Inclining: Before the Body

“And swiftly I would anticipate my end and say
that I am present in the after of my life.
I incline.”

3 January 1889. In Turin’s Piazza Carlo Alberto, Friedrich Nietzsche witnesses the incessant, brutal blows that a coachman repeatedly inflicts on his own horse with a whip. Irremediably moved by the scene, he runs towards the horse and embraces it, bursting into tears until he faints. Nietzsche sobs, embraces and brays. He never writes again, except for the well-known letters of madness, confined to an asylum, isolated from the world and absorbed in himself.

He spends the next eleven years of his life, the last before his death in 1900, without uttering a single word or breaking a single silence, cared for by his mother and sister, repeatedly and tirelessly playing one note on the piano: B flat. That note, endlessly repeated in a monotonous sequence, as his sister Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche describes it, finally becomes the very stone that Sisyphus drags eternally, struggling no longer against gravity but against himself. Nietzsche before the mirror. Imagine: he remains inclined.

From The Birth of Tragedy until his death, music signified for him both the grandeur and the abyss of existence. Music is lost in thought. When Nietzsche inclines, philosophy collapses, as in the death of Socrates, as Maurice Blanchot reminds us in The Writing of the Disaster:

“Socrates, certainly, does not write, although, beneath the voice, through writing, he gives himself to others as the perpetual subject, perpetually destined to die. He does not speak; he questions. In questioning, he interrupts and interrupts himself without cease, giving ironic form to the fragmentary and, through his death, devoting speech to the obsession of testamentary writing (though without a signature).”¹

When Socrates dies, the birth of dignified death takes place. Disaster is inscribed in language, written and described; where nothing seems to remain, an appearance, a spectre, springs forth. It is the ear of the other that signs, as Jacques Derrida so aptly reminds us. Socrates thus inaugurates the birth of dignified death: his body lies after ingesting the fatal mixture of hemlock (Conium maculatum) and opium (Papaver somniferum). With no apparent ethics or aesthetics. Everything seems one. Gravity takes control of his body. In the end, it is the others who incline: those who judged him and sentenced him to death. Those friends, Greeks, compatriots, who lent him their ears, finally inclined.

For before the dead, in the presence of their absence, we always offer our bodies; we yield before death just as we attend in listening. Death and attention unveil our bodies in an inclination where gravity becomes present without being seen. We vibrate in silence, with the fragility of reverence and surrender. The first true inclination takes place at the first wake².

Listening bears witness to this: every act of listening entails an inclination and certifies the death of the sound it attends to and to which we lend our ears. The listening body is therefore all ears and can only yield before the other, inclining towards the fragility and vulnerability implicit in the radical nature of experience.

Death and listening unveil the body that imagines itself upright. In an audience without faith, everything seems godforsaken, a suffering world. Let us remember for a moment those men who raise themselves above the earth as warriors and masters of upright thought. Deaf to the other, bodies struggle for the stability that gravity calls into question. Before the dead, a possible response can arise only through a relocation of experience within the relation between body and world.

An inclined body yields to what comes before, becoming conscious of gravity and opening itself to perceptual channels previously unknown. Every body is an excess. Inclination therefore always exists in relation to a fixity³. We cease to be in order to become. We become without intending to. A silent pact recognises the forces that move and affect us before we ourselves initiate any movement, however much we may have learned and practised what we learned. Memory is not the same as recollection. Martyrs know this well. They therefore bear witness to their faith even as their bodies are tortured. They rise in the rectitude of blind faith, left speechless before the delight of others. What we do before the pain of others betrays us before ourselves. We stand before the mirror.

In Chantal Maillard’s words, we undoubtedly have a strange propensity for verticality. (…) Let us remember Friedrich Nietzsche embracing the neck of an exhausted, mistreated horse. That this gesture was regarded as a symptom of madness is a clear indication of a sick society⁴.

In this gesture, the ethics of human compassion is born. Knowing how to incline is the sign of a being that embraces everything and listens to everything. The one who knows how to hear what nobody wishes to hear: Avalokiteshvara. The Sanskrit name is interpreted in many ways: the one who hears the cries of the world, the Lord who looks down, the Lord who looks in every direction. It appears that there truly is a way of unfolding omnidirectionally towards the world. It appears so, and this is precisely what we undergo.