CHAPTER THIRTEEN

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Nietzsche: Pretotalitarian, Postmodern

I. FROM ECONOMY TO CULTURE

They have something of which they are proud. What is it called that makes them proud? They call it culture …

—Friedrich Nietzsche1

Marx and the classical economists were agreed that the economy provided the substance of the political, of the common good and the well-being of citizens; that in a properly constituted society enjoying a broad consensus on social, economic, and political fundamentals, politics as the contestation for power would be reduced to a minor role; and that the principal activity of the state, or what remained of it beyond warfare and law enforcement, would be administrative. These confluent tendencies had a shared origin in revolution: in the revolutionary character of capitalist production and the French revolution—both of which Marx appropriated. The “realization of revolution,” either in a communist utopia or in the piecemeal, cumulative policy of liberal governments, suggested that the tensions between theory and practice were relaxing as practice appeared increasingly attuned to theory’s visions.²

When a challenge emerged to the primacy of economy, it brought not only a new focus but a different locus where theory could stake out a domain distinct from the determinisms of powerful economies and discover new potentialities in modern power. This new site can broadly be described as “culture”; its contests “the politics of the superstructure”; its modes of action critical rather than revolutionary; and its chief protagonist the learned academic intellectual.

There is something surprising about the emergence of a cultural domain rivaling the domains of economy, liberal politics, and state administration and challenging the modern idea of revolution as a popular movement. Ever since Montesquieu, Hume, and Burke, culture has tended to be the preserve of conservative theorists who identified it with national habits, customs, prejudices, and religious traditions. The conservative conception reflected, and presupposed, the slower pace of change of settled and largely agrarian societies where literacy and political participation were narrowly restricted. Traditional culture, when engrained among the lower classes, was supposed to serve as a counter-revolutionary force for social stability and control. It signified unthinking or uncritical acceptance of social norms, a means for dampening mass enthusiasms, as much a means of repressing power as of exerting it.

A powerful sign of impending changes in the significance of culture was Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America (1835, 1840). He wrote of encountering in the United States a vibrant, changing society where popular sovereignty was a fact rather than a fiction, where common people were uncommonly literate, and where culture was overwhelmingly popular yet conservative in character. The contents of democratic culture, as described by Tocqueville, were qualitatively different from the unreflective prejudices favored by Burke. Democracy was developing its own versions of literature, philosophy, and even science, thus challenging the divide between “high” and “low” culture. The phenomenon of a democratic culture was encouraged by the outpouring of newspapers, pamphlets, and books—testimony to the democratizing role of technology in the production and dissemination of culture.3

What was at stake in that shift from economy to culture? Was it the continuing decomposition of the political or the hopeful sign of a new politics, immaterial and unencumbered by political illusion, and prepared to contest the hegemony of economy? And what form, other than protector of the established order, might a political theory of culture take?

Although the nineteenth century produced several distinguished contributors to the topic of culture—Tocqueville, Jacob Burkhardt, and Ernst Renan, among others—Friedrich Nietzsche stands above them all, not only for the range and brilliance of his writings but for the powerful salience his ideas would have for the twentieth century and beyond. Nietzsche might be said to have composed both the critical epitaph for the culture of modernity, with its faith in political and economic revolution, and the anticipative epigraph for postmodernity, with its hopes for cultural revolution.

Nietzsche also has a claim on our attention as an instructive contrast to Marx, one that points to the complex character of the thought-patterns that illuminated and darkened the twentieth century. Nietzsche shared Marx’s disdain for capitalists and his talent for anti-Semitic asides and, along with Marx, was awarded the dubious distinction of being blamed for the century’s worst tyrannies. Nonetheless it is the contrasts that matter.

Marx provides a critical standard by which to measure how far later theorists have wandered from a concern for commonalities and especially for the material and cultural deprivations of the vast majority of humankind. Nietzsche, in contrast, details the beliefs and celebrates both the higher and lower sensibilities that could relieve theory of those burdens: “The strongest and most evil spirits,” he proclaimed, “have so far done the most to advance humanity.”⁴ While Marx exposed the destructive element in modern power, he also sought to redeem its promise. Nietzsche chose to ignore productive power and technology, and concentrated instead upon “nihilism,” the destructive power of intellectual disillusionment that enabled a few to see through the constructions fabricated by culture and to expose its “most amazing economy of the preservation of the species” and the “high prices” it exacted from the Few.5 Although each was a master of the kind of critical theorizing that exposes the assumptions and attacks the conclusions of the dominant orthodoxies of their day, for Marx criticism was only the preliminary to the reconstruction of theory and the construction of a just society. What mattered for Nietzsche was critical activity itself, even to the point of defending the anti-theoretical. Nietzschean theory has no destiny, no resting point, no conception of a just society. Where Marx imagines and fights for a world in which critical theory would ultimately have no raison d’être, Nietzsche presents a world that continuously reproduces the conditions on which critical theory could endlessly feed. He conceived of intellect as a mode of continuous provocation. Nietzsche was unique in the history of Western political theory in placing destruction and the cultivation of its arts or, better, its crafts at the center of a new conception of intellectual action.

II. “SOME ARE BORN POSTHUMOUSLY”

In contrast to those historians of ideas who insist on placing thinkers in “the context of their times,” Nietzsche’s context emerged after his death as though to confirm his striking claim that “some are born posthumously.”⁶ Unlike the fringe reputation of the pre–World War II Nietzsche, the post-war Nietzsche occupies iconic status. During his own era (1844–1900) and before World War I, Nietzsche was much admired by German writers and poets, and he was taken up again by French intellectuals prior to World War II.⁷ Among American intellectuals he was more of a rumor than a major intellectual force, an underground reputation that persisted until the mid–twentieth century. Thereafter he has become the uncrowned sovereign theorist in the unacknowledged canon of postmodernists. Postmodernism, deconstruction, and neo-pragmatism are all scarcely analyzable without reference to the profound influence of Nietzsche, either directly through his writings or mediated by highly influential thinkers such as Heidegger, Arendt, and Foucault.⁸ Not only has he become a cachet in postmodern thinking, but unlike Marx, Nietzsche is by no means the exclusive property of a particular ideological tendency. He was admired by radical thinkers such as Foucault, Deleuze, and Lyotard, yet he was also an influence upon the unclassifiable Hannah Arendt as well as self-styled “bourgeois liberals” such as Richard Rorty, and, moving further to the right, Leo Strauss and his followers.⁹ Astonishingly, and in sharp contrast to Marx, Nietzsche has become a unifying figure.

The virtual unanimity surrounding Nietzsche’s standing might express a postmodern temper, or it might stand for an unresolved political trauma.

III. THE NEW NIETZSCHE

To admit that fascism was anything other than a simple aberration, an accident, an outburst of collective folly, or a phenomenon that could be explained simply by the economic crisis, to observe that in nearly all the European countries there existed homespun fascist movements … to concede that the armed bands … were backed by a body of doctrine no less logically defensible than that of democratic or liberal parties, and to recognize, finally, that the ideas put forward did not belong only to the rejects of society … would [call for] the revision of a whole scale of values, a whole chain of reasonings.

—Zeev Sternhell10

How to explain the vogue of Nietzscheolatry in the late twentieth-century United States—Nietzsche, in whose thinking aspects of the century’s darkest side are clearly visible, from racial purity to the subordination of women, from the praise of instinct to the denunciation of democracy, from demands for cruelty and extermination to the celebration of suffering?

A simple answer is that his defenders have succeeded in promoting a “new Nietzsche” (to cite a book title), which might be taken as an admission that an older, less presentable Nietzsche had to be suppressed—along with the political experience of Nazism.

How does intellectual suppression work? What is going on when a commentator passes over in silence a politically repugnant or repulsive tendency in an author, say Bataille’s fascist phase, or the following from Heidegger?

Because hate lurks much more deeply in the origins of our being it has a cohesive power; like love hate brings an original cohesion and perdurance to our original being … But the permanent cohesion that comes to human existence through hate does not close it off and blind it but grants vision and premeditation … [R]eaching out occurs even in hate, since the hated one is pursued everywhere relentlessly.¹¹

The act of suppression by silence may be interpreted in several ways. The “user” may not find the tendency repellent; or, alternatively, she may find other elements in the same writer to be so precious as to justify hurrying past the objectionable elements—for example, the authoritarian elements in the early Thomas Mann or the pro-fascist articles written by the young Paul de Man. Finally, she may appropriate an element that is a “carrier” of the suppressed elements—as in Hannah Arendt’s elitist conception of great action as being incomplete unless accompanied by great speech, a formulation that she borrowed from a passage in which Nietzsche attacked “the age of the masses.”12

What is involved here is a question not of forbidden fruit but of ideas that seem related to events whose repugnant character most everyone agrees upon. In that case suppression serves to exterminate the repugnant. A reader might happen upon a passage in Nietzsche asserting that the Jews “mark the beginning of the slave rebellion in morals”¹³—but then either he mentally erases the Jews and slaves, fastening upon the “rebellion in morals”; or he moves past, leaving behind an amnesiac moment that allows him to be “struck” by a passage that seems to connect with the “rebellion in morals.” In the latter case he can safely appropriate it while dissociating it from the repellent passage.¹⁴

IV. TOTALITARIANISM AS A FORM

Another ideal runs ahead of us, a strange, tempting, dangerous ideal to which we should not wish to persuade anybody because we do not readily concede the right to it to anyone: the ideal of a spirit who plays naively—that is, not deliberately but from overflowing power and abundance—with all that was hitherto called holy, good, untouchable, divine … the ideal of human, superhuman well-being and benevolence that will often appear inhuman …

—Nietzsche¹⁵

Who, then, was the old Nietzsche? One answer representative of opinions between 1935 and 1945 declared Nietzsche to be one of the intellectual forebears of National Socialism.¹⁶ Following World War II defenders of Nietzsche depicted him as the exact opposite, a critic of nationalism and of many things German, including Bismarck.¹⁷ His was the quintessential free spirit, playful and subversive, discovering psychological repression, influencing Freud, defending aestheticism—thus the opposite of an anti-intellectual thug. The pro-Nietzscheans were reinforced by another intellectual development that anticipated the uses of Nietzsche during the last quarter of the century, Nietzsche as the archetype of the radical intellectual. The first of the new Nietzsches was enshrined as a precursor of existentialism, the fashionable scandal of philosophy and literature during the 1950s.¹⁸ Among other things, this new Nietzsche was exonerated of any anti-Semitism.

The pre-war attempt to connect the old Nietzsche with Nazism found certain affinities between the two:¹⁹ for example, the Nazis introduced slave labor into Europe; Nietzsche’s vision explicitly commends slavery. Although there is evidence that the Nazis made some desultory attempts to exploit Nietzsche, the connection between the two is not one of cause-and-effect. The Nazi regime would have followed exactly the same course if Nietzsche had never lived. Conversely, Nietzsche’s thinking might harbor proto-totalitarian elements even if Nazism had never existed. The “influence approach” unnecessarily restricts Nietzsche and totalitarianism to a historically specific regime. While a regime-approach might serve a strictly historical inquiry, it is an unduly narrow theoretical starting-point.

