the Eternal return

Athens School Of Fine Arts

Masters Course “Digital Forms of Arts”
2005-2006

Nietzsche’ s Idea of the eternal return refers to the wills’  strong ability for strength or existence – a will that can reform itself in the continuous changing of things in an obscure or invisible – infinite time.

Every event of the past will occur eternal again and again in the circled time called history.

In Zarathustra’ s image, the eternal return is the substantial idea of existence as a re-bringing of the same events in his view and perspective. He is aware of the repetition of every phrase and every concept of his life, thus having a fascinating time. In accordance, Albert Camus’  Sysifos experiences the eternal return in a constant positiveness.

19ths an 20ths century literature and philosophy had to criticize the idea of time trying to overcome the historical traditions’ constraints. Goethe refers to the repetition f every wise thought in ones experience through life.

In James Joys’ first [non finalized] sentence in Finnegan's wake “..by a commodious vicious recirculation…” – where events, words and ideas are cycled in an eternal present with no beginning or end.

Mark Twain criticize on history’s’ non repetition but rhyme…whilst Proust’ s writings rotate around moments of the past through a non voluntary memory.

Walter Benjamin refers to the loss of historical time. The 20^th century man seams to detach himself of history and be witness of this detachment in a dramatic way of farewell while attempting to grasp the remains of historical time. The ‘angel of history’ separates from something in which it stares insistently. Its face turns to the past and its ruins. The angel wishes to rebuilt the past but futures’  power pulls it towards a backlash movement.

Accordingly, Henri Bergson’s being is related to a perceptional center of a mattered action in a constantly changing presence. In this consideration of space there is only an eternal continuity of time points. During time’s itinerancy there is no beginning or ending – but an internal continuity in which all return eternally in itself. This is the form in which self relation to the past and present occurs.

Self being is captured in this cycled movement where every change of position in nothing but a repetitive moment in an indefinable time.

Probably fare welling the last consistence on linear historical time but then maybe welcoming through the interval the movement between the loss and ourselves – the possibility of passing through a map of randomly moving points where initial ideas communicate with time and overcome its constraints.

Probably history and non history narrative and non narrative consist of each other. In such supposed parallel position non historical needs historical to confirm itself in every present and vice verse.

[1]

According Deleuse we are thrown in an endless manifoldness of diverse relationships. The seemingly distinctive elements of the world are nothing but reformed relations of different points in time thus continuously returning in between.