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April 25, 2016 17:27
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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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