How to Read Like a Parasite, Appendix on Citations

Why editorial accuracy matters

N.B. I want to again thank @RomulusNotNuma for a comprehensive thread already detailing many of these errors, which served as an invaluable reference as I wrote this.

In advance of Part II of my series on Daniel Tutt’s How to Read Like a Parasite: Why the Left Got High on Nietzsche, which will examine the substance of Chapter 2 of the book, “Understanding Nietzsche’s Style,” I am posting a table breaking down the individual citations in the chapter. Since this caused a bit of a stir when I tweeted out part of an early draft, I want to preface the table by saying something about why I took the time to do this, and why I think the question of editorial accuracy is important.

As you can see below, I identified either inaccuracies or misleading claims in 30 out of the 36 endnotes for Chapter 2. I think that for many people, this fact alone—that the overwhelming preponderance of citations include editorial errors of some kind—will inherently cast doubt on whether Tutt’s interpretive claims can be sustained. I acknowledge that citational errors do happen quite often: it’s extremely laborious to do all the citations for a book on one’s own, making a handful of typos or misattributions all but inevitable. However, there will have to be some threshold past which, having identified enough of a critical mass of errors, we will be forced to conclude that the author has failed to do their duty in providing the source material to support their argument.

This will particularly be the case when the interpretation makes robust claims about Nietzsche’s intentions or motivations in writing his philosophy. For example, on page 62, Tutt makes the bold claim that “[f]or Nietzsche, it is nobility by blood lineage that explains the true origin of the very category of the noble,” a reading he adopts from Domenico Losurdo’s Nietzsche, the Aristocratic Rebel. As far I can tell, endnote 3 gives the citation for Tutt’s only textual reference in support of this claim. Since the citation is an error, a reader would have trouble referencing Nietzsche’s text for any context for the claim. They’d be most likely to stumble across it in the Kaufmann and Hollingdale translation of The Will to Power (§334). If so, they’d notice that the fragment says nothing about nobility or blood lineage at all. Instead, as Kaufmann correctly points out, Nietzsche’s comment should be placed in the context with his longstanding idea of the “reversal of cause and effect” as a pervasive error in human morality and thought (see Twilight of the Idols, “The Four Great Errors”, §1). We also miss the ambiguity of the passage, where Nietzsche speaks less in his own voice than in characterization of his time, where “we have learned to reverse cause and consequence in a curious way in moral matters” (WP, §334). In the next entry on Chapter 2, we will explore why Nietzsche’s conception of nature and inheritance are far more complicated than this (and I would refer the reader to my previous entries on this very topic), but this illustrates the kind of distortion the editorial errors introduce.

Similarly, mismatches between the endnotes and attributions given in the actual text make it extremely difficult to discern exactly who Tutt intends as the target of his criticism: Nietzsche is confused with Derrida (n. 29, 33), Derrida is confused with Losurdo (n. 30), and Losurdo is confused with Nietzsche (n. 28, 36). The source given for various Nietzsche passages is often secondary literature quoting Nietzsche, doubly removing the excerpt from its original context. Tutt claims to want to situate Nietzsche in his historical context on the one hand, then jumps freely between works from 1872 and 1888, never pausing to acknowledge either the gap or any possible development in Nietzsche’s thought.

Why does this matter? Daniel Tutt has written a book for popular audiences, and its express intent to make a political impact: “This book is written from the perspective of a socialist thinker who is interested in bringing philosophy to the class struggle in our time; it is not written with purely academic concerns regarding Nietzsche in mind” (p. 56). Tutt’s primary target seems to be young people who might be seduced by Nietzsche, as he reports once being himself (p. 14). These young readers of Tutt’s book are unlikely to have the time, resources, or willingness to check the sources as thoroughly as I have. But more importantly, they won’t be able to connect the book to Nietzsche’s actual text at all. That is, with errors this voluminous, the task of tracking down the context of a citation is difficult and time-consuming; a casual reader can’t easily pick up their copy of The Gay Science or Thus Spoke Zarathustra and find the passage Tutt is discussing, it its full context within a given aphorism and book. They’d be unlikely to know, for example, that on p. 64, Tutt attributes a view to Nietzsche that is actually voiced by “the old pope,” one of the “higher men” in Book IV of Thus Spoke Zarathustra who serve as Zarathustra’s foils. In fact, it’s unlikely that Tutt’s text would lead them to engage seriously with Nietzsche’s work at all. 

When all the errors are accounted for, we’re left with a partial and tendentious picture of Nietzsche, one cobbled together from a small handful of passages cherry-picked from across the entire range of Nietzsche’s oeuvre, and where the views attributed to Nietzsche blend strangely and misleadingly with the words of Deleuze, Losurdo, Derrida, and Strauss. These kinds of mistakes do clearly impact the substance of Tutt’s argument and the evidence he marshals to support it: in a chapter on Nietzsche’s style, we are left with precious few accurate representations of Nietzsche’s actual writing.

I suspect, however, that many will still find Tutt’s basic thesis at least minimally plausible and want more of a response to the substance. In the next entry, I want to address the substance of Tutt’s argument in three main ways: 1) by showing that his (and Losurdo’s) reading of Nietzsche as endorsing nobility by blood inheritance is incorrect, and why Nietzsche’s text directly undercuts this claim; 2) by explaining how Tutt’s political agenda leads him to misunderstand the intention and function of Nietzsche’s esotericism; and 3) by pointing out the ways that Tutt consistently fails to discuss the historical context that is most relevant for understanding Nietzsche’s writing, such as the Franco-Prussian War.

(I apologize for the somewhat awkward images - I had trouble getting the table to import cleanly)