The Misunderstanding: Nietzschean Politics and Freudian Politics
François Laruelle
From Nietzsche contre Heidegger: thèses pour une nietzschéenne politique (Paris: Payot, 1977), p.43-52.
The discovery of the Continent of Politics and the constitution of a Political Materialism assumes that the greatest misunderstanding would be unmasked if not suppressed (we do not suppress the necessary, transcendental appearance, of fascistic mastery by theoretical means). Four conditions must be fulfilled: the destruction of the four fundamental misunderstandings [contre-sens] which form the grounds of anti-Nietzschean foolishness and define the relation (let’s say, to be polite) of transcendental stupidity that the conjuncture, above all current Freudian politics (but not only Freudian ones, just as much Marxist politics) maintains with regard to Nietzschean politics.
1. Thesis 12:
The manifest Nietzschean concept of Mastery must not be confused with its latent concept. This confusion is the first form of “the most dangerous misunderstanding.”
The Relations of Power are formed by partial organs or drives of different and even differential definitions. Every relation-of-power is immediately, or in its matrix, a relation of one dominant force or Mastery (reactive relation) to a force of anti-power or rebellion, what Nietzsche however exoterically calls (the greatest of misunderstandings) “dominant.” In order to clarify this problem, we can conserve the dominant/dominated couple to describe the empirical or historical state of relations of force in this sense that all of history is the triumph or domination of reactive forces, forces of mastery or power (in the restrained and vulgar sense). And we can assign the non-Nietzschean couple of the Principal/Secondary to the description of the matrix of the internal relation of power: what is principal is the active drive (of resistance) which is most often dominated, and what is secondary is the reactive drive, which is most often dominant in history.
Nietzsche solely uses a double play of categories which, moreover, are not equivalent to each other: active/reactive (transcendental definitions), dominant/dominated (empirical descriptions), and therefore leads to the misunderstanding. Contrary to one almost general misunderstanding (except in Klossowski and Deleuze, but it is reprised by Heidegger), what Nietzsche calls the Sovereign, the Seigneurs and the Masters, do not at all correspond in general to what the contemporaries thus call them. To the contrary and if we must “defend the strong against the weak” as Nietzsche asks in a formula which entirely contains the misunderstanding and its dissolution, it is rather that the “strong” are de facto dominated, resistant and rebels; the “weak” are the true masters.
One example of the trap set up by Nietzsche to the vulgarity of his interpreters is this: by simulating an interpretation of the weakness of the Rebel or the specific force of the Resistant in terms of mastery, by elevating in a certain way mastery and fascism to the state of transcendental appearance, Nietzsche unmasks the latent fascism of his critique, in any case the ideal of mastery which secretly governs them: Christian, Marxist and the last to come, Freudian. This objective simulation is what we call the necessary and positive appearance of fascism as power.
Despite the well-founded appearances in the text, and despite the ideological positivity of his statements on the breeding of humanity and races – which is all of the material of Nietzsche’s exoteric politics – the object or rather the cause of this politics is not primacy, mastery or domination, but sovereignty which paradoxically designates the active-affirmative function of Resistance, more precise than the term Herrschaft which sometimes designates it ambiguously. To beat mastery strategically on its terrain, but from another terrain which is no longer a terrain of raw power, we must simulate primacy, simulate the repressive hierarchy, but always “against” those which are then the mask of a wholly other hierarchy, one which subordinates the dominant powers to forces of an “origin,” of a “quality,” and distinct effects.
Hence, a fundamental rule when interpreting Nietzsche: in the same way that there are two “interpretations” or two “uses” of the Will to Power (WP), there are two concepts of hierarchy, two concepts or two qualities (origin, effects) of violence, two politics – one simulating the other to lead the fascist into fascism and the revolutionary into resistance.
2. Thesis 13:
Anti-Nietzschean critique confuses “the Will to Power” with a natural energy, and also therefore with a technically mastered energy. The WP contrarily signifies that there is no natural desire anterior to the law, and furthermore no law anterior to desire and producing it as its effect. The WP dodges the opposition of nature and law in relation to what it constitutes as a supplementarity and a process of production where desire and what it eventually contains of the “law” or syntax (one that is a-signifying and a-dialectical) are simultaneously produced. This is the meaning of the radical functionalism of Nietzsche-thought.
