Abstract
This paper examines how Gilles Deleuze addresses, and fail to address, the darker strata in Nietzsche’s work which has enabled his work to be claimed by almost every far-right European political movement since the 1890s to the Alt-Right today. Part I argues that four rhetorical strategies are present which serve to domesticate Nietzsche’s ideas concerning class and caste, race and sexuality, and his opposition to forms of liberalism, democracy, feminism and socialism: avoiding directly political subjects which Nietzsche returned to; catachrestic use of political words to describe ostensibly supra- or non-political data; denials of Nietzsche’s rightist positions, followed by justifications which, upon analysis, do not support the denials but ‘change the subject’; openly erroneous misrepresentations of divisive subjects, led by Nietzsche on war. Part II looks at how these sophistical strategies are played out in two key passages in Nietzsche and Philosophy, concerning the second ‘selection’ in the eternal recurrence, with its ‘annihilation of all parasitical and degenerate elements’. Closing remarks address the situation today, and the paradoxes and limitations of Left Nietzscheanism in the academy.
“My philosophy aims at a new order of rank: not at an individualistic morality.’ (Friedrich Nietzsche, Will to Power, 287)
“Negation sacrifices all reactive forces, becoming ‘relentless destruction of everything that was degenerating and parasitical’, passing into the service of an excess of life (EH III, ‘Birth of Tragedy’, 3–4): only here is it completed.” (Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, 175)
In the process of what Kurt Rudolf Fischer (1977: 116) called the ‘denazifying’ of Nietzsche in the Allied nations following 1945, two texts have particular importance. The first is Walter Kaufmann’s Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist (1950). The second, at the heart of the post-structuralist moment, is Deleuze’s Nietzsche and Philosophy (1962). What unites these books is a reading of Nietzsche which removes him from his post-Darwinian, Bismarckian context. Instead, his work is presented as principally or solely concerned with individual self-transformation, aesthetic self-creation, and (as such) as either uninterested in political questions or as championing a kind of free-wheeling libertarianism.
Nietzsche’s German reception was always more fraught, due to his massive uptake by the National Socialists. As Martha Zapata Galindo documents in her Triumph des Willens zur Macht: Zur Nietzsche-rezeption im NS-Staat (1995), there were some 242 conferences on Nietzsche at German universities under the Third Reich, organised by 89 out of the nation’s 214 philosophy professors. There were also over 1200 academic and non-academic publications in German on Nietzsche from 1930–45 (cf. Aschheim, 1994, 1997). Since 1990, a French and English-language literature has also emerged which challenges the idea of an ‘apolitical’ or ‘Left’ Nietzsche. Authors including Bruce Detwiller (1990), Gregory Moore (2002), William Altman (2014), Bernhard Taureck (2018), Don Dombowsky (2004, 2014), Hugo Drochon (2016), Ishay Landa (2017), Ron Beiner (2018), Robert Holub (2019) and Dominic Losurdo (2019) have increasingly questioned the defensibility of such post-Kaufmannian or post-Deleuzian readings of the German philosopher. Nietzsche himself was happy when George Brandes described him as an ‘aristocratic radical’, up in arms against modern, post-revolutionary society (Detwiller, 1990: 66). Indeed, these authors note, especially Nietzsche’s later texts – the very texts, incidentally, that sometime-arrested white supremacist Gregory Johnson (2019) recommends to the readers of Counter-currents as their ‘way in’ to the German author – are explicitly and acerbically anti-liberal, anti-democratic, and anti-socialist (BGE, 127, 198–203, 231–7, 259; GM I, 4, 5; II, 12; III, 8; AC, 17, 57; TI ‘Skirmishes of an Untimely Man’, 38, 39; WP 40, 51, 125, 209, 339, 340, 373, 864) as well as fiercely anti-feminist (BGE, 231–7, esp. 232; TI, ‘Maxims and Missiles’, 14; ‘Skirmishes,’ 38; AC 53, 56; WP 12, 52, 53, 56, 95, 777, 838, 864). 1 At the same time, by drawing on contemporary eugenic literature, they propound a program of ‘breeding’ a new pan-European aristocracy (BGE, 213, 242, 248, 251 262, 264; AC 2–3, 57, WP 132, 181, 398, 462, 732, 942, 954, 960, 964; TI, ‘“Improvers” of Mankind’, 3–5; ‘Skirmishes’, 38), 2 albeit one notably including Jews (BGE, 251). 