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I do not refute ideals, I merely put on gloves before them

I do not refute ideals, I merely put on gloves before them. These words were written by Nietzsche in his Ecce Homo, the final book he wrote before his death twelve years later. There is a superficial hubris to an autobiography with chapters entitled ‘Why I Am So Wise’ and ‘Why I Am So Clever’ which can be off putting. But returning to it ten years after I first read it, I can clearly perceive the earnestness underlying the book: “Hear me! For I am such and such a person. Above all, do not mistake me for someone else” as he proclaims in the preface.

This was a man who, as Lesley Chamberlain puts it in her magnificent Nietzsche in Turin, “took issue with Aristotle over the very business of tragic spectacle” because “Pain was not something you purged, but something you lived with” (pg 49). There is in Ecce Homo a final struggle with that pain, a grappling with his own thwarted ideals, through the affirmation of his own singularity as this person who has led this life. What seems like hubris is, I would suggest, putting on gloves before handling his own ideals. To excavate and examine them, in order that he can he might change himself in relation to them. It is an attempt to, as Lacan would put it much later, traverse his fantasy. To find some other way of living with it, a mode of being adequate to it, a lighter way of co-existing with it.

In The Shortest Shadow Alenka Zupančič draws attention to Nietzsche’s notion of midday. This is the “stillest hour” in which the day is split in two. The sun is at its highest when the morning and the evening meet. It is a turning point in the day. A time in joint in which “the subject exists, so to speak, along the two edges of the event”. It marks a split between the subject as “that which makes a place and time for the event as well as that which (only) arises from the event” (pg 24). It suggests a notion of beginning as what starts at midday, in “the midst of life” (pg 26). Zupančič advocates for Nietzsche to be read in these terms as a theorist of the Real, postulating an essential split in the nature of things. If I understand correctly, this is locating the Lacanian Real not in what critical realists would call the real but rather the interface between the real, the actual and the empirical. It draws out the ontologically interstitial as primary rather than the contingent intersection between domains. It is all ultimately borderlands.

Instead I’m inclined to emphasise the poetic character of the midday, as Zupančič characterises it. Particularly the notion that beginnings start amidst life. The end is where we start from, as Eliot put it. It runs contrary to a linear temporality which sees the dawn as the beginning and the sunset as the end of the day. The new beginning is always tomorrow, next week, next month or next year. The possibility for change always comes after what currently is has ceased to be. This locates it firmly within the Lacanian imaginary: in positing change as something which comes next (or fails to) it remains an image, to which we relate in terms of the imaginary fullness (or lack thereof) it offers in relation to our present experience of reality.

In contrast the notion of the midday draws attention to the promise incipient in what immediately exists in our present circumstances: “Quick now, here, now, always – A condition of complete simplicity” as Eliot put it. It locates new beginnings, perhaps more adequately called renewal to emphasise its cyclical quality, in the drives rather than desire. It is something we are, which we do, rather than which we dream about or which we plan to do. It is a possibility anchored by our ideals, the fragmented images of a better tomorrow which gets us through our days. But it suggests we should put on gloves first, recognising what they are and dispensing with the narcotising belief they will ever be here, now, always. As opposed to forever just out of reach.

(I’m not sure Zupančič would necessarily disagree with what I’m saying here. But I wanted to emphasise the existential point which I felt got left behind in pursuit of the ontological one, to the extent these things can ultimately be separated)

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