Anti-Nietzschean foolishness contains a second principle, perhaps the fundamental falsification of what Nietzsche tried to understand under the name WP, what reinforces in any case the appearance of mastery which drives this expression. Its cheap vulgarization sometimes of a natural desire and sometimes (it’s the same thing) of a technically mastered energy and source from any technical domination is the misunderstanding which only reaches the most vulgar,[1] but the most careful render justice to Nietzsche (Heidegger: his whole interpretation culminates in the thesis of a Nietzsche as a thinker of absolute technics and the brutalitas of the energetic). Sometimes there’s also the most penetrating (Deleuze: desiring machines as physical machines, the unconscious of production as molecular; Foucault: the microphysics of power). On their side and despite hesitations (desiring machines: a production of desire anterior to the scission of physis and techne), we never gave our adversaries better sticks [verges] to get beaten with than this flaccid naturalism. For if it is true that the WP is “physical” energy, then we will become physicists, or historians of thermodynamics to which we reduce the Eternal Return of the Same (ERS)/WP, or even Lacanians who would be rigorous, and Nietzsche will return the junk from where it came.
By yielding to Nietzsche’s exoteric text and its thermodynamic references, we lose the specificity of his political discovery: power as irreducible to simply (micro-)physical and/or technical force. We also render impossible the constitution of a Political Materialism, its critical-revolutionary function, by reducing its object to a natural and positive materiality, a quasi-natural fact of primary libidinal processes: Nietzsche is then, without speaking of those who arbitrarily exploit him for local political motifs, a “bad master,” a true Master and a false Rebel. Then, how do we blame Heidegger? How do we not make of Nietzsche, through this naturalism, a thinker of absolute technics and planetary fascism? A racist thinker (how do you avoid the return of this nature?), the thinker par excellence of Western domination? Heidegger is a rigorous thinker, and the current tenants of Nietzsche would do better to persuade themselves rather than taking him lightly. To surmount Heidegger’s interpretation of a Nietzsche co-extensive with planetary fascism, we must not (this is the least we can do) joke around with his fundamental thesis of the WP as raw-technical energy. We must deracinate it in the principle, or renounce, that is, to succumb to, the misunderstanding and be served once more (getting to the end of the rigor) a Nietzsche broadly compromised with fascism.
The WP is not only what interprets, but also just as much what is interpreted: it is interpreted by the forces, drives or partial organs of power. As there are two distinct qualities in it, there is also a double interpretation of the WP. The reactive drives or the drives of mastery interpret the WP as the energy of natural and technical mastery (on this side, Heidegger, his disciple Lacan, and most interpreters, who confide in Nietzsche’s exoteric text). And the active drives, the drives of rebellion or resistance can only interpret the WP as libidinal matter which affirms its différance or its radical alterity in relation to the derived opposition nature/technics. Only revolutionary organs of anti-power can affirm power and the libido, in their correlation, as tendentially (but rigorously) critical-revolutionary: as the production of power and desire which crosses the opposition between physis and techne. This “reconciliation” of oppositions on another terrain cannot be called natural or technical.
Because reactive forces have some interest in us, it presents this fictive image of Nietzsche understood and based on psychoanalysis and its shameful politics of Mastery: by and for the Master. The Master is but the master of the paralogism, that’s what Kant taught: the Master begins by falsifying the functioning of libidinal matter, substituting it with a deceitful image qua image, banishing desire to nature – and then gives themselves without more shame the ease of opposing himself (nothing but opposing himself) his pseudo-revolution[2] that differs or re-splits [re-fend] it: the signifier (discourse, law, etc.), namely a technical, nothing but technical apparatus, for he will go no further on this point than Heidegger who knew that he needed to surmount this opposition. The analyst works for the Master, sufficiently mindful of the libido to make it an instinct at worse, to make it the foil of signifying mastery at best. One can always play with this instrument with two chords: real and signifier, nature and discourse, rebellion and law. It’s a bit of an old-fashioned music that it flatters only the ears of the Master: our Master. Everything, in this duality, its agreed-upon and culturally marked poverty, is foreign to Nietzsche.
Must we go further in specifying that Nietzsche is not the barely boorish thinker of primary processes, and the thinker of these processes as raw energy, as his adversaries, and some of his friends (who too often find themselves on the same edge with different intentions) would like us to believe? The intentions, even the revolutionary ones, no longer suffice as soon as it concerns Nietzsche: he only supports affirmations, he withdraws himself from this old half-Judaic half-Greek debate of nature and law that he only involves himself in to subvert it. Affirmation in the Nietzschean sense, as the production by/for revolutionary forces, by definition excludes any position of desire, namely the condition of one nature of the unconscious in which mastery (it’s true) would find new means. It is the reactive forces of mastery which viciously project the exoteric, even real and not at all “imaginary,” image of a power that is an object of recognition, struggle and appropriation. The misrecognition or recognition of the desire is not a Nietzschean problem: it is the problem that he demonstrates as the derived and vulgar character, just as knowing if the Master yields or not to the Rebel over their desire.
