Tellurian Nietzsche and the (Un)inhabitable Eternal Return

Abstract

This essay engages Nietzsche as a traveler who, by regularly sojourning in precariously inhabitable volcanic areas of Italy as he sought some relief for his health in propitious climes, pursued a philosophy of becoming. The firehound his Zarathustra encountered on an island reminiscent of Southern Italian landscapes that Nietzsche traveled to, famously declared that “the Earth has a skin, and that skin has diseases; one of its diseases is called man”—a claim that Zarathustra scoffed at. And yet, the demonic animal’s claim provokes us today: as Gaia is running a fever, the question of (un)inhabitability is not just a question of space but also of time—of eternity and ephemerality posed so well by Nietzsche’s concept of eternal return. I suggest that a “Nietzschean ecology” would force us to fatefully dance with the radical reckoning that the only time we can inhabit is the moment, collapsing means and ends for a new eco-ethics.

Bird-Opinion

Murmuring to myself, when Under dark trees I took a seat,I heard ticking, a faint ticking then, Delicate, as a measure and a beat.I got angry, grimaced a bit,There was nothing I could do,Until I, just like poet,Spoke in that ticktock, too.

I kept making verses, yetSyllable by syllable out they sprung,I had to laugh suddenly—laughter let Out fifteen minutes long.You a poet? You a poet?Are you so sick in the head? — “Yes, sir! You are a poet!”— Thus the woodpecker said.

(Nietzsche, “Messinese Idylls”)

Si mont’ o si ‘ma mont’ ‘e na jastemm’ Si ‘a morte si ‘namort’ ca’ po’ tremm’ Montagna fatta ‘e lava ‘e cient’ len’  (gue) Tu tien’ ‘mman a te’ sta vita meja.¹

(“Vesuvio,” Neapolitan folk song)

A Messinese fresco, painted by world-renowned Italian graffiti artist Blu (Sicilia, 2013), underscores the ongoing more-than-human ecological catastrophes, staging, in a manner either fleeting or contemplative depending on one’s walking or driving pace in Messina, the question of (un)inhabitability. In a spectacular and tragically provocative reversal, Blu chose for his protagonist species the swordfish, known foremost as a culinary specialty in the Sicilian city closest to mainland Italy, where the strait’s (in)famous currents facilitate intensive fishing. The quasi-Dantesque painting’s fish tear the nets that humans are caught in, cast by massive city boats with imposing churches, smoke-producing factories, and an overflow of consumer items. Swordfish heroes rescue the vulnerable and naked humans from their consumerist, urban, crowded, and frenetic drowning, as they too are an endangered, all-too-endangered species (http://blublu.org/b/2013/08/28/sicilia-3/). The human/nonhuman reversal provokes abyssal thoughts at the edge of extinction: it is the absence of a resolution to this reversal, that makes for the aesthetic provocation, inviting more thought.

The strait of Messina, in Sicily, 100 kilometers away from the Etna, may be the dream destination of many tourists, emblematizing no less than Southern Italians’ mythical dolce farniente.² But the difference between a tourist and a traveler arises the moment one sets eyes on those sun-bathed volcanic landscapes: the tourist’s first thought goes to the stories s/he will be able to tell upon returning home, while the traveler’s goes to the possibility of never going back.³ Today still, the hills of Messina, where Friedrich Nietzsche once wrote the “Idylls” that he later included as an appendix in the Gay Science (1974), remain striated, terraced. They carry the markings of Ancient Greek enslaved labor intended to stabilize the hills’ volatile volcanic soil to prevent rapid erosion. Meanwhile, the Etna is constantly active, and the threat ever present. Inhabitants around the Messinese strait and further East in Catania, show travelers (and tourists who slow down to listen) the lava collata of 1992, which stopped one meter from one house, and swallowed many others.

Another fresco by Blu (Catania, 2016) stages the powerless absurdity of political and economic human hierarchies, along with nonhuman animals (some headless, some giant), panickedly fleeing from the Etna lava. Euro bills and syringes on legs, a mayor still wearing his Italian flag across his chest and holding hands with a planes-carrying military official, an armed mafioso, all run for their life in a vain attempt to escape the boiling Earth reaching to swallow them alive (http://blublu.org/b/2016/07/10/librino/). Inhabitability is a precarious, volatile, and ambiguous condition that cannot be counted on forever. Some with a bit of historical knowledge may also recount the 1908 devastation of Messina by an earthquake, which explains a lot of the city’s relatively recent architecture. More recently, in 2014, ash rain covered the area all the way from the Etna to Messina and destroyed cars, damaged houses, frightened inhabitants, reminding them of the “fragility of things,” to borrow William Connolly’s phrase (The Fragility of Things). The area looks rather different today from what Nietzsche saw when he marveled at an albatross who “felt sorry for envy,” even as the striated Messinese hills stand as if suspended forever in height and in time. Those centuries of perennial markings of Greek empire on the terrain cohabit with threatening volatility and constant ephemerality.

Caught in the Messinese Strait: the Eternal Return and the Eruption of Gaia

Thinking at a planetary scale and in deep time is forced upon us in an increasingly uninhabitable context (ill-)named by some as the Anthropocene, and more aptly described as the racial Capitalocene. The stratigraphic markings underpinning the concept of a new geological epoch, which allegedly engrave “human” presence in the lithosphere all the way to a hardly imaginable future lacking a human geologist to decipher them (Colebrook 10), ironically remind us, in a future anterior mode, of how short the Holocene will have been. It was, the story goes, but an ephemeral period of precarious inhabitability, on an Earth now damaged by some of its dwellers, who found and made their refuge on and in it, and now are forced to face the scarcity of such refuges (Haraway). Could our condition nearing extinction be or become ripe with an intensity that would highlight life in all its thick layers and striating scars, underscoring that all there is has always only ever been but a moment, even as we are pushed to envision the end—an end that would be far from new for so many? (Danowski and Viveiros de Castro). In precarious (un)inhabitability, the short and long term, capitalist times and the Earth’s deep time, the constant, age-old imminence of local volcanic or other more-than-human threats, the slow yet sudden unfolding of global heating, bring our times into old and new intensities.

