I. The “golden loot”

The golden loot. — Many chains have been put on man so that he will forget to act like an animal: and indeed, he has become milder, more spiritual, more joyful, more prudent than all animals are. But now he still suffers from wearing his chains for so long that he lacked pure air and free movement for so long: — but these chains are, I repeat again and again, those serious and meaningful errors of moral, religious, metaphysical ideas. Only when the chain disease has been overcome, the first major goal has been fully achieved: the separation of humans from animals. — We are now in the midst of our work to remove the chains and need the utmost care. Nur the refined man May freedom of mind to be given; to him alone approaches making life easier and anoints out his wounds; he may first say that he is responsible for Happiness Live for the sake of no further goal; and on everyone else's lips his motto would be dangerous: Peace around me and pleasure in everything close to me. — In this motto for individuals, he remembers an old great and moving word, which allen was considered, and that has stood above the entire human race, as a motto and landmark, on which everyone who adorns their banner with it at an early stage — on which Christianity was the basis. Still, it seems Is it not timethat it all People may be like those shepherds who saw the sky illuminated above them and heard that word: “Peace on earth and good pleasure for people in one another.” The time of individuals.¹

With this aphorism, Nietzsche ends the second part of the second volume of Human, all-too-human, which is overwritten with The Wanderer and His Shadow. Looking back, Nietzsche describes this book as the document of a major personal crisis:

Back then — it was 1879 — I resigned my Basel professorship, lived like a shadow in St. Moritz over the summer and the next winter, the sunniest of my life, than Shadows in Naumburg. This was my minimum: “The Wanderer and His Shadow” was created in the meantime. Undoubtedly, I knew shadows back then...²

It is easy to see that a transformation is taking place in the second volume of his first large collection of aphorisms. The first volume of the “Book for Free Spirits”, which was published in 1878, is still entirely in the light of an enlightened and individualistic intellectual libertinage. The first edition is dedicated to the enlightener Voltaire, who had died a hundred years earlier. In the two supplements to this book — Mixed opinions and sayings And just The Wanderer and His Shadow —, which initially appeared as separate books in 1879 and 1880 and were only published as one book in 1886 together with the first volume, it does in fact strike a different, 'darker' and more thoughtful tone. Self-reflectivity is increasing, the style is becoming more paradoxical. Nietzsche increasingly becomes the doubting “hammer” of his later writings.

However, this final aphorism is now remarkably 'light'. In the first section of the aphorism, up to the second indent, he clearly represents the program of enlightenment humanism. Humans should overcome the animal within themselves and become “milder, more spiritual, more joyful, more prudent.” Zarathustra's ideas of “self-overcoming” and “superman” are suggested here, but without the “dark” twist that Nietzsche would later give them.

This is followed, up to the next indent, by the thesis, which could actually be described as Nietzsche's “basic view” and to which he should remain loyal from early work to late work: that in order to realize his very own potential, man must free himself from the “chains” of traditional metaphysics and morality, which have so far oppressed him and allowed him to remain in a state of animality.

This phrase is surprising, as those “errors” justify themselves precisely by creating a break between animals and humans. The biblical story of the fall of sin already tells of how this break in the world came about. Nietzsche diametrically reverses this familiar perspective here — how is he able to justify that?

Until the next indent, however, there is no answer to this obvious question, but a new twist in Nietzsche's argument by citing another of his core theses: that not everyone should be allowed to liberate themselves spiritually equally in their own sense. This life without moral ties should be reserved for “refined people.” His motto is — this is also a typical Nietzsche stylistic device — a variation of the Christmas Annunciation, as it is still read every year in churches on Christmas Eve.

At the end of the aphorism, this is quoted, although again slightly varied. In the classic wording of the Luther Bible, with which Nietzsche was of course very familiar — here in the 1912 version, which largely corresponds to him — the slogan is: “Glory be to God in the highest and peace on earth and to people! “(Luke 2, 14) It is a collective prophecy of the “multitude of heavenly hosts” (Luke 2, 13) to the shepherds as representatives of the common people.

However — and Nietzsche may have known this — the original Luther Bible follows a reading of the original Greek text that is now considered obsolete. The latest version of this translation from 2017 is therefore somewhat different: “Glory be to God in the highest and peace on earth among people of his good will. “This is therefore no longer a promise of mercy and peace to really all people, but only a promise of peace to those who share God's “goodwill.”

If you leaf forward one chapter in the Gospel of Luke, it becomes clear how this restriction could be meant, because it says in the famous hymn of praise to Mary (translated from 2017): God's “mercy lasts for and for those who fear him. He exercises violence with his arm and disperses who are arrogant in their heart's mind. He knocks the powerful off the throne and elevates the lowly. He fills the hungry with goods and lets the rich go out empty-handed.” (Luke 1, 50-53) The New Testament is therefore not necessarily about a shallow 'God loves all people, 'but a revolutionaries Message: God only “loves” people who believe in him and who are not “arrogant.” In particular, the rich and powerful are excluded here, as in countless other places in the book. — From this perspective, Nietzsche's first reversal of blessing sounds very “arrogant”: The free spirit only wants to yourself Live in peace and harmony with things that him surround.

This also raises questions again. Exactly why is it not yet time for this solution? What would have to happen so that it could be set up as an ideal? And how can it be explained that Nietzsche, on the one hand, proclaims a break with all previous ideals, but at the same time puts them into perspective, insofar as he even approves of the utopian goal of Christianity? — The fact that Nietzsche adopts this goal is underlined by the fact that he uses this formula — “Peace on earth and people to please one another! “— completed a postcard which he sent to his student and confidante Adolf Baumgartner on 23.12.1878.³

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II. Peace or Good to each other!

Two estate fragments from the 1880s illustrate that Nietzsche will answer the sensitive questions that this aphorism raises but leaves open by distancing himself from the goal of Christianity more than here. “Peace and good pleasure for people” now appears to him as the slogan of “decadence,” which expresses itself in the inability to resist others, in tolerance, compassion and tolerance. This morality of weakness should now be replaced by an ethic of strength and toughness, which in no way has “peace” and “good pleasure in one another” in mind, except in the sense of the first slogan.⁴

He now aggressively represents amorality:

“Illness makes people better”: this famous statement, which has been encountered throughout the centuries, in the mouths of the wise as well as in the mouths and mouths of the people, makes one think. In view of its validity, one would like to allow oneself to ask: Is there perhaps a causal link between morality and illness at all? The “improvement of man”, on a large scale, for example the undeniable alleviation of the humanization of the European within the last millennium — is it perhaps the result of a long secretly eerie suffering and misjudgment, deprivation, atrophy? Has “the disease” made the European “better”? Or to put it another way: is our morality — our modern tender morality in Europe, with which one might compare the morality of the Chinese — the expression of a physiological Decline?... One does not want to be able to deny that every passage in history where “man” has shown himself in particular splendor and power of the type immediately assumes a sudden, dangerous, eruptive character in which humanity goes bad; and perhaps it has in those cases where it Wants to seem different<er>, simply lacked the courage or subtlety to delve into psychology and extract the general sentence there as well: “The healthier, the stronger, the richer, more fertile, entrepreneurial a person feels, the more “immoral” becomes.” An embarrassing thought! You definitely shouldn't hang on to it! But assuming that you run forward with him for a short, brief moment, how astonished do you look into the future! What would then pay off on earth for Theurer than just what we are demanding with all our might — the humanization, the “improvement,” the growing “civilization” of humans? Nothing would be more expensive than virtue: because in the end, you would have Earth as a hospital: and “Everyone's Nurse” would be the ultimate wisdom. Of course, you would then also have that much-sought after “peace on earth”! But even so little “pleasure in one another”! So little beauty, exuberance, risk! So few “works” for which it was still worthwhile to live on earth! Ah! And absolutely no more “thats”! All big Works and deeds that stood still and were not washed away by the waves of time — were they not all great immoralities in the deepest sense? ... ⁵

The rule now is: either peace or “Pleasing one another.” When people behave peacefully when they are weakened, they cannot experience authentic mutual pleasure.

This looks like an attempt at the aphorism The Wanderer and His Shadow to back up argumentatively, at least retrospectively. Christianity failed to achieve its ideal because it made two adversarial demands. Of course, this not only makes it “not yet” realizable, it is never realizable and not even suitable as an ideal. Only the individual requirement of the individual to come into harmony with himself and to value his immediate environment can be regarded as such. But Nietzsche does not want this to be addressed to everyone, but only to strong natures, who are also worth affirming themselves. The weak should calmly deny themselves and live in discord with themselves and their environment — their nature predestines them to do so anyway.

The original revolutionary meaning of the Christmas Blessing only reinforces Nietzsche's reservations. This is obviously about what Nietzsche said in On the genealogy of morality is described as “slave morality”: The strong should be held down and tamed in order to make general peace possible. But Christianity fails to recognize that this only creates a boring, grey, “nihilistic” world in which there is nothing more to affirm about humans. Instead of transcending the animal in humans, people are transformed into pets.

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III. Un-Christmassy — all-too-Christmassy?

There is certainly something to Nietzsche's thoughts. Everyone knows social contexts in which everyone is terribly nice to each other, but in fact no real interpersonal resonances can arise, precisely because these include conflict and honesty. They often have a dull, stuffy atmosphere, like at a family party. Many probably experience Christmas in exactly the same way, as the epitome of Christian lies and hypocrisy. Let these people love themselves first and come to terms with themselves before they give others their “compassion”!

But the Nietzsche from The Wanderer and His Shadow It's not as easy as the later one. This is not about naturally strong individuals, but apparently those who have been “ennobled” in an educational process and have therefore truly become master of their secret desires and urges; who are “strong” in the sense that no remnant of unsublimated animality has remained in them. For whom, in Freud's sense, where “it” was, has become “I.” Only they could be truly peaceful with others without having to lie to themselves. So they are peaceful with others not because they should, but because they really want to. However, if this ideal is imposed on everyone, even those who are not yet ready for it, it only leads to hypocrisy and inner conflict. You're nice to everyone, but in reality you're full of aggression — for which you then hate yourself.

In this aphorism, however, Nietzsche still considers it possible and even desirable for all people to “refine” themselves in this sense and be at peace with themselves and their environment in such a way that real peace could reign in the world. Only then could people truly value each other. And peacefulness and appreciation would no longer be something that you would have to morally decree, but what would result from this enlightened, authentic consciousness agreed upon with yourself.

In the end, that would be Nietzsche's “happy message” at Christmas time: Respect, compassion, charity and all other ideals of Christianity cannot be dictated or demanded morally; they must arise out of genuine self-affirmation and self-control. True morality must come from within. Christianity deceives people in Nietzsche's account by promising such morality without any effort of its own. All you have to do is get rid of the 'bad people, 'and then everything is good. But peace can only spread around themselves and truly appreciate others, anyone who has found inner peace through their own efforts and who values themselves. — But is that so anti-Christian at all and doesn't Christianity rather remind Christianity of its own core? In any case, it is a very different message than the one you usually hear at Christmas.

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footnotes

1: Human, all-too-human II, The Wanderer and His Shadow 350.

2: Ecce homo, Human, all-too-human 1.

3: Letter number 785.

4: Cf. Subsequent fragments 1888 23 [4].

5: Subsequent fragments 1886 4 [7].

“Peace Surrounds Me”

An Unusual Christmas Message

In our last article before the break at the turn of the year, Paul Stephan explores a Close reading A remarkable aphorism of Nietzsche, in which he expresses himself with the famous Christmas blessing “Glory be to God in height and peace on earth and to people! “discusses. As when unwrapping a gift that has been covered several times, he tries to reveal the different layers of meaning in this text in order to make Nietzsche's exact positioning clearly stand out. The reader may decide for himself whether you end up holding a glowing truth in your hand or the box remains empty. In any case, we wish all our readers with Nietzsche: “Peace on earth and good pleasure for each other! ”

“[...], was it a comedy, that's how he wanted to play along. He was still free. ”

Kafka, The process

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I. Kafkaesque

In Woody Allen's movie Play It Again, Sam From 1972, there is a scene in a museum in which the protagonist Allan somewhat clumsily addresses a woman who is absorbed in looking at a painting. He tries his luck by asking her what the picture means to her. Instead of looking at him, she describes in a sonorous monologue her fascination with the existential pessimism that the painting has for her. In his different kind of fascination, Allan does not address the flood of dark philosophems and simply asks whether the lady happens to have time for a date on Saturday. She replies — apparently her existential pessimism is more serious — that she cannot on Saturdays, she would commit suicide on that day. Allan is not discouraged by this and asks somewhat desperately whether a meeting could then be set up on Friday. — One of the following scenes shows the two naked in an apparently post-coital situation in bed. Shy and nervous, Allan asks how she found sexual intercourse. Her answer: “It was Kafkaesque. ”

In this passage, Allen's film profoundly shows how Franz Kafka's inheritance collapsed into a phrase. In a jargon of absurdity¹ It functions as a kind of marker for the vocabulary of a negative worldview, which, thanks to its automatic fluency, skips over into inappropriate situations in a context-insensitive way. “Kafkaesque” connotes the fundamental absurdity of life. While in Kafka the absurdities of life usually express a gloomy surreal hopelessness, Allen's film points out that existential absurdities may well take a different direction. Sex instead of suicide. The following sections aim to promote this Nietzscheanization of Kafkaesque in a philosophical way. For a poetic approach with a similar thrust, reference is made to the work of Wilhelm Genazinos, which describes the “overall strangeness of life” in humorous detail.

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II. Kafka's Wound

Kafka is one of the key witnesses of modern philosophy, which despairs of modernity. His work is regarded as a collection of evidence for the dark truth of the “managed world” (Adorno). The fact that art must serve as a guarantor of this truth can, however, be regarded as an indication that philosophy alone no longer dares to say what is. But as a volunteer maid of art, thinking only appears at first glance in a new modesty. Philosophy as a queen maker reserves the right to have the last word on what art actually does best. This role of hermeneutical decipherment is also predestined for the development of works of art in modern times under the convention of the unconventional, which descend into ever more cryptic originals. Philosophy becomes a priesthood of aesthetics. Through the detour of art, she regains the consecration of metaphysical truth. Modern art also benefits from this, whose manic enigmatics can now imagine that it is of transcendental origin. A tongue-in-cheek reference to the show of the show ranges from Plato ion up to Sigmar Polkes: “Higher beings ordered: paint the upper right corner black! ”

In addition to Heidegger, it was Adorno in particular who wanted to save philosophy about the interpretive sovereignty of significant works for the truth again. After an attempt to valorize itself as an understanding, not just positivistic, intellectual science, as a form of interpretation of art, becomes new. In addition to Beckett and Schönberg, for Adorno Kafka, from whose work he wants to derive legitimacy, it is the modern world In bulk to defame it as the demiurgic hell of the “existing”.

The tragedy of Adorno's philosophy is that her stupendous sensibility is manipulated by her dogma of world pain. Her negation of abstract worldviews does not protect her from once again propagating a deeply resigning worldview, which is transmitted indirectly through repeated patterns of interpretation that interpret what is as a great misfortune overall. Adorno thus instrumentalizes Kafka as a confirmation of his gnostic² prejudices. He thus disguises himself with an enriching look at Kafka's work. And this despite the fact that he made it more accessible with sentences like this, which testify to his great aesthetic sensitivity: “Every sentence speaks: interpret me, and no one wants to tolerate it. ”³

With a socio-psychological approach, Kafka's wound could be understood in a more metaphysical way. It quickly becomes clear: Kafka had Daddy issues, eExemplically readable in The verdict in the form of Georg Bendemann or also in Letter to Father. The conflict is easy to understand: Kafka's father came from very simple backgrounds, the son of a butcher from a village of 100 people, who then sought his fortune in Prague and founded a gallantry shop there with the help of his wealthy wife. As a successful entrepreneur who wanted to and did it, he had no sympathy for a son who wanted to live for literature alone.

