Infinity Repeating: Daft Punk, Nietzsche and the Loop of Life

I’m not one to bow down to an artist or see them as some kind of invisible force of nature. This is applicable to John Lee Hooker, the Beatles, the Stones, whoever you want to name. So when I hear there is a new old (circa 2013) Daft Punk song released, “Infinity Repeating” (how did it not make the Random Access Memories cut?) I take it in stride. My first inclination is to poo poo. And in fact, upon the first listen, I do just that. I decide it’s just okay, a pop confection I can now dismiss. Next! However, something funny happened in the exit corridor. I began humming the melody, almost against my will. Here we go again, earworm. The concept of an earworm is interesting in itself. How and why a particular song burrows into my cranium is a bit of a mystery, always. There are times I might hear a song twenty, thirty times but it always has a chance with me in the thirty first listen. Something new might grab me. I might rehear the song in a new way. 

For “Infinity Repeating,” by the second listen I was hooked. The song is infinitely catchy, a slow burn featuring Julian Casablancas in wistful mode. And the song is a deceptively meaningful one at that: on the surface “Infinity Repeating” is just about meeting up with an old friend on happenstance. They bump into one another on a weekday, serendipity. And then it turns from one thing (friendship) into something else (sexual). The lyrics of this song are not difficult to understand. “It’s not right, it’s not true. It’s not how we used to do.” Their relationship has suddenly been transformed from one of friendship to something much more basic and elemental. The song asks the question: why? This is where it gets interesting.

As bare-bones as “Infinity Repeating” is lyrically, there is something philosophical about its theme and message. This is one of those instances where the song’s video helps amplify our understanding. The video makes it clear that evolution has taken us from animal to artificial intelligence, culminating in a robot racing in super human speed and imploding back into the circle that begins the video. The song lyrics emphasize the notion that biology transcends ethics. The friends sleep together because they have a need, a want, a deep drive to do so. This has nothing to do with pleasure and everything to do with biological compulsion. The song makes the sudden sex seem an almost empty experience, implying that friendship is deeper (here echoing “Instant Crush”--a song also focused on friendship). There is a sense of disappointment here; a sense that the two friends would be better off in a different sphere—or maybe better off without the unintentional meet up altogether.

The title of this song is “Infinity Repeating,” which is, of course, paradoxical. Since infinity, as it is broadly understood, is never ending the concept of repetition seems to be moot. However, the paradox at the heart of the song title makes you think philosophically and cosmologically about space and time, not just about evolution and the will to mate. What the song seems to suggest is that this transmutation of friendship to sex partner is part of a larger design. It is symbolic. It is not just about two friends–this is a song about change and time and a kind of desperate groping for meaning. I am thinking of the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus and his notion of the impossibility of stepping into the same river twice. Change is what makes it impossible. The water molecules are different, the river has slightly shifted. It is now a different river altogether.

Yet “Infinity Repeating” implies a kind of multiverse where everything repeats itself over and over again, a Groundhog’s Day unbeknownst to us. Do we end up with the same friends and lovers over and over again in an infinite loop? Is this Friedrich Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence? His idea (borrowed from the Stoics) is that we do repeat the same existence over and over–and he uses this as an ethical precept. Ethically we should act in a way that we could easily accept this fact. And here we have two friends who might just have stepped into a morass of regret. Is this eternal recurrence? My answer: yes, it is. That is exactly what “Infinity Repeating” is all about. We live in a world in which we have to do it again, over and over and over—all of our choices, all of our mistakes on a constant loop. The cymbals at the song’s conclusion go hog wild. Nietzsche has never sounded so good.