Subject: becoming invisible and simplicity
Date: Thu, 13 Aug 1998 15:40:23 -0400 (EDT)


I'm still comparing Nietzsche and Bataille and fell to ruminating on
what is perhaps Nietzsche's most profound provocation. He writes in _Will
to Power_ #943 on the question of "what is noble?": "we consider that a
man of our kind is not refuted by his vices, nor by his follies. We
know that we are hard to recognize, and that we have every reason to
give ourselves foregrounds."  This will to dissimulation is why
Nietzsche is the philosopher of theater, of the mask worned as a way of
becoming invisible. a-gain in #943 he suggests that what is noble goes
"always disguised: the higher the type, the more a man requires an
incognito." This would be to say that what the cultivation of a pathos
of distance amounts to, is solitude in the formless form of anonymity.
In this erring regard, the dying away of authorship, or the
dissappearance of expressive intentionality in the form of messages
meant to be read in the direction of a clear focus, a smooth absence of
friction as todays version of the search for happiness, is an
abandonment to a fictional character, a mask partly set aside from the
naked frankness of the Face. Bataille does not seem to have thought
much about this aspect of Nietzsche, at least it is not something that
I have paid much attention to while reading him. If the selection of
words tells something about a person's desire then "silence" as the
absence of friction, or noise, is an idealization without any empirical
evidence in life. Noise is the accursed part of silence. In the opening
of a gulf between them there is, rather inadequately, an ambient noise
soundscape. I really don't know why such a soundscape is t/here... I
just made it up as part of my believed fictional existence, my
tail of sentences linked by chance mixtures that move me deeply, that
prompt split tails. Rooted, corkscrewing growth becomes not only a
fund, an inheritance of imagery, but also a singular signature that
promotes independence from all expressive regulation. This is how I would
prefer a "state of exceptions".

You want to split some hairs Lucio or whoever? 

Ari






--