A Character in the Movie Called Life

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Allison to the group on 14 May 2015.

Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche

I tend to compartmentalize theories and philosophies from the people that birthed them.

Generally I pick out males, because (1) they dominate the field and (2) as a product of a male dominated major where we were taught the works of white males predominantly, they are what is in my arsenal.

However, I revere my mentor for being an ardent and progressive feminist, who took things like the works of men, critiqued them for having the wrong projections about women, but also taught them because they hold an important space in the academy, namely, more recent philosophy (written by men) has gotten really good at pinpointing the problem with men. But it’s often few and far between, because who is doing existentialism these days? Probably me and like three other people talking about Sartre and Camus at book club. Most people are worried about artificial intelligence and cognitive science. Nietzsche had a sort of female apprentice, Lou Salome, who was brilliant. His sister, though, was kind of a nutcase.

Judith Butler is excellent and I always read her work in conjunction with existentialism and its meshing with our surroundings, namely, the other and the work of drag (as in drag queens). The manipulation of gender roles and identities is so important to understanding how we form our own identities. For her, the other is a given and necessary component of our freely chosen existence. You mentioned violence--Zizek, of course, disagrees and views the other as horrifically invasive and penetrating (intentionally phallic). I am sometimes torn between these two camps. The way I have reconciled it to myself is that we are free to move in the world and take up various identities, but we are never free of the other. However much we may try to embrace our individuality, it is trumped by our human requirement to be in communities.

Now, does this mean the eternal recurrence would only work in an individualistic vacuum? Not at all. eternal recurrence of the same to me falls on a linear vision of time, not a looping spiral. We are a character in the movie called life and if we are to watch the movie (as I like to think we might do in purgatory), we would be able to see ourselves making individual movements contingent on the moves of others. I view the role of others, as I wrote in my thesis, as catastrophic and harmful to the movements, but a necessary evil. In my opinion, most interpretations of the eternal recurrence are too basic--they focus is on how time works, not on the meaning and identity derived over time.