I’ve had an odd morning drowning in unwelcome administration while plagued by Nietzschean ruminations about the midday. This is the “moment of the shortest shadow; end of the longest error; zenith of mankind”. It is the turning point where, as Zupančič describes it, “the subject exists, so to speak, along the two edges of the event” revealing the subject as “at one and the same time, that which makes a place and time for the event as well as that which (only) arises from the event” (pg 24).

What I find so powerful about this, as present by Zupančič, is the relief it offers from the Imaginary. To conceive of the subject’s becoming in a sequential way (first I am this, then I am that, before I become something else) inclines a relation to the future saturated by the experienced lack of the present. I aspire to become tomorrow the person without the lack which marks my being today. Our unfortunate fate tomorrow will be to find ourselves still marked by that lack, perhaps even intensifying our attempts to escape what is ultimately our own nature. We are what we care about, we are what we lack.

In contrast the Nietzschean Midday suggests a becoming which is imminent within being, rather than conceiving of becoming as a sequential transition through a whole series of states of being. Quick now, here, now, always. In Burnt Norton Eliot describes I think a Nietzschean Midday in which the capaciousness of the moment is briefly apprehended, only for the moment to have passed:

Sudden in a shaft of sunlight
Even while the dust moves
There rises the hidden laughter
Of children in the foliage
Quick now, here, now, always—
Ridiculous the waste sad time
Stretching before and after.

In contrast in Little Gidding, later in the Four Quartets there is a sense of capaciousness as something we might inhabit. Equal parts return and renewal (“And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time”) to the extent we can sustain that contact with the midday, the possibility incipient within the ‘shortest shadow’:

Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always–
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flames are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.

For Zupančič this is the moment of subjectivization: in which we are drawn into being by “the least, the softest, lightest, a lizard’s rustling, a breath, a breeze, a moment’s glance” to use Nietzsche’s words (pg 111). She draws attention to how Nietzsche focused on the midday as standstill: “the hand moved, the clock of my life drew a breath” while “All grows silent around him, vocies sound farther and farther in the distance … his heart stands still, only his eye lives”. It’s an “always-contemporary moment of our being”. Quick now, here, now, always. But is it subjectivization? If so it captures a sense of it closer to the realist notion of agency then how I’ve tended to understand the notion of subjects as being produced from their circumstances. It is a point from which, as Zupančič goes on to write, “one sees life as something that can turn in many different ways and directions, not necessarily following the path it (seemingly) follows” (pg 160). Her point is not that this represents a radical openness but rather an encounter with how the necessity of how our life is unfolding can only be understood in terms of the wider contingency.

When reading this I’ve had a vivid image in my mind. In fact so sensorily vivid it stretches the boundaries of the category ‘image’. I’m in Cambridgeshire on an impossibly hot sunny day, walking on my own, tired and sweating, with the sun glaring in my eyes. I have no phone or plan for the day. Part of me wants to turn around but I feel compelled to continue walking, for reasons that are not entirely clear to me. There is the buzzing of insects as I walk through a meadow, but little sign of human life. It’s a composite of memories which distills the essence of a certain mode of being, a certain way of relating to existence which I’ve dimly apprehended under those conditions. I keep walking, because I’ve started and there’s nothing in me which could or would stop. The walking is happening to me rather than being something I choose. I’m just existing. Watching, feeling, walking. If this is subjectivization it’s a mode which falls outside the usual range of experience. Not reflexively assuming a position in the world but the unravelling of the Imaginary into the pure satisfaction of drive. I keep walking. Eventually a return happens to me. I do not choose it. But I am in some sense renewed.

A core theme in Zupančič’s fascinating book is the Lacanian distinction between the object of satisfaction and satisfaction as object. Between the enjoyment which comes through the drives (e.g the pleasure of eating and the jouissance of overeating) and the pursuit of the satisfaction as an end in itself. The problem of Nietzschean nihilism is that it leads us to try and skip over the partial satisfaction in pursuit of what we really want: satisfaction as object. If we imagine there is a real satisfaction available to us beyond these fleeting partial satisfactions, we destabilise our relationship to the drives and short circuit the possibility of any satisfaction. It’s not that the partial satisfactions are the only real satisfaction available to us, it’s that satisfaction emerges in the margins between the object of satisfaction and satisfaction as object. This is the significance of the midday I think, the point where we are perfectly split between the two. In those moments of ‘complete simplicity’ comes a return to drive as that which can ground us, with the Imaginary the means through which we prevent ourselves become trapped in those circuits. The possibility of the Midday is the renewal of our lived embrace of drive, anchoring while continually being stretched by the motion of our desire.