3 This new ruling elite could, with a good conscience, overthrow the millennial legacy of slave morality culminating in feminism and the labour movement (esp. AC, 57; TI, 40; WP, 464) and reinstitute a new ‘order of rank’, including slave classes (BGE 219, 221, 250-251, 259, 260, 263, 270, 287; GM II, 14; AC, 57; WP, 3, 287, 280, with 31, 37, 51, 55, 116, 169, 284, 360, 552, 583, 592, 681, 729, 774, 783, 784, 786, 854, 856, 859, 860, 881, 886, 898, 911, 985, 988, 999, 1021). 4 They would operate ‘beyond good and evil’ as defined within the Judaeo-Christian heritage, engaging in deceit, exploitation, the political use of religion (BGE 30, 40, 44, 61, 257, 263; TI, ‘Improvers’, 5; WP 141, 142, 172, 306, 544), and other Machiavellian or Bonapartist arts of governing (Dombowsky, 2004, 2014). Whilst these authors are careful to delineate between ‘fascism’ and such political positions, they each note that the many passages in which Nietzsche develops these positions, especially after 1883, are exactly those to which those 20th-century ‘barbarians’ who invoked his name appealed. 5
Given the global influence of Deleuze’s Nietzsche and Philosophy, the stark contrast it presents with these post-post-structuralist assessments, at the same time as Deleuze’s influence through figures like Nick Land on the ‘neoreactionary’ wing of the Alt-Right (Klein, 2019), what I want to do here is ask several specific questions: How does this book address the issue of Nietzsche’s far-right appropriations and the textual bases for these appropriations, from Nazi authors through Italian, Romanian, Belgian, Russian, French, American and even Australian far-right thinkers, historically and today? Therefore how, if at all, can Deleuze’s exuberant celebration of Nietzsche’s work be squared with any meaningfully progressive, leftist position, beyond a quasi-libertarian pluralism with little to no concrete or institutional specifications?
My argument is simple. When we address these questions to Nietzsche and Philosophy, we see at least four increasingly contentious strategies Deleuze adopts to avoid any open confrontation with Nietzsche’s aristocratic-reactionary stances, and those ‘hard’ doctrines and passages to which his far-right readership historically recur: avoiding directly political subjects; catachrestic use of political words to describe ostensibly supra- or non-political data; denials of Nietzsche’s rightist positions, followed by justifications which, upon analysis, do not support the denials, but ‘change the subject’; openly erroneous misrepresentations of divisive subjects, led by Nietzsche on war.
We therefore look at these strategies of avoidance, denial and redirection in turn, in Part I of this paper. In Part II, we do a close analysis of two important passages in Deleuze on the eternal recurrence and its two ‘selections’, showing how these four forms of avoiding, downplaying, and misrepresenting play out around some of Nietzsche’s darkest sayings from the Will to Power. Our concluding remarks reflect on the significance of this analysis for ‘Left Nietzsheanism’ in this time of resurgent right Nietzscheanisms and neo-fascisms, arguing that the latter’s re-emergence makes a reconsideration of Nietzsche’s corps/es (to borrow Geoffrey Waite’s (1996) prescient condensation) imperative for progressive voices today.
I The four causes
Keeping silence
First, there is Deleuze’s avoidance of any directly political subject matter, as far as this is possible, given Nietzsche’s own continuing preoccupations with political subjects. To give a sense of this, the text of Nietzsche and Philosophy simply does not mention the subjects of ‘government’, ‘democracy’, ‘the workers’, ‘rulers’, or ‘master race[s]’ (GM I, 5, WP, 216), despite Nietzsche’s recourse to each of these terms. Napoleon, Caesar, Alcibiades, do not ennoble Deleuze’s pages, in contrast to Nietzsche’s own, and the glorious ‘beast of prey’, Cesare Borgia, appears once, in the English-edition Preface (xiii). 6 ‘Socialism’ is mentioned once (164); likewise ‘exploitation’ (3), ‘aristocracy’ (121) (‘aristocrats’ are raised twice (117, 120)), and ‘breeding’ (Züchtung) is mentioned once, where its biological register is minimised, although notably not denied, to Deleuze’s credit (127).
