Thomas, Peter. "Over-Man and the Commune," New Left Review, new series, no.
31, January-February 2005, pp. 137-144. Review of: Domenico Losurdo,
Nietzsche, il ribelle aristocratico & Jan Rehmann, Postmoderner
Links-Nietzscheanismus: Deleuze und Foucault; eine Dekonstruktion.
Intro:
Few thinkers have enjoyed such widespread appeal over the last forty years
as Nietzsche. The instrumentalization of the Nazi period seemingly left
behindLukácss dissenting voice notwithstandingNietzsches almost
Heraclitean metaphors and images, visceral incarnations of some
mythological wisdom which always seems to be in excess of itself, have
fascinated theorists from the whole range of the political spectrum. For
some, such as Kaufmann and Rorty, Nietzsche dissolved philosophy into an
aesthetic play and a relativism entirely in accord with, but lying beyond,
the values of the liberal democracies. For othersin the so-called New
Nietzsche emerging from post-war Francehis critique of the overweening
pretensions of the western philosophical tradition seemed to offer the
possibility to begin philosophy again, as a post-philosophy. While this
current of interpretation was not too shy to appropriate some of
Nietzsches concepts for a radical critique of contemporary bourgeois
societyone thinks in the first instance of Foucault, Derrida and
Deleuzeits presupposition was that Nietzsche himself was an essentially
apolitical philosopher, an innocent victim of right-wing distortion whose
indeterminacy permitted an attempt to expropriate him for the Left.
-----------------
In Losurdo's monumental volume, Nietzsche's politics are not seen as a
potentially embarrassing sideshow to the main event:
"His principal thesis is that Nietzsches thought, in all its stages and
transformations, was fundamentally determined by a central engagement: the
critique and denunciation of the tradition that derived
from the French Revolution, traversed 1848, and arrived, in Nietzsches
youth, at the Paris Commune."
Nietzsche was horrified by the Commune, when he read the malicious rumor
that it had burned the Louvre, but never revised his opinion. Not long
after, THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY appeared.
Losurdo demonstrates that whatever else The Birth of Tragedy became, it
must also
be understood in its own historical moment, as a theoretical response to a
specific political eventthe uprising of the Communearticulated within
a constellation of ideologies which include various forms of anti-Semitism,
secular and not-so-secular critiques of Christianity and conservative
opposition
to a consolidating transatlantic liberalism; all united by a belief in a
redemptive Imperial German Sonderweg leading back to the virtues of pre-
Enlightenment Greece. Although Nietzsche claimed to be a solitary thinker
who did not enjoy a con.dence with the currents of his time, Losurdo has
meticulously recorded the wider social echoes that provided a context for
his formulations during these decades. Thus, for instance, the terms of
Nietzsches critique of Socrates, singularly severe if considered in relation
to the disciplinary etiquette of late nineteenth-century classical philology,
become less exceptional when placed within earshot of the rhetoric of certain
anti-Semitic currents of the time.
Moreover:
At all stages, Nietzsches quest was accompanied by the shadow of the
socialist movement, as Losurdo demonstrates in detail. Thus he argues
that Nietzsches intertwined critiques of Christianity and the History of
Philosophy were a response to the role that the former in particular played
in the formation of the early socialist movement. The famous call for an
amoralism, beyond good and evil, is analysed as emerging in opposition
to socialist appeals to notions of justice and moral conduct; the call for a
new slavery as the foundation for a higher civilization is placed in the
context
of the American Civil War and the abolitionist movement, and support
for rule of a Herrenvolk over barbarians alongside anti-colonialist stirrings.
Nietzsches .nal position (insofar as the unstable constellation of competing
elements which make up his thought can be regarded as reaching a .nal
position) is seen as striving toward a radical aristocratic critique of
modernity,
liberalism, notions of equality and the rights of man.
But most surprisingly:
Perhaps most contentiously, Losurdos study has reopened the question
of Nietzsches relation to anti-Semitism. This aspect of the book has
already caused a minor furore in Italy and, more recently, Germany, enticing
Ernst Nolte into public debate with Losurdo. This has been largely
due to Losurdos philological critique of the approach of Giorgio Colli and
Mazzino Montinari, editors of both the German and Italian critical editions
of Nietzsches workand particularly of translation choices in the
Italian edition. Losurdo contends that Colli and Montinari, in their urge to
de-Nazify the philosophers image, have bent the stick too far in the other
direction and obscured the true picture of Nietzsches relation to
questions of Jewish culture and anti-Semitism in his own time. It should
be stressed
that Losurdo does not propose to re-Nazify Nietzsche; rather, he questions
some of the less plausible explanations offered as to why Nietzsche could
be appropriated by the ideology of National Socialism. In particular, he
demolishes the myth that the traces of anti-Semitism were introduced by
Nietzsches sister; on the contrary, he maintains that, if anything, Elisabeth
Förster-Nietzsche sought to make the posthumous image of her brother
more palatable to enlightened bourgeois taste. Even though Nietzsche does
break with the explicit and extreme anti-Semitism of his youth, Losurdo
demonstrates that the theoretical structure of this ideology and its fellow
travellers had an abiding in.uence on his thoughtas amply evidenced in
the call by the late Nietzsche, the prophet of the innocence of becoming, for
the extermination of the weak and ill-born.
Losurdo defends Lukacs, while (the reviewer is not clear) providing a more
nuanced analysis, viewing Nietzsche in the context of radical aristocratic
reaction among European intellectuals internationally.
Overall, Losurdo's reading opposes the decontextualized, ahistorical
reading of the 'new Nietzsche', largely inspired by Deleuze.
Deleuzes in.uential coupling of Nietzsche with Spinoza, as like-minded
philosophers of freedom, might have faltered before the evidence amassed
by Losurdo of the contemporary meaning of Nietzsches advocacy of
slavery, no mere metaphor for life but a concrete response to
anti-abolitionist
debates.
The reviewer finds some lapses when it comes to reviewing more recent
left-wing scholarship, but Rehmann fills in the gaps. Rehmann tears into
the false claims of Deleuze and Foucault, though in the end he concedes
that the "Left can indeed make use of Nietzsches insights into the dynamic
of modernity".
Losurdo bypasses this fashionable approach to Nietzsche altogether. The
reviewer suggests a different point of departure:
Losurdo argues that an accurate historical and political contextualization
of Nietzsches thought allows us to grasp elements which liberalism
and modernitys self-representations would like to repress. In a certain
sense, Nietzsches radical-aristocratic critique .gures as liberalisms guilty
conscience, exaggerating and thus revealing the hypocrisy of an ideology
professing notions of equality, liberty and rights institutes new forms of
oppression. Nietzsches is thus a demystifying critique . . .
Somehow, Nietzsche can be useful in unpacking the contemporary ideology of
"humanitarian war and the imperialism of human rights." I don't see
how, but there it is.
Anyway, more evidence to answer the question: Why Marx and not Nietzsche?".
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