An alternative would be treat totalitarianism as an “ideal-type” of what Aristotle and the ancients might have called a “perverted” form. This would mean treating it as a logically coherent, “idealized” system constructed from what its defenders claimed for it plus some of the characteristics of actual regimes that claimed to be totalitarian.20

Totalitarianism might be defined as a regime of dialectical opposites: of super-organization in control of all aspects of society combined with an “absence of system”;²¹ of expansionism determined to rule over, but not to absorb, “foreign” elements; of elitism and plebiscitary democracy; of calculated suppression controlling systemic chaos; of a triumphal present that promises only a bleak future of sacrifice and struggle. In this view totalitarianism is not exclusively a German phenomenon but stands for a set of uniquely modern aspirations towards totality that have been encouraged by the potentialities of modern power. These aspirations may or may not achieve a complete political life-form. Just as the concept of constitutionalism may be used to examine, say, a theory such as Locke’s, without restricting the range of its application to English constitutional practices or even to fully constitutional regimes, so totalitarianism can be conceptualized and used to refer to totalizing endeavors other than the German, including regimes that profess to be constitutionalist. Yet to ignore the Nazi experience would be to suppress one of the defining moments of the twentieth century. Rather Nazi Germany should be thought of as a particular version of totality but not exhaustive of its possibilities. The crucial point is that its dynamic of destructiveness—“Close your hearts to pity,” Hitler screamed at his generals. “Act brutally! Eighty million people [of Germany] must obtain what is their right”—²² combines an appearance of highly efficient organization with the reality of a chaos issuing from a dynamic that sets out to discredit familiar constraints of law and mundane morality. In Nietzsche’s words, “The total character of the world … is in all eternity chaos—in the sense not of a lack of necessity but of a lack of order, arrangement, form, beauty, wisdom, and whatever other names there are for our aesthetic anthropomorphisms.”²³

The Aristotelian typology of political forms distinguished a “good” form (e.g., aristocracy) from its perversion (oligarchy). A postmodern totality might be a “good totality,” a “superpower” of highly concentrated power that does not force its population to lock-step; it might thrive instead on widely shared fears of certain disorders, of rampant crime, corruption, threats of subversion, extreme forms of individualism, and moral laxity competing with moral rigidity. It might drown out or marginalize opposition rather than hunt it down, pacify public space by fostering communications monopolies rather than by unleashing storm troopers. Its leaders might dominate society, not to fulfill a mythic mission, but simply to make money and control power. It might project power beyond its borders, not in order to occupy foreign lands but to gain access to new markets and resources. Such a regime might discriminate, even repress, but not persecute.

Nietzsche originated a theoretical practice, relentlessly critical, a symbolic politics of destructiveness. The totality of its scope and the character of its values are suggestive of some analogies with the ideology and practices of a totalitarian regime.24

V. NIETZSCHE: A POLITICAL THEORIST?

Nietzsche is rarely treated as a full-fledged political theorist, notwithstanding that few theorists have been so persistently preoccupied with power.²⁵ The difference between Nietzsche and indisputable power-theorists such as Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Marx is that while they began from a picture of an extreme condition of rampant power—intense rivalry between princes and cities, a violent state of nature, or radical social polarization—all three attempted to ameliorate or domesticate it. In contrast, Nietzschean politics sets out to provoke the extreme conditions it thrives on, even constructs or fashions itself with those conditions in mind, and claims that they are healthful rather than pathological.

The underestimation of Nietzsche as a political thinker and his subsequent iconization are explained by the same fact that makes his obsession with power so singular. I am, he proclaimed, “the last anti-political German.”²⁶ He was, in fact, radically anti-political and for the same reason that he was anti-democratic: because the political and the democratic stood for leveling and values capable of being widely shared.

“Good” is no longer good when one’s neighbor mouths it. And how should there be a “common good”? The term contradicts itself: whatever can be common always has little value.²⁷

Nietzsche was unique not in rejecting the traditional ideal of the political, but rather in combining that rejection with a distinctive conception of politics. His conceptions of society, of theoretical knowledge, and of the origin and genealogy of morals and religion are saturated with politics, though not as conventionally understood. Nietzsche’s politics is rarely occupied with such standard political topics as state structure, rule of law, rights, or justice: with the ideals applicable to all members. It is, instead, obsessed with singularity, with heroic action, and takes the form of thought-deeds that attack, expose, and subvert the establishment’s modes of thought (e.g., philosophy and theology), as well as its forms of social morality and aesthetics. Nietzsche cast the counter-morality he preached as a “higher morality,” and its essential quality as “hardness.” Higher culture, he asserts, is primarily “based on the spiritualization of cruelty.”28

For Nietzsche cultural values are not the social representations of a disinterested search for what is true or right. Nietzsche’s culture refers to the moral and political values and notions of truth that a society institutionalizes and enforces in order to preserve its existence. All religions, philosophies, and moral codes are projections of physiological needs “under the cloak of the objective, ideal, purely spiritual …”²⁹

We have arranged for ourselves a world in which we can live—by positing bodies, lines, planes, causes and effects … without these articles of faith nobody now can endure life. But that does not prove them … The conditions of life might include error.³⁰

The politics of culture appears biological, and Darwin is stood on his head: not the survival of the fittest but the triumph of the will-to-power of the weak, not evolution but devolution or degeneration of the species. The political element of cultural values lies in their generality: they apply to everyone regardless of differences and inequalities of status, character, or intelligence. “These valuations … are always expressions of the needs of a community and herd … Morality is the herd instinct in the individual.”³¹ Thus the idea of the “good” is the expression of herd morality and the sign of the power of the “masses.”³² Laws and regulations aim at promoting the common good by treating everyone the “same,” but that means they deal merely with the “coarse exterior” of actions, capturing at best only “some semblance of sameness” in the action. In reality, “every action is unknowable” in the sense that no two actions are the same and actual motives are “impenetrable.”³³ Culture thus serves to oppress nonconformists who do not fit the generalizing rules of culture with its assumptions about individual similarities and its animus against the “unique.”

Nietzsche extends the analysis to knowledge and logic. Logic evolved out of “illogic:” “innumerable beings who made inferences in a way different from ours perished,” while the survivors were ones who “guessed immediately upon encountering similar instances that they must be equal.”³⁴ The belief or hypothesis that gives the intellect the greatest feeling of power and security is declared to be true. Truth is not the opposite of error but “only the posture of various errors in relation to one another.”³⁵ “The world seems logical to us because we have made it logical … Rational thought is interpretation according to a scheme we cannot throw off.”³⁶

Over against the “good” defined by herd morality Nietzsche sets “evil” represented by the Few, by “human beings who are new, unique, incomparable, who give themselves laws, who create themselves.”³⁷ Evil, for Nietzsche, is not a timeless, objective category of reprehensible acts. Like “good” it stands for actions that society has chosen to single out, in this case for condemnation. At the same time, like “error” or untruth, evil is “species-preserving,” as “indispensable … as the good instincts:” Rome was founded, after all, upon fratricide. The Nietzschean evil-doers are thus constructive. Their aim is to save society, not destroy it, to revivify it by teaching the joys of the “new, daring, untried.”38

VI. THE THEORIST AS IMMORALIST

Nietzsche justifies the politics of evil as the urgent response to cultural decadence. The signs of decadence are many, but they all suggest a pervasive weakness because the will-to-power has lost its assertiveness and favors submissiveness, the celebration of humble virtues, and a merciful rather than a sternly demanding god. Culture becomes Christianized and democratic. If the species is to survive, the will-to-power must find expression in harsh, demanding, and ruthless values. This requires “a master race whose sole task is to rule, a race with its own sphere of life with an excess of strength for beauty, bravery, culture, manners to the highest peak of the spirit … beyond good and evil.”³⁹ And it requires “new philosophers:”

… we teach estrangement in every sense, we open up gulfs such as have never existed before, we desire that man should become more evil than he has ever been before …⁴⁰

One of the most revealing descriptions of what Nietzsche meant by politics and of where he located it occurs in The Will to Power. There he described the stakes in “the grand politics of virtue” and the demands it laid on the theorist.⁴¹ The problem concerned “how virtue is made to dominate.” A theorist who strove for “the domination of virtue … absolutely must not desire [it]” for “[him]self.” The reason for that self-denial was not ascetic but tactical. The politics that seeks to make virtue dominate could not succeed “by means of virtue.”⁴² The theorist “must as such be an immoralist in practice” and adopt “the same ‘immoral’ means as every victor: force, lies, slander, injustice.”⁴³ He may have to “appear” moral and to offer the necessary “gestures of virtue.”⁴⁴ The politics of deception, the perfection of “Machiavellianism,” is rhapsodized as an ideal that is “at most approximated.” “Even Plato barely touched it.” It is a “superhuman, divine, transcendental” ideal, an imitatio Dei of that God who is “the greatest of all immoralists.”⁴⁵

It is characteristic of the dynamic of Nietzschean politics that while it begins critically, with “how virtue is made to dominate,” it leads to “domination over virtue,”⁴⁶ to the expression of the theorist’s will-to-power in a world where all of the traditional verities, in morals, religion, and politics, stand exposed as impositions, their nakedness pruriently emphasized by italics. The same dynamic reappears in the philosopher’s conduct towards “truth.” Here, too, Nietzsche taught that the philosopher must avoid identifying with what he is seeking to exert mastery over. If he is to dominate truth, he must have “freedom from morality, also from truth.”47 Necessarily the goal of domination over morality and truth meant that there would also be the dominated.

Nietzschean morality is situated in what might be described as the universal context of politics, politics as a never-ending struggle for power, “one quantum of power against another,”⁴⁸ politics without—indeed against—the commonality of the political. Nietzsche described that struggle in various domains: moral, philosophical, psychological, religious, biological, even sheerly physical. It is a struggle not for mere existence but for ever-increasing power between the best and the better, and waged against the ordinary.⁴⁹ Ideas of good and evil emerge, in his account, in a contest for dominance between elements of the Few, between the Few and the Many, between contrasting modes of life and conceptions of human worth whose representatives contrive values, beliefs, and laws as strategies for disabling their enemies and preserving themselves. Often ill-understood by the antagonists, it is a politics in which the essential stakes are for control over the cultural matrix of value-shaped behavior, “the culture complex,”⁵⁰ that ultimately determined the moral fiber and health of the species and, more particularly, of its highest representatives. In Nietzsche’s account the struggles raged unrelieved by any good-faith political conception of shared fate or cooperative action, all of these being, to his mind, merely rhetorical strategies for defending mediocrity.

When Nietzsche discussed politics in its ordinary meaning—of actions by politicians, of the role of government or of the state—his views were remarkably conventional and very similar to the ones expressed by many conservative publicists, especially those obsessed with exorcising the ghosts of the French Revolution. He warned that the democratic conception of the state as an “emanation” of the people overthrows the (natural?) relationship between the “above” or the superior and the “below,” thereby threatening all social relationships: teacher and pupil, general and ordinary soldier, master and apprentice. “In this matter nothing is more desirable than caution and slow evolution.” In the same vein, when “socialists of the subject caste … demand equality of rights,” that demand “is never an emanation of justice but of greed.”⁵¹ To those who would abolish slavery Nietzsche echoed Calhoun: “slaves live in every respect more happily and in greater security than the modern worker…,” a comparison, it need hardly be said, not meant as ammunition for workers.⁵²

Nietzsche’s practical warnings may seem out of character, but they were an element in a strategy aimed at developing a new elite. He was convinced that conventional politics diverted the creative energies of the best from cultural pursuits, a misdirection that attained threatening proportions during wartime. War inevitably decimated disproportionately “the most highly cultivated” because it demanded heroism and self-sacrifice.⁵³ If culture were to be reinvigorated, the hold of conventional politics over the Few had to be diminished.⁵⁴ The state must not, however, be weakened to the point of being unable to control the masses, even if that should require supporting religion, the traditional Lutheran solution for guaranteeing mass loyalty to the state.55

VII. THE POLITICS OF CRITICAL TOTALITARIANISM

And I turned my back upon the rulers when I saw what they now call ruling: bartering and haggling for power—with the rabble!

—Nietzsche⁵⁶

Although Nietzsche’s writings contain several references to state, society, laws, rights, parliamentary institutions, etc., the main concerns of what might be called his external politics were cultural. At the same time Nietzsche’s campaign against the status of the theories dominating philosophy, science, and morality was conducted in politically charged terms of power, authority, and superiority. Thus an internal politics of theory accompanied his external politics of culture and formed a continuum between Nietzsche’s internal and external political projects—between the style and character of the politics aimed at establishing the superiority of his practice of theory and the politics he advocated in the “real” world.

