07/07/14 2:17 PM

---------------------------------------------------------------From Haunting to Trauma: Nietzsche's Active

Forgetting and Blanchot's Writing of the
Disaster
Petar Ramadanovic
University of New Hampshire
petarr@cisunix.unh.edu
2001 Petar Ramadanovic.
All rights reserved.
---------------------------------------------------------------Part I: Active Forgetting
Introduction
1. In the second of his untimely meditations, Nietzsche suggests
that a cow lives without boredom and pain, because it does not
remember.[1] Because it has no past, the cow is happy. But the
animal cannot confirm its happiness precisely because it does
not have the power to recall its previous state. It lives
unmindful of the past, which, as it gives happiness, also takes
it away from the animal. Nietzsche uses this example to point to
the liberating power of what he terms "active forgetting," a
willfull abandonment of the past that is beyond the capacities
of the cow:
In the case of the smallest or of the greatest happiness...
it is always the same thing that makes happiness happiness:
the ability to forget or, expressed in more scholarly
fashion, the capacity to feel unhistorically during its
duration. (UD 62)
Nietzsche calls for an abandonment of the past because, as he
says, it "returns as a ghost and disturbs the peace of a later
moment" (UD 61). Too much past precludes action, happiness, and
further development. As an antidote to this predicament he
suggests a critical discourse on the past that would be
attentive to the needs of the present and able to distinguish
between what in the past is advantageous and what is
disadvantageous for life. Thus "active" forgetting is selective
remembering, the recognition that not all past forms of
knowledge and not all experiences are beneficial for present and
future life. Active forgetting is then part of a more general
attempt to rationalize the relation to the past and to render
conscious--in order to overcome--all those haunting events that
return to disturb the calm of a later moment.
2. Nietzsche's understanding of forgetting stands in marked
contrast to that of Plato.[2] For Plato,
forgetting--forgetfulness--is a predicament of human, that is,
mortal, embodied, and historical creatures; for Nietzsche
forgetting seems to be the opposite, for it enables the human to
step outside of history, to, in his words, "feel
unhistorically." While for Plato forgetting marks the disaster
at the very origin of thought, for Nietzsche forgetting is
evoked for its potential to save humans from history, which is
regarded, at least in part, as a disaster. That Nieztsche
regarded history as a partial disaster does not imply that
history itself is either a falling away from the immediate, or
http://pmc.iath.virginia.edu/text-only/issue.101/11.2ramadanovic.txt

Page 1 of 16

07/07/14 2:17 PM

solely a history of infliction, and, therefore, a politically

overdetermined term.[3] Such conclusions would miss other points
made by both Plato and Nietzsche: that history is not one, that
it does not have one direction, that there are moments in it
which interrupt the totality history is supposed to be. For
Plato, the loss that is forgetting is constitutive; for
Nietzsche the loss is inflicted: in both cases, however, the
centrality of forgetting reveals the kind of emotion, if not
outright fantasy, with which history is invested--namely, the
fantasy that history has a unifying principle and can serve as a
unifying principle, a horizon of meaning of a given culture or
nation.
3. But the ghost that haunts does not come from elsewhere; it comes
from here and now. In this essay, I treat Nitezsche's call for
active forgetting as a puzzle--how, indeed, can humans forget?
What is forgetting? In what follows, I will try to show that
active forgetting, when understood as a moment within the
Eternal Return, opens memory onto the radical alterity of
forgetting by relating a possibility for history to a discourse
about and in time. I focus my discussion largely on Nietzsche's
key essay "On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life,"
and move from haunting to active forgetting to the Eternal
Return as I argue that Nietzsche's critique of history requires
us to think about disaster. In part II of this essay, I turn to
Blanchot's writing of the disaster, and argue that Blanchot's
understanding of time echoes and extends Nietzche's critique of
history. I conclude with a consideration of the issue of trauma
itself.
4. When Nietzsche suggests that the future depends on the
forgetting of the past, he does not mean that the one who
forgets the past automatically has a future. He means, rather,
that the very taking place of an event depends on forgetting. In
this way, Nietzsche is marking the essential relatedness between
forgetting and the historicity of any given moment. Thus I can
formulate the question that will guide this analysis: What is
the relation between a point in time, a moment, and history?
History
5. Near the beginning of the second meditation, after he has
emphasized the transitory nature of existence, Nietzsche
counsels caution with respect to both the degree of forgetting
and the imperative to know or remember the past. He notes that:
There is a degree of sleeplessness, of rumination, of the
historical sense, which is harmful and ultimately fatal to
the living thing, whether this living thing be a man or a
people or a culture. (UD 62)
A page later, again emphasizing the lines, he specifies:
The unhistorical and the historical are necessary in equal
measure for the health of an individual, of a people and of
a culture. (63)
An individual or a people, when actively forgetting, seeks to
strike a balance between knowing and not knowing, between
remembering and forgetting the past, for life demands not simply
an oblivion of the past, but a balance between the historical
http://pmc.iath.virginia.edu/text-only/issue.101/11.2ramadanovic.txt

Page 2 of 16

07/07/14 2:17 PM

and the active, between reflection and experience.

