Whitewashing Nietzsche

An interview with philosopher Mehdi Belhaj Kacem

I sit down with Tunisian philosopher Mehdi Belhaj Kacem for an interview on his new book Nietzsche et la Psychose Occidentale: Du Nazisme au Transhumanisme. In my first interview with Kacem during the height of the pandemic in 2021 (“The Concept is a Weapon”) we discussed his main philosophical ideas, his break with former mentor Alain Badiou, and Kacem offered a penetrating analysis of the contemporary political landscape. We now focus on a topic that is dear to us both: Nietzsche’s philosophy and the political core to his thought which goes completely ignored in French Nietzscheanism and Anglo-American liberal academic Nietzschean interpretation.

What you are about to read reflects completely original material and insights that go far beyond Kacem’s book. This interview is driven by questions that emerge from his new book and its provocative theses as well as my own work on Nietzsche’s politics and the inherent problems we both see in left-Nietzscheanism. To give you a sense of what we cover in this interview: the singularity of Nietzsche’s style, the political symptom of “French Nietzscheanism”, the role of Nietzsche in Nazism and fascism, how Nietzsche’s “anti-humanism” has shaped contemporary thought up to today’s transhumanist movement, and much more.

Kacem’s latest book, which can be translated as Nietzsche and Western Psychosis: From Nazism to Transhumanism, is an autopsy of the astonishing whitewashing enterprise that constituted the reception of Nietzsche’s philosophy in France for more than a century. The most predominant French Nietzscheans, from Bataille and Blanchot to Sollers, Surya or Onfray, via Klossowski, Deleuze, Foucault have completely ignored Nietzsche’s true political core and in this interview we show why this ignorance has perverted the left and distorted our understanding of Nietzsche.

There will be a video interview with Kacem on my Emancipations podcast this summer based around this interview. If you enjoy this interview and my other podcast interviews, seminars and study groups, please consider subscribing to this Substack or join as a Patron for $3 - $10 per month where you will gain early access to all of my interviews and study groups. Many thanks are due to my good friend Saad Boutayeb for his translation and interpretation assistance.

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DT: How do you situate Nietzsche politically? Does Nietzsche have a core politics, or is he in fact decentered and open for multiple interpretations?

MBK: One of the many subjects of the book is the abyssal gap that exists between Nietzsche’s ontology and his politics. As much as his ontology, which will fascinate Deleuze and Guattari, is a “chaotic” ontology of becoming and perpetual change (Nietzsche expressly considers himself a modern Heraclitus), his politics is absolutely fixist. As you rightly point out in your How to Read Like a Parasite, Nietzsche absolutely does not want to hear about class struggle. He advocates everywhere for the creation of a new and ruthless aristocracy, and is fascinated by the most intractable caste societies, such as in India. Or in Antiquity, of course. Everything that comes from the “plebs” and the “herd,” as he writes, that is to say, from the people, horrifies him; he never has harsh enough words for socialism, anarchism, or democracy; his thought abounds with concrete proposals in terms of eugenic, selective, slave-owning, and hygienist politics.

Never, to be honest, have we encountered a philosophy so meticulously prescriptive, when it comes to administering the city, since Plato’s The Republic. Which is quite ironic, for the supposed champion and precursor of anti-Platonism, who will so mark the history of twentieth-century philosophy! So there is indeed a politics, and unfortunately a very precise one, in Nietzsche. The reasons why so many commentators overlook this politics will probably be one of the main subjects of our discussion. My ontologico-political vision is almost the opposite of his, since I believe that we wouldn’t even talk about an ontological situation if we weren’t the animals capable of science, that is, of determining an infinite number of invariants and enduring laws in the universe, whether through logic or mathematized physics, biology or astronomy.

We are far from the universe of the “fourth world” of a Meillassoux, where all physical laws would collapse and deliver us to a “chaoid”¹ whirlwind that would also prevent thought from manifesting. I think, on the contrary, that the ontological situation of our universe is relatively stable, but that it is the historico-political situation in which humanity has found itself since the invention of the archaeo-sciences such as hunting, breeding, agriculture, or cave drawing that is profoundly chaotic and shifting. And it is precisely because humans are capable of ontological reflection, that is, of sciences, that the political situation in which they find themselves is almost always and everywhere unstable.

I will not trace the demonstration here, but it is contained in a large part of my work and is too sophisticated to be summarized in a few sentences. I point this out just to highlight how, among other innovations that struck everyone and will enjoy enormous posterity (notably through Heidegger), Nietzsche introduces the theme of hostility to science in philosophy, which had never been done before him, especially not by Rousseau, whose purpose is radically different (Nietzsche’s hostility towards him is explained by a disagreement on the question of the origin of man).

It is not simply a matter of endorsing a new scientism against the discredit that Nietzsche or Heidegger tried to cast on scientific thought; but finally, the simple inversion of the original scheme of philosophy, with Plato and Aristotle, although in very different ways in each case, whereby philosophy must be regulated by the meticulous study of the sciences, by a revocation of these in favor of an archi-aesthetic, with Nietzsche, or an archi-poetic, with Heidegger, politically results in exactly the same type of political phantasmatic as with Plato (but not with Aristotle): an unhealthy obsession with the control and training of the masses, both in Nietzsche and in the young Heidegger, who would be disillusioned by his Nazi engagement. And thus we find the main flaw of what we wanted to combat, political Platonism, which is defined by a maniacal programmatic of social organization. And in Nietzsche even more than in Heidegger because, I repeat, Nietzsche’s prescriptions in this sense are of a frightful eugenic-selective precision, things that you would not even find in Plato, nor in any great philosopher of the tradition.

