N.B. I’ll be changing things up a bit from the usual content on this Substack to go chapter-by-chapter reviewing Daniel Tutt’s new study of Nietzsche’s politics, How to Read Like a Parasite: Why the Left Got High on Nietzsche. If you’re here to read the review, I hope you enjoy and that you have a look at the rest of my posts if you’re so inclined. If you were already a subscriber, the content of my review will be more explicitly political than most of what I’ve written on Methods of Madness so far, and less focused on questions of madness or mental health. Feel free to ignore these entries if the Great Nietzsche Debates don’t particularly interest you—I still hope to post the next installment of “In Search of Great Health” soon.
I have a confession to make: I am not by nature an optimist. I tend to expect things to go wrong more often than they go right, my expectations about the future are tempered by a healthy dose of cynicism, and I worry a great deal about those existential quandaries that evoke a sense of tragedy in our all-too-human existence. Why do bad things happen to good people? Does the arc of the moral universe really bend toward justice? And what exactly is the point of all of this when anyplace but our tiny corner of the cosmos appears to be filled with nothing but the eternal silence of infinite space?
I’ve come to see my extreme preoccupation with these problems of existential meaning and tragedy as more than a little idiosyncratic. But I don’t think I’m alone in feeling a sense of pessimism and even despair when looking to the future, knowing that the catastrophe of anthropogenic climate change intensifies by the day, that fascism is once again on the rise across the world, that the economic inequality and exploitation wrought by capitalism continues to deepen, and that war and genocide are again raging with the utmost of brutality. It doesn’t surprise me, then, that Nietzsche has renewed relevance in a crisis-ridden time. Few terms seem to better capture the culture of the present than “nihilistic”, and Nietzsche undoubtedly offers one of the most profound explorations of those existential themes that remain the enduring wellspring of human pessimism.
But if a reader who believes in liberal democracy or any version of a more radical, socialist alternative turns to Nietzsche seeking insight into our nihilistic times, they are bound to encounter passages that shock and offend their moral sensibilities. Everyone knows that Nietzsche was a self-professed “immoralist”, but what are we to make of his stridently right-wing political stances, such as the defense of aristocracy and slavery that we find in Beyond Good and Evil: “Every enhancement so far in the type ‘man’ has been the work of an aristocratic society—and that is how it will be, again and again, since this sort of society believes in a long ladder of rank order and value distinctions between men, and in some sense needs slavery” (BGE, §257)?
Daniel Tutt’s How to Read Like a Parasite: Why the Left Got High on Nietzsche is the latest contribution to what has become a significant tradition of Marxist scholarship on Nietzsche that aims to answer precisely this question.[1] For Tutt, Nietzsche scholars from Walter Kaufmann to Gilles Deleuze to Brian Leiter have systematically understated or even ignored the importance of Nietzsche’s politics to his philosophy. In fact, Tutt’s extraordinary thesis is that contra readings that paint Nietzsche as an apolitical individualist, the man who famously called himself “the last antipolitical German” not only had a quite coherent politics, but actually placed politics and a definite political program at the center of his thought.
What makes this thesis extraordinary? It might be better to say that Tutt’s claim that the core of Nietzsche’s thought is political would likely appear extraordinary to most Nietzsche scholars of any tradition. Compare, for example, Hugo Drochon’s recent study, Nietzsche’s Great Politics, which argues persuasively that Nietzsche had a consistent and definite politics, which importantly involved the view “that a caste society is essential to underpin a high culture.”[2] The context of Drochon’s invaluable contribution is, in part, that much of Nietzsche scholarship has long denied that Nietzsche had any coherent politics whatsoever. Hence while Drochon argues forcefully for a connection between Nietzsche’s politics and his views on culture, he is careful to add the caveat that he “[does] not mean to suggest…that Nietzsche is first and foremost a political thinker,” affirming that “[h]is primary concern is culture.”[3] By contrast, Tutt’s thesis is much stronger: according to How to Think Like a Parasite, Nietzsche should indeed be read as first and foremost a political thinker.
