synopsis

The conversation revolves around Daniel Tutt's book How to Read Like a Parasite. Why the Left Got High on Nietzsche, which was released at the end of 2023. Henry Holland first speaks to Tutt about his working class origins, which Tutt repeatedly addresses in the book. Tutt reports on this based on his first enthusiastic reading of Nietzsche as a teenager and how Nietzsche's individualism dissuaded him from developing class consciousness in the Marxist sense. For this reason, he wants to build on Marxist Nietzsche criticism, as articulated by Georg Lukács and Domenico Losurdo, for example. Holland then asks him about his assessment of left-wing Nietzscheanism. The example of this is Huey Newton (1942-1989), also discussed in the book, who co-founded the Black Panther Party in the USA in the 1960s and was subsequently one of its leading figures; an organization that campaigned in radical form for the emancipation of blacks. The discussion then revolves around the extent to which the Nietzschean search for the realization of a “higher self” is not yet compatible with Marxist social criticism and a corresponding commitment in the sense of a “parasitic” reading of Nietzsche's actually elitist ideas directed against the labor movement. By critically addressing the polemics of contemporary Rechtsnietzschean Costin Alamariu, Tutt and Holland see Nietzsche as a politically ambiguous defender of the individual and collective transgression of prevailing norms.

‍

Full conversation

‍

I. Nietzsche and the working class

Henry Holland: Thank you Daniel — Daniel Tutt — for being with us, for this blog and video interview. I came across your new book by chance after Micky Wierda from Repeater Verlag suggested the work to me for a review. How to Read Like a Parasite. Why the Left Got High on Nietzsche came out as a paperback and e-book at the end of 2023. It takes readers on an intellectual journey across a vast steppe of the modern history of ideas, in which political turning points — be it the Russian Revolution of 1917, or the turmoil of 1968 — are also always present. Taken into this fascinating but sometimes appalling territory, readers also learn the stories of extraordinary Nietzschean actors. And last but not least, right in the middle of this great history, the insights into your autobiography, which you repeatedly intersperse, also promote multiple changes of perspective. At this point, can you briefly reconstruct how your biography led you to Nietzsche and explain why your working class background plays a key role in your arguments?

‍

Daniel Tutt: First of all, thanks from my side, it is an honor to enter into a dialogue with you. As you suggest, I read Nietzsche for the first time as a very young student Beyond good and evil — and I understood almost nothing. But as with all of Nietzsche's texts — and because there is something about his attractive style — I felt compelled to read on and research what was actually going on in this extremely dynamic material. So it was something completely different from the usual Anglo-American analytical philosophy that I studied at university. And I was also interested in history and poetry, which went well together.

So I had this figure who came into my life, who somehow satisfied all my professional interests and also had to make a very profound comment on modern life, on modern existence. Nietzsche blew me away as only he could, and I think he also evoked a feeling of restless excitement in me that I couldn't exactly name or localize.

You spoke of the “working class”: That's true. It is one of the particular absurdities of our current capitalism that, in the understanding of many specialists, sociologists and even philosophers, there is no such thing as the “working class” anymore. This development has taken place in the last four generations since the Second World War. As a result of this development, the mere announcement that you yourself come from this “working class” is a scandal in itself. In doing so, you look at your mode of existence from the perspective of a specific antagonism that is being displaced by the status quo. Because the status quo doesn't want to see the world in classes. The status quo wants to see things in terms of individual singular agents or agents who try to define themselves through their relationship with the market. There, they also want to realize the “highest” version of their own “brand” — which, according to this perspective, is identical to their highest self.¹ But Nietzsche didn't make me more class-conscious. I rather believe that reading Nietzsche led me away from any formulation of class consciousness at the time; in return, however, she provided me with the necessary tools to attempt to realize a higher and singular self. And that is why the title of my first chapter is: “We live in Nietzsche's World.” That is exactly why I think his thinking is so timely. Peter Sloterdijk talks about the fact that it was Nietzsche's claim to bring us the fifth Gospel.² According to Sloterdijk, Nietzsche can therefore be regarded as a prophet of our world today. And in doing so, Nietzsche is also updating the Socratic maxim of expanding self-knowledge.³ But he adds something decisive to this important context: Those who strive for a higher self must take a dangerous path in order to get ahead. In other words, this path is only intended for a few. For me as a young person, that was the appeal of reading Nietzsche, namely that I wanted to reach my higher self and also be part of this Nietzschean community, which consisted of exceptional personalities. And that brings us to the other major narrative thread of the book: Nietzsche — he of all people — as a community-building philosopher.

