Nietzsche and Political Thought

Abstract

Nietzsche continues to be a source of inspiration for political thinking, as this diverse collection of articles makes clear. The aim of the volume—according to its commissioning editor Keith Ansell-Pearson, known for his seminal Introduction to Nietzsche as Political Thinker (Cambridge University Press, 1994) and Nietzsche contra Rousseau (Cambridge University Press, 1996)—is not to determine, once and for all, what that contribution to political thought ought to be, but rather to show how Nietzsche continues to provide new and interesting ways of thinking about politics today. So Rosalyn Diprose in “Nietzsche on Truth, Honesty and Responsibility in Politics,” for instance, criticizes Hannah Arendt's view of the role of truth in politics from a Nietzschean perspective, arguing that Nietzsche's commitment to perspectivism entails that “honesty” be the most important value in the political sphere, and not the distinction between factual and moral truth that Arendt wants to uphold. Peter Sedgwick, in “Nietzsche, Naturalism and Law,” challenges the view that Nietzsche is the enemy of law, characterized here as only the expression of power relations, positing instead that after the birth of the state law becomes a site of contestation in which authority itself comes into question. Taking his cues from Deleuze, Alan Schrift, in “Spinoza vs. Kant: Have I Been Understood?,” explores the possibility of a Nietzschean nontranscendental politics inspired by Spinoza's immanentist alternative to Kant, and which, even if it might not lead to an explicit political theory, opens up the space within which one can be developed. In “Nietzsche and the Engine of Politics,” Nandita Biswas Mellamphy, focusing on Nietzsche's concern with physiology, offers an interpretation of the Übermensch that privileges physis over logos, and thus affords us a glimpse into her recent work The Three Stigmata of Friedrich Nietzsche: Political Physiology in the Age of Nihilism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).As these examples show, the collection keeps its promise of opening up new and different avenues through which to explore how Nietzsche's political thinking might be used to think about politics today. This is amplified by the fact that it brings together both well-established and more up-and-coming Nietzsche scholars, and makes certain authors who work in the broader field address more specifically Nietzschean topics. In doing so, the collection offers a rather full and fertile snapshot of the state of Nietzsche scholarship today, and will not be of interest just to Nietzsche scholars, but can also serve as an excellent introduction to students entering the field, as a way of grasping a number of the different positions available in a rather concise manner.This thinking, it must be said, is done very much in the “Continental” vein: the collection after all appears in the Bloomsbury Studies in Continental Philosophy series. It is interesting to note, however, that while the figures that are called upon are very much Continental, or more to the point French—Deleuze, Badiou, Klossowski, and Lacan in particular loom large—the contributors themselves are more often than not drawn from the Anglo-American world, notably the United Kingdom, the United States, and, increasingly, Australia. So aside from Bruno Bosteels (a Belgian who teaches at Cornell), Vanessa Lemm (who studied in Paris, now in Australia), and Herman Siemens (of Leiden but, like much of the Netherlands, working in English), none of the authors are themselves French, and there is little engagement with contemporary French interpreters of Nietzsche. That, however, might be more of a commentary on the state of the French literature, which has seen a (natural) decline since its postmodern heyday, than anything else, and in any case contemporary French scholars such as Patrick Wotling and Monique Dixsaut do not work within the framework that interests the contributors to this collection in the first place.While the collection explores new terrain in Nietzsche studies, this does not mean that more conventional topics are not treated. So the theme of perfectionism runs throughout the book: Michael Ure, in “Nietzsche's Political Therapy,” is interested in how in his middle period Nietzsche draws on Hellenistic therapies to inform his reimagining of ancient ethical perfectionism, which in his later work he transforms into an aristocratic political program to enhance the capacities of the human species as a whole. This notion of “species” perfectionism—by which he means Nietzsche's interest in future human forms of justice and the broader social and political order—is present also in Paul Patton's chapter on “Nietzsche, Genealogy and Justice.” And David Owen, in “Nietzsche's Freedom: The Art of Agonic Perfectionism,” joins Nietzsche's interest in the ancient Greek agon, particularly as it is developed in Nietzsche's early unpublished piece “Homer's Contest,” with the notion of perfectionism, arguing that it is through an agonistic construction of the self that autonomy and freedom can be achieved.Indeed, the agon, and in particular how closely it is linked to Nietzsche's understanding of democracy, has been one of the most important themes that has emerged in the study of Nietzsche's political theory in the past twenty or so years, and what Nietzsche might teach us about democracy remains the most hotly contested topic in the literature. Much of this interest in Nietzsche and democracy has focused on Nietzsche's “middle period,” because it is thought that Nietzsche there expresses opinions that are more sympathetic to democracy than his “aristocratic radicalism.” Patton picks up on this theme, arguing that Nietzsche combines his interest in the origins of justice and rights with the theory of democratization