Kafka's father problems become philosophically demanding when interpreted in terms of cultural history. The figure of the father then figures as an educational authority that continues the act of birth in extended dimensions. The father as the complementary mother introduces society and cultural spaces. His authority thus appears not only as a diffuse form of imperious power, but as a superior pattern of competence. Seen in this light, Kafka's work is not indicative of the world of bureaucratic forms of rule, but is also a sign of the abysmal effects that occur when the connection between generations is no longer conveyed through traditions that can achieve sufficient plausibility for descendants. Kafka's diary is a hodgepodge of evidence of a placeless existence:

Without ancestors, without marriage, without descendants, with wild lust for ancestry, marriage and descendants. Everyone reaches out to me: ancestors, marriage and descendants, but too distant for me.⁴

I'm more insecure than I've ever been, I just feel the violence of life. And I'm pointlessly empty. I'm really a lost sheep at night and in the mountains, or like a sheep running after that sheep. Being so lost [...].⁵

I'm completely empty and pointless, the passing electric has more vivid meaning.⁶

When authorities, as plausible patterns that can be imitated and varied, are only experienced as alienating powers, the learning of a halfway extensive coming to the world fails: “My life is hesitation before birth. ”⁷

Kafka's work thus shows the first phase of this termination of a cultural tradition⁸ as a result of a generational process that was characterized by two world wars and resulted in the prevailing mood of universal helplessness.

In the second phase, the Joseph Ks are mobilized by more aggressive reddish brown heresies, which can name the alleged culprits for his plight and show him radical ways out. Dostoyevsky's scariest novel The demons (1872) narrated this basic tension, which was to become so dominant for the 20th century, in a prophetic deep psychology. It is exactly the preform of this tension that the monkey Rotpeter in Kafka's story A report for an academy describes in the following words: “No, I did not want freedom. Just one way out; right, left, wherever; [...] . ”⁹

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III. Nietzsche's possible notes on Kafka

There are no explicit records of Nietzsche in Kafka. However, it is said from Max Brod, Kafka's childhood friend, that his first acquaintance with Kafka took place in an intensive discussion, during which Kafka criticized Brod's advocacy for Schopenhauer with a reference to Nietzsche.¹⁰

Nevertheless, Nietzsche allows us to deepen a socio-psychological view of Kafka's work by taking a step towards a metaphysical perspective. It does not describe Kafka's literature as supposed theology in the sense of modern Kabbalah¹¹ read, but as an excavation site for philosophical archaeology that clarifies the trace effect of cultural concepts. With this view, two paradigms of suffering can be distinguished in Kafka's dark narrative universe. His two major works of novels may represent this. This is how thematized The castle Implies the platonic remoteness of being, which starts from a melancholy distance between the earthly world and the eternal good. Despite all traces and attempts at rapprochement, the best remains inaccessible. The sirens are silent. The novel The process In turn, you could read as an update of the Augustinian doctrine of hereditary sins — which moralizes Plato's distance from being — in the guise of modern bureaucracy. An inexplicable sense of guilt determines life like an anonymous force. All efforts in a bureaucratic process to obtain information about the character of this guilt, clarification and justice ultimately fail. The Kafka wound is therefore not an indication of the “managed world” (Adorno), but the trail of powerful metaphysical traditions that massively shape basic understandings and moods in the modern age.

If you follow this reading, the unnecessarily masochistic of Platonic Augustine existentialism in Kafka — presumably conveyed primarily by Kierkegaard — presumably conveyed primarily by Kierkegaard — is revealed in a variety of details. For example, when the starving hunger artist is juxtaposed with the “joy of life” in the form of a panther — “that noble body equipped with everything necessary to just about tearing it apart”: “He lacks nothing. ”¹²

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IV. Beautiful mystery

Kafka's works, however, are more than mere footnotes to Plato or Augustine. My suggestion is to read his literary work as an implicit existentialism that highlights the contingency of being in a modern way.

For a positive connotation of existential contingency, Nietzsche has found the liberating perspective of understanding life as an “experiment of the discerning.” However, this requires that you learn to say goodbye to the central ontological paradigms of Western culture. There is no being as a central center of origin that radiates to the margins and there is no justifying Advent¹³, who will one day be in a better world. Not a philosophy of history, not an entirely different one. The “non-identical” (Adorno) and the feeling of “abandonment” (Heidegger) are chimeras that arise from the fact that the contingent is unnecessarily resubstancialized into an emergency, against which inaccurate aggression is then released again. Kafka's poetic project could be combined with Nietzsche's philosophical project in the idea of an Apollonian transfiguration:

Could we ourselves an incarnation of dissonance think — and what else is a human being? — so this would dissonanceIn order to be able to live, you need a wonderful illusion that covers a veil of beauty over your own being.¹⁴

Kafka's Apollinism, however, is latent second-level Apollinism. His prose shows ways of making a minimal residual effort to the unlivable dissonance with the world through its portrayal as an unlivable dissonance. The explication of hermeneutical perspectivism is central to this. In Kafka's texts, the puzzle world is objectified through failed objectifications of the protagonists. Often, entire systems of understanding are continued, their autopoietic¹⁵ Dynamics contrast with the situation they are responding to. There is no confirmation. The whole thing is the strange thing that makes reflection fail: “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” (Beckett) What is more bizarre than Gregor Samsa, who mutates into a “tremendous bug” but is primarily concerned about the inconvenience that his absence from employment causes? In this way, Kafka's texts look like legends that do not explain the inexplicable with the gesture of explanation. Indirectly, the uncanny is thus transformed into something strange. A world that is too incomprehensible becomes more understandable by understanding its understanding as remaining incomprehensible. Each sentence speaks from an ordinary point of view, but everything remains unusual.

This not only continues the eternal conversation with and about the overall puzzling nature of the world, but also makes it possible, because its questionability is now more prominent due to the inadequacy of understanding. In these attempts to implicitly transform the disharmonious into the enigmatic, Kafka's works are, from a cultural functionalist point of view, representations of provisional attempts to merge horizons. Their irritations harmonize because they illustrate an understanding that becomes understandable when not understood. Demonstrated insanity creates an irony to make sense, but this must be the case. Kafka's prose is an exculpatory propaedeutic for the dissonance that we are. It transfigured the glorification. Contingency is felt in the ambivalence of an underlying mood of “beautiful stranger” (Eichendorff).

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V. The tired wound

Kafka's enigmatic objectifications of the enigmatic also have cultural-philosophical significance for Nietzsche readers. In an in-depth way, they explore the idea of being doomed to transfiguration. In addition, they show traces of what it means to no longer be obscured by God's shadows. It is not Kafka's wound, but the mysterious nature of Kafka that stimulates awareness of the attractive mystery of life called for by Nietzsche in the medium of philosophy, a little too cocky and slogans. Explication of the enigmatic stimulates mental vitality. Something interesting can now be found in everything. The futility of understanding is converted into a license to poetize. Through Kafka's art, the enigmatic character of the world becomes clearer as an opportunity for plural participation in the expression of hermeneutical diversity. Freedom can be when understanding becomes a game through failure. Especially without a king's message, the individualized couriers of the modern age are no longer miserably senseless at the mercy of their talk of reports. It is not an oath of service that obliges them to live, but an increased availability for the outrageous events tempts them to tell an encouraging story of the eternal novel World and a new engagement on their stages.

This transformation of the uncanny life process into an unforeseeably interesting mystery has the effect of cultural therapy peripety¹⁶. Kafka narratively shows what Nietzsche philosophizes about. In the midst of the fictionalization of permanent self-charges, which are based on an incomprehensible sense of guilt (cf. The process) and paranoid uncertainty (cf. The building) and the latent idea of a depressing, irrevocable distance to be fulfilled (cf. The castle), there are unKafkaesque passages here and there in Kafka that suggest emancipatory changes in the Platonic Augustine powers. The self-feeling of being a nobody without authority from the very top is released from the urge for redemption through grace and recognition, not to mention from the heroic desire to win and revolutions. Kafkaesque could become the contingency of existence for an honest “will to serve life” (Thomas Mann), to which the absurd was conveyed as a nice arbitrariness and possible beginnings of victories over banality. Nothing must, everything can. Angelus Silesius's well-known slogan would have to be reversed: Man, become irrelevant. An idea of a cocky contingency that honors chance as a source of opportunity is conveyed, for example The trip to the mountains:

“I don't know,” I shouted without a sound, “I don't know. If no one comes, then no one comes. I've done no harm to anyone, no one has done anything bad to me, but no one wants to help me. No one at all. But that's not the way it is. Except that no one helps me — otherwise no one would be pretty. I would really like — why not — to go on a trip with a company of no one. Into the mountains, of course, where else? ”¹⁷

Also for the paranoid mole in Kafkas The building Are there phases in which he lucidly distances himself from his incessant “defense preparations”: “Until, gradually, with complete awakening, disillusionment comes, I barely understand the haste, deeply inhale the peace of my home that I have disturbed myself, [...] . ”¹⁸

Kafka evaluates Kafka most clearly in the parable prometheus The values of the West. Prometheus, an ancient Christ on the cross, experiences a resurrection through the healing power of time, causing “the whole tragic Prometheia of all discerning people”¹⁹ Like a sandcastle on the seashore, disappears in the waves. No wound distracts from the puzzle of mere existence anymore:

The legend tries to clarify the inexplicable; [...] Four legends report about Prometheus. After the first, because he had betrayed the gods to humans, he was forged into the Caucasus and the gods sent eagles that ate from his ever-growing liver. [...] After the fourth, people became tired of what had become baseless. The gods got tired, the eagles. The wound closed tired. What remained was the inexplicable rocky mountains.²⁰

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sources

Adorno, Theodore W.: Notes about Kafka. In: Collected works 10/1: Cultural Criticism and Society. prisms. Without a mission statement, Frankfurt am Main 1977.

Kafka, Franz: narratives. Stuttgart 1994.

Ders. : Diaries. 1910-1923. Stuttgart 1967.

Oschmann, Dirk: Skeptical anthropology. Kafka and Nietzsche. In: Thorsten Valk (ed.): Friedrich Nietzsche and the literature of classical modernism. Berlin 2009, pp. 129—146.

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footnotes

1: Analogous to the “jargon of authenticity” that Adorno emphasized in Heidegger and his epigones.

2: Editor's note: “Gnosis” means the conviction that the world in which we live is not the creation of God, but of a subordinate, vicious “demiurge.”

3: Adorno, Kafka notes, P. 255.

4: Kafka, diaries, p. 402 (January 21, 1922).

5: Ibid., p. 236 (November 19, 1913).

6: Ibid. (November 20, 1913).

7: Ibid. p. 404 (January 24, 1922).

8: Editor's note: The implantation of the early form of the embryo resulting from the fertilized egg into the lining of the uterus.

9: Kafka, narratives, P. 202.

10: Cf. Oshman, Skeptical anthropology. Kafka and Nietzsche, P. 129.

11: Editor's note: Mystical tradition of Judaism.

12: Kafka, narratives, P. 235.

13: Editor's note: In addition to the first advent of Christ, the term “Advent” describes his return.

14: The birth of tragedy, Abs. 25.

15: Editor's note: “Autopoiesis” describes the process of self-creation and maintenance of a system.

16: Editor's note: In literary theory, the turning point of an action.

17: Kafka, narratives, P. 22.

18: Ibid., p. 468.

19: The happy science, Aph 300.

20: Kafka, narratives, P. 373.

Riveting Strangeness

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Remarks on Kafka's Work

Franz Kafka died 100 years ago. The following text is an attempt to update his work with a socio-psychological perspective inspired by Nietzsche. His thesis: Kafka narratingly shows what Nietzsche philosophizes about. Michael Meyer-Albert wants to promote the logic of a non-naive world enlightenment in the fictions of one of the most important authors of modern times: affirmation of life instead of suicide.

Editorial note: We have explained some difficult technical terms in the footnotes.

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I. Kafka, “the greatest theorist of bureaucracy”

Kafka sympathized with the Socialists. Nietzsche dreamed of the reign of political genius, which he missed in his contemporary politics, so that there are many state-critical places in his work, especially in Zarathustra. It was precisely this book that Kafka appreciated, about which Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in their monumental work A thousand plateaus 1980 write: “Kafka is the bureaucracy's greatest theorist [...] . ”¹ This is particularly evident in his two novels The process and The castle.

But for Deleuze & Guattari, Kafka is no critic of bureaucracy. Rather, they note in 1975 in their book about Kafka: “What makes Kafka so dangerous is precisely the power of his non-criticism.” (p. 84)

Their joint work has a project character. It starts in 1972 with the Anti-Oedipus ends 1991 with What is philosophy?, is in between A thousand plateaus — and the important book about Kafka: For a little literature. Kafka also plays an important role here in general, as does Nietzsche. They combine both as challengers of the modern state.

Like Nietzsche, they are sharp critics of the state and, like Kafka, they do not simply want to spell this out conceptually, but to present it in the way they write themselves; especially the A thousand plateaus have something Kafkaesque, describe something extremely bizarre, namely the rule of the state, in a bizarre way. At the beginning of Kafkas The trial If the main character K. is arrested but does not know why, K. loses his grip on the ground as a result, he no longer determines himself, and is thus deterritorialized. Every person in the modern state is faced with a power that dominates him; he therefore does not belong to himself. In castle It says: “The senseless appeals to the head, to the secretaries, lawyers, scribes began, usually he was not received, and if he was received by chance [...] [,] he was rejected extremely quickly and never received again.” (p. 239)

You can come up with explanations for this and come to terms with them. But what happens to people cannot be explained with such explanations, whether lawyers explain the law to them or politicians describe their actions or sociologists portray society. It is not self-evident that people take the state for granted. How does one state representative say to the other about K.: “[...], he admits that he does not know the law and at the same time claims to be innocent. ”²

On the other hand, political and social powers force people to function in a certain way, which gives them support in a certain sense, so that life continues as usual. K. comes in trial They do not go to jail, but are forced back to work in the bank and thus reterritorialized.

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II. “Make a war machine out of thinking”

Kafka thus demonstrates the absurdity of life in the modern state, to which he sees himself at the mercy of; that you cannot even bring up the critical concept that you do not understand in this way. You just have to present it soberly — Kafkaesque — which is ultimately much more revealing of the law. As explained in trial a priest: “[M] an doesn't have to believe everything to be true, you just have to think it's necessary.” (p. 160)

Nietzsche sees this in a similar way to Kafka: “It is better to know nothing than half know many things! It is better to be a fool on your own than to be a sage at someone else's will! ”³ Do not adopt the wisdom of experts, who use scientific stories to make the absurdities of modern statehood forgotten, but rather make various rhymes with the absurd themselves.

In contrast to the prevailing bureaucratic thinking, there is only one thing left for Deleuze & Guattari, namely “Make a war machine out of thinking, that is a peculiar company whose exact procedures can be studied with Nietzsche [...] . ”⁴ Because: “But the worst thing is the small thoughts. Truly better done bad than thought small! ”⁵ Nietzsche is a skeptic of modern sciences who at most interpret nature differently but cannot explain it, because explanation as such is only an illusion in that you replace an effect with something else, the cause, i.e. simply one thing with another, no matter how hard you try to find something that connects the two.

Nietzsche questions the supposed certainties and thus shakes political and social obligations. Deleuze & Guattari describe this as a war machine, which they also notice in Kafka: “Kafka deliberately destroys all metaphors, all symbolisms, every meaning and every designation.”⁶, so that the meanings that every state regularly enforces in order to be able to guide the thinking of its subjects. How does Nietzsche write in abatement: “Most people sometimes feel that they are living in a web of illusions. But few realize how far these illusions go. ”⁷

The scenario in Kafka's stories and novels shows the absurdity of bureaucratically controlled reality. What a crime is determined by law, for example still homosexuality or abortion in many countries, which even in Germany only remains exempt from punishment under certain conditions — exactly the absurd situation in trial: “Where was the judge he had never seen? Where was the high court he had never reached? “(p. 165) And most people recognize that, whether as fair or as positive legislation.