These intensities alter the composition of the moment(s) on an affective level. These events where imminent destruction and deep time surge to remind us of a certain insignificance, of the short-lived dimension of “our” lives and even “our” species, yet load every moment with meaning, are times when the Nietzschean concept of eternal return becomes especially relevant. (Un)Inhabitability is not only a spatial question, but also an urgent matter of time. Yet Nietzsche himself tragically oscillated between attempts to cultivate a joyful amor fati (love of fate), and a desperation that prompted immensely sad thoughts (often inspired by the omnipresence of ressentiment in modern living), these two poles forming the cyclothymic landscape and timescape of life: Nietzsche proposed his “Idylls” from Messina for publication in the Internationale Monatschrift, claiming that “even the most serious writings, every once in a while, need something cheerful” (Astor, Nietzsche. La détresse). Yet the poet also despaired: “My most profound objection against the eternal return, my properly abysmal thought, is always that of my mother and my sister” (Ecce homo). Though the thought of the eternal return felt as an unbearable weight on Nietzsche and his dancing and laughing Zarathustra, he desired a state where he could watch the whole orchestra and cry out: “da capo!”⁴ These intensities, these oscillations, this trembling (Glissant), this unbearably heavy lightness of becoming, seem particularly pertinent in a context where our presents and our horizons are rapidly producing the sixth extinction. Here a teleological envisioning of time as linear progress (or linear decay) seems ever more absurd, hubristic, tragi-comic, not to say dangerous. The eruption of Gaia threatens to sweep the world as we inhabit it. I contend that, if we indeed follow Nietzsche and his eternal return, we may perhaps find ways to inhabit the moment like the Messinese woodpecker who, untroubled by the Etna’s constant eruptions, told him very seriously that he, Nietzsche, was a poet. A poet who thought of each moment as comprising the infinity of all moments that had preceded it, with no point of origin, nor a beginning. A poet for whom each moment also comprised all moments coming out of it, ad infinitum. The future and the past, both infinite, repeating inexorably each difference constituted this anti-teleological time of becoming. With the looming presence of our species’ imminent disappearance and subsequent absence, in our current moment of eco-catastrophe, we are reminded of the thought of thoughts (as the eternal return was sometimes referred to by Nietzsche), an unbearable notion indeed.

In what follows, I refer to the contemporary condition and its array of ecological threats as “the eruption of Gaia.” I prefer this phrase to the “Anthropocene,” as the Anthropos violently masks under a semblance of universality the fact that not all humans are equally involved in causing or in suffering from the ongoing and multiple eco-catastrophes (e.g., Altvater et al.; Di Chiro; Haraway; Alaimo, “Your Shell”; Verges; Ferdinand). In addition, the concept of the Anthropocene anthropocentrically, hubristically, and teleologically grants “humans” a whole geological epoch when the bacterial holocaust that, about 2.7 billion years ago, caused “our” atmosphere to transform from 2 to 20% of oxygen has yet to be recognized as the “Cyanocene” (D. Sagan). The periodization performed by the concept of “Anthropocene” celebrates, including in its very apocalyptic or declentionist, or, even, accelerationist and purportedly critical ways, a human culmination, however destructive, as well as a linearity that an “out-of-joint,” always-returning temporality of eternal becoming that would multiply more-than-human perspectives, unsettles. Isabelle Stengers has evoked “the intrusion of Gaia” to refer to the ways in which after Western, modern imaginaries had long separated inseparable human and non-human nature-cultural histories, the latter now imposes itself back in our realities. In such a context, the term “intrusion” aptly (and ironically) describes the interrupting of a certain ontological and epistemological abuse committed by nature/human dualisms (Plumwood). “(Not) Sorry to intrude,” an absurd phrase Gaia could be perceived to utter as she indifferently “interrupts” the delusion of limitlessness of capitalist economies behaving as if they were not its inhabitants, as if she were inhabiting some abstract space alongside them, even as they have always already backgrounded—yet depended upon adapting to and to a limited extent shaping—its inhabitability. However, as I wish to emphasize non-linear temporality as well as the urgency in this “intrusion,” and as the immanent imminence of volatile volcanoes will be with us through this essay, both materially and as metaphor, the term “eruption” better serves my purposes here, defying capitalist delusions by exploding the ground they assumed to be stable and passive.

Rather than opposing the eternal return and the looming presence-to-come of our species’ end, I see the eternal return as part of the maddening and sobering realization that “we” all are “only” passing, ephemeral travelers, mere parasitic components of the Earth’s skin perhaps: we as a species are relatively soon to be recycled, a mere trace fading into the incommensurable History of Life. Nietzsche’s concept of eternal return may invite us to refrain from the petty pleasure of obsessively taking mediocre, touristic postcard pictures of places reduced to pristine abstraction, for the archive and to show into a future that will not be—or will not be with us in it, all the while destroying landscapes, life, and present joys. Here again the traveler, tourist, wanderer and nomadic figures may be contrasted, not only insofar as one would reside in the long term and the other in the short term, but more specifically because the tourist cannot help but subject him/herself to, and be in, an ever-postponed and abstracted moment while alienating her/himself from more genuine possibilities to inhabit the passing moment (which itself, as we will have seen again, contains the infinity of both the past and the future).

