The beginning of movies are anxious moments. There's a bombardment of signs as a world is constructed before our eyes. It is a swift composition (a novel or painting are more luxuriously paced); within mere minutes a universe of characters and their interrelations are established, usually without any meta-narrative or explanation. As I begin to stitch it all together, a subtle panic lurks: what if sense never emerges? What if I can't figure out what's going on?

And there is always that one person -- perhaps a friend, perhaps someone else in the theater -- who cannot wait for the shapes to emerge, for the sense to coalesce: who's that guy? why's he doing that? These questions become infuriating nudges, inspiring a visceral rage: I want to tear the flesh from the failed hermeneut's face, friend or not. A blind madness emerges. To make sense of things is to live; for someone to ask me to make sense for them is to ask me to live for them. But I'm already busy living my own life, making my own sense of the world. Hence, a primal urge to eliminate the creature who wants my life.

To read is to wrestle, an encounter of bodies, at least mine and the text's. Sense is not guaranteed.

A Reader does not necessarily follow a text wherever it goes; or at least not precisely. A friend once wrote an elaborate essay in which he reads several books by William Gass. In this essay, my friend writes, "Gass' books are horrible." Disjunctures, caesuras, gaps, twisted pleats, and unexpected reversals all work to define a readerly engagement. A Reader may be moving along just fine, piqued and prodded excitedly, barely audible yet distinct cries bubbling forth -- "Yes! Yeahyeahyeah, Oh, Yes!" -- when all of a sudden the ground disappears, sense vanishes, and there before our Reader sits some monstrosity, some ineffable addendum dangling just so, as if taunting the Reader's hubris of thinking that he has indeed made sense of something. The "yes's" give way to a stalled "huh?" as the orgasmic frenzy of a world taking shape becomes a plaintive befuddlement.

The Reader is now at a juncture. Either the sense heretofore forged needs to be adjusted, or the grotesquerie needs to be incorporated, assumed, digested. The obstacle may be a mere pot hole; then again, it may demand a fundamental reordering of sense, of limits, a realignment of what the hell is going on here. A flirtatious engagement is riddled with such moments: she likes me; no, no, she finds me supremely distasteful; no, wait, she digs me, I can tell; etc.

I have read Nietzsche. But there has always been one moment ­ a moment he himself calls his greatest ­ which leaves me absolutely confounded: the Eternal Return. Nietzsche explains the Eternal Return -- or does he wonder, as if he too were reading his own thought? -- as the concept that the world repeats itself identically and ad infinitum; every gesture, burp, smile, trip, and dream happens exactly the same way over and over and over again, forever. I do not understand this idea; I do not know why he includes it; it does not make sense (to me) within the sense I've made of Nietzsche over the years.

Now, Nietzsche often contradicts himself. But this makes sense to me because Nietzsche is concerned with (among other things) the odd logic of the appropriate, of saying the right thing to the right audience: the Hyperboleans need to hear this, the moralists that, women an entirely other thing, etc. Hence, of course he contradicts himself; that makes sense to the sense I've made of Nietzsche.

But then how does the Eternal Return fit into this schema, this construct I've built and named "Nietzsche"? Well, there are other moments within this Nietzsche sense (I do not want to reduce Nietzsche to one possibility, to a paraphrase; the sense a Reader makes is often multifarious). For instance, Nietzsche is interested in the peculiarity of disciplining the instincts, of the will to self-forging. Perhaps the Eternal Return is a cog within this wing, if you will, of the Nietzsche edifice: if we're damned to live the identical life over and over again ad infinitum then it behooves us to live a life we can stand over and over again. And this entails a rigorous self-discipline. But that doesn't suffice. The oddity of the Eternal Return, coupled with the emphasis Nietzsche ascribes to it, makes this last move at digestion incomplete: I remain bloated, as the Eternal Return bounces around my belly, undigested.

One night, sitting with two fellow Readers of Nietzsche, a sense began to emerge (yes, we were high, but still): Nietzsche manages to make sense of difference; his entire oeuvre can be seen as an explication and performance of the complex logic of difference; but the one difference with which he could never finally make sense was sameness; sameness is in fact the supreme oddity: how can two things be exactly the same? The Eternal Return is the ultimate enunciation of sameness; and it is this sameness which remains for Nietzsche the final moment of difference within the sense of his own thought. That is why he calls it "The Greatest Weight": it is an absolutely different idea.

An uncomfortable giddiness ensued as this digestive strategy showed itself, a giddiness which continues today, a giddiness which at once suggests an exhilarating hermeneutic gesture and that something is not quite right with this reading.

Am I now "done" with Nietzsche? Have I sewn up my reading? No, of course not: if nothing else, the Eternal Return will remain a quandary within my inhabitation of Nietzsche, a bloated moment within my Nietzsche feast. Reading is an extended, open event (that nevertheless seeks and operates within limits). A Reader wrestles with a text; sometimes things make sense, they fit; sometimes they don't. But this not-fitting is not the end of a reading; rather, these gaps make the ensuing constellation take this or that shape. These gaps, these disjunctures, temper the rhythm of a reading.

A Reader forges a path through a text according to his metabolism; he puts this here, that there. The manner in which he makes sense marks a border between his own body and the body of the text at hand. This border is as singular as the body which digests. The emergent reading is the entelechy, the realization, of the possibilities which flourish between the body of the Reader and the body of the text. This realization, this reading, is a productive consumption: it re-creates the world, finding new limits of both the Reader and the thing.

In a sense, the Reader resembles our would-be god who categorizes, who orders the world. The Reader prioritizes and hierarchizes as he goes, as he makes sense of things, focusing on this or that moment and then reading everything else in terms of that moment or moments, forging an economy, a symptomology, of this or that text. Deleuze reads Nietzsche's Eternal Return according to the sense he, Deleuze, has made of Nietzsche: the Deleuze-Nietzsche Eternal Return is a willful selection of difference. This makes no sense to me whatsoever (so don't ask me to explain it better). But it certainly makes sense to Deleuze.

Readers make shapes of the world. Who knows what shapes these may be. The Reader must risk his sense, and his nonsense, in order to forge these exquisite constellations.