If Tutt is to be believed, however, there’s good reason for Nietzsche scholarship’s silence on these matters. Far from an accident, the elision of Nietzsche’s politics is the deliberate achievement of a concerted effort on the part of what Tutt calls the “Nietzsche industry” to sanitize and “de-Nazify” Nietzsche’s thought for liberal audiences. Tutt writes in a way that makes the Nietzsche industry’s recuperation efforts to be sweeping, well-organized, and highly successful: though the project to mask Nietzsche’s politics originates in and receives its decisive impetus from Walter Kauffman’s English translations of Nietzsche’s writings, it apparently extends to “everything that prominent Nietzsche’s wrote about him, form Deleuze and Foucault to the American philosopher Brian Leiter and the school of analytic Nietzscheans” (48). Whereas a neutral observer might suppose that Nietzsche’s politics is an important but not all-encompassing aspect of his work that has been wrongly disregarded, Tutt aims to unmask an intentional and extended undertaking to distort the real meaning of Nietzsche’s work. Does he succeed?
It seems to me that How to Think Like a Parasite’s most original and interesting contributions to the Marxist interpretation established by Domenico Losurdo, Geoff Waite, and others are twofold. First, Tutt makes explicit and fleshes out the claim that Nietzsche’s politics are indispensable for understanding his core philosophical concepts, from perspectivism to the eternal return. Second, and perhaps most intriguingly, he contends that while we cannot avoid reading Nietzsche, attempts of a certain kind to draw upon his work for insights into left political thought and practice are doomed to fail and even further entrench the power and legitimacy of the ruling capitalist class. “Our argument can be understood in two ways,” Tutt writes, “first, Nietzsche’s politics must be understood as the core to his thought; and second, when we understand politics as his core, we unlock invaluable secrets about the way our social order justifies its existing status quo and class relations” (52). Not only this, but we also “discover the shortcomings in any attempt to rebel against the social order that adopts the romantic anti-capitalist approach that left-Nietzscheans tend to embrace.”
It is the chief virtue of How to Think Like a Parasite that it is bold enough to make these two claims explicit and offer a detailed defense of them. I certainly agree with Tutt when he writes that “left-Nietzschean radicals are only sensible for any left-oriented project that is stridently anti-capitalist if they are given a healthy dose of Marxist class analysis” (197), as I imagine most with “left-Nietzschean” sensibilities also would. As we will see, however, it may be a paradoxical virtue, in that Tutt’s central and most original claims also turn out to be the most difficult to sustain. My goal in this opening piece is not yet to lay out why I think both of Tutt’s two main arguments are at best misleading and at worst outright distortions. While I will intimate some of my key points of disagreement, I’m mostly interested here in determining what exactly it would take for Tutt to vindicate these claims. Put differently, now that Tutt has introduced at least two remarkably provocative claims about how we ought to interpret Nietzsche, what will the rest of his book have to show to successfully defend them?
It must be said at the outset that if the reader’s expectations in this regard include a close exegesis of Nietzsche’s text, How to Read Like a Parasite is bound disappoint them. In Tutt’s defense, he is upfront that this is not the book’s purpose. Early on, Tutt proposes a stark alternative that will come to structure much of his ensuring argument: “Do you read [Nietzsche] in a historical context that does justice to the true development of his thought, or do you read him as a timeless philosopher completely decontextualized from modern capitalist life?” (7). Complaints about the “timeless” reading of Nietzsche recur throughout the book: do we read his assault on Christianity “as a timeless metaphysical and moral critique” or an “immanently political one” (34)? “To seek timeless political insight from Nietzsche is to miss the incredible prescience of his thought in understanding the class struggle” (37). And: “Nietzsche is not a timeless thinker—he must be read as an activist, as continuously refining a metaphysics, a morality, and a series of concepts in response to political struggles” (123).