The execution machine in the Penal Colony Write the verdict into the victim's skin with needles, which the victim begins to recognize on his skin as words after hours: “Sense opens to the dumbest. It starts around the eyes. It spreads from here. [...] Nothing else happens, the man just starts deciphering the writing, he sharpens his mouth as if he were listening. [...] But our man deciphers them with his wounds.” (p. 108) Nietzsche On the genealogy of morality provides the template: “You burn something so that it stays in the memory: only what doesn't stop hurting stays in the memory [...] . ”⁸ That is when morality and scientific knowledge are the result of violence.

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III. Nietzsche: “There is no such general thing! ”

Scientific knowledge is based on the fact that it represents the world linguistically adequately, similar to how a picture shows a state of affairs, with the assumption that an image does not alienate the facts or possibly make sense of it in the first place. Deleuze & Guattari disagree: “Thinking is like a vampire, it has no image to make a model or a copy of it. ”⁹ The world is not easy to describe linguistically. As is well known, vampires have no reflection. Whether with Kafka or Nietzsche, language has the ontological status of a phantom: It says what is; but in doing so it does not say what is, but only ever what should be linguistic. It always turns what is into something different, something linguistic.

For Deleuze & Guattari, Kafka himself has a vampiric character. They note: “He wakes through the nights and locks himself in his office coffin during the day [...]. Kafka-Dracula has his escape line in his room, on his bed [...] . ”¹⁰ The opening scene from The process reflects Kafka's life situation of gaining free time to write through contract work. This is how life takes place at night, but the day is a grave.

The state determines the worldview of its subjects. So Zarathustra spoke: So “[...] the state is a hypocrite; [...] it likes to talk with smoke and roar — that it makes you believe [...] it speaks from the belly of things.^“11 In this way, the state pretends to know how things are, always and even more so today. And Zarathustra continues: “For he certainly wants to be the most important animal on earth, the state; and people believe him too.” (ibid.) Kafka doesn't believe him, certainly not that the state speaks “from the gut of things.” Rather, he speaks the language of bureaucracy.

Deleuze & Guattari spell out what Nietzsche suggests aphoristically:

It may be that, whether spiritual or secular, tyrannical or democratic, capitalist or socialist, it There has only ever been one state, the hypocrite state, who talks with smoke and roars. Nietzsche explains how he [...] does it: by virtue of an unprecedented terror, in contrast, the old system of cruelty, the primitive forms of training and education were child's play. [...] In the end, the earth becomes a madhouse.¹²

At the turn of 1887/88, Nietzsche describes how the state succeeds without the subjects noticing it: The state is the

Organized immorality [...]/How is it achieved that he a large quantity Do things to which the individual Would never understand each other? /— by dividing responsibility — command and execution/— by Interim the virtues of obedience, duty, patriotism and princely love [...]/The Artifices, to enable actions, measures, affects which, measured individually, are no longer “permitted” — are no longer “tasty” either [...].¹³

Since the state shares the functions of leading and executing, the executors no longer have any responsibility for what they do and commit terrible acts for which they could never be responsible for themselves. In trial It says: “Being bound even to the receipt of the law through one's service is incomparably more than living freely in the world. The man comes to the law first, the doorkeeper is already there.” (p. 160)

Kafka shows how it is possible that people do not notice this. This is how Deleuze & Guattari write:

The famous lyrics in trial (plus the stories In the penal colony, During the construction of the Great Wall of China etc.) present the law as a pure empty form, without any content and without any discernible subject matter: It only appears as a verdict, and this only becomes apparent in a penalty.¹⁴

The law only affects people through its effects. In doing so, the state claims to represent the common good. How does Nietzsche comment: “'The good of the general requires the dedication of the individual. '. But lo and behold, it giveth No such general thing! ” ¹⁵

In any case, there are no longer any substantive provisions of the general interest or the general public. Universalism can only be defined formally. Deleuze & Guattari write about this: “According to Kant [...], the law no longer originates from a pre-existing good that gives it content, but it is only pure form that determines the good as such: What the law proclaims is good, and in the same formal conditions under which it proclaims itself. ”¹⁶ Kant's legal principle is based on the general validity of laws, which is only due to their form and not to their content: Laws must apply generally. What they say in terms of content does not make them laws. In fact, you have to obey them because they are valid, which is based on force, not because they are right or just.

What Nietzsche writes about this is no longer surprising: “State is the coldest of all cold monsters. It also lies coldly; and this lie creeps out of its mouth: “I am the state, I am the people. '”¹⁷ In doing so, the state claims to represent the general good. The state determines what the people are. In doing so, he claims that the people are not a construct created and determined by him, but are natural.

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IV. “Substitution of love by a love letter”

But its mechanical engineering is responsible for state power. The bureaucracy works like a machine to which people are connected. Deleuze & Guattari write in 1975: “What makes you afraid (or happy) about Kafka is [...] the American technocracy machine and the Soviet bureaucracy machine and the fascist total machinery. ”¹⁸ The state and the machines on which it relies pose a threat to humans. In addition to bureaucracy, the focus is on law, which does not protect people but threatens them. In Anti-Oedipus It says: “No one has shown more impressively than Kafka that the law has nothing of an immanent, natural-harmonious totality, that it acts rather as an abolished formal unit, [...].” (p. 255) The rule of law also makes a Kafkaesque impression.

In fact, the individual can only withdraw from this. Nietzsche has already had a similar view: “Goes Yours Paths! And let people and peoples go their own way! — dark paths truly, on which even One Hope no longer glows! ”¹⁹ Nietzsche urges people not to participate in politics, not least because their paths only appear Kafkaesque. Deleuze & Guattari comment on this:

The established powers have occupied the earth and created popular organizations. The mass media and major popular organizations such as parties or trade unions are reproductive machines [...]. The established powers have driven us into an atomic, cosmic and galactic battle at the same time. Many artists have been aware of this situation for a long time, sometimes even before it was really there (for example Nietzsche).²⁰

In fact, Nietzsche predicts the battle for Earth rule in the coming century. And I already know what that amounts to Zarathustra: “State where the slow suicide of all — 'life. ' ” ²¹ The quick suicide takes place on the battlefields, the slow one in the office or in the family. Kafka is both attracted and repelled by women; because he is afraid of the family, marriage is the law after all, a contract that is supposed to be the basis of all love relationships in the 19th century and yet kills pleasure.

This is how Kafka flees from the institution of marriage. Deleuze & Guattari remark: “Substitution of love with a love letter? Deterritorialization of love. Substitution of the dreaded marriage contract through a Devil's Pact. ”²² Not to marry, rather to write, frees love from the shackles of the family and thus also from the compulsory state organization that involves people into the family. Why is Gregory's sister crying in The Metamorphosis? “Because he didn't get up and let the authorized signatory in, because he was in danger of losing his post and because then the boss would pursue his parents again with the old demands? ”²³

In The verdict (1913) the son obeys and commits suicide at the father's behest. In Kafka's works, the family appears as a place of submission, sacrifice, and suffering. How can you escape it? By no longer writing in a way that is socially accepted, but in such a way that the connections are difficult to understand because they are designed as intricately and absurdly as reality presents itself to a cool eye. that rhizome can be understood as a maze of linguistic signs, so that you are not understood but involves someone in a chaotic fabric of text: Kafka's lover, Kafka's reader, Kafka's enemies, namely bureaucrats and scientists. Deleuze & Guattari write: “The letters are a rhizome, a network, a spider web. [...], and its source of strength lies far away in what his letters deliver to him. He only fears two things: the cross of the family and the garlic of marriage. ”²⁴ The introduction to A thousand plateaus Has the title rhizome, a text that was also published separately.

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V. Kafka: “The court doesn't want anything from you”

Auch Zarathustra propagates people outside the state and thus also beyond the family, in which he is only ever a serving cog in the wheel that can be replaced. In The Metamorphosis It turns out that the parents are not as dependent on the son as they led him to motivate him to work hard. The superman does not arise in the state and not in the family. Nietzsche proclaims:

Where the state ends, that is where the human being begins, who is not superfluous: that is where the song of the necessary begins, the unique and irreplaceable way. Where the state ceasing“Look at me then, my brothers! Don't you see him, the rainbow and the bridges of Superman?²⁵

In the community, even if it is only that of concert-goers, people are only neighbors, not unique and not irreplaceable, but one among many.

How do you get to where you are human? Through an experimental philosophy, like that of Nietzsche, and by transforming yourself with Kafka, i.e. becoming an animal. Being a person or being a subject is not beneficial. Deleuze & Guattari write:

We just think that Kafka experiments Logs that it only Experiences reportedwithout interpreting them, without exploring their meaning [...]. A person who writes is never “just a writer”: he is a political person, and he is a machine person, and he is an experimental person (who stops being human in order to become an ape, or a beetle, dog, mouse, any animal [...]).²⁶

Gregor evades family and work by turning himself into a beetle. He makes of himself something different from what the state requires of him. He exceeds himself by spreading chaos, as Nietzsche demands:

Woe! The time is coming when man no longer throws the arrow of his longing beyond the person and has forgotten the tendon of his bow how to whizz! I tell you: You still have to have chaos in yourself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.²⁷

Kafka still has chaos in that he is not a critic of the state, but simply a reporter who soberly states how he affects people, what thoughts K. has in trial or Gregor in the Metamorphosis does. For Deleuze & Guattari, transformation, becoming an animal is an escape from social conditions, a political act when politics only has the purpose of asserting the interests of the state, but when it has no meaning for humans. Deleuze & Guattari see Kafka's writings as a political answer: “For Kafka, the essential thing about animals is the way out, the escape line, even without moving from the spot, even if you remain in a cage. Not freedom, but a way out. Not an attack, but a living escape line. ”²⁸

Nietzsche anticipated this situation: “Oh my brothers, is now Not everything in Rivers? Didn't all railings and walkways fall into the water? who held Still thinking of “good” and “bad”? ”²⁹ There are no longer any supreme ethical values, only those enacted by the state and the law, creating a situation for people from which they can only flee, and that by turning into animals, because people under the direction of the state are not people who would still be essential with Nietzsche. They are irrelevant, so you have to be different from them.

Becoming an animal is an ideal means of escape. Deleuze & Guattari write:

Becoming an animal is a motionless migration on the spot, which can only be experienced and understood in intensity [...]. There is nothing metaphorical about becoming an animal. It is not symbolism or allegory.³⁰

In this respect, it has neither a bureaucratic nor a scientific truth. No, there has never been anything like that! Or Kafka describes what is the case every day when people either get sick or go crazy, as Deleuze & Guattari did in their project Capitalism and Schizophrenia Show off. Going crazy appears as a similar escape line as becoming an animal.

It was the time when the second women's movement picked up steam. Instead of becoming an animal, there is the option of becoming a woman, which for Kafka in The castle develops a different perspective. Deleuze & Guattari write:

All together testify in their desire — in that which they themselves fulfill and in that which they awaken in others — the deep identity of justice, desire, and young woman or girl. The young girl is like the court: It is unprincipled, pure coincidence. “It picks you up when you come and it releases you when you leave”^[31]. In the village under the castle, the saying goes: “Official decisions are as shy as young girls.”³²

The judiciary is as unpredictable as capricious young women who notoriously evade their admirers and constantly cause them difficulties.

But Deleuze & Guattari recognize this as an escape line for men, becoming women, even during the time of the bourgeois women's movement. They attest to the most masculine writers such as D. H. Lawrence or Henry Miller just such an inclination. Politics is then no longer party politics, not even citizen protest, but lines of escape from such organizations and transformation to create confusion: become a woman! Or does that mean becoming human when, from a feminist perspective, humanity is embodied by women rather than by men? Beyond criticism of patriarchy, the fact that women give birth to children speaks for this. If women are more lovable than men, should the latter therefore emulate the former? Would that transform men?

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sources

Deleuze, Gilles & Felix Guattari: Anti-Oedipus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia Vol. 1 (1972). Frankfurt am Main 1979.

This. : Kafka. For a little literature (1975). Frankfurt am Main 2019.

This. : Capitalism and Schizophrenia. A thousand plateaus (1980). Berlin 1992.

Kafka, Franz: The castle (1926). Berlin 2010.

Ders. : The process (1925). Frankfurt am Main 1960.

Ders. : The Metamorphosis (1915). All stories, Frankfurt am Main 1970.

Ders. : In the penal colony (1919). In: All stories. Frankfurt am Main 1970.

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footnotes

1: Deleuze & Guattari, A thousand plateaus, P. 291.

2: Kafka, The process, P. 11.

3: So Zarathustra spoke, The leech.

4: Deleuze & Guattari, A thousand plateaus. P. 518.

5: So Zarathustra spoke, From the compassionate.

6: Deleuze & Guattari, Kafka, P. 32.

7: Subsequent fragments 1870 5 [33].

8: On the genealogy of morality, paragraph II, 3.

9: Deleuze & Guattari, A thousand plateaus, P. 519.

10: Deleuze & Guattari, Kafka, P. 42.

11: So Zarathustra spoke, Of the big events.

12: Deleuze & Guattari, A thousand plateaus, P. 247.

13: Subsequent fragments 1887 11 [407].

14: Deleuze & Guattari, Kafka, P. 60.

15: Subsequent fragments 1887 11 [99].

16: Deleuze & Guattari, Kafka, P. 60.

17: So Zarathustra spoke, From the new idol.

18: Deleuze & Guattari, Kafka, P. 18.

19: So Zarathustra spoke, Boards, 21.

20: Deleuze & Guattari, A thousand plateaus. P. 471.

21: So Zarathustra spoke, From the new idol.

22: Deleuze & Guattari, Kafka, P. 41.

23: Kafka, The Metamorphosis, P. 62.

24: Deleuze & Guattari, Kafka, P. 42.

25: So Zarathustra spoke, From the new idol.

26: Deleuze & Guattari, Kafka, P. 12.

27: So Zarathustra spoke, Preface, 5.

28: Deleuze & Guattari, Kafka, P. 49.

29: So Zarathustra spoke, Boards, 8.

30: Deleuze & Guattari, Kafka. P. 50.

31: Kafka, The process, P. 161.

32: Deleuze & Guattari, Kafka, P. 88.

Fleeing the State: Kafka and Nietzsche’s Human

Or: Becoming-woman after Deleuze & Guattari

Kafka and Nietzsche are united by their confrontation with the state and bureaucracy. Deleuze & Guattari, whose works are based on both, develop an apolitical response to the fatal political situation, namely transformations after Kafka, an expansion of themselves to Nietzsche, which can be understood as escape lines from a patronizing society.

Synopsis

Nietzsche placed himself on political issues in an extremely diverse and contradictory way. It is therefore no wonder that his thinking was subsequently adopted by a wide variety of political factions, from anarchists to Nazis. This has changed little to date, as two recent publications underline: Nietzsche — the contemporary by Julien Rochedy (2020/2022) and Praise for identity politics by Karsten Schubert (2024). While the former Front National politician and journalist Rochedy sees in Nietzsche a politically incorrect critic of left-wing identity politics and a thought leader of the right, the declared “left-wing Nietzschean” Schubert sees him precisely as an inspirer of a left. Remarkably, both are united by their strong reference to late Nietzsche and his power-theory analysis of the dualism of “master” and “slave morality” in the The genealogy of morality, from which, however, draw completely different consequences: Rochedy pleads for a new men's morality, Schubert reveals the criticism of slave morality.