Metapolitical catachresis
Secondly, ostensibly political terms in Nietzsche, and in explaining his work, undergo an ontological catachresis. Herein, they are predicated of non-political or sub-political realities (we will see the most troubling example of this in due course). This is arguably the principal rhetorical feature of Deleuze’s text. So, when ‘exploitation’ is mentioned, it is predicated of ‘force’, as in ‘[a]ll force is appropriation, domination, exploitation of a quantity of reality’ (3). All reference to the relationship between human beings, clear in BGE 257’s reflection on this subject, is gone. 7 Similar deanthropomorphising catachresis characterises Deleuze’s analyses of the political terms ‘domination’, ‘hierarchy’, ‘order (Ordnung) of rank’, ‘obedience’ (3, 4, 6–9, 40, 51, 56, 63, 67, 111), as well as ‘annihilation’ (Vernichtung, Zerstörung) and self-annihilation (Selbst-vernichtung), as we’ll see.
Changing the subjects
Third, Deleuze proffers open, strident denials of impolitic possibilities, followed by arguably sophistical (see 60–1) and certainly questionable justifications, which in effect change the subject under discussion. Consider one of two passages, both in the English preface, wherein Deleuze directly addresses the ‘fascist’ issue. Here is the text: But the difficulty of Nietzsche depends less on conceptual analysis than on practical evaluations which evoke a whole atmosphere, all kinds of emotional dispositions in the reader…Conceptual analyses are indispensable…but they will always be ineffective if the reader grasps them in an atmosphere which is not that of Nietzsche. As long as the reader persists in: 1) seeing the Nietzschean ‘slave’ as someone who finds himself dominated by a master, and deserves to be; 2) understanding the will to power as a will which wants and seeks power; 3) conceiving the eternal return as the tedious return of the same; 4) imagining the Overman as a given master race – no positive relationship between Nietzsche and his reader will be possible. Nietzsche will appear as a nihilist, or worse, a fascist and at best as an obscure and terrifying prophet. (xii)
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Secondly, we note this reference to an ‘atmosphere’ which is ‘that of Nietzsche’, which could alone save the reader from more troubling readings of Nietzsche. One wonders how, if at all, the presence or absence of such an ‘atmosphere’ and its ‘emotional dispositions’ could be tested, verified, checked, or whether it in effect amounts to a self-vindicating phenomenon: one knows that one has the correct atmosphere and disposition by agreeing with Deleuze’s readings. But this will not do on any traditional understanding of philosophy. Ad hominem dismissals of Socrates and philosophical dialectic as moved by revenge or ressentiment (which duly appear, alongside a defence of the ‘aggressive’ sophist, Callicles) are hardly comforting from a critical perspective (59–60; cf. TI, ‘Problem of Socrates’, esp. 6; WP, 431) – especially when so much about the debates surrounding Nietzsche turns upon the argumentative assessment of textual ‘facts’ and evidences: what did Nietzsche actually say and how should it be understood? Deleuze’s extraordinary claims that the appeal of scientific culture to factuality ‘is always something used by the weak against the strong’, since ‘the fact is always stupid, having at all times resembled a calf rather than a god’ (UM II ‘Use and Abuse of History’, 8) (60) also do not inspire confidence in the time of Mr Trump, ‘fake news’, Mr Putin and Pizzagate (cf. Snyder, 2019).
What should we then say to the four propositions that would prevent a ‘positive relationship’ between Nietzsche and his reader, as against a ‘philosophical’ or ‘critical’ relationship?
We will return in time to the eternal recurrence (claim 4) and what Deleuze makes of this concept. ‘Power (Macht)’ (the subject of claim 2) is another ostensibly political term that never takes the predicate ‘political’ in Nietzsche’s text, even when Deleuze discusses Nietzsche’s later depiction of philosophers as ‘commanders’, ‘legislators’, and ‘the Caesarian trainer[s] and dictator[s] of civilization’ (92–3; 9 BGE 61, 203, 207, 208, 210–13). The only time anything like such power is discussed, in a critique of Hobbes and Hegel, Deleuze argues that the image of the master in the master-slave dialectic of Hegel is ‘the sick’ or ‘the slave’s’ representation of the master (80, 80–82, cf. 10, 11, 39, 83). No true master cares if his power is ‘recognised’, certainly by slaves, and indeed the notion of such ‘representation’ is a ‘poison’ for philosophy, Deleuze argues (81) 10 – hardly a progressive logos on most understandings, but let us leave that aside.