So stated, however, this alternative is surely too strong to be plausible, let alone a helpful interpretive lens. It seems to go without saying that we read philosophers from very different historical periods in large part to gain insights that remain relevant today, and that any such insights will always have to be situated in the rich historical, social, and political context in which the author wrote. Or rather, to affirm these two points as obviously true is to set out the problem space within which any intelligible engagement with a historical philosopher must proceed, i.e., as an effort to resolve this tension, so that a philosopher becomes relevant to us today in light of the historical context of their work. Our solution to this problem might fall anywhere on a spectrum that runs from Leo Strauss at one extreme to R.G. Collingwood at the other, but rarely will the matter be resolved by a decisive either/or. The critical question we must pose to Tutt’s first argument is therefore whether it succeeds in making Nietzsche’s philosophy intelligible in terms of his historical and political situation, or whether instead the philosophical content of Nietzsche’s writing recedes behind the ideological function Tutt argues it plays.
After all, as Tutt concedes, “entire books have been written about Nietzsche’s views on music, or Nietzsche’s views on gender, or Nietzsche’s middle period, and so forth” (56). Such books presumably participate in a tradition of reading Nietzsche apolitically “[s]o widespread…that the entry on Nietzsche in the Stanford Encyclopedia…has no mention of Nietzsche as a ‘political’ thinker” (116). As a political theorist by training, I admit that I also find the omission of Nietzsche’s politics to be galling, but it’s worth pausing for a moment to contemplate why this might be the case. If the philosophical content of Nietzsche’s thought is irreducibly grounded in his reactionary politics, we might wonder how so many scholars have found his work sufficiently rich to write entire books without seeing fit to mention the topic, or what exactly could fill the (quite detailed and lengthy) SEP article on Nietzsche if his politics are so determining. Even if we believe Tutt’s narrative about a concerted effort by the Nietzsche industry to obscure his reactionary politics, this still wouldn’t explain what Nietzsche’s arguments or concepts actually meant for a scholar who, deceived by this conspiracy, is naïvely inspired to write an entire book or encyclopedia article about them.
Consider the following alternative explanation. Nietzsche, as Drochon’s book suggests, had a coherent and consistent politics that can meaningfully be described as reactionary or right-wing, but it is not the centerpiece of his thought as Tutt claims, and he often defends his most famous philosophical ideas—the will to power, eternal return, perspectivism, or nihilism—on grounds that do not require us to share his political beliefs. The lack of discussion about Nietzsche’s politics in academic scholarship is indeed lamentable, but it is better explained by the relatively small role of politics in his thought when compared to topics in ethics, epistemology, and metaphysics, paired with the fact that Nietzsche’s reputation did require salvaging from numerous deliberate and demonstrable distortions of his work by his sister, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, and later the Nazis. Nietzsche can be read as both significantly shaped by his historical and political situation and as a thinker who, like any philosopher we feel merits our attention, makes claims that a reader with neither overt nor covert fascist sympathies may still reasonably find persuasive.
This other hypothesis represents what Tutt, following Losurdo, derides as a “hermeneutics of innocence” that purges Nietzsche’s real aristocratic radicalism from his thought. I take it that Tutt’s two main arguments, and his critique of the hermeneutics of innocence, will only be successful if he can, to whatever degree it’s possible, rule out this alternative explanation, or at least make it seem deeply implausible, as if it misses something essential about Nietzsche. The extent to which Tutt is committed to the competing explanation that the very essence of Nietzsche’s thought is political can hardly be overstated: his thought “has at its very center a political agenda,” (7) “[w]e propose to read Nietzsche with the understanding that he has a center to his thought,” (12) “[w]e must read Nietzsche as a community-builder to truly understand the political vision at the core of his thought” (16), and “the academic authorities I consulted mentioned nothing about any political core to [Nietzsche’s] thought” (28)—to take only a few examples. The further we dig into the text, however, the more we encounter a misdistribution of the justificatory burden, where a Marxist theory of history increasingly serves to guarantee Nietzsche’s reactionary status when the evidence contained within his text and life and times is found wanting.
In fact, parsing Tutt’s direct engagement with the primary sources turns out to be a somewhat laborious undertaking. The issue is not simply that he almost exclusively cites English translations of Nietzsche’s writings, and that he draws from a wide range of translations and editions. It’s also that indexing Tutt’s claims to Nietzsche’s text requires wading into a morass of editorial confusion. Tutt frequently cites to secondary sources quoting Nietzsche’s text rather than that text itself, he refers at times to the page number, at others to the paragraph or section number, and mismatches between quoted passage and cited book abound.