If you want to follow my argument so far, you also have to admit that there is something like the Nietzscheanism There is that Nietzsche was more than just a philosopher of thought experiments or a critic of metaphysics. And also more than a philosopher who acts like a pure recluse beyond politics, who can be “subtracted” from social life and who is outdated.⁴ And finally, my book also asks the question of returning to Nietzsche once you have already familiarized yourself with him. In doing so, I draw on what I consider to be a long-neglected Marxist critique of Nietzsche.

‍

II. Individualism and Socialist Threat

HH: Yes, Georg Lukács' Marxist critique⁵ and Domenico Losurdo's almost encyclopedic recent writings form the pillars of your book.⁶ Among the many tempting threads you've just unfurled, let's first pick out Nietzsche's “community building project.” Because there is this debate, which is well-known to you and persists in a penetrating manner: Do Nietzsche's writings have an identifiable core, a definable center? Or are they hopelessly decentered? And here you are taking a clear stance per a “center,” for a crucial point in Nietzsche's philosophy, from which everything else starts. Or, more precisely, per a core of key points intentionally connected by Nietzsche. You will demonstrate how Nietzsche's thinking is essentially aimed at building an elite community of intellectual activists, an exclusive intelligentsia that in turn should have real influence on politics. Another part of this core, in your opinion, is that Nietzsche wants to maintain rankings at all costs, even if that means that the working class must be oppressed and put in their place. In short, he wants to maintain the existing taboos about identifying with the working class, or even class consciousness. Especially against this background, it would be useful to talk about one or the other so-called “Left Nietzschean” that you mention in the book. Because they obviously spoke of “class consciousness” in the course of their own efforts to build intellectual communities. Probably the most striking character you cover in this regard in your book is Huey Newton (1942-1989). Newton, known above all as one of the co-founders of the Black Panthers, came from a completely peripheral social position to suddenly take on a leading role within the radical left and especially the black communities in the late 60s and early 70s. You describe how Newton made this leap: Through a “creative misinterpretation” of Nietzsche's theses about the will to power.⁷ This took place almost at the same time as a cultural event: In 1968, an extraordinarily influential new translation of The will to power, this falsifying edition of Nietzsche's estate fragments by his sister and her collaborators, translated by Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale. You again find that Nietzsche, from around 1971, was a constant in Newton's thinking. Could you discuss these connections in more detail?

‍

DT: I'd love to. I take two questions from your remarks. One of them concerns Nietzsche's relationship with the working class. The second is aimed at how I understand Nietzsche's so-called “core.”

If we even dare to claim that Nietzsche's thinking has such a “core,” then this is initially contrary to the well-established academic orthodoxy of French Theory⁸. But even if you look at Maudemarie Clark's American Nietzsche interpretations⁹ all the way to Brian Leiter¹⁰ Look, and these are mostly analytical Nietzschean approaches, then these thinkers also insist that we are dealing with a decentred thinker in Nietzsche. Even though they base this on entirely different arguments than Derrida, Deleuze and Foucault, for example, they still insist on the same point. And then there are also the various perspectives on Nietzsche, which is a genuine left Nietzsche's interpretation could guide. In this regard, it is crucial to clarify that Nietzsche was of the plebeian or even the working class not met with particular hate. It is rather a question of understanding Nietzsche's conception of this question through the lens of his wider critique of slave morality.

In this context, I would like to stress that, from Nietzsche's point of view, the state of the working class after the French Revolution and after the development of industrial capitalism from the 1830s onwards became extremely problematic. He diagnoses that working class consciousness during this period was imbued with ideas of “slave morality.” According to Nietzsche in his early work, this “slave morality” is particularly problematic because it implies an “optimistic worldview.” Such an attitude interferes with a culture's ability to produce individual “geniuses.”