To explain the continuum in Nietzsche’s thinking, the proper starting-point is the inner political tendencies that shaped the structure of Nietzsche’s mode of theorizing. We might postulate that a theory contains a set of attitudes towards the rules or practices typical of the kind of discourse it is engaged in. A writer may follow those rules or reject them or adopt some position in between. Whatever the course chosen, a symbolic action is being taken towards “laws” and “authorities.” A writer will also comport him- or herself towards rivals or opponents or predecessors in acts that may be civil, critical, deferential, or violent. Finally, the theory will define its attitude towards the public: seeking to attract and constitute its own public while repelling, appropriating, or ignoring other possible publics.

I shall call Nietzsche’s symbolic actions “the politics of critical totalitarianism.” It is represented by the following:

All that the good call evil must come together that one truth may be born: O, my brothers are you, too, evil enough for this truth?

The bold attempt, prolonged mistrust, the cruel No, satiety, the cutting into the living—how seldom do these come together! But from such seed is—truth raised.⁵⁷

In calling Nietzscheanism the ideal of critical totalitarianism, I mean to call attention to its reactionary character. It takes the form of relentless destruction, of emptying the world of established forms of value, religion, morality, politics, and popular culture. The main object of that opposition was the modernity represented by the French Revolution, the emergence of parliamentary politics, mass culture, and Enlightenment values of science and rationality. Nietzsche adopts the traditional categories of superiority favored by anti-revolutionary writers—elite, hierarchy, and inequality. At the same time he attacks the system that the Enlightenment erected against arbitary governance: rule of law, individual rights, constitutionally limited power. Critical totalitarianism is an anti-system. It aims to liberate by—to use some of Nietzsche’s favorite words—“hardness” and “cruelty.” The politics of the anti-system is best represented by a famous passage from The Gay Science. There Nietzsche welcomes “all signs that a more virile, warlike age is to begin.” That “higher” age will “carry heroism into the search for knowledge and … will wage wars for the sake of ideas and their consequences.” The true heroes will be those who “live dangerously.” Then: “At long last the search for knowledge will reach out for its due; it will want to rule and possess, and you with it!”58

To name a discourse “critical-totalitarian” is to identify it as a certain mental construction and to locate it as a hostile presence in the artificial world conventionally formed around the idea and practice of interchange—what the Enlightenment called “the republic of letters.” Interchange might be likened to the discursive equivalent of the political: it signifies a governing ideal for engaging in intellectual activities whose life-blood is differences.

Critical-totalitarian discourse might be described as mind denouncing mind. It begins by invoking a metaphorical vocabulary that enables mind to remake its own nature in the image of anti-mind and to mount a radical challenge to the tradition of interchange. The mind’s historical association with the soul is renounced in order to enable mind to assume the physicalist or pre-political character of will-to-power and thus to merge its identity in its opposite. One of the most striking features of critical totalitarianism is the adoration of its opposite, a fascination with the non- or anti-intellectual. “[E]very higher culture,” Nietzsche claimed, begins with barbarism,

in every terrible sense of the word, men of prey who were still in possession of unbroken strength of will and lust for power, [and who] hurled themselves upon weaker, more civilized, more powerful races … [T]he noble caste was always the barbarian caste—they were more whole human beings (which also means, at every level, “more whole beasts”).⁵⁹

Accordingly, totalitarian discourse sets out to be menacing. It inverts into positive images “terror,” “cruelty,” “suffering,” “evil,” and “executioners”; it uses these to fantasize, to dilate the idea of politics, causing it to appear boundaryless, monstrous, habitually violent:

The concept of politics will have merged entirely with a war of spirits; all power structures of the old society will have been exploded—all of them are based on lies; there will be wars the like of which have never yet been seen on earth. It is only beginning with me that the earth knows great politics.60

Such a discourse, one can say, would be totalistic in the sense that the aggression acted out in its metaphors, images, and narratives aims not only to obliterate its enemies but to bring down an entire world it believes the enemies have made. This requires a privileged standpoint from which all preceding and existing value-systems can be surveyed and pronounced valueless, except for the occasional anticipation. “In a dream, in my last morning dream, I stood today upon a headland—beyond the world, I held a pair of scales and weighed the world.”⁶¹ In its godlike superiority, critical totalitarian discourse savages its enemies in dehumanizing terms, as, say, degenerate, decadent, sick, so that their disappearance is cause for exultation, even though they constitute the vast majority of mankind.⁶² The discourse does not invite interchange or dialogue but establishes a certain inaccessibility, typically of “heights” or “depths,” from which pronouncements are hurled that, while humiliating to the excluded many, lend credentials to the Few.⁶³

Our highest insights must—and should—sound like follies and sometimes like crimes when they are heard without permission by those who are not predisposed and predestined for them. The difference between the exoteric and the esoteric [was known] … wherever one believed in an order of rank and not in equality and equal rights. The exoteric approach sees things from below, the esoteric looks down from above.⁶⁴

Perhaps the true signature of the discourse is its bleak vision of the future and its absolute renunciation of any ideal state of affairs in which poverty, ignorance, conflict, and war would be abolished. The enemy is an all-pervasive decadence, typically described as “unclean” or as a “stench,” and hence the task of revitalization exceeds ordinary political and intellectual solutions. The location of the problem is not in a form of government; for government is a symptom, not a cause. Rather the carrier of decadence is an all-enveloping ethos, “civilization,” whose cunning immateriality and diffuseness incite the totalitarian into a rage for power as incommensurable as the evil it aims to extirpate. The “essential characteristic of a good healthy aristocracy,” Nietzsche wrote in a chilling passage, will be its accepting “with a good conscience the sacrifice of untold human beings who, for its sake, must be reduced and lowered to incomplete human beings, to slaves, to instruments.”⁶⁵

This passage makes it clear that critical totalitarianism does not conceive itself limited to the domain of “ideas.” Its own analysis impels it to attack the “real world” and to translate linguistic violence into real violence:

Refraining mutually from injury, violence, and exploitation, and placing one’s will on a par with someone else [when] accepted as the fundamental principle of society … is really a will to the denial of life, a principle of disintegration and decay.

VIII. THE EXTRAORDINARY VERSUS THE NORMAL

The best short description of the critical totalitarian is Nietzsche’s own, “the will-to-power.” As the primordial principle of life, the will-to-power takes diverse forms, from the subtlest scientific theory and most demanding philosophical system to the most naked acts of personal or political aggrandizement and the least demanding systems of popular morality.

In its various manifestations the will-to-power seeks superiority by conquering rival wills. In the particular form practiced by Nietzsche it is striking for its restless, driven character that finds him attacking virtually every major institution, every cultural form, every type of belief.66 The most striking characteristics of the critical totalitarian mentality stem from what seems to be a permanent dynamic, continuously in motion, and inherently transgressive/aggressive.⁶⁷ How that dynamic is acquired, and the elements that enter into its composition, are of crucial importance. The dynamic and its elements are shaped by the paradoxical requirement that total power should always elude it. What, then, is totalitarian about critical totalitarianism such that it can be identified as a theoretical practice with a corresponding politics?

Its defining characteristic can be described as the moment when the extraordinary marginalizes the normal, usurping its role in order to become the dominant practice. The normal might be said to be the product of cultivated relationships (e.g., of love, of family, friendship, neighbors, co-workers, citizens, patriotism, etc.). The normal sustains the skilled activities that assure the everyday operation of society. Critical totalitarianism seeks, literally, to belittle these relationships for the easy demands they make. In contrast, its own strategy imposes heavy demands on itself as it renounces the moral, social, political, scholarly, and aesthetic values it had once prized. Renunciation is a painful struggle that takes Nietzsche “outside” normal conceptions of right, justice, and punishment, and beyond even the category of “philosopher” or “theorist.”

The weak and ill-constituted shall perish: first principle of our philanthropy. And one shall help them to do so.

What is more harmful than any vice?—Active sympathy for the ill-constituted and weak-Christianity.⁶⁸

To be outside all relationships is to go beyond transgression, to follow “instincts,” and to consort with the extraordinary, with what is unconfined to a form. “I consider life itself instinct for growth, for continuance, for accumulation of forces, for power.”⁶⁹

It is crucial to the exaltation of the extraordinary that its enemies should never be wholly eliminated. One paradox of the totalitarian mind is that if it is to follow a practice, to be methodical, its enemies must ultimately be ineradicable even though their elimination is its proclaimed objective. The enemy, consequently, is never given the form of an “argument” subject to proof or disproof, to counterclaims; Nietzsche no more argued with “the herd” than the Nazis argued with the Jews: instead he exposes. The enemy embodies a way of being, vague in its outlines, shifting in its appearances, and ingenious in its disguises. Referring to “the greatest danger to the whole human future” represented by “the good and just,” Nietzsche warned: “Everything has been distorted and twisted down to the very bottom through the good.” His demand was: “Shatter, shatter the good and just!”70

Marginalizing the normal and attacking common morality are not gratuitous gestures or mere exuberant flourishes. They are essential conditions for the exercise of the forms of power peculiar to critical totalitarianism. Despite Nietzsche’s approving remarks about Machiavelli, totalitarian power rejects the fundamental principle of Machiavelli. To exercise power successfully, a true Machiavellian must possess a keen sense of political realities, a deep understanding of how the world works, of what enhances and what undermines power, and what actions are possible under specific circumstances. The necessary, though not the sufficient, condition for true, i.e., “effectual,” political thinking (verità effetuale) is to preserve detachment while maintaining close contact with the actual. Although Machiavellian power is active, always on the prowl, it cannot be called “dynamic.” It expands, not because of some mission, but in order to survive. The truly dynamic power for Machiavelli was represented by Fortuna.

In contrast, for the critical totalitarian, power appears as the opposite of Machiavelli’s reality-fetish. It is grosse Politik, not Realpolitik—grandiose, not radically realistic. Its momentum increases as its grip on reality loosens. Its marginalization of the normal—of what is grounded in everyday reality, what is settled—becomes a necessary condition of its power.⁷¹ The peculiarity of that power is its casual view of formal structures and conventions, seeing them as expedients rather than as limitations, and revealing a will-to-power that is mythic in its indifference to boundaries.⁷²

IX. THE TOTALITARIAN DYNAMIC

What kind of understanding helps to make the anti-historical possible? One that denies to things the depth that renders them less readily manipulable. “What is required,” Nietzsche wrote, “is to stop courageously at the surface, the fold, the skin, to adore appearance, to believe in forms, tones, words, in the whole Olympus of appearance.”⁷³

When all is surface or appearance, appearance is by default reality. The reduction of the world to appearances is the result not of a reasoned demonstration but of a decision based on the possibilities for the exercise of power opened by the elimination of “depth.” As testified by the economy of fashion and of consumption generally, and by the progress of scientific-technological knowledge, “vested interests” (the pejorative substitute for “depth”) tend to resist the simplifying of truth, while the regime of appearances encourages it. Nietzsche expressed that tension—and the ambivalence of the quondam scholar:

What is new is always evil, being that which wants to conquer and overthrow the old boundary markers and the old pieties … [In contrast] the good men are in all ages those who dig the old thoughts, digging deep and getting them to bear fruit—the farmers of the spirit.74

The totalitarian dynamic is the exact opposite of revolutionary dynamics: historically the latter has attacked the powerful and the privileged. Totalitarian theory turns revolutionary theory on its head: the enemy are the pitifully weak and vulnerable. For Nietzsche these include workers, the sick, socialists, anarchists, democrats, women, Christians, and other bleeding/bleating hearts. What makes the weak “strong” is the power represented by modern culture, liberal politics (the “dwarf animal of equal rights and claims”), and, above all, a morality of pity for those who suffer. Their pooled weakness is power, collectivist and suppliant, that envelops, stifles, levels. Weakness has the power to defeat strength, not by assault but by infecting the strong, arousing their pity. Thus the doctrine of equality is “poisonous” and socialists are “degenerates.”⁷⁵ When the Christian protests against suffering and privilege, when he “condemns, calumniates, and befouls the ‘world,’ he does so from the same instinct from which the Socialist condemns, calumniates, and befouls society…”⁷⁶

The totalitarian dynamic derives from a tension between two utterly contradictory tendencies, both of which are embraced with equal ardor. One tendency might be described as anti-modern, or a longing for communion with an idealized and archaic fons et origo to which is attributed revitalizing powers. The restorative powers of the archaic are conceived as an antidote to decadence.⁷⁷ While the archaic is the symbol of the “early health” of the “race,” of a mythological age dominated by heroes and noble warriors, decadence is the equivalent of a disease endemic to older “civilized” societies. The historical-temporal implication is that the present is reversible and a selected past recoverable, if only as inspiration.