That desire lacks nothing, that negativity would be excluded, that it does not fall under the universal law of castration, does not at all mean – to the contrary – that desire would be an auto-sufficient nature anterior to the law. The ridicule and infantilism of this interpretation forces us to abandon its “natural” and cultural place, its stupidity, if it was not today more than current in the issued environs of Lacanian psychoanalysis whose conceptual rigor and simply its knowledge of Nietzsche become problematic. The exclusion of lack and even simple absence, a fortiori castration, outside of the functioning of desire, implies no archaic return to a nature of desire which would obviously be complicit with castration, but to the contrary implies the symmetrical exclusion of a so-called natural desire. Freudian positions forbid us from understanding that the “superseding” (Übersteigen, Überwinden), the specific effect of WP, operates twice in the same way beyond the complicit terms that one claims to desperately circumscribe. The WP designates a production of desire which reverses and remarks the opposition of nature and the law, the real and the signifier, Mastery and Servitude such that Freudian politics can define them.
This perspective “over” the WP is issued from its revolutionary pole and makes us understand the ruse of the Master, assuring its Mastery sometimes through a nature (like synthesis, harmony, the production of large unities), and sometimes through a quasi-scientific technics of desire (as signifier, or the derived effect-reflection of the signifier). It’s done sometimes by stupidity (naturalism), sometimes by falsehood and fiction (law). In both cases it is done through a position which is no longer Nietzsche’s problem and which would make us think that the recourse to technics (the signifier, castration and the law) will not have made us fundamentally escape from Freud first not more than from his disciples of the drive-instinct – escaping from a certain naturalism and physicalism of desire.
Desire is wasted, failed, the breaking down of adequation to its object – but it is “positive,” an effect each time of a différance without negativity (resistance) and consequently one without relation of natural affinity with its object. Freudo-Lacanian politics systematically confuses (this is its paralogism – falsehood or falsification) desire with what the forces of conservation and reproduction do: adequacy or inadequacy of desire to its object. This is the Master’s problem who confuses desiring desire with desired desire, “imaged” desire. It’s not the Rebel’s problem who is content with insisting desire or “desiring” without anything further (affirming, producing). Insofar as psychoanalysis only grasps Nietzsche by his exoteric image, it will misunderstand that Rebellion and Mastery are “two” possible relations “to” desire, but such that the first is desire as relation (active resistance) and the second a relation to desire – a relation were Freudian politics installs itself and where it can only become political by and for conservation by definition, when it is not for reaction.
3. The misunderstanding takes on a third form as a consequence of the first two:
Thesis 14:
The repression of the production of desire, or the repression of the WP, is never purely external as would eventually be the repression of a nature.
Repression is also necessarily internal – the contrary ideal emerges from stupidity or perfidy – at least through its possibility. To explain the possibility of repression, it is necessary that the conditions internal to the process of repression and the conditions that are not less internal of the destruction of this repression be produced together. The process of the ERS/WP contains syntaxes that one can hardly define (we’ll see why) as being laws: they are fluent schema which the invariance and transcendence are in the last instance second, subordinate to their variations, and can be thus in a certain way destroyed. It is on these syntaxes that the internal possibility of the repression of desire is articulated, and, in particular, under the form of a specification of Différance or the Other which is the machinic matrix of these syntaxes: this specification of the ERS to the conditions of social reproduction has its internal or transcendental possibility within the syntaxes themselves. Inversely, this writing of desire, immanent to its process, cannot at all have in itself (except when it becomes the condition of repression) the transcendent form of a law, the abstract universality of the signifier and castration for example. These fluent syntaxes only have “différantial” universality – partial universality. They therefore form a partial universal that is consequently internal and the immanent condition of the process.
Also, there is not in Nietzsche (if it is not for a platitude or perfidy) any natural and free circulation of desire (this is the confusion of nature with “chance” and “necessity” in the Nietzschean sense). This lacanary [lacanerie] is motivated by anger: it is what the immanent inscription of drives over the Body of the Unconscious, or the partial organs of power over the Continent of Politics (being différantial, but without constituent negativity) do not use the famous battery of the signifier that it has nothing to do with, and that the signifier can only precisely intervene here as the specification or the system of the enclosure of machinic syntaxes. Castration is a universal-abstract inscription which itself restrains the general writing of desire or, if you will, the objective “Transcendental” Schematism of power over the body of the Continent of Politics. We will give these syntaxes the principle in the following section (they are the object, among others, of Machinic Materialism [MM]). The decisive point is first knowing what the simultaneous production (within the immanence of the process) of desire and its specific (immanent) law excludes what there would be of desire anterior to its syntaxes, and what there would be of the syntaxes anterior to the libido.