These are minor quibbles, but more serious are the cases when editorial errors serve to muddle the argument in substantive ways (thanks to @RomulusNotNuma for pointing many of these out). Nietzsche’s first major work, which “was in part inspired by politics,” is said to be The Birth of Tragedy and the Genealogy of Morals (28); a passage expressing “support for the role of Christianity in the imperial Opium Wars in China” is said to demonstrate Nietzsche’s affinity with capitalism, when in fact the relevant excerpt is from Tocqueville, referenced in Losurdo’s The Aristocratic Rebel (91); quotations sometimes from Losurdo, other times from Deleuze are erroneously attributed to Nietzsche himself (e.g., 91, 64); “a much-neglected work by the young Nietzsche entitled The Problem of Socrates…prior to his more mature work On the Genealogy of Morals” is invented whole cloth (99; Tutt presumably has in mind the chapter of Twilight of the Idols entitled “The Problem of Socrates,” which was written in 1888, the year after Genealogy was published)—and so on. It’s reasonable to wonder whether this inattentiveness suggests that Tutt has not engaged with Nietzsche’s text in a thorough and fully accurate way.
Despite this, I don’t think these errors capture the more serious issue with Tutt’s argument. More worrying in my view is the way that, as the book goes on, Tutt avails himself of increasingly untenable and questionable hypotheses to make plausible what is already a highly controversial reading. We learn not only that the center of Nietzsche’s philosophy is political, but also that its true political purpose has been deliberately concealed by a Nietzsche industry that seems to act monolithically across radically different times and places; that more than just endorsing a definite reactionary politics, Nietzsche’s thought constitutes a sophisticated and well-developed program to neutralize the revolutionary potential of the working class and entrench capitalist rule; that Nietzsche himself painstakingly masked the real political intent of his work with his esoteric style; and even that Nietzsche’s madness was caused “precisely by the success of his attempts to retain a feudal rank order amid a social moment that witnessed the collapse of the aristocracy” (179).
At some point, the reader is forced to weigh the relative probabilities of these two explanations, at which time they will likely have to concede that Tutt’s preferred hypothesis is far from the most natural or parsimonious one. This brings me to the second of Tutt’s two arguments—that Nietzsche’s ideas have been on balance a detriment to the left—and the Marxist framework within which it is situated. I have no qualms in general with conducting a Marxist reading of Nietzsche, and as I have already noted, I agree with Tutt that no viable “left-Nietzscheanism” can exist without integrating Marx’s class analysis and crisis theory of capitalism. Tutt’s primary target is an “elective affinity” approach to this synthesis, which he believes fails to grapple with the political core of Nietzsche’s thought. However, I wish to raise a series of critical questions regarding whether Tutt’s Marxist lens does more justificatory work in his account than it is entitled to, and if we should feel constrained to accept the particular version of Marxism that Tutt appears to endorse.
First, following upon the above concerns about attention to Nietzsche’s text, we will have obvious reasons to suspect a Marxist account that too eagerly rigs the game in advance in favor of a certain kind of political interpretation, one in which the bifurcated class structure under capitalism ensures that any philosopher not firmly rooted in Marx and Hegel falls neatly into a bucket labeled “reactionary”. Tutt’s definition of “reactionary” is astonishingly broad: “We will define a ‘reactionary’ as someone who concocts a series of strategies to prevent and block any changing of the world” (5). There is something prima facie odd about characterizing a thinker who claimed to break human history in two and inaugurate “a crisis such as the earth has never seen” (EH, “Why I am a Destiny,” §1) as a reactionary in this sense. If we take his published works at their word (we will return to the question of Nietzsche’s esotericism in Part II), then it seems he is quite determined to change the world, and in quite a radical way. This suggests that the significance of Tutt’s definition of a reactionary will depend importantly upon precisely what we would count as a meaningful change to the world and the sorts of strategies we take to be conducive to such a change. If it turns out that only a very narrow subset of actions or strategies will count as meaningfully “revolutionary”, then Tutt’s account will risk proving too much and losing any sense of Nietzsche’s distinctiveness as a reactionary thinker, turning him into just another product of his time and class.
