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Avital Ronell - Testing Your Love, or, Breaking Up: European Graduate
School. A lecture by Avital Ronell, August 2002
(fragment)
How can one thank the beloved? I mean, without bringing a dead mouse to the door as
if one were a cat.
(cut)
The paradoxes of Nietzschean gratitude are
legion. Gratitude, often in excess, is linked in his work to revenge,
very possibly recalling the way we say in American English "thank you
very much" with decisive intonation given over to "fuck you very much."
This could be a quote from Nietzsche, remastered. Yet, however torqued
and disfigured, gratitude henceforth belongs to the very possibility of
thinking. Mining prayer, it holds thought. Nietzsche signals a change of
address when he thanks his life, instead of say, God. Thanking thinks,
we could say, nearing Heidegger, where thanking as thinking puts out a
special call. Nietzsche’s act of thanking draws close to Heidegger’s
conjoining of danken and denken, only if one remembers that the kind of
mindfulness implied by thanking also involves remembrance, in other
words, a certain experience of mourning. The fellows in Hitchcock’s film
refuse to mourn. Their thank-you note is of another order than the one
Nietzsche plays out here. They are still students. For Nietzsche saying
thank you involves the experience of letting go without disavowing that
history which has run its course. Thanking sends it on its way, thus
allowing it to have arrived. The send-off is crucial here for it can
follow the trajectory of a missile or a missive, not so smart always,
not securely on target, making the violence of destination a matter of
concern for Nietzsche, of destinal concern. Whom is one addressing when
giving thanks? To the extent that one is giving, or given to thanks,
does the offering imply sacrifice, a sacrificial offering, or perhaps
the gift of death as Derrida offers? For Nietzsche, bestowing thanks,
something he never lets up on, comes at great cost, even though it
cannot be subsumed under any economy, but breaks the bank in the spirit
of potlatch. It’s the great giveaway that lets one start from scratch,
detach. It belongs to the repertory of Nietzschean violence. The
violence skips over the boundaries of what normally fastens a text down.
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