6. Time for Nietzsche has a similar twofold role: it is both a
figure for the specifically human situation and a dimension of
existence. The man wondering at the cow begins next to wonder at
himself and realizes "that he cannot learn to forget but clings
relentlessly to the past: however far and fast he may run, this
chain runs with him." Nietzsche describes time as "a moment, now
here and then gone, nothing before it came, again nothing after
it has gone." The moment "nonetheless returns as a ghost and
disturbs the peace of a later moment. A leaf flutters from the
scroll of time, floats away--and suddenly floats back again and
falls into the man's lap" (UD 61). Where nation--another concept
fundamental to our understanding of the call for active
forgetting--is concerned, Nietzsche favors "assimilation" and a
transformative "incorporation" of foreign elements into German
culture, as he says when he addresses the possibility of Germans
as an authentic people (123).
7. Now it should be obvious that Nietzsche invokes the cow not
simply to point to the need for selective memory but, more
importantly and more precisely, in order to assert that active
forgetting counters history because forgetting submits this
discourse to the living moment, to its animality and actuality.
Moreover, with active forgetting, Nietzsche is attempting not to
avoid the past but to open up a possibility for the future
together with a different understanding of what history is.
Because of this orientation toward the future, we could call him
the philosopher of the "new," but certainly not in the sense the
new has in the nineteenth-century scientific understanding of
history, where it is equated with progress. Having found that
both science and bourgeois society conserve existing relations,
Nietzsche tries to counter the drive to "press vigorously
forward" (UD 110). And this is where his sense of what is new,
what is radically new, comes to the fore.
8. What is especially significant for our present purposes is that,
in this affirmation of the new, Nietzsche seems to contradict
his later idea of the Eternal Return of the Same, which some
recent works have rightly described as central to his
philosophy, and which I would like to read together with the
call for active forgetting.[4] The contradiction is most obvious
in the following claims made in "On the Uses and Disadvantages
of History for Life." First, Nietzsche asserts that novelty
requires a step out of the circle of repetition (64). Second, in
this essay, the new requires the distinction between present and
past--a distinction that the Eternal Return obscures. Nietzsche
also faults suprahistorical man for blurring past and present:
for him, "the past and present are one, that is to say, with all
their diversity identical in all that is typical" (66); and
finally, he outright rejects the Pythagorean notion of
repetition of the same (70). In a more figurative sense, while
the affirmation of the new in "Uses and Disadvantages" calls for
recovery from the fever of history, Eternal Return is presented
as a feverish state.[5] Affirmation of the new is based on an
attempt to end the obsession with the past; Eternal Return is
the obsessive return of that which has already happened.
9. I will come back to the contradictory relationship between the
Eternal Return and active forgetting after further discussion of
"On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life," in which I
http://pmc.iath.virginia.edu/text-only/issue.101/11.2ramadanovic.txt

Page 3 of 16

07/07/14 2:17 PM

will distinguish the underlying motif of this meditation--the

attempt to offer a new measure for experience and time. After
this additional analysis I will read together the two
contradictory ideas (active forgetting and Eternal Return) and
try to understand more closely the radical nature of Nietzsche's
critique of history. Suffice it to note for the moment that my
intention is not to reconcile Nietzsche's contradictions but to
explore the force of his critique of history through them.
Active Forgetting
10. In "On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life" Nietzsche
presents three attitudes toward the past--historical,
unhistorical, and suprahistorical--and three discourses on the
past--monumental, antiquarian, and critical. He makes clear that
history differs from the past in that history is a reification
of what has happened. Instead of reification, but not as
something that can substitute for history, Nietzsche suggests
the actualization of the past in the present. In this process,
for example, not only would the Germans become like the Greeks,
but the Greeks themselves would be thought of as Germans, and
constituted as the Greeks (as distinct from the Romans)
belatedly, from a historical distance spanning more than two
millennia. In Nietzsche's words:
Thus the Greek conception of culture will be unveiled to
him [a German person]--in antithesis to the Roman--the
conception of culture as a new and improved physis, without
inner and outer, without dissimulation and convention,
culture as a unanimity of life, thought, appearance and
will. Thus he will learn from his own experience that it
was through the higher force of their moral nature that the
Greeks achieved victory over all other cultures, and that
every increase in truthfulness must also assist to promote
true culture: even though this truthfulness may sometimes
seriously damage precisely the kind of cultivatedness now
held in esteem, even though it may even be able to procure
the downfall of an entire merely decorative culture. (UD
123)
An individual is attentive to the emergence of the new. He does
not simply imitate the Greeks, nor learn the past from history
books, but learns "from his own experience." In the process he
discovers real needs, and "pseudo-needs die out" (122). This way
of thinking about the past, which is also a form of historical
thinking, instructs and invigorates action (59). Generalizing
the point, we could say that it is only when we become capable
of rearticulating and reexperiencing the originary moment of
identity that there can be a healthy individual, a people or a
culture. This repeated unveiling of the physis offers a new
possibility, a new measure for forgetting, time, and history.
11. But there are moments in this meditation that allow and invite
us to think about the relationship between the three temporal
modalities--past, present, future--in quite a different manner
from the one I have just outlined. At such moments, Nietzsche
does not support any discourse on history--be it knowing or
not-knowing, retaining or not-retaining the past--but argues
instead for their radical change. And this is because we do not
know what happens (to knowledge, for example) in a moment of
forgetfulness. Can such a moment be complementary to the
http://pmc.iath.virginia.edu/text-only/issue.101/11.2ramadanovic.txt

