TripleAmpersand Journal (&&&)

In ”On Reading and Writing”, a chapter in his seminal work, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche speaks through his prophet Zarathustra, who declares:

“Of all that is written I love only that which one writes with his blood. Write with blood, and you will experience that blood is spirit. It is not easily possible to understand the blood of another: I hate the reading idlers … Whoever writes in blood and proverbs does not want to be read, but to be learned by heart.” (1).

This ardent call for philosophical writing that is significantly authentic illustrates an enigma characterizing much of Nietzsche’s oeuvre: his concepts tend to be intoxicating and radically potent, yet are inconclusive in their vague definition. Zarathustra states that the writer who “writes in blood” also writes in “proverbs”, clarifying that writing which is opaque in form is Nietzsche’s authorial intent. (2)

Nietzsche’s inscrutable composition has been viewed with decades of derision from many in the academy, yet contemporary scholars generally maintain that his heterodox mode of writing is integral to the expression of his philosophical thought. Nietzsche scholar Bernd Magnus evidences this in his essay Deconstruction Site: The “Problem of Style” in Nietzsche’s Philosophy, arguing against the analytic dismissal of Nietzsche as an author hiding a lack of philosophical substance within obscure hyperbole. In his defense of Nietzsche, Magnus reasons that Nietzsche’s decisive refusal to give connective theses between many of his fragmented ideas forces the reader to reason those theses on their own, in a subjective interpretation. (3) Magnus asserts that “what is meant only becomes explicit in the reader’s (re)construction of the text’s meaning”. (4) Magnus’ point correlates with Nietzsche’s stance “On Reading and Writing”: to develop a thorough understanding of Nietzsche, any individual reader must participate in Nietzsche’s text by re-inscribing it in their blood. This is to observe Nietzsche’s desire to be “learned by heart”. (5)

In demanding to be learned by heart, not read by “reading idlers”, Nietzsche aims to write with experiential veracity that is in opposition to prevailing Western discourse; (6) he attacks Western discourse in his early work as obscuring truth within “a mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms, in short, a sum of human relations”. (7) Nietzsche distrusts those who would make universalizing systems on the supposed grounds of “the “improvement” of man”, which he expressly contends is “a ruse for draining life of its energy and of its blood”. (8) To reveal these discursive systems as “a ruse” constitutes Nietzsche’s practice of genealogy, continued by self-proclaimed Nietzschean Michel Foucault, stemming from his specific reading of Nietzsche. (9)

Having described human discourse as that which is negative to Nietzsche’s deliberate expression, how might we determine a positive understanding of writing with blood? Zarathustra proposes that in a worthy text, the ink which delineates the very existence of the written word must be blood, that interior fluid essential to the living body, which can only be expressed through the transgressing of flesh. (10) The immanent bodily experience of violent and painful transgression forms a major component of Nietzsche’s philosophy in his elaboration of Schopenhauer’s Will that he names the Dionysiac; “The Dionysiac is the drive towards the transgression of limits, the dissolution of boundaries, the destruction of individuality, and excess”. (11) This practice, the transgression of limits to draw blood for writing, can be followed further through the interpretive reading of Nietzsche by another French Nietzschean, Georges Bataille, and his concept of inner experience. (12)

My goal here is to argue that to write with blood is a practice of writing revelatory inner experience that is inextricably bonded to an individual’s distinct subjective reading of Nietzsche. Writing with blood is inconceivable without personal engagement in Nietzsche’s philosophy as a descendant. I will investigate this practice through Bataille’s reading of Nietzsche, which leads him to the dissolution of the subject through inner experience. Additionally, Foucault’s Nietzsche interpretation can provide the context in how it connects and contrasts productively with Bataille’s.

Nietzsche’s mistrust of those who systematize succeeds him in Bataille’s opaque texts, which refuse clear assimilation into any logical analysis. Aspects of Bataille’s work are necessarily indescribable. Because this essay is in academic form, it cannot itself be written in blood.

While Bataille does record his specific reading of Nietzsche in his book On Nietzsche, it is rarely clearly comprehensible. This is an explicit result of the attempt to write in blood. Bataille exclaims “Nietzsche wrote ‘with his blood’; to criticize or, better still, to test him, one must bleed in turn”. (13) Accordingly, On Nietzsche is an amalgamation of emotional raving, journaling, and tormented struggle with Nietzsche’s thoughts. Here is an example: Bataille cries that Nietzsche’s words are “demanding splendid explosions of self, this sense of majesty, more and more shaken with demented laughter . . . so that I’m dying of it”. (14)

Paradoxically, a more coherent path into Bataille’s Nietzsche is through Foucault’s Bataille. In A Preface to Transgression, an essay reflecting on Bataille after his death, Foucault emphasizes the importance that Nietzsche’s concept of the death of God carries as an inciting incident for Bataille. Foucault explains: “By denying us the limit of the Limitless, the death of God leads to an experience in which nothing may again announce the exteriority of being and consequently to an experience which is interior”. (15) For Foucault, Bataille’s inner experience emerges out of his reading of the death of God.

