Fusing the horizons: Heidegger, Nietzsche and the time of the "Augenblick"

This paper examines Heidegger’s lecture to the Bremen Club – delivered in 1953 – entitled Wer ist Nietzsche’s Zarathustra as the foreground for Heidegger’s notion of Augenblick in connection to the figure of Zarathustra and the concept of Eternal Return of the Same in the Nietzsche lectures – delivered in 1937. In these lectures Heidegger sums up his interpretation of Zarathustra as the figure whose task it is communicate the doctrine of the eternal return of the same and who therefore has as his particular task the explanation of the meaning of time. Heidegger cites repeated sayings of the eternal return. At the centre of the sayings is the passage referring to the riddle of the doorway named Augenblick. The question I shall endeavour to ask is: what is the eventuation of the Augenblick in the turn (Kehre) of the return (Wiederkehre)? I argue that the notion of Augenblick is key to Heidegger’s thinking of the turn and the understanding of the figure of Zarathustra as the return of the transcendence of Dasein. This connection becomes explicit through an exegesis of the different analogies delineated in the structure of the event of Augenblick – er-augen, Er-eignis – with Wieder-kehr/Wider-kunft.