What is so extraordinary about this figure or theme of midday? Nietzsche invents and uses this theme in order to provide a figure for the idea of a new beginning, the idea of an event after which nothing will be as before. Is this idea not something that we usually and spontaneously associate with the metaphor or theme of the morning? For instance, after the night of nihilism (the proverbial “dark night of the soul”), a new day will arise, a fresh start.And yet, in relation to this idea, Nietzsche keeps insisting upon another metaphor, that of midday, of “great midday.” Thus Spoke Zarathustra, which traces the path for this New, actually ends in the morning; but the morning is here only as the prelude to midday: “This is my morning, my day is breaking: rise now, rise, thou great noon!” are Zarathustra’s last words. If Zarathustra does not hesitate to suggest to his last companions, the “higher men,” that they might just as well drown in their passion for the Nothing, their death or disappearance is in no way the condition of a “new beginning.” Just before the end, Zarathustra separates from them, leaving them in his cave.
Thus, the time of the event is neither the time of birth nor the
time of death but, so to speak, the time of the “middle.”Why does Nietzsche keep insisting on this?Let us briefly sketch the crucial points of the figure of midday that will interest us throughout this study. There are three closely connected points. The first is the dimension of separation, whose logic is not that of the end, of achieving or finishing (off), but the logic of subtraction, withdrawal, or split. The second point concerns the singular temporality of the event, implying a curving of time as something like a temporal loop coiling in upon itself—midday is a “time-within-time” (in the same sense that the “mousetrap” in Hamlet is a play-within-the-play). It exists in time, it has its time, but it further “hollows out” time from the inside (“the hand moved, the clock of my life drew a breath”). The third point is what Nietzsche formulates in terms of the “shortest shadow”(“Mid-day; moment of the shortest shadow; end of the longest error; zenith of mankind”). Midday is not the moment when the sun embraces everything, makes all shadows disappear, and constitutes an undivided Unity of the world; it is the moment of the shortest shadow. And what is the shortest shadow of a thing, if not this thing itself? Yet, for Nietzsche, this does not mean that the two become one, but, rather, that one becomes two.Why? The thing (as one) no longer throws its shadow upon another thing; instead, it throws its shadow upon itself, thus becoming, at the same time, the thing and its shadow.When the sun is at its zenith, things are not simply exposed (“naked,” as it were); they are, so to speak, dressed in their own shadows. This poetic description should not distract us from the epistemological issue involved here, given that it plays a crucial part in Nietzsche’s theory of truth.
All three points evoked above are articulations of a certain figure of the two. And this figure of the two constitutes—such is my claim—the event “Nietzsche.” This figure of the two is Nietzsche’s fundamental invention. It involves his breaking out of the field determined by the sterile alternative between realism and nominalism. It involves a specific articulation of the relationship between the Real and representation. This articulation does not place the Real somewhere beyond or outside representation, nor does it abolish the Real in the name of reducing everything to mere representational semblances. It suggests that the Real exists as the internal fracture or split of representation, as its intrinsic edge on account of which representation never fully coincides, not simply with its object, but with itself. This figure of the two, together with what it implies, is the thread we will follow and explore further, especially in Part II (Part I deals primarily with Nietzsche’s detecting and analyzing a growing “discontent in civilization”).
After his illness broke out, Nietzsche lived for another twelve years. He died in August 1900, at the “break” of the century. He is said to have died at midday.
From The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche’s Philosophy of the Two by Alenka Zupančič
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