03 Quiet Fidelity

(Close)

Quiet Fidelity: Eternal Return and Inherritance lived forward is a new short philosophical essay illustrated with photographic images exploring how objects and practices serve as mediums for embodying and retrieving personal memory, identity, and philosophical concepts of time and inheritance. The image gallery below and used in the written text were all taken on a 1982 Canon AE1 - Program 35mm film camera fitted with a Canon ND 50mm f 1/1.4 lens, loaded with a roll of Fufifilm 400, during the walks I took whilst thinking through the themes discussed below.
Any B&W images here are digital & documentary.

Quiet Fidelity

Eternal Return and Inheritance Lived Forward

Mike Hale

September 2026

One measures time;
the other exposes it.

The architecture of a life

Next May it will be forty years since my father died. Forty years is an immense chronological distance, yet grief and attachment do not necessarily conform to chronological time. The person who has died does not simply recede at the same rate that the years accumulate. The relation changes form. It becomes embedded within the architecture of the life subsequently lived.

I was seventeen when my father died, only three days beyond my birthday. His death therefore belongs not merely to my remembered past but to the facticity from which my adult life emerged. It forms part of my thrownness: the field of conditions, histories and inheritances into which I found myself delivered without having chosen them.¹

Heideggerian authenticity does not overcome this condition. Nor does it involve discovering a pure self beneath the contingencies of one’s history. It consists in taking up those contingencies as one’s own - resolutely, finitely and without illusion - and projecting possibilities from within them. What has been given becomes the ground upon which a life must still be made.²

Recently I carried a newly acquired Canon AE-1 Program made in 1982 while wearing the Rolex GMT Master 2 BLNR that serves as a memorial watch for my father.³ The Canon matters because it returns me to the world of my father’s cameras and to the Canons of his that I still possess.⁴ The BLNR likewise matters as more than a finely made mechanical object. It has become bound to particular dates, memories and private acts of remembrance. I had decided in 2017 that it was the watch I should acquire for this purpose and managed to do so a few months before the May 11 date of his death. I waited until that day and wore it for the first time whilst making a short trip to Newport beach, a site of remembrance of learning to surf with him as a boy.

Together they formed a quiet conjunction.

One measures time; the other exposes it.

Yet their significance does not finally reside in steel, glass or the mechanics of an old film camera, despite the analogue nature of both machines. Neither object contains memory by itself. What matters is the way of being conducted through them: choosing the watch, lifting the camera, walking into the day, attending to the world and allowing the past to remain active within the present.⁵ The objects become most meaningful when they recede into use. The watch is worn rather than displayed. The camera becomes an instrument of attention rather than an artefact contemplated from a distance. Each enters into a lived relation among body, memory, perception and action. Their meaning lies not in possession but in the living of them.⁶

I have come to think of this as quiet fidelity.

Quiet fidelity is not the conspicuous declaration of remembrance. It does not require grief to be publicly performed or loss to be converted into identity. It persists through small, repeated gestures whose deepest significance may remain invisible to others. It is fidelity enacted as conduct: a way of carrying something without continually announcing that it is being carried.

But quiet fidelity is not merely preservation. To preserve an inheritance unchanged would be to withdraw it from life. An inheritance survives only by passing through the singular existence of the inheritor. It must be interpreted, selected and transformed. Fidelity therefore cannot mean identity with the past. It must include difference.⁷

Retrieval and the force of the possible

Heidegger’s Wiederholung - repetition or retrieval - provides the first movement of this thought. Retrieval does not reactivate a past event exactly as it occurred. It returns to a possibility contained within what has been handed down and releases that possibility into a different future.

The direction of retrieval is therefore not simply backward. It begins from a future towards which one projects oneself and, from that orientation, reopens what has been. The inherited past becomes active because it contains possibilities that have not been exhausted by their original historical form.⁸

To retrieve my relation to my father is not to reconstruct him as he was in 1987, nor to recreate the world we shared. That actuality is irrecoverable. What can be retrieved is a possibility carried by the relation: a way of attending, valuing, making or inhabiting time. The past returns not as a complete presence but as a force within the possible.

The Canon participates in such a retrieval. It does not reproduce my father’s seeing, and my photographs do not imitate photographs he might have made.There is an obvious materiality to this, the object itself, its tactility, the satisfying shutter release sound, and many other micro references to the my reconstructed memories of that era, a certain nostalgia I remain cautious of for its lack of fidelity. Rather, the camera reopens a connection between his photographic world and mine. That connection becomes newly actual through my own practice. It returns by becoming different.

The greatest weight

Nietzsche’s eternal return adds a more demanding dimension. In The Gay Science, the thought arrives as the greatest weight: what if one were required to live this life again, innumerable times, with every joy, pain, accident and apparently insignificant detail returning?⁹

The force of the thought does not depend here upon proving a cosmological cycle. It acts as an existential and ethical test. Can this life be affirmed without subtraction? Can one affirm becoming without requiring suffering to be retrospectively redeemed by another world?

