The Test Drive

Part 4. The Test Drive: On Nietzsche’s Gay Science

 On Passing the Test Part 4 The Test Drive On Nietzsche’s Gay Science Wasted a fair bit of patriotic young flesh in order to test some new technology. – William Gibson, Neuromancer  Attunement There was once a man; he had learned as a child that beautiful tale of how God tried Abraham, how he withstood the test, kept his faith and for the second time received a son against every expectation. . . . This man was no thinker, he felt no need to go further than faith. . . . This man was no learned exegete, he knew no Hebrew; had he known Hebrew then perhaps it might have been easy for him to understand the story of Abraham. – Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling   We do not always know how to calculate the importance of a work.In some cases,there is nothing even to guarantee that the work will arrive. Some works seem to set an ETA – there is a sense that it will take them years to make their arrangements, overcome the obstacles of an unprotected journey,get past the false reception desks blocking their paths. In the more assured and seductive version, these works follow the itinerary of Walter Benjamin’s secret rendezvous – targeting the “geheime Verabredung” that a work has made with the singularity of a destination: in the form, perhaps, of a future reader. The reader or receptor from the future assumes the responsibility of being addressed, of signing for the work when it finally arrives, helping it originate. Yet little tells us how many hits a work will have taken on its way or whether we will be there to receive it.Perhaps the work will be prevented from showing up at the appointed time.On the other hand,some works barrel toward their destination, causing a lot of trouble for a lot of Daseins. Heidegger once said that it can take two hundred years to undo the damage inflicted by certain works – I think he was evaluating Plato. For my part, I cannot tell whether the Gay Science has arrived or even, really, where it was going when Nietzsche sent it on its way. Still, I am prepared to sign for it. That is to say, I have prepared myself for it. I am not reluctant to assess the damage for which it still may be responsible – assuming the work has arrived and I can find its points of entry – or whether (but this is not a contradiction) this work has fashioned essential trajectories that provide ☛ ☛ ☛ ☛ ☛ ☛ ☛ ☛ ☛ ☛     existence with ever new supplies of meaning. I am using “work” here in the widest possible sense because Nietzsche – well, Nietzsche stood for the absence of the work.1 He continues to pose the dilemma of the most unauthorized of authors – so many signatures, styles, shredders. Nonetheless , something keeps arriving and returning under that name, something that addresses us with uncommon urgency. So: The Gay Science. To the extent that science is meant to promote life, Nietzsche makes it his business to put demands on its self-understanding. For Nietzsche, science – or, more to the point, the scientific interpretation of life – owes us an account of itself, if only to give us access to its overwhelming use of force over diverse discursive populations. It would not be stretching things too far to say that in Nietzsche’s estimation science needs to be audited at every turn, each year. The philosophical pressure is on for science to come clean, to declassify the language usage and rhetorical combinations that have supported the prodigal domination of science over other interpretive interventions and possible worlds. If Nietzsche wants to keep it clean, this in part is because he needs science in order to make some of his most radical claims. His relation to science is by no means driven by resentment but rests on appropriative affirmation. As with all appropriations, things can get rough at times. Yet it is from a place of exorbitant responsibility that Nietzsche writes up his version of science and, against the many pronounced inclinations of science, makes joyousness a new prerequisite of scientific endeavor. Not one to get tangled in obsolesced subjectivities, Nietzsche at times saw himself as a scientific object. Thus, in an effort to explain himself as a prophetic human being he writes: “I should have been at the electric exhibition in Paris” as an exhibit at the world’s science...