Zarathustra\'s dance: A Heideggerian misstep

Man and Worm 28: 145--162, 1995. (~) 1995 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

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Zarathustra's dance: A Heideggerian misstep? ALIN CRISTIAN Celestijnenlaan 76, #316, B-3001 Heverlee, Belgium

Men have sunk very low, the devil take them.t They've let their bodies become mute and they only speak with their mouths. But what d'you expect a mouth to say? What can it tell you? I f only you couM have seen how the Russian listened to me from head to foot, and how he followed everything! 1danced him my misfortunes; my travels; how many times 1had been married; the trades I'd learned.., how I escaped; how I arrived in Russia . . . . Even he, dense as he was, could understand everything, everything. My feet and my hands spoke, so did my hair and my clothes.

Nikos Kazantzakis, Zorba The Greek

1. Revisiting Heidegger's appropriation of Nietzsche The labyrinth of Nietzschean metaphors allows for a wide variety of interpretations the conflictual character of which is by now a philosophical commonplace. Consistency becomes a most difficult exigency to maintain for a hermeneutic striving to appropriate a thinking defiant of logical rigor. A critical approach to the existing interpretations of Nietzsche that would establish its foothold in the absence of this or that presumably important theme, in other words, a demand for even a selective form of completeness would sound preposterous. The enigmatic meaning structure enshrined in this thick o f symbols where every element refers indirectly, obscurely, and uncertainly to a vast gamut o f other possible nexuses seems to resist a safe ranking of motifs in accordance with their significance. This is primarily due to the fact that significance itself depends upon still unexplicated connections the articulation o f which remains, in Nietzsche's casepar excellence, an outstanding task. Needless to remind that the author himself meant the dialogue this way, i.e., as a dangerous, demanding, and possibly deceitful venture beyond. In the light of these considerations, the mention of one (more) key reference such as dance and the attempt to defend its centrality with textual evidence

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might, in the best of cases, encounter an apathetic approval. This is not the direction of my project here. Its primary task is rather to show how closely Heidegger's dialogue with Nietzsche is dependent upon the ontological status ascribed to corporeality, to examine the silent embarrassment surrounding it, and to indicate some consequences that follow from this. Since Heidegger advocated Nietzsche's confinement to metaphysics, I consider not irrelevant a certain coincidence in Heidegger's own writings, namely the double complete silence about, on the one hand, Zarathustra's being a dancer and, on the other, about dance as an art. In elucidating the background of this omission, it will appear that Nietzsche's emphasis on the creator which pervades his whole conception of art is rooted in a non-metaphysical form of subjectivity epitomized in dance. The suggestion is not that Heidegger deliberately withheld the mention of this peculiar, corporeal expression but rather that the emergence of its significance was precluded by his exclusively ecstatic conception of projection. "I know how to speak the simile of the highest things only in the dance ''1 reads a well-known pronouncement of Zarathustra which, along with several other references scattered across the whole of Nietzsche's works, concur in conveying what might be called a subjectivity without a subject. The subjectivity of the Nietzschean creator cannot be fully grasped by reference to a self-identical, self-transparent hupokeimenon but always necessarily exceeds the meaning of the traditional subject thus pointing out to an essential openness in the core of what used to be taken for the ontological guarantee of sameness. Although Heidegger claims to have left Nietzsche behind when moving from the metaphysical subject to the essence thereof, i.e., to a form of subjectivity characterized by non-coincidence, by the 'ek' of a fundamental ek-stasis, by the 'da' of Da-sein, it will be one of my contentions here that the Nietzschean subject realizes this essential openness in dance. The "highest things" dance is said to carry with it intimate a conception of subjectivity pervaded by its Other in such a way that its Othemess gets characteristically retrieved in the gestural expression of other fellow humans.

2. The mode of being of the body Heidegger's appropriation of Nietzsche conceptualizes the corporeal in terms of bodily states which, when interpreted ontologically, conduce us to that moment in the open structure of subjectivity designated as moods [Stimmungen]. "Feeling, as feeling oneself to be, is precisely the way we are corporeally. ''2 Hunger, for example, would be interpreted as a bodily state in which Dasein gets attuned to specific, ontic needs originating in its factical embodiment. But being bodily attuned to the ontic in no way deprives Dasein

