Prosumption, the interrelated process of production and consumption, is increasingly obvious everywhere, but especially on the internet where people “prosume,” for example, Facebook pages, Wikipedia ...entries, and Amazon.com orders. But what is prosumption? Has it evolved out of recent behaviors? Or, is it new and revolutionary? Or, is it what we’ve always done? In fact, it is all three. Beyond dealing with these questions and re-conceptualizing much of what we do as prosumption rather than as either production or consumption, we reflect on the future of prosumption, as well as on the continuing utility of traditional concepts, paradigms, theories and methods that were created to deal with epochs, phenomena and processes seemingly focused on production or consumption.
Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality warns that revenge’s reactiveness can jeopardize salutary change in shared values. I identify an overlooked revenge-mitigating praxis in the spatial movements ...of Nietzsche’s fictional prophet Zarathustra, who seeks collaborators to overcome Christian morality and create new world-affirming values. Zarathustra’s well-known response to revenge, specifically the revenge against time undergirding interpersonal revenge, is willing the eternal return of the same. But he also exemplifies a more available response. “Passing by” is a coming close to, followed by a veering away from, the most insistent embodiments of reigning values. Although Nietzsche inspires agonistic political theory, Zarathustra avoids direct contest in the usual late modern milieux, which he finds constitutively vulnerable to revenge. When revenge floods the communal passional reservoir, it forestalls recovery—essential to new-values creation—of passions effaced by reigning values. Zarathustra still approaches the usual milieux to know the present-past as the raw material of the future. But by then veering away he practices relaxing his value-creative will and not raging against the present-past. Repeated passing by helps him accept and thus better take up the raw material of the future and accept value change’s slow temporality. Since passing by’s concern is the value horizon, not the political sphere, and since it minimizes direct resistance, it may be less reactive to the political sphere than directly contestatory versions of “refusal.” Analysis of Gandhi’s value-praxis confirms passing by as a tactic for less reactive value-creation and as a lens on the reactiveness of different value-praxes.
This paper sketches a tour de force of philosophical as well as poetic concepts of time from G. Vico (ricorsi), F. Nietzsche (Wiederkunft), V. Woolf (Orlando), W. Benjamin (Ur/Sprung), E. Auerbach ...(figura) and Hannah Arendt (“in-between”). It maps the returns and lapses of time from cycles to spirals, theoretical models, and visualizations which are brought forth to solve the problem of how not to fall back into earlier already overcome stages of development, and to realize the network of strings between now and then in order to make a difference in the future. I will underline the statement that we have no access to the archives of history as long as we are not traveling back to the future. For history is not enclosed in the past, it is reassembled by future tasks: from Vico’s chronological monsters as illegitimate descendants to Zarathustra’s pregnancies as preparation for the return of the unbearable, from the queer feeling of time vibrations in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando to Benjamin’s jumping sessions from origin to origin, from Auerbach’s vertical lift to Arendt’s “in-between.”
In this article I shall investigate Alexander Nehamas’s classic interpretation of Friedrich Nietzsche in relation to the idea of self-fashioning. My aim is to dispel certain misconceptions about ...Nehamas’s Nietzsche and to explore what his vision of life actually involves. First, I shall expose some basic presuppositions about self-fashioning, that have to do with the nature of the self. Then I shall examine the concept of style, which is related to the concept of the self, and what it means to give style to oneself. This endeavour will further expand on the prominently literary model of life espoused by Nehamas’s Nietzsche. We will see that Nietzsche’s (in)famous idea of the eternal return plays a pivotal role within this framework. Afterwards, it will be argued that realizing the idea of self-fashioning is a pluralistic affair, unique to each person. Subsequently, the temporal structure of self-fashioning will be addressed in greater detail, by focusing on two aspects: coming to terms with the past and being open to the future. Finally, the processual nature of this project will be further revealed with the analysis of its slogan ‘become who you are.’
This article argues for a new interpretation of the relation between Deleuze's engagements with Nietzsche and Plato in the first chapter of Différence et répétition (1968). It (a) argues scholarship ...has overlooked important features of this relation, (b) reconstructs the text's motivating problem of the reduction of difference to identity, (c) rethinks Deleuze's use of "faire la différence" to show its methodological significance relative to Nietzsche and Plato, (d) proposes an account of the basic movement of differential being or becoming figured as the Nietzschean "test" of the eternal return, (e) examines Deleuze's derivation of the concept of simulacrum from Platonism for his revisionist theory of beings, and (f) proposes a solution to a problem unresolved in existing interpretations of the text: namely, how the text's theory of beings as simulacra and its theory of being or becoming as the differential movement of the eternal return can have systematic unity.
Zarathustra initially describes churches as the stale caves of world-denying priests. However, following his encounter with the eternal return of the same, Zarathustra overcomes this resentful ...atheism. The pure sky that Zarathustra desires above all else, a sky emptied of the gods, is not visible
through the holes in ruined church roofs, but really
these holes. The pure sky is an image of the world liberated from the teleological time of theistic providence, indeed even from the divine necessity that pantheism attributes to the world. Yet for all that it is god-less, the pure sky is acknowledged to be a gift of the same metaphysical-Christian history of God that it only seems to negate: the sky’s pure eye peers through holes in church roofs. Zarathustra, though an “old atheist,” can now love “even churches.” I call this Zarathustra’s affirmative atheism. I also link affirmative atheism to the conception of eternal recurrence as a self-abolishing anti-teaching. In the eternal return, Zarathustra’s atheism is finally indistinguishable from a history of churches and therefore negates itself. But although it is not a new teaching, affirmative atheism points to something novel. This is an atheism that can no longer be taught in doctrines but must be lived as fate.
The appeal of the reimagined Battlestar Galactica series (2003-2009) derives from the struggle between human and Cylon, and the thin line that distinguishes human from machine. One of the major story ...arcs presented in the series is the clash between human polytheism and Cylon monotheism which is reminiscent of ancient Gnostic texts dealing with an alternative creation myth and knowledge of self. Furthering this storyline is the consistent and relentless mantra that "All this has happened before, and all of it will happen again". This cyclic nature of time refers to the concept of the eternal return which may be taken both in the Nietzschean and Eliadean sense where they collide with search of self through gnosis. Thereby, using a philosophical and theological approach, this article seeks to analyse Battlestar Galactica by focussing on the development of key human/Cylon character pairings such as Gaius Baltar and Number Six, along with Kara "Starbuck" Thrace and Leoben Conoy (Number Two).