The second critical question follows naturally from the first, which is whether Tutt does in fact have recourse to an unconvincingly rigid and orthodox form of Marxism: a form of economic determinism in which class relationships are taken as the primary driver of politics in a simple and unproblematic way, and in which class issues can be cleanly disentangled from cultural ones. If we follow How to Read Like a Parasite’s interpretive strategy, we will need to situate Tutt himself in his historical and political context, especially where personal narrative enters the text. When we do, we see that the financial crisis of 2008 marks a pivotal rupture for Tutt, from which arose “new forms of protest and revolt” (45). Despite the claim to rupture, however, Tutt continues to appeal to the traditional hobbyhorses of industrial-era socialist organizing: “For the working class to liberate itself, massive solidarity is required, involving organizing at workplaces, forming unions, education in socialist politics, and the development of new modes of class consciousness.” Since this might sound like hoping for a revolution to materialize out of thin air, it may be easier to see what Tutt has in mind what he considers to be the opposed approach: “we must interrogate the resentments and common affects of the working class instead of relying on a partial and limited culture-war framework of analysis” (261).
William Clare Roberts has recently warned against a “class abstractionist” interpretation of Marxism that overstates the trade-off between class and culture, arguing that “[c]lass and culture can and must be analytically distinguished, but this does not mean they can be separated in life.”[4] Class abstractionism involves a strong claim about the political primacy of class, which asserts “that naming and appealing to people’s material class interests is both more motivating and more inclusive than naming and appealing to people’s status, standing and identity, which are particularistic and divisive, rather than universalistic and unifying.”[5] By confusing the structural primacy of class with a political primacy of class and class relationships with workplace relationships, class abstractionists attribute a kind of fictional, unified agency to the working class as a whole, thereby missing the ways in which the particularistic “connections and divisions of race, gender, neighborhood, religion, [and] political affiliation…[are] inextricably interwoven into the experience of work, even though capital and the proletariat have no race, no gender, no religion.”[6] If we find that Tutt’s critique of the Nietzschean left falls prey to class abstractionism, then there will be reason to question whether Nietzsche’s emphasis on culture is as pernicious to left politics as Tutt makes it out to be.
Tutt’s particular critique of the cultural left is importantly related to what he follows the German sociologist Andreas Reckwitz in calling the “society of singularities”. Under the postmodern cultural logic of late capitalism, “society is defined by the logic of singularity, which refers to the common demand to live out our most authentic selves at all costs” (17). A society in which everyone is encouraged to internalize a model of self-empowerment and market their own unique brand is importantly different than “one in which the normative or instrumentalized modes of living that modernity has imposed on us are the regulating principle of social power and authority” (18). No doubt Tutt is correct that new modes of social discipline and control have replaced the homogenizing influences of 20th century mass culture, ones which seem to encourage rather than repress difference and individuality.
Still, to claim that “power and authority in our contemporary society are no longer structured around a repressive norm that we struggle to overcome” seems to advance an implausibly strong version of this shift in social power relations, one in which the conventionalizing forces of modern instrumental reason and normalization have somehow ceased to exist rather than becoming incorporated into new modes and structures of the exercise of power. It should go without saying that, at least in the United States, we face a rising revanchist right that aims to reinstitute traditional repressive practices on a wide scale, eviscerating LGBTQ+ rights and women’s reproductive freedoms, expanding a regime of racialized mass incarceration, and restoring Christian theocratic norms at the highest levels of government. Any transition we might have made to a “society of singularities” thus seems at best highly incomplete.