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of its interpretative freedom which remains, for Heidegger, the hallmark of Geist over and against any behavioristic explaining away of human essence. 3 In §29 and §31 of Being and 7~me moods and projective understanding are presented as the basic modes of being of the "there," ofDasein's da. Through feelings we are exposed to that essential ambiguity within the truth of being whereby unconcealment and concealment are united in the most original strife. Feelings possibilize [vermdgen] all pre-predicative comportments on the basis of which alone propositional truth and falsity can arise, they attune us to entities prior to the latter's being the object of our knowledge. Following these bearings, one can assume from the absence of explicit comments that dance as a particular instance of bodily comportment is inscribed within the horizon of questioning where the structure of the "there" in Being and Time was dealt with. It is, I believe, at this level that a tension between an interiority and an exteriority subtends Heidegger's philosophy: " . . . feeling has the character of opening up and keeping open, and therefore also, depending on the kind of feeling it is, the character of closing off. ''4 Two years after his treatise came out, in the course entitled The Basic Concepts of Metaphysics, the concept of mood appears considerably elaborated within the framework of an analysis focusing on boredom. This important explication conveys the idea that the "kinds of feelings" refered to above are in fact differentiated according to their power to penetrate into the ontological dimension proper. Some feelings- deep boredom, for instance- open the access to the possibility of that outstanding [ausgezeichnet], existential understanding of ourselves. 5 The closing off that amusement [Zeitvertreib] as mood brings about does not forfeit Dasein's essential ontological openness but does away only with the specific opportunity that deep boredom creates for Dasein to seize upon the basic structures of experience. Closing off feelings, surreptitiously related to everydayness, are a privative mode of and an escape from more basic, opening up feelings. In the example Heidegger chooses in The Basic Concepts, the way the analysis moves from one kind of feelings to another is guided by a hermeneutic of suspicion: what if, in spite of its apparently successful unfolding, the amusement provided by a soirre in a circle of friends covers up the reflection [ Widerschein] of an ontological, deep-level boredom? This interpretation hinges upon gestural details of a comportment which is, socially speaking, inconspicuous- smoking, a disguised and suppressed yawning, finger drumming. It is, therefore, in the corporeal and, perhaps, not only there that such 'openings' to the ontological occur. In this case, the body functions as interface between the socially celebrated ontic and the lurking existential, where

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the former displays the bright hues of a closing off amusement and the latter the pale halo of an opening up, deep boredom. Corporeal feelings do have, according to Heidegger, a secluding character by virtue of which we acquire from the outset "the inherent internalizing tendency of the body in our Dasein, ''6 The question that arises here is how this intrinsically closing off nature which bodily states are said to possess relates to the being-with [Mitsein] structure as primordial openness to the others. How can the ontic, social openness be at the same time, because of the feelings involves, ontologically secluding? The tension between interiority and exteriority stands, as tension, in need for further clarification. If nobody can experience my feelings in my place, in what way is the other already with me in this bodily conveyed interiority? Moreover, could this Othemess, i.e., what is not properly speaking mine in my feelings, be the key to a more essential understanding of myself, to an ontological grasp of those feelings' structure? In this case, the corporeal tendency to seclusion would preserve within its very core an alterity that would at the same time open up a more profound access to the self by way of a detour passing through that peculiar disclosure which is the other's body. In other words, my corporeality which as source of bodily states denies itself to me directly, i.e., via my own feelings, might be retrievable via the gesturally expressed embodiment of the other, indeed not through a projective understanding of his/her body as entity but by virtue of a shared Otherness that both me and my fellow humans experience each in relation to his/her corporeality. Nietzsche's suggestion here is that what I refered to above as "peculiar disclosure" occurs eminently in dance. According to § 18 of Being and Time, Dasein always lets entities be encountered as ready-to-hand. It is this position that entitles one to infer that the body as entity, apart from beingfelt as a state, also allows for an instrumental appropriation- strictly speaking a misappropriation. One's own body gets disclosed as an entity involved with things ready-to-hand, be they as basic as the earth with its gravitation or the air with its vital proximity. The body often becomes the object of measurements, experiments, medical interventions, ritual or profane practices guided by an 'in order to' structure. Such an instrumental character of the body is also responsible for my experiencing it as burdensome in states of extreme fatigue or physical handicaps. 7 Touching myself in such cases confronts me more obviously with a bodily felt state and, simultaneously, with an instrumental, projective understanding of the entity 'body.' This recalls the basic thesis from Being and Time about the equiprimordiality of understanding and moods. And yet, this does not decide about the essence of life, of the corporeal itself which Heidegger carefully places between the categorial ready-to-hand and the existential Dasein. "The basic ontological state of 'living' is a problem in

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its own right and can be tackled only reductively and privately in terms of the ontology of Dasein. ''8 In fact, by the time of The Basic Concepts, the living in general acquires the status of a fundamental mode of Being along with the present-at-hand, ready-to-hand and existence. 9 Granted that the 'living' in the corporeal can only be approached reductively, always starting from the facticity of our incarnated Dasein, the ambiguity of its ontological status cannot be easily dispelled in favor of the ecstatic structure. The body resists its dissolution into bodily states denying itself precisely as origin thereof. Nevertheless, it is the disclosure of the body as entity that creates the possibility o f considering it as a potential receptacle of artistic significations. The truth o f being originally experienced, according to Heidegger, as tension between unconcealment and concealment can be creatively fixed into what was traditionally called the material of the work of art. As to the adequacy of materials in general to the artistic purpose, Nietzsche's pronouncement reads categorically: only the movements of the human body can receie those "highest things" that grand style art delivers. Insofar as the body is claimed by the ontic, as source and material support of gestures, its expressive potential can become relevant from an artistic point of view. What are, in fact, the particularities that recommend the body in motion as 'material' for a performance with initiatory, heuristic dimensions?