DT: Why have French philosophers, from Klossowski, Bataille, Deleuze and Foucault, preferred to read Nietzsche as without a political core? What is the meaning of making Nietzsche the main philosopher for leftwing rebellion and liberation? What is taking place when this occurs?

MBK: One of the reasons for what you say is almost never mentioned by commentators, but it is blindingly obvious, and that is why I insist on it greatly in my book: Nietzsche writes in a dazzling style. What makes him reach, in addition to an important readership of leading thinkers, a large number of significant writers and artists, and—we will have to come back to this—political activists. For someone with a good general education without being trained in philosophy, the immediate pleasure that reading Nietzsche provides is still something different from what the first readings of Hegel or Husserl can offer.

But this also applies to philosophers, except that, perhaps due to professional bias, they never mention this hedonism of reading, which in Nietzsche often borders on ecstasy. Heinrich Heine, in a book that had an enormous influence on Nietzsche (History of Philosophy and Religion in Germany), mischievously summarizes the matter by saying that from Kant onwards, the prejudice spread that it had become impossible to be a great philosopher while writing well... Nietzsche is a striking refutation of this. No one has ever written like this man: he has a sense of phrasing, a knack for semantic and adjectival balance, an art of crafting sentences, unique in the history of prose, beyond just German prose. Let's add to this that Nietzsche is the only philosopher of this stature who is exalted. And not only is he exalted, but he transmits this exaltation to the reader, precisely thanks to his unparalleled stylistic genius. This effect of ecstatic contagion is explicitly part of his philosophical program. It is therefore a performative abyss: he says what he does and does what he says.

Here is my first response to your question, very little philosophical at first glance: many readers want to know nothing about Nietzschean politics, so as not to renounce the ecstatic pleasure of reading, of Nietzsche’s absolutely dazzling prose. That was my case for a long time, because Nietzsche was one of those who made me want to do philosophy. But it is precisely because I am a passionate reader, for each author I practice assiduously (I am going to write a monograph on Marx in a few months...), that I gradually awakened to the evidence of the extremely violent political theses defended by Nietzsche, which have no equivalent, in terms of cruelty and assumed ‘immorality,’ in the entire history of philosophy. My book has a narrative side: it tells the story of my disenchantment in this regard. A slow, progressive disenchantment, spread over decades, but irresistible.

Bataille is for me the exemplary author of this ecstatic blindness, and the main promoter, in France, of the untenable myth of a simple “instrumentalization” of Nietzsche by the Nazis. Even today, there have been numerous Pavlovian reactions to my book, by pious Nietzscheans: as if it were his sister, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, who had “sold” Nietzsche to the Nazis, which I very easily refute in my book, as this thesis is akin to a children’s tale. At the risk of shocking his sycophants, I find that Bataille, who was a great thinker otherwise, stops thinking when it comes to Nietzsche. In his book dedicated to the latter, one feels someone absolutely swooning, who merely quotes the Master without any commentary: there is a fusion aspect, with the debilitating side inherent to any fusion impulse. Bataille never truly enters Nietzsche's philosophy (unlike Heidegger and Deleuze, or even his friend Klossowski), he is content to be dazzled by the formulaic virtuosity of his idol. Nietzsche is an idol for many people, and it is quite uncomfortable to be in my position, namely having to debunk the idol’s stature—of the one who prided himself on enacting “the twilight of the idols” for the posterity that would follow him, with a success that is hard to contest—to be iconoclastic with the supposed chief philosophical iconoclast of modernity.

But I am going to be even more shocking to the French public, who, moreover, forgive me very little, which makes me laugh more than anything else, as I know my reading is rigorous and destined to change the history of receptions of Nietzsche in France and beyond. Thank God—if I may say so—my book has also sobered up a lot of convinced, even fanatical, Nietzscheans. Because I am always admiring and respectful in my reading, my analyses, my comments. My book is not a book of ideological critique or political polemic, but rather of philosophy. I only question the ideology and politics that stem from it in a second phase. I wanted to make these cautious clarifications before saying what I am going to say.

So here is what I assert in the book that is very shocking for the French intelligentsia: it is that French Nietzschean fanaticism is, in my opinion, a continuation of the German occupation of France under Vichy by other means. That’s the key point: the submission of France to Germany, which continues still today in another form, with the totalitarian functioning of the European Union. Philosophically speaking, it is not difficult to determine why this has been the case: the German University since Kant was something else compared to the French University before Bergson arrived, the only one to have proposed a credible alternative to the German way of philosophizing. But it’s a bit like Rameau and Couperin compared to Bach, Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven; or Debussy, a absolute musical genius but very alone, against Wagner, Richard Strauss, and Schönberg: the struggle was unequal. Bergson versus Husserl and Heidegger is somewhat similar, and it is these latter two who have overwhelmed the French University of the twentieth century. There is a French inferiority complex towards Germany, especially crushing as it is, most of the time, not recognized as such.

