“Bird that heralds dawn, please stop the clock’s hands now.”
Life’s pleasures hang like dew on the tips of grass; happiness in this world is foam and lightning. As Qian Zhongshu writes, “We hope it will come, we hope it will stay, we hope it will come again.”1 Yet time flows on—what mighty power could preserve the splendor of days gone by? If a god promised you happiness without end, would you willingly turn this world into an eternal recurrence?
In episode 7 of Revue Starlight, Nana Daiba tells us that, to see the 99th Seisho Festival again, she would rather live inside a motionless circle: endlessly a character who already knows the story, enjoying a brilliance at once fleeting and eternally preserved, working out how to recreate exactly the same stage.2
Just as Faust’s wish for his imagined vision of land reclaimed from the sea to linger a moment delivered his soul into Satan’s hands, just as hundreds of returns to June 8, 1965, would ultimately leave the man who stirred ripples in the Dirac sea to perish in flames—what tragedy will Nana’s countless restagings of the festival bring about?3 Is this conception of recurrence the return of an ancient idea, an imitation of a celebrated work, or an experiment with Nietzsche’s “eternal recurrence” (eternal return)?
If we are willing to try explaining these cycles through Nietzsche’s concepts, it is not hard to see that Nana symbolizes a conjunction of Apollo (a figure we cannot understand through The Birth of Tragedy alone) and a force that obstructs ascent. She is a Platonist sunk in dreams, longing for a world held eternally still for contemplation, unable to escape her fascination with a lost, perfect archetype. Nana suffers from her powerlessness before “It was,” from the lonely sorrow of a will unable to “break time and time’s desire.” Even if, having become top star, she uses brilliance as fuel and willfully makes the world return, the banana muffins cannot forever smell as sweet as they did on that first March 5. The words from Nietzsche’s The Gay Science that Junna quotes to Nana in episode 9 are now easy enough to understand: the original meaning of “Whoever goes not forward comes backward” is “Because we cannot go back, we can only choose to go forward.”4
Put briefly, the early conception of eternal recurrence takes Nana’s restaging to its extreme:
(“The life you live now and have lived before is the life you will live in the future. It will recur over and over, with nothing new. Every pain, joy, thought, and sigh, everything great or small and beyond expression in life, will return in the same order.”)5
Nana cannot even reproduce a single year exactly; this kind of recurrence is a graveyard of sheer nothingness. In Beyond Good and Evil and subsequent works, however, Nietzsche addresses recurrence’s origins and its effects on the individual with an exalted will to power, breaking entirely with his earlier decadence. He interprets recurrence as an unending cry and demand for the world and the will to power, voiced by those who affirm the world most ardently. Believers in eternal recurrence should not merely endure and reconcile past and future; they should also keep asking themselves, “Is this moment worthy of recurring hundreds, thousands of times?” This leads them to obey their desire to create and enter into becoming. (These two readings of eternal recurrence are Heidegger’s eternal recurrence of the same, which emphasizes persistence, and Deleuze’s eternal recurrence of the different, which emphasizes becoming.)
Nana sets the first 99th Seisho Festival at a supreme height, something like Plato’s world of Forms. Every subsequent loop is a copy of that perfect existence. Although differences remain, making these seem less than exact repetitions, for Nana at this point—this contemplative spectator who has fallen into the cave—repetition is nothing more than the product of a clumsy imitation of the archetype. After episode 9, however, her conception of recurrence becomes Nietzschean–Deleuzian: force makes the same continually repeat a simulacral process; to repeat is itself to differ. A somewhat inapt analogy for this transformation would be the process in “On the Vision and the Riddle” (also translated as “The Vision and the Enigma”) in Thus Spoke Zarathustra: Zarathustra overcomes the spirit of gravity (the demon in The Gay Science, the force that obstructs upward and forward movement), corrects the dwarf, and elucidates this heaviest of thoughts.
Nana’s vision of recurrence has two sources:
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First, to preserve what she already possesses and regards as the highest value.
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Second, to remain untouched by the unpredictable turns of future fate.
After losing to Hikari and Karen, she turns from recurrence in its traditional sense to Nietzschean eternal recurrence, accepting chance and attending to the moment. Her embodiment of the Goddess of Despair stems from two things: despair at the limits of development, and despair at the process of development itself. Once, out of impoverishment, she demanded the feeling of being needed; now she gives out of fullness. Nana now recognizes the terror of repeating the same and longs for the transformation difference brings, full of hope for all that comes by chance or necessity.
“You are happy because you know nothing of the sins you will commit, the tragedy that awaits you.” Are the “tragedy,” “sin,” and “pain” endlessly repeated by the Goddess of Despair, played by Nana, merely the delirious ravings of a twisted soul?
The Greek-style costumes and vessels at the 99th Seisho Festival suggest a scene like the feast in the Symposium, with its wise men honoring the gods and drinking wine.