3. Corporeality and artistic creation In order to answer the question above, we should turn for a moment our attention to Heidegger's analysis of art. The problem he sees with Nietzsche's understanding of art is the constant emphasis on the artist's role in the creative process. This gets interpreted as a metaphysical hangover and a sign that Nietzsche's expressed wish for "an ever greater spiritualization and augmentation of the senses ''2° has not achieved a proper degree of emancipation from the subjectivistic perspective. When understood as the expression of a metaphysical subject, art as a particular case of intersubjective relation runs into the age-old problem of putting its meaning across the metaphysically disputed boundary between artist and public. Heidegger's presentation of the Nietzsche Lectures (193 6-1937) coincides temporally with his elaboration of the essay "The Origin o f The Work of Art" in which an "altogether different" approach to aesthetics was intended. This essay attempts to shift the focus from the creator to the work of art in view of rendering the latter autonomous with respect to the conditions o f its appearance. From this perspective, a work of art that stands on its own could be better understood by the public than by the author herself. We distinguish therein a rejoinder to Schleiermacher's hermeneutical theory and its advocacy in favor of a retum to the conditions

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of production of the artwork since those alone, according to the author, could safeguard the transmission of meaning. Heidegger's insistence upon the createdness [Geschaffensein] of art redeems the supreme authority of the work in the dispute among conflicting interpretations. Createdness points out to the fully accomplished, self-reliant character of the work by virtue of which its bonds with the creative process as a whole are undone. To sever art from its genetic context amounts in fact to an instituting gesture that establishes the finished work itself as origin of artistic meaning. Thus the initial dependence of the work on technical, economical, psychological, etc. conditions of appearance is sublated through the event of a fundamental discontinuity that subsequently orients hermeneutical appropriation toward a full employment of its specific resources and away from sterile biographical speculation. In order to cut into the temporal continuum of creative experience and institute an origin, Heidegger relies on his concept of world which, with its self-contained character of guiding measure, has the power to inaugurate a break into a new referential totality. As announced in Being and Time, the world is the ever non-objective structure that Dasein has always already projected ahead of itself, the totality of possibilities purely as possibilities and hence, according to §31, to be sharply distinguished from their mental contents. It is upon this virtue of always preceding and therefore always escaping its content that the world itself founds its founding power. The foundation refers to the opening of new possibilities for the understanding of the work by receding into a dimension where the well-trodden approaches to it appear among other altematives, some perhaps authentic, i.e., cleared by the thing itself. In receding, the content of the trite hermeneutical possibilities the previously unquestioned foundation-gets its monopoly cancelled in favor of the possibilizing as such, as ontological dimension. The world maintains itself in the mode of possibility always embracing the specific possibilities with a leeway which guarantees the freedom of movement between an'either' and an 'or' of what may be conflicting interpretations. When fixed [festgestellt] into the masterpiece, the world takes what used to be merely a material out of its ordinary referential context thus freeing it to its ownmost mode o f being. "The entity really belongs to the world, but only insofar as it is accessible, insofar as the entity itself allows and facilitates this. ''11 Can one really speak of fixation in the case of a world which, as mentioned above, guarantees the freedom of movement? To say that the freedom of movement is fixed means that a dimension- art proper is opened for this movement and held open through questioning. Openness, accessibility, possibility of coming into question are all that is fixed into the work. "The simple 'factum est' is to be held forth into the open by the work:

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namely this, that unconcealedness of what is has happened here, and that as this happening it happens here for the first time. ''12 Heidegger's conception of art pursues the mode in which the truth of being is received by the creator, fixed in the work of art, and further preserved by its recipients. This truth itself is, as already mentioned, a strife between unconcealment and concealment which in the realm of aesthetics get conceptualized as worm and earth. "The opposition of world and earth is a striving . . . . In setting up a world and setting forth the earth, the work is an instigating of this striving. ''13 If the world is pure possibilizing as such, what it tries to recede from is the ontic content of specific possibilities, the ' o f . . . ' that inevitably accompanies any possibility and co-determines it. The earth engaged by the self-disclosing openness of the world conveys the idea of self-seclusion, of a sheltering agent into which the work sets back essentially withholding a moment o f its truth. What the instituted origin sublates is that instance of the truth of being which first comes forth in the creator's own existence as very specific kind o f disclosure, as life. Artistic inspiration as "a receiving and a gathering [Entnehmen] o f a relation to unconcealedness''14 breaks out through the act of a living human which conveys and fixes it into the work. If, as Heidegger claims, such a relation to unconcealedness is deeply rooted in the work, one can indeed wonder why it should be less rooted in the bodily performed act that received and gathered it, at least as long as the corporeal cannot be reduced to an indifferent medium for the disclosure of truth. When invoking life, Zarathustra not only recognizes its primordiality but explicitly takes up to pursue it: "I dance after you, I follow you even when only the slightest traces o f you linger. ''15 What is at stake here is the continuous or discontinuous character that our experience of the truth of being has. The vicissitudes underlying the genesis of the masterpiece seem to be more consequential than it first appeared. That relation to unconcealedness which is the creator's own existence is a corporealrelation as the statement from the commentary on Nietzsche clearly attests: "we live em-bodying ourselves" [Wir leben, indem wir leiben]. 16 Artistic inspiration as outstanding, origin-giving disclosure in need to be fixed, formed, set into its limits in the artwork is therefore already embodied, i.e., already related to a specific unconcealedness. One cannot overemphasize that the truth seeking literally a form of artistic expression gets in fact reformed after having already instigated that most often tragic strife within the artist's own life. A fundamental relationship between difference and sameness insinuates itself in this repetition. Only upon being acted out in an incarnated human existence is the conflict set forth in the masterpiece in order to be preserved and enhanced there on its own terms. The whole problematic to

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which the present study is dedicated aims at following the trace (or history of the disappearance) of this original corporeality into the work's self-subsistent nature.