Deleuze thereby passes over in silence myriad passages in the original wherein figures like Alcibiades, Julius Caesar, Cesare Borgia and Napoleon are exalted as master types, 11 wherein Machiavellianism is lauded as ‘perfection in politics’ (Detwiller, 1990: 4, 49; Dombowsky, 2004), or wherein Nietzsche laments that modern democratic rulers cannot rule, so fettered are they by the bad conscience afforded them by modern, egalitarian slave morality, with its democratic outgrowths of parliaments, independent media, checks and balances, etc. (BGE 199). Deleuze can, on the other hand, affirm that Nietzsche’s apparently startlingly reactionary claim that ‘[t]he strong always have to be defended against the weak (VP I 395)’ is one of Nietzsche’s ‘finest’ comments, however ‘desperate’ he later tells us that the enterprise proves for the strong (57, 167).
Concerning claim (1) – ‘[a]s long as the reader persists in: 1) seeing the Nietzschean “slave” as someone who finds himself dominated by a master, and deserves to be…’ – Deleuze’s statement leads us to expect that he will provide a different account of ‘the slave’ than one which sees the latter as worthy only of masterly domination; moved by a spirit of resentment and revenge; agents of a ‘slave revolt’ ‘to reject all that represents the ascending movement of life, well-constitutedness, power, beauty, self-affirmation on earth’ (AC 24), led by ‘Judaic priests’ (124, 132, 152; BGE, 195), 12 etc. But, as the previous remarks underscore, we look in vain for such an account of ‘the slave’ in Nietzsche and Philosophy. There is nothing in what Deleuze says of this essentialised ‘type’ that would counteract the Nietzschean calls in ‘The Greek State’ (Nietzsche, 2009), Gay Science (377), Beyond Good and Evil (44, 239, 257), and Will to Power for a reinstatement of a slave class as instruments to serve, or be sacrificed, as the necessary condition of a new aristocracy (WP, 315, 356, 464, 679, 859, 953) – and deservedly so, given their squalid natures. The slaves are ‘the weak’. They beget the benighted dialectic, from Socrates to Hegel, which serves to derail ‘the strong’ (8–11, 17, 36, 60–1, 89, 139, 159, 165, 196). They are filled with envy and resentment towards their betters. This leads them to create other-worldly fantasies, a God of love, and to preach the anti-natural doctrine of equality before God, the law, or in nature (36, 64, 111, 116–17, 124, 131, 133, 143). As we have indicated, their ‘cunning’ is a real and perpetual threat to the elites. The term ‘compassion’ is absent from Deleuze’s text. ‘Pity’, as in Nietzsche, is pitilessly attacked as a principal instrument of the weak to subdue the strong (17, 148–50). 13
What looks like a qualification of Deleuze’s unremittingly negative account of the ‘slave’ comes, once more, in the Preface to the English translation. So, let us look at the passage and unpack how it functions: This shows the extent to which the Nietzschean notion of the slave does not necessarily stand for someone dominated, by fate or social condition, but also characterises the dominators as much as the dominated once the regime of domination comes under the sway of forces which are reactive and not active. Totalitarian regimes are in this sense regimes of slaves, not merely because of the people that they subjugate, but above all because of the type of ‘masters’ they set up. (p. xvi)
Don’t mention the war
Fourthly, Deleuze presents readily falsifiable claims. At page 82, Deleuze tells us of the man who once proclaimed ‘I bring the war’ (NF 1888, 1 25), 14 ‘that he who renounces the war renounces the great life’ (AC, ‘Morality as Anti-Nature’, 3) and that the next century would see ‘wars, the like of which have never been seen on earth before’ (EH, ‘Why I Am a Destiny’, 1), that ‘[o]ne cannot overemphasise the extent to which the notions of struggle, war, rivalry or even comparison are foreign to Nietzsche and to his conception of the will to power’ (82).