Page 4 of 16

07/07/14 2:17 PM

remembering of the past? Can forgetting undo the unwitting

memory?
12. The question is not whether remembering can recreate the
forgotten or whether forgetting can fully erase what is
remembered. The question is rather of the possibility of a
balance between remembering and forgetting, the historical and
the active as Nietzsche envisions them. So, let us ask whether
there can be an equal measure in anything concerning life or
time or history.
Measure
13. Nietzsche holds on to some kind of measurement, the rule or the
law of history, that he does not readily disclose. There is, for
example, that measure which allows Nietzsche to speak in the
same breath of an individual, a people, and a culture. But what
is this tacit measure? As a first guess we might say that these
three forms of subjectivity constitute a dialectical triad that
echoes the three attitudes (historical, unhistorical, and
suprahistorical) and the three historical discourses
(monumental, antiquarian, and critical). We might, that is,
assert that the three phases of the dialectical process are
reduced to one of their constitutive elements such that, for
example, a culture and a people, ultimately, present the needs
of an individual. Indeed, "On the Uses and Disadvantages" is
frequently read by critics as favoring critical history over
monumental and antiquarian. But this reading, I'd argue, is a
mistake, because the three (an individual, a people, and a
culture; monumental, antiquarian, and critical histories), once
they are brought into a relation, also express a fourth entity
which is greater than the sum of its parts. For example, an
individual can agree to be a part of the collective because the
group vouchsafes his or her right to pursue happiness. The
individual renounces one kind of individuality and expresses and
constitutes another kind of individuality through a communally
guaranteed right, whereby the community itself is formed. So
too, Nietzsche's critique of the extant science of history
argues for a discourse on history that is more than the simple
choice between critical, monumental, and antiquarian histories
would allow.
14. We can thus refine our first guess and formulate a second: that
the measure Nietzsche has in mind for the
individual-people-culture triad is neither reduction nor
Hegelian sublation in its usual sense, but continual exchange
and transformation among the constitutive elements. This forms
the new guiding principle, the new rule or law of history.
Active forgetting is hence a process in which a past measure is
abandoned and a new measure is continually reconstituted on the
basis of new experiences. In this way measure is perpetually
rediscovered, and so kept in synch with the difference that time
introduces. This way of doing history does not reduce the new to
the old--the Germans do not become the Greeks, for example--but
perpetually recreates the new/old such that the outcome of
historical processes is reflected in the degree of happiness
achieved. To the extent that a nation has become happy it has
also become healthy, and this good feeling is felt--we may
assume--by an individual, a people, and a culture
simultaneously. The individual is in harmony with the
collective, so that there is not simply a resolution of
http://pmc.iath.virginia.edu/text-only/issue.101/11.2ramadanovic.txt

Page 5 of 16

07/07/14 2:17 PM

dialectic relationships but also a balance between individual

interest and group needs.
15. But can happiness be a measure? Or, better yet, isn't happiness
that which refuses itself to any measure? What if individual and
collective, past and present, remembering and forgetting have
nothing in common, no middle ground? Can a balance still be
achieved? If it cannot be achieved, happiness itself cannot be
the index of non-reified history, and so we must make yet
another guess at what the tacit measure is that guides
Nietzsche's critique of history. Might it be that measure
itself, as a guiding principle, remains unmeasured and is left
out as immeasurable? That is, in its radical version,
Nietzsche's argument leads us to conclude that the principle of
history would be a transgression, a breaking off from the
possibility of (common) measure. However, we are not yet
prepared to think measure in its unmeasuredness, and need to
pull back a little in order to introduce a decisive turn in our
understanding of active forgetting and history.
Measure Without Measure
16. If Nietzsche indeed suggests that healthy identity depends on
the existence of a measure, has he then reinstated the very
founding moment--of science and of history--that his meditation
purportedly tries to displace? No, because Nietzsche, unlike the
discourse of science he critiques, does not ground identity in
history. For Nietzsche, identity is bound up in the now-moment,
in harmony and in happiness. Yet, while these two processes of
grounding--in history or in the now--do not have the same
ontological, ethical, epistemological or political significance,
they do follow the same principle: that of measure. In both, a
dialectical relation between the individual, people, and culture
is based upon already available and legitimated instances or
agencies. So the problem with history now boils down to a series
of questions: Can radically new things be measured? Can there be
measure as difference? Is there a principle of history and of
science that would itself be the principle of difference? Can
there be a principle that would maintain the singularity of a
human being without subsuming it under either individuality,
community, culture, or any other already existing form of
subjectivity?
17. These are also the questions that the older Nietzsche would have
asked of the younger one. What indeed is the measure of time if
it is not history? What is the time of measure? Put differently,
the problem we are facing here is how can one address the notion
of history or of historicity--history's usefulness for
life--without addressing time and what it is? In what follows I
will try to show that the attempt to emancipate the notion of
time as moment from the notion of time as history in "On the
Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life" parallels what
Nietzsche calls the Eternal Return.
18. But first, let me review the most forceful epistemological
challenge that history presents.
19. Historiography challenges the ontological status of being in
that it suggests that historical specificity is the horizon of
meaning, and, as such, gives meaning to an event. The event is
that which happens in the light of events immediately
http://pmc.iath.virginia.edu/text-only/issue.101/11.2ramadanovic.txt