4. Between continuity and discontinuity: Instigation and inauguration My perhaps overhasty depiction of Heidegger's aesthetic theory is prone to a misunderstanding that would unduely assimilate the receiving, taking out [entnehmen], and fixing of the truth of being to some sort of a 'journey' reminiscent of the Spirit's falling into history along a series of mediations. In fact, Heidegger explicitly discards an interpretation of creation that would see truth as being merely housed [untergebracht] in the work. Responding to the metaphor with another metaphor, one could say that a house is not necessarily a home. Heidegger's objection to Nietzsche aims at establishing the work as the true home of that essentially veritative experience which art is said to be. The underlying assumption here is that somehow the artist's own life is not quite a home, or an ontologically lesser one anyway. Consequently, Heidegger's nuanced articulation of what happens in the work bespeaks a certain radicalization: from an instigation [Anstifiung] of the presumably existing conflict to a straightforward inauguration [Errffnung] of it. Of course, the difference may appear insignificant, especially if the truth of being experienced in the material prior to creation is utterly inconspicuous. In the case of a still unfashioned marble block, its being disclosed in the mode of instrumentality-more exactly, as resource or stuff lying around-virtually precludes it from shining forth into the full possibilities of its being. Along the 'in order to' relation characteristic of the ready-to-hand mode of being, the world does not appear as world, hence the truth of being of the marble block remains concealed within it. By fixing an artistic world into it, creation, whether as instigation or as inauguration, accomplishes for this marble block nothing less than an ontological leap comparable to the traversing of the ontological difference. One can safely say that the transformation carried out in the act of creation is, ontologically speaking, so radical that, by contrast, emphasis on the difference between instigation and inauguration fades into pedantry. Undoubtedly, this holds for all the examples Heidegger's essay "The Origin of The Work of Art" uses. There are references to all the major traditional forms of art with only one notable exception: dance. In fact, drama is also absent, but one may assume, with a good deal of approximation, that it is indirectly addressed via literature. What the approximation leaves in the shadow are exactly its performative features such as gestural expression and

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intonation, in other words, those moments of it claimed by the living body. In music and literature the ontologizing measure of art is given even to those more subtle 'materials' which are sound and language- the latter understood not as speech, which would not need to be ontologized, but as a system of linguistically regulated combinations available. What happens, though, when the movements of the human body are chosen to be the receptacle of the strife characterizing the truth of being? If for the marble block artistic fashioning had the power to take it out of inconspicuousness and let it be into an ontological state quite remote from the initial ready-to-hand, for the human body the fact of entrusting to it a world is not in the least new. Given the strong connivance that exists between the body and Dasein, it becomes indeed meaningful to inquire to what extent creation is, in this case, an instigation or an inauguration. One notices that the suitability of a material for receiving the artistic Feststellung is closely dependent upon how strong an opposition the world can put up when confronting the earth. Or, put differently, upon how efficaciously the earth's withdrawal and self-seclusion can defy the ruses ofvermrgen. Thefest in Feststellung assumes the radical difference between the ex-static mode of being of the world and the static one of the categorial. Without the fixity of the earth which translates ontologically into closedness and concealedness, Heidegger's phenomenological analysis of art would fall apart precisely because its main pillar - the inaugural fixation of truth - would totter. With regard to this fixity, the human body turns out to be unique among other materials. In its ontological ambiguity it raises difficulties not so much in the direction o f the ecstasis the primacy of which Heidegger took pains to establish but rather in relation to the capacity of fixation that art requires. What makes it problematic as a material for art is not the absence of Festheit, of fixity, in the sense that it is always moving, but in the sense that its self-secluding character which alone sustains the world is in fact most originally open for an immediately corporeal, unprojective understanding of the other's gestures. The truth of being can be fixed into the categorial because the latter's mode of being does not interfere with this truth but rather preserves and enhances it by virtue of its self-secluding nature. Unlike the categorial, our living body possesses a world the immediacy of which it shares, among others, with its fellow humans and which, even though denying its essence, differs radically from the self-seclusion of the categorial. The absence of fixity on the part of the body indicates that the meaning ascribed to its attitudes characteristically vacillates between the self and the other and that, correspondingly, the access to it is of necessity detoured via the other's body. Going back to the distinction between instigation and inauguration, it appears now that life and its 'world' might not only shy away from the

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struggle with the world of a r t - not from the world of art, t h o u g h - but might turn out to support the artistic experience through and through. Its essence might even transcend the alternative continuous/discontinuousthat an ontology of finitude constructs 17 and in which art with its instituting power is still entangled. In relation to this pre-existing ground, an artistic performance setting up a world could hardly claim the privilege of being inaugural. It may be said to bring corporeality to its full radiance, to instigate the disclosure of the utmost possibilities dormant in our embodiment, but it always has to recognize the precedence of a gestural 'world' that transcends the subjective and cannot be instituted. My next task will be to show why in Heidegger's philosophy the concept of world, if qualified by the attribute 'gestural,' calls for quotation marks.

