Dark: Reflections on time’s eternal recurrence, or abyssal thinking

And when you stare for a long time into an abyss, the abyss stares back into you (Friedrich Nietzsche – Beyond Good and Evil (BGE), §146, p.69.)

So begins Episode 1 of Season 2 of Dark: a time-travelling Netflix drama set against a nuclear energy plant in the fictional town of ‘Winden’ Germany. Undeniably, Dark is a series that touches on some familiar themes: love and family (especially its fragmentation), birth and death (as an endless cycle), and nuclear energy (its hazardous consequences). It is a series that, according to lead actor Louis Hofmann, is “a generational story about whether you are like your parents, whether you imitate them, whether you want to act exactly opposite to how they were acting in their youth” (Seal, 2020). Yet the series also enters unfamiliar terrain by directly addressing the concept of time itself – especially in exploring how the human subject can come-into-being in such a way that its sense of agency, its desires, and its most innate sense of value can become radically altered, monstrously so, by an unremitting passing of time. And it is precisely due to its attention to the concept of time and processes of subjective transformation that Dark seems to directly contemplate the preceding line to Nietzsche’s famous words on the abyss: “Whoever fights with monsters should see to it that he does not become one himself” (BGE §146, p.69).

In order to engage with ‘time’ itself and its radical remaking of subjectivity, characters in Dark explicitly refer to Nietzsche’s ‘eternal recurrence’ [ewige Wiederkunft] – or what he sometimes terms the ‘eternal return’ [ewige Wiederkehr] – understood abruptly as “the unconditional and infinitely repeated circulation of all things” (Ecce Homo (EH), III BT 4: 48). On the one hand, the eternal recurrence suggests time must be understood as explicitly cyclical and interconnected. Time, in this framing, evokes a certain inevitability: as the characters in Dark exhibit through concurrent, folding plotlines, time’s eternal recurrence seems to imply an absence of anything resembling free will. “Everything will happen as it always has” is repeated by several characters across Dark’s three Seasons, suggesting not a glib pronouncement that ‘nothing ever changes’ but a direct theorisation of a notion of time that involves the necessary unfolding of contingent events whose actualisation occur according to their own mutual necessity. For Nietzsche, time’s eternal recurrence does not invoke the figure of a glib human subject resigned to a future that is pre-determined, but concerns how the human might entirely remake its sense of the future and its specific power to embrace the widest extent of future experience at its most joyous and most woeful extremes. The call to embrace all of what is possible in future experience – including processes such as suffering – is directly to embrace the future of what life could be in its fullest sense, or what Nietzsche (EH, III BT 4: 48) refers to as a “Dionysian philosophy” in which in the human subject strives to live in such a way that it is willing to experience everything it has experienced again (double affirmation). This Dionysian philosophy of eternal recurrence shuns a contemporary image of a human that becomes increasingly adapted and harmonious with life through chronological time, and instead confronts forms lived experience that falls outside of the gravity of this habituated image of human life. One of the implications of the eternal recurrence, therefore, is that the human subject may come to perceive time not as a simple unfolding of past, present and future, but in alternative ways such as though looped and synchronous temporal realities. If the eternal recurrence can be said to posit time as looped, or as infinitely re-occurring, this is would imply confronting another notion of time that jars with conventional understandings of agency, decision-making and the human subject’s supposed capacity to shape its future.

On the other hand, the eternal recurrence also signals a specific ethical question concerning how a subject can alter its evaluation of events to live without ressentiment. The eternal recurrence is clearly not restricted to a mediation on time, but also – and perhaps principally – theorises an ethical demand to repeat everything of lived experience again without resentment and precondition. Nietzsche is concerned with a particular practice of living no longer bound by morals, a predefined sense of ethics, nor any set ethical criteria about how to judge the human subject. To this end, the eternal recurrence opens the possibility to affirm hitherto unthought values produced in an immediate experience though a “transvaluation” of values (Nietzsche, 2011 [1910]), which involves the complete rejection of normative (especially Judeo-Christian) productions of ethical value based on the hypothesis of eternal being. As Brassier (2007: 207) reflects, on this level the eternal recurrence “marks the discovery of a previously inconceivable kind of value because it asserts the absolute, invaluable worth of every moment of existence as such”.

To conclude, I want to reflect briefly on how eternal recurrence, and the related transvaluation of values via immediate experience, connects to how geographers have turned to ‘the abyss’ under the auspices of critiquing the colonialising tendences of ‘world making’. In developing the notion of the abyss, abyssal geographies and thinking “seeks to suspend and to question rather than to affirm the cuts and distinctions of the subject and the world” (Chandler & Pugh 2023: 200). In holding open an abyssal cut between subject and world, this line of thinking offers the opportunity to posit a certain decolonising refusal of the impulse to ‘live on better’ within the Anthropocene. Likewise when Nietzsche describes eternal recurrence as his “truly abyssal thought” (EH §3, p.10 original emphasis), this not only signifies a rejection of the family whose image of subjectivity and relation he could not affirm, but also how eternal recurrence marks a concept that problematises an image of human life as a process of living on and living better. It thus comes as no surprise, therefore, that in Dark there is also an effort to problematise the ‘redemptive arch’ of the human subject through the way different characters inhabit the status of hero and anti-hero at the same time within various looped timelines. Yet differently to recent abyssal geographies, for Nietzsche eternal recurrence aims at thinking how the human subject can strive towards an ethical relation to the future free from ressentiment and the paralysis of the negative. Abyssal-thinking-as-eternal-recurrence is not about affirming a temporal cut that can be willed as a subject, but a much more modest recognition of the human’s partial agency within an incessant passing of time, and a mode of living towards the future in such a way that it might be repeated exactly how it was and without limit. Dark develops this form of temporal thinking by staging how chronological time already relies on its non-chronological other in the formulation of contemporary regimes of time and time-making (see Keating, 2024). As Hofman’s character realises towards the end of Season 2: “I thought I still had time. Why do people say that anyway, ‘to have time’? How can you have time when it clearly has you?” (Dark, 2019).

Thomas P. Keating is a human geography researcher who investigates problems posed by human-technology relationships. He has recently published on nuclear memory in Progress in Environmental Geography, geophilosophies in Subjectivity, techno-genesis in Progress in Human Geography, and co-edited Speculative Geographies (Palgrave Macmillan).

Referenser

Brassier, R. (2007) Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction. London: Palgrave Macmillan UK.
Chandler, D., & Pugh, J. (2023). Abyssal geography. Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography, 44(2), 199-214.
Dark (2019) “An Endless Cycle” Season 2 Episode 6. Directed by Baran bo Odar. Available at: Netflix (29 July 2024).
Keating, T. (2024). Eternal Objects of Nuclear Waste Futures. In More-Than-Human Aesthetics (pp. 42-56). Bristol University Press.
Nietzsche, F. (2002 [1882]) Beyond Good & Evil. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Nietzsche, F. (2009 [1908]). Ecce homo: how to become what you are. Oxford University Press.
Nietzsche, F. (2011 [1910]). The Will to Power. Vintage.
Seale, J. (2020) One character, three actors: Meet the stars of knotty netflix smash dark. The Guardian. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2020/jun/25/netflix-dark-louis-hofmann-andreas-pietschmann-dietrich-hollinderbaumer (Accessed: 22 August 2024).