centred on the notion of a 'grand ephemeral pellicule' constituted by the deployed surfaces of the body, which are swept by an incessantly mobile libidinal cathexis generating points of pure sensation or 'intensity'. This description of the libidinal band is perhaps best considered as a philosophical experiment, a paradoxical attempt to explore what experience would be like before the emergence of a self-conscious subject of experience. In Lyotard's view, this emergence can take place only through a cooling of intensity, a transformation of energy. Rendering more explicit the assumptions of his commentary on Borges, he writes:

Theatricality and representation, far from being something one should take as a libidinal given, a fortiori as a metaphysical given, result from a certain kind of work on the labyrinthine and moebian band, an operation which imprints these special folds and creases whose effect is a box closed in on itself, and allowing to appear on the stage only those impulses which, coming from what will from now on be called the exterior, satisfy the conditions of interiority. ¹⁰

Once the representational chamber of consciousness is constituted, then the libidinal band is inevitably occluded: all representation is misrepresentation. For Lyotard each segment of the band is 'absolutely singular', so that the attempt to divide it up into conceptual identities 'implies the denial of disparities, of heterogeneities, of transits and stases of energy, it implies the denial of polymorphy'. ¹¹ This ontological affirmation of an irreducible plurality -- in more or less sophisticated versions -- has been one of the most influential themes of post-structuralism, and has had widespread political repercussions. It is, however, fraught with difficulties, which I would like to explore by looking a little more closely at the Nietzschean thought by which it is inspired.

From the very beginning of his work, Nietzsche is concerned to combat the notion of knowledge as the mere reproduction of an objective reality, believing that forms of knowledge necessarily are -- and should be -- in the service of and shaped by human interests. The argument is already central to The Birth of Tragedy, where Nietzsche draws an unfavourable contrast between Greek tragedy at the height of its powers -- a form of artistic creation which, through its blending of Dionysiac insight and Apollonian order, was able to confront the

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