5. The world of possibilities and the 'world' of capabilities The body in movement does support a world, indeed a world in which, according to Heidegger, the broad paths of essential decisions first open up in order to be appropriated into one's destiny. In Tchaikovsky's The Nutcracker, for example, the world of childhood in its enchanting play of fantasy underlines, by contrast with its ludic space, the too often neglected responsibility of maturity: marvelous travels bespeaking the quest for the rare, the hospitable and the alien confronting each other within the safe but transparent brackets of the humorous; or the world of ritual human sacrifices holding us suspended above the abysmal ambiguity between horror and beauty in Stravinsky's The Rite o f Spring - these are only some possibilities disclosed by means of the radiating power of dance. Instead of establishing themselves upon a worldless material, these worlds rather seem to take over a pre-existing 'world' of bodily attitudes and movements without completely severing these from their acquired meaning. Although fractured and taken out of context, these corporeal repositories of sense maintain an implicit reference to the living body outside the stage and its immersion in that collective, immemorial reservoir of gestures which is the Lebenswelt.18 For this reason, the dance performance reminds one rather of a work of bricollage, but one in which the diversity of implicit references as diversity, i.e., the 'seam' of the patchwork, is maintained in the invisible. The scenic effect remains that of a perfectly harmonious, coherent, and self-standing whole where essential dimensions of the human are imperatively winning the open. And yet, that which in other arts withdraws itself into self-seclusion thus sheltering its innermost nature becomes in dance a way of access to the most primordial ground of shared meanings. This access is, ontologically speaking, a Nietzschean "highest thing." The body in movement supporting

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an artistic world, although not shining forth in the same way as this world, is not secluded either since its meaning is, in principle at least, transmitted and shared via bodily attitudes. Of course, I cannot make transparent to myself m y own corporeality but I can perform some gestures, acquire new ones, reach this essence of movement embodied in me by means of an 'I can' and thus remain gesturally open. This Other in onself which is one's own body gets disclosed via the other's body to which one remains attuned by virtue of what Mefleau-Ponty has called "a general power of putting onself into a situation, ''19 and which I believe to be essentially an explication of Heidegger's concept of Stimmung. When set against its gestural ground that is claimed to be openness itself, to wit, a dimension in which the diaphora of"the highest things" gets triggered, Nietzsche's emphasis on the creator appears to elude the boundaries of the traditional subject. Dance movements are loftier than ordinary vehicles of meaning because they are the medium of intersubjectivity itself, a medium that does not merely house the meaning but is its home, i.e., keeps it alive in that 'back and forth' upon which the self and its other are constituted in their difference.2° The essential intersubjectivity underlying the valuating act of the Nietzschean creator eliminates the possibility of its appropriation in terms of afundamentum inconcussum. 21 As the discussion of rapture in the first volume of Nietzsche indicates, Heidegger was indeed quite aware of this overcoming of metaphysics so that only its implicit, insufficiently elaborated character made him assign Nietzsche the liminal position of consummated metaphysician. "I should believe only in a god who understood how to dance" reemphasizes, though, Zarathustra. 22 1 think one can argue that in fact dance amounts to an explicit overcoming of the onto-theo-logical legacy as we will see even more clearly in a moment. Returning to the body as earth, if we admit that the essence of bodily movement is self-secluding, then it is so in such a way that in principle every human being has access to it insofar as he/she is partaking in an intersubjective world. 'Under' the world of possibilities that art purportedly sets up, the body o f the spectator harks to the fomenting murmur of a sea on which the complicated web of gestural sillages draw up their own illegible but virtual charts. The body, by virtue of its ontologically liminal status, cannot be rid of its everyday involvements with one creative stroke in an instituting fervor. More precisely, it cannot dispense with a mode of understanding and being understood that is its own because this mode of understanding is nothing less than its mode of being. 23 Corporeal understanding ties the body up to a 'world' o f its own which cannot be stripped offbut rather tends to in-corporate the new in a way that eludes ecstatic projection. This says nothing at all about the quality of the performance, as if the gestures were insufficiently refined or

