Petar Ramadanovic

Department of English
University of New Hampshire
petarr@cisunix.unh.edu

Part I: Active Forgetting

Introduction

 

In the second of his untimely meditations, Nietzsche suggests that a cow lives without boredom and pain, because it does not remember.¹ Because it has no past, the cow is happy. But the animal cannot confirm its happiness precisely because it does not have the power to recall its previous state. It lives unmindful of the past, which, as it gives happiness, also takes it away from the animal. Nietzsche uses this example to point to the liberating power of what he terms “active forgetting,” a willfull abandonment of the past that is beyond the capacities of the cow:

 

In the case of the smallest or of the greatest happiness… it is always the same thing that makes happiness happiness: the ability to forget or, expressed in more scholarly fashion, the capacity to feel unhistorically during its duration. (UD 62)

 

Nietzsche calls for an abandonment of the past because, as he says, it “returns as a ghost and disturbs the peace of a later moment” (UD 61). Too much past precludes action, happiness, and further development. As an antidote to this predicament he suggests a critical discourse on the past that would be attentive to the needs of the present and able to distinguish between what in the past is advantageous and what is disadvantageous for life. Thus “active” forgetting is selective remembering, the recognition that not all past forms of knowledge and not all experiences are beneficial for present and future life. Active forgetting is then part of a more general attempt to rationalize the relation to the past and to render conscious–in order to overcome–all those haunting events that return to disturb the calm of a later moment.

 

Nietzsche’s understanding of forgetting stands in marked contrast to that of Plato.² For Plato, forgetting–forgetfulness–is a predicament of human, that is, mortal, embodied, and historical creatures; for Nietzsche forgetting seems to be the opposite, for it enables the human to step outside of history, to, in his words, “feel unhistorically.” While for Plato forgetting marks the disaster at the very origin of thought, for Nietzsche forgetting is evoked for its potential to save humans from history, which is regarded, at least in part, as a disaster. That Nieztsche regarded history as a partial disaster does not imply that history itself is either a falling away from the immediate, or solely a history of infliction, and, therefore, a politically overdetermined term.³ Such conclusions would miss other points made by both Plato and Nietzsche: that history is not one, that it does not have one direction, that there are moments in it which interrupt the totality history is supposed to be. For Plato, the loss that is forgetting is constitutive; for Nietzsche the loss is inflicted: in both cases, however, the centrality of forgetting reveals the kind of emotion, if not outright fantasy, with which history is invested–namely, the fantasy that history has a unifying principle and can serve as a unifying principle, a horizon of meaning of a given culture or nation.

 

But the ghost that haunts does not come from elsewhere; it comes from here and now. In this essay, I treat Nitezsche’s call for active forgetting as a puzzle–how, indeed, can humans forget? What is forgetting? In what follows, I will try to show that active forgetting, when understood as a moment within the Eternal Return, opens memory onto the radical alterity of forgetting by relating a possibility for history to a discourse about and in time. I focus my discussion largely on Nietzsche’s key essay “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life,” and move from haunting to active forgetting to the Eternal Return as I argue that Nietzsche’s critique of history requires us to think about disaster. In part II of this essay, I turn to Blanchot’s writing of the disaster, and argue that Blanchot’s understanding of time echoes and extends Nietzche’s critique of history. I conclude with a consideration of the issue of trauma itself.

 

When Nietzsche suggests that the future depends on the forgetting of the past, he does not mean that the one who forgets the past automatically has a future. He means, rather, that the very taking place of an event depends on forgetting. In this way, Nietzsche is marking the essential relatedness between forgetting and the historicity of any given moment. Thus I can formulate the question that will guide this analysis: What is the relation between a point in time, a moment, and history?

 

History

 

Near the beginning of the second meditation, after he has emphasized the transitory nature of existence, Nietzsche counsels caution with respect to both the degree of forgetting and the imperative to know or remember the past. He notes that:

 

There is a degree of sleeplessness, of rumination, of the historical sense, which is harmful and ultimately fatal to the living thing, whether this living thing be a man or a people or a culture. (UD 62)

 

A page later, again emphasizing the lines, he specifies:

 

The unhistorical and the historical are necessary in equal measure for the health of an individual, of a people and of a culture. (63)

 

An individual or a people, when actively forgetting, seeks to strike a balance between knowing and not knowing, between remembering and forgetting the past, for life demands not simply an oblivion of the past, but a balance between the historical and the active, between reflection and experience.