And it is indeed obviously in philosophy that this complex manifests itself most visibly. For this complex was fully justified beyond even the University (Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel...), with Hölderlin, Schopenhauer, Marx, and, at the right time, Nietzsche: never, in the West, has there been thinking like the Germans thought for a century and a half since the Greeks. That is why my book is not a book of ideological-political critique: French academics were correct to submit to the genius produced by German thought, so close and yet so foreign, so familiar and yet so exotic all at once. I fully agree with what you say in your book, when you criticize French commentators for completely detaching Nietzsche's political theses from the historical and sociological context in which they were formed; I make some harsh reminders in my book in this sense, for example on eugenics or anti-Semitism, which were commonplaces at the time in cultivated Western society, to which Nietzsche gives “only” a much more sophisticated speculative form than others. Nietzschean eugenics is philosophical, as with his anti-Semitism too. Nietzsche gives a brilliant form to thoughts that, for today’s left-wing good conscience are unpalatable, but which were very widespread in his era.

The obliteration thus places itself, once again, in an abyss, with the apologetic reception of Nietzsche in France: namely, it is as if this dithyrambic reception had not itself taken place in an extremely specific historical, political, and sociological context, that of the two world wars, especially the second, with the unconditional submission of France to the Nazi occupation for nearly five years, which was a national trauma very little or very poorly analyzed in this country, which we pay for extremely dearly today. After the end of the Second World War, there is an immense French philosophical moment, which is fading today and will be relayed elsewhere, just as German philosophy was relayed by the French. But finally, this “French theory,” as it is sometimes called (I hate this “marketing” appellation, which leads so many people to confuse theory and philosophy), is almost nothing other than a commentary on German philosophy. It dominated the continental production of the post-war period, with German philosophers facing the task of expiating, including philosophically, the Nazi cataclysm (Habermas is the main symbol of this long expiatory moment). France thus “relayed,” for nearly seventy years (let’s say: from Sartre to Meillassoux), the immense German philosophy that unfolded from Kant to Heidegger and the all too neglected Adorno.

This is evident with the current deconstructionists: Derrida, Nancy, Lacoue-Labarthe (my main reference in the book, but I will come back to this), and finally Sarah Kofman, the most fanatical Nietzschean ever, and who probably died because of it (death by suicide at 60, on the day of Nietzsche’s 150th birthday...). The case of Foucault is too complex for us to analyze here, but he entirely proceeds, by his own admission, from a particular reading of Nietzsche and Heidegger. We can summarize this reading as follows: Foucault borrowed from Nietzsche and Heidegger the genealogical method of thought, which is typically German (German philosophy created, with Kant and especially Hegel, philosophy as a philosophy of History, which Marx, Nietzsche, or Heidegger will harden to the extreme). Foucault makes something entirely different out of his two main influences, that is to say, he makes a history of anthropological norms—what he calls epistemes—that have dictated actions in various constantly changing political epochs of humanity. But I find that it is still Deleuze’s case that is the most interesting, regarding the reception of Nietzsche in France.

Deleuze’s thought is often discussed, in his works with Guattari, on schizophrenia, without ever wondering if by chance he was not talking about his own philosophy. Let me explain. I think there was an internal divide within Deleuze, between his passion for philosophy and his thwarted hatred of the University, since he was a professor. This is evident in his (moderate) hostility towards Kant, and (very violent) position on Hegel. One of Deleuze’s other main philosophical references is Spinoza (a non-university philosopher), who in many minds will remain aligned with Nietzsche under the title of “philosophical vitalism,” which is a serious misunderstanding that I try to correct in my own genealogical construction of philosophy.

Finally, and this is Deleuze’s main philosophical influence (Badiou excellently noted this in his book dedicated to him), there is Bergson, a university figure who was very little so in his writing and teaching, not in the German sense at least. In short: Deleuze’s schizophrenia is finding, as an antidote to his very pronounced hatred of German academic philosophy, the Nietzschean “breath,” this kind of atmosphere of emancipation that so many readers have believed they could breathe, always and again because of the intoxicating genius of the writing; without ever considering Nietzsche’s concrete political program, “more obviously pro-Nazi than permissible,” as the great writer Julien Gracq said after rereading Beyond Good and Evil.

DT: You disagree with Badiou that Nietzsche is to be understood as an "anti-philosopher"? Why is that label inaccurate when describing Nietzsche, and what sort of philosopher is Nietzsche?

MBK: My explanation on this subject is psychoanalytic, even psychiatric, but it aligns, by inverting it, with Deleuzian schizophrenia. The category of “anti- philosopher,” according to Badiou, is somewhat of a catch-all, but it concerns, as if by chance, only thinkers outside the University, or almost: Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, or Lacan. The only exception is Wittgenstein, but Wittgenstein is a philosopher who detested the University and would have liked to develop his thought outside any academic framework. For example, Badiou does not consider Marx a philosopher, which is a grave error, as demonstrated by Reiner Schürmann, whose book on this subject I translated into French (Reading Marx, in reference of course to Althusser, but in a very polemical way: and Badiou’s Marx is entirely Althusser’s Marx, like all the normaliens² of his generation).

