The Test Drive

Part 6. Testing Your Love, or: Breaking Up

 Testing Your Love Part 6 Testing Your Love or: Breaking up     For I was condemned to Germans. If one wants to rid oneself of an unbearable pressure, one needs hashish. Well, I needed Wagner. Wagner is the antitoxin against everything German par excellence – a toxin, a poison, that I don’t deny. – Nietzsche Type of my disciples. – To those human beings who are of any concern to me I wish suffering, desolation, sickness, illtreatment , indignities – I wish that they should not remain unfamiliar with profound self-contempt, the torture of self, mistrust, the wretchedness of the vanquished . –Nietzsche Refrain: One pays heavily for being one of Nietzsche’s disciples.  Testing Your Love 1.The End,My Friend Supposing I were in love, or, let us say, I am deeply transferentially engaged. Supposing the transference went sour. Well, not sour; I am still transferred onto this other, unavoidably. But I feel betrayed. At some level I don’t care about the schoolboyish ideologies of betrayal: my middle name is betrayal. That’s another story. I am in love; I am betrayed; the other is my fate. (I am also drawn to the other’s partner , but that, too, is another story. I keep on skidding off the other’s desire track.) I am amorously caught on an object. Demobilized. The loner and loser Friedrich Nietzsche spins out a story that catches me by surprise. Alfred Hitchcock caught a spark off the transferential machine that Nietzsche installed; he called it Rope. Hitchcock’s Rope thematizes the temptation of tying Nietzsche to reference. The same rope that strangles a student is used to tie up the books that are returned, if I recall correctly, to the dead student’s father. The purloined rope is meant to name in the end (I know one shouldn’t skip to the end when discussing a film; I can’t help it, precipitating toward the end whether of art or the relationship) – it is meant to name in the end the way we are roped in by Nietzsche, transferentially duped, told to get lost. Zarathustra does it, Nietzsche does it: they sever transference, thereby tightening the bind. For Hitchcock the Nietzschean love story captures the pedagogical ordeal. It stages the drama of reference, for the murderous students, the perps, read Nietzsche with a passion for the literal. Out of love. For the teacher. The students want to translate Nietzsche into a referential act. It is an offer of love to the teacher, a postcard from the classroom. Jimmy Stewart didn’t mean for the students to take Nietzsche as a blueprint for historical action. He takes a swig of whiskey. An exemplary pedagogy, Stewart’s teaching of Nietzsche will have prepared the crime scene: a commencement feast in which a corpse is buried (not yet buried, another “Trouble with Harry” issue of :     transferring the body-text). The students – one senses that the two men are a gay couple – are in the school of transference and translation . They triangulate onto the teacher, Nietzsche. Stewart, as emissary and purveyor of Nietzsche, is appalled, defeated. His teaching produced a corpse. Dissolve. The perfect crime, this was to be the final exam that the ever-transferring students wrote for the teacher. A term paper that in the end understood everything the teacher had tried to convey. Now they have to transfer the body. Another swig of whiskey. Nietzsche, transference, love. Sirens. Maybe the students had understood something or at least their homework assignment was to redraw the boundary of the pedagogical reach. Who’s to say that passion for the literal can be controlled, that gaping and scarring will not break through to the real at any given moment?1 Who can patrol symbolic territories and assure secure frontiers among levels and systems of transfer? Where Nietzsche teaches severance, Hitchcock refuses the suture, suspends the edit as the long shot of the film goes on, making it to the end of its thematic rope, without a marking cut.2 That is the shot of transference, the shot of whiskey that burns the teacher’s throat in the film experiment induced by Nietzsche’s text. Hitchcock’s reluctance to cut trails the unbreakable corridor of transference. At the end of the day, at the end of the semester, the students refuse to mourn. They create an unmournable corpse, a sign of gratitude for the teaching instigated by Jimmy Stewart, who...