 

Time for Nietzsche has a similar twofold role: it is both a figure for the specifically human situation and a dimension of existence. The man wondering at the cow begins next to wonder at himself and realizes “that he cannot learn to forget but clings relentlessly to the past: however far and fast he may run, this chain runs with him.” Nietzsche describes time as “a moment, now here and then gone, nothing before it came, again nothing after it has gone.” The moment “nonetheless returns as a ghost and disturbs the peace of a later moment. A leaf flutters from the scroll of time, floats away–and suddenly floats back again and falls into the man’s lap” (UD 61). Where nation–another concept fundamental to our understanding of the call for active forgetting–is concerned, Nietzsche favors “assimilation” and a transformative “incorporation” of foreign elements into German culture, as he says when he addresses the possibility of Germans as an authentic people (123).

 

Now it should be obvious that Nietzsche invokes the cow not simply to point to the need for selective memory but, more importantly and more precisely, in order to assert that active forgetting counters history because forgetting submits this discourse to the living moment, to its animality and actuality. Moreover, with active forgetting, Nietzsche is attempting not to avoid the past but to open up a possibility for the future together with a different understanding of what history is. Because of this orientation toward the future, we could call him the philosopher of the “new,” but certainly not in the sense the new has in the nineteenth-century scientific understanding of history, where it is equated with progress. Having found that both science and bourgeois society conserve existing relations, Nietzsche tries to counter the drive to “press vigorously forward” (UD 110). And this is where his sense of what is new, what is radically new, comes to the fore.

 

What is especially significant for our present purposes is that, in this affirmation of the new, Nietzsche seems to contradict his later idea of the Eternal Return of the Same, which some recent works have rightly described as central to his philosophy, and which I would like to read together with the call for active forgetting.⁴ The contradiction is most obvious in the following claims made in “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life.” First, Nietzsche asserts that novelty requires a step out of the circle of repetition (64). Second, in this essay, the new requires the distinction between present and past–a distinction that the Eternal Return obscures. Nietzsche also faults suprahistorical man for blurring past and present: for him, “the past and present are one, that is to say, with all their diversity identical in all that is typical” (66); and finally, he outright rejects the Pythagorean notion of repetition of the same (70). In a more figurative sense, while the affirmation of the new in “Uses and Disadvantages” calls for recovery from the fever of history, Eternal Return is presented as a feverish state.⁵ Affirmation of the new is based on an attempt to end the obsession with the past; Eternal Return is the obsessive return of that which has already happened.

 

I will come back to the contradictory relationship between the Eternal Return and active forgetting after further discussion of “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life,” in which I will distinguish the underlying motif of this meditation–the attempt to offer a new measure for experience and time. After this additional analysis I will read together the two contradictory ideas (active forgetting and Eternal Return) and try to understand more closely the radical nature of Nietzsche’s critique of history. Suffice it to note for the moment that my intention is not to reconcile Nietzsche’s contradictions but to explore the force of his critique of history through them.

 

Active Forgetting

 

In “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life” Nietzsche presents three attitudes toward the past–historical, unhistorical, and suprahistorical–and three discourses on the past–monumental, antiquarian, and critical. He makes clear that history differs from the past in that history is a reification of what has happened. Instead of reification, but not as something that can substitute for history, Nietzsche suggests the actualization of the past in the present. In this process, for example, not only would the Germans become like the Greeks, but the Greeks themselves would be thought of as Germans, and constituted as the Greeks (as distinct from the Romans) belatedly, from a historical distance spanning more than two millennia. In Nietzsche’s words:

 

Thus the Greek conception of culture will be unveiled to him [a German person]–in antithesis to the Roman–the conception of culture as a new and improved physis, without inner and outer, without dissimulation and convention, culture as a unanimity of life, thought, appearance and will. Thus he will learn from his own experience that it was through the higher force of their moral nature that the Greeks achieved victory over all other cultures, and that every increase in truthfulness must also assist to promote true culture: even though this truthfulness may sometimes seriously damage precisely the kind of cultivatedness now held in esteem, even though it may even be able to procure the downfall of an entire merely decorative culture. (UD 123)

 

An individual is attentive to the emergence of the new. He does not simply imitate the Greeks, nor learn the past from history books, but learns “from his own experience.” In the process he discovers real needs, and “pseudo-needs die out” (122). This way of thinking about the past, which is also a form of historical thinking, instructs and invigorates action (59). Generalizing the point, we could say that it is only when we become capable of rearticulating and reexperiencing the originary moment of identity that there can be a healthy individual, a people or a culture. This repeated unveiling of the physis offers a new possibility, a new measure for forgetting, time, and history.

 

But there are moments in this meditation that allow and invite us to think about the relationship between the three temporal modalities–past, present, future–in quite a different manner from the one I have just outlined. At such moments, Nietzsche does not support any discourse on history–be it knowing or not-knowing, retaining or not-retaining the past–but argues instead for their radical change. And this is because we do not know what happens (to knowledge, for example) in a moment of forgetfulness. Can such a moment be complementary to the remembering of the past? Can forgetting undo the unwitting memory?