Applied to bereavement, this requires care. To affirm one’s life does not mean judging the death of a loved person to be good, desirable or justified. It does not neutralise grief or transform catastrophe into providence. Nietzschean affirmation is not the claim that everything happens for a reason.

Importantly in opposition to this, it refuses the fantasy that one’s authentic life exists elsewhere, purified of contingency and loss. My father’s death cannot be isolated from the person I became, as though I might remove the event while retaining the remainder of my life unchanged. Its effects traverse everything that followed. To affirm the life that has been lived is to acknowledge this inseparability without pretending that the loss itself ceases to be loss.

Eternal return thus introduces something more intense than remembrance. It asks whether the whole configuration of one’s life can be assumed - not merely endured as an unfortunate sequence, but taken up as the singular field from which creation remains possible.

Here quiet fidelity approaches amor fati: not passive resignation to fate, but an active relation to necessity. What cannot be altered is not allowed to terminate becoming. It becomes material for the creation of further possibilities.¹⁰

This alignment should be understood as a philosophical constellation rather than a claim that Heidegger’s retrieval simply derives from, or develops, Nietzsche’s eternal return. Heidegger’s own later interpretation of Nietzsche follows a markedly different path. Here, the concepts are brought together because they disclose complementary temporal movements: retrieval reopens the possible within what has been, while eternal return places the weight of affirmation upon the life in which that inheritance must be lived.¹¹

The return of difference

Deleuze releases the creative power implicit in this encounter between return and affirmation. In his reading of Nietzsche, eternal return is not the circular recurrence of identical events. It is not the return of the Same. What returns is becoming itself: difference, multiplicity, chance and the power of transformation.¹²

Repetition is creative because no return merely reinstates an original identity. Each repetition occurs within a new composition of forces and therefore produces another difference. The returned element is not copied; its virtual possibilities are actualised anew.¹³

This carries Heideggerian retrieval beyond the recovery of an inherited possibility. The possibility itself changes as it enters a new assemblage. Inheritance is not simply chosen again. It becomes capable of producing something that was not already contained within it as a predetermined form.

Every time I wear the watch, the original memorial gesture returns, but it does not return identically. It enters another day, another place and another affective atmosphere. Every time I use the Canon, my father’s association with photography returns, but now within images he could neither have made nor foreseen. The relation persists through its capacity to differ.

This is the deepest sense of inheritance lived forward. The inheritance remains faithful to its source not through resemblance but through continued production. Its truth lies in what it can still make possible.

Quiet fidelity is therefore a fidelity to difference.

The sensate monument

This does not mean that quiet fidelity refuses the monument. It produces another kind of monument - one closer to the Deleuzian monument I developed in my doctoral and published work.¹⁴

The conventional memorial monument seeks to stabilise memory through representation. It identifies a subject, locates that subject in the past and gives remembrance an enduring material form. The Deleuzian monument operates otherwise. Its action is not principally memory but fabulation. It composes a bloc of percepts and affects capable of enduring beyond the circumstances of its genesis.¹⁵

Such a monument does not preserve an identity intact. It preserves an intensity.

The camera and the watch are not, individually, this monument. Nor is the monument simply the memory of my father attached to them. It arises through the assemblage formed among camera, watch, body, date, gesture, recollection, light and movement. It occurs when these heterogeneous elements acquire sufficient consistency to produce an affect exceeding any one of them.

In the terminology of my earlier work, it is a sensate monument or mobile sensation machine. It gathers forces, gives them consistency and permits them to act beyond the moment of their formation. It holds open a moment for difference.¹⁶

Repetition is essential to this monument, but only because repetition continually varies it. The watch worn again, the shutter released again, the familiar place revisited and the photograph made under another configuration of light, a different film stock, different frames of mind: each return preserves the relation by altering its expression.

The monument is therefore neither a fixed object nor a static container of the past. It is a cascade of sensations carried across changing encounters. Its durability is intensive rather than merely material. It persists because it retains the capacity to affect and to be recomposed.

This is where Heideggerian retrieval, Nietzschean affirmation and Deleuzian difference meet. Retrieval reopens the inherited possibility. Eternal return places the full weight of affirmation upon the life in which that inheritance has been received. Deleuzian repetition transforms its return into the production of difference.

The resulting monument does not bind the present to what has been. It allows what has been to arrive from the future as a still-unexhausted power.

Quiet fidelity as a way of being

Quiet fidelity is consequently more than remembrance and more than a relation to cherished objects. It is an ethos of temporal existence: a way of remaining answerable to what has been inherited while refusing to reduce that inheritance to a completed past.

It neither denies absence nor allows absence to become pure negation. It does not defeat loss or claim to recover the person who has gone. It permits the affective relation to continue producing perception, thought and action.

The monument it creates is not erected once and left behind. It must be lived. It is mobile and variable as I create my way through the world. Its consistency is renewed through gestures of attention. It passes through the body, through repeated practices and through the encounters from which new sensations emerge.

