The Politics of the Eternal Return

In Nietzsche and Philosophy, Gilles Deleuze distinguishes two aspects of the eternal return. First, the eternal return is a cosmological and physical doctrine that posits a world of pure becoming. The world as we know it has regularities and identities, but these are only the surface effects of a deeper game of difference and repetition. The eternal return invites us to think of a world that emerges from, and always retains elements of, chaos: Chaosmos. The eternal return is also an ethical and selective thought that presses us to affirm a world without solid foundations. We live with beings and forces that resent the transience and injustice of this world and demand retribution, either against themselves (bad conscience) or others (ressentiment). The test of the eternal return—“whatever you will, will it in such a way that also wills its eternal return”—expunges reactive forces that demand solidity or vengeance and awakens joy for a world of surging and transient identities. The question becomes, though, how to translate the idea of the eternal return into a democratic, pluralistic politics. That is, how can we advocate the eternal return when we share the planet with theists, secularists, and others who hold that politics must have a secure foundation?

In Reflections on Time and Politics, Nathan Widder thinks broadly and profoundly about the political prospects opened up by understanding time as the structural ungrounding of movement and chronology. The book’s deceptively simple title illustrates its thesis that identities, though necessary for human life, hide the complex interactions that produce them. For though the book is about time and politics, these topics are nodes in a network that includes ontology, epistemology, mathematics, linguistics, psychology, discursive formations, disciplinary regimes, ethical practices, micropolitics, the history of philosophy, and the philosophy of history. Widder examines each of these topics by drawing upon an impressive array of philosophers, psychologists, and political theorists, including Adorno, Aristotle, Bergson, Deleuze, Foucault, Freud, Hegel, Irigaray, Klein, Lacan, Nietzsche, the Stoics, and Wittgenstein. The book is composed of eighteen “focused components” that explore themes—with the help of one or several authors—that resonate together, and with exterior forces, to change how we think politically. In the introduction, Widder divides the components into three groupings that we may summarize as ontology, genealogy, and politics.

Widder’s first aim in Reflections in Time and Politics is to present an ontology of the eternal return and anticipate the politics that it makes possible. Here, Widder follows Deleuze’s lead in combating the Hegelian presuppositions that continue to inform much radical political thought. Widder recovers Deleuze’s 1954 review of Jean Hyppolite’s Logic and Existence to show how Deleuze travels partway with his Hegelian teacher. Their shared task is the achievement of a philosophy of immanence, one that surpasses traditional metaphysical binaries such as essence and appearance. The solution, for both, is a logic of sense. A logic of sense retains a distinction between the inside and outside of a thing—between its external sense (its smell, as it were) and its internal core (the sense of the thing)—as two levels on the same plane of immanence. A logic of sense illuminates “the many mutually imbricated layers of reality residing within the empirical but going unnoticed by empirical thinking” (37). How, though, to describe the mutually imbricated layers of reality?

The key difference between Deleuze and Hyppolite—and their respective progenitors Nietzsche and Hegel—is how to interpret the syntheses that compose identities. For Hegel, the glue of being is contradiction. Any thing is only by virtue of not being what it is not. Forces oppose one another, but only in order to reconcile identity and difference in a higher synthesis: the Absolute. For Hegel, the logic of contradiction explains both the movement of history (detailed in the Phenomenology of Sense) and the movement of thinking (described in the Logic). Deleuze’s first objection to the dialectical method is that its concepts—contradiction, negation, the One, the multiple, and...