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I’m joined by Keegan Kjeldsen, host of The Nietzsche Podcast for a critical dialogue on the politics of Nietzsche. This is the second discussion I have had with Keegan and I enjoyed both times. It has been quite the experience to engage with Nietzscheans after publishing my book, How to Read Like a Parasite. There is little to prepare you for writing a polemical work. It throws you to the whims of pure intellectual combat. The last two years have been incredibly eye opening and interesting. In the event that you have not read my book—or even if you have—I want to draw your attention to a new review that was published by Jack Graveney in the Nietzsche-Studien journal. This is by far the most meticulous review the book has received and I am grateful for it. A couple of quotes from the review:
Primarily, he is concerned with Nietzsche’s deleterious impact on the left. If his reactionary character is missed, Tutt argues, Nietzsche “performs a certain victory over the left that can and often does compromise any socialist or Marxist approach to changing the world” (6–7). Left Nietzscheanism is seen as variously flawed: in its tending to elitist conceptions of leadership; embrace of irrationalism in action and socio-historic understanding alike; and politicization of culture, inclining it to deemphasize political economy in favor of countercultural revolt (12, 54). Under these conditions, the left becomes indistinguishable from the world it is trying to change, which is likewise wholly animated by what Tutt calls, drawing on Waite, “Nietzscheanism.”[16] This denotes the historical legacy and “cultural effect of Nietzsche’s philosophy,” the ways in which it produces a “set of ideologies that continues to interact with and shape our liberal, entrepreneurial, capitalist society” – even becoming its “common sense” (3, 5).
Parasite is a stirring read and well worthy of engagement by those interested in Nietzsche, modern intellectual history, as well as leftist theory and politics. Its history of “left Nietzscheanism” is illuminating, and its treatment of Nietzsche and Marx on religion, revolution, and ressentiment strident. It will appeal to a wide audience beyond academia, who will find much to challenge themselves, especially in the book’s latter half, which looks beyond exegesis of Nietzsche to a compelling intervention in contemporary political and socioeconomic dynamics. Those in the universities will also find themselves provoked. Albeit less than in their late twentieth-century heyday, the interpretive commonplaces at which Tutt takes aim still largely dominate. If reading Nietzsche as a political philosopher is increasingly uncontroversial, placing a critique of socialism at the center of his thinking certainly is, let alone presenting him as an apologist, indirect or not, for the bourgeois, liberal, Christian status quo. Tutt will surely find many willing to defend Nietzsche’s status as an apolitical thinker, or one far from the reactionary excesses with which Tutt associates him.
But Graveney is not fully on board with my conclusions, particularly around Nietzsche’s relation to contemporary capitalism and liberalism.
If on Tutt’s account Nietzsche would be essentially happy with the reception and impact of his philosophy, and on my telling above he would be aghast, the truth perhaps lies somewhere in the middle. Much as he would have welcomed an instantaneous return to the world of ancient Greece, Nietzsche knew that “time does not run backward” – rather, one must go “forward […] step by step further into decadence” (Z II, Redemption, and TI, Skirmishes 43). Not only this: as Daniel Conway has shown, Nietzsche acknowledged his own complicity in the crisis, giving his critique of modernity a “self-referential context.”[43] He reminded his readers: “Need I say after all this that in questions of decadence I am experienced?” (EH, Wise 1). His disciples have been equally impotent in escaping the malaise of modernity. Yet if he has, to quote Conway, “attracted all the wrong readers,” inspiring “for every Stefan George or Thomas Mann […] a legion of graffiti artists, hack playwrights, and adolescent songwriters,” Nietzsche may yet have managed to view this with the wry consciousness of an unfortunate – but hopefully temporary – necessity.[44] Perhaps the heralded “philosophers of the future,” to whom the task of legislation is deferred, are simply yet to arrive, the activation energy for the reaction of transvaluation having not yet been reached (BGE 42–4). In this respect, Tutt is right to note the “accelerationist” elements of Nietzsche’s philosophy (135–43).
Where we differ is on the question of whether this drive into decadence seeks a genuine exit from the prevailing bourgeois capitalist order – its palingenetic overcoming – or merely the preservation of existing contradictions in radicalized form; whether Nietzsche is, as Tutt has it, a reactionary, or, to return to Habermas, a Revolutionär von rechts.[45] This is an important disagreement, and I have aimed here to make a (necessarily partial) case for the latter position, focusing on how Tutt’s methodological strictures ultimately overdetermine and narrow his reading of Nietzsche’s political philosophy.
I disagree with Graveney that my reading method ‘overdetermines and narrows’ my reading of Nietzsche’s political philosophy. This is one of the things that my parasitical reading has sought to bring out, which I find Losurdo’s method does not, namely an immanent reading of Nietzsche that allows us on the left to incorporate elements of his thought and use them against their intended application and direction. I will write more in depth on this in the future.