Page 6 of 16

07/07/14 2:17 PM

surrounding it, including those which precede it and those which

come after it. To know means to know historically. And to know
historically means to see an event or a process not as it
happened but when it happened. To see an event, in other words,
in its proper place and time: at the moment when it took place.
For the time is ripe only once for each event. In this sense,
Nietzsche's own writing is marked, unsurprisingly, by its
historical context: the latter half of the nineteenth century in
Germany; on the one hand, by debates on the formation of history
as a science and a cultural discourse, and on the other hand, by
the process and the sentiments of Germany's becoming a unified
nation.
20. But Nietzsche's essay, according to its author, is untimely. It
is not a text of its time and does not belong to its historical
context. If Nietzsche attempts to cast a fresh look at history,
he does so by countering the sentiment of his epoch. In his
words, this meditation is "untimely, because I am here
attempting to look afresh at something of which our time is
rightly proud--its cultivation of history--as being injurious to
it, a defect and deficiency in it" (UD 60). Also, classical
studies--and we should bear in mind that Nietzsche still defines
himself as a classicist while he writes this meditation--are
regarded as untimely in the sense that they are "acting counter
to our time and thereby acting on our time" (60). Moreover, in
"Uses and Disadvantages" Nietzsche argues that to construct
history is necessarily to impose a certain horizon of meaning.
Historians, this is to say, do not see the event when it
happened, but rather narrate it, reconstructing it in the
historical present. In doing so they make the past event happen
(as a discrete, past event). So, the time appears to be ripe not
only once for each event. In effect, an articulation of history
limits innumerable other possibilities and hence limits action.
In this sense, historical specificity is posited only after the
fact, from a different historical moment. The moment is ripe
twice for each occurrence: once in historical discourse and once
in time.
21. Having said this, we can conclude that Nietzsche's critique
targets not history as such but the science of history as it
becomes the medium and the measure for the taking place of
things; as it becomes three things at the same time: the
symbolic universe, the horizon of thinking, and the guarantor of
those two. The condition of such a science is the displacement
of the event from one domain (the domain of action and
experience) into another (the domain of science, instruction,
and reflection). This displacement restricts the happening of a
moment. It is important to emphasize that each historical moment
consists of two moments and that, basically, Nietzsche is trying
to rescue this duality (action/reflection) from being repressed
as a duality or made into an opposition. Thus, by the end of the
meditation, Nietzsche can say that both the suprahistorical and
unhistorical attitudes have subversive effects on the
relationship between history and life. The suprahistorical,
because it stands above, disentangles itself from history and is
in this sense ahistorical or counter-historical. The
unhistorical, because it does not acknowledge that there is/was
a history, is unmindful of it. These illusions, the
suprahistorical and the unhistorical, are necessary for action.
22. Nietzsche identifies the reification of action in extant modes
http://pmc.iath.virginia.edu/text-only/issue.101/11.2ramadanovic.txt

Page 7 of 16

07/07/14 2:17 PM

of history and uses this to suggest that every historical moment

is profoundly ahistorical. Every historical moment both follows
a historical development and exists outside of it. Every
historical moment gives a specificity to every other historical
moment but does so precisely as an exception and not because it
serves to continue the same. Every event is, essentially, a
chance event. So it is more precise to say that the event
counters and resists the sameness and the projection of the
before onto the after and of the after onto the before. Thus, to
describe the historical specificity of an event entails the
recognition of its untimeliness, of its "acting on" its context,
and of its being outside of linear, that is, historical order.
23. The event is not illuminated when placed in its context; the
contextual meaning rather obscures the eccentric position of the
event in respect to the period when it happened. The historical
specificity of an event is, then, not measured by the extent to
which it represents or references its time but by the extent to
which it is irreducible to its context. Only as an exception
does an event have any specificity whatsoever.
24. For Nietzsche, then, every historical moment is always radically
new. The direct implications of this radical newness are that
the science of history is impossible and that it should be
replaced by a certain kind of philosophy. Not a life-philosophy,
which simulates both life and philosophy, but a philosophy that
leads to action and does not suppress life. This new attitude
towards history is a philosophy and not a historiography in the
sense that what needs to be thought is the very impossibility of
the historical project. Further, the thought itself needs to be
situated in this impossibility. Such thinking is not merely
un-historical, but historical in a different sense: thought
thinks time in order to be able to address the historicity of a
moment. It thinks that which, in every moment, is
ahistorical--i.e., that which counters, displaces, or interrupts
continuity--and only by going out of history does it make
historical thinking possible.
25. Hence, it is already in "On the Uses and Disadvantages of
History for Life" that we find a proposition fundamental for the
Eternal Return, that at every moment time renews itself,
beginning again.
Eternal Return
26. There is something in the Eternal Return that cannot be
possessed and that evades conceptualization. Perhaps this is
precisely what the Eternal Return is: a feeling of time that
stands in lieu of a concept of time. As such, the Eternal Return
is a reminder that there is time and that time renews itself at
every moment. We can say then, provisionally, that time is not
man's chain. Neither is it a leaf that "flutters from the
scroll... floats away--and suddenly floats back again" (UD 61).
Time is not a dimension, nor a reminder of the changeable nature
of things, missed chances, lost opportunities. It is neither old
nor young, neither past, present, nor future. Time is rather the
proof that things and beings are, that they exist. Thus, the
point of provisional cohesion of a philosophical system is found
only where thought attempts to comprehend and experience
itself--where the subject starts to retrace its history and
envisions itself in historical terms. But this cohesion or
http://pmc.iath.virginia.edu/text-only/issue.101/11.2ramadanovic.txt

