Artwork by Wesley Johnson
The hymen is neither consummation nor virginity, neither the veil nor unveiling,
neither the inside nor the outside. It is that which stands between;
the intimate binding middle that brings together two bodies whilst holding them apart.
Someone from Wisconsin - America's dairyland - who, when not making cheese, likes to read European philosophy and listen to old school punk rock, suggests with reference to a recent post that perhaps what Heidegger means by the phrase Nietzsche hat mich kaputt gemacht is that Nietzsche was the one who took his philosophical innocence or purity - his virginity, if you will - and that the phrase might productively be read in relation to Derrida's thinking on the hymen [1].
That seems to me to be a clever and helpful insight. And I do like the idea of Heidegger being broken by Nietzsche in the sense of being fucked and fucked hard (or fucked up and fucked over). One can't help recalling Deleuze's interpretation of the history of philosophy in terms of penetrating (and being penetrated by) those authors who move us most (something that ultimately results in monstrous offspring) [2].
The key thing is that inspiration comes not from above, but from behind and below and that there is no immaculate conception; there is, rather, pain, violence, bloodshed ... Philosophy is not an ideal love of wisdom, but a perverse form of libidinal materialism.
Heidegger isn't merely stimulated by Nietzsche's ideas, he's ravished and broken by the insistence with which Nietzsche imposes himself; Nietzsche infiltrates, inseminates, and impregnates. Which is why Zarathustra's instruction to his followers to lose him and find themselves, isn't so easy. Once the hymen has been torn - and one's virginity is lost in the very act that proves its existence - there's no going back; one is fatally wedded to Nietzsche for life.
Notes
[1] Unfortunately, my knowledge of Derrida is very limited; as far as I understand it, hymen indicates both proximity and separation; i.e., the relation and the difference between two bodies. But what this tells us - or how we are supposed to think la logique de l'hymen in relation to the Nietzsche/Heidegger relationship - I'm not quite sure.
For Derrida's description of the hymen as a kind of mediating space, see 'The Double Session', in Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (University of Chicago Press, 1981), pp. 210-215
[2] See Deleuze, 'Letter to a Harsh Critic', in Negotiations, trans. Martin Joughin, (Columbia University Press, 1995), p. 6.