 

The question is not whether remembering can recreate the forgotten or whether forgetting can fully erase what is remembered. The question is rather of the possibility of a balance between remembering and forgetting, the historical and the active as Nietzsche envisions them. So, let us ask whether there can be an equal measure in anything concerning life or time or history.

 

Measure

 

Nietzsche holds on to some kind of measurement, the rule or the law of history, that he does not readily disclose. There is, for example, that measure which allows Nietzsche to speak in the same breath of an individual, a people, and a culture. But what is this tacit measure? As a first guess we might say that these three forms of subjectivity constitute a dialectical triad that echoes the three attitudes (historical, unhistorical, and suprahistorical) and the three historical discourses (monumental, antiquarian, and critical). We might, that is, assert that the three phases of the dialectical process are reduced to one of their constitutive elements such that, for example, a culture and a people, ultimately, present the needs of an individual. Indeed, “On the Uses and Disadvantages” is frequently read by critics as favoring critical history over monumental and antiquarian. But this reading, I’d argue, is a mistake, because the three (an individual, a people, and a culture; monumental, antiquarian, and critical histories), once they are brought into a relation, also express a fourth entity which is greater than the sum of its parts. For example, an individual can agree to be a part of the collective because the group vouchsafes his or her right to pursue happiness. The individual renounces one kind of individuality and expresses and constitutes another kind of individuality through a communally guaranteed right, whereby the community itself is formed. So too, Nietzsche’s critique of the extant science of history argues for a discourse on history that is more than the simple choice between critical, monumental, and antiquarian histories would allow.

 

We can thus refine our first guess and formulate a second: that the measure Nietzsche has in mind for the individual-people-culture triad is neither reduction nor Hegelian sublation in its usual sense, but continual exchange and transformation among the constitutive elements. This forms the new guiding principle, the new rule or law of history. Active forgetting is hence a process in which a past measure is abandoned and a new measure is continually reconstituted on the basis of new experiences. In this way measure is perpetually rediscovered, and so kept in synch with the difference that time introduces. This way of doing history does not reduce the new to the old–the Germans do not become the Greeks, for example–but perpetually recreates the new/old such that the outcome of historical processes is reflected in the degree of happiness achieved. To the extent that a nation has become happy it has also become healthy, and this good feeling is felt–we may assume–by an individual, a people, and a culture simultaneously. The individual is in harmony with the collective, so that there is not simply a resolution of dialectic relationships but also a balance between individual interest and group needs.

 

But can happiness be a measure? Or, better yet, isn’t happiness that which refuses itself to any measure? What if individual and collective, past and present, remembering and forgetting have nothing in common, no middle ground? Can a balance still be achieved? If it cannot be achieved, happiness itself cannot be the index of non-reified history, and so we must make yet another guess at what the tacit measure is that guides Nietzsche’s critique of history. Might it be that measure itself, as a guiding principle, remains unmeasured and is left out as immeasurable? That is, in its radical version, Nietzsche’s argument leads us to conclude that the principle of history would be a transgression, a breaking off from the possibility of (common) measure. However, we are not yet prepared to think measure in its unmeasuredness, and need to pull back a little in order to introduce a decisive turn in our understanding of active forgetting and history.

 

Measure Without Measure

 

If Nietzsche indeed suggests that healthy identity depends on the existence of a measure, has he then reinstated the very founding moment–of science and of history–that his meditation purportedly tries to displace? No, because Nietzsche, unlike the discourse of science he critiques, does not ground identity in history. For Nietzsche, identity is bound up in the now-moment, in harmony and in happiness. Yet, while these two processes of grounding–in history or in the now–do not have the same ontological, ethical, epistemological or political significance, they do follow the same principle: that of measure. In both, a dialectical relation between the individual, people, and culture is based upon already available and legitimated instances or agencies. So the problem with history now boils down to a series of questions: Can radically new things be measured? Can there be measure as difference? Is there a principle of history and of science that would itself be the principle of difference? Can there be a principle that would maintain the singularity of a human being without subsuming it under either individuality, community, culture, or any other already existing form of subjectivity?

 

These are also the questions that the older Nietzsche would have asked of the younger one. What indeed is the measure of time if it is not history? What is the time of measure? Put differently, the problem we are facing here is how can one address the notion of history or of historicity–history’s usefulness for life–without addressing time and what it is? In what follows I will try to show that the attempt to emancipate the notion of time as moment from the notion of time as history in “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life” parallels what Nietzsche calls the Eternal Return.

 

But first, let me review the most forceful epistemological challenge that history presents.