This is also why the idea belongs naturally within my photographic practice. Photography for me is always already an engagement with return: returning to places, returning to particular structures, returning to the changing operations of atmosphere, matter and light. The repeated site is never the same site because neither light, camera, body, perception nor duration returns unchanged. The refrain establishes a provisional territory only so that difference can become perceptible within it.¹⁷

The personal and photographic practices therefore converge. Wearing the watch and carrying the Canon are not illustrations of a philosophical concept established elsewhere. They are instances in which the concept becomes lived and material. Philosophy, memory, body and apparatus become inseparable within the act.

A seemingly modest day can then become quietly significant. Nothing outwardly monumental need occur. A watch is placed on the wrist. A camera is carried on a walk. Photographs are made. Yet within those gestures several temporalities coexist: my father’s life, my seventeen-year-old self, forty years of absence, the present act of seeing and the future into which the resulting images will pass.

The past does not return as the Same. It returns as an intensity within what I am still becoming.

My father is not monumentalised by being fixed in 1987. Something of our relation becomes monumental because it continues to act: in the objects I choose, the rituals I sustain, the photographs I make and the form of attention through which I encounter the world.

Quiet fidelity is my name for that continuation. It is retrieval without reproduction, affirmation without consolation and repetition without identity. It is a monument composed not to arrest time but to carry an affect across it.

My inheritance therefore has not merely survived.

It returns by becoming different.

It is being lived forward.

Endnotes

1. On facticity and thrownness, see Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962), secs. 29 and 38. The concept of ‘thrownness’ has been a great catalyst and remains useful to me in thinking through the core concerns of existentialism and life more generally.

2. Heidegger develops resoluteness, authentic temporality and the relation between having-been and futurity in Being and Time, secs. 60, 65 and 74. This is also the springing point for Deleuze’s notion of the Refrain as a means for creating order out of chaos. See also Note 17 below: On the refrain as the rhythmic constitution of territory and its opening towards deterritorialisation, see Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 310-50. The extension of refrain, repetition and material transformation into photographic practice develops the experimental ethos established in Hale, Escaping Architecture, especially chaps. 1, 3 and 4.

3. The colour images throughout were made on the Canon AE1-Program with a roll of Fujifilm 400 colour film.

4. A Canon F-1 circa 1970-1971 and a Canon AE-1 circa 1976-1978. Both still in their original deteriorating cases, and leather bag, with flash, Canon FD 50mm f1:1.4 S.S.C. lenses and a Tamron 28mm. I have a hazy memory these were haggled for on one of our shopping trips to Sigatoka, Fiji. A wonderful memory as a young boy as a place of vibrance and different cultures.

5. For Heidegger, Being is that which makes entities intelligible as entities—what it means for something to be—and is not itself an entity. He approaches its meaning through Dasein, the human way of existing, which already possesses an implicit understanding of Being and can question it; see Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1962), pp. 25–27 (§2) and 32–34 (§4).

6. This account draws upon Heidegger’s analysis of equipment and readiness-to-hand, in which equipment ordinarily withdraws from thematic attention within absorbed use. See Heidegger, Being and Time, secs. 15-16.

7. Jacques Derrida describes inheritance not as a unified possession or given, but as an injunction and task that requires active interpretation. See Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994), 16-18.

8. Heidegger defines repetition as the explicit handing down of an inherited possibility and insists that it does not bring back a past actuality. See Heidegger, Being and Time, sec. 74, especially 435-39.

9. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1974), sec. 341.

10. Nietzsche introduces amor fati as the desire to become one who says yes to necessity in The Gay Science, sec. 276. Eternal return intensifies this affirmative demand in sec. 341.

11. For Heidegger’s distinct interpretation of eternal recurrence, see Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, Volume II: The Eternal Recurrence of the Same, trans. David Farrell Krell (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1984).

12. Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 47-54 and 68-72. Deleuze presents eternal return both as the being of becoming and as a selective, ethical test of what can be affirmed.

13. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 40-42, 90-91 and 297-301. Deleuze’s reading makes repetition the differential production of the new rather than the recurrence of an original identity.

14. Michael Hale, Escaping Architecture: Deleuze and the Reinvention of Experimental Practice (PhD thesis, University of New South Wales, 2011), chap. 4, especially 179-220 and 196-97, doi:10.26190/unsworks/15373; and Mike Hale, “Radicalising Architecture by Redefining the Monument,” in Architectural and Urban Reflections after Deleuze and Guattari, ed. Constantin V. Boundas and Vana Tentokali (London and New York: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2018), 221-42.

15. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 163-77. Their account defines the work of art as a self-preserving bloc of sensations and distinguishes the monument’s fabulatory action from commemorative memory.

16. Hale, Escaping Architecture, 196-97. There I propose architecture as a “mobile sensation machine” producing sensate monuments capable of altering their ground. The formulation is further developed in Hale, “Radicalising Architecture,” 221-42.

17. On the refrain as the rhythmic constitution of territory and its opening towards deterritorialisation, see Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 310-50. The extension of refrain, repetition and material transformation into photographic practice develops the experimental ethos established in Hale, Escaping Architecture, especially chaps. 1, 3 and 4.

(Return to Projects)

September 2026