The
first in a series of apparatus commissioned by the Embassy to
write borderlines or frontiers. This apparatus never performed
its prescribed function. Endlessly rotating in a circle the apparatus
writes with one side and simultaneously erases with the other
side. According to Deleuze, the notion of the eternal return is
clarified in two specific moments.
The first being one's participation
in becoming, thus an affirmation of being; the second being one's
recognition that all moments in the world are moments of becoming
and that the very fact of being of the world is becoming, therefore,
re-affirming that every moment is a return to the state of becoming
and that the very fact of being of the world is becoming, therefore,
re-affirming that every moment is a return to the state of becoming.
In this notion, Deleuze is
influenced by Nietzsche's remarks on Heraclitus regarding the
eternal return in his Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks.
According to Nietzsche, Heraclitus conceived of the world as a
realm of innocent becoming, of 'play as artists and children engage
in it', exhibiting 'coming-to-be and passing away, structuring
and destroying', as the 'game of the great world-child Zeus'.
