The Supreme Opponent

Interview with new German magazine "Nietzsche POParts"

The following interview was conducted by Henry Holland, a Nietzsche specialist and writer for a new German website and magazine entitled Nietzsche POParts. I’m happy to offer you an English excerpt of the interview and if you did not catch my interview with Nathan Robinson of Current Affairs you should check that out too (How to Read Nietzsche). It was quite intense to conduct this interview with Henry Holland because he read my work very deeply, and he seemed to genuinely enjoy the book, which is always nice. Like most Nietzscheans, Holland is scrupulous regarding footnotes and he emailed me multiple times to confirm references from points that I said spontaneously in our conversation, hence all of the footnotes you will see in the interview.

The conversation revolves quite a lot around my working-class origins, which I address in the book, and to which Holland took a particular fascination. I found it interesting to explore that theme given that I believe this category is dealt with in American contexts with repression and that a lot of social taboos are placed on class. Holland did not hesitate to dive into that topic and I am happy that he did.

We talk about my enthusiastic reading of Nietzsche in my late teens and early 20s and how Nietzsche's individualism distracted me from developing class consciousness. For this reason, one aim of my book is to build on the Marxist criticism of Nietzsche, as articulated by Georg Lukács, Geoff Waite and Domenico Losurdo and Kurt Eisner. Holland then asks me about my assessment of left-Nietzscheanism and Huey Newton (1942-1989), who is also discussed in the book.

The conversation then revolves around the extent to which the Nietzschean search for the realization of a "higher self" is or is not compatible with Marxist social criticism and how my "parasitic" reading of Nietzsche's elitist ideas are to be read as directed against the labor movement. Critically taking up the polemics of the contemporary right-Nietzschean Costin Alamariu, we discuss Nietzsche as a politically ambiguous defender of the individual and collective transgression of prevailing norms.

I. Nietzsche and the Working Class

Henry Holland: Thank you very much, Daniel – Daniel Tutt – for being with us for this blog and video interview. I came across your new book quite by chance after Micky Wierda from Repeater-Verlag suggested the work to me for a review. How to Read Like a Parasite: Why the Left Got High on Nietzsche was published as a paperback and e-book at the end of 2023. It takes readers on an intellectual journey across a vast steppe of modern intellectual history, in which political turning points – be it the Russian Revolution of 1917 or the riots of 1968 – are always present. Taken to this fascinating but also at times horrifying territory, readers also learn the stories of extraordinary Nietzschean actors. And last but not least, in the midst of this great history, the insights into your autobiography, which you repeatedly sprinkle in, often force a change of perspective. At this point, can you briefly reconstruct how your biography led you to Nietzsche and explain why your working-class background plays a key role in your arguments?

Daniel Tutt: First of all, thank you, it is an honour to enter into a dialogue with you. As you suggest, I read Nietzsche for the first time as a very young student, Beyond Good and Evil - and I understood almost nothing. But as with all of Nietzsche's texts - and because there is something about his attractive style - I felt compelled to read on and research what was actually going on in this extremely dynamic material. So it was something completely different from the usual Anglo-American analytical philosophy that I studied at university. And I was also interested in history and poetry, which went well together.

So I had this figure who came into my life who somehow satisfied all my professional interests and also had a very profound commentary on modern life, modern existence. Nietzsche blew me away in a way that only he can, and I think he also spoke to a feeling of restless excitement in me that I couldn't quite name or pinpoint.

You mentioned the “working class”: One of the particular absurdities of our current capitalism is that, in the understanding of many specialists, sociologists and even philosophers, there is no such thing as the “working class” anymore. This development has been taking shape over the last four generations since the Second World War. As a result of this development, the mere announcement that one comes from this “working class” is in itself a scandal. It means viewing one’s way of being from the perspective of a certain antagonism that is being suppressed by the status quo. Because the status quo does not want to see the world in classes. The status quo wants to see things in terms of individual, singular agents or actors who try to define themselves through their relationship to the market. There they also want to realize the “highest” version of their own “brand” – identical, according to this perspective, with their highest self.¹

But Nietzsche did not make me more class-conscious. I think that reading Nietzsche at that time dissuaded me from any formulation of class consciousness; however, it did equip me with the necessary tools to attempt to realize a higher and singular self. And that is why the title of my first chapter is: "We live in Nietzsche's world". That is precisely why I think his thinking is so relevant. Peter Sloterdijk says that Nietzsche's aim was to bring us the fifth gospel.² According to Sloterdijk, Nietzsche can therefore be seen as a prophet of our world today. And in doing so, Nietzsche also updates the Socratic maxim of expanding self-knowledge.³ But he adds something crucial to this important connection: those who strive for a higher self must take a dangerous path to progress. In other words: this path is only meant for a few. That was the appeal of reading Nietzsche for me as a young person: I wanted to reach my higher self and also be part of this Nietzschean community, which consisted of extraordinary personalities. And that brings us to the other major narrative thread of the book: Nietzsche—of all people—as a community-building philosopher.