Based on his own study Left-Nietzscheanism. An introduction (2020), in which he himself argues for left-wing Nietzscheanism, Paul Stephan compares these two approaches and highlights their respective weaknesses. Despite all efforts, Rochedy fails to sufficiently distance himself from historical fascism and the Conservative Revolution as its intellectual vanguard; he remains completely stuck in a particularist position. Schubert's alternative proposal of “particularist universalism,” however, suffers from the fact that he is unable to present a truly radical alternative to right-wing particularism. It remains in the same logic of identity-political cultural struggles, the simulation of politics as a spectacle of symbols, that afflicts our present day. Contemporary right and left Nietzscheanism is proving unable to present a radical alternative to existing global capitalism and even to ask the essential questions of humanity's future. They thus fall short of the level of Nietzsche's “big politics” on the “guideline of the body.” Political realism today means feeling, acting and thinking utopian and not participating in the “eternal return” of “master” and “slave morality.”

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Full article

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I. Nietzsche between the chairs of political modernity

As is well known, Nietzsche attempts in his writings to adopt an unpolitical, yes, anti-political position. Regardless of whether they are conservatives, socialists, feminists, liberals, nationalists, anti-Semites... they all get their fat off equally and become victims of “modern ideas.”¹ branded. However, this does not prevent him from repeatedly making positive proposals to solve the pressing political questions of his time or at least from outlining approaches to political utopias, which, however, remain vague and therefore ambiguous in their political content: from “superman” to wild fantasies of new social hierarchies, “a new slavery.”², up to the transfiguration of the Polish noble republic of the early modern period into an ideal anarchic state.³ Paradoxically, Nietzsche thus becomes highly compatible with almost all political ideologies of modernity: Because he distances himself equally from everyone, everyone projects their own ideas into him. You have to think of a coveted — or rather: desiring — woman; or in the words Nietzsche puts in the mouth of the feminine figure of “life”: “[I] her men always present us with their own virtues — oh, you virtues! ”⁴ Nietzsche as a seducer.

In recent times, the broad debate has been dominated by a relatively “moderate” image of Nietzsche as an individualist and critic of all ideologies — which, however, once again adapts him very much to the current post-modern zeitgeist, which the “great stories” Jean-François Lyotard spoke of as early as 1979,⁵ declared abolished and prefers to stick to pragmatic realpolitik in the name of values that are as non-binding as possible. Nietzsche as a “tame and civilized animal, [...] Hausthier”⁶ of the left-liberal mainstream. The “outdated” of yesteryear became the contemporary of today.

On the other hand, it is more exciting — and possibly: closer to Nietzsche's own intentions — to target Nietzsche for radical political projects that are directed precisely against this mainstream. How plausible is that? What potential does Nietzsche's writings have in this regard? And does Nietzsche lead us more to the right or to the left in this regard?

I myself have a two-volume book with the humble title in 2020 Left-Nietzscheanism. An introduction publishes that seeks to answer exactly such questions on the basis of an examination of Nietzsche's own writings (volume 1) and his history of influence, right and left (volume 2). There I tend to hold back with an unequivocal position of Nietzsche, but refer to the potential that he could have for left-wing theory and practice of the present day, for example in his plea for heroic individualism, in his accentuation of man's corporeality and dependence on nature, in his critique of resentful, small-minded left-wing in the form of “slave morality,” in his encouragement of departure and utopian thinking (keyword: “superman”), in his sharp diagnosis of modern nihilism culture, in its appreciation of authentic passion and carefree creativity. And much more. For me, “left-wing Nietzscheanism” cannot be an ideology — hence the indent — but rather an attitude that combines individualism and free-spiritedness with the struggle for universal values — which Nietzsche often, though not always, rejects (“universalism” — for me, in essence, being left-wing⁷). An attitude which, as the history of left-Nietzscheanism shows, can lead to a wide variety of practical and theoretical consequences, whether in the form of the anarchist approaches of Gustav Landauer and Emma Goldman, the Nietzschean Marxism of Ernst Bloch and the Frankfurt School, or the “left-Dionysm” of Georges Bataille and the Surrealists. In any case, the individualism of the left-Nietzschean actors is central, their striving for the combination of individual and collective liberation, which repeatedly brought them into conflict with the mainstream of left-wing parties and institutions.

In the meantime, two other remarkable works on the same subject have been published. What unites us is that we belong to roughly the same generation, even though our career paths are very different, and ask ourselves the same question: What follows from Nietzsche's philosophy for political theory and practice in today's social situation? And what unites us is that we are striving for answers that differ from the above-mentioned left-liberal mainstream. But that's where the common ground stops. Karsten Schubert demands in his recently published book Praise for identity politics based on his numerous articles published on this subject area in recent years⁸ Out of his “left-wing Nietzscheanism” (without a line), exactly a party for what I would describe, at least in parts, as the “resentment left.” For the French journalist, Julien Rochedy, a leading member of the National Front Youth Organization, in his book Nietzsche — the contemporary, originally published in French in 2020 and 2022 into German, it is clear that Nietzsche was a right-wing and therefore a pioneer of a completely different kind of “identity politics.”

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II. A new far-right Nietzsche from France

Rochedy's book is a fairly compact introduction to Nietzsche's thinking, a popular philosophical work that largely does not contain references and also contains factual errors in some places.⁹ It is based on the three-hour presentation Nietzsche: Life and Philosophy, which Rochedy kept on YouTube in 2019 and reached 1.5 million viewers (link). As you can see, the former leading FN official, who generally has a very strong presence on social media and has published further books in the meantime, is not an intellectual loner, but a popular and influential figure in the milieu of the young radical right, whose theses should be taken note of for this reason alone, even if you disagree with them.

The book is easy to read and captivating, especially as Rochedy repeatedly interweaves anecdotes from his life and strong statements on current issues. He retells the most important stages in Nietzsche's life and talks about the content of his writings. However, it is noticeable that he, from the Birth of Tragedy Apart from that, the writings up to Happy science Just roam casually. He can probably still do something with the Dionysian aestheticism of the first work, but little with the Untimely Considerations and with the enlightenment pathos of the first three volumes of aphorisms¹⁰, they don't quite fit into his Nietzsche image. He even claims that Nietzsche dedicated the first volume of Human, all-too-human Voltaire was meant ironically¹¹ which Untimely Considerations he dismisses as “premature considerations” (p. 35), which “are firmly based in a temporal context and are anything but “timeless” (ibid.). Nietzsche only really becomes interesting for Rochedy from Happy science and especially in his late work, for which he decidedly also includes the controversial collage edited by Nietzsche's sister and her collaborators The will to power counts. This is Nietzsche's, albeit “unfinished”, “main work” (p. 65), from which Rochedy extracts a “metaphysics of the will to power” (p. 68).¹² He also gives a particularly detailed presentation of the core theses of The genealogy of morality.

Rochedy's guiding principle: You should recognize the “will to power” as an essential basic principle of all being and develop a power-affirming way of life on this basis. For him, “anti-racism, feminism, progressivism and socialism” (p. 97) are nothing more than “degeneration [s] and perversion [s]” (p. 74) of the same, ideologies which promise a rule-free society but must always introduce new hierarchies. He concludes: Get rid of hypocrisy — and demands a new European sense of power, an ethic of masculinity and strength in order to be able to counter the surrounding major powers and escape “decadence” within.

Rochedy is thus decidedly based on the Nietzsche interpretation of the “Conservative Revolution,” which includes right-wing intellectuals who, during the Weimar Republic, used similar arguments against it and who once more and less openly advocated a fascist overthrow of the hated democracy, such as Julius Evola, Martin Heidegger or Ernst Jünger. But there are also clear allusions to Thomas Mann's nationalist writings during the First World War, Alfred Bäumler and last but not least Oswald Spengler, who, like Rochedy, prophesied the “fall of the West” if there was no “life-affirming” renaissance of “men's morality.”¹³.

Of course, Rochedy is trying to distance himself from the “old right.” He promotes a united Europe — admittedly in decisive differentiation from the EU's “decadent” project — and criticizes imperialism and militarism, even speaks of the “absurd violence in two world wars” (p. 111). Rochedy wants to present an alternative to communism and left-wing ideology in general, but also to post-modernism, without therefore representing a fascist position.

However, this distinction from historical fascism is rather half-hearted in view of the obvious ideological proximity to it. How does Rochedy also want to criticize him when he rejects all modern values — human rights, democracy, social justice, etc. — as phenomena of decadence and excesses of “slave morality”? He dreams of exactly the same eruption of violence and archaic masculinity controlled by civilization. In the “new Europe,” white heterosexual men should clearly be at the forefront and everyone else should be granted inferior status at best. And when you then read sentences like “Is [...] a cleanly executed Uppercut Is it necessarily less' clever 'on the opponent's chin than the verbal counterargument? “(p. 154), there are really doubts about the serious bourgeois image that Rochedy is clearly striving for in his public self-presentation. His “new Europe” must be imagined as a copy of Putin's Russia, an authoritarian democracy in which perhaps basic civil rights — at least those that serve to maintain the capitalist economy — and formally even democratic institutions continue to exist, but in reality everything is done to keep a small elite of “masters” in power.

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III. Nietzsche as a pioneer of left-wing identity politics

It is not surprising that left-wing identity politics and everything associated with it — political correctness, Wokeness, Cancel culture etc. — Rochedy is a particular thorn in the side. For him, Nietzsche is a politically incorrect person par excellence, whose “timeliness” results precisely from helping us to immunize ourselves against this ideology and to organize decisive resistance. One enemy image Rochedy repeatedly uses is the current intellectual left-liberal post-modern elite, whose alleged bodyhostility and physical neglect he repeatedly makes fun of when he writes, for example:

Nowadays, people like Plato [who is said to have been a broad-shouldered athlete; PS] in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, on Sciences Po or around Rue d'Ulm in Paris would undoubtedly be looked at with disparaging looks, because no one can believe anymore that the figure of a boxer could be more enlightened and clever than a slender sociologist or sloppy journalist with an egg-headed.¹⁴

Doesn't resentment itself speak from such sentences? — And this is just one of many examples of verbal provocation in Rochedy's book.

In any case, the doctorate in philosopher and political scientist Karsten Schubert is likely to appear to Rochedy as an exemplary member of this “elite” (which of course not It should be said that I would just like to start with Rochedy's polemic here!¹⁵). He has had a solid academic career so far and is currently working as an associate researcher at HU Berlin, with decidedly left-wing positions. His latest book Praise for identity politics In every respect, it reads as a diametrical alternative to Rochedy's theses.

It starts with the form: Schubert's book is written quite dry. His aim is not to captivate the reader with wit and polemics, but to convince him with good arguments. Schubert makes an honest effort to make a sober argument and in the book spends a lot of space on clearly defining his terms and fairly reflecting the positions of his opponents. The target group of the book is obviously an academically educated audience. His laudatory speech is surprisingly dispassionate. If Rochedy has to put up with the accusation of imobjectivity, Schubert's monograph is rather the opposite, often coming across as too instructive due to her academic style and thus missing its purpose of persuasion.

The point of Schubert's book is that he takes up numerous legal Nietzschean arguments also presented by Rochedy and also discusses them in detail in his study. However, he uses them in the sense of an avowed “left-wing Nietzscheanism”: He partially agrees with the Nietzschean critique of the universalism of modernity and, just like Rochedy, refers in particular to the The genealogy of morality and the power-theory considerations of late Nietzsche — always viewed from the perspective of Michel Foucault, arguably his most important thought leader — but picks up on these ideas to promote a redefinition of universalism. The classical universalism of Enlightenment philosophy and liberalism was in fact too blind to power relations and to the particular standpoints of individuals. Schubert now wants to overcome this limitation through a “particularist universalism,” which is about “grounding” classical universalism by repeatedly questioning the extent to which it really meets its claim and does not in fact only support the existing privileges of powerful groups. Schubert openly admits that this “left-Nietzscheanism,” in contrast to right-Nietzscheanism, is a rather loose connection to Nietzsche, based on the classics of post-structuralist theory.¹⁶

For Schubert, “identity politics” means the continuous and basically inexhaustible effort to “democratize democracy.” In the spirit of a “radical theory of democracy,” ever new oppressed groups should receive their fair share of democratic discourse and thus contribute to a continuous transformation of democratic institutions, which should become ever more inclusive. For Schubert, “identity politics” is therefore definitely the particular struggle of certain social groups (women, homosexuals, blacks, queers etc.) for more democratic participation and cultural recognition, but since these are the groups that have so far been neglected by the prevailing discourse, in this case, the particular struggle is also universal. For Schubert, not every interest policy is equally good; he distinguishes between a regressive “interest policy” that serves to expand and maintain one's own privileges — this would include the renaissance of “men's morality” sought by Rochedy — and a true progressive “identity policy,” which at the same time submits itself to certain normative standards with regard to its design and strategy. Schubert wants the real existing identity politics with his “praise,” i.e. decidedly none.”carte blanche“(p. 167), but rather develop criteria for how they can be criticized from within on the basis of their own claim — while at the same time it is clear that Schubert uses most forms of real identity politics, including language regulations (political correctness), Cancel culture and other often criticized problem areas, approves.

Against moral criticism of identity politics understood in this way, Schubert argues precisely that identity politics ultimately serves moral purposes on the one hand, but on the other hand, decisive power politics are necessary in order to enforce the concerns of the marginalized groups even against the will of a privileged majority. He makes no secret of the fact that identity politics in many cases means taking something away from members of privileged groups — but this is precisely necessary in line with the goal of “democratizing democracy” in order to overcome the much more serious oppression of disadvantaged groups. Schubert reflects very clearly that identity politics must therefore provoke sometimes angry defensive reactions, “resentment,” from the privileged.

What Schubert has explained in this context is the critique of “slave morality,” which for him is based on a false naturalistic understanding of “strength” and “weakness” and only serves to legitimize the privileges of the privileged. What Nietzsche calls “slave morality” is actually not a problem, but “actually forms the general core of politics” (p. 72). In truth, there are neither life-affirming masters on the one hand nor life-denying slaves on the other, but simply constellations of power to be considered soberly, whose change in the sense of a deeper democracy is important — and where planing is done, chips fall.

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IV. Beyond correct and incorrect

Schubert and Rochedy's approach to Nietzsche is remarkably similar. At first, they both interpret Nietzsche as theorists of power, based primarily on analyses of late work and, last but not least, the The genealogy of morality. Against mainstream moralism and its transparent illusions, they plead for a decisive power struggle to push their own identity: Here the white “West” with clearly defined gender role models, there the “queer” otherness. There is, of course, a central difference: Schubert firmly adheres to universalism, to the left-wing project, and Rochedy does not want to know anything about all this. In Schubert's analysis, he pursues regressive interests, not emancipatory identity politics.

As different, yes: opposite, these views may be, they are based on a shared experience that is undoubtedly also that of late Nietzsche: the devaluation of all values in a reality seen as nihilistic, against the background of which the official moralisms appear to be hypocrisy. Of course, and also in agreement with Nietzsche, neither Schubert nor Rochedy draw the consequence of cynicism: rather, they both want to stick to values, in one case decidedly particularist, in the other case universalistic. “Gentlemen's morality” is also a moral. In this general attitude, both rightly claim the title “Nietzschean” and express an attitude towards life that is likely to be widespread. A feeling of disorientation and the search for new orientation — which, from the point of view of both, can only be achieved through submission to a collective ideology and through participation in a community. Both are equally opposed to the fashionable individualism of our time and the corresponding Nietzsche guidebooks for household use.