The other tendency is a modernizing one, and unlike the archaizing tendency it is “progressive” or at least anti-nostalgic rather than regressive. The term “modernizing” captures its ambivalence, its suggestion of a permanent passage from the modern to the postmodern that combines elements of both, allowing it to be always in transit. The modern stands for Enlightenment rationality and its accompaniments of science, technological innovation, industrialization, public education, and limited government. It also stands for a temporary equilibrium between scepticism or critical doubt and a belief that the objective character of truths is demonstrable by the methods of rationalism and empiricism. The postmodern upsets the equilibrium. It retains the sceptical element but drops the belief in objectivity, thus inevitably expanding the sceptical and the critical and refining them into virtuoso “techniques”: detego ergo cogito (I unmask, therefore I think).

The anti-modern tendencies formed the basis from which Nietzsche launched his attack on contemporary civilization. In The Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche praises the Dionysian cult as a celebration of the orgiastic, the primitive, the ecstatic, the naturalistic, and the mythical. Myth and transgression are extolled as creative and powerful expressions of a healthy credulous naturalism that contrasts with the sickly, over-intellectualized, utility-oriented rationality of modern European cultures. But Nietzsche was also an advanced thinker, perhaps one of the most acute critics in the history of Western philosophy and the possessor of a dazzling array of techniques of exposé and diagnosis. The crucial character of those techniques is that they formed a dynamic of exposure that included ridicule, irony, reversal of perspective, substitution of psychological accounts for moral or political explanations, and reductionism (e.g., philosophy as the unconscious expression of a thinker’s autobiography).78

The dynamic of critical totalitarianism expresses itself as a philosophy of becoming, of permanent change, always on the attack, shaped to be an aggressive form of overcoming. Critical totalitarianism protests the stifling atmosphere allegedly emanating from a security-hungry mass. It forms the basis of a demand for spiritual Lebensraum. The destructiveness of the techniques is uncontrollable because they can easily be turned against any notion of a fixed limit. Thus the modernizing impulse is a constant threat to the archaizing impulse in totalitarianism: the latter proclaims a fixed, non-developmental ideal; the former proclaims that nothing is sacred or privileged.

Nietzsche’s cult of destruction has many facets. It is the necessary preliminary to, and accompaniment of, creativity; it is the expression of a will to overcome, to conquer; it is a protest against being stifled by the rules of Enlightenment rationalism, by the idea that truth lay at the end of a sequence of “steps.” Perhaps its deepest driving force is as an agent of purification. Nietzsche first describes himself as having “the will to power as no man ever possessed it”; then he describes his creation, Zarathustra, as “the act of tremendous purification and consecration of humanity.”⁷⁹ Purification is preceded by categorial stigmatization, forced confinement.

Confinement and purification were fundamental to the Nazi destruction of European Jewry. The ultimate purifier: the ovens that incinerated dirty Jewry, thereby ritually purifying the world and leaving no traces behind. Confinement was also the key to Nazi power: mass mobilization = regimentation = confinement.

Nietzsche’s enemies, too, have to be eliminated if the slide towards decay, decadence, and degeneration is to be arrested. First he identifies, in order to segregate, his foes: the ordinary, the common, the average.80 He sees “the ever madder howling of anarchist dogs who are baring their fangs more and more obviously and roam through the alleys of European culture.” His ire is directed at the democratic and socialist “religion of pity,” “their almost feminine inability to remain spectators, to let someone suffer.”⁸¹ These categories of the condemned, it should be noted, allow for no appeal or even rehabilitation.

And the original line between critical totalitarianism and actual totalitarianism begins to blur.

X. THE EXTERMINATION OF DECADENCE

For this is our height and our home: we live here too high and steep for all the unclean and their thirst …

And like a wind I yet want to blow among them one day, and with my spirit take away the breath of their spirit: thus my future wills it.

—Nietzsche⁸²

Totalitarianism’s dynamic of total destruction fed upon a belief that since culture was all-pervasive, when corruptive influences invaded culture they potentially infected the entire society. A corrupted culture was a diseased totality, a “civilization,” that called for and justified heroic counter-measures to combat an infection being continuously transmitted throughout the social body.⁸³ Culture could not, however, be restored to health by cultural measures alone. Culture was insufficiently primordial, too removed from life itself, from a primal force, from the body. The curing of culture was to be achieved, not by transcending, but by descending from culture to the elemental physical plane of the body. The descent to the body required identifying those whose visible appearance (shape of a nose) or condition (ill) were the external marks of the contagion. Then it became possible to proceed from the visible to the invisible carriers of contagion.

The crucial point in moving to the invisible is to efface the category of innocence that stands in the way of extermination.⁸⁴ The object of extermination need not have committed any “objective” act of wrong-doing but need only have belonged to a particular race, religion, or nation, or have subscribed to certain beliefs (e.g., Marxism, trade unionism, evangelical Christianity). Slaughter is practiced systematically, though represented not as mass murder but as a purification ritual for an evil that is likened to a secret, i.e., non-empirical, contagion. “Disease” and “health,” “sick” and “deformed” figure as major categories of identification; acting as a “carrier” of “infection” becomes criminal in itself. By representing its enemies as carriers of an infection, the totalitarian is assured of an inexhaustible supply of sacrificial victims because the contaminated elements have inevitably become mixed (e.g., by marriage) with elements otherwise pure.

In order to justify unlimited power, totalitarianism must represent the enemy as a hidden power whose extent cannot, therefore, be known precisely. Culture is, after all, secreted in the interstices of society. The more deeply embedded that evil power (“the Jews”), the more unrelenting must be the attacks. Violence, torture, and warfare—the most extreme forms of power—become sacralized in the name of purification.85 The widespread use of the imagery of “blood” had a double significance: the preservation of the “pure blood” of the race, the transmutation of the blood of the impure into ashes.⁸⁶ Nietzsche spoke of “the malice of my snowflakes in June.”⁸⁷

“Nothing,” Nietzsche declares, “has preoccupied me more profoundly than the problem of decadence …”⁸⁸ Decadence = decay = stench. In Nietzsche’s theorizing the demand for the destruction of entire systems of thought, value, and practices; for cleansing diseased societies of the unhealthy; and for sniffing out the deepest hiding places of corruption and lies attained an obsessiveness and insistence unequalled in Western theory: “My genius is in my nostrils.”⁸⁹

His campaign for intellectual and cultural hygiene was centered in the charge of “decadence” or “materialism” and leveled against “civilization” in the name of “instincts.” The association of civilization with contagion led Nietzsche to declare that society should be ordered so as to segregate the higher from the lower forms of life. Society “needs slavery in some form or other.” He praised that subordination as “the pathos of distance” whereby “the ruling caste … looks after and looks down upon subjects and instruments.” The greater the distance, the “more remote, further-stretching,” the more “man” is enhanced by “the continual ‘self-overcoming of man’ …”⁹⁰ A protest that this was but a crude justification for exploitation Nietzsche dismissed with a warning that the elimination of exploitation would result in the elimination of “a basic organic function.” Exploitation “is a consequence of the will to power, which is after all the will to life.”⁹¹

XI. CULTURAL WARS

Above all, war. War has always been the grand sagacity of every spirit which has grown too inward and too profound; its curative power lies in the wounds one receives.

—Nietzsche⁹²

In the late 1930s totalitarianism was described as “a revolution of nihilism” because of its shocking defiance of values assumed to be widely accepted, such as freedom, toleration, the rule of law, and truth-telling.⁹³ The characterization of totalitarianism as nihilism identified culture as the crucial site where the contest for total power would be decided. The priority of culture, its attraction as an objective of control, was its seeming all-pervasiveness: everything—authority, obedience, social norms and practices, industry, education, and military power—seemed to depend, ultimately, on “values” and their accompanying practices, and to be subsumed under what a postmodern writer would refer to as “the total cultural fabric.”94 Culture, then, as the ultimate paradox, a “whole” with no clear boundaries; culture as all-enveloping yet immaterial, powerful yet ideal; culture as a totality before and after the fact of totalitarianism.

The first, and most important, of the theoretical tendencies that formed the dominant theme of Nietzsche’s life work, and that guides much postmodernist thinking, can initially be described as one in which “politics” and “culture” change places—and economy remains a constant, unchallenged. Politics was once commonly assumed to be a distinctive domain—the “public” as distinct from the “private”—while the values, beliefs, and practices that were thought to compose a culture were viewed in Burke’s mode as diffused throughout society as “natural” rather than the object of systematic coordination.

In the new understanding culture is assumed to be the overarching domain, while politics is considered to be omnipresent but expressed most significantly through cultural forms. The conception of culture as all-pervasive and saturated with politics is illustrated in Nietzsche’s reference to “the institutions of culture in the form of society, state, and education.”⁹⁵

The identification of culture as the primary site of political contestation was formulated by Nietzsche in a way intended to revive the 2,500-year-old rivalry between the politician and the theorist, between the bios praktikos and the bios theoretikos. The one stood for the man of action who sought power to accomplish some deed that left a mark on society. The man of theory, in contrast, knew what society needed, but, unless he could establish some working relationship with the man of action, he would remain a mere observer.

Nietzsche took up the challenge of trying to discover a role for the thinker that mattered politically. The “contemplative,” as Nietzsche calls the “higher human being,” suffers from “a delusion.” The contemplative fancies himself a mere passive observer, “a spectator and listener who has been placed before the great visual and acoustic spectacle that is life …” In reality he is possessor of the “vis creativa,” or creative power, that the active type lacks. Those who “think and feel … continually fashion something that had not been there before, the whole eternally growing world of valuations, colors, perspectives, scales, affirmations, and negations.” While the active men merely translate these creations into “flesh,” it is “we” who “gave and bestowed value” upon a world otherwise devoid of it. “Only we have created the world that concerns man.”⁹⁶ In the role-reversal of thinker and doer the thinker is depicted as the “hard” one who “lives dangerously,” who carries “heroism into the search for knowledge and will wage wars for the sake of ideas and their consequences”; the politician is merely adept at catering to the rabble.⁹⁷

XII. THE CRISIS OF NIHILISM

Thus just as Marx had attributed to homo faber the demiurgic power to bring the material world into existence and to sustain it by ever-increasing prodigies of production, Nietzsche proposes homo creativus as his worthy rival, a world-creator of value, beauty, and meaning, the stuff of great culture. And just as Marx’s concepts of class and relations of production served to politicize what had previously been understood primarily as economic relationships, so Nietzsche reads political notions of class, inequality, domination, war, and revolution into cultural relationships. The rivalry could not be represented more starkly than by the inescapably collective identity of Marx’s homo faber, the vast majority whose work exhausts the body and benumbs the mind; and Nietzsche’s homo creativus, the tiny minority that creates the values which delight the mind, especially the cultivated mind. Homo faber’s enemy is the Few who exploit the power of the Many; homo creativus, in turn, feels threatened by the Many—“all the swarming ‘cultured’ vermin who feast upon the sweat of every hero!”—who exploit and vulgarize the values created by the Few.98

The crisis of the modern world in Marx’s view was located in the “antagonism” between “the forces of production” and the constraints imposed by “the relations of production.” The resolution of the crisis required a revolution by the Many, not only to seize power but to transform themselves into self-conscious collective actors. Their triumph meant not only an end to pain and suffering but the opportunity to experience the great cultural treasures that the Few alone had enjoyed—and that Nietzsche would restrict to an even fewer Few.