If one follows my argument so far, then one must also admit that there is such a thing as Nietzscheanism, that Nietzsche was more than just a philosopher of thought experiments or a critic of metaphysics. And also more than a philosopher who seems like a pure hermit outside of politics, who can be "subtracted" from social life and who is out of date. ⁴ And finally, my book also raises the question of returning to Nietzsche once one has already familiarized oneself with him. In doing so, I draw on what I consider to be a long-neglected Marxist critique of Nietzsche.

II. Individualism and the socialist threat

The left-Nietzschean Huey Newton in 1967 in the magazine The Black Panther (Vol. 1, Issue 6). Photograph by Blair Stapp ( Image source ).

HH: Yes, Georg Lukács's Marxist critique⁵ and Domenico Losurdo's almost encyclopedic recent writings form the main pillars of your book.⁶ Among the many tempting threads that you are currently unraveling, let us first pick out Nietzsche's "community-building project". Because there is this debate that you are familiar with and that persists persistently: do Nietzsche's writings have a nameable core, a definable center? Or are they hopelessly decentered? And here you take a clear position for a "center", for a crucial point in Nietzsche's philosophy from which everything else emanates. Or, to be more precise, for a core of crucial points that Nietzsche intentionally connected. You demonstrate how Nietzsche's thinking is essentially aimed at building an elite community of intellectual activists, an exclusive intelligentsia that in turn is intended to exercise real influence on politics.

Another part of this core, in your view, is that Nietzsche wants to maintain hierarchy at all costs, even if that means oppressing and putting the working class in its place. In short, he wants to maintain the existing taboos about identifying with the working class, or even class consciousness. It would be useful, particularly against this background, to talk about one or two of the so-called "left Nietzscheans" that you cite in the book. Because they obviously talked about "class consciousness" in the course of their own efforts to build intellectual communities.

Probably the most striking figure you deal with in your book in this regard is Huey Newton (1942-1989). Newton, best known as one of the co-founders of the Black Panthers, came from a completely peripheral social position to suddenly assume a leadership role within the radical left and especially the black communities in the late 60s and early 70s. You describe how Newton made this leap: through a "creative misinterpretation" of Nietzsche's theses on the will to power.⁷ This took place almost simultaneously with a cultural event: in 1968, an extraordinarily influential new translation of The Will to Power appeared , this falsified edition of Nietzsche's posthumous fragments by his sister and her colleagues, translated by Walter Kaufmann and RJ Hollingdale. You again note that Nietzsche was a constant in Newton's thinking from around 1971. Could you discuss these connections in more detail?

DT: With pleasure. I take two questions from your remarks. One of them concerns Nietzsche's relationship to the working class. The second is about how I understand Nietzsche's so-called "core".

If we dare to claim that Nietzsche's thought has such a "core," then this violates the firmly established academic orthodoxy of French Theory .⁸ But if we look at the American interpretations of Nietzsche, for example, from Maudemarie Clark⁹ to Brian Leiter ¹⁰ - and these are predominantly analytical Nietzschean approaches - then these thinkers also insist that Nietzsche is a decentered thinker. Even if they justify this with very different arguments than, for example, Derrida, Deleuze and Foucault, they insist on the same point. And then there are the various perspectives on Nietzsche that could guide a genuinely left-wing interpretation of Nietzsche. It is crucial to make clear in this respect that Nietzsche does not have any particular hatred for the plebeian or even the working class. Rather, it is a matter of understanding Nietzsche's conceptualization of this question through the magnifying glass of his broader critique of slave morality.

In this context, I would like to emphasize that, from Nietzsche's point of view, the state of the working class became extremely problematic after the French Revolution and after the emergence of industrial capitalism from the 1830s onwards. He diagnoses that the consciousness of the working class during this period was saturated with ideas of "slave morality". This "slave morality" is problematic above all, says Nietzsche in his early work, because it implies an "optimistic worldview". Such an attitude impairs the ability of a culture to produce individual "geniuses".