Page 8 of 16

07/07/14 2:17 PM

gathering is precisely the impossible enterprise which leads to

the attempt to theorize time. This philosophical cohesion,
thought comprehending itself, is impossible because it requires
a metahistorical instance, which, by virtue of being outside of
history, prevents action and, therefore, confounds the attempt
at historical thinking. Philosophical cohesion is also
impossible because of the obsessive relation humans have with
the past, to which, as Nietzsche says, they "relentlessly" cling
(61). It is precisely in response to these limitations that
Nietzsche formulates the call for active forgetting in his early
writing; later he has the idea of the Eternal Return.
27. But why can the Eternal Return comprehend neither itself nor
time? What I am asking is at once directed to the problem of
history, history as a problem and not a given, and to the
genesis of Nietzsche's philosophy which, as Klossowski shows,
reaches its critical point in the Eternal Return. Why is it that
the feeling of Eternal Return cannot become coherent thought?
Why is it that thought cannot comprehend itself? Why, to put it
differently, can't thought realize itself through a dialectical
relation to its past? Are the reasons objectifiable and
historical? Are they conceptual? Is it because of what thought
attempts to think or because of intrinsic, structural
inadequacies of thought? Is thought, for example, deconstructed
or destroyed when it attempts to think time and experience? Why
doesn't the Hegelian dialectic work? Why doesn't history work?
Why doesn't work work? Why does historical thought give way to
feeling? Why does historical thought give way to trauma?
28. As we note these limitations of thought, another possibility
emerges. If thought is destroyed as a thought when it attempts
to think time, then history may offer a shelter from
decomposition. In this sense, one uses history as a screen in
order to be able to say something about time, which shatters
thought if approached directly.[6] To be sure, in "Uses and
Disadvantages" Nietzsche suggests that we use history in this
manner, albeit partially, balancing knowledge with action.
Complementing this use of history, then, there is a second
strategy. Thinking involves finding a way for thought to receive
actively that which it is not prepared to think. To think hence
is to attempt to know--to engage--that which thinking is not yet
prepared to know, to attend to that which does not arrive and
which is at certain times more than a period or an epoch; an
event in history that is more than history, a form of recall
that is more than memory. This thought is not exclusive to
philosophy but, as Lyotard poignantly reminds us, is found in
other discursive genres--namely, in "reputedly rational language
as much as in the poetic, in art" as well as in ordinary
language (73).
29. Time is the ruse of thought, and regardless which way we go,
whether we retreat to the shelter of historiography or leap
forward with thinking or stay in the same place, we are bound to
encounter the exigency which cannot be measured. Humans, in
other words, can never become cows, "neither melancholy nor
bored" (UD 60). They are bound by time and freed by time.
History hence requires not simply an active forgetting of the
past but some form of thinking of the disaster.
Part II: Blanchot

http://pmc.iath.virginia.edu/text-only/issue.101/11.2ramadanovic.txt

Page 9 of 16

07/07/14 2:17 PM

30. I will return to this notion of disaster in a moment. But first,

let me sum up what was said thus far about Nietzsche's notion of
forgetting. Forgetting, which we now understand to be a moment
of Eternal Return, marks the renunciation of the self and
especially of the possessive pronoun, mine. A forgetfulness in
which "I" is not placed between the opposites of remembering and
forgetting, past and future, singularity and heterogeneity, life
and death, but in which "I" is becoming in the return to itself
through an immeasurable number of other possibilities. The
forgetting which makes action, history, and signification
possible is here displaced from a Platonic immemorial past to a
moment (Augenblick) when the being's presence to itself is
interrupted. The moment is not an instant between the past and
future, but an ecstasy of time, a now at once in the past, in
the future, and in the present. In the anamnestic now, "I"
remembers its multiplicity, its being outside "I," and forgets
itself and becomes open to the radical alterity of unrealized
possibilities. The call for active forgetting is hence the call
for a difficult break in the opposition between past and future,
presence and absence, remembering and forgetting, being and
not-being, thinking and acting. With it we are brought to the
verge of understanding that what tradition has handed down to us
as opposites--remembering and forgetting, history and action--do
not necessarily exclude or repress one another.
31. With Nietzsche's forgetting one does not forget any object of
thought as such. Rather, immersed in forgetting, one withdraws
not only the subject's claim on objects but also the claim on
the subject's unity, self-sufficiency, and groundedness. Thus,
it is more precise to say that through "active forgetting"
something is accepted and affirmed rather than omitted, erased,
or denied. What this something is--this forgotten--is impossible
to describe precisely. It is, perhaps, the very impossibility of
telling, knowing, and apprehending, and thus of telling,
knowing, and apprehending a future. It ushers in a thought, a
future, a community without any guarantees. No future as much as
all future. No past as much as all past. A return to tradition,
a break with tradition, and a leap into the unknown.
32. We may see it as a disaster, this lack of measure, this
impossibility of a thought to comprehend its objects, this
shattering of thought attempting to think itself, this
destruction of the moment in our thinking hands. But, if it is a
disaster, it is also that which Nietzsche called a gay science.
Not that we laugh (at ourselves) because we have, like the cow,
forgotten. Rather, the science is gay in the sense that certain
possibilities open up in spite of the trauma--the shattering of
thought in time.
Disaster
33. Active forgetting, then, does not save humans from history. On
the contrary, it refers us to a disaster (of? in? history)
that--as conflation, augmentation, explosion,
concentration--presumes another time "without presence" and, as
we saw above, bereft of measure. As Blanchot puts it, commenting
without direct acknowledgment on the moments of Nietzsche's
Eternal Return:[7]
If forgetfulness precedes memory or perhaps founds it, or
has no connection with it at all, then to forget is not
http://pmc.iath.virginia.edu/text-only/issue.101/11.2ramadanovic.txt

