"God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us?"
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1947), p. 181; Aphorism, 125.
"The first death of God does not lead to the restoration of the sacred and ritual order, but to a decomposition of meaning so radical and irremediable that an abyss opens beneath the feet of modern man.... The aphorism affirms the eternal return, but it reveals the engine of that return: the collective murder of arbitrary victims. It goes too far in the revelation and destroys its own foundations. Owing to the very fact that it bases the eternal return on collective murder, its true foundation, violence, which should remain hidden in order to be a foundation, is undermined and secretly sabotaged by the very thing that it believes is triumphing over: Christianity. Nietzsche's entire tragedy is to have seen but to have not wished to understand the undermining performed by the Bible. Violence no longer has any meaning. Yet Nietzsche tried to reinvest it with meaning by betting on Dionysus. In this there is terrible tragedy, a desire for the Absolute from which Nietzsche was not able to extricate himself."
René Girard, "The Duel and the Sacred" in Battling to the End: Conversations with Benoît Chantre, trans. Mary Baker (East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 2010), pp. 95-96.
No comments:
Post a Comment