The Giraffe keeps saying that the top star is the eternal protagonist, whose brilliance transcends time. Together with the Seisho Festival’s own song-and-dance form, this gives it the feel of a Dionysian rite. “I, reborn,” in particular, makes me think of Dionysus’s dismemberment and rebirth. (An unprompted association with The Phantom of the Opera: “You will be reborn, as though you had never lived… Forget what you once knew; let your soul guide you to the place you desire. Only then will you belong to me.”)6
In short, the whole performance of Starlight has an underlying mixture of dream and intoxication. This is one reason I have tried to interpret it through Nietzsche. The vessels are for ritual cleansing and drinking, or for sacrifice. But the differences between this year’s staging and last year’s are not confined to movement in the scene (the flags stir in the wind): the vessels also disappear. Has the brilliance of the girls offered in sacrifice been exhausted? Or rather, has the girls’ brilliance, used as fuel, already run out?
At 1:29 in episode 7, the statue of the goddess of beauty first appears, a deity within the tower. (I’m not sure what this actually is—a lighting effect, perhaps?)
Nana then takes a photograph with her phone at 2:01. Likewise, just as her inner monologue ends—at 4:53, with “It was on this day that Nana Daiba, the Stage Girl, was born”—a close-up of the goddess’s statue moves slowly upward for six seconds.
The tower topples, sending up a splash; the fall of that towering thing brings a new deity into being. Yet whatever mighty powers this immortal in the throes of love possesses, all she gains is a passing brilliance, a moment’s joy. What we see again and again is this: “She mourns the herbs that cannot grow in the garden bed; / she mourns the maize that cannot form in the ear.”7
For Platonic metaphysicians, desire is conceived in terms of “acquisition.” Its essence is regret for what is lacking, the evil of incompleteness opposed to reason (a good without reason). In psychoanalysis, meanwhile, desire is an unfulfillable quest. Sliding along an endless chain of signifiers—sounds, images, writing—it finds substitute satisfactions but can never be satisfied completely, because what desire wants has been forbidden by the symbolic order. At first glance, Nana’s behavior fits this account: after ninety-nine Seisho Festivals,8 she covets a lost object that does not exist—perfect, eternal companions and a stage of destiny. Even recurrence cannot fill this hollow desire for what does not exist, while desire proliferates because it cannot be satisfied.
Through his studies of Nietzsche and Bergson and his engagement with Lacanian psychoanalysis, the French thinker Deleuze came to understand “desire” differently. In his reading of Nietzsche’s will to power, he identifies it as the desire to create and to give, suggesting desire’s productivity. Drawing on eternal recurrence and Bergson’s thinking about movement, he also gradually developed his own concepts of time and difference. Finally, in Anti-Oedipus, he bound desire to machines.9 Let us try taking Nana as an example.
For Deleuze, desire is not, as earlier thinkers described it, a negative state of lacking an object, but a machine of creation and production. When we regard Nana as a desiring-machine, we mean that she, a human being, forms an abundant, vigorous whole with the inorganic object that is the 99th Seisho Festival—or even a year of time—a whole continually becoming and producing. This resistance to separating human beings from other entities also appears in the importance Hikari attaches to the hair ornament Karen gave her. What Nana seeks, the object of her desire, is the entire environment that sustains desire, in which it arises and travels: campus life throughout the term leading up to and including the 99th Seisho Festival. Perhaps this is why the loop we see does not simply cover the period from preparations for the festival to the celebration afterward. A desiring-machine cannot exist alone. The entire process in which the Stage Girls compete until the winner becomes top star and makes a wish connects to it as another machine, together constituting an eternal recurrence of differing and opposing entities. The process of recurrence wears away at the metaphor of the “Seisho Festival” as a social machine. As Nana gradually becomes depleted, this alienation of desiring-production makes the entire operation rigid.
“The intoxication of the will, an intoxication of accumulated, surging will.—The essence of intoxication is the feeling of heightened power and overflowing fullness. From this feeling, people bestow gifts on all things and make all things demand gifts from them.”10 At the end of episode 9, after countless loops and two defeats, Nana’s outlook changes. Finally, under Junna’s guidance, she turns from the Goddess of Despair into the Goddess of Hope. She becomes someone who gives because she overflows, the figure Nietzsche describes in “The Night Song” and in Zarathustra’s departure from the valley: a believer in and teacher of eternal recurrence, reconciling and embracing all things, recognizing that life is intoxication, is will to power. Even when faced with the question that Homer and Hesiod put to Silenus, Dionysus’s companion, in The Birth of Tragedy (the famous answer actually came from the Greek poet Theognis, who particularly interested Nietzsche from his secondary-school years through university), she can answer calmly:11 we ask only for a moment’s brilliance—why fear this life’s sorrows and hardships?
To close, Nietzsche’s “Among Friends,” dedicated to this Goddess of Despair.12
If I did well, let us be silent,
If I did badly, let us laugh
And do it bad again by half,
More badly done, more badly laugh,
Until the grave, when down we climb
Friends! Well! What do you say?
Amen! Until we meet again!