Today in particular, Nietzsche’s thought is ripe with volcanic, “dynamite” (Ecce homo) insight into and critique of “our” human, all too human (mis)anthropos-scenes and human, more-than-human, posthuman extinctions. If Nietzsche called for a transmutation of all values, such a transmutation now becomes necessary beyond a simple extension onto nonhumans of the Kantian imperative to treat alterity as end rather than mere means: we may be forced into a kind of anarchistic immediatism, where there cannot be any more ends and means. Equipped with his philosophizing hammer, Nietzsche’s examination of all idols challenged “truths” normally, all-too-normally accepted as facts, those truths that provide a general orientation to life – this, indeed, is what Nietzsche described as “values” (Astor, Nietzsche. La détresse). God, Man, Growth, have been allowed to serve as such—and the Anthropocene reinscribes this vision of Man as the hyper-achieving telos of the Earth, resonating and clashing with the Zarathustran call for surpassing him. These idols have served, successively or in concert, as the “measure of all things.” Yet each eventually (will) die. They become targets for the resounding philosophical hammer again, today, in a context of ecological destruction, and a tragic political moment when the God of some (e.g., far-right, American evangelical Christians [Connolly, Capitalism]) and the sacrosanct growth of predatory capitalism, are (seemingly) triumphing, allied together as not-so-strange delusional bedfellows. Yet the eruption of Gaia remains, and will ultimately prove, by far, stronger, its history transcending “ours” (Stengers 17–27): indeed it will have been “our” history, much more than capitalist history, and these histories’ ends do not coincide. The eternal return is incompatible with a teleology of growth-desiring “progress” now turned threat against life as we inhabit it, as it is incompatible with any teleological temporality, any reason or unreason driving the course of (vibrant) things. This course of becoming can now more than ever be allegorized, as Nietzsche did, as a “ring of sand” where forces spiral (we, “specks of dust,” included). This inevitable and tragic dance may highlight how all meaning cannot be but a willful creation. And these words, “willful,” “creation,” are indicative rather than dismissive of our insignificant meaningfulness: all gestures and events being, becoming, inherently relational (as Karen Barad famously puts it, “relata do not precede relations”). What follows will further explore this critique of teleology, the eternal return as ontological condition, and some ethical implications this condition entails, showing how Tellurian Nietzsche, equipped with the “heaviest” thought, the thought of thoughts, and yet seeking amor fati, provokes us to consider the inhabiting of all times (even approaching or past ends) as momentary, momentous, as nothing but the eternal moment.

I should specify, before proceeding, that contrary to some previous attempts (e.g., Acampora; Hallman; Parkes; Vincenzo), I am by no means trying to portray Nietzsche as some sort of proto-environmentalist. Rather, I suggest that the eternal return is pertinent to our times as we as a species face extinction, experiencing the tension between needs to act fast and desires to slow down, at least to pause and think, all this caused by the urgency erupting with Gaia. I want to suggest that the identification of this proximity between the notion and experience of the eternal return on the one hand, and our condition of ecological urgency on the other, calls for, ultimately, the emergence or invention of a “Nietzschean ecology.” The idea here is not to travesty Nietzsche into an ecologist or an environmentalist avant la lettre, but rather to steal some of his concepts (and perhaps some of what we might know about his life travels and travails) to think and feel with,⁵ at a time of dire ecological collapse when we may need them deeply.

The Eternal Return as Ontological Condition: a “Real Philosophy of Becoming”

If all will pass, all has to return, infinitely. Like the constant, age-old imminence of an earthquake, like the cohabitation of deep and quotidian time and the eruption of Gaia and/or the Etna, the eternal return intensifies the moment. Contrary to dismissals of this notion that deem it a “half-mad idea,” as Milan Kundera claimed in his lucky Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), I, fully mad or not, see this notion as especially welcome, needed and inspiring in a maddening context of eco-catastrophe. While Kundera simply rejected the notion of the eternal return, advancing that in lieu of return, all there could be was ephemerality, fleetingness, becoming, and finding that thought to be unbearable, I side instead with Gilles Deleuze’s reading, which emphasizes the moment, as forever returning the return, reading the eternal return as the “being of becoming.” In this perspective, far from opposed to becoming, the eternal return becomes the condition of possibility for time to pass. I should note that readings like Kundera’s, that struggle with what to do with the “half-mad” idea and with how to reconcile it with the philosopher of becoming who generated it, are still common today. William Connolly, whose work on temporality and new materialisms has abundantly drawn from Nietzsche, dismissed the eternal return in a footnote in his 2013 book The Fragility of Things. Referring to a Nietzschean quote that stressed becoming, he asked:

“How … does this formulation and innumerable others like it in several Nietzschean texts, square with the idea of eternal return as the return of long cycles, in which everything that becomes during one cosmic cycle returns in exactly that mode in future cycles? There is no tension if this idea is merely posed as an existential test: ‘would you choose life again if everything in it repeats?’ But Nietzsche, besides treating it as only a test sometimes, also experiments with long cycles as a metaphysical theme. To me that theme is incompatible with a real philosophy of becoming.”

(217)

I take a different approach to the concept of the eternal return: first, as we will see, Nietzsche played with many metaphors for it, clearly suggesting that the return is not one of long cycles, given that these would still reduce time to linearity. In my and others’ reading, the eternal return does not stop at an “existential” or ethical test, either: it is a matter of an ontology of becoming, of forces forever and again constituting what is, or rather, what becomes—eternally. Furthermore, to the extent that this has ethical and affective consequences, the question Nietzsche provokes with this concept is not “would you choose life again?”—a formulation much too reminiscent of notions of free will that do not make sense in the context of Nietzsche’s thought. Rather, he struggles with the question of how, not just the moment as conceived on the scale of a life, but every moment large and small, could possibly be affirmed, even with all the unbearable sufferings and immense joys ever repeating in each: this is what he famously articulates as amor fati, an affective disposition which may be necessary to cultivate as we struggle to live through (and die in) an eco-catastrophic context.