What I am now designing myself in the book I mentioned appears to me to be a qualitatively different alternative to these two approaches. Both Schubert and Rochedy are completely in the intellectual cosmos of late Nietzsche and his metaphysics of power — however broken experimentally and in perspective. Both are realistically moving in the paths of the existing society, whose adequate ideological expression is this metaphysics. They bring about the eternal return of the struggle between “master morality” and “slave morality.” Their fight is ultimately aimed at making “their own people” a better position within the hierarchy within the existing system: here the decent European boys and girls, there the cosmopolitan queers. But these are not all well-trodden paths Role modelsthat are suggested to us by the cultural industry itself? The woke intellectual and the “brave” politically incorrect as fake opponents whose mirror fencing can only be escaped by putting the fight in a completely different kind of arena.

What both Schubert and Rochedy lack is an insight into the economic roots of alienation, in one word: Marx. In Rochedy's book, he doesn't even play a role as an antipode; Schubert must somehow unify him as a leftist, but in this process he is forced to turn the critic of capitalism Marx into the pioneer of working class identity politics, i.e. completely reinterpret him.¹⁷ Unlike Nietzsche, they are also not interested in the materialistic questions of corporeality and ecology.¹⁸ They are, in the bad sense, culturalists and thus reflect the real problem of current politics: That it is never really about the really decisive issues — economic distribution, ownership, ecology — but rather side scenes that scratch the surface, but then political discourse revolves solely around (immigration, gender language, quota regulations, norms of political correctness...). Nietzsche himself wrote:

All questions of politics, social order, education are falsified down to the ground in that they took the most harmful people for big people — that they taught to despise the “small” things, that is, the basic matters of life themselves...¹⁹

This is not to say that the topics mentioned per se They are of secondary importance, but it is important to analyze them in the overall context of capitalist world society and not against the background of the culturalist analytical framework “Nihilism vs. Saving the West” (Rochedy) or “Privileged vs. Unprivileged” (Schubert), which, in their rude, contribute little to a precise understanding of these conflicts. It is obviously not only a small minority that is affected by the oppression of women, but it is important to determine exactly which economic interests the forced opening of the labour market for women serves and what additional burdens this leads to, instead of blindly taking the side of “women back to the stove” versus “women on the labour market.” The situation is similar with global migration flows, which can only be understood as part of the continuing exploitation of the global South by the North and the simultaneous “craving” of the industries of the capitalist states for workers. If you stick to the thinking template of “closing borders” vs. “open borders for all,” you lose the opportunity here too for a differentiated and nuanced analysis of this issue — and especially the development of convincing real political strategies on this issue: The right-wing perspective ignores the fact that mass immigration certainly corresponds to a certain economic necessity and must first show how it actually imagines maintaining the prosperity of Western nations without it; which Perspective of radical left-wing liberalism suppresses the fact that it serves very specific capital interests, which must first be understood above all questions of moral or political evaluation.

This culturalist self-dumbdown is a necessary expression of the apparent powerlessness in which we find ourselves: The general framework of the capitalist mode of production in its neoliberal form is more or less accepted without question,²⁰ At best, agency is still experienced in the face of such cultural issues and moral skirmishes. In this respect, Schubert and Rochedy must equally be accused of failing to achieve their own claim to stimulate consistent power politics: rather, they are satisfied with the “small politics” set, without really the dimension of the “big politics” called for by Nietzsche, of radical utopias and alternatives,²¹ to look at. They both get stuck in what Nietzsche did in Zarathustra as the “noise of great actors”²² describes and admonishes: “They all want to go to the throne: it is their madness — as if luck were sitting on the throne! ”²³

You don't have to be a conspiracy theorist to see in exactly this opposition of “political incorrections” and “woken” a spectacle that ultimately benefits one person in particular: the truly powerful. A banal example: Current feminism is just tearing itself apart in bitterly fought, often to the point of physical violence, between followers of queer feminism and traditional feminism, which starts from a biologically determined root of sexuality. In these, as you will assume, Schubert also locates himself in a very polemical and one-sided way on the side of queer feminism²⁴ — and if Rochedy were to position himself in this conflict at all, his preference should be clear. But without this dispute having been artificially instigated for this purpose, it is clear that it objectively only amounts to dividing, weakening and rendering the feminist movement unable to act. And the same mechanisms can be observed in all sorts of other areas.

On the other hand, what needs to be done would be creative and life-affirming visions of a non-capitalist (and of course also: non-patriarchal, non-racial, reconciled with nature...) life that are strong and convincing enough to overcome the isolation and cultural division that is so characteristic of our time and which lead us to address the really important questions — the so-called by Nietzsche to focus on “small things.” Nietzsche is one of them: “Nutrition, location, climate, relaxation, the whole casuistry of selfishness”²⁵, which for all People care about “basic issues of life,” which global capitalism threatens more today than ever before in history: Even in core capitalist states such as the USA and Great Britain, hunger and malnutrition — not to mention the absurdly simultaneous problem of mass obesity—are becoming mass problems again,²⁶ Ever greater resources are being expended to forcibly maintain the repressive border regimes in the face of steadily increasing emigration pressure, the consequences of climate change are becoming ever more obvious, the cultural industry is shifting the capitalist pressure to perform more and more “into” our dwindling leisure time, “selfishness” is only welcome if it is that of the rich...

I do not mean any kind of alliance policy, but rather the cognitive and, above all, emotional focus on more important issues than those dictated to us by left and right identity politics (whether the latter is a “real” identity policy or not). I dream of such a movement; left and right identity politicians are torpedoing it in equal measure.

Nietzsche writes in the Happy science clairvoyant:

When I think of the desire to do something, as it constantly tickles and spikes the millions of young Europeans, all of whom cannot bear boredom and themselves, I understand that there must be a desire to suffer something in order to derive from their suffering a probable reason to do something, to do something. Emergency is necessary! Hence the cries of politicians, therefore the many false, fabricated, exaggerated “emergencies” of all sorts of classes and the blind willingness to believe in them. This young world demands From outside Should — not luck — but misfortune come or become visible; and her imagination is busy in advance to form a monster out of it so that she can fight with a monster afterwards. If these needy addicts felt within themselves the strength to benefit themselves from within, to do something to themselves, they would also understand how to create their own, self-own emergency from within. Their inventions could then be finer and their satisfactions could sound like good music: while they are now the world with their cries of distress and therefore all too often with the Nothgefühle Fill it up!²⁷

Based on this, I would draw from Nietzsche's writings the essential lesson for our time to ask ourselves — each and every one of us in dialogue and dispute — the question of what for us real necessities are. It cannot be a question of authoritarizing what is essential and insignificant, but about entering into this process in the first place and the question Throw it up afterwards. I am, of course, confident that such a process, if it even got off the ground, would reveal certain answers that we could all agree on; major human problems that lie completely outside of what contemporary Right and Left Nietzscheanism is equally trying to praise us as the “most pressing” questions. Perhaps such a perspective would be conceivable that really lies beyond master and slave morality; a “master morality of slaves.”

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For the background of the article image, those photograph was used.

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Literature

Lyotard, Jean-François: Post-modern knowledge. A report. Vienna 2019.

Rochedy, Julien: Nietzsche — the contemporary. Dresden 2022.

Schubert, Karsten: Praise for identity politics. Munich 2024.

Stephen, Paul: Left-Nietzscheanism. An introduction. 2 vol.E. Stuttgart 2020.

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Footnotes

1: See e.g. The happy science, Aph 358.

2: The happy science, Aph 377.

3: See the latter aspect my corresponding article on this blog.

4: So Zarathustra spoke, The dance song.

5: Cf. Lyotard, Post-modern knowledge.

6: On the genealogy of morality, paragraph I, 11.

7: A minimal definition that Schubert and Rochedy also share. — In today's language, the terms “left” and “right” are unfortunately often used arbitrarily and based on mere lifestyle issues — and then, of course, declared obsolete after they have been emptied to the point of unrecognizability.

8: I won't go into detail about these articles, as the book is largely based on them. On the author's website Are they listed.

9: For example, Rochedy uncritically shares the Nietzsche family legend of the Polish origin of the name (see p. 22 f. & my article mentioned in footnote 3), claims that Richard Wagner only changed into a “nationalist, anti-Semite and Christian reactionary” (p. 35) in 1872 and presents it in such a way that academic German philosophy was still in the 1870s from Hegelianism and not from the New Kantianism was dominated (see p. 38).

10: Human, all-too-human, Morgenröthe and The happy science.

11: Cf. P. 38.

12: In reality, Nietzsche stopped working on that “major work” and the sister's falsifications are far more serious than Rochedy admits. See the relevant notes here.

13: Cf. the corresponding article by Christian Sährendt on this blog.

14: P. 47.

15: Why should it be particularly “body-affirming” to make a desperate effort to build a boxer's figure? And unlike in Rochedy's portrayal, the current cultural elite seems to me to be more characterized by their extreme efforts at “fitness” and hedonism. It is really body affirming to free oneself from such body images. — And it is obvious anyway that Nietzsche Rochedy's ideal type of boxing intellectual did not match. By the way, the left-wing anti-fascist Jean-Paul Sartre of all people was a passionate boxer.

16: Cf. P. 69.

17: Cf. p. 25. At the end of the book, he then pleads for an extension of identity politics around the axis Class (see pp. 183—187).

18: With Schubert, these topics are only marginally present or the body only from the limited perspective of Foucault's analysis of power, which must necessarily deny his pre-social life of itself (cf. also his mentioned rejection of psychology). — Rochedy talks a lot about a return to corporeality, but it only has the “strong”, trained body in mind, even if he is about an overly naive body cult alla Arno Breker distances (see p. 143). He briefly discusses ecological issues (see p. 156 et seq.), but more important to him than mentioning climate change is a critique of the harmful consequences of the “so-called [n] contraceptive pill” (p. 157).

19: Ecce homo, Why I'm so smart, 10.

20: At one point, Rochedy even praises the American author Ayn Rand, one of the most important thought leaders of radical neoliberalism (p. 142).

21: Cf. Ecce homo, Why I am a fate Am, 1.

22: From the flies of the market.

23: From the new idol.

24: Cf. p. 169 f.

25: Ecce homo, Why I'm so smart, 10.

26: In June 2023, 17% of all households in the UK were affected by moderate to severe food insecurity (spring), 13.5% of all households in the USA are hungry in 2023 (spring).

27: Aph 56.

Caught in the Crossfire of the Culture Wars, There Stands Nietzsche

Comparing Two Current Perspectives

It is well known that Nietzsche's history of influence has been read and absorbed across all political camps. But what about our present tense? Paul Stephan examines the writings of two authors who are about the same age as himself, in their mid/late 30s, and whose perspectives on Nietzsche could hardly be more different: While French journalist and YouTuber Julien Rochedy declares Nietzsche a pioneer of a right-wing cultural struggle, the German philosopher and political scientist Karsten Schubert attacks him for a left-wing identity politics. Both positions do not really convince our authors; rather, they are entirely within the framework of the prevailing simulation of politics as a cultural struggle, which would need to be countered by focusing on the really pressing life problems of contemporary humanity.

I. spring in autumn

Although it is now mid-October, spring weather has set in for the duration of this year's International Nietzsche Congress in Naumburg an der Saale. This year, the five-day event has the motto “Commenting on Nietzsche.” On the flyer (see the article image): Nietzsche sitting and reading; on the top of a mountain of books that can only be climbed through a ladder. The painting is by Halle artist Michael Girod, who has designed almost all posters for the annual conferences since 2006.

The event was organized by literary scholars Prof. Dr. Sebastian Kaufmann and Prof. Dr. Katharina Grätz as well as the philosopher Prof. Dr. Andreas Urs Sommer, who are all members of the Nietzsche Research Center at Albert Ludwig University Freiburg. All three are centrally involved in the Freiburg Nietzsche Commentary, which is based at the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences. Sommer is also director of the Nietzsche Foundation.

The conference is a cooperation event between the Friedrich Nietzsche Foundation, the Nietzsche Society and the aforementioned research center. The venue was the both modern and contemplative Nietzsche Documentation Center, which is directly adjacent to the Nietzsche House decorated with vines, whose leaves shimmer wonderfully bright reddish this autumn. Although Nietzsche was neither born nor died here, he spent his youth here since 1858 and several years during his mental transformation.¹ Today, there is a playground and a daycare center right nearby, next to the historic city center.

To get in the mood for the conference, which took place from Wednesday, 16/10/2024 to Sunday, 20/10/2024, Renate Müller-Bruck gave a presentation about her booklet published in the summer “... trembling with colorful bliss.” Nietzsche in Venice. Müller-Bruck is a distinguished Nietzsche expert and worked for Mazzino Montinari, among others. From the mid-60s, Montinari, together with Giorgio Colli, initiated the Complete critical edition of Nietzsche's works, estate fragments and letters, which form the basis for the published in the 80s Critical study edition forms. Montinari is therefore one, if not which An essential figure in the history of critical editions of Nietzsche's writings. The congress was opened on Thursday with various greetings, including from Naumburg Mayor Armin Müller, Sommer and Prof. Dr. Marco Brusotti, chairman of the Nietzsche Society. Katharina Grätz took over the introduction after the program.

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II. The (un) popular philosopher

Even before the conference, in conversation with a Belgian business manager I know, the event comes up as a topic. The well-connected manager asks whether Nietzsche is very well known in Germany. So as is known. Known as... Sigmund Freud?! In Belgium, people are probably more familiar with Freud. — For him, Nietzsche is a philosopher, no more, no less. Beyond that, he can't say anything. Does not know any of the writings, is vaguely familiar with the term “superman” and correctly estimates it in the 19th century. — The average citizen will feel the same way: Ever heard, a title and one or two terms may be correctly guessed.

For lovers, this idea is sobering. Nonetheless, Nietzsche is probably one of the great philosophers who have also taken up a firm place in the pantheon of thinkers and writers abroad and in popular culture — his quotes have become commonplaces and bon mots. In this respect, he lives on, even though Nietzsche never quite as suited himself as a poster boy as Che Guevara, Karl Marx or Jesus, for example.

It is a sad truth that it will have remained more or less a side note for the majority of our current modern fellow citizens. He has this in common with most major figures in the history of literature and philosophy.
Although the Nietzsche brand remains an educational and intellectual phenomenon in a certain sense, it is true for Nietzsche in particular that this sphere repeatedly proves to be porous. On the Internet, he is celebrating success as a subject of videos, as an icon with a moustache or reference figure for a wide variety of celebrities and performers or those who consider themselves to be such. The Internet only rarely comments on Nietzsche in the way science would like. But more on the question of its digitization later. His significance is enormous for post-modern philosophy, as is for modern artists and, in their followers, popular culture, which certainly also has to do with the provocative and offensive character of his writings. Time and again, he used to cross the artificial limits of individual scientific disciplines with a romantic approach to completeness. For the event, I would like to watch the lectures, which promise a certain level of popularity, and confidently leave Nietzsche to the principle of chance; I hope they won't take offense at me.

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III. Destructions, Explanations, Editions

The first talk I'm listening to on Friday is surprising because of its joviality. Young scientist Milan Wenner talks about the Freiburg Nietzsche commentary. The long title of the commentary already suggests a tension between historical and critical editions. Different from the title of the talk From destruction to deconstruction? The Freiburger-Nietzsche Commentary as a phenomenon in the history of science suggests, this is neither about Martin Heidegger nor Jacques Derrida, but about the question of how editorial studies developed from its strongly philosophical beginnings — more on that later — to a more analytical, textual orientation: “The subject [Nietzsche] secede” from the text, means deconstruction in Wenner, the technical “lyrical ego” and the “texts as a complex fabric of clear voices.”

I am unable to listen to the full length of the second presentation I would like to attend, as Wenner's presentation resulted in such lively discussions in the already overcrowded room that I had no choice but to stay. The atmosphere is generally more cheerful and open than would have been expected from a scientific conference. The short length of the section presentations of 20 minutes, including the 10-minute discussion, gives the event a pleasant pace. The audience is also more diverse than you might think: interested people (I talk to a musician, a yoga teacher, a mechanic), experts, professors, teachers, scientists and those who want to become one, from a variety of different countries and of all ages.