 

Historiography challenges the ontological status of being in that it suggests that historical specificity is the horizon of meaning, and, as such, gives meaning to an event. The event is that which happens in the light of events immediately surrounding it, including those which precede it and those which come after it. To know means to know historically. And to know historically means to see an event or a process not as it happened but when it happened. To see an event, in other words, in its proper place and time: at the moment when it took place. For the time is ripe only once for each event. In this sense, Nietzsche’s own writing is marked, unsurprisingly, by its historical context: the latter half of the nineteenth century in Germany; on the one hand, by debates on the formation of history as a science and a cultural discourse, and on the other hand, by the process and the sentiments of Germany’s becoming a unified nation.

 

But Nietzsche’s essay, according to its author, is untimely. It is not a text of its time and does not belong to its historical context. If Nietzsche attempts to cast a fresh look at history, he does so by countering the sentiment of his epoch. In his words, this meditation is “untimely, because I am here attempting to look afresh at something of which our time is rightly proud–its cultivation of history–as being injurious to it, a defect and deficiency in it” (UD 60). Also, classical studies–and we should bear in mind that Nietzsche still defines himself as a classicist while he writes this meditation–are regarded as untimely in the sense that they are “acting counter to our time and thereby acting on our time” (60). Moreover, in “Uses and Disadvantages” Nietzsche argues that to construct history is necessarily to impose a certain horizon of meaning. Historians, this is to say, do not see the event when it happened, but rather narrate it, reconstructing it in the historical present. In doing so they make the past event happen (as a discrete, past event). So, the time appears to be ripe not only once for each event. In effect, an articulation of history limits innumerable other possibilities and hence limits action. In this sense, historical specificity is posited only after the fact, from a different historical moment. The moment is ripe twice for each occurrence: once in historical discourse and once in time.

 

Having said this, we can conclude that Nietzsche’s critique targets not history as such but the science of history as it becomes the medium and the measure for the taking place of things; as it becomes three things at the same time: the symbolic universe, the horizon of thinking, and the guarantor of those two. The condition of such a science is the displacement of the event from one domain (the domain of action and experience) into another (the domain of science, instruction, and reflection). This displacement restricts the happening of a moment. It is important to emphasize that each historical moment consists of two moments and that, basically, Nietzsche is trying to rescue this duality (action/reflection) from being repressed as a duality or made into an opposition. Thus, by the end of the meditation, Nietzsche can say that both the suprahistorical and unhistorical attitudes have subversive effects on the relationship between history and life. The suprahistorical, because it stands above, disentangles itself from history and is in this sense ahistorical or counter-historical. The unhistorical, because it does not acknowledge that there is/was a history, is unmindful of it. These illusions, the suprahistorical and the unhistorical, are necessary for action.

 

Nietzsche identifies the reification of action in extant modes of history and uses this to suggest that every historical moment is profoundly ahistorical. Every historical moment both follows a historical development and exists outside of it. Every historical moment gives a specificity to every other historical moment but does so precisely as an exception and not because it serves to continue the same. Every event is, essentially, a chance event. So it is more precise to say that the event counters and resists the sameness and the projection of the before onto the after and of the after onto the before. Thus, to describe the historical specificity of an event entails the recognition of its untimeliness, of its “acting on” its context, and of its being outside of linear, that is, historical order.

 

The event is not illuminated when placed in its context; the contextual meaning rather obscures the eccentric position of the event in respect to the period when it happened. The historical specificity of an event is, then, not measured by the extent to which it represents or references its time but by the extent to which it is irreducible to its context. Only as an exception does an event have any specificity whatsoever.

 

For Nietzsche, then, every historical moment is always radically new. The direct implications of this radical newness are that the science of history is impossible and that it should be replaced by a certain kind of philosophy. Not a life-philosophy, which simulates both life and philosophy, but a philosophy that leads to action and does not suppress life. This new attitude towards history is a philosophy and not a historiography in the sense that what needs to be thought is the very impossibility of the historical project. Further, the thought itself needs to be situated in this impossibility. Such thinking is not merely un-historical, but historical in a different sense: thought thinks time in order to be able to address the historicity of a moment. It thinks that which, in every moment, is ahistorical–i.e., that which counters, displaces, or interrupts continuity–and only by going out of history does it make historical thinking possible.

 

Hence, it is already in “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life” that we find a proposition fundamental for the Eternal Return, that at every moment time renews itself, beginning again.