Emphasizing the “instant,” in a posthumous fragment written in the fall of 1881, the philosopher discusses this understanding and some of its ontological implications:

The world of forces has suffered no interruption in its movement: for otherwise its end would be reached and the clock of life would be still. The world of forces thus never comes into equilibrium, never has a moment of calm, and its strength, its agitation are equal at all times. Whatever state this world may reach, it must have reached it already not only once, but countless times. Thus this instant: it has already existed once and many times and will also come back, all the forces distributed exactly as now: and thus with the instant that gave birth to it and so as well of that which is the child of the present instant. Man! Your entire life will be turned again and again and again like an hourglass always spilling – meanwhile, a great minute of time for all conditions from which you have become to come together again in a circle over the world. And then you’ll see again every pain and every joy and every friend and foe and every hope and every mistake and every bit of grass, every sunshine, the integral series of all things. This ring, on which you are nothing but a grain, shines again and again. And on each ring of human existence, taken in its absolute meaning, comes the hour when, to one, then many, then all, the most powerful thought arises, that of the eternal return of all things – for humanity it is each time noontime.

(Nietzsche, Unpublished Fragments)

To Nietzsche, time cannot have either end or beginning, an original or ultimate moment of culmination where all forces would cohere and organize rationally, it cannot “suffer any diminution,” “interruption,” otherwise it would cease to exist. A teleological vision of time is excluded by this account, given that if forces were to unfold from a beginning to a pre-determined goal, this goal would have been achieved already. The very condition of becoming we are caught in is evidence that there was always (already) nothing but becoming, and that there will always be becoming, otherwise there would be nothing rather than something. In the non-beginning, was always already difference. Hence the idea that the eternal return is the being of becoming: nothing is ever lost, no force ceases to exist, but is re-absorbed and transformed, to assemble anew, at each moment. Hence also, the ergodic⁶ quality of difference and becoming. Nietzsche asserts: “whatever state the world may reach, it must have reached it already not only once, but countless times.” In the above fragment (a Nietzschean writing form that matches his emphasis on the moment), it is clear that Nietzsche does not merely conceive the eternal return as an ethical challenge—though it is very much that as well—but also as our ontological condition.⁷ It is also the case that this is not only an individual, internal psychological state, as Nietzsche announces the shared experience of the thought of thoughts: “for humanity it is each time noontime.”

If every grass, every bit of sunshine, every friend and every foe, every joy and sadness will eternally return, the metaphor to be deployed is not that of a cycle but, however imperfectly, that of a ring. Nietzsche describes the ring metaphor as one where grains of sand would constantly be animated and in motion, eventually coming back to exactly the same point where they have been an infinite number of times, and carrying on in this motion within a closed universe. But the ring of sand and the throw of dice remain necessarily inapt, as spatial metaphors. One way to put this would be to say, borrowing Elizabeth Grosz’s language, that these spatial metaphors lack “the immaterial dimension of the material” (which is how the feminist philosopher characterizes time [Space, time and perversion]), or the “incorporeal dimension of the corporeal” (The Incorporeal): materiality is always infused and animated by ideality. In other words, and for our specific purposes here, space is always a spacetime matter, while time is always a matter of timescape. It follows, more generally, that all we have to inhabit is the moment, in its infinity. But further even than a need to recognize the limits of specifically spatial metaphors, the issue concerns, more broadly, the way the thought of thoughts eludes any formulation: arguably, the eternal return defies images, languages, or representation of any sort (Klossowski).

Ethical Implications

Though they cannot be reduced to an ethical challenge or “existential test,” Nietzsche’s ontological views certainly do have ethical as well as affective consequences. How could the moment become inhabitable, and under what conditions does it risk turning into its opposite? Zarathustra oscillates between praising and hating the “throw of dice,” though he at times calls it his “lover.” In the excerpt below, it is ardent love of fate that prevails, and is even presented as inevitably attractive (“how then could I not…”):

If ever I laughed with the laugh of creative lightning that follows rumbling but obediently the long thunder of the deed:

If ever I rolled the dice with gods at the gods’ table of the earth, so that the earth quaked and ruptured and snorted up rivers of fire – because the earth is a gods’ table, and it trembles with creative new words and gods’ throws –

Oh how then could I not lust for eternity and for the nuptial ring of rings - the ring of recurrence! … For I love you, oh eternity!

(Thus Spoke Zarathustra 185; emphases mine)

Zarathustra exclaims: “I have liberated them of goals!” in a triumphant outcry directed against teleology. But if Zarathustra holds this fate as not only inevitable but also desirable, we might just as well ask a question opposite to his: how could such a crushing thought, whereby “even accidents dance astral rounds” (185; in other words, even the most seemingly unexpected is ever so fateful and will repeat ad infinitum), and the earth spectacularly “quakes, ruptures, snorts out rivers of fire,” prompt a love of fate? How could the great randomness of the throw of dice recurrent in Thus Spoke Zarathustra be accompanied by the loving affirmation of the Earth and its eruptions, the joyful affirmation of life? In other words, how could we inhabit the moment—given that this is all we may, of necessity, inhabit? Nietzsche seeks to affirm life, to transvalue all values, and to reject the philosophical and Christian tradition of asking life to redeem itself, redeem the suffering it contains, or to read all suffering as a redemption of life, always assumed to be guilty, sinful. The critical problem becomes, then, the value of values, and in a famous aphorism of the Genealogy of Morality which proclaims the death of the subject, the relations between the transvaluation of all values, the eternal return, and images of volatile climes, become glaring:

A quantum of force is … a quantum of drive, will, action, in fact it is nothing but this driving, willing and acting, and only the seduction of language (and the fundamental errors of reason petrified within it), which construes and misconstrues all actions as conditional upon an agency, a ‘subject’, can make it appear otherwise. … The common people separates lightning from its flash and takes the latter to be a deed, something performed by a subject, which is called lightning … But … there is no ‘being’ behind the deed, its effect and what becomes of it; ‘the doer’ is invented as an afterthought, – the doing is everything. Basically, the common people double a deed; when they see lightning, they make a doing-a-deed out of it: they posit the same event, first as cause and then as its effect. The scientists do no better when they say ‘force moves, force causes’ and such like, – all our science, in spite of its coolness and freedom from emotion, still stands exposed to the seduction of language....

(Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra 26)

There is no doer behind the deed, indeed, just as there is no separation between lightning and flash, an image cherished and recurrent in Nietzsche’s thought.⁸ If the flash is not caused by lightning but rather is the lightning, or simultaneous with it, or a doubling of it, language’s doing, a doing-doing, similarly our actions are not caused by us, but belong to the unpredictable and contingent ever-becoming continuum that we reduce to a self. Everything has already happened, at once, and at once recurs. What Pierre Klossowski called “the system of codes” necessarily betrays this ontological experience and ethical-affective provocation: language, even in invoking images of rings of rings, rings of sand, dances, astral rounds, throws of dice, thunder and lightning, is incapable of rendering the experience of eternal recurrence.

The “existential test,” the ethical challenge of the eternal return, thus has to do with how to inhabit the moment one (or many) is (are) thrown in: thus its acute pertinence to those of us to whom, and those moments within us in which, the thought of extinction, of global warming, of the destructive character of carbon-emitting ways comes crushing. But if all we may have is amor fati, how could this possibly be at all helpful in a context of ecological collapse, and not simply result in a paralysis? The point is evidently not to be subdued by fate, to become passive, but rather to actively embrace fate. Rather than a passive resignation, amor fati is an active fatalism: of necessity, we have to inhabit the forces that Nietzsche describes and which constitute us, inhabit the will, action, deeds that move in creative ways going much beyond us and extending ad infinitum to the pasts and futures that are present in our present, beyond the human. There is nowhere, no-when, else to go. Inhabiting becomes the fateful wandering in the eternal moment. Our deeds are but effects of effects, and we are caught in a volatile eruption of contingency and necessity. The embrace of Earth and life deploys and re-deploys active forces, and the (perhaps impossible) reckoning with the eternal return, as the animating principle of a life-affirmation beyond nihilism, speaks to our current context of extinction. And, at the same time, this amor fati is further complicated and challenged by the thought (and looming experience) of extinction. The point is not to simply affirm the real, which has been sculpted into hollow idols and has damaged life, as nihilist forces have required of life a redemption, compensation, justification. Rather, what Nietzsche calls for, as manifest in the penultimate excerpt quoted above (“If ever I rolled the dice with gods at the gods’ table of the earth”), is that we actively throw ourselves in the divine throw of dice. If it is not the case that “force moves, force causes,” etc., then responsibilities shift and the question of what makes life worth living, in the context of many and of our own species’ approaching death, is disrupted by questions about the worth of worth, the value of values.

One more passage may illustrate the difficulty regarding the potential unbearability of the thought of thoughts, which might be understood as the uninhabitability of the moment. The quote’s length will hopefully be forgiven as the reader (you) enjoys the beauty of this famous aphorism, from the Gay Science, an aphorism often stressed, even by commentators who dismiss the ontological aspect of the eternal return and yet might grant it the quality of an ethical challenge:

The greatest weight —What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: “This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence—even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!” Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: “You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.” If this thought gained possession of you, it would change you as you are or perhaps crush you. The question in each and every thing, “Do you desire this once more and innumerable times more?” would lie upon your actions as the greatest weight. Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?

(Nietzsche, The Gay Science 273)

This passage emphasizes the return at the scale of a life, and poses the challenge of saying ‘yes’ to it even when a demon asserts it will recur eternally. Let us note that here choice, reason, unreason are irrelevant to the thought of thoughts, to the being of becoming. Here the demon calls his interlocutor not a grain of sand but a similarly insignificant “speck of dust.” This metaphor is obviously another playful image, just as imperfect as previously cited ones, but here the aggressiveness of the thought incarnated in the demon is revealing of the weight of the eternal return, of the intensity at play in facing the crushing thought: the alternatives are choreographed with (Earth’s) gravity: either to “throw [oneself] down and gnash [one’s] teeth and curse the demon,” or to “crave nothing more fervently.” The former is what philosophy, theology, and morals have so often done, as they demanded redemption of life. The latter, the “craving,” is Nietzsche’s call to cry out “da capo!”, to desire the eternal repetition from its beginning as if we “specks of dust” were the conductors of the orchestra of life, which indeed, we would espouse and affirm—inhabiting, in movement, the moment.

The ethical implications of the eternal return are indeed a tall order that refuses any petty pleasure, justified in utilitarian or teleological fashion by invoking something else they are not. The thought of thoughts excludes means subjected to ends postponed to a later moment, especially when the same forces will be present in that future moment. Hence one of the ethical dimensions of the eternal return: small pleasures, petty compensatory acts, actions performed “one last time,” as a temporary exception redeemed elsewhere or in some other time(s), are systematically excluded by this principle of selection. All actions should be performed for their own sake, or both for no reason or purpose, and with all the reason and purpose one may be able to muster. Reason and unreason, purpose and aimlessness, are irrelevant to the course of the universe. We “specks of dust” are put before a high-stakes challenge: would I be prepared to live this instant an infinite number of times, can this action be both self-justified, performed for its own sake, and completely gratuitous, can means and ends collapse into one at each moment? Can I embrace, inhabit this moment and the forces engaged in it, asking for no further justification, with no bad conscience or ressentiment? In this spirit, we cannot logically be asked to sacrifice Gaia on the altar of growth⁹ or God or both, as the currently hegemonic regime and its “forward” “progress” prompts us to do, all the way to uninhabitability. This temporality of capitalist growth, with its ever-postponed satisfaction of destructively impossible abundance, which I have called elsewhere “uchronia” (C. Sagan), is precisely the sort of teleology questioned by the eternal return. So are petty pleasures justified after or outside of themselves: capitalism, begging for and clinging to its last carbon emission out of our exhaust(ed) pipes so as to continue on with growth just a bit longer, becomes absurd. To accumulate now, and postpone our confrontation with present and future planetary limits, is equally bankrupt. The moment of uninhabitability resulting from centuries of deleterious ways is already with us. Yet no top-down, technocratic environmentalism would resist the ethical challenge either. For instance, contrary to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC, 2014) and ExxonMobil’s bafflingly converging views on this point,¹⁰ “overshooting” thresholds or limits in order to later geoengineer the planet is out of the question under an ethics which refuses to let the ends justify the means.

