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Showing posts from February 26, 2012

4.2 Kafka and Felice

Für mich ist der Sonntag wenigstens seit 1 ½ Monaten ein Wunder, dessen Schein ich schon Montag früh beim Aufwachen sehe. Das Problem bleibt, die Woche bis zum Sonntag hinzuschleppen, die Arbeit über diese Wochentage hinzuziehn und wie ich es auch anstelle, Freitag geht es gewöhnlich nicht mehr weiter. Wenn man so Stunde für Stunde einer Woche verbringt, selbst bei Tag nicht viel weniger aufmerksam als der Schlaflose in der Nacht und wenn man sich so in der unerbittlichen Maschinerie einer solchen Woche umschaut, dann muß man wirklich noch froh sein, dass diese trostlos sich aufbauenden Tage nicht zurückfallen, um von neuem zu beginnen, sondern dass sie glatt vergehn und endlich zum Aufatmen der Abend und die Nacht beginnt.   [“For me, Sunday, at least for the last one and one half months, has been a miracle, whose light I see shining when I wake up on Monday morning. The problem remains, how to drag through the week until Sunday, pulling the work through these week days and ho

simultaneity 4.1: EWG in Nietzsche and Kafka

When Nietzsche came down from the mountains of Sils Maria in 1882 and wrote the first four books of the Gay Science, he was filled with a rare, unifying vision that had sprung itself upon him and completely turned around his mood. As any moraliste knows, the mood is a cognitive tool   – it is by the mood that one judges certain intangible but real changes in the world. No barometer is complex enough to allow us to judge our historical moment, with its different forms of existence that are set   loose in the quotidian and bump against each other as though in a fair; with its obsessions and routines, its shifting matrixes of exchange, its speeds. Thus, Nietzsche wrote his book with this mood like a muse on his shoulder, and revealed, shyly, like a great secret, in the fourth book, his inspiration and great idea. It was of course the doctrine of the eternal return, announced – as though balancing the lightness of the title of the book – as the heaviest weight, das grösste Schwergewich