 

Eternal Return

 

There is something in the Eternal Return that cannot be possessed and that evades conceptualization. Perhaps this is precisely what the Eternal Return is: a feeling of time that stands in lieu of a concept of time. As such, the Eternal Return is a reminder that there is time and that time renews itself at every moment. We can say then, provisionally, that time is not man’s chain. Neither is it a leaf that “flutters from the scroll… floats away–and suddenly floats back again” (UD 61). Time is not a dimension, nor a reminder of the changeable nature of things, missed chances, lost opportunities. It is neither old nor young, neither past, present, nor future. Time is rather the proof that things and beings are, that they exist. Thus, the point of provisional cohesion of a philosophical system is found only where thought attempts to comprehend and experience itself–where the subject starts to retrace its history and envisions itself in historical terms. But this cohesion or gathering is precisely the impossible enterprise which leads to the attempt to theorize time. This philosophical cohesion, thought comprehending itself, is impossible because it requires a metahistorical instance, which, by virtue of being outside of history, prevents action and, therefore, confounds the attempt at historical thinking. Philosophical cohesion is also impossible because of the obsessive relation humans have with the past, to which, as Nietzsche says, they “relentlessly” cling (61). It is precisely in response to these limitations that Nietzsche formulates the call for active forgetting in his early writing; later he has the idea of the Eternal Return.

 

But why can the Eternal Return comprehend neither itself nor time? What I am asking is at once directed to the problem of history, history as a problem and not a given, and to the genesis of Nietzsche’s philosophy which, as Klossowski shows, reaches its critical point in the Eternal Return. Why is it that the feeling of Eternal Return cannot become coherent thought? Why is it that thought cannot comprehend itself? Why, to put it differently, can’t thought realize itself through a dialectical relation to its past? Are the reasons objectifiable and historical? Are they conceptual? Is it because of what thought attempts to think or because of intrinsic, structural inadequacies of thought? Is thought, for example, deconstructed or destroyed when it attempts to think time and experience? Why doesn’t the Hegelian dialectic work? Why doesn’t history work? Why doesn’t work work? Why does historical thought give way to feeling? Why does historical thought give way to trauma?

 

As we note these limitations of thought, another possibility emerges. If thought is destroyed as a thought when it attempts to think time, then history may offer a shelter from decomposition. In this sense, one uses history as a screen in order to be able to say something about time, which shatters thought if approached directly.⁶ To be sure, in “Uses and Disadvantages” Nietzsche suggests that we use history in this manner, albeit partially, balancing knowledge with action. Complementing this use of history, then, there is a second strategy. Thinking involves finding a way for thought to receive actively that which it is not prepared to think. To think hence is to attempt to know–to engage–that which thinking is not yet prepared to know, to attend to that which does not arrive and which is at certain times more than a period or an epoch; an event in history that is more than history, a form of recall that is more than memory. This thought is not exclusive to philosophy but, as Lyotard poignantly reminds us, is found in other discursive genres–namely, in “reputedly rational language as much as in the poetic, in art” as well as in ordinary language (73).

 

Time is the ruse of thought, and regardless which way we go, whether we retreat to the shelter of historiography or leap forward with thinking or stay in the same place, we are bound to encounter the exigency which cannot be measured. Humans, in other words, can never become cows, “neither melancholy nor bored” (UD 60). They are bound by time and freed by time. History hence requires not simply an active forgetting of the past but some form of thinking of the disaster.

 

Part II: Blanchot

 

I will return to this notion of disaster in a moment. But first, let me sum up what was said thus far about Nietzsche’s notion of forgetting. Forgetting, which we now understand to be a moment of Eternal Return, marks the renunciation of the self and especially of the possessive pronoun, mine. A forgetfulness in which “I” is not placed between the opposites of remembering and forgetting, past and future, singularity and heterogeneity, life and death, but in which “I” is becoming in the return to itself through an immeasurable number of other possibilities. The forgetting which makes action, history, and signification possible is here displaced from a Platonic immemorial past to a moment (Augenblick) when the being’s presence to itself is interrupted. The moment is not an instant between the past and future, but an ecstasy of time, a now at once in the past, in the future, and in the present. In the anamnestic now, “I” remembers its multiplicity, its being outside “I,” and forgets itself and becomes open to the radical alterity of unrealized possibilities. The call for active forgetting is hence the call for a difficult break in the opposition between past and future, presence and absence, remembering and forgetting, being and not-being, thinking and acting. With it we are brought to the verge of understanding that what tradition has handed down to us as opposites–remembering and forgetting, history and action–do not necessarily exclude or repress one another.

 

With Nietzsche’s forgetting one does not forget any object of thought as such. Rather, immersed in forgetting, one withdraws not only the subject’s claim on objects but also the claim on the subject’s unity, self-sufficiency, and groundedness. Thus, it is more precise to say that through “active forgetting” something is accepted and affirmed rather than omitted, erased, or denied. What this something is–this forgotten–is impossible to describe precisely. It is, perhaps, the very impossibility of telling, knowing, and apprehending, and thus of telling, knowing, and apprehending a future. It ushers in a thought, a future, a community without any guarantees. No future as much as all future. No past as much as all past. A return to tradition, a break with tradition, and a leap into the unknown.

