Time-Fetishes: The Secret History of Eternal Recurrence (review)

Time Fetishes traces a "secret history of eternal recurrence from Heraclitus to Derrida." Lukacher finds that, besides the well-known history of the cosmological theory, some thinkers have described a double relation that posits a metaphysical structure while ironically undermining the possibility of establishing the truth of the infinity of time and the nature of becoming. Lukacher favors Derrida, whom he considers to be the most ironical of these thinkers in his attempts to preserve the undecidability of the truth of the aporetic moment in which the infinite comes to mind, replacing autonomous thought. For Lukacher, the thought of eternal recurrence has been used to signify this disruptive event. Such thinkers preserve the "libidinal, sadistic and erotic basis," rather than allowing it to be covered over by religiously and metaphysically based interpretations (xi).

Lukacher finds that the theory signifies the infinite through awe and its presentiment in a manner that, after Freud, he ascribes to the "fetish" objects of the Dionysian Mysteries (x). The notion of a "time-fetish" is supported by Nietzsche's own mixture of elation and apprehension in the whispering revelation of the eternal return to Lou Salomé as described in The Vision and the Riddle (11). However, this revelation and the notion that the theory was the sternest test for affirmation suggest a desperate attempt at transfiguring the nihilism Nietzsche associated with deterministic cycles, rather than any usual sense of irony. The playfulness that Nietzsche uses is a bait to attract followers; a laughter that signifies his children's future, rather than a self-conscious relation to truth.

The book does not deal solely with Nietzsche. However, of Lukacher's other fetishists, I found Shakespeare to be of peripheral interest, as were Plotinus, Hegel, Schelling, and Schopenhauer at the level discussed here, while some of the speculation concerning Ovid, Hölderlin, and others was too internalized and enthusiastic. Nonetheless, I found the discussion of Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Derrida that occupies much of the first, seventh, and eighth chapters to be stimulating and useful. I also enjoyed the section of de Sade, whose characters decry the incapacity to annihilate another person, given that they will recur in the next cycle (113), when "a Stoic again joins with an epicurean to murder a Caesar" (128). "The Pope" accepts this impossibility, which is also fundamental to the most peripheral figure in the history, Levinas, who finds that the relation with the other originates in a reiteration of this incapacity as the message of nonviolence that turns the ego back on itself and causes disruption. "The Pope" might take what he can get and repeat it throughout eternity, though even de Sade seems to hope for an end to the cycles of bloodshed and for peace of a kind.

Lukacher finds that Nietzsche also uses the cycles to signify some kind of transfiguration or transcendence of the ego. This leads to the more contentious and interesting claim of this book—that, for Nietzsche, an individual relation with time is replaced by a relation to the "time of the other" (17, 120, 159). This interpretation suggests that the unease Nietzsche associates with the theory arises from the advent of the other. This is similar to the way that Derrida controversially reads Nietzsche in The Politics of Friendship. In this reading, the solution to nihilism is to think affirmatively about the fundamentality of the Levinasian/Derridean notion of "the time of the other" in which the otherness of the other person, not some abstract opposition to the same, "comes to mind," occupying thinking for some duration (which is the "time of the other").

For this interpretation to be plausible, it must demonstrate that the temporality which substitutes for autonomous thought; that as it "comes to mind," disrupting will to power due to being more fundamental than will to power, or that...