There is a complete ontology of Marx, a philosophy and an ethics, etc., and of course, a politics. As with Nietzsche, this is still the heart of the matter, and we will dwell on it. However, what Marx lacks compared to Nietzsche, and the gap will have gigantic consequences, is an aesthetics. Even more so, I am tempted to say provocatively, than with academics, and that is why the philosophers Marx and Nietzsche have had such a considerable influence on world history (“I break the history of the world in two,” writes Nietzsche shortly before descending into madness, a phrase that fascinates Badiou in a stupefying way in the seminar he devotes to the question), much more immediately tangible in any case than the philosophies of Kant, Hegel, Husserl (or, outside the University, of Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Benjamin…).

Nietzsche is therefore, of course, a philosopher, in the broadest and most impressive sense of the term, since he has influenced (like Marx) several people and historical events after which Mr. Badiou can still chase for a long time. Simply, as Badiou's ultimate instance of dogmatism cannot admit that philosophy can be anything other than Platonic, he is not ready to admit that Nietzsche purely and simply proposes to refound the very bases of philosophy, by going back to its very origins, which will be his main influence on Heidegger: to cut off the ‘false beginning’ initiated by Plato and Aristotle, and to take things up again from Anaximander, Heraclitus, Parmenides, and of course the rehabilitation of Tragedy (an essential subject, obviously, of my book)

Nietzsche, as I mentioned earlier, sees himself as a modern Heraclitus; he also sees himself, and undoubtedly above all, as Dionysus. We talked about schizophrenia in Deleuze, we could mention the question of madness in Foucault; but finally, in the case of Nietzsche, the question of madness is not secondary, to say the least, literally and in every sense. And yet, many commentators dismiss it lightly, even though it is central to understanding the philosophical aporias of Nietzscheanism.

That is why I talk about it so much in the book as well: Nietzsche truly sees himself as Dionysus, and this is not something to be taken lightly at all. What Nietzsche explicitly proposes to create is nothing less than a new theology, and I am somewhat astonished to be the first philosopher to analyze this fact. Bataille (who weakly confuses this with his “atheology”), Deleuze, or Heidegger (who himself had a rather advanced neo-theological meditation) never mention it at all. It's as if Nietzsche were aligned with the almost obligatory atheism of philosophical modernity, which is entirely false. When he says “God is dead,” he is talking about the God of monotheisms, especially Christian monotheism (he has a lot of admiration for Islam, by the way, even if he doesn't understand much about it). And if all the great commentators on Nietzsche overlook this theology, which is inseparable from his politics (since politics, in the West as almost everywhere else, has almost always been religion), it is because, for a Westerner, “theology” simply means “Christianity.”

Well, no: there was indeed a Greek theology, no less sophisticated than the Christian one; this theology is entirely contained in Tragedy, Homer, Aeschylus, and especially Sophocles. The genius of a Hölderlin is to have understood this point, which led him, not without some coincidence, to madness (there would be much to say about Heidegger's scandalous misunderstandings on this point). What the young Nietzsche calls the “Birth of Tragedy” is the very precise programmatic goal of a re-birth of Tragedy (his admiration and friendship, then his rejection and enmity towards Wagner can only be explained on this basis); and it is not simply a matter of an aesthetic refoundation, as is almost always believed. It is a theological refoundation, on the ashes of Christianity, by means of a neo-tragic aesthetic; that is to say—we return to it—a political one. What was Nazism? Nothing else. But of all this, no one in the West wants to know anything anymore, which perpetuates its somnambulistic race to the abyss, preferably dragging other countries and civilizations into this suicidal logic.

Of course, Nietzsche calls for the liquidation of the Christian God. In this, he does not invent much, as he triumphantly believes; but merely endorses a movement that has haunted the entire West since the Renaissance, particularly in Germany with Luther: “God himself is dead,” which continues with the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, etc. Nietzsche brings nothing new on this point, except, once again, a certain emphasis, a prophetic exaltation. But he calls for the coming of new Gods, a new paganism: which is also not an invention of his own, but a theme taken up from the very influential German ideological current of the nineteenth century, the völkish, a German national-ethnicism fueled by neo-pagan re-foundation, which Nazism would obviously do anything but forget.

The “thinkers” of the völkish were quite mediocre, but Nietzsche gives a brilliant form once again to the neo-pagan theme that haunts even some of the greatest German minds (Hölderlin, the romantics of Jena, Schelling), but also, whether it pleases the devout Nietzscheans or not, to the theme of the “Aryan,” present in all letters in his work, and in a speculatively fascinating way. The hardest European far-rights (particularly the Scandinavians) will remember this, and that is what my book demonstrates.

DT: What is Nietzsche’s relation to fascism? How does Nietzsche contribute to the rise of 20th century fascism in Italy, France and elsewhere? Is there a Nietzsche beyond or other than fascism for you? How is Nietzsche’s politics an aberration from liberalism?

MBK: I indicated it. The subject of my book, perhaps even more than Nietzsche himself, is to propose the first conceptual determination of what Nazism was in its historico-political essence. All the avenues I pursue there were indicated to me by the exceptional, and exceptionally courageous, work of Phillipe Lacoue-Labarthe, the most underestimated and yet one of the greatest thinkers of the “French moment” of the post-war period. A passionate scholar of German culture and thought, a complex fellow traveler of Derrida, Nancy, and Kofman, it was at the end of his life that he had to face the evidence: Nietzsche was a decisive moment in the birth of Nazism, to the point that the mere possibility of the latter has as its indispensable condition Nietzschean thought.