Page 10 of 16

07/07/14 2:17 PM

simply a weakness, a failing, an absence or void (the

starting point of recollection but a starting which, like
an anticipatory shade, would obscure remembrance in its
very possibility, restoring the memorable to its fragility
and memory to the loss of memory). No, forgetfulness would
be not emptiness, but neither negative nor positive: the
passive demand that neither welcomes nor withdraws the
past, but, designating there what has never taken place
(just as it indicates in the yet to come that which will
never be able to find its place in any present), refers us
to nonhistorical forms of time, to the other of all tenses,
to their eternal or eternally provisional indecision,
bereft of destiny, without presence. (Writing 85)
This time without presence is not a Christian eternity, but a
time otherwise than history and chronology. It is as a trace of
what will remain without presence.
34. Now, we could say that forgetting points to the loss of ground,
a failure of thought, and that this failure has disastrous and
traumatic effects. But, there is no inherent reason to conclude
that time divided into the temporal modalities of present, past,
future is, as such, non-traumatic, and that the other time, time
without present-presence, is necessarily traumatic. There is
indeed nothing except a cultural norm or a certain scholarly
inertia that can justify the assumption that, on the one hand,
the present understood as an effect of the past inaugurates a
history, and, on the other hand, that doubt in the presence of
the present destroys history. So, what Blanchot calls "the
disaster" is not a devastation, but a non-modality of presence
which entails a different understanding of action, history,
experience, and writing. It is not the atomic bomb, the
Holocaust, nationalism, or racism, but an unspecifiable event: a
something--a return--that happens to time. It is something that
happens in order for time to be there. In this sense, "disaster"
is the event of time, the becoming of time. And if time is a
ruination--if, as Blanchot writes in the first sentence of The
Writing of the Disaster, it "ruins everything"--it also leaves
"everything intact" (1).
35. Disaster touches no one "in particular" (Writing 1). This is not
to say that "disaster" is infinitely remote from human beings
and that Blanchot could have--or must have if he follows
Nietzsche--chosen another word for it, a word that would not
confuse the historical event with a structural characteristic of
experience. To the contrary, the very word "disaster" obligates,
and thus by using it, Blanchot questions the very limits of
signification. Disasters are disastrous because they destroy the
possibility for the dissociation and forgetting that are
necessary for most traditional forms of knowledge. While not
touching anyone in particular, disaster threatens that which is
particularly human. In this the disaster draws the human into an
as of yet unknown realm.
36. By disaster Blanchot means the Holocaust, Hiroshima, and refers
also to the newer bombs which destroy forms of life, leaving
inanimate matter intact. He means that the human ability to
destroy is far ahead of its ability to create. He means that the
human has achieved a destructive absolute and can eradicate life
on Earth, life as we know it, several times over. But what is
the meaning of this meaning? How can it have any significance if
http://pmc.iath.virginia.edu/text-only/issue.101/11.2ramadanovic.txt

Page 11 of 16

07/07/14 2:17 PM

significance is derived from containment and yet containment of

disaster is not possible? How can there be meaning if it
requires a shelter and there is nothing that can shield the
human from catastrophe?
37. This erasure of frame and meaning--the impossibility of
forgetting--is the disaster. What can be characterized as a
technological invention (gas chamber, A-bomb) or a historical
event (Holocaust, Hiroshima) cannot be only that, but is also
reflected in the internal condition of the human.[8] A
condition, moreover, that is, strictly speaking, not situated
either inside or outside, is neither past nor present, and does
not follow the distinction between presence and absence. We
therefore do know something about the disaster, namely, that it
is not an objective event that can happen or has happened to us.
If anything, the position of the subject and the position of the
object are inverted--we happen to it. And here "we" is the
necessary agency, for disaster never happens to an individual.
When it happens to a particular person, the very individuality
is radically disfigured and only possibly reconfigured.
38. The disaster interrupts the experience of time and history, and
gives a different meaning to simultaneity and coincidence. In
the writing of the disaster--in what has come to be called
"trauma narratives"--contemporaneity ceases to signify a shared
moment, and becomes a marker of congestion in a temporal
continuum. The forgetting of the disaster thus refers us to that
which is other than history in history, to that which has no
temporal modality or destiny, and thus cannot be predicted:
"Presence unsustained by any presence, be it yet-to-come or in
the past--a forgetting that supposes nothing forgotten, and
which is detached from all memory, without certainties," as
Blanchot says in his article on Marguerite Duras ("Destroy"
130).
39. The disaster is a binding force. It links together individuals
with different experiences as it links different ages and
epochs. It comes before it comes and lasts after it has
happened. If, however, the disaster is a binding experience, it
binds by doing away with that which is common and by forcing us
to face the possibility of a relation when there is nothing in
common, when there is nothing that is common.
Transcendental or Historical
40. Parallel to Blanchot's "forgetting" we can formulate the aporia
in the thinking and writing of the disaster:
a) Each disaster is a singular disaster.
b) There is no singular disaster.
From Kant we know that the solution to an antinomy thus posited
is transcendental, and that this solution ascribes to disaster a
transcendental status. But let us listen carefully to what is
said in saying that the disaster both happens and does not
happen, is concrete and evades concretization within any
discourse. What is said when one concludes that an abstract,
primary forgetting invokes a concrete, secondary forgetting?
What does it mean to say that every particular, historical
forgetting repeats a certain forgetting which pre-dates it but
has never taken place as such?
41. In response to these questions, following the logic of Plato's
http://pmc.iath.virginia.edu/text-only/issue.101/11.2ramadanovic.txt