For Nietzsche, the crisis was identified with the Few, in the intellectual ruling class, the cultured elites, and located in the changing relationships between moral values and truth. Throughout most of the past, truth had been the ally of morality, establishing its foundation, demonstrating its valuable social role, and proving its validity. “Truthfulness,” now, however, “has turned against morality,” exposing it as nothing more than “a partial perspective.” The revolt of truth has enabled “us” to use the “needs implanted by centuries of moral interpretation” and to redirect them so that they become “the needs for untruth.” The crisis takes the form of an “antagonism” but one that afflicts only the conscious Few or, rather, the bad conscience of the Few who can no longer “esteem” morality once they have become aware of “its shabby origin” in “the lies we should like to tell ourselves.” The Few are experiencing “a process of dissolution” in which “the universe seems to have lost value, seems ‘meaningless.’”⁹⁹

The condition, in which the moral and the phenomenological order seems to have collapsed, Nietzsche labeled “nihilism.” It is the intellectual’s counterpoint to Marx’s notion of the growing misery of the workers. There is loss of faith in “process” and “development” and a growing realization “that becoming aims at nothing and achieves nothing…”100 And the experience, like that of the oppressed worker, is potentially radicalizing because it brings disenchantment: the thinking man realizes that his faith (= false consciousness) in his own values had rested on an assumption about an underlying order that—had Nietzsche been Marx—could have been taken for the ideological fantasy of an exuberant capitalism:

a totality, a systematization, indeed any organization in all events, and underneath all events, and a soul that longs to admire and revere has wallowed in the idea of some supreme form of domination and administration.¹⁰¹

Nietzsche’s revolt against teleology and the received moral teachings became the basis of a call, not to revolution, but to counter-revolution on the part of those he calls “the underprivileged.” Where Marx had believed that suffering would promote solidarity among the workers, Nietzsche envisions the underprivileged being driven to “self-destruction” once they have seen through the sham of morality:

It was morality that protected life against despair and the leap into nothing, among men and classes who were violated and oppressed by men; for it is the experience of being powerless against men, not against nature, that generates the most desperate embitterment against existence. Morality treated the violent despots, the doers of violence, the “masters” in general as the enemy against whom the common man must be protected, which means first of all encouraged and strengthened. Morality consequently taught men to hate and despise most profoundly what is the basic character trait of those who rule: their will to power.¹⁰²

Once “the suffering and oppressed” lost faith in their “right” to despise the will-to-power, “they would enter the phase of hopeless despair.”¹⁰³ Nietzsche would welcome that development, not least because of the counter-revolutionary possibilities he saw in the “dissolution” of morality.

XIII. THE AESTHETE AND THE HERD

The sense in which Nietzsche’s continuous focus on power constitutes a theory, and what kind of theory it is, might be approached through a contrast with Machiavelli, a political theorist he greatly admired. Nietzsche’s theory, like Machiavelli’s, takes the form of a series of strategies for attacking, undermining, and conquering. That Nietzsche, unlike Machiavelli, was concerned with ideas rather than with gaining principalities or revitalizing republics points to the crucial difference in their modes of theoretical action: Machiavelli’s actor wanted to exploit, that is, to incorporate and utilize the resources of his foes: his power increased when he annexed the power or resources of rivals. Nietzsche, too, will use comparable terms in describing how the “spirit” could appropriate what is “foreign” to it and feel its powers increased, yet a vital difference remains. Machiavelli counseled his prince to eliminate only those opponents who were potential conspirators, while Nietzsche wanted to obliterate enemies because their weakness posed a threat of contagion.

There were two sharply contrasting themes that alternately lent coherence and dissonance to the Nietzschean struggles for power. One motif was aesthetic, the other biological and physicalist. Nietzsche’s criticisms are consistently colored by aesthetic revulsion at vulgarity, banality, by what is common, ordinary, and malodorous:

Books for all the world [to read] are always foul smelling books: the smell of small people clings to them. Where the people eat and drink, even where they venerate, it usually stinks.104

“… [I]t is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world are eternally justified.”¹⁰⁵ The aesthetic sensibility is far from being power-innocent, mere dandyism. Nietzsche described artistic creativity as “intoxication:”

[Its] essence … is the feeling of plenitude and increased energy. From out of this feeling one gives to things, one compels them to take, one rapes them … The man in this condition transforms things until they mirror his power—until they are reflections of his perfection. The compulsion to transform into the perfect is—art.¹⁰⁶

The philosopher serves for Nietzsche, as he had for Plato, as the one to transform creativity into political force:

Genuine philosophers, however, are commanders and legislators: They say “thus it shall be.” They first determine the Whither and For What of man, and in so doing have at their disposal all philosophical laborers, all who have overcome the past. With a creative hand they reach for the future, and all that is and has been becomes a means for them, an instrument, a hammer. Their “knowing” is creating, their creating is a legislation, their will to truth is—will to power.¹⁰⁷

But while Nietzsche, like Plato, may have imposed aesthetic demands on politics, his aestheticism was the precise opposite of Plato’s. That difference was at the center of The Birth of Tragedy, in the vivid contrast between the Apollonian urge for form and reason (which Nietzsche associates with the political) and the Dionysian drive for transgression and ecstasy. Clearly Plato, with his preoccupation with boundaries of containment and with the sovereignty of reason over desire, was Apollo incarnate, while Nietzsche, with his sharp attacks on the pretensions of reason and his unrelenting efforts to restore the “natural,” was Dionysus, albeit a Dionysus who yearned for a harmonious union with Apollo.¹⁰⁸ Nietzsche’s combination of nihilism and pessimism can be seen as an attempt to lay down the terms of a new politics that would simultaneously attract (“seduce” in his words) a new elite and upset “the democratic herd” by striking at its most cherished beliefs.109

The herd has, in the form of democracy, made a politics for itself, a politics of mass parties, elections, representation, political and civil liberties, and constitutional restraints upon power, as well as a supporting culture of public education, popular literature, arts and crafts, and civic religion. Nietzsche described those achievements as “the historical form of the decay of the state.”¹¹⁰

If one spends oneself on power, grand politics, economic affairs, world commerce, parliamentary institutions, military interests—if one expends in this direction the quantum of reason, seriousness, will, self-overcoming that one is, then there will be a shortage in the other direction [of culture]. Culture and the state … are antagonists: the “cultural state” is merely a modern idea. The one lives off the other, the one thrives at the expense of the other. All great cultural epochs are epochs of political decline; that which is great in the cultural sense has been unpolitical, even anti-political …¹¹¹

XIV. THE POLITICS OF CULTURE

Thus precisely because the political and the cultural have become joined and democratized, culture has to be reclaimed and made into a critical weapon for uncoupling the links. Nietzsche is the first major theorist to claim that culture replaced the political, that it has become the crucial battleground of politics and theory, and not, as the political had ideally signified, the site of reconciliation. Popular culture is seen not as the ensemble of habits, beliefs, and practices that helped to maintain political commonality but as the will-to-power crystallized by the ressentiment of the weak. The critique of popular culture starts from the standpoint of a “higher” culture, higher because it is knowledgeable about the history of “great” cultural achievements, about the history of the “rare.” Politics is relocated accordingly and reconstituted. Its relocation calls for the inscription of politics into culture and making culture the realized expression of a superior will-to-power. What is at stake in the dismissal of a whole historical vocabulary of commonality—justice, rights, and equal citizenship—is the reinstatement of exclusionary politics.

The Nietzschean reconstitution of politics as Kulturkampf requires a ground on which to establish a new form of rule and begin recruitment of a new elite.¹¹² Culture, in its “high” expressions, is the chosen site for contestation. High culture is the world of ideas, aesthetics, literature, music, Sophoclean tragedy, and philosophy. That realm affords the elite a clear advantage that leaves ordinary people handicapped. High culture establishes not only superiority but “a pathos of distance” from the herd and its corrupting influence.¹¹³ A Marxist might note that high culture gives intellectual elites an illusion of power, it being the one form of property that they “own:” they are the instruments of cultural production. Culture is also a way of reasserting the primacy of some elites over others: of aesthetes, for instance, who have been elbowed aside by modern scientists, inventors, economists, and other creatures of a demotic culture.

High culture served Nietzsche as the weapon for striking at the vitals of low or popular culture and at the democratization of the political that accompanied the spread of enlightenment to “lower” classes throughout the nineteenth century.114 His aggressive declaration “God is dead!” was an attack not only upon theism but, more important, upon the comforting, populist assumption of Western religions that mankind lived in a meaningful world expressly designed for human habitation. Nietzsche’s attack was meant to hurry the crisis by tormenting the herd to desperation and self-destruction. Nihilism stands for a “symptom that the underprivileged have no comfort left; that they destroy in order to be destroyed … by compelling the powerful to become their hangmen.”¹¹⁵

It was not alone the metaphysical comfort of the Many that Nietzsche sought to disturb but the solidity of the factual world on which common sense relies. Reliance upon facticity creates what Nietzsche saw as an alliance between the herd and modern science based on a shared belief in the irreducibly factual/prosaic character of the world. Science and common sense are seen as enemies of the unique. For the herd what is “true” is what is attested to by every normal person; for the scientist it is what is demonstrably the case and replicable. Nietzsche rejected the notion that facts had any special status. The idea of a fact is simply another construction, another interpretation. By that move power is transferred. Fact becomes a weapon in the arsenal of those with interpretive power and disarms those who had used it to win popular support or promote agreement.

Nietzsche never directly addressed the herd, though clearly he counted on their learning indirectly of his subversive teachings from journalists, Nietzsche’s modern equivalent to Plato’s rhetoricians.¹¹⁶ For while he wants to unnerve the Many and to bait them, thereby raising the stakes for the elite, he also needs them, not as a worthy antagonist but as an unworthy yet immensely powerful enemy. The “impatient spirits” who “delight in madness” must cultivate a certain stolidity “to make sure that those faithful to the great shared faith stay together and continue their dance.” “We” who are “the exception and the danger” must not seek “to become the rule.”¹¹⁷

Without the continuing presence of the herd, cultural elitism would clearly be an incoherent notion.¹¹⁸ Accordingly, Nietzsche teaches doctrines meant to perplex or confuse rather than persuade. The Many are told of a world that is completely contingent, where the self has no stability, “the subject as multiplicity,”¹¹⁹ and values enjoy no special status; where Christianity has elevated “the lowliest into the standard ideal of all values [and] called it God”;¹²⁰ and where the reliability of the everyday world becomes uncertain because the idea of an objective fact is a subjective construction.

The precise sense in which the critique of culture paves the way for a certain politics derives from the destructive character of Nietzsche’s criticisms and their targets. The deliberate undermining of popular moral and political beliefs serves to relax the controls they exert, thereby creating a void, an unpreempted space for new powers. The politics of cultures thus represents a strategy for dissolving the power formations built upon existing values and beliefs. An elite becomes not a preference but the necessary accompaniment to that strategy.