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the body poorly mastered. It refers to the ontological status of the gesture as always situated, to put it in Heidegger's terms, 'between' the entity disclosed and the world upon which it is to be projected, i.e., in the abyss of the middle [der Mitte]. The living body and the projection as performing of a human act appear to be indistinguishable, indeed as "an embodiment attuned" and "a unity of embodying attunement. ''24 One notices that here the Heideggerian distinction between the possibility as possibility and its mental content cannot be helpful in understanding the intimate nature of human gestures since the essence of the latter gets elaborated in the 'between' [Zwiespalt] that carries out the world in its worlding [welten] and the ontic contents in their being. A corporeal attitude does not deliver its meaning first to a projective understanding that would take it as this or as that. The world as possibilizing, as freedom to recede from specific 'as this' and 'as that,' provides a horizon for understanding some-'thing' that has already been bodily lived upon acquiring its thingness projectively. If meaning is the blueprint of understanding, then its rootedness in the corporeal allows us to speak of a 'world' of the body. Heidegger himself is, at points, very careful not to explicate away his concept of world: "World means, among others, accessibility of the entities as such. ''25 Yet he seems reluctant to range corporeal attitudes among those mysterious "others." 'While' being projected, i.e., prior to being assigned an ' a s . . . ' from the world, a received gesture encounters my body which respondingly gets in tune with it 'before' this gesture gets interpreted as such-and-such. Temporal indexes in the previous statement call for quotation marks because the time they try to order is a time of the body to be distinguished from ecstatic time. It goes without saying that upon interpreting the perceived gesture I can choose to suppress the spontaneous response of my body in accordance with, say, the prevalent conventions, but this is not a proof against the absence o f an immediate, gestural understanding of the other's corporeality on the part of my body. It is in this sense that the most original 'world' of bodily attitudes - Merleau-Ponty refers to it sometimes as "practical possibilities" can be claimed as foundation of Dasein's ecstasis. The closest Heidegger comes to an idea of practical possibilities is in The Basic Concepts, where his reference to capabilities [Fiihigkeiten] is once more intended to disentangle the limits of the animal marked thereby from the uniquely human privilege of possibilizing. Obviously, to reconsider the radical character of the difference between comporting oneself [ Verhalten] and possibilizing such comportment [VermOgen] threatens to explain the human away by yielding the upper hand to a more sophisticated version of behaviorism. And yet, by virtue o f its 'world' the body is something other than a bundle of capabilities but also other than a series of bodily states.

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The interpretation of the Heideggerian Stimmung advocated here should not appear biased in favor o f an intellectualistic appropriation of what was meant to remain an existential conception of possibility. It is rather an emphasis on the unexplicated moment of corporeal understanding embedded in the concept of attunement and especially on the way it comes to self-explication in dance. But my claim is that precisely this bodily element at work in every attunement endangers the inaugurating power of the dance performance by retaining an inexpungeable reference to the creator's embodiment. It is in this ambition to become foundational that the Heideggerian concept of world tends at points to renegate its corporeal filiation even if only by way of a forgetting.

6. The body's presence in absence One may find it interesting in this context to see how, for example, Heidegger's reading of Rilke operates a kind of selection that makes his existential grasp of the world prone to intellectualistic misunderstandings. Probably one of his favorite readings, Rilke's The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge was used as an illustration of his concept of world in The Basic Problems of Phenomenology. Starting from an empirically given d e t a i l - a tom. off w a l l Malte, the personage of this novel, slips in a moment of vision into a world of the past masterly retrieved by the conjoined work of his imagination and memory. Heidegger's textual evocation of this fragment does not highlight the corporeally experienced anxiety and the simultaneity (perhaps co-originality) of the latter with Make's sense of being this terrifying world of the vision. The sudden realization is deeply entrenched in the body, it is physically scary to the point of making Malte run away and feel exhausted. 26 One cannot establish upon a presuppositionless analysis of the description whether the vision was announced through the symptoms or preceded them, but to consider the physical merely as an indication of the ontological seems not to do justice to the whole o f the text. In fact, in one of the many passages describing anxiety as gesturally aroused, Rilke explicitly points out that this mood is intertwined with the vision [Blick] of the world not merely indicatively but rather as a

melting together into the same blood.27 The omission to take into account the special role Nietzsche has ascribed to dance has a striking similarity with that of corporeal references in Rilke. In the essay "Who Is Nietzsche's Zarathustra?" Heidegger quotes a very interesting passage depicting a peculiar, twofold soliloquy. The prophet addresses his soul in a discourse mentioning both a spoken teaching and a message conveyed directly by means o f dance. The exact formulation is worth reproducing: "O m y soul, I taught you to say 'Today' like 'One day' and 'Formerly,' I