Tellurian Nietzsche

“The secret for harvesting for existence the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment is – to live dangerously! Build your cities on the slopes of Vesuvius!”

(Nietzsche, Gay Science 160)

Nietzsche’s is an ontology of immanence and imminence, one that is embodied, and goes beyond individuated human bodies, into Dionysian worlds. The theme of eternal return erupts in a vast array of telluric movements, and a rich bestiary (Babbich et al.). Because of the above-described emphasis on the moment, because of the collapse of means and ends, because of the questioning of doers and deeds, a Nietzschean ecology is unlikely to entail simply “extending” agency to nonhumans, i.e., subjecting (assujettir) nonhumans (even in order to grant them rights, or respect, or recognition), as is so fashionable in the inclusionary politics of today’s environmental thought (e.g., Ignatov; Bennett; Grusin). Instead, we have to face the abysmal thought that, just like all of life’s forces, humans fundamentally have no choice but to become what they are, before disappearing—or, rather, changing form to the point of unrecognizability, i.e., becoming extinct as such, forever: after all, no force is ever lost or ever entirely new. A Nietzschean ecology de-centers the question of agency when engaging the nonhuman, and radically de-centers the human, in favor of an ungrounded, unstable and indifferent Earth. Gaia and its eruption(s) become as extra-moral¹¹ as they are beyond human(s), reticent to accept Anthroposcenic characterizations,¹² constantly posing anew the question of its volatile, limited, conditional inhabitability, and prompting to see all landscapes as timescapes, as spacetime matters.

Traveling with Nietzsche’s intellectual biography can further enable a (un)grounded, volcanic Nietzschean ecology of amor fati, tragically cherishing the moment. Along with the eternal return as an offering for how to inhabit a spacetime characterized by Gaia’s eruption, Nietzsche’s itinerant life tells the story of a tellurian philosopher-poet whose “valetudinary states” (Klossowski) prompted him to become a tourist, a traveler, a wanderer, a colonist, an illegal immigrant, a stateless thinker, a refugee, an adventurer, a hiker, transiently inhabiting and meandering through the Italian South and walking alongside lakes, up mountains and islands, where sickness, fresh healthy air, thunder, lightning and lava inspired the thought of thoughts. Such inhabiting takes the form of constant motion, though without abstract universalist placelessness: to the contrary. And here, in multiple ever-moving heres, the moment takes over even further.

As is well known and documented, Nietzsche was deeply ill throughout his life. Although for a long time it was assumed that Nietzsche’s illness was syphilis, this hypothesis is increasingly considered unconvincing (Astor, Nietzsche. La détresse). We will probably never know whether the redoubtable Treponema spirochetes indeed caused his frequent bouts of migraines,¹³ his seizures, and his degenerating eyesight, culminating in 1889, when on a public square in Turin, he threw himself onto a horse and hugged it, later writing demented letters, to then spend the last years of his life under the care of his infamous anti-Semitic sister Elizabeth, paralyzed and unable to walk or speak. Throughout his many years of suffering, and in accordance with the medical fashion of the time, Nietzsche sought better health by looking for climates which he hoped more suitable. The expectation that the volcanic air and sun-bathed skies of Italy would be more clement was never quite met, but the philosopher regularly stayed in various places in the Mezzogiorno, from Sorrento in the bay of Naples to Sicily’s strait of Messina, as well as by the Swiss lake of Sils-Maria, where the “revelation” of the eternal return occurred (Astor). This meandering was that of a tourist or colonist, insofar as Nietzsche, like the many Germans and North European bourgeois of the time, spoke little Italian—let alone Southern dialects—and was primarily relating to his various destinations by way of instrumental goals and a search for health. Italy was a resort for the Northern European, wealthy convalescents. This tourism was accompanied by a fascination for this peninsula fueled by an idealization of the Greeks and the traces of the Magna Graecia empire still visible today in the Neopolitan, Lazian and Sicilian areas which convalescents visited (D’Iorio). Furthermore, the relatively less wealthy, nomadic Nietzsche as well as some of his rich hosts and friends, would fantasize about creating a form of academy, explicitly describing this project as that of “colonists” (D’Iorio 30) a fact that biographers rarely report through a critical lens. Alongside the problematic “arrowlike nomadism” (Glissant) typical of destructive colonial élans, was a praise of the landscapes and views, especially with regard to Italy’s many volcanoes and volcanic isles. As a colonist, Nietzsche could not have understood the lyrics of the Neapolitan song I opened this essay with, which dramatizes the Neapolitan Vesuvius as a more-than-mountain “holding one’s life in one’s hand.” His volcanic, precarious travels find echoes in Zarathustra. Nietzsche was also a stateless migrant, as he obtained a passport in 1876 which allowed him to stay for only a year outside of Switzerland, where he had recently acquired citizenship, yet he stayed beyond this permitted time (D’Iorio 9). The themes of wandering, nomadism, travels, are recurrent in his works. What recurs, therefore, is also all sorts of transient forms of Earthly inhabiting. “I am a wanderer and a mountain climber,” exclaims Zarathustra in a section titled “the Wanderer” (173), conjuring the sort of “adventurer” Nietzsche would likely have fancied himself to be, but was unable to become, as his own travels were in fact marred with long days of agonizing pain in the darkness of his bedrooms.