If we examine Nietzsche's early work Schopenhauer as Educator, we see something that follows in Goethe's wake: a departure from a certain understanding of the intellectual and from a certain understanding of greatness. Nietzsche describes individuals who still carry such greatness within themselves as "higher" or "most valuable specimens". Nietzsche contrasts this with the philosophy of resentment and slave morality, which includes Judaism, Christianity and modern socialism and which, according to this understanding, insists on a vulgar conception of equality. This prevents the full blossoming of the form of human greatness just mentioned; in contrast to the "optimistic" worldview ushered in by socialism, Nietzsche calls forth the tragic worldview.

According to this reading, Schopenhauer is a philosopher who thinks this historical transition of tragic individualism, but he only thinks the tragic individual in terms of contemplation, not in terms of action. So Nietzsche places great emphasis on the need to combat slave morality through a political practice that is concerned with preserving this possible man of action and genius. For the movements of leveling, especially socialism, seem to eliminate this possibility. And this is a source of deep melancholy in Nietzsche. We should also recognize that Nietzsche himself was a precocious genius, or at least was considered that way, obtaining a full professorship in such an extraordinary way at only twenty-four years of age.

III. Fist Fights with the Philosopher of Transgression

HH: There are some hot topics worth discussing that I would like to take up. Let's start with the biographical perspective. I have repeatedly found Nietzsche's biography to be simply too chaotic for him to have been able to create a coherent center in his oceanic work, which he could hardly control. Just think of his major health problems, which he developed as an adult and which did not go away. One is tempted to apply his own harsh words, which he repeatedly directed mercilessly against the most defenseless sections of the population, to himself.

Objectively speaking, i.e. primarily from a physiological point of view, he was a "sick nature," and what connection do the statements of such a person have to reality? "What humanity has seriously considered up to now are not even realities, mere imaginations, to put it more sternly, lies born of the bad instincts of sick, in the deepest sense harmful natures."¹² Such mischievous temptations aside, but still against the same background: to what extent do you want to attribute a planned intentionality to Nietzsche's work? At the same time, I would like to talk about Huey Newton. In earlier conversations between us, you recommended dealing with Nietzsche in a fist-fight-like manner. In short, you claim that we can learn the most from "Nietzsche's politics", as you put it yourself, if we see it as being at the centre of his entire work - and in doing so, treat Nietzsche like a sparring partner.

And Newton also took a fistfight approach to his reading of Nietzsche. Metaphorically speaking, it took place out there in the streets and in confrontations, not in nice reading groups of "do-gooders" where the question of whose turn it was to read aloud was the greatest possible issue. And in this context I also want to explore the question of transgression or criminal transgression. For I suggest that the reason Nietzsche is so attractive to so many readers, including so many working-class readers ¹³ , is that he clears the way for individuals to pursue "legitimate transgressions": that is what we might call such acts.

In this context, it is crucial that Newton's leadership of the Black Panthers was characterized by various transgressions of the civil order, transgressions that had an emancipatory effect on their protagonists, even if they were repeatedly violent. In fact, he only became a national leader in the USA after he was involved in the fatal shooting of a police officer in October 1967. After this death, for which he was charged with murder - if found guilty, the authorities would have executed him—a nationwide "Free Huey" campaign was organized in the USA, in which a number of disenfranchised groups were involved, including the Young Lords or the so-called Latin Panthers. These groups recognized the racially motivated state violence in what Newton was confronted with. However, he was found not guilty of the charges against him and was therefore able, and distinguished, so to speak, by the physical experience of the punishment of a transgression, to take on a leadership role in his organizations.¹⁴

Finally, I want to link this question about justified transgression in and with Nietzsche with a perspective from contemporary "right-wing Nietzscheanism" and also ask you for your view on the latter. It is about the new book by Costin Alamariu, who many people only know by his daredevil social media pseudonym: Bronze Age Pervert. Alamariu is obviously concerned with staging and bringing about transgressions: whether these are "justified" is another question. According to Alamariu, Nietzsche postulated a "happy moment" in historical cycles in which a political weakness occurs, the previously enforced homogeneity collapses and a tension that has long been pent up in regimes is released. (In contrast to Alamariu, I am also thinking here of the repressive homogeneity of working life in late capitalism, which is touchingly illuminated in your book, Daniel.) Moreover, Alamariu claims that this homogeneity is replaced by a “tropical proliferation” of monstrous types, most of them weak and/or defective, but a few fortunately strong and “well-behaved”. And now I would like to quote Alamariu directly: “The qualities or virtues, the inner states that are the result of aristocratic upbringing and education, are now free to go their way in new, unexpected directions. […] One comes to have new tastes: to the new as such and to a preference for transgression, a boredom with the law…” ¹⁵