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taught you to dance your round-dance beyond every Here and There and Yonder. ''28 From this twofold structure of the soliloquy Heidegger retains only the first part which he uses in order to support the appropriation of Nietzsche's doctrine of the eternal return in terms of fundamental ontology and its ecstatic temporality. As for the second, expressly bodily conveyed soli'loquy,' it fails to win Heidegger's attention just as Rilke's strange melting together of vision and gesture did. And yet, in spite of its cryptic phrasing, Nietzsche's statement clearly has in view a self-refering, circular structure whereby dance transcends the isolation and fixity ascribed to location in the ordinary conception of spatiality. Moreover, this structure needed to be refered to distinctly, beside the hint at an original temporality. The 'Here,' 'There,' and 'Yonder' bespeak a spatial indexicality whereby anonymous gestural possibilities can be claimed by an incarnated dancer. Beyond this spatial indexicality one expects to find at work a form of corporeality that supports and at the same time transcends the partes extra partes structure of the traditional res extensa. It might be that Zarathustra's engaging his own soul in dance, apart from pointing out to a common origin of meaning and expression, also draws one's attention to the wider corporeal context of speech which not merely echoes the primordial externalization of meaning but makes it possible to start with. This is to say that even the silent articulation of the word involves most originally the whole of our 'world' of bodily attitudes. 29 To paraphrase Derrida, not only that the voice most originally weds the ideal with the empirical but it discovers itself rooted in a more inclusive corporeality in the gestural self-explication of which it first resonates. "One should neither dissimulate nor distort the effective way in which our thoughts dawned upon us" writes Nietzsche. 3° It is this effectiveness that dance seems to conduce back to a type of spatiality characteristic of the body and resisting the reduction to an ecstatic temporality. 31 I will not develop further what can be said to constitute a highly speculative interpretation of an obscure passage in Nietzsche. Suffice to signal here that Zarathustra's being a dancer appears, on the part of Heidegger, less as an accidental omission than, within the explicit reference to it that the quotation bears, as a downplay of its importance in favor of the exclusivity of ecstatic temporality. It is maybe here that the attempt fromBeingand Time to distinguish between an existentially most primordial anxiety and a physiological, derivative one runs into difficulties. If the concept of Stimmung is an embodying attunement as well as attuning embodiment, if the corporeal is dissolved into bodily states which are basically attunements with no unprojective possibility of self-explication, then one finds it somewhat forcible to disentangle them again into two radically different species of anxiety. The fact that, according to Heidegger, the existential anxiety reveals the world as world and remains

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severed from the physiological anxiety entitles one to assume that this latter makes up a landscape of the corporeal 'world' in its questionable ontological remoteness from the existential world of Dasein. Granted that the Stimmung holds understanding and corporeality together, what keeps the two types of anxiety apart and especially at what level? Cannot this unique type of stone which is anxiety hit the two birds of understanding and feeling with just one stroke? In my opinion this difficulty is not the last reason why Heidegger later abandoned the concept of anxiety. 32

7. Concluding remarks I have attempted to show that Heidegger's idea of an artistic world being expressly [eigens] set up in the work is based upon the assumption that the material itself is deprived of such ontological dignity. Dance does not qualify in this respect and drama or music do only to the extent to which they allow for a prior disembodiment of their corresponding 'substances,' i.e., the living dialogue and s o u n d . 33 This could explain Heidegger's reserve at least in the case o f the first of them. His insistence upon the express character that the founding of the masterpiece has (it appears at least twice in the essay) points out by contrast to the problematic nature of an artwork whose world is rather an in-corporation, an inconspicuous expansion of our bodily 'world.' If we take into account that this expressness refers in fact to the opening of a new world and thus comes to support a decision on the part of the beholder to remain open to the truth of being, we notice the intimate connection between expressness and resolute openness [Entschlossenheit]. Creation can only take place expressly, specifically, that is, in the same way in which one resolves to remain open. A resolution to let one's existentially projected world be renewed does not just 'happen' inconspicuously but stands and falls with its express commitment. The thrust o f this is that a founding corporeal 'world' that grows and changes unawarely contaminating the existentially projected world seriously threatens the possibility o f authenticity by undermining its very comerstone, the concept of resolute openness. We remember the way Merleau-Ponty conceived of this dilation [dilatation] of our gestural register by means of habit acquisition: "Habit expresses our power of dilating our being in the world, or changing our existence by appropriating fresh instruments. ''34 Given that in principle the body naturally remains open to new constellations of gestures, that its 'world' expands without ever sinking into insignificance upon the catharctic advent of a moment of vision, it seems as though it claimed to take over the privileged role of resolute openness while dissolving the latter's inaugural character into the inconspicuousness of habit. Correspondingly, the

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concept of understanding shifts in the direction of an agreement between the encountered entity and the projection itself as given capacity to realize the encounter bodily. 35 Disease and physical handicaps would then play for this corporeal 'world' the same role as anxiety for the ecstatically projected world. It is over this obscure region of corporeal effectuation that the Heideggerian conception of projection steps thus realizing through this very step something more akin to a dance than Heidegger would be ready to admit. It is maybe the irony of etymology - can we still take this as a mere coincidence after reading Derrida?-that the foundational concept of transcendence [Oberschritt] preserves in its ontologically granted purity an embarassing reference to our everyday step [Schritt]. At least this can be safely said, namely that from the positivistically contaminated Fortschritt of philosophy back to poetic thinking through a Zuriickschritt while nevertheless carefully preserving the primacy of the Oberschritt, what wins the floor of the open are the masterly steps of a painstaking effort t o . . . step over that problematic shadow of thought which is corporeality. My attempt was simply to show that this gracious zig-zag of moves that Heidegger's ontology describes lies only one step away from dance.

