![\"420px-jan_baptist_weenix_-_portrait_of_rene_descartes\"](\"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/nietzsche1313\/files\/2016\/09\/420px-Jan_Baptist_Weenix_-_Portrait_of_Ren\u00e9_Descartes-263x300.jpg\")
<\/p>\nWe can identify this intriguing door in that moment in which, speaking of Nietzsche, Blanchot quotes the words written on the book held by Descartes, on Jan Baptist Weenix\u2019s 1647 portrait of of the philosopher. \u201cMundus est fabula\u201d (The infinite conversation<\/i>, 166). The world is a fable. Fable is a keyword for Nietzsche: he repeatedly begun his texts with different unfinished, fragmentary fables; other times, he interspersed, equally in a fragmented way, in his writings. Fables of untimely history, of language, of truth \u2014remember that planet lost among thousands of solar systems in which wise animals invented knowledge (\u201cIn irgend einem abgelegenen Winkel des in zahllosen Sonnensystemen flimmernd ausgegossenen Weltalls gab es einmal ein Gestirn, auf dem kluge Thiere das Erkennen erfanden\u201d On Truth and Lie in a Non-moral sense<\/i>). Fables that are maybe the deployment of a metaphor \u2014the eternal recurrence. Fables that encompass an entirely new persona speaking an entirely new fabricated philosophical language \u2014Zarathustra.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn thinking the world \u2014Blanchot says\u2014 Nietzsche thinks it is a text. Is this a metaphor? It is a metaphor. Thinking the world at this depth that is not reached by the light of the day, he substitutes for it a metaphor that seems to restore to the day all its prerogatives. For what is a text? A set of phenomena that hold themselves in view; and what is writing if not bringing into view, making appear, bringing to the surface?\u201d (IC, 165) This is the intended power of writing: unveiling by covering things with the veil of fable, of fragmentation, of metaphor. Questioning the metaphor as a possibility for writing knowledge, philosophy, and thought \u2014a living element of Nietzsche\u2019s work, as Sarah Kofman also demonstrated in his Nietzsche and Metaphor<\/i>\u2014 is maybe not a casual trope. On the contrary, the metaphor is the seed of knowledge, both physical and metaphysical \u2014the first question of the first article of the first part to Thomas Aquinas\u2019 Summa Theologiae<\/i> addresses the question whether metaphors and fiction are legitimate resources for theological thinking. The metaphor, the fable underlying the narrative of the world would determine the nature of this world.<\/p>\n
Mundus est fabula. What kind of fable? Maurice Blanchot\u2019s work of writing, his livre \u00e0 venir<\/i> is a process to discover the kind of fable the world is. In his short essay on \u201cLe langage de la fiction\u201d, included in La part du feu<\/i>, he claims that fictional language \u2014the language that veils and unveils the world-as-fable\u2014 provides us with the consciousness of the ignorance of a world to which we cannot have any access, the world created with the language of fiction. Since we cannot have access to this fictional world in particular, to this fable in particular, we need to have access to its meaning, to its allegories, to its interpretations.<\/p>\n
It is perhaps not a surprise that Blanchot\u2019s essay \u201cDu c\u00f4t\u00e9 de\u00a0Nietzsche\u201d is eminently devoted to Henri de Lubac, le P\u00e8re Lubac, and his work on Le Drame de l\u2019humanisme ath\u00e9e<\/i>. A book, as Blanchot puts it, written for Christians alone. If Henri de Lubac is so important, it is not only because of that book of 1944, but also because of the whole project the P\u00e8re Lubac was engaged in, that included the political fable of the corpus mysticum<\/i>, the dialogues between buddhism and christianity, and more importantly, the whole universe of christian exegesis that would end up in his multivolume work published in the late the fifties, Les quatre sens de l\u2019\u00e9criture<\/i> \u2014a book on how to interpret the fable of the world; on how to write the fable of the world.<\/p>\n
This is one of the central questions, I guess, in which Blanchot thinks with Nietzsche \u2014and especially with the Nietzsche who thinks that the truth is a process of invention (erfindung<\/i>), that is, a poetical and rhetorical invention, or inventio<\/i>, and therefore the articulation of writing strategies, of fables, myths, personae or masks, and fragments of writing that explore the very nature and the very fiction (as fabrication) of language.<\/p>\n
Mundus est fabula. But let me continue in Latin, this time with\u00a0Horace: quod rides? \/ De te fabula narratur<\/i> \u2014don\u2019t laugh at it, for\u00a0the fable speaks about you. In Le pas au-del\u00e0<\/i> one could say, the fable talks about something much more important that you (than me). It talks about \u201cil\u201d \u2014the third-person singular personal pronoun, masculine or, more probably, neutral, the great fiction, fabrication, fable of neutrality.<\/p>\n
Mundus est, indeed, fabula. And that\u2019s the real critical question. Fable is a language that needs to be written, and writing is the greatest act of violence, one that breaks all the laws \u2014even its own.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Why \u2014we wondered\u2014 did it become necessary for so many thinkers around the globe \u2014a number far higher than 13\u2014 to think with Nietzsche? How did they think with Nietzsche? We\u00a0 are not interested in understanding a certain flow… Continue Reading