One of the centerpieces follows in the afternoon. Dr. Sarah Bianchi, also a young scientist whose research focused both on micropolicies in Adorno and Foucault and critically on the implications of so-called digital enhancement, gives a presentation entitled Read essayistically. Power, Enlightenment, and Experimental Philosophical History after Nietzsche. According to Bianchi, commenting is already an enlightenment practice and — speaking with Nietzsche — not only a question of the subjectivity of essayistic artistry, but also of genealogy. A thoroughly controversial view, since, as was later interjected by the audience, the question is whether Nietzsche and, following him, Foucault's method would not exactly consist in undermining the philosophy of Enlightenment and its narratives of subjectivity. Bianchi refers to current French novelists, including Annie Ernaux and Édouard Louis. The aim would be to create spaces of discourse for the marginalized through essayistic writing and thus contribute to the “unmasking of ideologies.” As well as to contribute to the possibility of “affect and power-sensitive” positions beyond “digital perfection logic,” which, in contrast to the often predisposed self-help or advice literature, opened up “not a therapeutic or naturalistic, i.e. drive-based understanding, but a power-based” of subjects.

Bianchi's presentation is followed by a laudatory speech and panel discussion with Sommer, Kaufmann, Müller-Bruck and Grätz. With free speech sparkly with Swiss charm and gentle irony — and in print-ready letters — Sommer remembers Prof. Dr. Karl Pestalozzi and Prof. Dr. Annemarie Pieper. The former was, among others, president of the Nietzsche House Foundation in Sils Maria² and involved in the continuation of Complete critical edition, the latter of her name co-editor of Complete critical edition the letters and yearbook of the Nietzsche Society. In his laudatory memoriae, Sommer describes Pestalozzi as a representative of the University of Basel with integrity and improbably literate. Pieper, on the other hand, as a feminist and unadjusted pioneer in philosophy, whose academic-critical novel The Klugscheisser GmbH He doesn't go unmentioned with a long smile. Pieper died in February this year, Pestalozzi died in the previous summer.

From the panel discussion following the presentation with a title that references Nietzsche's famous essay, The benefits and disadvantages of Nietzsche editing for (academic) life, Grätz also tells me in passing, deciphers the motto of the congress. It is the project of a “new critical edition of the estate,” which is explained in more detail by Kaufmann. With a digital genetic edition, for which Prof. Dr. Paolo d'Iorio in the form of the website nietzschesource.org has already presented a prototype, Montinaris and Collis will be followed up on the preparatory work. The new edition should be even closer to the originals and create a digital citable source. As Kaufmann explains, parts of the Colli/Montinari edition are based on conjectures — i.e. editorial interventions — which no longer meet today's editorial standards. These include stylistic “corrections,” which were not without interpretive moments on the part of the editors, as well as problems with the critical apparatus that the project sets out to fix.

Many lectures also mentioned the exemplary years of failed editing practice on the part of the Nietzsche Archive under the aegis of Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, whose administrative practices, although they did not remain without widespread impact, can be described as thoroughly abusive. An indiscriminate source — even though it is still considered uncritically by parts of the international audience as a genuine work of Nietzsche and is published as such — is and remains the book The will to power, published by the sister herself and Nietzsche's close confidante Heinrich Köselitz alias Peter Gast. As all speakers never tire of stressing: an editorial construct, a very free interpretation by the editors. To put it bluntly: A “philological nonsense” that sailed under “false flag [the name 'Nietzsche']” is what one of the speeches that evening said; and not even the only one of its kind.

However, according to Kaufmann, the criticism can also be transferred to today. This is how the “myth of the alleged estate” emerged from the disorderly hodgepodge, which was also further fuelled by Colli and Montinari. The whole range of editorial questions arise: What is the score with the order, the authorization; but also the correct evaluation and evaluation, e.g. the question of whether the estate should be assessed as a work of equal importance at all? Even the Colli/Montinari edition is thus subject to a history of interpretation and a filtering process, which the new estate edition aims to compensate for and expand the possibilities of digital editing work. However, the project has not yet been able to find a financier.

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III. Spiritual flower reading

Saturday is still spring-like and warmer, a pleasant breeze is blowing — again: the beauty of the red vines of the Nietzsche House.

In the presentation The flower harvest — an endless commentary Dr. Catarina Caetano da Rosa, Deputy Director of the Documentation Center, presents a project in which she meticulously excerpted references to Nietzsche in secondary literature and references to them. A collection of second-hand quotes, pictures and mentions found on the Documentation Center website can be found. Da Rosa is also reminiscent of the list of fantastic animal groups that Michel Foucault wrote in his Order of things quoted by Jorge Luis Borges. In short, although this is more than an idiosyncratic art project, for the time being it is not a reception science project in the strict sense of the word. The experimental collection illustrates a “fragmented profile” of the philosopher and the “driving force” Nietzsche. In the room in the former study on the first floor of the Nietzsche House, there are a number of trendy T-shirts that look like a cross-section of the philosopher's iconography. They once again underline his pop cultural influence, which does not always have to coincide with reality or historical contexts.

In the evening, the grand awarding of the International Friedrich Nietzsche Prize to Prof. Dr. Renate Reschke, a luminary in Nietzsche research who in particular was one of the few in the GDR to conduct research on Nietzsche, will be celebrated. The prize is endowed with 15,000€. She receives congratulations, greetings and gifts from her colleagues and the mayor. The ceremony will be rounded off with a laudatory speech by Prof. Dr. Christoph Türcke. The evening will be accompanied by a performance of Nietzsche's compositions with vocals and piano.

Reschke's own presentation under the title About the dilemma of presence of mind and the lack of sense of history. On the continued topicality of Nietzschean cultural criticism characterizes a wonderfully pessimistic diagnosis of the present — in the sense of Nietzsche's time, but also of our own. In fact, according to Reschke, she would rather have talked about the topic “Why I am not a Nietzscherian”, but then decided on the present one. Reschke critically examines the concept of “presence of mind” and its relationship to history. Summarizing the enormously dense and partly polemical presentation seems neither possible nor effective to me at this point; rather, Reschke's wonderfully natural style is emphasized, which does not have much affection. She only rarely becomes very concrete: She speaks of the philosophical, so her presentation remains enigmatic in a certain sense and in the space of abstract. Her criticism is directed not only against the mass culture of modern media, which tended more to solidify the present (machine culture, acceleration, etc.), but also against his own milieu, including the (political) role of Nietzsche in the past East-West conflict, in which he long (for both systems) as Enfant Terrible valid, does not remain unaffected. Only Nietzsche himself could probably express it more beautifully: “No, we don't love humanity”³.

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IV. Two ghosts

What is crystal clear at the end of the conference is how closely interpretation, criticism and editorial studies are linked. As shown in particular by the dispute over Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche's administration of the estate, political, economic, but also private interests play a role time and again.

Finally, one last picture: Two ghosts, in the form of two mutually exclusive methodological camps, seemed to haunt Congress time and again. One that wants to stick to the concept, figure and personality, an authentic Nietzsche and a philosophy of his own, and the other, which is concerned with scientific analysis, technical structures and the historical and intellectual influences in his thinking. The image of the battle of scientific love for truth with theatrical love for appearances is not something you want to try in the end. I'd rather spend a moment with sunlight and the changing colors of autumn.

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Jonas Pohler was born in Hanover in 1995. He studied German literature in Leipzig and completed his studies with a master's degree on “Theory of Expressionism and with Franz Werfel.” He now works in Leipzig as a language teacher and is involved in integration work.

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Except for the article image, the pictures for this article are photographs of the author.

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Footnotes

1: Editor's note: See also the Nietzsche House and its history this Article by Lukas Meisner on this blog.

2: Editor's note: See the article by Christian Sährendt on this blog (link).

3: The happy science, Aph 377.

The Will to Commentary

A Report on This Year's Nietzsche Society Meeting

The almost complete Freiburg Nietzsche commentary has now become an indispensable tool for Nietzsche research. In meticulous detail work, the authors compiled useful information on almost all aspects of Nietzsche's works (history of origin, sources, allusions, receptions, interpretations...) and commented on them passage by passage, sometimes sentence by sentence and word by word. Almost all of the volumes published so far are available free of charge on the de Gruyter Verlag website (link). Even laymen will find a real treasure trove of background information and explanations here. The three leading employees of the project — its long-time manager Andreas Urs Sommer, Katharina Grätz and Sebastian Kaufmann — took the opportunity to dedicate this year's annual meeting of the Nietzsche Society to the topic of “Commenting on Nietzsche.” They were not only looking back, but also looking ahead.

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.

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Full conversation

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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?

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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.

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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?

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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.

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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?

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

“The Most Noble Adversary”

Daniel Tutt and Henry Holland in Dialogue

After two previous contributions to Nietzsche in the Anglosphere For this blog, Henry Holland interviewed American thinker Daniel Tutt about his perspective on Nietzsche as the most important antagonist of the left. The discussion included Huey Newton, leader of the Black Panthers in the 1970s, and what his “parasitic” way of reading Nietzsche prompted him to read. An unedited and unabridged version of this interview, in original English, can be heard and watched on Tutt's YouTube channel (link).

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“The future, the wonderful unknown of the future, is the only object of the Nietzsche Festival. ”¹

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synopsis

Nietzsche is one of the great thinkers of the future. “Prelude to a philosophy of the future” is the subtitle of Beyond good and evil And already in the second Unexpected viewing Nietzsche conceptualizes the future as a primary tense from which past and present can only be adequately understood.

So what could be more obvious than dedicating his own conference to “Nietzsche's Future” — a plural that he also uses himself again and again? I stayed the first day of the meeting Nietzsche's Futures at, organized by the Klassik Stiftung Weimar. It lasted from October 7 to 11 and brought together proven Nietzsche experts from all over the world, who were asked to present their respective perspectives on Nietzsche's future from the context of their home country's experience.

After greetings from Ulrike Lorenz, President of the Foundation, and Helmut Heit, Director of the Friedrich Nietzsche College, who had organized the conference together with his assistants Corinna Schubert and Evelyn Höfer, a panel followed in which Nietzsche researchers David Simonin from France, Hans Ruin from Sweden and Martine Prange from the Netherlands spoke about the two questions asked as representatives of their respective countries of origin. In the next panel, South African researcher Vasti Roodt and Willow Verkerk from Canada spoke. The first day of the conference was concluded by a panel, at which the four editors of the Nietzsche studies, perhaps the most important body of international academic Nietzsche research, Christian Emden, Helmut Heit, Vanessa Lemm and Claus Zittel.

Most speakers largely agreed that Nietzsche's future lay in the continuation of the post-structuralist Nietzsche interpretation and in philological, textual approaches.² One must engage with Nietzsche's texts in order to experience their radical potential, which consists primarily in the destruction of existing truths and certainties. Time and again, the ambiguity, and complexity of Nietzsche's work was emphasized, which could in no way be reduced to specific “doctrines.”

I was only partially convinced by this point of view. Was this really a glimpse of Nietzsche's future or rather a summary of the last 20 years of Nietzsche research? Is Nietzsche really simply an ironist, masquerade player and trapper — or is he not always inspiring with his substantive statements, which, in addition to everything contradictory and ambiguous, also exist — and of which there was certainly talk of again and again during the conference?

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I. Nietzsches Futures

Nietzsche is one of the great thinkers of the future. “Prelude to a philosophy of the future” is the subtitle of Beyond good and evil And already in the second Unexpected viewing Nietzsche conceives the future as a primary tense from which past and present can only be adequately understood: We need an idea of what will be in order to understand what was and what is. — An important, not to say: forward-looking, thought that later Heidegger in Being and time would pick up.

Last but not least, the “superman” is an open utopia whose philosophical content could almost be translated as “future at any price.” Nietzsche's insight: Man is essentially an animal that lives in the future, that needs an idea of it as much as the daily bread that fluctuates between fear and hope. But he doesn't want to dictate a specific future to people; he consciously thinks of it as radically open. No wonder that he repeatedly speaks of her in plural form when he writes, for example: “Out, out, my eye! Oh what many seas all around me, what twilight human futures! And above me — what a rose-pink silence! What an obscured silence! ”³

Nietzsche is thus opposed to the entire tradition in philosophy that dates back to Plato, which sees truth essentially as a reminder, as a re—construction of something past. For him, truth is essentially something that must be actively created with courage, something that Not yet is: “Courageous, carefree, mocking, violent — that is what wisdom wants us: she is a woman and only ever loves a man of war”⁴.

Every generation, every individual, urges Nietzsche time and again to create this truth, to make the unheard audible, the unseen visible, the unthinkable imaginable. It is no wonder that he is perhaps the most important philosophical leader of the avant-garde and radical political movements of all kinds. Hegel still wanted to understand the present and this as the result of the entire history of the world: “The owl of Minerva only begins its flight at dusk.” Nietzsche, on the other hand, is the philosopher of dawn and departure — for him, as at the same time for Marx, the actual story has not even begun.

With this philosophy of “not yet”, Nietzsche in particular inspired the unorthodox Marxist Ernst Bloch, who took up and developed this aspect of Nietzsche's thinking more consistently than any other thinker, into an entire system of hope and utopia. Certainly there are also elements in Nietzsche's work — this is no surprise — that contradict this emphasis on the future: the myth of the “eternal return,” which has no real future, since everything has already existed; the peculiar nostalgic fixation on “men's morality” as a backwards “utopia,” which is not a utopia after all. But this Nietzsche simply has no future; it is necessary to defend the radical adventurer who goes out into the “open sea” against him⁵ And all the “shadows”⁶ wanted to leave the dead god behind. You can certainly ask whether he doesn't go 'too far', whether the new doesn't always have to contain elements of the old and abolish them in itself; but it is the pathos of the new that is essential, and that Nietzsche always just for boy draws interest to readers who see his writings as a catalyst for their own will to change.

What is the score of these thoughts in a time that has apparently adopted “No future” as its slogan and which is characterized by sheer promises of salvation, exhaustion and relativism — Nietzsche would say: nihilism? In which the young feel they are the “last generation” and the elderly have more and more power for demographic reasons alone and seem to be blocking real progress? Is there still a future? And if Nietzsche and Heidegger are right, a negative answer would mean: Then there is also no present and no past. And in what way could in such a post-historical world Nietzsches Exist the future?

II. “Nietzsche's Futures” in Weimar

With the expectation that I would receive, if not answers, then clues to these questions, I drove to Weimar on the first day of the conference Nietzsche's Futures hosted under the wing of none other than the Klassik Stiftung Weimar, one of Germany's largest cultural institutions. It went from October 7 to 11 and brought together proven Nietzsche experts from all over the world, who were invited to present their respective perspectives on Nietzsche's future from the context of their home country's experience.

In her welcome address, the President of the Foundation, Ulrike Lorenz, placed the conference in the context of her entire work and emphasized that it was the closing event of the theme year “Departure.” According to her unspoken statement, this was deliberately placed in the year of the Thuringian elections in order to counteract the AfD's victory in the election.

Helmut Heit, Head of the Foundation's Research Department and the Friedrich Nietzsche College, which is also affiliated with it, gave a further welcome address, an institution dedicated specifically to maintaining and continuing the Weimar Nietzsche tradition. He organized the conference together with his assistants Corinna Schubert and Evelyn Höfer. Heit emphasized that Weimar was the starting point of the “Nietzsche event,” even though the philosopher only spent the last three years of his life here, abducted and cared for by his sister. The with the sister and her controversial edition of some fragments of Nietzsche's estate as The will to power He did not conceal the dark side of this heritage, but rightly emphasized that Weimar Nietzsche reception was under progressive auspices until the First World War and was closely linked to the cultural avant-garde of that time, in particular Art Nouveau. He also pointed out that the Klassik Stiftung Weimar is making every effort to have Nietzsche's estate stored here on UNESCO's list of intangible world cultural heritage. However, the request in this regard had not yet been decided.

