And I understood that significance demands frequentation, the frequenting of a practice. One does not arrive at the significance of a language, for example, in which one does not have a sustained relation where one individuates oneself, in a language that one does not speak, no more than one arrives at the significance of a music that one does not frequent assiduously—like the poetry of Mallarme, which gives itself only to the patient.

It is thus that I came to impose upon myself and to systematically practice my disciplines, my melete—where I discovered that significance has a part essentially tied to memory: objects and, more generally, the “significants”—the utterances, books, signs and symbols, objets d’art, and all that which frames the unity of human milieus—only appear to me as echoes of my memory. It is insofar as they respond to an expectation of my memory, a protention, that they can signi-fy, make signs, make signs to me. From then on it was a question of learning to cultivate high expectations.

This affirmation of the Ubermensch is achieved not by a simple and naive will of stubbornness or betise, but an augmentation of the senses. Such an augmentation of the sense doesn’t mean today’s “human enhancement” where intagible objects or subharmonic frequencies can be seen or heard, but a development of a sensibility that transcends the limits of the five sense. In Nietzschean philosophy, this new sensibility means rapture (Rausch, sometimes rendered as “intoxication,” or “ecstasy”). In rapture, the human oversteps the limitations on the senses in everyday life. It was in this sense that Nietzsche considered art to be physiological.

We view reality – the world of experience – as human collective practice in all of its living content and in the entire sum of forces and resistances that generate that content. The task of cognition consists in expediently organising experience. Every act of organisation is carried out precisely by combining specific elements. Consequently, it is necessary to have elements of experience before us, and they are not merely ‘data’ given to us ‘ready-made’. They must be singled out and isolated from the continuous flow of experience. (206)

If we completely abstract ourselves from humanity and its methods of labour and cognition, then there would be no physical experience, no world of regular phenomena. There would remain only the elemental spontaneity of the universe, which would know no laws, since it could not measure, calculate, or communicate. In order to understand it and to master it, we are obliged once again to introduce humanity, which would exert its efforts to struggle with that spontaneity, to know it, change it, and organise it. Then, once again, we would obtain physical experience, with its objective – i.e. socially worked-out and socially useful – regularity. (219)