Another recurrent image already mentioned in this essay speaks directly to the heavy heat and volatile climes typical of mountainous, long hikes Nietzsche undertook in Sils-Maria Lake, where the “revelation” of the thought of thoughts occurred. Namely, Nietzsche strikingly mobilizes images of thunder and lightning, which images evoke the stroboscopic effects of a body “weathering” (Neimanis and Walker) stormy climates, a body regularly overtaken by epileptic episodes that are notorious for provoking, in many persons, mystical experiences challenging linear perceptions of time in favor of infinite simultaneity in the moment (Connolly, Neuropolitics). Here the (un)inhabitability of the infinitude of the moment tragically poses the question of extinction, in deeply concrete terms. Neimanis and Walker have underscored our urgent need to think of “transcorporeality” (a term they draw from Stacy Alaimo’s work, Bodily Natures) in terms of the unsettling temporalities imposed on us by climate change, proposing the term “weathering” as the meeting point between transcorporeality (i.e., the phenomenological, more-than-human and vulnerable experience of human embodiment) and ecological urgencies in the long and short term, together. Rather than speculate on the cause of Nietzsche’s ailments as reducible to syphilis (a more-than-human intimate encounter with spirochetes nonetheless provocative in its own right), one may speculate about his symptoms in their ecological context. This epileptic and thunderous “weathering” could thus be understood as an instance of the intimate entanglements and simultaneities suffusing all (contingent, large and small, celestial, tellurian, more-than-human living) bodies’ eternal, ambivalent, ever-self-extinguishing (un)inhabitability in the moment.

In the lived context of his itinerant and alternately social, friendship-filled, yet solitary, lifestyle, Nietzsche’s philosophy was intimately tied to the struggle between health and unhealth, as well as to the connected theme of styling one’s life so as to eliminate remorse and espouse amor fati. May the omnipresence of the “fragility of things”—the looming, imminent, constant threat of eruption tensely cohabiting with the peace Nietzsche sought in Italy’s climes—have informed the thought of thoughts? This influence is certainly present through the fragile endurance of antiquity’s traces striating the Italian hills and scattered in slave-built monuments from Rome to Naples to Sicily. If the Greeks’ tragic mode famously inspired Nietzsche’s thinking (The Birth of Tragedy) on the tellurian movement of life and the necessity for an Earth-affirming thought, the ambivalence, volatility and fragility of things omnipresent among the ruins of Greek empire did so at least as much as his philological engagements with antiquity’s texts. Cosima Wagner described the German thinker as drawn to a tellurian dark élan: “I think there is in Nietzsche a darkly creative substratum of which he is himself hardly conscious; … in him it is the tellurian element that is of importance” (qtd. in D’Iorio 51). Though this judgement’s negative valence is tainted with the context of the famous loss of friendship between Nietzsche and the composer and his wife, the assessment of the philosopher as “tellurian” is compelling. It is in part in contemplation of nature’s unforgiving yet spectacular and tragic aesthetics that Nietzsche finds the inspiration for his call to transvalue all values. In the “Old and New Tablets” (Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra 156–172), for instance, he takes life itself as evidence for the bankruptcy of good and evil as Christianity understands them, pointing out that life is filled with theft, murder, and what morality would call evil, ultimately insisting that life is, by nature, in its more-than-human nature, extra-moral, and seeing there an exhortation to defy morals, to smash the tablets.

Among many moments when volcanic forces burst in Zarathustra’s itinerant epic, from mountains to valleys and swamps, a section titled “On Great Events” acutely stages the volatility of Earth’s inhabitability, posing the question of meaning and moment via the imminent immanent threat of vast more-than-human forces. There is, the narrator tells us, “an island in the sea – not far from the blessed isles of Zarathustra – on which a fiery mountain smokes continuously.” It is there that Zarathustra will encounter a fire hound that imitates the smoke and fury of volcanic force, and portends to overthrow the past, burying statues in the mud. This figure of the fire hound declares that “the earth has a skin, and this skin has diseases. One of these diseases for example is called ‘Human being’” (101), a famous quote often extracted out of context, erroneously making Nietzsche sound misanthropic. But the animal erupts as a caricature, a figure who claims to destroy the old yet desires nothing less than to take over and to replace, barely changed, the state, the church. Thus Zarathustra’s reply: “and another of these diseases is called ‘fire hound’” (103). Thus also, Zarathustra’s despicable interlocutor manifests so much envy when the former tells him that “the state is a hypocrite hound; like you it likes to speak with smoke and bellowing – to make believe, like you, that it speaks from the belly of things. For it wants absolutely to be the most important animal on earth, this state; and people believe him” (103).¹⁴ Yet Zarathustra will then tell of another sort of fire hound, one who more authentically speaks from the boiling core of Earth, and whose evocation ends up shaming the insincere figure of the envious fire hound, seeing that from the actual heart of earth, laughter and “golden rain” supplant “smoke and mud.” The layered nature of nature speaks through this parable, and evokes the way in which life bursts, erupts, some of its forces pretending to create the new when in fact this would-be new is quickly discredited. The actual depths of earthly forces defy the insincere “great events,” the nihilist forces, and this even includes the questioning of misanthropy as another form of anthropocentrism. Affirming the tellurian movements of life, which turns against itself and shall be styled anew to become what it is, volcanic fumes and lava offer the perfect image of instability and constancy. Tectonic forces are never quite new in a pure sense, but rather the expression of a constant renewal, recycling: nothing is ever lost; nothing radically begins; all returns.