Heit blamed the following factors for the continued impact of that “event”: that Nietzsche had repeatedly found new multipliers such as the mentioned Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, Georg Brandes, Lou Salomé, the Chinese writer Lu Xun, Heidegger, Foucault or Judith Butler; the stylistic and content-related diversity of Nietzsche's philosophy; the aesthetics of his style, which repeatedly drew the attention of artists in particular to him has; that he repeatedly asks important questions of recurring relevance to stimulating Weise said that, as a radical critic, he repeatedly appeals to young people and inspires innovations. Nietzsche's present is still our time and Nietzsche critically described it.

This was followed by a panel in which Nietzsche researchers David Simonin from France, Hans Ruin from Sweden and Martine Prange from the Netherlands spoke about the two questions asked as representatives of their respective countries of origin. The conference was generally pleasant because, by focusing on these two problems — Nietzsche's impact in the various cultures and his future in them — the common thread of the contributions was always clearly visible and they always clearly related to each other.

David Simonin emphasized how early, as early as the 1870s, Nietzsche was discovered in France, even though it was only from the 1960s as part of post-structuralism — usually referred to as “French Theory” during the conference⁷ — has been incorporated into academic research. He distinguished between three perspectives on Nietzsche in today's French discussion: polemical, which criticize Nietzsche and especially his left-wing performers, in some cases vehemently; dialogical ones, which interpret and appropriate Nietzsche in light of current cultural problems; and philological — he referred in particular to the project nietzschesource.org —, which approach Nietzsche from a more historicizing, contextualizing and immanent point of view. From his point of view, the future of Nietzsche would lie in the latter approach, which he also professed himself. He spoke of the fact that it might soon be possible to solve Nietzsche's life with the help of virtual reality-Experience technologies directly and in 3D and accompany him on a train journey through the Swiss Alps, for example.

Hans Ruin presented the Scandinavian reception of Nietzsche. This was very fruitful and important for Scandinavian culture well into the 20th century, with Nietzsche being appropriated primarily as a pioneer of progressive and avant-garde — so-called “cultural radical” — positions. However, there had been no discussion about Nietzsche in Sweden until the 1980s; he even compared the situation at that time with censorship in the GDR. The Swedish translations of Nietzsche's works are, apart from that of Zarathustra was out of stock. Nietzsche's influence on Scandinavian culture was suppressed, Ruin spoke of a “hidden heritage” that had only been rediscovered from the 1990s by researchers such as himself and Thomas H. Brobjer, who had also brought about a new translation of Nietzsche's works into Swedish. In the noughties, this led to an upsurge in Swedish Nietzsche research. Ruin described it as a sign of a culture's health if it was able to read, digest and talk to Nietzsche's texts.

Martine Prange finally explained that Nietzsche had only played a minor role in the culture and, above all, the philosophy of her country. In addition to the generally hostile, very “croaky” mentality of the country, she attributed this in particular to the “Americanization” of Dutch culture and philosophy beginning after the Second World War, which has now gone so far that Dutch as a language of science has almost completely been supplanted by English. The Dutch research system has also been structured in an extremely competitive and market-like manner in recent years, so that hardly any funding has been awarded for research on intellectual history topics; there is only applied ethics everywhere. The new right-wing government has now cut back on already scarce research funding and is now mistreating “long-term students” with fines, so that Prange was very pessimistic, at least when it comes to academic Nietzsche research in the Netherlands. She emphasized the close connection between research and politics and expressed the hope that Trump would not be re-elected. With this clear accusation of poor political conditions for intellectual history research, Prange struck a nerve and received much encouragement. During the discussion, Ruin even spoke of the Americanization of Europe as a cultural “decadence.”

In the next panel, South African researcher Vasti Roodt and Willow Verkerk from Canada spoke. Roodt was of the opinion that Nietzsche was not a political thinker in the sense that his philosophy made no contribution to building a just democratic society. He is a thinker who talks primarily about personal problems by repeatedly pointing out the implicit background value underlying our explicit evaluations and calling for the endless project of critiquing these prejudices. She took up Nietzsche's distinction between mere scholarship, which could not set its own purposes, and genuine purposeful philosophy and warned against the dominance of the former. Even today, Nietzsche is calling for a “rendezvous at questions and question marks.”

Her presentation, in turn, provoked several critical questions. In particular, it remained unclear why Nietzsche's critique of our unconscious values could not also be applied to political values. Roodt also put her assessment into perspective a bit during the discussion and emphasized that she was speaking from the perspective of an unstable democracy that is still in its infancy.

Willow Verkerk's presentation was particularly exciting because she has broad international experience and has conducted research in Belgium, Canada, Great Britain and Japan, among others. She differentiated between a more European approach to Nietzsche, which roughly corresponds to what Simonin had called a “philological” interpretation, and a more English-language approach, which she described as “toolboxing Nietzsche,” i.e. a rather superficial selection of individual passages of the philosopher's text in order to use them to support her own considerations. She identified herself as a feminist researcher whose main aim was to import this European method to Canada.

Heidegger and the representatives of French Theory had already done this kind of “toolboxing”, and their students also mostly approached Nietzsche from this lens, being particularly inspired by Gilles Deleuze and Marxist Nietzsche interpretations. She named Nietzsche's genealogical method in particular as relevant core concepts, in particular in its development by Michel Foucault, the radical feminism of Judith Butler and the Critical Race Studies; his diagnosis of nihilism or the “last person,” which in recent times has often been understood as an accusation of environmental or ecological nihilism; his critique of metaphysics and the resulting perspectivism; his critique of the “sovereign individual,” whose autonomy is a result of discipline, in the second treatise of The genealogy of morality; and finally Nietzsche's view of the self as an embodiment of the will to power, which makes Nietzsche a pioneer of phenomenology, especially that of Maurice Merleau-Pontys, and psychoanalysis. Verkerk named Nietzsche's influence on early feminism and anarchism as further problem areas that deserve more attention from future Nietzsche research. She also pointed out that Nietzsche's critique of compassion has recently been approving in the Disability Studies will be picked up.

In the following discussion, various researchers emphasized that intensive immersion in Nietzsche's writings per se, regardless of their content, is a transformative educational experience that is lost when approaching them purely through instruments. Verkerk, for example, reported on the strong emotional reactions that Nietzsche's texts repeatedly evoked among her students⁸ and invite them to question where they actually came from.

At the end of the official part of the first day of the conference, the four prominent Nietzsche researchers Christian Emden from the USA, Helmut Heit, Vanessa Lemm from Great Britain and Claus Zittel from Stuttgart directly discussed the question “Does Nietzsche's philosophy have a future? ”. It was an illustrious round not least because it involved the current editors of the Nietzsche studies, probably the most important international body of Nietzsche academic research, acts.

Vanessa Lemm emphasized that Nietzsche stands for a completely new understanding of philosophy and a new philosophical way of life. He regards philosophy as a fundamentally relational endeavor, is a thinker of relation. Claus Zittel agreed with her that Nietzsche was a critic of any claim to absolute truth. This perspectivistic and relativizing method of thinking and writing by Nietzsche is very topical in a time of rampant 'absolutisms. ' He is a thinker of “difference” (with which Zittel took up one of the main keywords of post-structuralist philosophy), who repeatedly urges us to relativize our own positions to the point of radical consequence, to constantly abolish ourselves. He heightens our awareness that positions can only ever be transitory, and diagnoses different expiration logics in his writings without articulating an opposite position, playing a game with ambiguities, puzzles and masks that you would only understand correctly if you could read Nietzsche in the original.

Christian Emden agreed with Zittel that Nietzsche was not conveying a message or teaching, but that was above all a critic and that was his potential. Similar to Verkerk before, he named the genealogical method and the diagnosis of nihilism — understood as a radical question of the conditions for the possibility of values in general — as central relevant topics of his thinking. She also added the question of the relationship between normativity and nature, how it raised post-humanist thinking and New Materialism, and the question of what philosophy actually was.

All four editors were therefore largely in agreement to favor a more philological, work-immanent reading of Nietzsche — Zittel warned against an “escape from the text,” for example — and to reject interpretations that would like to take positions from Nietzsche's texts. According to Heit, Nietzsche wanted to fail and not create a system; failure was the great constant in Nietzsche's life, according to Emden; Nietzsche had recognized that only “false gods” were possible in modern times and that the lie had lost its innocence, according to Zittel. His notorious late work Ecce homo Zittel continues, for example, as a mere parody. Lemm spoke of the danger of politicizing interpretations of Nietzsche and of the philological approach as the most important antidote to them, as a central advance in Nietzsche research in recent decades, which, as Zittel added, took place around 2000. What is therefore particularly important about Nietzsche is his spelling, not so much what he writes in detail — although the editors of the Nietzsche studies They agreed unanimously that they did not want to print overly experimental texts in their magazine.

Nietzsche thus appears as a pioneer of “Antihumanism” and New Materialism — according to Lemm, who even spoke of the replacement of human intelligence by AI should —; not as an overcomer of nihilism, but as a nihilist himself, according to Zittel and Emden, even though, according to Emden and Heit, he also stresses the need for, though never absolute, values for our human existence.

Recently, the question was raised by the audience where Because Nietzsche's philosophy actually still has a future. At university? In this regard, the editors of the Nietzsche studies rather subdued. Zittel recommended that you not choose a research topic for career reasons that did not suit you, Lemm pleaded for a stronger intra-academic and cultural appreciation of philosophy.

III. And now?

The event was a rendezvous between the mainstream of current Nietzsche academic research, a mutual confirmation of one's own convictions in a family atmosphere, which was reflected, for example, in the fact that people usually called each other by first name. Almost all of the approximately 70 listeners were there for professional reasons, and even students from the surrounding universities were searched in vain. Critically, you could say: left-liberal followers of post-modernism among themselves. From the point of view of the researchers present, the “future” of Nietzsche lies primarily in the unwavering continuation of the present, a textual, philological reading of Nietzsche in connection with the classics of “French Theory” such as Foucault, Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Butler or, recently, Bruno Latour, the most important advocate of New Materialism.  

For now, there is nothing wrong with that. You don't want to imagine what a Nietzsche conference would look like, organized by ideologues from the strongest party in Thuringia — you would almost think that it was talking about two different philosophers. Nietzsche as a radical critic and relativizer of all, especially right-wing, ideologies and “truths”: Yes! More of that!

The drawings by German-Iranian artist Farzane Vaziritabar, which visually accompanied the conference, illustrated this view of Nietzsche particularly well. In a cartoonish style, they repeatedly question the Nietzsche cult of past decades and its (self) heroization, but without ridiculing it. He appears on them as a masked player and religious critic, as a pioneer of the critical philosophers of the 20th century from Sigmund Freud to Theodor W. Adorno and Jean-Paul Sartre to the “French Theory.” However, in keeping with Lemms's plea, an AI-generated pop Nietzsche was chosen as the cover photo of the conference.

And yet there is room for doubt. Nietzsche repeatedly criticizes skepticism, nihilism and, last but not least, philological research in his texts themselves — even though, as always, Kurt Tucholsky's famous mocking dictum applies in this regard: “Tell me what you need and I will get you a Nietzsche quote in return.” Like Natalie Schulte, taking up Tucholsky's quip, on this blog Recently emphasized, although Nietzsche's texts are ambiguous and often puzzled, they cannot therefore be interpreted at will. He combines his perspectivism with the call to create a”Ranking of values to determine”⁹. He is not simply a masked player and ironist, but also criticizes the masquerade and the arbitrariness of modernity in countless places.¹⁰ He wants Europe, that the world, to create a new, self-determined future for itself¹¹ even if it becomes vague when it comes to their concrete form. An appeal that cannot mean to stick to a general reference to the relativity of every positioning, but which amounts to taking decisive and courageous positions in the face of its relativity. Last but not least, as can be seen from Heidegger, Nietzsche and Bloch alike, the future is not simply given to us as an object, but that we are called upon to actively shape: Wir Are they who give Nietzsche a future or not and it is up to us, as its readers and performers, to design them responsibly without being determined by any past or present. Rather, these only make sense in the light of this draft.

This uniqueness To recognize Nietzsche, which in addition to all “difference” also exists in many respects, would rather be the future of Nietzsche research that would also appear to be relevant beyond its own haze. But this recognition is perhaps more difficult and painful than the same perpetual lyre of ambiguity, ambiguity, relativity, etc., as it refers not least to Nietzsche's problematic political legacy, which Heit referred to at the outset and later in particular, albeit rather subtly, Roodt. The sad truth, not said by Roodt, but clearly hinted at: Nietzsche himself might have been more of a supporter of political projects such as the South African apartheid regime than her critic.

After decades of philologizing and relativizing Nietzsche, it would therefore probably take another “content” — to take up a term Andreas Urs Sommers, who also spoke at the conference¹² — A turning point in Nietzsche research, which goes hand in hand with an unequivocal political positioning in line with the political ideals of modernity pointed out by Roodt. It should mercilessly uncover and criticize Nietzsche's positions that are incompatible with these ideals, but at the same time also point out the important and promising aspects of his thinking, which contradict these positions and which were rightly mentioned again and again at the conference. Because if you leave it with pure skepticism, you undermine all positions, including emancipatory ones; you only do half the work of criticism in the sense of emancipation.

This is particularly supported by the fact that during the conference, despite all affirmation of Nietzsche's ambiguity, mysteriousness, etc., there was always the contents of his writings — such as his insights into psychology — which were also brought to the forefront by the researchers themselves. So “textism” — according to Sommer's expression — obviously cannot completely eradicate this moment if it wants to save even a grain of relevance in the world. Hic Rhodus, hic salta! — The rose of renewed Nietzscheanism blossoms here, you researchers dance!

This rethink is all the more necessary because otherwise the future of Nietzsche will inevitably be written by forces other than the participants of the conference would like in unison. Only in passing was the danger of renewed legal Nietzscheanism pointed out.¹³

None of this is intended to diminish the merits of the philological interpretation of Nietzsche. Rather, it should be pointed out that, in the sense of a Hegelian three-step, it is probably time to find a new path in the sense of Nietzsche's countless ambiguities that took place up to the 1970s and the successive ambiguities of his philosophy in the sense of informed ambiguity, which does not ignore the results of philological research, but takes them up in order to engage again with contents to pave the way for Nietzsche's thinking. The growing interest of her students in Marxist Nietzsche interpretations mentioned by Verkerk — as well as in feminist, racism-critical or those within the Disability Studies — gives hope that this development, in response to the renewed legal Nietzscheanism, whose renaissance beyond Nietzsche university research has already been taking place a long time ago, will just as inevitably take place. And the seemingly still undecided mainstream of Nietzsche academic research will be just as necessary in this regard position must. A renewed enlightened humanism, as Bloch advocated in his specific synthesis of Marx and Nietzsche, could be the fruit of these efforts, perhaps even a collective cultural departure like the one that took place around 1900 in Weimar and throughout Europe, inspired not least by Nietzsche's ideas — which were understood quite “naively” at the time.

IV. Anecdotal sequel

During breaks, I spent time and again in front of the conference venue, the Mon Ami Cultural Center in the heart of Weimar. Passers-by came and went and looked curiously at what was going on there today. Some simply asked for the toilet, no one stayed. One person quoted from his head one of the countless misogynous passages from Beyond good and evil¹⁴ And said Feist: “That's misogynistic — so what? “Did he choose Höcke a few weeks earlier? Would participation in the conference have convinced him otherwise in terms of the hoped-for “departure” or would at least have brought him to relativize his position?

