Distime and death
16
Jul
Recalling Nietzsche, Chul Han speaks of the feeling of the last of
men (in “Thus spoke Zaratrusta”): “what is love? What is creation? What is craving? What are the stars? ” (page 13), is not the anxious question of a thinker, but rather the desperate question before the end:” ex-pyre (ver-endet) is in distemper instead of dying “(HAN, 2016, 13).
Thus, the author explains, what can not die due to time seems a “dis-time”, then the “present acceleration” is this inability to finish and conclude, disappears “any appropriate or good time” (page 14), then life is small pleasures at night or in the day.
Here Nietzsche ingeniously approaches Heidegger: “being free for death,” but there is something new in our time where “the fragmentation of death reduces death apparently” (page 15), and will say both Nietzsche and Heidegger “oppose fragmentation of time”, but how?
Han’s analysis of Nietzsche is perfect, claiming that insistently invoking “the heir” and the “goal” indicates that “he is not aware of the extent of God’s death” (page 16) (HAN, 2016, p. 16).
Here he will separate Heidegger’s impersonal “se” from Nietzsche’s “last of men”, while in Being and Time, Heidegger tries “history in view of its imminent end,” the inheritance (not Nietzsche’s heir) and transmission as “legacy” generate “a historical continuity,” but in a “present-day disengagement,” the contraction of the present, and the loss of duration and acceleration that are much more complex forms, Han states.
Here I return to the point, where there is no temporal attraction between processes, which would be in essence what he called the smell of time, both in its appreciation and in its duration.
It is a present reduced to current peaks, it also intensifies the terrain of action, to the timelessness (Unzeitigkeit) (page 19), where the opposite of full time, “is that of an empty duration, which expands without principle nor end “(HAN, 2016, p.19).
He explains at the end of this chapter, which he somehow intuited without having an exact explanation, “people tend rather to rush from one present to another.
This is how each one grows old without becoming bigger, “then time ex-pyre in the meantime”.
