The extreme right has picked up Nietzsche as an inspiration-again. Richard Spencer, a leader of the Alt-Right
movement in the United States, says he was awakened, “red pilled” by his study
of the philosopher; “to ‘red-pill’ is the slang in the Alt-Right movement that
refers to the moment when people see that all the ideals of liberal
democracy--equality, liberty, pluralism, and peace--are delusional, and that
the true reality of life is the racial and ethnic struggle for cultural
dominance.”[1] In our last post, we mentioned the key political difference between Nietzsche and Heidegger,
which is that Nietzsche was not a Nazi or any kind of anti-Semite, and
Heidegger was. That means that while Heidegger can simply be appropriated by
the very worst of the Alt-Right, Nietzsche may to be selectively appropriated,
interpreted, and recovered according to the distortions of both his earliest
publishers and of later
readings. Or not.
To Spencer we can say that Nietzsche "red pills"
everyone who reads him, whatever their political convictions. That effect is deliberate,
rhetorical; Nietzsche writes in a way that gives the reader a sense of being directly,
urgently, personally addressed by a brilliant friend who wants to awaken us
from our dogmatic slumber. The question is, what's the right interpretation? How should we respond to the appropriation of Nietzsche by the Alt-Right?
Nietzsche was a provocateur. That was
his intention, and he succeeded brilliantly at it. Much of his great success as a philosopher lies
in that provocation. But the
fact is that people take what politics they already had from these deliberately
polemical, inconsistent, contradictory writings. He himself warned his readers
about these risks, always inherent in language, always inherent in truth itself:
“Truth is a mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, anthropomorphisms, in short a
sum of human relations which have been subjected to poetic and rhetorical
intensification, translation and
decoration…”[2]
We are faced with the need both to interpret a very difficult philosopher, a deliberately difficult philosopher, whose writings while provocative and even inspirational are famously recalcitrant to clear interpretaton, and to address the history
of political readings and misreadings of his work. A hermeneutic task.
So it is that the
extreme right must ignore the scholarship of Walter Kaufmann and others like
him who showed that Nietzsche’s use by the Nazis required a distortion of his
philosophy, one already underway during his sister’s editing and publication.
It’s as if Nietzsche had been
rehabilitated and put to work by America’s leftist intellectuals, and must now
be retaken by the extreme right. Of course, the fact is that either left or
right can make use of any philosopher they wish, especially one whose political
implications are as wide-ranging and ambiguous as those of Nietzsche. This is all a continuation of the culture wars of the 80s. And what's at stake here is how elements of Nietzsche's philosophy are deployed in the framing
of the far-right narrative and program and what it means for politics; “…it would appear that ‘bad Nietzsche’
is back, and he looks a lot like he did in the early 20th century when his
ideas were unjustly appropriated by the (original) Nazis. So now’s a good time
to reengage with Nietzsche’s ideas and explain what the alt-right gets right
and wrong about their favorite philosopher.”
[2]. Friederich Nietzsche,
“On Truth and Lying in an Extra-Moral Sense” (1873) https://archive.org/stream/NietzscheOnTruthAndLying/nietzsche%20on%20truth%20and%20lying_djvu.txt
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