carnival: Ressentiment and the Abject Hero (Princeton University Press, 1992), p. 102)  It is a fundamental reconfiguring of the organism, an alteration of Being, a transformation of Becoming.  It is something new, contrary to the existence of hunter-gatherers.  It is a particular type of Being that is the characteristic element of the age of civilization and the state.

This adaptive response is empirically and clinically developed in psychoanalysis's concept of the mechanisms of defense.  Personalities are in large part constituted by these endlessly repeated mechanisms of defense.  In this sense eternal return is consistent with Nietzsche's other key concepts and with the deepening of Nietzsch's insight in the work of "Freud".

Without this particular way of conceptualizing eternal recurrence contemporary politics makes no sense.  With this concept one is engulfed in a profound darkness as one contemplates the future.  Read the excerpt to the right and observe: today's GOP is still recycling the same old shit.  

from Puritanism as a Revolutionary Ideology, Michael Walzer, History and Theory, Vol. 3, No. 1 (1963), pp. 59-90

About the Puritan saints Walzer writes of " . . . their almost Manichean warfare against Satan and his worldly allies, their nervous lust for systematic repression and control." p. 63 

"They felt themselves to be living in an age of chaos and crime and sought to train conscience to be permanently on guard against sin.  The extent to which they would have carried the moral discipline can be seen in the following list of offenses which merited excommunication in one seventeenth-century congregation:

-for unfathfulness in his masters service
-for admitting cardplaying in his house . . .
-for sloth in business.
-for being overtaken in beer.
-for borrowing a pillion and not returning it.
-for jumping for wagers . . .
-for dancing and other vanities.

Had the saints been successful in establishing their Holy Commonwealth, the enforcement of this discipline would have consituted the Puritan terror." p. 64

"The persecution of witches, of course, was not a vital aspect of Puritan endeavor, but the active, fearful struggle against wickedness was.  And the saints imagined wickedness as a creative and omnipresent demonic force, that is, as a continual threat." p. 79

the Plen-T-Plaint

As culture war, backlash was born to lose.  Its goal is not to win cultural battles but to take offense, conspicuously, vocally, even flamboyantly.  Indignation is the great aesthetic principle of backlash culture; voicing the fury of the imposed-upon is to the backlash what the guitar solo is to heavy metal.  Indignation is the privilege emotion, the magic moment that brings a consciuosness of rightness and a determination to persist. . . .  Everything seems to piss conservatives off, and they react by documenting and cataloguing their disgust.  The result is what we call the plen-T-plaint, a curious amassing of petty, unrelated beefs with the world.  Its purpose is not really to evaluate the hated liberal culture that surrounds us; the plen-T-plaint is a horizontal rather than vertical mode of criticism, aiming instead to infuriate us with dozens, hundreds, thousands of stories of the many tiny ways the world around us assaults family values, uses obscenities, disrespects parents, foments revolution, and so on.  pp. 121-3

"If the state was one master-noun of eighteenth-century political discourse, the nation was another.  Indeed, as a source of inspiration, it was the more potent.  For although the state was an ambitious, omnivorous, hyperactive agent, the blood it sent pulsing round the body politic was very much on the thin side.  While a dedicated enlightened absolutist such as Frederick the Great or Joseph II might wish to dedicate his life to its service, most Eurpeans found it difficult to work up much enthusiasm for such an abstract entity.  The nation, on the other hand, proved to be brimful with motivating force, for it triggered both positive and negative responses to a self-generating dialectical progression.  For every virtue a nationalist ascribed to his own national group, there was a corresponding vice to be denigrated in the 'other' against which national identity was defined."

"This kind of mutually supportive national prejudice was of long standing by the eighteenth century.  In the Middle Ages, satires singled out, for example, the envy of the Jews, the cunning of the Greeks, the arrogance of the Romans, the avarice of the French, the bravery of the Saxons, the bad temper of the English and the lasciviousness of the Scots.  As the German scholar Winfried Schulze has cogently argued, the humanists of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries advanced these simple stereotypes much further by integrating simple prejudices in national historical narratives, especially foundation myths, for 'just about every culture and every religion has its own creation myth, its own equivalent of the Book of Genesis' (Colin Renfrew)." (306)