On the way home, I met a local man who identified himself as the poet of quite original puzzle verses. Some of them reminded me a bit of Nietzsche's aphorisms. He proudly showed me a television report from one of his readings on his smartphone and told me that he had already sold several thousand copies of his books. I preferred to keep silent about mine sales figures and he probably outperformed just about all of the researchers who had spoken today in terms of sales success. And not even Weimar local television has appeared in Nietzsche's Futures strayed.

How to popularize the insights of philosophy without popularizing them? That was perhaps the actual background question of the conference and the dwindling research funding is only an expression of this problem. What future does it have philosophy? Does philosophy have as an academic discipline?

But perhaps this is also the wrong way to ask the question. Philosophy, if it has any value, will always have a future. If she doesn't have him, you don't have to grieve about it with Nietzsche, but realize: “[W] as falls, you should also push that! Everything of today — that falls, that expires: Who wanted to keep it! But I — me wants Still bumping it! ”¹⁵ Nietzsche will always find his readers as long as we live in a culture that is similar to his own. He, Plato, Hegel, Kant, so many others: They have all advanced to something that may even be valid forever as long as there are people. Even if it wasn't so, so must But we, as philosophers who take themselves seriously, believe in it. And it is the same with the future of humanum, with the future of democracy. Hope is a principle, a principle that enables a self-fulfilling future. The thinking that poisons hope and faith may have no future. Or, in the words of early Nietzsche, directed against philology, quoting an important humanist from Weimar:

History, however, which only destroys without an inner building instinct leading it, makes its tools embarrassed and unnatural in the long run: because such people destroy illusions, and “anyone who destroys the illusion in themselves and others is punished by nature as the strictest tyrant. ”¹⁶

The photographs accompanying this article are by Paul Stephan. The product image is a drawing by Farzane Vaziritabar (Link to the artist's homepage with the complete series Ecce Nietzsche).

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literature

Battalile, Georges: Nietzsche and the fascists. In: Compensation to Nietzsche. Munich 1999.

Summer, Andreas Urs: What remains of Nietzsche's philosophy? Berlin 2018.

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footnotes

1: Georges Bataille, Nietzsche and the fascists, P. 164.

2: At the conference, it was more or less assumed that these two strands of interpretation were ultimately one strand. Or it was assumed that both strands ultimately resulted in the same interpretation. However, I certainly see a certain tension here that should have been discussed in more detail. The term “philology” was also used synonymously with “textual reading,” which could also be doubted given the variety of philological methods.

3: So Zarathustra spoke, The Honey Sacrifice.

4: So Zarathustra spoke, About reading and writing.

5: Cf. The happy science, Aph 343.

6: The happy science, Aph 108.

7: Whereby Simonin emphasized that this current of theory is no longer so “French.”

8: A male student burst into tears while discussing a seemingly misogynous passage and asked desperately, “How can you even think of something like that? “, while a fellow student said enthusiastically that Nietzsche was absolutely right in his critique of feminism.

9: On the genealogy of morality, paragraph I, 17.

10: Just think of the famous section From the land of education in Zarathustra. One of his last sentences is: “I alone still love my children's land, The undiscovered, in the farthest seas: My name is to search for and search for my sails.” Hans Ruin pointed out that Swedish feminist Ellen Key made an almost identical sentence from another section of the book their main work The century of the child preceded.

11: Heit rightly referred to the important body Ecce homo: “My task is to prepare humanity for a moment of supreme self-reflection, a big Midday, where she looks back and looks out, where she emerges from the reign of chance and the priest and the question of why? , of what for? for the first time as a whole Set “(Morgenröthe, paragraph 2). — This is where Nietzsche and Marx touch, here even the late Nietzsche ventures very far into the no man's land of utopia, oriented himself into the blue, which Bloch wrote about a few decades later. It is not a happy science, but a sad science to see such bright spots as a pure “parody.”

12: Cf. summer, What remains of Nietzsche's philosophy?, PP. 28—41.

13: Simonin, for example, only spoke in a subordinate clause of a few French “YouTubers” who would recently promote a right-wing Nietzsche interpretation. However, when he means authors like Julien Rochedy, whose videos about Nietzsche sometimes reach hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of clicks — we will dedicate a separate article to his Nietzsche interpretation on this blog shortly — that seems like a serious understatement; Simonin should be happy to reach even a few hundred readers with one of his undoubtedly more scientifically based articles.

14: It was, if I remember correctly, that 145. aphorism.

15: So Zarathustra spoke, From old and new boards, 20.

16: The benefits and disadvantages of history for life, paragraph 7.

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A Day in the Life of Nietzsche's Future

Report on the Conference Nietzsche's Futures in Weimar

From October 7 to 11, 2024, the event organized by the Klassik Stiftung Weimar took place in Weimar Nietzsche's futures. Global Conference on the Futures of Nietzsche instead of. Our regular author Paul Stephan was on site on the first day and gives an insight into the current state of academic discussions about Nietzsche. His question: What is the future of Nietzsche academic research when viewed from the perspective of Nietzsche's own radical understanding of the future?

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I. Summer evening philosophy

Idleness is the beginning of all philosophy. No effort of arguments and no analytical headache characterizes relevant thinking. At the beginning of one of the classic texts of philosophy, a rest in the shade under a plane tree is therefore advertised in order to be able to adequately address the major topics:

PHAEDROS: Well, do you see that tallest plane tree there?

SOCRATES: How should I not?

PHAEDROS: There is both shade and a moderate draft, also grass to sit down or, if we'd rather, lie down!

SOCRATES: You just want to go about it like that!¹

This motif of philosophy as an art of pause has also been preserved in modern times. In joking verses, Nietzsche votes for an outdoor philosophy that is based on mutual sympathy:

It is nice to be silent with each other

Better to laugh with each other —

Under silk sky cloth

Leaning towards moss and beech

Laugh sweetly out loud with friends

And white teeth show up.²

Philosophizing in the protective gray of shadow as the place where time can be thought of contradicts the attitude of philosophy as a work of concept as a work of concept as circulated by Hegel. Nevertheless, there could also be found a passage from the master thinker of the 19th century that suggests an objection to brooding reflection. This is how the famous preface to his ends Principles of the Philosophy of Law from 1821 with the words: “When philosophy paints its gray in gray, then a figure of life has grown old, and with gray in gray it cannot be rejuvenated, but only recognized; the Minerva owl only begins its flight at dusk. ”³

It is with these thoughts that a philosophical serenade in Gütchenpark zu Halle between Peter Sloterdijk and Stefano Vastano — organized by Literaturhaus Halle — began in July 2024. They allude to a theme that Sloterdijk, who repeatedly pointed out in his work that he was significantly influenced by Nietzsche's thinking, in his book published two years ago Who hasn't thought gray yet. A theory of colors developed extensively. While the swallows performed their seasonal capers in the alarmingly gray summer evening sky and from time to time a dull murmur was heard from the city, which came from the European Football Championships taking place at the same time, the approximately 80 participants, who were greying reindeer, listened to the conversation lasting approximately 90 minutes. The interplay between Vastano and Sloterdijk was interesting to watch. In a strong Italian accent, the former presented sentences such as melody suggestions to the philosopher, who turned 77 years old on June 26, bent over like a self-playing piano, and visualized wide contexts at heavenly lengths as the day was running out.

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II. Grey theory

Sloterdijk explained that gray was actually the basal color of Western philosophy. Right at the beginning of Plato's philosophy, in fact, there is an influential distinction between real essence and superficial appearance in the allegory of the cave, which is described by a kind of cinematic theory of fraud. In the seventh book of Politeia lets Plato Socrates philosophically construct reality as a kind of involuntary cinema event. According to this, the mass of people is bound within a dark cave, in which they are biased by a play of shadows that are projected onto the cave wall in front of them by candlelight behind them, in front of the undetectable wearer. In this sense, what most people think is the actual reality and what therefore sets them in suspense are just illusions. For Plato, the truth consists of climbing out of the cave and seeing the light of reality. The difference between Plato and Sloterdijk now lies in the fact that Sloterdijk draws attention to the distinctions created by the grey shadows on the grey cave wall. There would be differences in gray in gray. This is how the world of apparitions emerges from the shades of gray between shadow and wall. There is no need to break out for this truth.

In this respect, one could speculate, Sloterdijk is following Nietzsche's project to reverse Platonism. Instead of promoting an exodus from the cave to light and campaigning for the black and white difference, post-Platonic philosophy addresses twilight. This is the reversal of the most powerful western prejudice. Not everything that doesn't glitter is gold. Wouldn't reality be presented in a completely different light if the essence of ontology was that the essence of being was its appearance? Not so much reflection and the idea as attention to the objects and the atmospheres in which they appeared would become so central. The light of the Enlightenment, which gave up the idea of making ideas and no longer defames the caves as illusory worlds, no longer provides a clear and clear definition of the crystal-clear facts. What it can do at best is a better description of the horror, the ambiguity, the ambivalent, the complex mixtures of the possible. No “pressure to light” (Celan) requires shadowless illumination of everything and everyone as a massive object. Explication is becoming more careful. Post-Platonic theory stands as a good awakening of the Enlightenment to itself in the twilight of utopia: Between light and dark, the diversity of horror opens up as the true colorfulness of life. There are still plenty of worlds to discover in grey. Plato and Hegel's ideas thus become imaginable as conceptual caves from which thought must free itself: When philosophy paints its gray in gray, life can sometimes be recognized and understood again in a new form that can rejuvenate it.

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III. Exciting boredom

When the completely enlightened world is no longer, as was the case with the critical, all-too self-critical theory at the beginning of Dialectic of Enlightenment Presented against the rational culture of modernity, must shine in the sign of triumphant disaster, the opportunity opens up to analyse the structural change of modern lifestyles in more detail. As a result, Sloterdijk then showed Heidegger's meditations on boredom from his winter semester lecture The basic concepts of metaphysics — perhaps the best lecture by, as Emmanuel Levinas once said, “unfortunately the greatest thinker of the 20th century” — from 1929/30 exactly the basic mood of horror. Only humans can be an animal that is bored because they are open to a world that can affect you. The stone is “worldless”, the animal is “world-poor.” It is only through perception and participation in the wealth of the world that, with an astonishingly activist connotation for Heidegger, can be “world-building.” If this world-building fails, the self that is open to it fails and you notice yourself as a penetrating absence. Boredom is the sobering self-knowledge as an emotion: I am fog, therefore I am. But here too, Sloterdijk, again following Nietzsche's project, is trying to revalue the gravity. Where Heidegger suggests that “deep boredom in the abysses of existence like a silent fog goes back and forth”⁴ And showing the arch-conservative's clear will to philosophize a new state of emergency out of this phenomenon, Sloterdijk strives to recognize a sparkling freedom in the absence of intrinsic initiative. Whoever is none of their business, who loses themselves in boredom, is radically disposable of everything possible. In gray leisure, the ability to “unalarmed alert” (Sloterdijk) to let the world get close to you grows. And it increases the ability to roll off the appeals of urgency. Sloterdijk referred to Melville's character Bartleby, who infuriated his environment by evading the impositions with which he was confronted with a notorious “I would prefer not to” — Sloterdijk translated ad hoc as “I would rather not”. (However, the author can only conditionally recommend the use of this saying, in view of the immediate and lasting negative effect it had on the course of the evening when his companion at the event expressed the wish whether he would be so kind as to fetch her another glass of wine.)

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IV. The politics of gray

Through an allusion to the figure of the “gray eminence,” Sloterdijk recently drew attention to the political implications that affect his thoughts. He writes about this in his book: “[T] he liberality of modernity that invites mixing cannot force the desired rainbow society. At the same time, it is too late for segregation and pure colored identities. ”⁵  Sloterdijk concludes from this that grey is the most politically rational color of the time. The gray is fate. The toxic dualisms of true and false, good and evil dissolve in their unconditionality. From the epochal, utopian departure into better worlds through the reddish brown or brown-red mobilizations, the horizon emerges, which offers the prospect of better living in the now more interesting gray of everyday life. Grey is the communication of extremes, the twilight of consensus, the wonderfully unobtrusive boredom of the middle, whose life dramas no longer need the fight to live and die in order to feel something. Through his chromatic speculation, Sloterdijk thus supports Francis Fukuyama's thesis that the story of making history has come to an end. According to the story, that is, after archaic heroism, which always needed the strong contrast of black and white thinking in order to legitimize its intensities. Lots of enemies, lots of honor, lots of unnecessary bloodshed.

Nevertheless, according to Sloterdijk, the dimension of thymos — the “courage” — remains significant as the part of the soul that, according to Plato, is central to the impulses of insult, recognition and pride. In the gray story, it was no longer the heroic epics of the warriors and the missionary projects of the priests that colored the era. In the modern age, post-heroic heroism emanates from entrepreneurs, artists and athletes. It is they who invent the sacred games after the death of God, which on the one hand can provide new comfort, but which on the other hand also re-ritualize the thymotic energies. It is less the invisible hand of the market than the invisible hands of a new thymotic morality that governs such as extended Checks and Balances the community. The prestige struggles for a more profitable business, the more successful work, the new record mark domesticate the surplus of the aspiring part of the soul, which wants to exceed what is, without having to destroy what is or prevents it from having to destroy it. Enemies don't have to become friends. It is enough if they face each other as opponents, competitors, opponents. The ever-increasing diffuse cheers from the city, which burned on during the conversation and were played at the same time by the German national team, impressively pointed to the established structural change of the heroic in the modern world.

If civil integration of the thymotic does not succeed, for example by equating the thymotic too sub-complex with the belligerent and being canceled as toxic masculinity, the phenomenon of cynicism acquires a new charisma. Sloterdijk quotes a quip from Rochefoucauld, according to which hypocrisy is a bow of vice to virtue. Cynicism no longer makes this effort. He impresses by openly displaying his amoral disinhibition. Napoleon, who crowned himself emperor in 1804, provided the paradigmatic scene for this. This relapse into the monarchy has happened in France, the second home of Sloterdijk, four times since 1789. The alarming developments in the USA currently point to the virulent dimension of wild Thymos as Trumpism, which celebrates itself in its cynicism and brazenly exploits the legal grey areas in its favor.

Sloterdijk ended the evening with a mixture of joy and concern with the words that they hope they had completed their workload. The swallows were silent, the day grew grey and the last master thinker, after quickly signing a few more books, took the car to the train to Berlin.

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sources

Adorno, Theodor W. & Max Horkheimer: Dialectic of Enlightenment. Philosophical fragments. Frankfurt am Main 2022.

Hegel, George Frederick William: Principles of a Philosophy of Law. Frankfurt am Main 2002.

Heidegger, Martin: Basic concepts of metaphysics. Frankfurt am Main 2001.

Plato: Phaedrus. Hamburg 2005.

Sloterdijk, Peter: Who hasn't thought of gray yet. A theory of colors. Frankfurt am Main 2022.

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Item image template

https://www.wikiwand.com/de/Peter_Sloterdijk#Media/Datei:Peter_Sloterdijk,_Karlsruhe_07-2009,_IMGP3019.jpg

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footnotes

1: Plato, Phaedrus, 229 3a.

2: Human, all-too-human I, sequel 1.

3: Hegel, Principles of the Philosophy of Law, P. 28.

4: Heidegger, Basic concepts of metaphysics, P. 119.

5: Sloterdijk, Who hasn't thought gray yet, P. 18.

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A Philosophical Serenade About Grayness

A Summer Evening with Sloterdijk at Gütchenpark in Halle

One of the most important philosophers of our time, Peter Sloterdijk (born 1947), visited Halle at the beginning of July. The thinker, who was heavily influenced by Nietzsche, shared his thoughts about “gray” there and impressively showed the heights to which philosophy can rise.