The Last Day of creation. M. Naimy’s mystical manifesto

The article is devoted to the mystical manifesto The Last Day (1963) of the Lebanese novelist, playwright and journalist Mikhail Naimy (1889–1988). The author suggests that Naimy, under the spell of classical Russian literature, attempted an audacious experiment: by successfully combining the totality of concepts of Dostoevsky’s The Dream of a Ridiculous Man [ Son smeshnogo cheloveka] with the traditional mythologemes of Sufi poetry, this graduate of the Poltava theological seminary overcomes mystical imagery, and in doing so postulates human impotence in the face of the Nietzschean ‘eternal recurrence’ and the ineffable nature of true the ophanies. The article demonstrates the innovative character of The Last Day, a novel that stands apart from the works of other Pen League members: while Gibran’s The Prophet seeks to infantilise a religious myth, Naimy’s objective is to bring mythology back into the 20th-c. Middle Eastern literary discourse and reimagine it using the categories of contemporary existential philosophy. The study opens with a short biography, covering Naimy’s Russian and American periods.

Nietzsche’s Heraclitean Doctrine of the Eternal Recurrence of the Same

There is a long and successful scholarly tradition of commenting on Nietzsche’s deep affinity for the philosophy of Heraclitus. But scholars remain puzzled as to why he suggested at the end of his career, in Ecce Homo, that the doctrine he valued most, the eternal recurrence of the same, might also have been taught by Heraclitus. This essay aims to answer this question through a close examination of Nietzsche’s allusions to Heraclitus in his first published mention of eternal recurrence in The Joyful Science and in a related set of notes from the period when he was formulating and defending his doctrine of eternal recurrence while writing Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The key to answering this question, it is argued, is that Nietzsche came to believe that the doctrine of eternal recurrence, when properly understood as requiring identical repetition, has to presuppose a Heraclitean reality of eternal, absolute, and universal flux.

Nietzsche’s Heraclitean Doctrine of the Eternal Recurrence of the Same

There is a long and successful scholarly tradition of commenting on Nietzsche’s deep affinity for the philosophy of Heraclitus. But scholars remain puzzled as to why he suggested at the end of his career, in Ecce Homo, that the doctrine he valued most, the eternal recurrence of the same, might also have been taught by Heraclitus. This essay aims to answer this question through a close examination of Nietzsche’s allusions to Heraclitus in his first published mention of eternal recurrence in The Joyful Science and in a related set of notes from the period when he was formulating and defending his doctrine of eternal recurrence while writing Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The key to answering this question, it is argued, is that Nietzsche came to believe that the doctrine of eternal recurrence, when properly understood as requiring identical repetition, has to presuppose a Heraclitean reality of eternal, absolute, and universal flux.

Ludwig van Beethoven: Symphonies 1–9; Gerald Barry: Beethoven Piano Concerto, Viola Concerto The Conquest of Ireland, The Eternal Recurrence (Signum Classics: 2020, 2020, 2021)

A review of Ludwig van Beethoven: Symphonies 1–3; Gerald Barry: Beethoven, Piano Concerto, Nicolas Hodges, Mark Stone, Britten Sinfonia conducted by Thomas Adès, Signum Classics (2020), (CD) SIGCD616. Ludwig van Beethoven: Symphonies 4–6; Gerald Barry: Viola Concerto, The Conquest of Ireland, Lawrence Power, Joshua Bloom, Britten Sinfonia conducted by Thomas Adès, Signum Classics (2020), (CD) SIGCD639. Ludwig van Beethoven: Symphonies 7–9; Gerald Barry: The Eternal Recurrence, Jennifer France, Christianne Stotjin, Ed Lyon, Matthew Rose, Britten Sinfonia conducted by Thomas Adès, Signum Classics (2021), (CD) SIGCD659.

