Speculating on the Moment: The Poetics of Time and Recurrence in Goethe, Leopardi, and Nietzsche (review)

We may be reluctant to admit it, but every interpretation is to some extent a wager. Most of us bet cautiously and are pleased with modest returns. Fewer are prepared to take greater risks and place larger bets. If we do, chances are we'll overplay our hand and lose more often than win. The effort, I would argue, is instructive (and intellectually entertaining) regardless of the outcome. Risk-taking interpretations deserve to be read with admiration and respect.

Nicholas Rennie's Speculating on the Moment is an interpretation of this kind. Rennie places a huge wager on the concept of the Augenblick in Goethe, the nineteenth-century Italian poet and philosopher Giacomo Leopardi (1798–1837), and Nietzsche. Arguing prospectively for a revisionist reading of Nietzsche's 1874 essay "On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life" that would recognize Nietzsche's wrestling with the idea of eternal recurrence at this early date, Rennie claims that Nietzsche is in fact engaged in a dialogue with both these predecessors with respect to the meaning and function of the Augenblick. This claim is justification for detailed and densely argued readings of key passages in Goethe's Faust and Leopardi's Zibaldone, a posthumously published compendium of dialogues, essays, aphorisms, and literary criticism. Briefly put, Rennie argues that Goethe and Leopardi offer immanent and modern versions of Pascal's wager, whereby the moment of wagering on the moment attains (or lays claim to) the redemptive quality of the hereafter in Pascal. In the case of Goethe, Rennie focuses his attention on Faust's wager with Mephistopheles and the fulfillment of its terms with his final words: "Im Vorgefühl von solchem hohen Glück / Genieß ich jetzt den höchsten Augenblick" (11585–86). Rennie argues that this is functionally an epiphanic moment, the secular counterpart of Job's epiphany at the end of his tribulations. Compromised as Faust's moment is, however, it is more properly an anti-epiphanic moment. As Rennie writes, "the schöner Augenblick...undermines itself as a substitute aesthetic (or ideology) of self-presence" (90). Goethe emerges as an allegorist, Faust's Augenblick a memento mori. The anticipation ("Vorgefühl") that constitutes the moment points to the role of chance and probability characteristic of the modern world.

For many Goethe scholars, the transition to Leopardi in the second section of Rennie's book means a move to terra incognita, even if Nietzsche and Walter Benjamin read him with admiration and profit. As chance would have it, Goethe and Leopardi both concluded work on their respective lifelong projects in the year 1832. Both texts count as profound meditations on the historical crises of their time. Through Rennie's thoughtful and systematic discussion of some of Leopardi's key dialogues, poems, and other writings, we become acquainted with a powerful and poetic thinker whose deep pessimism has been compared to Schopenhauer. Time is something to be suffered. It occasions boredom, nausea, and a longing for death. If time can be redeemed at all, then only through aesthetic illusion—we hear clear anticipations of Nietzsche's early thought. For Rennie, Goethe and Leopardi differ in the their agreement about the importance of wagering on the moment: "In Goethe's case, the conciliatory vision of the schöner Augenblick (we may call this the 'frame theodicy' of Goethe's thinking) is consistently undermined by an opposite, 'tragic' insight; in Leopardi, conversely, a tragic experience of time is sporadically illuminated by abrupt, epiphanic moments of visual synthesis" (196).

Rennie's opening gambit was to assert that the circumstance that Nietzsche engaged both Goethe and Leopardi as dialogue partners in his essay on history and life necessitated a return to their thought on the moment. Now that we have come full circle, so to speak, we are in for a surprise and a letdown. Not only does Nietzsche's essay not receive the same solicitous interpretive attention that...