Who Deleuze’s ‘one’ is, we can only speculate: their atmosphere is evidently not that of critical scholarship. Here again, the justificatory addendum for this extraordinary claim is interesting (82–3). Deleuze fixes on the term ‘struggle’ from his list of subjects (struggle, war, rivalry, comparison) ‘foreign to Nietzsche’, and associates it with Darwin’s struggle for existence. But, truly, Nietzsche opposed Darwin’s idea of the struggle for survival and reproduction, because the philosophy of the will to power sees existence as a contest for power, self-assertion, and creativity – what Deleuze calls ‘selection’, on which more in due course. There is thus nothing on ‘struggle’ in Nietzsche, we are asked to agree – as if Darwinian ‘struggle’ was the only kind the German philosopher might have wanted to consider.
Leaving aside Darwin (cf. Moore, 2002; Salanskis, 2018), we note that, alongside many other passages,
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Deleuze seems here also to have had a moment of active forgetfulness of one of Zarathustra’s more famous addresses: that given in Book I of TSZ, exactly, to the warriors. Let me sample here only its more openly bellicose elements, to refresh our memories: My brethren in war! I love you from the very heart. I am, and was ever, your counterpart. And I am also your best enemy. So let me tell you the truth! I know the hatred and envy of your hearts. Ye are not great enough not to know of hatred and envy. Then be great enough not to be ashamed of them!…Ye shall be those whose eyes ever seek for an enemy – for your enemy. And with some of you there is hatred at first sight. Your enemy shall ye seek; your war shall ye wage…Ye shall love peace as a means to new wars – and the short peace more than the long. You I advise not to work, but to fight. You I advise not to peace, but to victory. Let your work be a fight, let your peace be a victory! Ye say it is the good cause which halloweth even war? I say unto you: it is the good war which halloweth every cause…Thus spake Zarathustra. (TSZ I, 10)
II Deleuze, self-extermination, and changing the subject
But let me now highlight how these four forms of softening Nietzsche for liberal consumption operate, by turning to an absolutely central issue within Deleuze’s Nietzsche and Philosophy: his striking reading of the eternal recurrence. This teaching, Deleuze tells us, is amongst the most ‘esoteric’ parts of Nietzsche’s corpus (69), as well he might. It is nevertheless central in Deleuze, as in Nietzsche.
There is a problem that has haunted Nietzsche exegesis concerning this eternal recurrence, and its relationship with other celebrated Nietzschean themes. If we are asked to will the eternal recurrence of all things by the teacher or his Zarathustra, this would seem to mean willing the recurrence of all weakness and reactive forces – the very things that we, as good Nietzscheans, know should never be willed, even once. It is to respond to this dilemma that Deleuze introduces a new term, not present in Nietzsche. He talks of a ‘second selection’ at play in the eternal recurrence (69, 71). 16 The second selection will allow us to as it were ‘select away’ the kinds of values, forces, and (as we shall see) human types praised by the slaves, their Christianity, democracy, egalitarianism, socialism, etc. (69–71). How does this happen?
In the second selection, the reactive forces do not return as negative, Deleuze instructs us. They become affirmative. And what this means, says Deleuze, is that they actively submit to their own self-destruction or self-negation. And here is where we need to pay attention. Deleuze begins to explain as follows, citing Will to Power: Only the eternal return can complete nihilism because it makes negation a negation of reactive forces themselves. By and in the eternal return nihilism no longer expresses itself as the conservation and victory of the weak but as their destruction, their self-destruction. ‘This perishing takes the form of a self-destruction – the instinctive selection of that which must destroy…The will to destruction as the will of a still deeper instinct, the instinct of self-destruction, the will for nothingness’ (VP III 8/WP 55). This is why Zarathustra, as early as the Prologue, sings of the ‘one who wills his own downfall’, ‘for he does not want to preserve himself’, ‘for he will cross the bridge without hesitation’. (TSZ, Prologue 4, 70; emphasis in original) Supposing that the faith in this morality would perish, then the botched and bungled (Schlechtweggekommenen) would no longer have their comfort – and they would perish (ze Grunde gehen). / This perishing (das Zu-Grunde-gehen) takes the form of self-destruction (Sich-zu-Grunde-richten) – the instinctive selection of that which must be destroyed (was zerstören Muß). Symptoms of this self-destruction (Selbstzerstörung) of the underprivileged: self-vivisection, poisoning, intoxication, romanticism, above all the instinctive need for actions that turn the powerful into mortal enemies…; the will to destruction (Zerstörung) as the will of a still deeper instinct, the instinct of self-destruction (Selbstzerstörung), the will for nothingness (Nichts). (WP 55)