The tragic and the irresistibility in this account should be stressed if we are to uncover a Nietzschean ecology that may help shed light on the ongoing eruption of Gaia. In a whole range of recent literature engaged with eco-catastrophes, at times busily conceding to the “incentive to discourse” (Foucault) ill-called “Anthropocene,” many seek to find evidence of the agentic character of nonhuman nature, beings, and things (e.g., Bennett; Barad) as they call for a new ethics to match our unprecedented circumstances. This emphasis on “agency”—depending on how such agency is conceptualized—might indeed be highly needed. Yet I fear that the politics of inclusion under which some interpellate nonhuman nature may miss at least part of the tragic in our contemporary, soon-to-be posthuman condition. In contrast, what I call a “Nietzschean ecology”¹⁵ offers a fatalist dimension, stressing the necessity in each contingent moment—there can only be joy if there is love of fate, amor fati: insofar as there may be any “freedom,” such an ecology of (un)inhabitability would tragically commit itself to the love of fate, and by no means allow room for any sort of “free will.” Of course, “agency” is often convoked to think something a bit more subtle than “free will,” and yet, it remains that agents are not the issue, as there are no doers behind deeds. Instead of extending what we so far have assumed was properly human (and granted that even there, the agentic is far from evident), onto the nonhuman, a Nietzschean ecology would perhaps incite us to recognize ourselves as monistically caught up within more-than-human forces and nature and their power relations, ones that defy dualisms staging subjects and objects, doer and deeds, and ones that would be neither deliberate nor intentional. The eternal return prompts us to experience the immensity of what we cannot control, grasp, comprehend, affect, and our status as “specks of dust,” grains of sand. Not that we do not matter, but “our” matter boils and erupts, animated as it is, much beyond us, just like tellurian forces, large (volcanic, global atmospheric) or small (the Gaian microbiome). We do not consciously or intentionally or deliberately act as sovereign subjects over the “transcorporeality” (Alaimo, Bodily Natures) of our bodies, involved in becoming us: as you read these lines, you have very little to no awareness of the virtual totality of the processes keeping you alive, and taking place in your liver, your kidney, your veins and lungs, the air around you, etc., to the point that your consciousness is arguably a highly limited epiphenomenon. At the scale of countless lifetimes over evolutionary time, neither do you “remember having grown the eyes which you undoubtedly did grow,” as Samuel Butler put it (132). You do not command your gut, and are agentic in relation to it only if this “agency” is clearly distinguished from any sort of sovereignty, command, control, consciousness, deliberation.¹⁶

Of course, if agency is strictly defined as the capacity to affect and be affected, then surely, your sitting in an awkwardly bent position to read these lines affects the movements in your spleen, whether you know it or not, and all the porous bits and boundaries that make “you,” are agentic in all sorts of ways. It seems obvious, especially from the perspective of an ontology of eternal return, that all of what is (becomes), is always already endowed with that sort of agency strictly defined. But if that is the case, why would suddenly recognizing this agency enlighten humans to “respect” nonhuman nature, beings, and things, or to oh-so-generously grant them “rights,” or to “include” them in our ethics? Doesn’t the recognition of this more-than-human agency do more to expose the abysmally anthropocentric ignorance of Western imaginaries now suddenly, finally, marveling about it, than to change much in response to the eruption of Gaia? A Nietzschean ecology asks what timescapes might emerge from a new-and-age-old soil, as the lava of an authentic fire hound’s eruption brings about (un)inhabitability, in our ecologically catastrophic moment. Couldn’t the recognition of the utter limitedness of any sort of marginally, epiphenomenally, anecdotally conscious agency, which we may indeed share with virtually everything that becomes, pose the eco-ethical and ecopolitical questions in more interesting, less anthropocentric and absurdly (dangerously) liberal or hubristic, insufficiently revolutionary ways, with all sorts of humbling consequences that would prompt a re-envisioning of the ways in which we may inhabit the moment?

Among other ways to respond, a Nietzschean ecology would let go of teleological accounts of the natural as cherishing “Man” as its goal, of the human as accomplishing “Nature’s” telos, and moving “progress” “forward,” to concede to a much more complex understanding and experience of temporality. It would also define agency not as the foundation of respect or rights that we would extend in more and less inclusionary/exclusionary games to the more or less human, but more strictly, fatalistically, and perhaps in a conception closer to Nietzsche’s “precursor” Spinoza (qtd. in Astor, Nietzsche), as that which a thing can do, as the capacity of all things to affect and be affected. Surely, in this sense, the dance of life of a Nietzschean ecology may benefit from, yet not be reduced to, the “nonhuman turn”’s gestures of extension of agency, as they stop short of completing the deconstruction it points to (in Derridean terms, the human/nonhuman dualism is merely strategically reversed in such critiques, as opposed to fully deconstructed [Dissemination]). Thus, for instance, we may return to the fresco found in a wandering walk through today’s streets of Messina, with which I opened this essay. There, graffiti artist Blu indeed reverses the roles of humans/nonhumans, those doing the saving/those in need of rescue, begging us to reconsider in the event of a volcanic, nonhuman uprising, what flow we should or could possibly inhabit, as well as what we are running from or to. But the perceptual, artistic provocation initiates a thought that arguably leads to considerations according to which, in a Nietzschean ecology with its tellurian, momentous mode of inhabiting, neither swordfish nor humans or even bellowing fire hounds, were ever in or out of control in the first place. Neither stopping at the inclusion of nonhuman forces under a supposedly human fold, nor at reversals without deconstruction, the multitude of ever-returning fateful forces provokes us to create meaning with each repeating moment we may fleetingly, nomadically inhabit.