Friedrich Nietzsche, Gilles Deleuze and the Eternal Return

IN his complex 1962 work, Nietzsche & Philosophy, the French postmodernist, Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995), is so desperate to make Nietzsche’s ideas accord with his own materialistic worldview that certain aspects of the German thinker’s work are completely relegated to the sidelines. When Deleuze tackles the notion of the Eternal Return, for example, to which Nietzsche alludes in both The Gay Science (1882) and Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883-1891), the concept is said to contain

“the most obscure parts of Nietzsche’s philosophy and forms an almost esoteric element on the doctrine” (p.69).

Elsewhere, Deleuze suggests that Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality (1887) is a blatant attempt to rewrite Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1781), even though Nietzsche refrains from discussing matters pertaining to epistemology in this particular work and at no point does he mention Kant himself.

Deleuze, like Emma Goldman (1869-1940) before him, greatly admired Nietzsche’s uncompromising attitude and attempted to spruce up his own revolutionary credentials by creating a form of left-wing Nietzscheanism. It is debatable whether he actually succeeds in this regard, but returning - as one does - to his discussion about the Eternal Return, I do agree with Deleuze that some of Nietzsche’s remarks about the nature of reactive tendencies are explained by the relationship between the will to nothingness and the Eternal Return itself.

The will to nothingness, it will be remembered, is the name that Nietzsche applies to the pessimistic philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) and which involves life turning away from itself due to finding no actual value in the world. Similar, in many ways, to Buddhism. This tendency, of course, is presented as the way of the nihilist, described posthumously by Nietzsche in The Will to Power (1901) as

“a man who judges of the world as it is that it ought not to be, and of the world as it ought to be that it does not exist.”

The will to nothingness, therefore, is vitally important in the philosophical scheme of things because, as Deleuze notes, by coming into contact with the Eternal Return “it breaks its alliance with reactive forces” and therefore

“the Eternal Return can complete nihilism because it makes negation a negation of reactive forces themselves.” (p.70)

In other words, although nihilism is usually perceived as being something that is the preserve of the weak, here it becomes the instrument of their own self-destruction. Prior to this ironic association between the will to nothingness and the Eternal Return, the former was always presented as something that allied itself with reactive forces and, thus, inevitably sought to deny or stifle active force. Nietzsche, in 1901, had already observed that the “law of conservation of energy demands eternal recurrence”. The will to nothingness, on the other hand, is merely an incomplete form of nihilism and, as Deleuzes notes:

“Active negation or active destruction is the state of strong spirits which destroy the reactive in themselves, submitting it to the test of the Eternal Return and submitting themselves to this test even if it entails willing their own decline” (Ibid.).

Negation is therefore radically transformed into a state of affirmation in what may ultimately be interpreted as a Dionysian metamorphosis.