One can characterise modernity as the realm of the relentlessly new. But it is also the realm of repetition. We are in an eternal interregnum. In the 1930s Antonio Gramsci famously declares that “the old is dying and the new cannot be born.” Yet it appears we have been stuck in this moment ever since, and the eternal recurrence of this quote indicates the infinite interregnum of modernity.
Modernity is a great topic because its start date can always be pushed backed. So we find echoes of Gramsci’s sentiment – although I admit the key is different – when Nietzsche declared that God is Dead. In The Gay Science he does so at least three separate times (§108, §125, §343) and each time insists it will take us a long long time to come to understand this statement and its meaning. In §108 he suggests it will take “thousands of years” to truly overcome God, in §343 he suggests that “the event [of God’s Death] itself is far too great, too distant, too remote from the multitude’s capacity for comprehension even for the tidings of it to be thought of as having arrived as yet.” The emphasis on “arrived” is Nietzsche’s.
This will not be the first or last time Nietzsche’s thought echoes that of Marxist thinkers. For they grapple with fundamentally the same problem: of newness, modernity, transvaluation and the liveability of a life. It is true that Nietzsche is anti-egalitarian, that he has nothing kind to say about socialism and that his later writings are obsessed with willpower and strength. Yet it also true that Nietzsche is elusive, self-undermining and ironic. You go to Nietzsche scholarship? Bring your whip!
The publication of Daniel Tutt’s How to Read like a Parasite: Why the Left Got High on Nietzsche joins a chorus of recently published works that wish to drive an insurmountable wedge between Nietzsche and Marxism. There is the recent republication of Georg Lukács’ The Destruction of Reason and Domenic Losurdo’s The Aristocratic Rebel, both door stoppers. Tutt’s book is anorexic by comparison, a mere 326 pages. I am not that interested in discussing these books or reviewing them: others have taken on this task. If you want to be brought up to speed on the left case against Nietzsche without reading 1,000 pages, there are several Jacobin articles on this exact topic.
A more interesting question might be what is of value in Nietzsche? What are the ethics of reading presupposed by the left-wing critics of him? I follow Alain Badiou in thinking that Nietzsche must be left behind, but we will see what exactly I take this to mean in what follows.
Let us begin with something I find compelling about Nietzsche. In his less cynical and more joyous moments Nietzsche is grappling with a question of what kind of person can confront the era before us. He is interested in the new and in becoming. In the same aphorism of The Gay Science where Nietzsche says we are not yet able to understand the death of God he also writes:
We philosophers and free spirits feel as if a new dawn were shining on us when we received the tidings that the old god is dead; our heart overflows with gratitude, amazement, anticipation, expectation. At last the horizon appears free to us again, even granted that it is not bright; at last our ships may venture out again, venture out to face danger; all the daring of the lover of knowledge is permitted again, the sea, our sea, lies open again; perhaps there has never been yet such an open sea.
God is dead and a new era approaches. This era must be confronted by certain figures, but the problematic here is that of newness. It is a point underscored in how Nietzsche writes about his own audience. Nietzsche frequently claims that his audience exists only in the future, and this reaches absurd heights in the forward to The Antichrist where he declares “this book belongs to the very few. Perhaps none of them is even living yet….Only the day after tomorrow belongs to me. Some are born posthumously.” In a real sense Nietzsche can be said to be bringing fort his audience with his works, for clearing the way to readers of Nietzsche. The question that follows from this is to what end?
Nietzsche sees himself as intervening in a stagnant, sick culture. The health metaphor in Nietzsche is constant but one must remember it is a metaphor: health is not a state of return but a state of overcoming. One does not return to normal health but overcomes their sickness into superior health. Thus, reading Nietzsche as simply a reactionary will not do. Something else must be afoot in his work and he is not, as Joshua Dunigan said, “your father’s reactionary”.