In the infamous aphorism in which Nietzsche’s madman proclaims the death of God, the madman cries out in question: “Is the magnitude of this deed not too great for us? Do we not ourselves have to become gods merely to appear worthy of it?”. (16) Without the absolute in God, humanity has no meaning with which to justify existence. If the human subject must become a God to affirm their life without Him, what great burden must they take up to do so? Nietzsche answers: “The heaviest weight”, as he titles the aphorism in which he introduces his pivotal ontology of the Eternal Return. (17) This is a connective thesis Bataille reads, joining the death of God to the Eternal Return as its consequence. The Return asks one to accept one’s life as one has lived and experienced it to be a forever recurring cycle, and yet to still affirm it.

The acceptance of the Return corresponds to Nietzsche’s idea of self-mastery, that for one to take command, even over one’s own life, one “must become the judge and avenger and victim of [their] own law”. (18) The requisite conclusion of God’s demise is that the divine is now enacted by and therefore upon the human subject. Now that God is dead, the inconceivably momentous responsibility for the vicissitudes of a human’s life rests in the hands of that human.

This idea is monumental for Bataille, who proposes that one who would accept the Eternal Return, thus becoming God, must understand that God cannot be anything but a lack of existence, a void. For Bataille, the human subject who accepts the Return “seeks within himself that which could annihilate him and make him like God, like nothing”. (19) In the Return, the limit that is God is transgressed by the death of God within the subject. Affirming the Return is to retroactively instigate the traumas that one has experienced in one’s past. This act is a transgression upon oneself, upon the pain that one has lived. Foucault connects Nietzsche’s affirmation to Bataille’s transgression: “Transgression contains nothing negative, but affirms limited being- affirms the limitlessness into which it leaps as it opens this zone to existence for the first time”. (20)

The limitlessness that describes Bataille’s ineffable inner experience arises out of the pain sanctified in the self-transgressive acceptance of the Eternal Return. Zarathustra sings:

“Pain is also a joy, a curse is also a blessing, night is also a sun –
go away or else you will learn: a wise man is also a fool.
Have you ever said Yes to one joy? Oh my friends, then you also said Yes to all pain. All things are enchained, entwined, enamored–” (21)

The above words illustrate exactly that the saying “Yes” to the joy of the Return is simultaneously the saying “Yes” to the pain of the Return. Nietzsche struggled with poor health and debilitating migraines throughout his life, and this pain greatly influenced his need to affirm life despite suffering. (22) This is to be “only a Yes-sayer!”, adopting what Nietzsche calls “Amor fati”, a love of one’s fate. (23) In Ecce Homo, Nietzsche’s tongue-in-cheek autobiography written towards the advent of his madness, he expresses that “it was during those years in which my vitality reached its lowest point that I ceased from being a pessimist”. (24)

Bataille finds the inextricable marriage of pain and joy of the Return epitomized in the sensual encounters of the body, where agony and delight become immanent to each other. He defines the “dominant element in eroticism” as arising out of the assertion that as human subjects are “discontinuous beings”, death allows us to access the “continuity of being” existing before we became through sexual creation. (25) “Continuity of being” is Nietzsche’s Dionysiac will, the source of both sexuality and death, spewing life out into the world to die and be remelted into primal unity. (26) This is evidenced in The Birth of Tragedy, where Nietzsche renders this moment of fluxes: “we become one with the immeasurable, primordial delight in existence … not as individuals, but as the one living being, with whose procreative lust we have become one”. (27)

Nietzsche’s Dionysiac stands in opposition to the Apollonian, a drive towards individuated and rational order, erected by humanity as a defense against horrifying reality. (28) Nietzsche’s central argument in The Birth of Tragedy is that the subject-dissolving contact with Dionysiac reality can only truly be accessed through art, specifically in the theatrical practice of Greek Attic tragedy. (29) In tragic theater, the actor representing the individual Apollonian subject is revealed as discontinuous, then cut along those fissures to rupture outward into the pure continuity of the Dionysiac. (30)