More fundamentally, however, Tutt’s unambiguous picture of how social power is exercised under late capitalism systematically ignores the ways in which capitalist modes of self-realization and self-empowerment stand to intensify normalization and conformity rather than undermine them in favor of a truly individualistic society. In his recent book Empire of Normality, Robert Chapman offers a Marxian[7] analysis of the new cognitive hierarchies and modes of normalization that have emerged under capitalism in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, arguing that “where capitalism does bring limited advances that allow increased mobility in social class, we simply switch more traditional forms of domination for neuronormative domination relative to the increasingly intense cognitive needs of capital.”[8] This neuronormative domination is perhaps most evident in the “rise and grind” mentality of the culture of personal self-branding that Tutt finds so characteristically Nietzschean, and which he casts as breaking with traditional forms of repression. Chapman’s “Neurodivergent Marxism” recognizes the way in which contemporary capitalism, far from abolishing patterns of normalization, institutes an apparatus of new cognitive hierarchies, “material relations, social practices, scientific research programmes, bureaucratic mechanisms, economic compulsions, and administrative procedures” designed to ensure conformity with the neurotypical ideal best aligned with a life of relentless work and profit extraction. As Chapman writes, “[t]hose aspects of our species-wide neuro-cognitive diversity that [capitalism] cannot currently use are disenabled, devalued, and discriminated against; while those it can use are ruthlessly exploited and thus made unwell.”[9]
The same can be said about the modern, Weberian theme of instrumental reason and its continued dominance in the regime of capital accumulation. On its face, an individualized culture of personal self-branding hardly constitutes a break with a paradigm of purely utilitarian, means-ends rationality; to the contrary, it appears to require generalizing an ethic of self-promotion, grift, and profit-seeking to all spheres of life. As Shoshana Zuboff describes in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, the ubiquity of surveillance techniques and artificial intelligence-guided data analytics “unilaterally claims human experience as free raw material for translation into behavioral data,” from which capital extracts a “behavioral surplus” value through targeted advertising and other sophisticated means of psychological and behavioral control.[10] Far from eliminating or replacing traditional modes of instrumental reason and behavioral control, surveillance capitalism perfects these and installs their devices within every interstice of social practice, ensuring that the very stuff of our personality and emotions becomes pervasively instrumentalized.
My third critical question, then, is whether we ought to accept the picture that Tutt paints of late capitalism, in which what Christopher Lasch called the “culture of narcissism” makes Nietzsche-inspired revolts against repression just another tool for the ruling class. Behind this, however, is a deeper disquiet I feel regarding Tutt’s description of modern reason, which brings us back to the question of optimism. Tutt reads Nietzsche’s critique of optimistic culture as primarily directed against working class emancipation: “The movements of the working masses were too optimistic; they promised a world where selfishness would be removed” (82). Yet Tutt does not mention that the primary target of Nietzsche’s critique of optimism in Birth of Tragedy is a certain scientific worldview and the faith in reason’s capacity to reconcile us to reality that it entails:
“At present…science, spurred on by its powerful delusion, is hurrying unstoppably to tis limits, where the optimism hidden in the essence of logic will founder and break up. For there is an infinite number of points on the periphery of the circle of science, and while we have no way of foreseeing how the circle could ever be completed, a noble and gifted man inevitably encounters…boundary points on the periphery like this, where he stares into that which cannot be illuminated. When, to his horror, he sees how logic curls up around itself at these limits and finally bites its own tail, then a new form of knowledge breaks through, tragic knowledge, which, simply to be endured, needs art for protection and as medicine” (BT, §15).
Tutt follows Lukács in reading Nietzsche as offering “an irrationalist philosophy grounded in an aristocratic epistemology” (39). The brush of irrationalism happens to be surprisingly broad, painting over Kant as well as Nietzsche (see p. 85, which offers one of the book’s few substantive discussions of Nietzsche’s epistemology). This flattening interpretation seems to miss the core of Kant’s critical project: to ground the a priori authority of pure reason in part by demonstrating reason’s proper limits. I would suggest that Nietzsche should be read as an inheritor of Kant’s critical project in this sense. Far from proposing any facile irrationalism, Nietzsche interrogates the ambiguities of modern reason inherent in what Adorno and Horkheimer termed the “dialectic of Enlightenment”. One consequence of erasing the role of modern, instrumental reason in today’s capitalist society is that we blithely overlook the dangers of rationalism that Max Weber associated with capitalism: the disenchantment of the world, processes of rationalization that transform lifeworld practices into instrumentalized forms of domination, and the fragmentation of ethical life into incommensurable and competing value-spheres. I remain firmly convinced that a Marxist analysis of capitalism must be supplemented with these Weberian themes, which are significantly influenced by Nietzsche’s critique of reason and morality.