The focus on the new is not just something that appears in Nietzsche’s late work. The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche first major work, is not just a study of ancient Greek tragedy but also an intervention in German culture, which Nietzsche see as having lost its way. Thus, towards the end of that book he declares:
Let no one believe that the German spirit has forever lost its mythical home when it can still understand so plainly the voices of the birds that tell of that home. Someday it will find itself awake in all the morning freshness following a tremendous sleep: then it will lay dragons, destroy vicious dwarfs, wake Brunnhilde – and even Wotan’s spear will not be able to stop its course!
It wasn’t until Nietzsche’s essay “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life” that Nietzsche made clear his future looking approach. The essay was written as a respond to Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorf’s “Future Philology!” which accused Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy of being embarrassingly unhistorical. In his essay Nietzsche makes clear that there must be space for a history of creation and culture, and that a historian who seeks merely to gather the truest facts – a form of history he calls antiquarian – risks never allowing us to have a critical relationship to history, in which we use it selectively to forge the new. In this sense antiquarian history is capable of producing cultural stagnation. We can depart from Nietzsche’s lexicon and examples here: a society which is 100% tradition and obedience to tradition would simply not be any kind of functioning society at all. In fact it is not even possible to imagine such a society. And here’s another example that is critical to Nietzsche’s approach here: we cannot know every fact about what has happened in the past, we cannot have everything in front of us. If the criterion of critique and advancement is total mastery of the past we will never finish the project of knowing about the past. This means that we cannot, culturally speaking, move forward. For Nietzsche the past must enable the new, as he makes clear: “When the past speaks it always speaks as an oracle: only if you are an architect of the future and know the present will you understand it.”
This instance on the new does not make Nietzsche left wing. It does, however, make him sympathetic to left wing ideas that are also invested in this question. How do we create a new political order, how to we escape from the tyranny of the old? From where does the new emerge and what forces are capable of unleashing it? Communism is a struggle for a new world. And the new can be many things, and the new can be something worse, but as moderns we are already amidst the new. Another Marxist echo in the problematic; “all that is solid melts into air.”
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The old is dying and the new cannot be born is as much a Gramscian diagnosis as it is a Nietzschean one. Yet what of other Nietzschean concepts? One that the right is particularly enamored with – apart from, as always, the concept of the Übermensch – is ressentiment. Yet even this term, born out of Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals, a text the lends itself well to right wing readings, is not so easy to place politically.
Let us start with a slightly old but interesting piece. In an opinion piece with the antipodean newspaper The Australian, conservative academic Mark Bauerlin pulled out an overused analysis of the left:
They suffer from this condition that Nietzsche brilliantly identified as ressentiment, the French term for resentment. Not ‘I resent this or that’. Ressentiment is a general attitude towards the world. They resent great things. Greatness makes them feel their own mediocrity. They don’t believe in heroes because heroes remind them of their inferiority. People with ressentiment want to tear down heroes and statues. They look at a hero like Thomas Jefferson and say: ‘He’s a slave owner.’ But if you don’t suffer from ressentiment, you look at Jefferson and say: ‘Don’t you understand, Jefferson grows up in a slave society, his family-owned slaves, his plantation depends on slaves, his material wellbeing depends upon slaves, everything conditions him to be a full-on supporter of slavery.’
The argument seems simple enough. It is that the left hate what is great: the monuments of western civilisation, the heroes of old and those able and capable of making hard practical decisions beyond good and evil (i.e. world leaders). Yet this reading, or application, of Nietzsche is a deeply unfaithful one. A conservative idea of ressentiment can be easily flipped on its head.
Let me offer quick anecdote to show how Nietzsche can quickly be flipped from pro-conservative to anti-conservative. Between 2017 and 2020 I taught a course on deception and political theory. One of the weeks focuses on Nietzsche and his account of truth. During that week I would ask students if they thought Donald Trump was an Übermenschlich figure. In Nietzsche the Übermensch is a figure of self-determination, overcoming and life affirmation. Against Christian meekness and otherworldliness, the Übermensch is of this world and wholly his own.