XV. A NEW ELITE

My ideas do not revolve around the degree of freedom that is granted to [individualistic and collectivistic morality], to the one or to the other or to all, but around the degree of power that the one or the other should exercise over others or over all, and to what extent a sacrifice of freedom, even enslavement, provides the basis for the emergence of a higher type. Put in the crudest form: how could one sacrifice the development of mankind to help a higher species than man to come into existence?

—Nietzsche.121

Nietzsche’s politics can be characterized as a project for a wholly unique utopia, an ideal state for a permanently alienated intellectual elite that is estranged not only from society but, in a tormented way, from a now foundationless intellectualism of its own making. A disillusioned Prometheus, the elite is bound to and by its own intellectualism: it can do no other. Unlike Plato’s philosophers, who divided their lives between ruling and contemplation, Nietzsche’s superior men must rail furiously at society, and continuously, knowing no rest even in withdrawal, all the while proclaiming possession of the terrible truth that the world is lies:

… I am the opposite of a No-saying spirit … I know tasks of such elevation that any notion of them has been lacking so far; only beginning with me are there hopes again. For all that, I am necessarily the man of calamity. For when truth enters into a fight with the lies of millennia, we shall have upheavals, a convulsion of earthquakes, a moving of mountains and valleys, the like of which has never been dreamed of. The concept of politics will have merged with a war of spirits; all power structures of the old society will have been exploded—all of them are based on lies: there will be wars the like of which have never yet been seen on earth. It is only beginning with me that the earth knows great politics.¹²²

Whatever hopes Nietzsche had for the future were vested in the possibility of creating a new elite. He gave that elite various names: “new philosophers,” superior men (Übermenschen), free spirits. His characterization of them was always a paradoxical combination of anti-naturalism and naturalism, of hyper-intellectualism and crude biologism. Thus in one description of “the noble mode of thought” of the future philosopher he writes:

… [it] believes in slavery and in many degrees of bondage as the precondition of every higher culture; [practices] a creative mode of thought … that does not posit the happiness of repose … as a goal for the world, and honors even in peace the means to new wars.123

Nietzsche envisaged a philosophical elite that would prove itself worthy by embracing the central tenet of nihilism, the meaninglessness of the world. His test was to discover how much fear, terror, and anxiety the elite can endure.¹²⁴ The supreme test for the philosophers is to accept, even exult in, the destruction of that which, as lovers of truth, they had held most dear. Nihilism begins with the announcement of “the end of the moral interpretation of the world” and the “suspicion that all interpretations of the world are false” and culminates in the exhortation to a distinctive form of action, the deliberate transgression of prevailing norms.¹²⁵ Nihilism means “that the highest values devaluate themselves.”¹²⁶ The highest values become self-subverting.

Destruction is a vital rite of purification, an essential step towards health. Nietzsche’s nihilism is, in part, a call to destroy the values by which the theoretical life has been lived, to restore instinct and heal the wounds inflicted by the intellect. “The history of philosophy is a secret war raging against the preconditions of life, against the value feelings of life …”¹²⁷ We need, he declared, “untruth.” Nihilism is the despair of an elite, the projection of those who have learned that, by some measure, every truth can be shown to be untrue or doubtful. Truth is a construction, “a consequence of the cultivation of ‘truthfulness’ …” “Radical nihilism is the conviction of an absolute untenability of existence when it comes to the highest values one recognizes; plus the realization that we lack the least right to posit a beyond or an in-itself …”¹²⁸

Nihilism represents an intellectualist version of revolutionary action that turns the world upside down: symbolic gestures that violate what society regards as true in order to proclaim the truth of “untruth.” Action takes the form of transvaluation, or going beyond conventional values, beyond especially the “normal” understanding of good and evil. “There is nothing to life that has value, except the degree of power—assuming that life itself is the will to power.”¹²⁹

The ultimate expression of nihilism “in its most terrible form” is the idea of “eternal recurrence:” “existence as it is, without meaning or aim, yet recurring inevitably without any finale of nothingness …”¹³⁰ Once the meaninglessness of existence is widely broadcast, human beings will revolt against existence and thereby provoke an apocalypse:

What does “underprivileged” mean? Above all, physiologically—no longer politically. The unhealthiest kind of man in Europe (in all classes) furnishes the soil for this nihilism … [O]ne no longer shrinks from any action; not to be extinguished passively but to distinguish everything that is so aim[less] and meaningless, although this is a mere convulsion, a blind rage at the insight that everything has been for eternities—even this moment of nihilism and lust for destruction. It is the value of such a crisis that it purifies, that it pushes together related elements that perish of each other … and promotes an order of rank according to strength, from the point of view of health.131

XVI. THE THEORIST OF ANTI-THEORY

What is attacked deep down today is the instinct and the will of tradition; all institutions that owe their origins to this instinct violate the taste of the modern spirit.—At bottom nothing is thought and done without the purpose of eradicating this sense for tradition.

—Nietzsche¹³²

The irony of Nietzsche’s status in postmodern thought—he, the greatest of all iconoclasts now iconized, undercriticized, and overauthoritative—is equalled only by the irony of his admirers’ eagerly embracing “theory.”¹³³ Not only had he scorned the idea of followers, but he made a major project of demolishing the idea of theory and the traditions it had inspired. That project was remarkable in the specific sense that ever since Plato had invented the notion of philosopher-kings, intellectual elitism had been linked with various types of theoretical knowledge, such as philosophy, theology, science, mathematics, or, later, economics and social science. In no province was that association older or more intimate than in politics (politike theoretike).

The theoretical enterprise, Nietzsche asserted, was founded upon an illusion first foisted on the world by Socrates and Plato, and thereafter elevated to the status of a cultural first principle and celebrated as the fulfillment of the human mind. Beginning with the ancients, theorists had described theorizing as an act of “unveiling” that revealed the principle underlying all existence, which Nietzsche described trenchantly but not inaccurately:

This illusion consists in the imperturbable belief that, with the clue of logic, thinking can reach the nethermost depths of being, and that thinking can not only perceive being but even modify it.¹³⁴

That claim, Nietzsche declared, was empty because there was no ultimate reality for thinking to contact other than the one it had constructed. The world and thinking were not such that the structure of the one corresponded to the constructs of the other. Nietzsche’s main point, however, was not that theorists were bent on duping everyone else, as though they really knew better. What they had represented as timeless truths should not be classified as a purely epistemological claim. Instead, Nietzsche argued, epistemological claims should be understood in hyper-political terms, as the expression of the philosopher’s will-to-power. Theory was rooted in an urge to dominate: while this urge was not peculiar to theorists, they were remarkable for the skill by which they had managed to persuade others of the overriding political and cultural importance of theoretical truths. All truth-claims, Nietzsche insisted, are partial perspectives reflective of some person’s or group’s drive to dominate:

every center of force … construes all the rest of the world from its own viewpoint, i.e., measures, feels, forms, according to its own force … [Each] specific body strives to extend its force—its will to power and to thrust back all that resists its extension.135

Not only were all truths relative, but each theory was ultimately autobiographical, indicative of a particular subject’s power-needs.¹³⁶

How does perspectivism serve to privilege the theorist, the idea-man whom Nietzsche has stripped of his historical identity as truth-teller? Each person, Nietzsche avers, “contains a vast confusion of contradictory valuations and, consequently, of contradictory drives.” Contradictions are “a great method of acquiring knowledge,” for they eventually stimulate a going beyond such conventional notions as the absolute distinction between good and evil or of truth and untruth. “The wisest man would be the one richest in contradictions,” the one capable of acquiring and relishing new and different perspectives.¹³⁷ Who more skillful at that than theoretical, self-conscious man, and who more inept than atheoretical, unself-conscious, ordinary man?¹³⁸

Although Nietzsche’s critique might be described as a theoretical subversion of theory by anti-theory, its aim was to liberate theory by undeceiving the theorist, dissolving the unity of theory and truth in order to reveal the dazzling range of expressive modes made available once the model of a depersonalized self, disinterestedly serving the common good, had been overthrown. Nietzsche did not dismiss altogether the idea of truth. He sought to reveal the truth of the untruth of theory, to expose what it really is, and to declare what real values are needed to revive culture.

Nietzsche tried to demonstrate his teaching through a variety of poses by which he displayed himself as the antithesis of homo theoreticus—as prophet, seer, dancer, poet, magician, savior. Despite the iconoclasm, the poses were mimetic of his predecessors: of Socrates’ oracular moments, of the demos-phobic Plato (“a species of conquering and ruling natures in search of material to mold” that needs a “lower species” as “a base”),¹³⁹ the suffering Jesus who offers others rebirth (“Now I bid you lose me and find yourselves; and only when you have all denied me will I return to you”),140 the political immoralist (“the type of perfectionism in politics … is Machiavellianism”),¹⁴¹ and the destructive Bakunin (“we have to be destroyers”).¹⁴² There is even an ocular moment in which Nietzsche fancies himself as “the eye of Zarathustra.” That conceit is but an appropriation of the all-seeing god of the Old Testament, “an eye that beholds the fate of man at a tremendous distance.”¹⁴³ The one constant in all of these poses was self-dramatization, an insistence that readers not only attune themselves to Nietzsche’s voice but experience him as a charismatic presence—and a threat.

Paradoxically Nietzsche based his challenge to the tradition of theory upon an age-old contrast, between revelation and reason.¹⁴⁴ For the ordinary understanding, revelation means announcing a unique truth; for Nietzsche, a unique person: he was the truth of anti-truth. Nietzsche, the self-proclaimed Anti-Christ, would reveal not another god but a self: “Seeing that before long I must confront humanity with the most difficult demand ever made of it, it seems indispensable to me to say who I am.”¹⁴⁵ Nietzsche’s revelation, as he clearly realized, was incomprehensible without the tradition it combats, a tradition in which depersonalization was postulated as a pre-condition of the vocation of truth-seeker.

Ironically for those followers, such as Foucault, who have gone to great lengths to deflate the puffery of the “sovereign theorist” who presumes to have discovered an encompassing system of truth, Nietzsche’s project was even more comprehensive: the destruction of entire systems—moral, religious, and epistemological. Yet for all his efforts at demolishing the tradition of theorizing, few thinkers have as faithfully followed one of its generic forms, theory conceived as a mixed mode in which inquiry is performed. There had been theorists before Nietzsche who had depicted themselves as Suffering Servants, had assaulted established pieties, and had transgressed the boundaries between thought and action while proclaiming thought to be not only a species of action but its most splendid form, “the supreme deed,” the epical triumph over entrenched powers.¹⁴⁶ The scale of Nietzsche’s labors exceeds or at least rivals that of the most hubristic theorists—of a Hobbes or a Hegel—but, more important, it suggests a lesson: that dismantlng theory, deconstructing the entire enterprise of Western culture, is a project as grandly presumptuous and totalizing as any of the canonical constructions ridiculed by Nietzsche’s postmodern heirs.

Theory is not so much overthrown by anti-theory as it is peeled back. What is then left exposed? In place of theory Nietzsche attempted to revive myth, seeing in its aesthetic properties a more intimate expression of nature and a capacity, which neither philosophy nor science possessed, for healing the suffering consequent to the rupture with nature.¹⁴⁷ Although Plato had incorporated myth, as in the figure of the demiurge of the Timaeus, or as in the myth of the metals in Republic, he had taken care to subordinate myth to philosophy. Nietzsche set out to reverse matters, to undo that historical accomplishment by first creating a thought-form to fill the new emptiness and then acting it out as if he had sunk past accomplishments without a trace. Instead of Plato’s philosophizing of myth, myth-philosophicus, Nietzsche further mythified the hybrid, reducing philosophy while elevating aestheticism into a heroic mode.