Even if I think little of Alamarius' polemic as a whole, his description at this point resonates strongly with the campaigns of Newton and other left-wing political actors in the 1960s and 1970s. You again state, Daniel, that "Nietzsche openly championed the crises of capitalism and the decadence they stirred up" because these "offer an opportunity to accelerate the brutality they reveal [even further]" ¹⁶ . You obviously do not believe in a collapse of our current political order that would have an emancipatory effect on most people in the working class: and you also see the vast majority of the world's population in this group. Would you nevertheless work to ensure that more people develop a taste for transgression in a positive sense?

DT: That's a complex question, but I can follow your line of thought. Let me try to unpack the question. First of all, why do I think Nietzsche was in favor of accelerating decadence? This is a claim that is, by the way, different from the interpretations that were circulating in the period immediately after the thinker's death, for example Stefan George's interpretations and those of the other early Nietzsche cults. And we can also talk about what Nietzsche saw as the value of transgressive communities, namely that they could serve as guinea pigs for the elasticity of the mores of slave morality. This strategy qualified Nietzsche in the eyes of many as an anti-bourgeois thinker. And to a certain extent, this classification is correct. I am not saying that Nietzsche is easy to understand as a supporter of bourgeois power. Lukács, on the other hand, will argue that Nietzsche's anti-morality, Nietzsche's theory of transgression and so on, or even the community that Nietzsche tries to build, constitute the elements that are to be understood as a militant aesthetic in favour of the preservation of bourgeois power.

The value sphere of bourgeois power is itself to be understood as a kind of elastic sphere in which transgressions of its own values ​​do not necessarily represent a mortal threat to its status as a class power. In 1968 Nietzsche returned, but – and unlike the 1930s – this time he returned on the side of the left. This switch horrified Lukács, who had witnessed the rise of the Nazis and had accused Nietzsche of complicity with them. But that’s just how it was: Nietzsche returned among leftists, and the focus is on counterculture, because Nietzsche's value sphere, put into practice, lies primarily in culture. The question now remains: What is the benefit or strength of Nietzsche’s critique of cultural value?

There is a lot to say. Huey Newton offers an interesting, let's call it a "parasitic" reading. For Newton certainly recognizes that Nietzsche carried reactionary baggage with him, but he nevertheless reads a particular text by Nietzsche that greatly influences him: On Truth and Lies in the Extra-moral Sense.¹⁸ This extremely convincing short early text can be described as a precursor to what later became discourse theory. Language, according to Nietzsche, is the home of values ​​manifested in words; words therefore have a political value.

In parallel, Newton perceived Nietzsche's critique of the working class: the conditions of modern life have sedated them, robbed them of a certain vitalism. As a result, working-class people are partly unable to engage in the kind of activity through which their higher self can ultimately be realized. That is actually, I think, Henry, a true point of Nietzsche's. We should not pretend that there is nothing there. And I think Huey Newton saw the same thing. Yes, being in a state of passivity is one of the things to recognize when you come from a working-class background or are subject to a life of poverty. The question thus becomes essential: how can you reframe this oppression and detach it from its entanglement with the pervasive passivity? For Newton, the answer was a linguistic and publicity operation, driven by the Panthers, which redefined the police in the minds of many. Redefining the police, literally as “pigs,” also allowed the Panthers to reinvent themselves and their relationship with the state, and this is where it gets interesting.

Because that means that Newton was basically able to promote class consciousness by reading Nietzsche. Even though that is, I think, the opposite of Nietzsche's intentions. Nietzsche is a militant bourgeois who may be for transgression, but not necessarily for a social order that is in a constant revolutionary moment of agitation. Nietzsche is anti-revolutionary. That doesn't mean we can't get something out of him, and that brings us back to the pugilistic. Yes, if you are a leftist and you have an end to exploitation close to your heart, you can read Nietzsche like that. I think that will be the most productive for you, right? And if you read him like that, you will be able to identify with that very famous sentence of Nietzsche's, which is almost like a prayer for his enemies: "You must be proud of your enemy: then the successes of your enemy are also your successes."¹⁹

‍IV. Video Interview

Daniel Tutt  (born 1981) grew up on the West Coast of the United States in a working-class family that fell apart several times. He worked in construction from a young age, first as a hod carrier, and continued to earn money in the construction industry after graduating from university. In 2014, he earned his doctorate on the subject of "Political Community in Badiou, Laclau, Nancy, and Žižek." Tutt states on his website that he was able to make the transition to the "bourgeois" profession of philosopher primarily because he enjoyed the financial support of a businessman during the transition phase. Since then, he has taught in prisons and at universities and has published numerous articles on the interface between psychoanalysis, politics, and Marxian philosophy.