Do we, then, live in Nietzsche’s world, and if so, in what sense? In the end, we are asked to make a decision between Tutt’s Marxist optimism and Nietzsche’s Dionysian pessimism. This is a decision that I refuse. If Nietzsche’s critique is that the revolutionary tradition depends upon an implicit metaphysical optimism, then it is one that must be taken seriously, particularly in the face of the terrifying future we all face. A revolutionary praxis that does not incorporate Nietzsche’s critique of optimism risks losing the ability to understand and withstand its setbacks and failures, settling instead for a paranoid search for the class enemies taken to have sabotaged the revolutionary destiny of the working class. The task of integrating insights from both Marx and Nietzsche in order to understand the present is more urgent now than ever. But the meager understanding that a parasite extracts from the living body of Nietzsche’s text falls woefully short of what such a synthesis would really require. We would do better to follow Nietzsche’s own advice in reading his writing: proceed slowly, like the ruminating cow methodically grazing and digesting—and this means, above all, do not chase after political phantasms that foreclose a genuine encounter with Nietzsche’s philosophical contributions.
In the next entry, we’ll turn to the second chapter of How to Read Like a Parasite, which focuses on Nietzsche’s esoteric style. While this review lays out some of my main points of contention with Tutt’s arguments, subsequent entries will aim to pick apart his more detailed engagements with Nietzsche’s text to determine whether Tutt’s interpretive lens illuminates or obscures. Tutt argues—correctly, in my view—that Nietzsche’s philosophy has a community-building function that operates primarily through his style and rhetoric. But what kind of community does Nietzsche wish to build? This will be the topic of our next entry.
Note on citations: I consistently use the Cambridge University Press editions of Nietzsche’s work when referencing English translations. For unpublished fragments, I will always reference the Colli and Montinari edition of the Nachlass, available online at http://www.nietzschesource.org/. I use parenthetical citations for all of Nietzsche’s texts as well as Tutt’s book (in the former case, the parenthetical will reference the book and section number, or fragment number; in the latter, the parenthetical will reference the relevant page number). Any other cited works will be listed in endnotes, as below.
[1] See György Lukács, The Destruction of Reason; Domenico Losurdo, Nietzsche, the Aristocratic Rebel: Intellectual Biography and Critical Balance-Sheet; Geoff Waite, Nietzsche’s Corps/e: Aesthetics, Politics, Prophecy, or, the Spectacular Technoculture of Everyday Life; Malcolm Bull, Anti-Nietzsche; and Ishay Landa, The Overman in the Marketplace: Nietzschean Heroism in Popular Culture.
[2] Hugo Drochon, Nietzsche’s Great Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), p. 13
[3] Ibid
[4] William Clare Roberts, “Class in Theory, Class in Practice” (Crisis and Critique: Volume 10, Issue 1, 2023), p. 261
[5] Ibid, p. 251
[6] Ibid, pp. 254-255
[7] Chapman prefers “Marxian” to “Marxist”, I assume to avoid association with precisely the doctrinaire form of orthodox Marxism Tutt appears to embrace.
[8] Robert Chapman, Empire of Normality: Neurodiversity and Capitalism (London: Pluto Press, 2023), p. 19
[9] Ibid
[10] See Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (New York: Hachette, 2019), chapter 2
When stumbling upon such an impassioned reaction to a book, I tend to take a step back to question my counter-transference and why I feel so strongly. I have despised Nietzsche since I first read him because it reminded me of my adolescent self and all the existential angst that comes from self-actualization. What Daniel has done is provide a valuable tool for those who read Nietzsche at a young age and get sucked into his cult during their formative years. We don’t live in Nietzsche’s world; we live in Fredrik Hayek’s world, whether you like it or not. Sure, Nietzsche would be in horror at neoliberalism. Still, it doesn’t change the fact that his thoughts contributed to what the Austrian economists did by bringing the moral/ethical into the Market rigged to favor the indecent because the indecent sells and making money is good. Hayek also ignored how the Market would influence the political at the expense of the democratic. Whether Hayek intended this outcome or not, it is the reality of the world we live in today because the political is not sovereign from Schumpeter’s entrepreneurs.