 

We may see it as a disaster, this lack of measure, this impossibility of a thought to comprehend its objects, this shattering of thought attempting to think itself, this destruction of the moment in our thinking hands. But, if it is a disaster, it is also that which Nietzsche called a gay science. Not that we laugh (at ourselves) because we have, like the cow, forgotten. Rather, the science is gay in the sense that certain possibilities open up in spite of the trauma–the shattering of thought in time.

 

Disaster

 

Active forgetting, then, does not save humans from history. On the contrary, it refers us to a disaster (of? in? history) that–as conflation, augmentation, explosion, concentration–presumes another time “without presence” and, as we saw above, bereft of measure. As Blanchot puts it, commenting without direct acknowledgment on the moments of Nietzsche’s Eternal Return:⁷

 

If forgetfulness precedes memory or perhaps founds it, or has no connection with it at all, then to forget is not simply a weakness, a failing, an absence or void (the starting point of recollection but a starting which, like an anticipatory shade, would obscure remembrance in its very possibility, restoring the memorable to its fragility and memory to the loss of memory). No, forgetfulness would be not emptiness, but neither negative nor positive: the passive demand that neither welcomes nor withdraws the past, but, designating there what has never taken place (just as it indicates in the yet to come that which will never be able to find its place in any present), refers us to nonhistorical forms of time, to the other of all tenses, to their eternal or eternally provisional indecision, bereft of destiny, without presence. (Writing 85)

 

This time without presence is not a Christian eternity, but a time otherwise than history and chronology. It is as a trace of what will remain without presence.

 

Now, we could say that forgetting points to the loss of ground, a failure of thought, and that this failure has disastrous and traumatic effects. But, there is no inherent reason to conclude that time divided into the temporal modalities of present, past, future is, as such, non-traumatic, and that the other time, time without present-presence, is necessarily traumatic. There is indeed nothing except a cultural norm or a certain scholarly inertia that can justify the assumption that, on the one hand, the present understood as an effect of the past inaugurates a history, and, on the other hand, that doubt in the presence of the present destroys history. So, what Blanchot calls “the disaster” is not a devastation, but a non-modality of presence which entails a different understanding of action, history, experience, and writing. It is not the atomic bomb, the Holocaust, nationalism, or racism, but an unspecifiable event: a something–a return–that happens to time. It is something that happens in order for time to be there. In this sense, “disaster” is the event of time, the becoming of time. And if time is a ruination–if, as Blanchot writes in the first sentence of The Writing of the Disaster, it “ruins everything”–it also leaves “everything intact” (1).

 

Disaster touches no one “in particular” (Writing 1). This is not to say that “disaster” is infinitely remote from human beings and that Blanchot could have–or must have if he follows Nietzsche–chosen another word for it, a word that would not confuse the historical event with a structural characteristic of experience. To the contrary, the very word “disaster” obligates, and thus by using it, Blanchot questions the very limits of signification. Disasters are disastrous because they destroy the possibility for the dissociation and forgetting that are necessary for most traditional forms of knowledge. While not touching anyone in particular, disaster threatens that which is particularly human. In this the disaster draws the human into an as of yet unknown realm.

 

By disaster Blanchot means the Holocaust, Hiroshima, and refers also to the newer bombs which destroy forms of life, leaving inanimate matter intact. He means that the human ability to destroy is far ahead of its ability to create. He means that the human has achieved a destructive absolute and can eradicate life on Earth, life as we know it, several times over. But what is the meaning of this meaning? How can it have any significance if significance is derived from containment and yet containment of disaster is not possible? How can there be meaning if it requires a shelter and there is nothing that can shield the human from catastrophe?

 

This erasure of frame and meaning–the impossibility of forgetting–is the disaster. What can be characterized as a technological invention (gas chamber, A-bomb) or a historical event (Holocaust, Hiroshima) cannot be only that, but is also reflected in the internal condition of the human.⁸ A condition, moreover, that is, strictly speaking, not situated either inside or outside, is neither past nor present, and does not follow the distinction between presence and absence. We therefore do know something about the disaster, namely, that it is not an objective event that can happen or has happened to us. If anything, the position of the subject and the position of the object are inverted–we happen to it. And here “we” is the necessary agency, for disaster never happens to an individual. When it happens to a particular person, the very individuality is radically disfigured and only possibly reconfigured.

