On the Horizon: Nietzsche's Lady Dawn and Deleuze's Sky-Chance

Frank Stevenson

《Concentric： Literary and Cultural Studies》 35卷2期 (2009/09) Pp. 355-378

https://doi.org/10.6240/concentric.lit.200909_35(2).0012

並列摘要

This interpretation of Nietzsche's (Zarathustra III) and Deleuze's (Difference and Repetition) highly poetic passages on the Greek goddess Eos (Aurora, Dawn) and the ”sky-chance”-set in the context of the eternal return-emphasizes the role in both thinkers of Greek cosmogony. Of particular importance are the notions (figures) of earth-sky and Chaos in its double-sense of disorder and earth-sky gap or interface, where the latter is also the extended surface of the ”horizon.” Nietzsche calls Lady Dawn a ”table for dice players” and ”dance floor for accidents”-suggesting the momentary event of her appearance, her radical contingency-and an ”abyss of light,” suggesting the possibility of upper-sky/deep-earth inversion. Deleuze speaks of the ”dice” that are ”thrown against the sky” or ”sky-chance,” suggesting the singularity of repetition (of dawns, future possibilities) and radical openness of the future. His ”hinge between two tables” seems to interpret Nietzsche's horizontal gap or double-horizon as a porous, flat surface of time (Aion) ”through which” the dice are thrown-suggesting the possibility not just of the vertical reversibility (inversion) of earth-sky but of a flattening-out or projection of the vertical dice-throw onto a horizontal table or game-board. But in the original Homeric myth Dawn rises into pure singularity from her horizon-couch, where she lies at night with her lover Tithonos, and this dualism of horizontal embedment and vertical singularity could describe the two sides or aspects of mytho-poetic-metaphysical language: its force of figuration-the horizontal ”couching” of one thing or idea in terms of another-and its vertical singularity that lies beyond all embedment.

並列關鍵字

Nietzsche ； Deleuze ； Lady Dawn ； couch ； horizon ； cosmogony ； singularity ； dice-throw ； sky-chance ； figuration

參考文獻

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Deleuze, Gilles.,Paul Patton. (Trans.)(1994).Difference and Repetition.New York:Columbia UP.

Deleuze, Gilles.,Hugh Tomlinson. (Trans.)(1983).Nietzsche and Philosophy.New York:Columbia UP.

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