This question was supposed to use a contemporary example to get them thinking about the material. I like the question because so much of Trump seems like it might conform to Nietzsche’s ideas of Übermensch or the will to power; a strongman figure, cutting against the grain. But some students pipe up, and cautiously suggest that this analysis is hard to square with the fact his values are so clearly the current dominate values about wealthy, money and success; he holds the very Untermenschlich status of being a capitalist in a capitalist society. What kind of free spiritedness is this? Nietzsche’s concepts do not stick for long with those who are mostly satisfied with this world, or who wish to go backwards.
In the Genealogy of Morals Nietzsche seems to be inveighing against an ongoing situation where what he calls “slave morality” is overcoming “master morality”:
the slaves’ revolt in morality begins when ressentiment itself becomes creative and gives birth to values – a ressentiment experienced by those who, deprived as they are of the proper outlet of action, are forced to obtain their satisfaction in imaginary acts of vengeance. While all aristocratic morality springs from a triumphant affirmation of its own demands, the slave morality says ‘no’ ab initio to what is ‘outside itself’, ‘different from itself’ and ‘not itself’; and this ‘no’ is its creative act.
This is the first major passage in which ressentiment appears in The Genealogy of Morals. Read it carefully and questions about a contemporary conservative deployment of the term abound. Perhaps contemporary left wing ressentiment appears in saying no to tradition and to our past? Yet surely such a tradition would be the de facto starting point? Is there not a gap between saying no to what is different from itself and the affirmation of one’s own demands? Could the latter not actually describe transfigurative politics? It is again difficult here to square all this with a view of Nietzsche as simply reactionary.
What is missing in the conservative reading is an understanding of Nietzsche’s relationship to creativity and freedom. What freedom is it to inherit your values directly from the ruling classes and their ideology? What free spiritedness lies in adherence and admiration for bygone eras and ancient monuments? To enjoy aesthetic products – statues, churches, books, philosophers – because you were told to, rather than because you wish to? The free spirit is the one who possesses the will to power and the will to power is often read as nothing more than the will to truth, but this will is a creative force, a willingness to render something new, to create without adherence to the old order.
There is another way to craft this distinction, and it is simple. A weird logic is at work amongst the conservative intellectuals who claim that the victimhood is the defining feature of the left (which left, whose left? The communist left? The liberal left? More on this in a bit). Yet it is often they who take up the position of the victim. The world is changing, and they hate this. They resent it. They say no to it. They hate those who exercise power over them, often in ingenious ways, all whilst holding all the cards, cards they possess through nothing more than sheer luck and good inheritance.
What is beginning to emerge here is a crucial inversion. It is in fact conservatives who often suffer from ressentiment, unable to handle a world of dissent and dissensus. Those in power rage from positions of comfort, those whose world is slipping react violently, nihilistically to their surroundings. This is the vision of ressentiment coming from the right that Pankaj Mishra identifies so brilliantly in his The Age of Anger:
Donald Trump led an upsurge of white nationalists enraged at being duped by globalized liberals. A similar loathing of London technocrats and cosmopolitans led to Brexit. Hindu nationalists, who tend to belong to lower middle classes with education and some experience of mobility, aim at “pseudo-secularist” English-speaking Indians, accusing them of disdain for Hinduism and vernacular traditions.
Now it may seem that there is indeed a left that barters in ressentiment and guilt. They impose moral and Christian values. This is true, but often this left is an equally staid left (not always of course) and crucially a liberal left content with the current order. This is a left Wendy Brown analysed as early as 1995, in her States of Injury. For Brown, Nietzsche’s concept of ressentiment can be applied precisely to a left that doesn’t go far enough. Brown’s concern is that to leave political questions of emancipation in the space of legal and moral questions is to replace the political logic of transformation with the legal logic of punishment and revenge: “in its economy of perpetrator and victim, this project [of legal-liberal redress] seeks not power or emancipation for the injured or subordinated, but the revenge of punishment, making the perpetrator hurt as the sufferer does.” A left that seeks the total revaluation of our current order, including its juridical and carceral system, would go beyond this state of affairs and into the open seas of the abyss which Nietzsche so praised.
