McLuhan ANG - Blätterfolge 21

ANG\EXEG_09.WP * 1.10.1993

LACOUE-LABARTHE Typography : "No doubt, it is also necessary that we 'translate' Zarathustra, which is to say, in fact, submit it, ... to an allegorical treatment... And what wie must 'translate,' in any case, is never of the orde of 'poetic ornament,'of poetische Ausschmückung, and still less of the order or 'expression.' But rather, as IT FINALLY COMES OUT, of the order of the unthought. So that if 'Zarathustra' - besides establishing the Gestalt, in the onto-TYPO-logical sense of the term, for /61/ the philosophy of the modern age - still 'FIGURES' something, it es because he is, as a spokesman for Dionysus and the master of the Eternal Return and the Overman, the Gestalt of the thinker who has thought metaphysics at the stage of its COMPLETION: one who has nothing to do, we can easily imagine, with some subject by the name of 'Nietzsche,' but everthing to do with a certain answer, which is 'his' word, to what had TO COME ABOUT and DECLARED ITSELF through him (to a silent, voiceless - but echoing - 'sending' [envoi] of the voice of Being in its withdrawal. ALLEGORISM, at first inevitable - one must ask about the meaning of Dionysus, about what the eagle and the serpent represent, etc. -

ends by EMPTYING [<--> ERFÜLLUNG, completion]

itself out and destroying itself from within,

progressively ERODING THE GAP [gap doch selbst

eroding, endlos schweifend geworden] (from which,

as with all alegorism, it proceed) between 'figure'

and 'concept', but in such a way, that neither the

'figure' nor the 'concept' escapes this sapping,

this process of wear and disintegration.

To the extent that this might be compared with anything philosophical, it is no doubt to SCHELLING'S tautegorism that such a movement should be related. But to a negative verson of such a tautegorism - a little like when we speak of 'NEGATIVE THEOLOGY' - which for this reason, would be nothing other (in a still more obvious way than in Schelling), and at the most extreme limits of hermeneutics as such, than an absolute allegorism. (60/61)