When we look at Nietzsche's early writing Schopenhauer as an educator Then we see something that is in Goethe's wake: a departure from a particular understanding of the intellectual and from a particular understanding of greatness. Nietzsche describes individuals who still carry such size as “higher” or “most valuable specimens.” Nietzsche contrasts these with the philosophy of resentment and slave morality, which includes Judaism, Christianity and modern socialism and which, according to this understanding, insists on a vulgar concept of equality. This prevents the just mentioned form of human size from fully blooming. In contrast to the “optimistic”, Nietzsche calls this prevented form the tragic worldview. According to this reading, Schopenhauer is a philosopher who thinks of the great individual only in terms of contemplation, but not in terms of action. Nietzsche therefore attaches great importance to the need to combat slave morality through political practice that is anxious to kill this potential man of action and to preserve the genius. Because leveling movements, particularly socialism, seem to eliminate this possibility. And that is a source of deep melancholy for Nietzsche. We should also recognize that Nietzsche himself was a precocious genius, or at least that he was viewed in this way, receiving a full professorship in such an exceptional way at just twenty-four years of age.

‍

III. Fist fights with the philosopher of transgression

HH: There are some hot and conversational topics in the room that I like to address. Let's start with a biographical perspective. I repeatedly find Nietzsche's biography simply too chaotic that he could have created a coherent center in his oceanic work, which he could barely contain. Just think of his major health restrictions, which occurred to him as an adult and did not go away. One is tempted to apply his own blatant words, which he repeatedly directed mercilessly against the most defenseless sections of the population, to himself. Quite objectively, i.e. above all physiologically speaking, he was a “sick nature,” and what is the relationship between the realities of such a person's statements? “What humanity has seriously considered up to now are not even realities, mere imaginations, more strictly speaking, lies out of the bad instincts of sick, in the deepest sense harmful natures”¹². Such mischievous temptations aside, but still against the same background: To what extent do you want to attribute to Nietzsche a well-planned intentionality in his work? At the same time, I would like to talk about Huey Newton. In previous conversations between us, you recommended a fist-fighting approach to Nietzsche. In short, you claim that we can learn most from “Nietzsche's politics,” “Nietzsche's politics,” as you put it yourself, when we see them at the center of his entire work — and treat Nietzsche as a sparring partner.

And Newton also took a fist-fighting approach to his Nietzsche reading. Metaphorically speaking, it took place out there on the street and during confrontations; it wasn't about nice reading groups of “do-gooders,” for whom the question of who would be reading aloud was the biggest possible subject of dispute. And in this context, I also want to address the question of transgression or punishable transgression. Because I suggest that the reason for Nietzsche's attraction for so many readers, including so many working-class readers¹³, is that it paves the way for individuals to pursue “justified transgressions”: That is what we could call such acts.

In this context, it is crucial that Newton's participation in the Black Panthers was characterized by various transgressions of the bourgeois order, transgressions that had an overall emancipatory effect on their protagonists, even if they were violent again and again. In fact, he only became a nationwide leader in the USA after he was involved in fatal shooting of a police officer in October 1967. Following this death, for which he was charged with murder — in the event of a guilty verdict, the authorities would have executed him — a nationwide “Free Huey” campaign was organized in the USA, involving a number of disenfranchised groups, including the Young Lords and the so-called Latin Panthers. These groups recognized the racially motivated state violence in what Newton faced. However, he was not found guilty of the charges against him and was therefore able to take on a leading role in his organizations, as it were distinguished by his physical experience in punishing a transgression.¹⁴

Finally, I want to combine this question regarding the justified transgression by and with Nietzsche with a perspective from contemporary “legal Nietzscheanism” and also ask you for your position on the latter. It's about the new book by Costin Alamariu, whom many people only know under his daring social media pseudonym: Bronze Age Pervert. Alamariu is apparently concerned with staging and bringing about transgressions: But whether these are “justified” is another question. According to Alamariu, Nietzsche postulated a “happy moment” in historical cycles in which political weakness occurs, the previously enforced homogeneity collapses and a tension built up in regimes for a long time unleashes. (Against Alamariu, I am also thinking of the repressive homogeneity of working life in late capitalism, which is touched upon in your book, Daniel.) Furthermore, Alamariu claims that this homogeneity is being replaced by a “tropical multiplication” of monstrous types, most of them weak and/or deficient, but a few fortunately strong and “well-off.” And now I would like to quote Alamariu directly: “The qualities or virtues, the inner states, which are the result of aristocratic education and education, are now free to go their way in new, unexpected directions. [...] You come up with new tastes: the new as such and a preference for transgression, boredom with the law... ”¹⁵

Even though I think little of Alamarius's polemic as a whole, his description here resonates strongly with the campaigns of Newton and other left-wing political actors in the sixties and seventies. You again state, Daniel, that “Nietzsche openly championed the crises of capitalism and the decadence they stirred up,” because these “offer an opportunity to [further] accelerate the brutality they reveal.”¹⁶. You obviously don't believe in a collapse of our current political order that would have an emancipatory effect on most people in the working class: And you also see the vast majority of the world's population in this group. Would you still work to ensure that more people get a taste for transgression in a positive sense?