Bataille inherits Nietzsche’s assertion that art is the only approach toward a connection to alterity: to convey inner experience through writing, the writing must be inherently aesthetic. That is why Bataille writes with such obscurity, often abandoning logic for poetic ineffability. This is evidenced in Bataille asserting that to take up the Return, one must reject “reason, intelligibility, the ground itself upon which he stands”. (31) Rejecting the comforting solidity of cognition allows for the free fall into inner experience, the moment of subject-annihilation, described by Bataille as “the depth of terror, the extreme limit where he succumbs”. (32)

However, Bataille acknowledges the impossibility of fully transcending the discursive confinement of language and perspectival subjectivity. He writes: “philosophy finds itself in an impasse; without discipline, it could accomplish nothing and yet in that it cannot embrace the extremes of its subject, the extremes of the possible as I have called them, the outermost reaches of human life, it is doomed to failure”. (33) This conclusion, that while extreme inner experience negates discourse, discourse simultaneously negates inner experience, echoes the contradiction of the Eternal Return. To write with blood becomes the paradox of an impracticable practice.

A connective thesis can be made between Bataille’s resolve to move towards subject dissolution through inner experience, and Nietzsche’s concept of the noble “going-under”. “Going under” is self-sacrifice that pushes one towards another pillar of Nietzsche’s ontology, the mythic Overman, the future evolution of the human. Zarathustra speaks:

“I love the one who makes of his virtue his desire and his doom: thus for the sake of his virtue he wants to live on and to live no more.
I love the one whose soul is overfull, so that he forgets himself, and all things are in him: thus all things become his going under.”(34)

Importantly, this process is affixed to the need for the subject to “forget himself” in order to go under, denoting a continuation of the subject in a corporeal sense, while their awareness enters a space of non-being. (35) Bataille writes on self-forgetfulness as key to how inner experience sustains the practice of writing with blood: “such an experience dislocates us and excludes calm reflection, its essence being to put us ‘beside ourselves’”. (36)

The dichotomy of being encountered in the Eternal Return is evident in “going under”, in the desire “to live on” and yet to “to live no more”. (37) While the subject would indeed dissolve in physical death, after death there would be nobody to experience the transgression upon the limit of life taking place. Nietzsche, and in turn Bataille, are not advocating suicide. The concrete consequence of the dangerous excursion into alterity that is a “going under”, is not death, but madness. (38) Madness is a reasonable reaction to the impossibility of living Nietzsche’s philosophy.

In the conclusion to Madness and Civilization, Foucault’s acute dissection of psychiatric genealogy, Foucault reads Nietzsche’s tragic descent into madness towards the end of his life as a condition arising out of the nature of his philosophy, inherently important to it. He writes that “Nietzsche’s last cry, proclaiming himself both Christ and Dionysos . . . is the very annihilation of the work of art . . . the hammer has just fallen from the philosopher’s hands”. (39) Foucault designates Nietzsche’s philosophy as “the work of art” precisely because of its poetic, aphoristic form, which positions it beyond a state of argumentative discourse, in pure opposition to the diagnostic paradigm forcing the binary of reason/unreason upon the psychiatric subject of Madness and Civilization. Nietzsche’s madness is the culmination of his work, yet takes from him the very ability to continue working. This is true living madness, menacing the legitimacy of human discourse, ripping asunder “a breach without reconciliation where the world is forced to question itself”. (40)

In a note, Bataille reflects on how the specific unraveling of Nietzsche’s madness follows his work: “that his reason was sinking into megalomania was the equivalent of a confirmation of the solitude of a tomb; the sacrifice of reason took on the form the most laden with meaning”. (41) The tragedy in this demise is the loss of sanity and dignity along the lines of the impassioned thoughts that were most cherished by one in lucidity. Profoundly disturbing and embarrassing, this madness seems to delegitimize one’s works before all people living as subjects within the confines of human discourse. Why would one risk this dire fate?

The desire for a path towards truth surges through Nietzsche, driving him towards the desolation of madness. Even in his early essay On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense, Nietzsche rails against objectivity. He bemoans the fact that asserting an empirical “pure truth” beyond human subjectivity is impossible through language, calling it “not at all desirable”. (42) The overt lies disseminated by subject-oriented human discourse are motivation enough for Bataille to risk himself after Nietzsche through inner experience, and for Foucault to mount his genealogical war.

