The thing is, I became more and more aware of the possibility of distinguishing between becoming and history. It was Nietzsche who said that nothing important is ever free from a nonhistorical cloud. This isnt to oppose eternal and historical, or contemplation and action: Nietzsche is talking about the way things happen, about events themselves or becoming. What history grasps in an event is the way its actualized in particular circumstances; the events becoming is beyond the scope of history. History isnt experimental,3 its just the set of more or less negative preconditions that make it possible to experiment with something beyond history. Without history the experimentation would remain indeterminate, lacking any initial conditions, but experimentation isnt historical. In a major philosophical work, Clio, Peguy explained that there are two ways of considering events, one being to follow the course of the event, gathering how it comes about historically, how its prepared and then decomposes in history, while the other way is to go back into the event, to take ones place in it as in a becoming, to grow both young and old in it at once, going through all its components or singularities. Becoming isnt part of history; history amounts only the set of preconditions, however recent, that one leaves behind in order to become, that is, to create something new. This is precisely what Nietzsche calls the Untimely. May 68 was a demonstration, an irruption, of a becoming in its pure state. Its fashionable these days to condemn the horrors of revolution. Its nothing new; English Romanticism is permeated by reflections on Cromwell very similar to present-day reflections on Stalin.4 They say revolutions turn out badly. But theyre constantly confusing two different things, the way revolutions turn out historically and peoples revolutionary becoming. These relate to two different sets of people. Mens only hope lies in a revolutionary becoming: the only way of casting off their shame or responding to what is intolerable. generation-online.org/p/fpdeleuze3.htm
Posted on: Sat, 28 Jun 2014 21:05:43 +0000
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