 

The disaster interrupts the experience of time and history, and gives a different meaning to simultaneity and coincidence. In the writing of the disaster–in what has come to be called “trauma narratives”–contemporaneity ceases to signify a shared moment, and becomes a marker of congestion in a temporal continuum. The forgetting of the disaster thus refers us to that which is other than history in history, to that which has no temporal modality or destiny, and thus cannot be predicted: “Presence unsustained by any presence, be it yet-to-come or in the past–a forgetting that supposes nothing forgotten, and which is detached from all memory, without certainties,” as Blanchot says in his article on Marguerite Duras (“Destroy” 130).

 

The disaster is a binding force. It links together individuals with different experiences as it links different ages and epochs. It comes before it comes and lasts after it has happened. If, however, the disaster is a binding experience, it binds by doing away with that which is common and by forcing us to face the possibility of a relation when there is nothing in common, when there is nothing that is common.

 

Transcendental or Historical

 

Parallel to Blanchot’s “forgetting” we can formulate the aporia in the thinking and writing of the disaster:

 

a) Each disaster is a singular disaster.

 

b) There is no singular disaster.

 

From Kant we know that the solution to an antinomy thus posited is transcendental, and that this solution ascribes to disaster a transcendental status. But let us listen carefully to what is said in saying that the disaster both happens and does not happen, is concrete and evades concretization within any discourse. What is said when one concludes that an abstract, primary forgetting invokes a concrete, secondary forgetting? What does it mean to say that every particular, historical forgetting repeats a certain forgetting which pre-dates it but has never taken place as such?

 

In response to these questions, following the logic of Plato’s argument about ideas, we can say that there is no concrete loss without an abstract loss. Or, in terms closer to Blanchot, we might say that there is no loss without the possibility for loss. On the other hand, it is only because of the concrete loss that there is a loss that is not concrete. There is, however, a different answer to the above aporia. To say that each disaster is singular and that there is no singular disaster is to describe a properly historical situation and the very condition for doing history–a doing of history that is never finally resolved and that is written so as to mark the alterity of the past, of disaster, of memory, as well as the alterity of the present. This should not, however, lead us to invent the right substitute, nor another order of facts and another methodology, another mnemotechnics and mythology, to deal with the immeasurable. The disaster is an event the consequences of which, the nature of which, the memory of which, have delayed effects whose meaning can only be grasped later and whose most serious consequences concern not memory as such but the community (association, alliance, relation) of and in the future. What is needed, in short, is a decisive move towards the examination of what tradition and community are: “what was to have been the future,” as Rebecca Comay puts it (32).⁹

 

It is not so much that, after Nietzsche, there is no one to accept the sacrificial offering because God is missing, but rather that a substitute (measure) cannot be found to fit the role. Substitution as such is not fit for the representation of the immeasurable–the representation of that which we have come to understand as having no measure, be it a community, forgetting, or disaster. One could then say, even matter-of-factly, that to forget the disaster is the same as to remember it, to write about it is the same as not to write, to witness the same as not to witness. This is the disaster, this is the (acting out of) trauma.

 

* * * 

The place outside–the place of forgetting–is somewhat forced upon Nietzsche and those who inhabit the universe of the dead, that is, corporeal, God. It is not an outright choice, but closer to the lack of one, for what is here called disaster implies that a closure and a clear demarcation between inside and outside, we and not-we, return and departure, remembering and forgetting, is not possible. Nietzschean thought, conceived within the rupture, has encountered this impossibility as impossibility and has directed its passion, almost solely, almost inevitably, to this rupture. The claim that all discourses have always only thought their limit, the points of their break, does not diminish but rather enhances the import of the contemporary inquiries that follow this direction. I am not certain that we can still logically speak of writing or of disciplines as either building or destroying, remembering or forgetting, and this may be the distinctive character of the thesis forwarded here.

 

Our new task seems to be the old one, at least as old as Nietzsche’s early writing, to learn how to mourn without surrendering to grief, to nostalgia, or to the hope for revenge, redemption, reunification, and restitution.

 

Notes

 

1. Friedrich Nietzsche, “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life.” Untimely Meditations. Trans. R.J. Hollingdale (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 1983). Hereafter abbreviated UD.