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Morality for doctors. – The sick person (der Kranke) is a parasite on society. In a certain condition, living any longer is improper. Vegetating on, in cowardly dependence on doctors and treatments, once the meaning of life, the right to life has been lost, should incur the profound contempt of society. Furthermore, doctors should be the ones to convey this contempt – not prescriptions, but every day a new dose of disgust with their patients…To create a new responsibility, the responsibility of the doctor, in all cases in which the highest interest of life, of ascending life, demands that degenerating life be ruthlessly suppressed (wo das höchste Interesse des Lebens, des aufsteigenden Lebens, das rücksichtsloseste Nieder- und Beiseite-Drängen des entartenden Lebens verlang) – for example, as regards the right to reproduce, the right to be born, the right to life (für das Recht, geboren zu werden, für das Recht, zu leben). (AC, ‘Skirmishes of an Untimely Man’, 36; cf. WP 734; Ludovici, 1936)
In fact, the same fallacy of equivocation – changing the subject, and not alerting readers to the change – itself recurs at the culmination of his text, as Deleuze returns to the same subject of the ‘selections’ of the eternal recurrence and their link to this leitmotif of self-destruction. Here is some of what he says: Destruction becomes active to the extent that the negative is transmuted and converted into affirmative power: the ‘eternal joy of becoming’ which is avowed in an instant, the ‘joy of annihilation’, the ‘affirmation of annihilation and destruction’ (EH, ‘Birth of Tragedy’, 3)…In the man who wants to perish, to be overcome, negation has broken everything which still held it back, it has defeated itself, it has become…a power which is already superhuman, a power which announces and prepares the Overman. ‘You could transform yourselves into forefathers and ancestors of the Overman: and let this be your finest creating’ (Z II ‘On the Blissful Islands’ p. 110). Negation sacrifices all reactive forces, becoming ‘relentless destruction of everything that was degenerating and parasitical’, passing into the service of an excess of life (EH III, ‘Birth of Tragedy’, 3–4): only here is it completed. (175) Jene neue Partei des Lebens, welche die größte aller Aufgaben, die Höherzüchtung der Menschheit in die Hände nimmt, eingerechnet die schonungslose Vernichtung alles Entartenden und Parasitischen… [The new Party of Life that takes on the greatest task of all, that of breeding humanity to higher levels (which includes the ruthless annihilation [Vernichtung] of everything degenerate and parasitical/all degenerate and parasitical elements/things), will make possible a surplus of life on earth that will necessarily regenerate the Dionysian state.] (EH, ‘Birth of Tragedy’, 4)
III Conclusions on Left Nietzscheanism
As Stephen Aschheim’s The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany (1994) documents, from the start, Nietzsche has been embraced by different elements on the Left, as well as by antiliberal and eugenic voices on the Right (Moore, 2002; Stone, 2002; Holub, 2019). Deleuze’s Nietzsche and Philosophy is a key document in the process whereby the German thinker went from being interpreted as the father of imperialistic irrationalism and interwar fascism and National Socialism (Lukacs, 2016) to a formative figure within what its critics call the ‘postmodernist’ Left. It is easy to throw one’s hands up in the air, faced with this politically bipolar reception, and to embrace the idea that Nietzsche had no determinate doctrine. All perspectives, ostensibly Left as well as Right, are equally valid. For none is absolutely valid. Nietzsche is a sphinx without a secret, a philosopher without a teaching, only a style or myriad of styles (Derrida, 1979). Does not Nietzsche himself at different points announce himself a perspectivist, for whom there are no moral phenomena, only interpretations?
