Abstract
In his paper, "Reading War with Nietzsche and Reading Nietzsche with Kant, Rimbaud, and Bataille," Adrian Gargett discusses the aspects of poetry, communication, and notion that the apparition of Nietzsche manifested in Bataille is not a locus of secular reason but of necromantic religion: a writer who escapes philosophical conceptuality in the direction of unidentified zones, and dispenses with the "thing in itself" because it is an article of intelligible representation with no importance as a vector of becoming/of travel. Necromancy resists the transcendence of death opening territories of "voyages of discovery never reported." Against the strain of inert and superficial phenomenalism that typifies Nietzsche readings, Bataille pursues the fissure of abysmal skepticism, which passes out of the Kantian noumenon (intelligible object) through Kant and Schopenhauer's "thing in itself" (stripping away a layer of residual Platonism) and onwards in the direction of a-categorical, epochal, or base-matter that connects with Rimbaud's "invisible splendours": the immense death-scapes of a "universe without images." Matter cannot be allocated a category without being reclaimed for "ideality" and the Nietzschean crisis with the Ding an sich was not its tangible dogmatic materialism, but rather that it anticipated "an ideal form of matter" as the transcendent (quarantined) scene of primary truth, a "real world." Materialism is not a dogma but a journey, a break from socially regulated belief. It is "before anything else the obstinate negation of idealism, which is to say the very basis of all philosophy." Exploring a-categorical matter guides thought as chance and matter as chaos, beyond all parameters. It yields no propositions to ascertain, but only routes to discover.
Recommended Citation
Gargett, Adrian.
"Reading War with Nietzsche and Reading Nietzsche with Kant, Rimbaud, and Bataille."
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
5.1
(2003):
<https://doi.org/10.7771/1481-4374.1178>
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