Page 12 of 16

07/07/14 2:17 PM

argument about ideas, we can say that there is no concrete loss

without an abstract loss. Or, in terms closer to Blanchot, we
might say that there is no loss without the possibility for
loss. On the other hand, it is only because of the concrete loss
that there is a loss that is not concrete. There is, however, a
different answer to the above aporia. To say that each disaster
is singular and that there is no singular disaster is to
describe a properly historical situation and the very condition
for doing history--a doing of history that is never finally
resolved and that is written so as to mark the alterity of the
past, of disaster, of memory, as well as the alterity of the
present. This should not, however, lead us to invent the right
substitute, nor another order of facts and another methodology,
another mnemotechnics and mythology, to deal with the
immeasurable. The disaster is an event the consequences of
which, the nature of which, the memory of which, have delayed
effects whose meaning can only be grasped later and whose most
serious consequences concern not memory as such but the
community (association, alliance, relation) of and in the
future. What is needed, in short, is a decisive move towards the
examination of what tradition and community are: "what was to
have been the future," as Rebecca Comay puts it (32).[9]
42. It is not so much that, after Nietzsche, there is no one to
accept the sacrificial offering because God is missing, but
rather that a substitute (measure) cannot be found to fit the
role. Substitution as such is not fit for the representation of
the immeasurable--the representation of that which we have come
to understand as having no measure, be it a community,
forgetting, or disaster. One could then say, even
matter-of-factly, that to forget the disaster is the same as to
remember it, to write about it is the same as not to write, to
witness the same as not to witness. This is the disaster, this
is the (acting out of) trauma.
* * *
43. The place outside--the place of forgetting--is somewhat forced
upon Nietzsche and those who inhabit the universe of the dead,
that is, corporeal, God. It is not an outright choice, but
closer to the lack of one, for what is here called disaster
implies that a closure and a clear demarcation between inside
and outside, we and not-we, return and departure, remembering
and forgetting, is not possible. Nietzschean thought, conceived
within the rupture, has encountered this impossibility as
impossibility and has directed its passion, almost solely,
almost inevitably, to this rupture. The claim that all
discourses have always only thought their limit, the points of
their break, does not diminish but rather enhances the import of
the contemporary inquiries that follow this direction. I am not
certain that we can still logically speak of writing or of
disciplines as either building or destroying, remembering or
forgetting, and this may be the distinctive character of the
thesis forwarded here.
44. Our new task seems to be the old one, at least as old as
Nietzsche's early writing, to learn how to mourn without
surrendering to grief, to nostalgia, or to the hope for revenge,
redemption, reunification, and restitution.
Department of English
http://pmc.iath.virginia.edu/text-only/issue.101/11.2ramadanovic.txt

Page 13 of 16

07/07/14 2:17 PM

University of New Hampshire

petarr@cisunix.unh.edu
---------------------------------------------------------------COPYRIGHT (c) 2001 PETAR RAMADANOVIC. READERS MAY USE PORTIONS
OF THIS WORK IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE FAIR USE PROVISIONS OF U.S.
COPYRIGHT LAW. IN ADDITION, SUBSCRIBERS AND MEMBERS OF
SUBSCRIBED INSTITUTIONS MAY USE THE ENTIRE WORK FOR ANY INTERNAL
NONCOMMERCIAL PURPOSE BUT, OTHER THAN ONE COPY SENT BY EMAIL,
PRINT OR FAX TO ONE PERSON AT ANOTHER LOCATION FOR THAT
INDIVIDUAL'S PERSONAL USE, DISTRIBUTION OF THIS ARTICLE OUTSIDE
OF A SUBSCRIBED INSTITUTION WITHOUT EXPRESS WRITTEN PERMISSION
FROM EITHER THE AUTHOR OR THE JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY PRESS IS
EXPRESSLY FORBIDDEN.
THIS ARTICLE AND OTHER CONTENTS OF THIS ISSUE ARE AVAILABLE FREE
OF CHARGE UNTIL RELEASE OF THE NEXT ISSUE. A TEXT-ONLY ARCHIVE
OF THE JOURNAL IS ALSO AVAILABLE FREE OF CHARGE. FOR FULL
HYPERTEXT ACCESS TO BACK ISSUES, SEARCH UTILITIES, AND OTHER
VALUABLE FEATURES, YOU OR YOUR INSTITUTION MAY SUBSCRIBE TO
PROJECT MUSE, THE ON-LINE JOURNALS PROJECT OF THE JOHNS HOPKINS
UNIVERSITY PRESS.
---------------------------------------------------------------Notes
1. Friedrich Nietzsche, "On the Uses and Disadvantages of
History for Life." Untimely Meditations. Trans. R.J. Hollingdale
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 1983). Hereafter abbreviated UD.
2. I have written on forgetting in Plato in Petar Ramadanovic,
"Plato's Forgetting."
3. The most famous example of Nietzsche's claim that history is
an overdetermined concept is the one from On the Genealogy of
Morals, where he criticizes a mnemotechnology which stands for
both a method for remembering and the history of memory:
One can well believe that the answers and methods for
solving this primeval problem [how things are remembered]
were not precisely gentle; perhaps indeed there was nothing
more fearful and uncanny in the whole prehistory of man
than his mnemotechnics. "If something is to stay in the
memory it must be burned in: only that which never ceases
to hurt stays in the memory"--this is a main clause of the
oldest (unhappily also the most enduring) psychology on
earth.... Man could never do without blood, torture, and
sacrifice when he felt the need to create a memory of
himself; the most dreadful sacrifices and pledges
(sacrifices of the first-born among them), the most
repulsive mutilations (castration, for example), the
cruelest rites of all the religious cults (and all
religions are at the deepest level systems of
cruelties)--all this has its origin in the instinct that
realized that pain is the most powerful aid to mnemonics.
(61)
4. David B. Allison's collection The New Nietzsche is new in
part because it shows the import of the visionary idea of
http://pmc.iath.virginia.edu/text-only/issue.101/11.2ramadanovic.txt