XVII. REDISCOVERING MYTH

One of the distinctive marks of twentieth-century totalitarian movements was an obsession with inventing ideal origins and thereby signalling the intention of expunging the corrupting influences that had intervened between a pure “then” and a repurifying “now.” For the Nazis it was a pure Aryan or primitive Teutonic past; for the Italian Fascists it was ancient Rome. For Nietzsche, the classical philologist and the flower of a culture in which Hellenism was a defining element, it was the ancient Greeks who, “as charioteers, hold in their hands the reins of our own and every other culture.”148

That choice of pure origin was a striking combination of highly self-conscious intellectualism and a revolt against it. For Nietzsche it was more than choice. It was achieved by an insistent, aggressive reversal of perspectives that set out to dethrone the idealized Greece of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle constructed by scholars and philosophers, and to substitute an alternative pre-Socratic world of myth, early Greek drama, primitive orgies of release—a mythopoeic world of natural vitality, uninhibited, frenzied, transgressive, the expression of “the contrast between the real truth of nature and the lie of culture.”¹⁴⁹ “Culture” is the embodiment of decadence, of the defeat of the natural by the anti-natural, by the moralizing, rationalizing, form-and-boundary consciousness.

Nietzsche dramatized the opposition in his famous antithesis of Apollo and Dionysus. In that drama the two opposites coexisted briefly in fruitful tension, and for one glorious moment the Dionysian achieved its finest expression in the Old Tragedy of Aeschylus and Sophocles. However, it was routed by an alliance that saw Euripidean drama serve as the mouthpiece for Socratic rationalism and as the complement to the political emergence of the demos.

The figure of Dionysus reappears throughout virtually all of Nietzsche’s writings. Although its symbolic meaning came to acquire several shades of emphasis, the Dionysian never lost its association with the natural or its critical thrust against the culture of rationalism, optimism, and moralism. Yet there was a deep paradox. The Dionysian contains a powerful drive towards oneness that expresses Nietzsche’s yearning for the communalism and primal unity achieved in “the work of art” and the frenzy of dance and song by which “all the rigid hostile barriers between man and man are broken”;¹⁵⁰ yet it coexisted with an even deeper loathing of all that is common and shared, as represented by the everyday world of “state and society.”¹⁵¹

That Nietzsche retained the myth of Dionysus throughout his writings points to the persistently archaic character of his politics. Its hero is Prometheus. For Nietzsche the core of the Promethean myth “is that the best and highest that men can acquire they must obtain by a crime.”152 The resort to myth opens up a range of dramatic possibilities denied to methodical philosophy. The language of myth enables one to speak of terror, of suffering, of pain, of intellectual crime, of struggling against the gods, and to serialize the episodes into a continuing saga, a narrative of epical encounters, deep wounds, and defeats by and triumphs over enemies of power and cunning.

… a preference for questionable and terrifying things is a symptom of strength; while a taste for the pretty and dainty belongs to the weak and delicate. It is the heroic spirits who say Yes to themselves in tragic cruelty; they are hard enough to experience suffering as a pleasure.¹⁵³

Nietzsche believed that only the aesthetic, as revealed in poetry, tragedy, and music, could redeem existence.¹⁵⁴ But like Plato, who—though demoting the aesthetic proceeded to practice it in the dramas of his dialogues—took great pains to incorporate an ascetic, Spartan character to his ideal polity, Nietzsche felt compelled to proclaim the manliness of his vision as though to ward off charges of being effete or effeminate.¹⁵⁵ Where then did Nietzsche locate his “Sparta”?

XVIII. THE MAKING OF THE HERD

The ultimate stake in Nietzsche’s indictment of theory and revival of myth was not this or that system of philosophy, politics, science, or ethics, but the deleterious consequences for the biologic health of the species that resulted when the vita contemplativa was exalted as the best way of life, and its values, of objective, universal truth and disinterested truth-seeking, were installed as the finest realization of human potentialities. The most important consequence, according to Nietzsche, of claims such as that of Aristotle, that motionless, theoretical contemplation is superior to political action and to war-making because it has no aim beyond itself,¹⁵⁶ was deterioration among the “natural” aristocracies who had once ruled society by their heroism, their willingness to take risks, and their sheer physical prowess. Deterioration would be played out, in Nietzsche’s account, as a form of politics in which aesthetic, religious, and moral values were developed as weapons: first as a struggle between elites (dramatized, for example, by Plato in the Gorgias) but then broadened when the masses were courted by elites (as by the figure of Protagoras in Plato’s dialogue of that name) or by early Christianity—“the meek shall inherit the earth.”

The invention of truth, Nietzsche averred, had been turned against myth, robbing humanity of spiritual resources for dealing with a meaningless world for which the tragedian was a surer guide than the philosopher. According to Nietzsche’s narrative, an ascetically inclined remnant had broken off from the aristocracy and from the philosophical elite of Plato and discovered the power latent in mass belief. That power was mobilized and then tapped by the cultural invention of popular religious ethics. Theory, having emasculated the Few and undermined warrior-culture, then negotiated an alliance with the Many. The remnant turned itself into a priestly caste and proceeded to in-form the Many with the self-denying values of “morality” and “goodness,” values diametrically opposed to the warrior code of struggle and conquest. Nietzsche characterized that development as an alliance between the “ascetic priests” and the “sick herd.” The invention of ethics destroyed the culture of the nobility by another invention, “conscience.” It served to infect and enfeeble the aristoi by the notion of guilt, thereby preparing the way for the elevation of the bovine virtues of meekness, suffering, humility, and forgiveness.

With the appearance of the masses, first in the form of Christianity, then of democracy and socialism, an agonistic culture is succeeded by one of passivity and resentment, the culture of the Many. A herd morality, such as Christianity, not only enfeebled the Many but encouraged a culture of resentment whose members felt threatened by anyone challenging or deviating from its norms of mediocrity. Ressentiment was the masses’ will-to-power, their defense against superiority and excellence.157

The effect of centuries of moral instruction was to constitute calculable human beings who could be relied upon to keep promises, carry out contracts, and obey rules without the expenditure of continuous force. The “natural” instinctual character of man became a source of shame and inhibition and an object of repression. Western mankind evolved into a stunted mass, comfortable in its egalitarianism, stirred only by suspicion of all superiorities.

XIX. MYTH AND THEORY

We owe it to Napoleon … that we now confront a succession of a few warlike centuries that have no parallel in history … [W]e have entered the classical age of war, of scientific and at the same time popular war on the largest scale (in weapons, talents, and discipline). All coming centuries will look back with envy and awe for its perfection … [Napoleon] brought back a whole slab of antiquity … And who knows whether this slab of antiquity might not finally become master again over the national movement … [W]hat he wanted was one unified Europe … —as mistress of the earth.

—Nietzsche¹⁵⁸

It has sometimes been suggested that the true Nietzsche might have been discovered sooner save for the misguided efforts of his sister to offer him in a bowdlerized version to the Nazis as their precursor.159 That apologia, however, too easily glides over passages in which Nietzsche glorifies militarism, “blond beasts of prey,” and “supermen,” while disparaging “shopkeepers, Christians, cows, women, Englishmen and other democrats.”¹⁶⁰

Nietzsche’s political hopes were founded upon what might be called a theorized myth. For myth to be retrieved, the conditions for its reappearance must be the obverse of the conditions that caused it to disappear or prevented it from appearing. One name for those conditions would be philosophy; another would be modern science. Early on, philosophy and science defined their projects in opposition to myth and heralded their own emergence as signifying the end of myth. Other than assigning it an underground existence (e.g., witchcraft), one could resuscitate the mythic simply by overriding the boundaries by which anti-myth had tried to contain or eliminate it. Nietzsche’s strategy was bolder. He attempted to weaken the authorities that defined the boundaries. One tactic was perspectivism, which rejected the idea of a final, objective authority.¹⁶¹ But he also dissolved the boundaries by claiming that all efforts at explanation were necessarily mythologizing.¹⁶²

The radically theoretical character of Nietzsche’s myth-making was not in his subversion of philosophy, nor even in the irreducibly theoretical techniques he employed (e.g., categories of naturalism and anti-naturalism, rationalism and irrationalism). Nietzsche’s theorizing returns to myth and distills a meaning from a selected form of it, but he had to preserve theory in order to perpetuate the struggle against it. The enterprise of conceiving myth is, ineluctably, post-mythical, not a mythical creation. The political meanings that theory distills from myth do not precede the modern experience of the political but necessarily follow it, although the endeavor seeks to give the impression of getting behind, or shedding the modern.

The totalitarian character of Nietzsche’s myth–theoreticus et politicus first took shape in The Birth of Tragedy. There Nietzsche set out to trace the origins and evolution of tragedy. He found it in the Dionysian myth, which he interpreted as an orgiastic, boundary-transgressing expression of “a mystic feeling of Oneness.” Through primitive song and dance “man expressed himself as a member of a higher community.”¹⁶³ Dionysian tragedy dissolved “state and society” and “the gulf between man and man.” The central element of Old Tragedy was the role of myth as the healing force that enabled man to live with the horrors of nature. Art’s representations of “the sublime” saved man from paralysis in the face of “the destructive process of history and the cruelty of nature”; and by its representations of the comic it provided release from “the nausea of the absurd.”¹⁶⁴ However, Nietzsche chose not to dwell upon the alleged horrors of nature but turned towards those of its opposite, civilization. The shift was towards auto-creation inspired by a myth of rebellion.

The new stance was announced in Nietzsche’s claim to have uncovered a later variation on the Dionysian myth in Aeschylus’s version of the Prometheus legend. By daring to depict a rebellion against the gods, “the Titanic artist discovered in himself a bold confidence in his ability to create man and at least destroy the gods.”165 Prometheus was a powerful image for the young Marx, who also saw rebellion as the means of auto-creation. Marx broadened the myth, enlisting Promethean revolt in the cause of all of humanity in the inclusive Enlightenment sense; Nietzsche, in contrast, parochialized the myth to the point of racializing it.

Nietzsche declared the Promethean myth, with its revelation that the gods were man’s creation, to be “the original possession of the entire Aryan race, and documentary evidence of its capacity for the profoundly tragic.” He contrasted the Aryan myth, and its teaching about “irreconcilable antagonism between man and God,” with the “Semitic” counterpart, the “myth of the fall of man.” The Semitic myth reflected the “preeminently feminist passions” of curiosity, weakness, and wantonness,” while “the innermost core of the Promethean myth” is “active sin,” “the necessity for crime imposed on the titanically striving individual.”¹⁶⁶

When Nietzsche turned to describing the downfall of Aeschylean tragedy and blaming Euripides, the political enemy comes into focus. The enemy’s identity was revealed in the architecture of the Greek theater. The common spectator was seated so as to “overlook … the entire world of culture around him,” and he was thereby stimulated to “an overabundance of contemplation.”¹⁶⁷ The seating arrangements thus heralded the appearance of the demos and its appropriation of distance and contemplation, the trademarks and prerogatives of the philosopher.