In Fascism and the Masses: The Revolt against the Last Man, 1848–1945, Ishay Landa introduces a series of salient qualifications which speak against such politico-hermeneutic laissez faire. Nietzsche’s appeal to the antiliberal Right, from the 1880s to today, has been ‘endemic’, whereas elements of the Left – one thinks of figures as different as Lukacs, Bloch or Habermas – have always seen him as a prophet of the anti-liberal or reactionary Right. On the Right, Nietzsche attracts people who are more radical and anti-liberal, whereas on the Left: the very reverse is the case: Nietzsche’s influence is strongest the more one takes distance from the core. It is felt particularly strongly among left-liberals, anarchists, social democrats or various unaffiliated, maverick authors. Marxism and communism remained relatively, if by no means absolutely, allergic to Nietzsche or indifferent to him. (Landa, 2017: 410–11)
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however slightly; and that is just sufficient to rule out a wholehearted popular commitment. It thus weakens the left’s ability to convincingly challenge reactionary politics, take a resolute stand against outright elitism. Benign and enlightened elitism may be a pleasant and comfortable middle position to occupy. One can be radical, all too radical, while looking with aversion at the great unwashed. But elitism is ultimately neither benign nor enlightened. (2017: 417)
But we have seen how Deleuze’s changing of the subject in passages at the heart of his text does not stand up hermeneutically. It also raises hard ethico-political questions. Almost no one is saying that Nietzsche ‘shouldn’t be read’, as a challenging and profoundly influential thinker. The issue is that there are real problems in celebrating Nietzsche as ‘radical’ but then, when presented with the ample textual evidence showing the full radicality of his ‘philosophy of the future’, pretending that this evidence doesn’t exist, implausibly claiming that calls to annihilate the weak are ‘merely metaphors’ or equivocating, as Deleuze does, so as to give the impression that it is only the ‘reactive forces’ of benign liberal artist-philosophers who usually are also academic professors that are going to be ‘selected away’ in a peaceably edifying operation of ethical self-cultivation.
To be sure, readers can extract many different strata from a writer as Protean as Nietzsche. But we should have the honesty to say that this is what we are doing, especially if we are claiming a political of metapolitical significance to his work, not our own. For it is simply impossible, on any standard political understanding, to sustain that Nietzsche himself was a progressive or a liberal of any stripe, and still read the unpublished and published passages in which he criticises Christianity for ‘instead of encouraging death (Tode) and self-annihilation (selbst-vernichtung), protect[ing] everything ill-constituted (mißratene) and sick (Kranke) and making it propagate itself ’ (WP 234); wherein he intones that ‘mankind in the mass sacrificed to the prosperity of a single stronger species of man – that would be an advance’ (GM II, 14); or about the need to ‘put an end without pity to all that is degenerate and parasitic [sie macht unerbittlich mit allem Entarteten und Parasitischen ein Ende]’ (NF 1888 25 1; cf. EH, ‘BT’, 4); and on the need for ‘physiology’ to be the basis of a new ‘great politics’ which will render Bismarck’s imperialist great politics of ‘blood and iron’ comparatively miniscule (NF 1888 25 1). It is also deeply problematic, if anything can be, to celebrate his radical elitist immoralism whilst ignoring those passages where Nietzsche links ‘greatness’ to ‘terribleness’ (‘terribleness belongs to greatness: let us not deceive ourselves’ (WP 1028)) and asserts that the ‘higher man’ whose absence he laments will be ‘a combination of the monster and the superman’ (WP 1027); that the ‘genius of culture’ will ‘manipulate falsehood, force, the most ruthless self-interest as his instruments so skilfully he could only be called an evil, demonic being’ (HH 40), and more; wherein he tells us that all moral systems, and all great advances in humanity, have come at the cost of immorality, falsity and criminality (WP 942--4, 1017; 1884 KSA 11 25[268]; TI, ‘Expeditions’, 45); and wherein we are flatly told that the object of his Grosse Politik is to attain: The enormous energy of greatness which can model the man of the future by means of discipline and also by means of the extermination of millions of the bungled and botched (Vernichtung von Millionen Mißratenen), and which can yet avoid going to ruin at the sight of the suffering created thereby, the like of which has never been seen before. (WP 964; cf. 862; 734; 960)
To close, let me say that, before assuming that Nietzsche’s and Deleuze’s appeal to the artist in us must mean that they couldn’t have meant any of this, those of us who are intellectuals or artists should remember Thomas Mann’s 1947 mea culpa: Nietzsche’s glorification of the barbaric is nothing more than a debauchery of his aesthetic drunkenness, and yet it betrays a neighborhood over which we have every reason to think: the very neighborhood of aestheticism and barbarism. (Mann, 1947: 33; cf. Losurdo, 2019: 405-410, 672-691)
Footnotes
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.