he develops over the course of this period, to ask whether these might be made compatible with our contemporary understanding of democracy. This attempted appropriation of Nietzsche for a refounding of modern democratic politics has not gone unchallenged, however, and in many ways Robert Guay, in his “Movements and Motivations: Nietzsche and the Invention of Political Psychology,” takes up the baton here. Rejecting the view that Nietzsche is interested in political perfectionism, Guay offers instead an interpretation of Nietzsche's theory of democracy as one of a “movement,” a psychological formation writ large that has become reactively pathological.But perhaps the most striking chapter on this topic is Herman Siemens's “Reassessing Radical Democratic Theory in the Light of Nietzsche's Ontology of Conflict,” which lays down a challenge that postmodern appropriations of Nietzsche's theory of the agon for contemporary democratic theory will find hard to meet. Arguing against William Connolly's interpretation of the agon—and by extension David Owen's in the collection—as one based on “respect” between participants, Siemens offers instead a reading of Nietzsche's agon as one based on “agonal hatred,” where the notion of “valuing enemies” is grounded not in mutual respect, but rather in the valuing of enmity that is guaranteed by the institutions of the agon. In doing so Siemens moves the discussion about the agon in Nietzsche from one centered on the supposed positive virtues that it is meant internally to foster, to one centered on the fact that it is the structure, and not the content, of the agon that guarantees positive outcomes for society as a whole. This is a move, one might say, from a politics based on good faith to one based on bad faith, where the benefits of the agon do not arise from the intentions of the participants themselves, which may in fact be absolutely nefarious, but from the institution of the agon, which channels and directs this hatred into something positive. Therein might lie the true lesson of Nietzsche's theory of the agon for politics today.Another noteworthy aspect of the collection is the return of “great politics” as an entry point into theorizing about Nietzsche's politics. This is not the first time that Nietzsche's politics has been apprehended from the perspective of great politics. In fact the interwar period saw a large—and indeed perhaps the first—debate surrounding Nietzsche's politics between a diverse number of interlocutors, including Heidegger, Jaspers, and Alfred Baeumler (of the “Hitler prophecy”), and that debate was articulated through the notion of grosse Politik. If the political context of that time means that this should come as no surprise, it is interesting to see its return in the last three chapters of this collection: Vanessa Lemm's “Nietzsche's Great Politics of the Event,” Daniel Conway's “Nietzsche's Immoralism and the Advent of ‘Great Politics,’” and Bruno Bosteels's “Nietzsche, Badiou, and Grand Politics: An Antiphilosophical Reading.”All three chapters—along with Gary Shapiro's “Kairos and Chronos: Nietzsche and the Time of the Multitude,” which explores Nietzsche's declaration in BGE that “this is the century of the multitude [Menge]!” and how it can help us enrich discussions about cosmopolitanism and multiculturalism—link great politics to an event of a certain kind, whether it is the great politics of going beyond time and morality to affirm the eternity of the moment through amor fati (Lemm), the advent of immoralism and the transformation of politics into the “great” ideological politics of the twentieth century after a fateful “day of decision” (Conway), or again the “grand” “anti-” or “archi-” politics of the revaluation that breaks history into two (Bosteels). This recent interest in the “event” finds its origins in Heidegger's writings, where the “event” was meant to determine the existence of Being instead of Nothingness. As such it has associations with a certain theology of which Nietzsche would have been highly suspicious. Indeed, in its fascination with the “spectacular” and the “great,” understood as the “big,” the notion of “event” seems related to the “grand” power politics of which Nietzsche was so critical, and which he ultimately associated with slave morality. So if Lemm and Conway are right to point out that Nietzsche rejected the “petty politics” of his day, that of the nationalist state and its jockeying for position within the European balance of power, Lemm's claim that events become great only if they are received as such by the democratic people seems a little harder to accept: Nietzsche's claim that a culture is judged not solely by its great men but also by how they are received is made in the first instance about a particular people, namely the Greeks, and we know that for Nietzsche the ancients were in fact the aristocrats par excellence.Both Lemm and Bosteels refer to Badiou's idea of “anti-” or “archi-” philosophy as a way of capturing Nietzsche's “great politics,” understood as either going beyond or even breaking with a conventional understanding of politics, and it has become commonplace to depict Nietzsche's political thought as being in some sense “supra-” political. But we need not appeal to extraneous notions to be able to make sense of Nietzsche's political thought. Indeed, in depicting Nietzsche in this way, the end result might prove more of a double peine of contributing neither to our understanding of Nietzsche nor to a deepening of the philosophical project that was called upon in the first place. Nietzsche wanted us to “relearn” politics, yet we can do so from within the structures of his own thought, for instance by analyzing contemporary politics from the perspective of either master or slave morality. As this collection shows, we still have a lot to learn from him.