Natural Selection, Levelling, and Eternal Recurrence

Ovaj se rad bavi aktualnom raspravom o Nietzscheovoj vezi s darvinizmom, usmjeren na posebno značenje Nietzscheova integrativnog razmatranja evolucije u njegovim spisima. Istražujući rječnik evolucije u njegovim raspravama o volji za moć i kriticizmu Malthusova pojma prilagodbe, radom se tvrdi da je takozvana anti-darvinistička pozicija u Nietzscheovim kasnim spisima dio njegova obuhvatnog pokušaja da nadiđe uske granice strogo anatomskobiološkog ili društveno-darvinističkog pojma evolucije. Da Nietzsche to čini služeći se biologijskim rječnikom pokazuje njegova revnost u kartiranju utjecaja bioloških i kulturnih sila na ljudsku evoluciju. Radom se aktualna rasprava o kulturi i evoluciji želi smjestiti u širu povijesnu perspektivu. Istovremeno, želi doprinijeti i boljem razumijevanju Nietzscheove filozofijske antropologije, a posebno, njegove mijenjajuće ideje o slabosti i snazi, o intelektu i vječnom vraćanju istoga kao principu selekcije – ideje koje je Nietzsche razvio u nastojanju da nadiđe tradicionalnu podjelu tijela i uma.

Foucault’s Queer Virgins: An Unfinished History in Fragments

This essay attends to the place of virginity at the center of the fourth volume of Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality, Confessions of the Flesh. Reading virginity through a rhetorical lens, the essay argues for an ethics and a politics of counter-conduct in Foucault characterized by chiasmus, a rhetorical structure of inverted parallelism. That chiastic structure frames Foucault’s Confessions, and all of his work, as a fragmented, self-hollowing speech haunted by death and the dissolution of the subject. The essay reads Foucault as apophatic speech that returns to us, no longer itself, made strange. In that deathly movement of eternal recurrence, Foucault’s Confessions speak after death from the x’d out place of the queer virgin: on a threshold that separates life from death, in a movement of metanoia or ethical conversion. As an unfinished history in fragments, the essay’s form brings attention to incompletion as a crucial aspect of Foucault’s work. The fragmentation that characterizes an unfinished history underscores poetic discontinuity as the hallmark of Foucault’s genealogical method and thought.

Golden calf: Deleuze’s Nietzsche in the time of Trump

This paper examines how Gilles Deleuze addresses, and fail to address, the darker strata in Nietzsche’s work which has enabled his work to be claimed by almost every far-right European political movement since the 1890s to the Alt-Right today. Part I argues that four rhetorical strategies are present which serve to domesticate Nietzsche’s ideas concerning class and caste, race and sexuality, and his opposition to forms of liberalism, democracy, feminism and socialism: avoiding directly political subjects which Nietzsche returned to; catachrestic use of political words to describe ostensibly supra- or non-political data; denials of Nietzsche’s rightist positions, followed by justifications which, upon analysis, do not support the denials but ‘change the subject’; openly erroneous misrepresentations of divisive subjects, led by Nietzsche on war. Part II looks at how these sophistical strategies are played out in two key passages in Nietzsche and Philosophy, concerning the second ‘selection’ in the eternal recurrence, with its ‘annihilation of all parasitical and degenerate elements’. Closing remarks address the situation today, and the paradoxes and limitations of Left Nietzscheanism in the academy.

Unamuno on making oneself indispensable and having the strength to long for immortality

Unamuno believes that longing for immortality is what motivates nearly all of human behavior. Unfortunately, in a world in which many people despair of ever achieving true personal immortality, we increasingly turn to what he calls mere “shadows of immortality” for comforting ideas about how our names, energy, or basic material substance will carry on in our absence. Unamuno advocates fighting against such despair, staying out of the shadows, and longing for personal immortality even when it seems impossible. Unamuno’s approach to this issue resembles, in a few significant ways, Kierkegaard’s struggle for the cultivation of subjective selfhood. At the same time, it also runs afoul of Nietzsche’s derisive claims about immortality-seekers. Whereas Nietzsche sees longing for immortality as a sign of being too weak to make the most of mortal life, the more Kierkegaardian Unamuno counters that it is a sign of strong appreciation for life to demand, without surrender, that there be more of it. Given the proper understanding of Nietzsche’s claims about the eternal recurrence, I think he and Unamuno might not be quite as far apart as it initially seems. However, exploring the latter’s critique of the former suggests an intriguing way of seeing the contemporary analytic debate about the desirability of immortality. Building on Unamuno’s position, one could argue that pessimism about the value of immortality is actually indicative of a flawed character and an impoverished relationship with life.