Apart from Lacoue-Labarthe, the denial on this subject is indeed total in France, for the reasons I mentioned earlier: it was necessary to “forget” the Vichy collaboration, to know the shameful political submission of France to the Hitlerian regime. Deleuze, Foucault, Derrida, Nancy, etc., have been somewhat more critical of the Nietzschean or Heideggerian letter than they have been in practice. Lacoue-Labarthe, because he knew German culture much better than the others - beyond even philosophy - was the only one to take his responsibilities. He paid a very high price for that. No less a specialist in Heidegger than in Nietzsche, Lacoue-Labarthe also experienced a martyrdom in realizing the depth of Heidegger's investment in the Nazi movement, which was also the subject of an absolutely astonishing denial in France for a long time. It was Lacoue-Labarthe who introduced me to the theme of ‘philosophical wars’: Nietzsche against Marx, fascisms against ‘actually existing socialism.’

It is somewhat disheartening to have to remind people that Nietzsche was Mussolini’s bedside author, and the main ideological reference for the Nazis, through the omnipresent themes in the daily lives of Germans, such as the will to power, nihilism, the race war opposed to the class war, explicit neo-paganism increasingly openly assumed (which Mussolini could not do, due to the Vatican), etc. Germans lived with these ideologemes from morning to night between 1932 and 1945. The Nazi dignitaries did not pull them out of their magic hat, but from the passionate reading of Nietzsche. And from nowhere else.

I really go into detail in my book, which is extremely concentrated; it is impossible to cover everything in an interview. For example, one of the elements that Lacoue-Labarthe, who himself got it from Walter Benjamin, helped me understand is that the power of fascisms, Hitlerian more than any other, is an aesthetic power: what Benjamin called the “aestheticization of politics,” and what Lacoue-Labarthe defined regarding Nazism as “national-aestheticism.” One cannot understand Nazism without taking into account this aesthetic tidal wave that swept over Germany and hypnotically seduced its population; then over all of Europe. That is why I alluded earlier to Marx’s neglect of the aesthetic question. Wagner or Richard Strauss was something else compared to the Red Army Choir and “socialist realism,” or even Prokofiev and Shostakovich (or, therefore, Debussy and Ravel). And “socialist realism” could not compete with Triumph of the Will—one of Žižek’s favorite films. Things are more complex than that, since there was Eisenstein and Vertov, the former being a huge influence on Nazi aesthetics. It takes a lot of dialectics to understand all this, and I cannot cover it all in an interview, nor in a book (even though a book is always much better).

In truth, the Germans had won the aesthetic victory much earlier, with their immense composers (Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven…), and German romanticism which set the artistic program for the entire nineteenth century in Europe. The other countries were merely following. Germany was thus already culturally dominating Europe since the beginning of the nineteenth century. Wagner was an unprecedented cultural earthquake in the entire cultivated European bourgeoisie of the time, and it is he who provided Nazism with all its mythological imagery, as everyone knows or should know. As Gramsci so aptly put it, there is no political hegemony without cultural hegemony. The Americans, without reading him (although…), will hear something about it. Except that outside of their immense literature, and jazz (for which Lacoue-Labarthe had a true passion), what the Americans use to conquer the world is not Nietzsche and Wagner, but Hollywood and Disney.

It is essential to understand to what extent the (temporary) defeat of Marxism against Nazism was partly an aesthetic defeat, due to the fault of the Marxist dignitaries themselves, Lenin and Stalin, who eradicated the unprecedented aesthetic effervescence that was taking place in the young U.S.S.R.: but it is in my book on Marx that I will discuss this in detail. Later, the “actually existing socialism” would also lose the aesthetic battle against the American mass subculture. Everything is connected for those who know how to think and seek answers where they are found.

This is where the problem lies: in addition to the European denial on the issue, especially in France or Germany (in Italy, there is a much more uninhibited assumption of the memory of Mussolini's fascism), there was the American obliteration of Nazism (in addition to the mass recycling they did of Nazi officers into NATO, and Nazi scientists into the largest research centers in the USA). And this is also where things become very serious for me, because we are no longer talking about the past, but about the present: Nazism was such a political trauma, and more than political, for all the people concerned, that no one wanted to understand the essence of this movement. To commemorate the horror, we settled for Hollywood caricatures like Spielberg or Tarantino, making Nazis grotesque scarecrows, macabre puppets of “Radical Evil.”

This conveniently prevented Americans from questioning their own genocidal and slave-owning past: we only have westerns where the Indians make ridiculous little cries before getting shot, without ever encountering the humanity of these Indians. I am very much a cinephile, but I have never been able to love the westerns of Ford or Hawks, unlike almost all French cinephiles. However, what has become impossible for us to admit due to all this caricatured propaganda is how much Nazism was a spirituality, which, far more upstream of Nietzsche or Wagner, goes back to the very roots of all German History. Due to the simple demonizing caricature, we have forgot- ten the simple fact that Hitler, Goebbels, Himmler, etc., were intellectuals, no less thoughtful and erudite than Lenin, Stalin, or Trotsky. On his side, Mussolini had read Marx and Bakunin at sixteen, Nietzsche became his bedside author in 1904, and he surrounded himself with brilliant intellectuals, like the Hegelian Gentile, Italian futurism is not a mediocre artistic movement, etc. But Nazism, German art, and thought since Bach and Kant, is something else entirely. All the infantilizing imagery that merely presents Hitler as the incarnation of a mentally deficient Satan, and the Nazis as irrational and evil monsters, has once again prevented us from understanding what happened. Philosophers—and everyone—should always be reminded of Spinoza’s motto: “Do not judge, do not laugh, but understand.” And one cannot understand Nazism from the outside, with Hollywood’s carnival imagery, but of course from the inside, which is obviously not an easy task. Writing this book was extremely painful for me. But who said that philosophy was a walk in the park?