‍

DT: It's a complex question, but I can follow your thought process. Let me try to unpack the question. First of all, why do I think Nietzsche was in favour of accelerating decadence? This is a claim which, by the way, differs from the interpretations that were in circulation in the period immediately after the thinker's death, for example by Stefan George's Interpretations and those of the other early Nietzsche cults. And we can also talk about what Nietzsche recognized as the value of transgressive communities, namely that they could serve as guinea pigs for the elasticity of the morals of slave morality. In the eyes of many, this strategy has qualified Nietzsche as an anti-bourgeois thinker. And to a certain extent, this classification is also correct. I am not saying that Nietzsche is easy to understand as a supporter of bourgeois power. Lukács, on the other hand, will argue that Nietzsche's anti-morality, Nietzsche's theory of transgression, and so on, or even the community that Nietzsche is trying to build, form the elements that are to be understood as militant aesthetics in favor of maintaining bourgeois power.¹⁷ The value sphere of bourgeois power is itself to be understood as a kind of elastic sphere in which transgressions of their own values do not necessarily pose a mortal threat to their status as a class power. Nietzsche returned in 1968, but — and in contrast to the 1930s — he returned this time on the side of the left. This change appalled Lukács, who had witnessed the rise of the Nazis and had accused Nietzsche of complicity with it. But that's it: Nietzsche returned on the left, and the focus is on Counterculture, because Nietzsche's values, implemented in practice, lie primarily in culture. The question now remains: What is the benefit or strength of Nietzsche's critique of cultural value?

There's a lot to say about that. Huey Newton offers an interesting, let's call it a “parasitic” reading. Because Newton certainly acknowledges that Nietzsche carried reactionary baggage with him, but he still reads a specific text by Nietzsche that has a strong influence on him: About truth and lies in an extra-moral sense.¹⁸ This extremely convincing short early publication can be described as a precursor to what later became discourse theory. According to Nietzsche, language is the home of values that are manifested in words; words therefore have a political value.

In parallel, Newton took note of Nietzsche's critique of the working class: The conditions of modern life have pacified them, robbed them of a certain vitalism. As a result, people in the working class are sometimes no longer able to engage in the type of activity through which their higher self can ultimately be realized. That is actually, I think Henry, a true Nietzsche point. We shouldn't pretend that there isn't anything there. And I think Huey Newton saw the same thing. Yes, being in a state of passivity is one of the things to recognize when you come from the working class or are exposed to a life of poverty. The question thus becomes essential: How can we change this oppression and release it from its interdependence with the increasing passivity? For Newton, the answer was a linguistic and eye-catching operation, driven by the Panthers, which redefined the police in the minds of many. Redefining the police, literally as “pigs,” also allowed the Panthers to reinvent themselves and their relationship with the state, and this is where things get interesting.

Because that means that Newton was basically able to promote class consciousness by reading Nietzsche. Even though that, I believe, is the opposite of Nietzsche's intentions. Nietzsche is a militant bourgeois who may be in favour of transgression, but not necessarily in favour of a social order that would be in a constant revolutionary moment of agitation. Nietzsche is an anti-revolutionary. That doesn't mean we can't elicit something from him, and that brings us back to fist-fighting. Yes, if you are a left-wing person and ending the exploitation is a matter of your heart, you can read Nietzsche that way. I think that's going to be the most productive for you, right? And if you read it like this, then you will be able to identify with this very famous Nietzsche sentence, which is almost like a prayer for his enemies: “You must be proud of your enemy: then your enemy's successes are also your successes. ”¹⁹

‍

Daniel Tutt (born 1981) grew up on the US West Coast, in a working-class family that fell apart several times. Since he was a young teen, he worked in the construction industry, first as a mason's assistant (“hod carrier” in English), and earned his money in the construction industry even after graduating from university. In 2014, he completed his doctorate on the topic “Political Community in Badiou, Laclau, Nancy, and Žižek.” Tutt gives on his website states that he succeeded in making the transition to the “bourgeois” profession of philosopher primarily because he enjoyed the financial support of a businessman during the transition phase. Since then, he has taught in prisons and at universities and has published extensively on the interface of psychoanalysis, politics and Marxist philosophy.