Foucault’s practice is permeated with contempt for the discursive presentation of history as universal, objective, and predestined towards progress; his genealogy will “cultivate the details and accidents that accompany every beginning; it will be scrupulously attentive to their petty malice”. (43) Nietzsche opens for Foucault an escape route from discursive systems in proving that they can be revealed as non-objective through the tracing of their arbitrary origins. In the essay Nietzsche, Genealogy, History, Foucault quotes a line from Nietzsche’s Dawn to justify this point: “the world of effective history knows only one kingdom, without providence or final cause, where there is only the iron hand of necessity shaking the dice-box of chance”. (44)

Despite working in this essentially reason-oriented genealogy, the annihilation of the writing subject through the task of self-forgetfulness is still necessary for Foucault as “the fundamental lesson that I’ve learned from these authors [Nietzsche and Bataille]”. He stresses the importance of envisioning his writing “as direct experiences to “tear” me from me, to prevent me from always being the same”. (45) In the self-effacing manner he often inhabits, Foucault considers his books emerging from this method “boring and erudite”, a critique which seems evident in any direct comparison between Foucault and the delirious intensity that possesses Bataille. However, Bataille vindicates the value of philosophizing closer to discourse and reason in the manner of Foucault. Bataille ruefully explicates:

“In agreeing to compete [in philosophy] I have personally felt it necessary to accept the difficulties of both paths, the path of transgression as well as the path of work . . . We are obviously faced with the impossible.” (46)

One cannot avoid discursive structures entirely if one is writing. The “path of work”, of writing discourse, can be strongly associated with Foucault’s interpretive reading of Nietzsche, in which he privileges argumentative rigor over attempting to engage in mystical inner experience himself. (47) In contrast, Bataille’s reading privileges the “path of transgression”, while maintaining that the “path of work” is still necessary, as it is inseparable from thought. (48) Taking an almost reciprocal stance, Foucault does not demean or negate Bataille’s Nietzsche interpretation for how it differs from his ranking of values.

To write with blood is demanding, an unattainable practice that eludes clear description and comprehension. It comes with a haunting question of the severe risk it poses, yet the emancipatory potential remains; Foucault affirms that to make a “test of the limits that we may go beyond” is to work and write “ourselves upon ourselves as free beings”. (49)

Finding himself consistently desperate in his attempts to formulate the inconceivable, Bataille writes with blood. In the section where Bataille states this aim, he proclaims that “those who read or admire [Nietzsche] flout him”, asking tentatively, “Except myself?”. (50) Bataille’s question mark speaks for itself. His vigorous and original explorations into an experience beyond constricting discourse succeed in being anathema to even the notion of a singular, universal interpretation of Nietzsche. Yet the most loyal Nietzschean reading Bataille can experience is his reading; ultimately, Zarathustra will have no followers. (50)

_____

Notes

1. Nietzsche, 2006, pp. 27-28.
2. Ibid.
3. Magnus, 1991, p. 229.
4. Ibid.
5. Nietzsche, 2006, 27-28.
6. Ibid.
7. Nietzsche, 2019, p. 185.
8. Nietzsche, 1913, p. 141
9. Foucault, 1991, p. 51.
10. Nietzsche, 2006, 27-28
11. Nietzsche, 2019, xi
12. Bataille, 1997, p. 332.
13. Ibid.
14. Bataille, 1992, p. 90.
15. Foucault, 1977, p. 32.
16. Nietzsche, 2001, p. 120.
17. Nietzsche, 2001, p. 194.
18. Nietzsche, 2006, pp. 88-89.
19. Bataille, 1986, p. 269.
20. Foucault, 1977, p. 35.
21. Nietzsche, 2006, p. 263.
22. Anderson, 2017, p. 157.
23. Nietzsche, 2001, p. 157.
24. Nietzsche, 1913, p. 13.
25. Bataille, 1986, p. 13.
26. Ibid.
27. Nietzsche, 2019, p. 81.
28. Nietzsche, 2019, p. 28.
29. Ibid.
30. Nietzsche, 2019, p. 105.
31. Bataille, 1997, p. 134.
32. Ibid.
33. Bataille, 1997, p. 259.
34. Nietzsche, 2006, p. 8.
35. Ibid.
36. Bataille, 1997, p. 260.
37. Nietzsche, 2006, p. 8.
38. Ibid.
39. Foucault, 1988, p. 287.
40. Foucault, 1988, p. 288.
41. Bataille, 2014, p. 207.
42. Nietzsche, 2019, p. 144.
43. Foucault, 1984, p. 80.
44. Foucault, 1984, pp. 88-89 45
45. Foucault, 1991, pp. 31-32.
45. Bataille, 1986, p. 261.
46. Ibid.
47. Ibid.
48. Foucault, 1984, p. 47.
49. Bataille, 1997, p. 332.
50. Nietzsche, 2006, pp. 58-59.

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