DT: What do you make of "leftwing Nietzscheanism" and is there an anarchist Nietzscheanism that you would advocate? What is to be done with the Nietzsche question on the left?

MBK: Here, we are at the heart of the Great Nietzschean swindle, if you allow me the expression. More charitably, we are dealing here, once again, with the schism separating the intoxication provoked by the virtuosity of Nietzschean writing, its “Dionysian trance”, with, I would say, a sort of frenetic freedom (I am in ecstasy, therefore I am free: the German masses of 1932-45 had nothing else in mind), which is mistaken for anarchism, which is not a culture of trance or intoxication, but of autonomy and the happiness of the proletariat. As you rightly say in your book, Deleuze and Foucault believed they found in Nietzsche the possibility of animating a left that breaks with the “actually existing socialisms”, which no longer meant much to many people in the sixties, despite the still enormous vitality of certain European Communist Parties, like Berlinguer’s Italian Communist Party. But it was obviously a misunderstanding: Nietzsche’s explicit politics are incompatible with anarchism, and at most have given rise to a bourgeois anarchism, a salon anarchism of fine words, and purely literary anarchism, which has caused enormous damage in France, up to and including today. The same observation applies to the “left-wing Nietzscheanism,” very well analyzed in a quasi-eponymous book by Aymeric Monville, Misery of Left-Wing Nietzscheanism: from Georges Bataille to Michel Onfray. It is obviously an antiphrasis, but an antiphrasis that defines a very important part of French intellectual life after the war.

I open a parenthesis. Because what bothers me a little in answering some of your questions, this one in particular, is that you speak as if the left still existed in the West, beyond the simple words of various left-wing intellectuals. However, I have long harbored strong doubts on this subject; leading to the recent conclusion: the left simply no longer exists and can no longer exist in the West since the collapse of the Eastern bloc. There is not a single party, a single political organization in Europe, not to mention the United States, that represents anything of a credible alternative to the existing ultraliberal order.

Ultraliberalism is something far worse than the classical age liberalism, whose terminal ideologues are those “far-right anarchists” known as libertarians (as I had told my friend David Graeber, who agreed). As one of the last clear-sighted French intellectuals of our time, Emmanuel Todd, noted in his latest book, the excellent The Defeat of the West, there is no longer anything that resembles the good old liberal democracies in the West. What we are now dealing with are “neoliberal oligarchies,” says Todd. For this is what we have been witnessing for many years: the end of democracy in the West, as well as the collapse of its very civilization, its intellectual production as well as its arts, its internal political vitality (left versus right, for example) as well as its external geopolitical importance, apart from the “endless wars” dictated to Europe by the waning American imperialism.

It is for all these rather depressing reasons that I have decided to leave France permanently to return to live in Tunisia, where I feel much more in coherence with myself than swimming without a lifebuoy against the current of a suicidal West: psychotic, as my book plainly states. I am currently dedicating an ambitious work to the question of this total disappearance of the left in the West: a book whose main subject is the confrontation of the philosophies of the event (those of Heidegger, Deleuze, Foucault, Badiou, Meillassoux, and mine) with modern geopolitics since the end of the Second World War.

Another book that is not going to please everyone... but it will be a book both very well-documented and very philosophically sophisticated. For the question that concerns us here, my diagnosis can be summarized in the following broad strokes: the West no longer has the means to activate a left-wing policy anywhere, because the overwhelming majority of its citizens are ontologically right-wing, even if their convictions are “left-wing”; for they are bourgeois parasites living off the neo-slavery enabled by globalized off- shoring (Todd, who is an avowed bourgeois, makes roughly the same observation in his book).

For example, here in Africa, you will find almost nowhere political debates opposing left and right opinions, because we are, in a way, ontologically left-wing. Africa is overexploited, plundered of its immense resources, and enslaved by commercial offshoring; to put it in Marxist terms, the proletariat/bourgeoisie opposition within any given African nation, it is obviously a very secondary contradiction compared to the main contradiction: the fight against Western imperialism, which in reality did not cease with political decolonizations. To put it in still Marxist terms: the economy is political, and formal political decolonization continues today in the war for material economic decolonization. That is why I am much more interested in what is happening right now in Central Africa than in European electoral kitchens, which precisely have as their stake this economic decolonization.

I will speak in this book of the one who was the greatest anarcho-socialist genius, in practice as in theory, of our era, to the candid ignorance of almost all Western intellectuals: you are likely to be very astonished by the scoop… It seems to me that with very different coordinates, the essence of Asia is confronted with the same type of questions, but with a much greater power of opposition in several countries. The only place, in fact, where the word “left” still holds a tangible political meaning is South America: undoubtedly because the violence of the conflicts between revolutionary attempts to establish a real socialist order, and atrocious repression by fascist regimes entirely financed and manipulated by the CIA, has been much more open and explicit than anywhere else.