Notes 1. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Penguin Books, 1969), 135, translation modified. 2. Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, trans. David Farrel Krell, 4 vols. (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1991), 1: 98. 3. "No matter how much influence corporeality is granted upon the factical possibilities of spirit, a philosophical knowledge of man will, as conceptual, be always centered on spirit, at least, in order to be quite cautious, as long as presenting the functioning process of gastric juices as an interpretation of man still does not succeed." Phiinomenologische Interpretation von Kants Kritik der reinen Vernunfi (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1977), Gesamtausgabe 25: 399, my translation. 4. Nietzsche 1: 51. 5. Martin Heidegger, Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1992), GA 29/30: 205. 6. Nietzsehe 1: 99. 7. "Last night, my right arm stretched out of my sheets fell asleep, 'died.' I pinch it between the thumb and the index of my left hand and I lift this foreign thing, this enormous and ponderous mass of flesh, this heavy and fat limb of someone else welded to my body by mistake." Michel Toumier, Vendredi ou les limbes du Paei.fique (Paris: Gallimard, 1972), 87, my translation. 8. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), 238; cf. also 75. 9. "The understanding that there exist fundamentally different modes of being itself and, therefore, of entities was particularly pointed up through the interpretation of animality." GA 29/30: 400, my translation.

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10. Friedrich Nietzsche, Der Wille zur Macht (Leipzig: Alfred KrOner Verlag, 1930), 552, note 820, my translation. 11. GA 29/30: 405. 12. "The Origin of The Work of Art," in Philosophies of Art and Beauty ed. A. Hofstadter and R. Kuhns (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1976), 689. 13. Ibid. 673. 14. Ibid. 687. 15. Thus Spoke Zarathustra 241. 16. Nietzsche 1: 99. 17. "To finitude," writes Heidegger, "belong in-consequence [Un-folge], lack of foundation and hiddenness of foundation." GA 29/30: 306, my translation. 18. "The gesture has in no way unveiled an essence of the lady, one should rather say that the lady revealed to me the charm of a gesture. Since one can consider the gesture neither as the property of an individual, nor as her creation (no one being capable to create a gesture of one's own, entirely original and belonging only to oneself), not even as one's instrument; the opposite is true: it is the gestures that are using us; we are their instruments, their marionettes, their incarnations." Milan Kundera, L'immortalitk (Paris: Gallimard, 1990), 19, my translation. 19. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology o f Perception, trans. C. Smith (New Jersey: The Humanities Press, 1981), 135. 20. Granted that the 'ordinary vehicles of meaning' are more than purely external, unproductive devices, the distinction between a house and a home of meaning, although a matter of degree and, hence, not deconstruetable, remains still useful. 21. A proper defence of this thesis exceeds the task of the present essay. My conclusion corroborates the results of the excellent study in which Georg Picht, starting from the direction of Nietzsehe's conception of history, proved the latter's thinking to be emancipated from metaphysics. Cf. Nietzsche (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1988). 22. Thus Spoke Zarathustra 68. 23. Cf. Maurice Merleau-Ponty: " . . . I read anger in the gesture, the gesture does not make me think of anger, it is anger itself." And further: "The sense of the gestures is not given, but understood, that is, recaptured by an act on the spectator's part." Phenomenology of Perception 184-185. 24. Nietzsche 1: 100. 25. GA 29/30: 391, emphasis in the original. 26. Rainer Maria Rilke, Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge (Frankfurt am Main: Insel Verlag, 1910), 52. 27. "First when they [the memories] turn into our blood, vision and gesture, nameless and no longer to be differentiated from ourselves, first then can it happen that in a very peculiar hour the first word of a verse arises in their midst and radiates out of them." Die Aufzeichnungen 24, my translation. The episode in which Malte submits to the gesturally conveyed 'call' of one of his hands (98-99), or the walk behind the Parisian whose strange gestures arouse in Malte a deep solidarity against the shared anxiety (71-76) support the idea that Rilke had in mind a much more intimate relationship between body and anxiety than Heidegger would concede. 28. Nietzsche 2: 218. 29. It is for this reason that Kafka's Gregor Samsa in The Metamorphosis appears to me most bizarre when carrying on his soliloquy, i.e., thinking humanly in an inhuman body. 30. Cited by Milan Kundera, Lestestamentstrahis(Paris:Gallimard, 1993), 178, my emphasis. 31. For the spatiality of the body, el. Didier Frank, Heidegger et le probl~me de l'espace (Paris: Eds. de Minuit, 1986), esp. "L'Angoisse, La Chair et L'Espaee." 32. The same track resumed later in the discussion of the Greek deinon and to deinotaton avoids the clear location of the uncanny [Unheimliches] with respect to the ontological difference; deinon is rather that which trangresses the familiar, the limits, any precise location and, presumably, any coincidence with itself that would allow us to inquire about

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its 'in itself.' Cf. Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. R. Manheim (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959), 150-152. 33. It can be argued that the sounds ofthe human voice are predominantly emotion, expression, disclosure, thus accomplishing what Milan Kundera has called a "semantic gesture." Leos Jan~ek, the Czech composer, has tested the possibilities of music from this psychologizing perspective unlike Stravinsky, for example, who stripped the notes of any expressive power. Probably this form of debate would have much to benefit from Derrida's Speech and Phenomena where the dichotomy between 'pure' meaning and 'pure' expression gets deconstructed. For the former remark I am indebted to Kundera, Les testaments trahis, 161-162. 34. Phenomenology of Perception 143. 35. "To understand is to experience the agreement between what we aim at and what is given, between the intention and the performance - and the body is our anchorage in a world." Phenomenology of Perception 144-145.