"To detect the continuing ground-swell of submerged hatred of past wrongs and hopes of future vengeance, it is the oral tradition of nationalist ballads and epics that need to be examined, for 'if a man were permitted to make all the ballads, he need not care who should make the laws of a nation', as the Scottish patriot Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun (1653? — 1716) put it.  That this is not an impossible unertaking has been shown by Vincent Morley, who has demonstrated just how ubiquitous and popular ws the long historical poem variously entited 'Tuireamh na hÉireann' ('Ireland's Dirge') or 'Aiste Sheáin Uí Chonaill' ('Seán Ó Conaill's Composition'), first composed in Kerry in the middle of the seventeenth century.  This offered all the essential elements of a fully fledged nationalism: a foundation myth (the migration of the Milesians to Ireland from Spain), a mythical hero (Fionn mac Cumhail and his warrior band, the Fianna), special assistance from God (the arrival of St Patrick), cultural achievement (the monasteries), an alibi for failure in the face of foregn invasion ('the betrayer Dermod' was just the first of many), and — above all — a gnawing sense of grievance in the face of foreign oppression (Henry VIII, Elizabeth I, Cromwell, etc.)." (314)

"Unfortunately for enlightened intellectuals, more often than not 'the people' proved to be not just unenlightened but positively reactionary, just as likely to riot against attempts to remove discrimnation against Jews or Catholics as to demonstrate in favor of 'Wilkes and Liberty!'  In the Habsburg Monarchy they were far more likely to turn out to greet the Pope, as more than 100,000 proved in April 1782, than to welcome the enlighened reforms Joseph II was trying to thrust down their throats.  Indeed, what prompted Joseph to put the brakes on his liberalization of the public sphere toward the end of his reign was the awful realization that it was not being used to propagate enlightenment, as he had hoped, but rather to incite conservative resistance to his reforms.  As so often before and since, it was the reactionaries who proved the more adept at exploiting the written word, not least because their arguments struck a much more responsive chord than those of their progressive opponents." (334)

What were the elements of this emergent right wing vision?  The fundamental importance of religion in maintaining political order, a preoccupation with the perils of intellectual and social license, the valorization of the family and history, the critique of abstract rights, the dangers of dividing sovereignty, and the need for a strategic alliance between throne and altar . . .  Even more fundamental was a Manichean readiness to divide the word in two: bewtween good and evil, right and wrong, Right and Left.

Yet to say that the anti-philosophe discourse fulfilled an ideological function is not to assert that it offered a fully developed political platform.  Rather it provided a "symbolic template" through which to construe a perplexing and rapidly changing world, a number of "authoritative concepts" and "suasive images" by which they could be grasped.  

By invoking this mythic golden past . . . anti-philosophes revealed signs of a romantic, qasi-utopian yearning for wholeness and social unity that would characterize a strain in far Right thinking for years to come.             

Reactive, reductive, Manichean, this thinking is less noteworthy, perhaps, for its particulars than for its general form.  It was precisely this tendency to view society as a battleground between opposing camps that stands as a hallmark of the bipolar, Right-Left model of politics so fundamental to subsequent European history. . . .  Dividing the world between good and evil, between the pious and the profane, anti-philosphes saw their struggle as a cosmic war in which the winners would take all.

Catholic polemicists writing during the Civil War had no difficulty in blaming the Popular Front for the tragic end of the Second Republic.  One of the innumerable tracts put out by Catholic apologists in support of the generals' rising [Franco] baldly stated that the Popular Front was essentially evil, 'a monstrous conglomeration of anti-Catholic political parties' whose tyranny was manifested in its persecution of the 'sacred institutions' of the family, relgion and property.  Manipulated by international masonry, it intended to deliver Spain to Soviet communism thus betraying both the fatherland and the Catholic religion. (p. 79)

This appeal for united action was given greater weight by the presentation of the Popular Front as the Church's declared enemy, a nihilitic alliance of the forces of evil.  The right was firm in its intentions to cauterize all 'unhealthy' elements in the Spanish state.  In 1933 Gil Robles had announced the need to purge the fatherland of 'judaising freemasons'.  In 1936 he broadened this considerably, saying on the eve of the elections that the party wanted primarily

to eliminate the sowers of discord who leave the fatherland broken and blood-stained, to eliminate in the realm of ideas that suicidal rationalism which, killing the great universal ideas of Catholicism and the fatherland, had broken with those supreme factors which made up the soul of the nation.

The CEDA called on all its supporters to work against 'anti-Spain', 'against the revolution and its accomplices', obscure figures commonly understood to be marxists, fremasons and Jews.  In similar vein, the Dominican Father Carrión published an article in his Order's journal which spoke of those three forces aligning themselves against Spain.  Jewish marxists, expelled from ghettos all over the world, came to Spain where 'they settle down and sprawl about as in conquered territory'.