It is all well and good to harp on the atrocities committed by the Nazis: everyone does that in the West, as a sort of pious prayer forever protecting us from radical Evil. But if we do not talk about the even worse atrocities perpetrated all over the world by American imperialism for nearly eighty years, what are we talking about, in the end? I close this long parenthesis, intended to explain to you the slight discomfort that seizes me when I am asked questions about “the left”, as if it were an immaterial, timeless entity: a Holy Spirit that merely needs to be invoked to be immediately present. I close this long parenthesis.

To return to our subject: the history of Nietzsche and the advent of Nazism are inextricable, because both are concatenation events in German history. Because of his invectives against the Germans of his time, many people take Nietzsche at face value and consider him somewhat foreign to Germany, which is false. Nietzsche is only possible in Germany, of course; and many of the themes he stirs in his work, starting with neo-paganism, are typically German themes. As for Nazism, it is a concatenation of all of German history, as my book demonstrates.

That is why there is a sort of melancholy surrounding the publication of the latter: I provide the first true determination of what Nazism was in its politico-historical essence, and even spiritualo-politico-historical essence. But the fascism that has been ravaging the world since the end of World War II is Atlanticist fascism, and no other. It is this one that now needs to be determined in precise terms, but left-wing intellectuals are content to condemn American imperialism in vague terms, myself included. Writing this book on the event in modern philosophy and global realpolitik will allow me to overcome the melancholy associated with the publication of my Nietzsche, in the sense that it may be too late for philosophically understanding what Nazism was to be of any use today.

But as soon as I say this, my melancholy tempers: since I am laying, in this book, the great foundations of how Americanism is a continuation of Nazism, that is to say, western imperialism for five centuries, by other means. And what Americanism ‘owes’ to Nazism, in a perfectly unconscious but everywhere visible manner, is a kind of vulgarization of ‘Dionysianism’ through the so-called ‘popular’ subculture: mass sports as a parody of the Greek Olympics and the trance of electric or electronic music, the gore violence of Hollywood films as a parody of Greek tragedy, and the ‘orgiastic’ porn as a parody of ‘liberated’ sexuality, the reversal of all values and the will to unlimited power (from the trader to the gangster, including the corrupt politician or the cynical cowboy) in favor of an ‘unapologetic’ aristocracy, etc. I discuss all this extensively in my book, so it is not just a simple book of philosophical historiography.

Of course, Nazism was a vulgarization of Nietzscheanism, just as Stalinism was a vulgarization of Marxism. And Americanism, in a way, is a vulgarization of this vulgarization. Except that Americanism does not even have the probity (to say nothing of the genius) of Nietzsche, nor the frankness of the Nazi discourse, which at least had the merit of saying what they were doing and doing what they were saying. Americanism (and the entire West at its heel: EU, NATO, same mass subculture everywhere, etc.), is of a delirious hypocrisy: it presents its neo-imperialism and neo-colonialism as a “war against terrorism and for democracy”; it presents its absolute immorality under the guise of the most virtuous and disinterested mission; it poses as the “sheriff of the world” while trampling on everyone’s rights for eighty years, as no other country has ever dared to do.

The answer is surprisingly simple: Nietzsche introduces, in continental philosophy, the theme of anti-humanism, which will have a formidable posterity later, from Heidegger to Badiou, including Lévi-Strauss, Althusser, Lacan, or Foucault. “Speculative Realism,” for me, is somewhat the tail end of this philosophical anti-humanism, which in Nietzsche, I cannot stress enough, is closely tied to an extremely precise aristocratic-neo-pagan theology, which is nevertheless neglected by all those who have inherited the anti-humanist theme. I have been talking about this in my work for a long time: I advocate for the formation of a new humanism, which is no longer the humanism of the Renaissance, nor that of the Enlightenment, which had both their letters of nobility and their limits.

An example of such a limit: anthropocentrism. Given the achievements of modern science, anthropocentrism is now forbidden to us; but this is what modern anti-humanist philosophy has broadly signified. Not necessarily, moreover, that of Nietzsche, who felt a very acute anxiety towards the dizzying decentering that modern science inflicts on man and saw it as one more charge against science in general. It is not the least poignant of his paradoxes: what he reproaches modern science for is what the “speculative realists” find very good, namely the ridicule of the importance of man. And the theme of the overman is a desperate attempt to overcome this dizzying ontological relativism of the importance of man in the universe.

The humanism to come will be for me not essentialist, but modal. What does that mean? Well, it comes back to the notion of event. Someone like Meillassoux is often credited with being the “father” of “speculative realism,” and indeed, reading After Finitude one might get the impression that it is a new, particularly exciting speculative version of philosophical anti-humanism. But in reality, if you read his great unpublished work, The Divine Inexistence, you come away with a completely different impression, and the absolute certainty that his thought lays the foundations for an entirely new humanism, in that, based on the scientific knowledge we have, we are dealing with a type of humanism that is absolutely unprecedented. This is not the place to discuss it, but it is only to say that, against a relatively chic pose of modern philosophy, dating back to Nietzsche, it is possible to refound humanism for our time. Given the state of geopolitical affairs, the task seems vital to me. What one might call: a humanism of contingency.

