I’m in Chicago this week attending the annual Colloquium on Violence & Religion (CoV&R).
I brought Cynthia L. Haven’s All Desire Is Desire for Being and found myself lingering over her chapter on Girard’s reading of Nietzsche. Girard comments on the famous passage from The Gay Science in which the Madman announces the death of God and asks, “Where is the planet spinning to now? To what place is its movement carrying us?” The imagery is striking precisely because it is not primarily an argument. Nietzsche does not begin with a proposition. He begins with the experience of disorientation.
Girard’s reading is that Nietzsche is describing the consequences of what he calls the sacrificial crisis—the collapse of the differences that once ordered human society. Whether or not Nietzsche himself fully understood the anthropological implications of his own imagery, Girard argues that he saw the experience with remarkable clarity. The world no longer knows where it stands because it has lost the center around which it once revolved.
Reading this passage, I found myself thinking not of another philosopher but of Shakespeare.
In Troilus and Cressida, Ulysses gives his well-known speech on “degree”:
Take but degree away, untune that string,
And, hark, what discord follows...
The speech is often read as a defense of hierarchy, but I suspect that “degree” means something richer than hierarchy alone. It refers to the distinctions, relationships, and forms that allow a society to remain intelligible to itself. Remove those distinctions, and appetite gradually becomes its own justification. Ulysses traces that movement with unsettling precision.
What struck me was not that Shakespeare and Nietzsche agree. They do not. Shakespeare writes from within a Christian world that still possesses an order, while Nietzsche is writing after he believes that order has collapsed. Yet each reaches for remarkably similar images. Shakespeare imagines an orchestra gone out of tune. Nietzsche imagines a planet spinning without a center.
Girard’s contribution is to suggest that these are not merely poetic images but descriptions of the same anthropological reality.
That thought alone made the flight worthwhile. I’m sure the conference will give me much more to ponder over the next few days
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