Leaping

I read a paper (in draft form) by a friend today and had one of those moments where you realise/make a connection, and then can't work out if it's one you made ages ago and then forgot. There's a quote from Deleuze's Nietzsche and Philosophy that has always been one of my favourites, and that was originally what I was going to base my PhD around except I never really got that far (was the quote even in there? Almost certainly, it's barely taken me a week to mention it here.. and yet, I just searched for it, and it's not in there once. Well. I really don't know what to say.. right, the quote..)

It's from the final part of the first section (The Tragic: 16. The Touchstone):

From Pascal to Kierkegaard one bets and then leaps. But these are not the exercises of Dionysus or Zarathustra: leaping is not dancing and betting is not playing. It will be noted how Zarathustra, without preconceptions, opposes playing to betting and dancing to leaping: it is the bad player who bets and above all it is the buffoon who leaps, who thinks that leaping means dancing, over­ coming, going beyond.

It's the leaping-dancing distinction that I've always been interested in (I haven't read much Pascal) (and I like dancing) (I mean, I like playing too, so that's clearly not it.. still.) - the Kierkegaardian leap of faith as an incommunicable rupture from the past, vs dancing which according to Deleuze here is transformative in a different way.

My friend's draft that I read today was contrasting Fanon and Glissant's approaches to how the past might inform different, decolonialised, futures. Fanon talks of the need for a rupture with History (capital H) and writes that "I must constantly remind myself that the real leap consists of introducing invention into life." (Black Skin, White Masks - Fanon was apparently reading Fear and Trembling around the time he wrote this). Glissant, on the other hand, emphasises the role of histories (plural, small h) which, unlike the overarching colonial grand narrative History, may provide multiple points into different futures (this is all me paraphrasing the draft btw - I'll try and put a proper link up to it when there's a version to link to).

Anyway. The thing that this made me realise was a(nother) way of understanding the difference between the dance and the leap. A leap is never multiple. It is one single moment in time, one all-or-nothing movement, and it is only ever in one direction. One cannot change or correct a leap midway through - this, from what I remember, is the whole point of the leap, a throwing oneself into the mercy of that which transcends regular ethics and humanity. I also, as I write this, have a feeling that it is more complicated than this, and that I'm probably taking the metaphor too far, so sorry to Kierkegaard for that, I will try to make it up to you one day, but until that point and in lieu of infinite time I'll just have to go with my gut.

Leaping is not a multiplicity. Dancing is. That was the thought I had.