As for what Nietzsche foreshadows about transhumanism, my verdict in the book is nuanced. For, in a sense, transhumanism is the opposite of what Nietzsche advocated, which was a sort of phantasmatic return to pure physical strength, to animality and instinct against the tyranny of Reason and consciousness, to the ‘superb blonde beast,’ etc., all tropes that again would not play a secondary role in Nazi and fascist doctrines. Transhumanism, on the contrary, proposes, in an equally phantasmatic way, to eliminate said animality, to give birth to a purely machinic being, free from the regret- table contingencies related to life and death: an overman achieved by entirely different means than those advocated by Nietzsche. It remains true that transhumanism shares with Nietzsche the theme of the overcoming of man: “man is something that shall be overcome.”

However, in several of my works, notably one explicitly dedicated to transhumanism (The Transhumanist Myth), I dismantle this argument, which is also fantastical, by demonstrating that the human animal is already the animal of self-overcoming: that it is by definition the animal which, since the appearance of Cro-Magnon, or even Neanderthal, has surpassed itself through technology. This implies in my work a vast revisitation of the concepts that have best described the process of overcoming: katharsis in Aristotle (who was also an initial thinker of technique), and aufhebung in Hegel. Man has therefore always-already been “transhuman”: transhumanism is nothing but a vast delirious tautology.

Regarding Nietzsche, I do not say it in the book, but there is fundamentally an immense idealism in Nietzsche, from someone who willingly presents himself as the chief demystifier, the number one enemy of all idealism. That is why I have regularly used the word “fantasy” in relation to him: it is particularly evident with his neo-pagan and mythologizing reverie, which again will not be without effect on Nazi doctrine and imagery (no less than Wagner, as I show in the book). He thinks of himself as Dionysus, believes that Wagner is the reincarnation of Theseus and Cosima that of Ariadne, etc. His delirium goes extremely far, and again, what I would willingly call “Nietzschean romanticism” makes light of the fact that Nietzsche fell into madness so early (I am writing a book on madness as a concept), just as later the whole of Germany would fall into Nazi psychosis (Hitler is the aesthetic psychosis of Germany: this is Syberberg's thesis, which guided all of Lacoue-Labarthe’s steps in this direction, and thus mine). The Übermensch participates par excellence in such a delirious idealism.

But the link between Nietzsche and transhumanism is perhaps even closer (and I am surprised that, in fact, transhumanist ideologues do not invoke Nietzsche more often, where they would find very powerful arguments to support their own delusions). I conclude my book by aligning with Heidegger’s brilliant insight, precisely inspired by his engagement with Nazism (when Heidegger dedicates five years of lectures to Nietzsche, it is to cryptically explain himself with the “movement”): Nietzsche, in the phantasmatic form of the will to power, is in reality an unrecognized thinker of technology. This is precisely what Heidegger wagered on in Nazism: an appropriate use of technological over-power that arises in the nuclear age.

And indeed, I have long been ruthlessly criticizing this illusionism of Nietzsche: namely the exaltation of the will to power as being intrinsically “physical,” “instinctual,” the sworn enemy of Reason and consciousness, etc. No! It is obvious that, if the human animal has crushed the “wills to power” of other beings, notably animals a thousand times more powerful physically than him, it is indeed thanks to technology, that is to say, the good old capacity for Reason, calculation, consciousness, all things that Nietzsche wants to send to the Greek calends, so to speak. This does not mean, in my work, giving a blank check classically metaphysical to the unblemished excellence of Reason and consciousness: in the wake of Kant, Schopenhauer, or even Freud, I believe that Reason and consciousness are poisoned gifts given to man, miraculous faculties that elevate our “will to power” to exorbitant degrees, but which are also sources of illusions and sufferings that other animals are not susceptible to.

To conclude our discussion, I will simply read a quote from Nietzsche’s posthumous fragments, which I place as an epigraph in my book as this passage is extraordinary. I know of only two texts in the nineteenth century that are as prophetic: Bakunin’s speech to the Marxists at the time of his exclusion from the First International, where he clinically describes the bureaucratic horror to which state communism is destined to transform; the end of Heinrich Heine's book, which I have already cited above and comment on extensively in the book, which just as clinically announces the inevitable advent of Nazism; and finally this one, which even more precisely announces the grip of transhumanist ideology today on the West.

In these three texts, we are beyond philosophy, beyond politics, beyond poetry (the three authors cited here played on these three registers, and Nietzsche even more so than the other two): we are in prophecy, even divination. But where Bakunin was fifty years ahead; where Heine was ninety years ahead; Nietzsche was almost one hundred and fifty years ahead. He is a visionary, Beyond Good and Evil. That is to say, whatever one might and should criticize in his thought, one must never make the mistake of disrespecting him.

“There will henceforth be favorable initial conditions for the formation of larger organisms of domination, such as have never existed before. And this is not yet the most important; it has become possible for international eugenic associations to appear, which would aim to raise a race of masters, the future "masters of the earth"; a new and prodigious aristocracy, founded on the hardest self-legislation, in which the will of the violent endowed with philosophical sense and artist-tyrants will be given a duration extending over millennia: a type of superior men who, thanks to the preponderance of their will, their knowledge, their wealth, and their influence, would use democratic Europe as their most docile and flexible instrument to take control of the destinies of the earth, to work as artists in shaping man himself.”

Amen, if you will excuse the expression.

1. The term “chaoid” was coined by Deleuze and Guattari in What is Philosophy and it refers to forms produced by planes or lines cutting through chaos.

2. “Normaleians” refers to students of the prestigious and elite university in Paris the École normale supérieure.