Henry Holland (born 1975) is a literary translator, from German into English, and lives in Hamburg. He also writes and researches the history of ideas and culture and published in 2023 on Ernst Bloch and Rudolf Steiner in German Studies Review. Together with religious scholar Aaron French (University of Erfurt), he is working on a critical biography of Steiner in English. You can find out more about Holland's scientific work and cultural policy on his blog, German books, reloaded, or in Print newspapers. He is a member and board member of Hamburger Writers' Room: The working space for literary writers in Europe.

‍

sources

Alamariu, Costin: Selective Breeding and the Birth of Philosophy. New York 2023.

Clark, Maudemarie: Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy. Cambridge 1991.

Doggett, Peter: There's A Riot Going On. Revolutionaries, Rock Stars And The Rise And Fall Of The 60s Counter-Culture. Edinburgh 2007.

Director, Brian: Nietzsche on Morality. London 2014.

Losurdo, Domenico: Nietzsche, the aristocratic rebel. Berlin 2012.

Lukacs, Georg: The destruction of reason. Berlin 1960.

Sloterdijk, Peter: About improving the good news. Nietzsche's fifth “Gospel.” Speech on the 100th anniversary of Friedrich Nietzsche's death. Frankfurt am Main 2000.

Tutt, Daniel: How to Read Like a Parasite. Why the Left Got High on Nietzsche. London 2024.

Xenophon: Memories of Socrates. Greek-German. Translated and edited by Peter Järisch. Düsseldorf & Zurich 2003.

‍

footnotes

1: Cf. Nietzsche's idea of an individual's “loyalty” to “his higher self” in Richard Wagner in Bayreuth, paragraph 3.

2: Cf. Peter Sloterdijk, About improving the good news. Nietzsche's fifth “Gospel”. Sloterdijk draws on Nietzsche's description of So did Zarathustra I speak back, as can be found in a letter to his publisher Ernst Schmeitzner: “It is a 'poetry', or a fifth 'gospel' or something” (Letter dated 13/2/1883).

3: See, among other things, the report by Socrates's student Xenophon, who collected some statements by Socrates on the subject of self-knowledge: Xenophon, memories of Socrates, P. 199-201.

4: In dozens of places in his writings, Nietzsche presents himself as “an untimely one”: In this regard, the four volumes of his Untimely Considerations, published between 1873 and 1876, best known. But also a chapter of the late script Götzen-Dämmerung Entitled Nietzsche's “Streifzüge eines Unzeitgemeines” (Link).

5: Cf. Georg Lukacs, The destruction of reason.

6: In particular: Domenico Losurdo, Nietzsche, the aristocratic rebel.

7: Cf. Daniel Tutt, How to Read Like a Parasite, P. 193.

8: Editor's note: In the international debate, post-structuralism in particular is referred to as “French Theory” (see also the corresponding remarks on this here).

9: See Maudemarie Clark, among others, Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy.

10: Cf. Brian Leiter, Nietzsche on Morality.

11: Cf. Schopenhauer as an educator, Paragraph 6

12: Cf. Ecce homo, Why I'm so smart, paragraph 10.

13: See, for example, a survey carried out in 1897 for the Leipzig Workers Reading Room regarding the reading behavior of workers, which was already mentioned on this blog (link).

14: Cf. Doggett, There's a Riot Going On, P. 128-130.

15: Alamariu paraphrases and quotes directly from Chapter Four by Costin Alamariu, Selective Breeding and the Birth of Philosophy.

16: Tutt, How to Read Like a Parasite, P. 278.

17: Lukács writes in The destruction of reason For example: “Nietzsche [...] creates the concept of an instinctive bondage: the declining bourgeoisie must unleash everything bad, bestial in people in order to win over militant activists to save their rule” (p. 305). In the so-called “expressionism debate,” he emphasized the affinity between Nietzschean aesthetics and the fascist movement as early as the 1930s.

18: Cf. http://www.nietzschesource.org/#eKGWB/WL. However, this work from 1873 was only published posthumously.

19: So Zarathustra spoke, Of War and War People.