 

2. I have written on forgetting in Plato in Petar Ramadanovic, “Plato’s Forgetting.”

 

3. The most famous example of Nietzsche’s claim that history is an overdetermined concept is the one from On the Genealogy of Morals, where he criticizes a mnemotechnology which stands for both a method for remembering and the history of memory:

 

One can well believe that the answers and methods for solving this primeval problem [how things are remembered] were not precisely gentle; perhaps indeed there was nothing more fearful and uncanny in the whole prehistory of man than his mnemotechnics. “If something is to stay in the memory it must be burned in: only that which never ceases to hurt stays in the memory”–this is a main clause of the oldest (unhappily also the most enduring) psychology on earth…. Man could never do without blood, torture, and sacrifice when he felt the need to create a memory of himself; the most dreadful sacrifices and pledges (sacrifices of the first-born among them), the most repulsive mutilations (castration, for example), the cruelest rites of all the religious cults (and all religions are at the deepest level systems of cruelties)–all this has its origin in the instinct that realized that pain is the most powerful aid to mnemonics. (61)

 

4. David B. Allison’s collection The New Nietzsche is new in part because it shows the import of the visionary idea of Eternal Return for Nietzsche’s entire philosophical oeuvre. My treatment of Nietzsche’s “forgetting” is a dialogue with this “new” development. First, I trace back the Eternal Return to active forgetting, which is both a proto-Eternal Return and a moment within it. Second, I bring the concerns of “Uses and Disadvantages” to bear on the Eternal Return so as to specify the value of history, the meaning of active forgetting, and some reasons why the Eternal Return is not developed by Nietzsche as a coherent thought. In doing this I assume the reader’s familiarity with Allison’s collection and Pierre Klossowski’s Nietzsche et le Cercle Vicieux. Part of Klossowski’s book is reprinted in Allison, “Nietzsche’s Experience of the Eternal Return.” Trans. Allen Weiss. The New Nietzsche: Contemporary Styles of Interpretation. Ed. David B. Allison. New York: Dell, 1977.

 

5. In a letter to Peter Gast (14 August 1881) cited by Klossowski, Nietzsche writes: “Thoughts have emerged on my horizon the likes of which I’ve never seen…. The intensity of my feelings makes me shudder and laugh. Several times I have been unable to leave my room, for the ridiculous reason that my eyes were inflamed. Why? Because I’d cried too much on my wanderings the day before. Not sentimental tears, mind you, but tears of joy, to the accompaniment of which I sang and talked nonsense, filled with a new vision far superior to that of other men” (Allison 107).

 

6. A parallel conclusion can be drawn from Klossowski’s understanding of the Eternal Return. Klossowski assumes that in the Eternal Return the same self is remembered and must be forgotten. So, if individuals must forget the remembering of their previous selves, history is freed to do its work but only as a discourse not on memory and without affect. Such a history would even support the forgetting of the past–forgetting that would be a sign that certain events are finished, that they are not still happening. But, in such a case, strictly speaking, there would be no past.

 

7. Blanchot’s references to Nietzsche go via Klossowski’s interpretation of the vicious circle, cited in The Writing of the Disaster some thirty pages earlier (56-7).

 

8. I would limit this claim to specific cultures if I could only imagine a contemporary culture which is not touched by the mentioned technological inventions.

 

9. Comay adds:

 

Note the strange tense of this formulation: a future radically imperfect because it will never have been rendered fully present; a future which persists precisely in and as its own failure to have been. It is a radically finite future which memorializes itself as the will-have-been of what was-not-to-be: a future whose only moment inscribes the missed moment of betrayed and relinquished hope. Its presence is thus just its foregone absence, its possibility just its impossibility: its self-disclosure just the gap left by its prior failure to appear. (32)

Works Cited

 

• Allison, David B., ed. The New Nietzsche: Contemporary Styles of Interpretation. New York: Dell, 1977.
• Blanchot, Maurice. The Writing of the Disaster. Trans. Ann Smock. Lincoln: Nebraska UP, 1986.
• —. “Destroy.” Marguerite Duras. By Marguerite Duras. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1987. 130-4.
• Comay, Rebecca. “Redeeming Revenge: Nietzsche, Benjamin, Heidegger, and the Politics of Memory.” Nietzsche as Postmodernist: Essays Pro and Contra. Ed. Clayton Koelb. Albany: SUNY Press, 1990. 105-30.
• Klossowski, Pierre. Nietzsche et le Cercle Vicieux. Paris: Mercure de France, 1975.
• —. “Nietzsche’s Experience of the Eternal Return.” Trans. Allen Weiss. Allison 107-20.
• Lyotard, Jean-François. The Inhuman. Trans. G. Bennington and R. Bowlby. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1991.
• Nietzsche, Friederich. On the Genealogy of Morals. Trans. Walter Kaufmann & R.J. Hollingdale. New York: Random House, 1969.
• —. “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life.” Untimely Meditations. Trans. R.J. Hollingdale. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 1983. 57-124.
• Ramadanovic, Petar. “Plato’s Forgetting: Theaetetus and Phaedrus.” Khoraographies for Jacques Derrida, on July 15, 2000. Ed. Dragan Kujundzic. Spec. issue of Tympanum 4 (Summer 2000) <http://www.usc.edu/dept/comp-lit/tympanum/4/ramadanovic.html>.