Nietzsche used Greek drama to attack Greek democracy, but not quite as Plato had in portraying the “theatrocracy” of a mindless, undisciplined rabble, the incarnation of anti-philosophy. Plato had associated democracy and the theater with a common enmity towards philosophy. For Nietzsche there had been a convergence between the democratization of the polis-theater and philosophy’s penetration of tragedy in the form of “Socratism” that rendered all three complicit. Euripides figured in both developments. He killed tragedy. “Through him the average man forced his way from the spectators’ benches to the stage itself.” What was occurring in the theater was transmitted into politics: “… from [Euripides] the people have learned how to observe, debate, and draw conclusions according to the rules of art and with the cleverest sophistries.” Nietzsche then bitingly describes what he saw as the triumph of the “slaves”:

Civic mediocrity, on which Euripides built all his political hopes, was now given a voice, while heretofore the demigod in tragedy and the drunken satyr or demiman, in comedy, had determined the character of the language … Euripides prides himself on having portrayed the common, familiar, everyday life and activities of the people, about which all are qualified to pass judgment. If now the entire populace philosophizes, manages land and goods, and conducts law-suits with unheard of circumspection, the glory is all his, together with the splendid results of the wisdom with which he has inoculated the rabble.168

XX. LOOKING FOR A NEW DIONYSIUS

Critical totalitarianism has a vision of the future. It is of catastrophism, of a climactic moment when a morally bankrupt civilization is confronted with a showdown: “The period of catastrophe: the advent of a doctrine that sifts men—driving the weak to decisions, and the strong as well.”¹⁶⁹ The cleansing, revitalizing power that is to overcome decadence is not provided by ideas; ideas are merely the means for promoting an element of barbarism that exults in physical strength and trumpets the primordial, the biological, life itself. Opposing the homogenized world and its befuddled, “blinking” representative will be “the last man,” “a higher sovereign species”:

Not merely a master race whose sole task is to rule, but a race with its own sphere of life, with an excess of strength for beauty, bravery, culture, manners to the highest peak of the spirit.¹⁷⁰

The driving force behind totalitarian discourse is an intellectual elitism that feared the cultivated mind was being threatened by irrelevancy in a world progressively dominated by various forms of leveling: of tastes, of political power, morals, education, and culture. One recurrent expression of that animus—one found in Nietzsche—took the metaphorical form of complaining about the “heaviness” of modern society, its suffocating weight, and world-weariness. Heaviness is a metaphor for the oppressiveness of “mass society” and is favored by those weightless spirits who fancy themselves “dancers” or “tightrope walkers.” Another expression of that same animus—and also to be found in Nietzsche—was to lay much of the blame for this condition upon the French Revolution.¹⁷¹ That accusation, however, should not connect totalitarian discourse to the powerful counter-revolutionary tradition that emerged in the last decade of the eighteenth century and included theorists such as de Maistre, de Bonald, and Hegel. Although those writers were authoritarian in varying degrees, they could not contemplate the theoretical and practical move, crucial to the totalitarian, of integrating the “mass” activated by the American and French revolutions; rather the masses were for fearing and loathing, not for exploitation. Critical totalitarian discourse and totalitarian practice kept the loathing—Nietzsche compared the mass to fleas¹⁷²—but put aside the fear, recognizing that the raison d’être for the elite required the presence of the mass. As Nietzsche put it:

In opposition to this dwarfing and adaptation of man to a specialized utility, a reverse movement is needed—the production of a synthetic, summarizing, justifying man for whose existence this transformation of mankind into a machine is a precondition, as a base on which he can invent his higher form of being.

He needs the opposition of the masses, of the “leveled,” a feeling of distance from them! he stands on them, lives off them.173

Unlike totalitarian practice, critical totalitarianism did not culminate in a vision of its elite directly ruling the masses. Nietzsche’s Übermenschen were not and could not be philosophers. For in a world where there are no universal standards of truth but only perspectives, the truth-seekers were only the illusionless Few who, nonetheless, must protest their purity even as they “stoop” for power:

Lust for power: but who shall call it lust, when the height longs to stoop down after power! Truly, there is no sickness and lust in such a longing and descent.¹⁷⁴

Such is their will-to-power that while the Few remained in their true element of social isolation, they would nonetheless connect with those who dominate society. Nietzsche thus perpetuated the intellectual’s oldest fantasy of manipulating the tyrant while escaping public accountability:

The highest men live beyond the rulers, freed from all bonds; and in the rulers they have their instruments.¹⁷⁵

XXI. NIETZSCHE AS POLITICAL ANALYST

Marx and Nietzsche: communism and totalitarianism played out first in the ghostly politics of the mind, in theory-politics, then as ghastly politics, the transference of caricature from its usual place, a frolic of the imagination, to a violation of normality so unimaginable as to leave the boundaries between the unreal and the real forever porous. If, paradoxically, Marx turns out to be the unhonored prophet of uncollapsible capitalism, what of Nietzsche? Here, too, a surprise: Nietzsche’s prophecy of the disintegration of the liberal-democratic state proved more prescient than Marx’s.

The principal support for this oddity is to be found in Nietzsche’s Human, All Too Human (sections 472–481). It represents one of the few occasions when Nietzsche addressed politics in its conventional forms. More surprising, a number of his themes intersect with some of Marx’s: the most arresting, a prophecy of the state’s disappearance that is analytically more suggestive than Marx’s intuition that eventually the state will wither away because its primary functions of repression will have become obsolete. For Marx class-domination, currently enforced by state protection of private ownership of the means of production, would end with the revolutionary abolition of that form of ownership and the substitution of social ownership. The implications of Marx’s formulation might be put this way: the disappearance of the state leads to the shrinking of the private and the expansion of the public in the form of administration of the economy. The bureaucratization of the public domain promotes the shrinking of the domain where the irrational held sway and the expansion of the sphere of rationality. At the same time, puzzlingly, Marx believed that the shrinking of the private and the expansion of the public-bureaucratic would democratize individualism, making the cultivation of a manysided personality accessible to all rather than to the privileged Few.

Virtually beginning with his first pronouncements on socialism Nietzsche labeled it “reactionary” in the literal sense. Socialism, he insisted, sought “an abundance of state power such as only despotism has ever had …” It aimed at the “annihilation of the individual” by making him “a useful organ of the community.” His prediction was that socialism would make a brief appearance “here and there” but only “through the exercise of the extremist terrorism.”176 If socialism is fated to be a bloody interlude in the history of the state rather than the composer of its epitaph, then the main drama remains focused on the state.

While Marx had linked the disappearance of the state to the expansion of social-ism, Nietzsche asserted that the state would shrink in scope owing to advancing democratization and the permutations that religion would undergo in response to growing secularization. Nietzsche attributed secularization not to the diffusion of scientific values but to the installation of the demos as political sovereign. Popular sovereignty signified the ushering in of an era of leveling, with no exceptions for “higher” powers.

Nietzsche was eerily prophetic about phenomena that a later age would describe as “the rise of the Christian Right” and “the growth of religious fundamentalism.” He also suggested that the welfare state would eventually be stripped of many of its functions; these would be taken over by private agencies. These developments were, he maintained, interrelated. The powers of the sovereign state could not survive intact once it had been deprived of the mystique of superiority, the “Above and Below,” which religion alone could furnish.¹⁷⁷ At the onset of the democratic state, Nietzsche surmised, the religions that enjoyed preferred positions in various parts of Europe would splinter and preclude the existence of a “single unified policy” on religion henceforth. The resulting privatization of religions could follow two distinctly different directions. Either the governing group would appear hostile to religion in matters affecting public policies; or the people, still fervent believers, would react to the anti-religious views of their governors and turn “hostile to the state,” obstructing it whenever possible. That development “drives” the political elites to try and fill the religious “emptiness” of the state by cultivating “an almost fanatical enthusiasm for the state.”¹⁷⁸ Should the religious enthusiasts among the elites win out, an “enlightened despotism” might be established. However, should the anti-religious faction gain the upper hand, it would likely promote secularization and thereby expose the emptiness of the state, without an aura, and uninteresting. This would mark the inauguration of the strictly utilitarian state. Instead of ushering in a politics of reasonableness, the aura-less state is buffeted by fierce competition among groups seeking to exploit it for private ends. Politics assumes the form of a struggle to muster a majority, but each majority proves temporary and no party manages to do more than alternate with its rivals every few years.

None of the measures effected by a government will be guaranteed continuity; everyone will draw back from undertakings that require tending for decades or centuries if their fruits are to mature.179

The “certain” end to the politics of the temporary will be “distrust of all government” and the “resolve to do away with the concept of the state” and abolish “the distinction between public and private.”

Private companies will step by step absorb the business of the state: even the most resistant reminders of what was formerly the work of government (for example its activities designed to protect the private person) will in the long run be taken care of by private contractors.¹⁸⁰

•••

Nietzsche’s tormented genius, which has given posterity so many stunning insights, so much healthy provocation and puncturing of intellectual pretensions, and sheer wit, should be granted that peace he sought beyond the will-to-power:

Here I stand in the flaming surf whose white tongues are licking at my feet; from all sides I hear howling, threats, screaming, roaring coming at me … [Suddenly a symbol of tranquillity is spied, a white sailboat of] ghostly beauty. How magically it touches me! .. Not to be dead and yet no longer alive? A spiritlike intermediate being: quietly observing, gliding, floating … Yes! To move over existence! That’s it! That would be something.¹⁸¹

XXII. THE WILL-TO-POWER IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

[Nazi foreign policy was] in its form domestic policy projected outwards, which was able to conceal [überspielen] the increasing loss of reality only by maintaining political dynamism through incessant action. As such it became ever more distant from the chance of political stabilization.

—Hans Mommsen¹⁸²

The twentieth century demonstrated in abundance the varied forms that the totalizing will-to-power could assume: for example, wars that are by nature interminable—wars on drugs, terrorists—and the drive to invent ever more powerful weapons, even though existing stockpiles are sufficient to render the globe uninhabitable several times over.

Consider the modern competitive economy with its “takeovers,” mergers, media “empires,” successive technological revolutions, and frequent transformations, each more dynamic and expansive than the one displaced. Their common character is a dynamic that is law-breaking, or, in contemporary language, transgressive, boundary-defiant, disruptive of established life-forms, whether of norms, cultures, or skills. It is totalitarian in the attempt to impose its own activity as a universal (“globalization,” “global market”) with no alternatives except mordant ones (“no free lunches”). To be consistently transgressive, to be always projecting political power over conventional boundaries, to be pressing relentlessly for new opportunities for profit, to be searching methodically for new knowledge that will lead to new technologies all assume that existing limits of power can, with sufficient ingenuity and persistence, be pushed back. The peculiarity of totalitarianism: it is a totality with receding boundaries.

The problem that the totalitarian calculus of power sets for itself is to reduce or eliminate “resistance,” to make fear pervasive but not paralyzing, and then to reorganize what are now pliable “elements.” In its political version the story is sufficiently familiar: mass propaganda plus censorship, violence, terror, and torture. Under the Nazis these were the instruments of the regime. In societies advancing towards totality, where economy is predominant, fear appears as the by-product of systemic adjustments, in the normality of practices such as “restructuring” work, promoting technological obsolescence, or rendering employment and “benefits” insecure; tacitly allowing illegal immigrants to enter and then encouraging anti-immigrant politics and restrictive legislation—meanwhile the “native” labor force experiences declining wages and social benefits.

At the same time, the system never quite manages to find sufficient resources to eliminate the random terror and disorganized violence practiced in the streets. The ordinary citizen’s experience of arbitrary power (with the police or a social service agency or in most workplaces) combines with the cult of violence in the popular media to furnish plausible grounds for the regime of constitutional democracy to acquire unprecedented powers to punish; to imprison (prisons are doubly institutionalized forms of terror—inmates who brutalize each other also serve, at one and the same time, to threaten and reassure the outside world); or to gain unrivaled surveillance powers through government regulation of the globalized networks created by new communication methods.

The social and cultural complement takes the form of diminishing the power-resources of the modern popular consciousness through de-historicization and its replacement by a hegemony of the pure present. The culture produces “practical powerlessness” by erasing or radically reducing the dependence of practice upon time: promoting, not once but repeatedly, obsolescence of painstakingly acquired skills and understandings; or discouraging memory of older ways and experiences by sentimentalizing them (consider the musical Les Misérables and the “Disneyization” of The Hunchback of Notre Dame); or disrupting the kind of attachments developed over time (family, marriage) by imposing mobility upon the disintegrating fabric of ordinary life—President Clinton advised Americans that each could expect to hold “eleven different jobs” in the course of a lifetime.