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The difficulties of the term ressentiment led us to another question: how should we read Nietzsche? Nietzsche is a difficult writer, a self-undermining ironist. In Ecce Homo he has this to say about ressentiment: “Freedom from ressentiment, enlightenment over ressentiment- who knows the extent to which I ultimately owe thanks to my protracted sickness for this too! The problem is not exactly simple: one has to have experienced it from a state of strength and a state of weakness.” This is a classic Nietzsche move, in which strength and weakness appear to together, in which being reduced helps one overcome. This kind of ambiguity is fundamental to Nietzsche and appears multiple times in his work. He veers from harsh dictates to kind words. He shames Christianity but tells us that he bears no ill will against its followers.
And Nietzsche, like many of the greatest German writers, is deeply funny. In the bombastic section of Ecce Homo entitled “Why I am so Clever” Nietzsche answers the question with anything but a comment about his mental acumen. An accident that he never obsessed himself with religion, that he has the right instincts (i.e. he was built different) and a long passage on food and consumption are what he offers us as the source of his genius. And then he tells us that “it was only sickness that brought me to reason.” This is all very funny, but also quite serious. What if intelligence is mostly accidental? What if it is related to one’s pitfalls? What if it is necessary to be unwell to think well? These points are not directly argued for, but presented, to trouble us, to compel us to revalue our values.
The attempts to prove Nietzsche as reactionary betray a twisted ethics of reading and strange belief in the power of ideas. The great racist ideologues and intellectual criminals of our time (and of past times) are very direct! Nietzsche’s elusiveness comes from his distance from such things. He is before the great terrors of the age, but he is always driving a wedge between any stable interpretation of him. He cannot quite be brought under the hallmark of reactionary or conservative thought. His ideas always go a little further. To place him alongside Edmund Burke or Joseph de Maistre is a grave error. Yet he bears no love from progressive movements, for equality and in this he is unequivocal. Yet can we believe that if we enjoy reading Nietzsche, if we find him compelling or insightful, we must take the worst of him too? He is only a systematic thinker to the extent he has a singular mission, but part of this mission is to frequently dissolve himself.
When it comes to the question of if we should read Nietzsche, of where he belongs, we mistake his artistry for philosophy. The question should we read Nietzsche is not the question should we read Carl Schmitt or Alfred Speers. It is the question should we read Ernst Jünger or Louis-Ferdinand Celine or Yukio Mishma. It is the question of if we are reading a violent and cruel Machiavelli, a racist Kant or Hegel, a Nazi Heidegger, a Christian Pascal or a distant Montaigne. There are figures who remain worthwhile despite their dubious commitments. Figures who have much to tell us even, or precisely, when we find them loathsome.
Nietzsche himself shows us a world whose fracturing gives us permission to pick and choose and craft our own way forward. It is unclear what salience infinite interpretive battles will have. Perhaps Nietzsche is like Hegel, waiting for us just as we believe we have gotten away from him. In Badiou’s essay, “Who is Nietzsche?” he claims that Nietzsche “is someone that one must at once discover, find, and lose.” For Badiou this insight clings to his own conceptions of philosophy and anti-philosophy. But there is another meaning there, lurking. We must learn to lose Nietzsche because his problems are our problems, his modernity our modernity. A new world beyond the cruel elements of this one awaits, but it must be forged through an act of will. We are Nietzsche’s future readers, the ones who awaited him. But it is also our duty to be his last readers. And Nietzsche knew this too, writing in Ecce Homo that “one repays a teacher badly if one remains only a pupil.” After the interregnum we will be able to read Nietzsche easily, peacefully. Nietzsche tells us, before Ecce Homo truly begins, that “only when you have all denied me will I return to you…” One hopes such a day draws near.