While talking with a friend a couple of hours ago, Henry Ford slithered into the conversation. We started talking about Ford, assembly lines, square dancing, and everything I said sounded rather, well, familiar. Then I realized that I was stealing without a pang of conscience themes from one of my favorite footnotes by the evil David Bentley Hart.* You know Hart, the jolly fellow who forgets his notes and always has a cold or some such condition when he gives a lecture, and who according to some wiseacres requires a Burning Bush and choirs of Seraphim to inform him that it would be good to brush his teeth. Anyway, without ado of any kind, here 'tis.
'Nietzsche's avowed god, Dionysius, is of course an endlessly protean and deceptive deity and a wearer of many masks. When he makes his unannounced appearance at the end of Beyond Good and Evil, as its secret protagonist, whose divine irony has occultly enlivened its pages, he exercises his uniquely divine gift, the numinous privilege of veiling and unveiling, concealment and manifestation; he is the patron deity, appropriately, of the philosophical project of genealogy. But perhaps another veil remains to be lifted, and the god may be invited to step forth again, in his still more essential identity: Henry Ford. . . . And there could scarcely be a more vibrant image of univocity's perpetual beat of repetition - of eternal recurrence, the eternal return of the same - than the assembly line: difference here is certainly not analogical, but merely univocal, and the affirmation of one instance is an affirmation of the whole. It is, moreover, well documented that Ford was a devotee of square dancing, which is clearly akin to (perhaps descended from) the dithyrambic choreia of the bacchantes; Ford was a god who danced,' The Beauty of the Infinite, pg. 435.
*Yes, I have favorite footnotes. Doesn't everybody?
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