Page 14 of 16

07/07/14 2:17 PM

Eternal Return for Nietzsche's entire philosophical oeuvre. My

treatment of Nietzsche's "forgetting" is a dialogue with this
"new" development. First, I trace back the Eternal Return to
active forgetting, which is both a proto-Eternal Return and a
moment within it. Second, I bring the concerns of "Uses and
Disadvantages" to bear on the Eternal Return so as to specify
the value of history, the meaning of active forgetting, and some
reasons why the Eternal Return is not developed by Nietzsche as
a coherent thought. In doing this I assume the reader's
familiarity with Allison's collection and Pierre Klossowski's
Nietzsche et le Cercle Vicieux. Part of Klossowski's book is
reprinted in Allison, "Nietzsche's Experience of the Eternal
Return." Trans. Allen Weiss. The New Nietzsche: Contemporary
Styles of Interpretation. Ed. David B. Allison. New York: Dell,
1977.
5. In a letter to Peter Gast (14 August 1881) cited by
Klossowski, Nietzsche writes: "Thoughts have emerged on my
horizon the likes of which I've never seen.... The intensity of
my feelings makes me shudder and laugh. Several times I have
been unable to leave my room, for the ridiculous reason that my
eyes were inflamed. Why? Because I'd cried too much on my
wanderings the day before. Not sentimental tears, mind you, but
tears of joy, to the accompaniment of which I sang and talked
nonsense, filled with a new vision far superior to that of other
men" (Allison 107).
6. A parallel conclusion can be drawn from Klossowski's
understanding of the Eternal Return. Klossowski assumes that in
the Eternal Return the same self is remembered and must be
forgotten. So, if individuals must forget the remembering of
their previous selves, history is freed to do its work but only
as a discourse not on memory and without affect. Such a history
would even support the forgetting of the past--forgetting that
would be a sign that certain events are finished, that they are
not still happening. But, in such a case, strictly speaking,
there would be no past.
7. Blanchot's references to Nietzsche go via Klossowski's
interpretation of the vicious circle, cited in The Writing of
the Disaster some thirty pages earlier (56-7).
8. I would limit this claim to specific cultures if I could only
imagine a contemporary culture which is not touched by the
mentioned technological inventions.
9. Comay adds:
Note the strange tense of this formulation: a future
radically imperfect because it will never have been
rendered fully present; a future which persists precisely
in and as its own failure to have been. It is a radically
finite future which memorializes itself as the
will-have-been of what was-not-to-be: a future whose only
moment inscribes the missed moment of betrayed and
relinquished hope. Its presence is thus just its foregone
absence, its possibility just its impossibility: its
self-disclosure just the gap left by its prior failure to
appear. (32)
Works Cited
http://pmc.iath.virginia.edu/text-only/issue.101/11.2ramadanovic.txt

Page 15 of 16

07/07/14 2:17 PM

Allison, David B., ed. The New Nietzsche: Contemporary Styles of

Interpretation. New York: Dell, 1977.
Blanchot, Maurice. The Writing of the Disaster. Trans. Ann
Smock. Lincoln: Nebraska UP, 1986.
---. "Destroy." Marguerite Duras. By Marguerite Duras. San
Francisco: City Lights Books, 1987. 130-4.
Comay, Rebecca. "Redeeming Revenge: Nietzsche, Benjamin,
Heidegger, and the Politics of Memory." Nietzsche as
Postmodernist: Essays Pro and Contra. Ed. Clayton Koelb. Albany:
SUNY Press, 1990. 105-30.
Klossowski, Pierre. Nietzsche et le Cercle Vicieux. Paris:
Mercure de France, 1975.
---. "Nietzsche's Experience of the Eternal Return." Trans.
Allen Weiss. Allison 107-20.
Lyotard, Jean-Franois. The Inhuman. Trans. G. Bennington and R.
Bowlby. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1991.
Nietzsche, Friederich. On the Genealogy of Morals. Trans. Walter
Kaufmann & R.J. Hollingdale. New York: Random House, 1969.
---. "On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life."
Untimely Meditations. Trans. R.J. Hollingdale. Cambridge, UK:
Cambridge UP, 1983. 57-124.
Ramadanovic, Petar. "Plato's Forgetting: Theaetetus and
Phaedrus." Khoraographies for Jacques Derrida, on July 15, 2000.
Ed. Dragan Kujundzic. Spec. issue of Tympanum 4 (Summer 2000)
<http://www.usc.edu/dept/comp-lit/tympanum/4/ramadanovic.html>.

http://pmc.iath.virginia.edu/text-only/issue.101/11.2ramadanovic.txt

Page 16 of 16