From: "Frank W. Stevenson" <t22006-AT-cc.ntnu.edu.tw>
Subject: Re: rhetorical questions in Z
Date: Wed, 31 Oct 2001 22:33:21 +0800


yes--very interesting indeed (i need more time to ruminate or chew my 2nd
cud/stomach.....) lots of passages in Z can be read via Freud (and Oedipus)
no doubt, though perhaps not only in this way..."D's of D" certainly lends
itself to this. (Though here we also have the Sphinx--and speaking of Freud,
N's "umsphinxt" here is likely playing on, among other things,
"sphincter"--it works also in German.....thus the Sphinx-ladies "choke" this
guy in various senses, and/or he "chokes himself").....I'm also fascinated
by the possibilities of the palm tree as (to the warped/ warping male
observer) a one-legged dancing lady in short skirt.....   fws

----- Original Message -----
From: "Ruth Chandler" <R.Chandler-AT-ucc.ac.uk>
To: <nietzsche-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu>
Sent: Wednesday, October 31, 2001 1:40 AM
Subject: Re: rhetorical questions in Z


> Hi Frank,
>
> not yet finished my thesis am hardly a scholar but a few thoughts-
>
> havn't worked on the stillest hour piece but have made some comparisons
between the daughters of the desert and poverty of the richest man- in
daughters i think N is at his oedipal best- the logic of the fetish is
operative-the dancers are hermetically sealed, it is a palm tree/phallus but
not a deeprooted tree like the one on the mountainside-as with Freud's text
on fetishism, a group of dancers is suddenly individuated into one dancer in
particular-the piece is also interesting on time and movement-N sits in an
impossible timeless space whereas the dancer reflects back the impossibility
of movement apart from within prescribed limits-the question of what if she
did move is thus not far away
>
> in poverty, there is a completely different logic going on- N is under a
voice from the heights,  a creator on his seventh day- in the context of his
desire for milk udders can this be read as a regressive return to an
originary scene without a subject, the maternal voice as phantasm or is
something else going on-i'm inlcined to think that there is-the clouds and
the multiplication of little truths refute N's earlier castigations of the
cloudlands of poets-a space reserved for the eternal feminine of Goethe and
which N would like to replace as a masculine force that draws  everything
up- in this dialogue between Z and the girl, N reverses the earlier hiatus
on time and movement and, ironically, castigates his earlier voice for
having presumed too much in dismissing the clouds in the favour of light
etc. Derrida's logic of self- distancing isn't enough to explain what is
going with the movement of the girl in terms of relative speeds and
slownesses to N's own durational rythyms.
>
> Ruth.C
> >>> "Frank W. Stevenson" <t22006-AT-cc.ntnu.edu.tw> 10/30 5:04 am >>>
>     I was thinking of trying to interpret the male speaker/ Stillest Hour
> dialogue near the end of Z II, and also some  some other male-female
> dialogue passages (as in "Daughters of the Desert" in "Dithyrambs for
> Dionysus" and also near end of Z IV, where Sphinx-ladies "engulf" the male
> speaker),  in terms of the (woman-figure's) asking of rhetorical questions
> (affirmative answer assumed) and of riddle questions (unanswerable because
> "already answered"). I wonder if people (N. scholars) have been talking
> explicitly of N's use (within the broader domain of his "rhetoric,"
"style,"
> "irony" etc.--Derrida of course ties N's woman-figures to the "ironic
> self-distancing of truth") of "rhetorical questions" in general, and more
> specifically in this sort of context? (If they have I can't come up with
it
> from the MLA bibliography.)
>       Frank Stevenson, NTNU, Taipei
>
>
>
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