Henry Holland  (born 1975) is a literary translator from German into English and lives in Hamburg. He also writes and researches the history of ideas and culture and published on Ernst Bloch and Rudolf Steiner in  German Studies Review in 2023.  Together with the religious scholar Aaron French (University of Erfurt), he is working on a critical, English-language biography of Steiner. You can find out more about Holland's academic work and cultural policy on his blog,  German books, reloaded,  or in  print newspapers.  He is a member and on the board of the Hamburg  writers' room: the work space for literary writers in Europe.

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Sources

Alamariu, Costin: Selective Breeding and the Birth of Philosophy . New York 2023.

Clark, Maudemarie: Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy . Cambridge 1991.

Doggett, Peter: There's A Riot Going On. Revolutionaries, Rock Stars And the Rise And Fall Of '60s Counter-Culture . Edinburgh 2007.

Leiter, Brian: Nietzsche on Morality . London 2014.

Losurdo, Domenico: Nietzsche, the aristocratic rebel . Berlin 2012.

Lukács, Georg: The Destruction of Reason . Berlin 1960.

Sloterdijk, Peter: On the Improvement of the Good News. Nietzsche's fifth "Gospel". Speech on the 100th anniversary of the death of Friedrich Nietzsche. Frankfurt a M. 2000.

Tutt, Daniel: How to Read Like a Parasite. Why the Left Got High on Nietzsche . London 2024.

Xenophon: Memories of Socrates . Greek-German. Translated and edited by Peter Jaerisch. Düsseldorf & Zurich 2003.

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footnotes

1: See Nietzsche’s idea of ​​the ‘loyalty’ of an individual to ‘his higher self’ in Richard Wagner in Bayreuth , para. 3 .

2: See Peter Sloterdijk, On the Improvement of the Good News. Nietzsche's Fifth "Gospel" . Sloterdijk draws on Nietzsche's description of Thus Spoke Zarathustra I , as it can be found in a letter to his publisher Ernst Schmeitzner: "It is a 'poetry', or a fifth 'gospel' or something" (letter of February 13, 1883).

3: See, among others, the report of Socrates' student Xenophon, who collected some of Socrates' statements on the subject of self-knowledge: Xenophon , Memoirs of Socrates, pp. 199-201.

4: In dozens of places in his writings, Nietzsche presents himself as “an untimely man”: in this respect, the four volumes of his Untimely Meditations , published between 1873 and 1876, are the best known. But Nietzsche also titles a chapter of his late work Twilight of the Idols “Forays of an Untimely Man” (Link).

5: See Georg Lukács, The Destruction of Reason.

6: Above all: Domenico Losurdo, Nietzsche, the aristocratic rebel.

7: See Daniel Tutt, How to Read Like a Parasite, p. 193.

8: Editor’s note: In the international debate, post-structuralism is primarily referred to as “French Theory” (see also the relevant comments here ).

9: See et al. Maudemarie Clark, Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy.

10: See Brian Leiter, Nietzsche on Morality.

11: See Schopenhauer as Educator, paragraph 6.

12: See Ecce homo, Why I am so wise , para. 10.

13: See, for example, a survey conducted in 1897 for the Leipzig Workers' Reading Room regarding the reading habits of workers, which has already been discussed on this blog (Link).

14: See Doggett, There's a Riot Going On , pp. 128-130.

15: Alamariu paraphrases and quotes directly from Chapter Four of Costin Alamariu, Selective Breeding and the Birth of Philosophy.

16: Tutt, Daniel How to Read Like a Parasite , p. 278.

17: Lukács writes in The Destruction of Reason : "Nietzsche developed [...] the concept of a fettering of instincts: the declining bourgeoisie must unleash everything bad and bestial in people in order to win militant activists to save their rule" (p. 305). In the so-called "Expressionism debate" he emphasized the affinity between Nietzschean aesthetics and the fascist movement as early as the 1930s.

18: See http://www.nietzschesource.org/#eKGWB/WL. This text from 1873 was, however, only published posthumously.

19: Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Of War and Military People.