4. From these fundamental misunderstandings results another affirmation which prevents the constitution of a materialism of the Relations of Power.
Thesis 15:
The Politico-Libidinal Break cannot be radical in the sense of a generic or even specific-formal difference. It is individuated by the Other as Différance.
This thesis does not say therefore that there is no more Master, but the Master is no longer the Master, the imbecility worthy of this other one: there have only ever been Masters. It breaks with the complicity of finite mastery, mechanically broken by a Revolution-event, and breaks from the interminable or indefinitely reconducted mastery. The material process of the production of power is (cf. second section) such that it crosses the opposition of brutal mechanical end and indefinite continuity – naivety and cynicism. It has never been a question for Nietzsche, who so minutely explored the forms and necessity of the domination of the “strong” by the “weak,” the contrary necessity of the law and the breeding of reactive forces, of massively eliminating mastery to restore a so-called spontaneous desire and even less an unbound and natural energy. Nietzsche knew that reactive power never lacks its goal – this is proven in the psychoanalytic ideology of mastery.
All that Nietzsche said is on the one hand that there is a possible knowledge or a “thought” (rather than a science or a rationalization) of mastery, that the Relations of Power are inexplicable outside of the ERS/WP “hypothesis,” namely outside of a contradictory correlation (without mediation of a form but individuated by the Other) of power and libidinal productive forces, a correlation which is the Rebel’s perspective. And that on the other hand this knowledge or this thought – let’s give it the name Political Materialism – are themselves affected by their object, deducted from the Relations of Power, crossed by the power of the Other and consequently susceptible to several political uses. It’s not an indifferent knowledge but already submitted to the re-splitting of différance or the revolutionary cause: a practico-desiring intervention of the Resistant, the very Revolution become process; neither finite nor infinite, but transfinite.
5. Against the falsifying readings of Nietzsche, we will argue a general principle of critique and refutation, but also a relative legitimation or ideological positivity of their misunderstandings. Conforming to the principle which brings the greatest misunderstanding to its root in the internal articulation of Nietzsche-thought and forms the instrument of the analysis of the political positions of the interpreter, we must recognize the positivity of these falsifications which belongs to any power, even the most reactive and the most nihilist. Nietzsche is the only revolutionary capable of thus elevating fascism as the pole of every ideology to the positivity of a transcendental appearance. We must find a formula for selection or testing the interpreter which unmasks them as always being more or less a fascistic interpreter – but which does right to their discourse or recognizes a certain “truth” to it.
Therefore, this formula will pose Nietzsche-thought as demarcated and re-inscribed by principle outside of the theoretical interpretations, categories and apparatuses that define it, but in a partial definition. Reduced to its most schematic argument and on an extreme case, the selective test of the interpreter is formulated thus: the Nazis are Nietzschean, but Nietzsche is not a Nazi. One will have recognized a machinic syntax of asymmetrical or unilateral identity without dialectical sublation [relève] or sublimation. When nuanced, this principle allows one to correctly pose the problem of Nietzsche’s fascism: without running away from this accusation as if it has no place to be, without further letting it go to the end of what it can do, and without critique, it poses the problem to those who bring the accusation with stupidity. Nietzsche is strong enough to make all of these interpretations where he is the object – even the stupidest, the most intellectually bestial have some positivity and truth – some ideological appearance. And at the same time he is critical and repulsive enough to de-marcate himself from falsifications that the interpreter gets bogged down by – to actively resist them.
What we call Nietzsche-thought is an apparatus of the reproduction and the critique of the prophesies that the interpreter address to Nietzsche as if to a radically positive Other. Under the name Nietzsche acts an alterity that only has a peripheral negation so that it’s always the interpreter who assumes their identification with Nietzsche or (it’s the same thing) their denial of Nietzsche. To be or to become authentically Nietzschean (if this “means” something regardless), the interpreter’s discourse must be reversed and re-inscribed: the double operated contained within the Other. In brief: as he is the origin of the vicissitudes of the literature on this subject, Nietzsche is not – he ex-ists or better insists as Other, sub-sisting and super-sisting at once. Nietzsche is an Other that no negativity can claim to constitute: Nietzsche’s not only a knave-hunter [chaisse-canaille][3], the fascist blackguard [canaille fasciste], but just as much the Lacknavian [lacanaille] analyst.[4]
[1] Lardreau and Jambet: L’Ange, an anthology of varying forms of misunderstandings. And even Lacan: “I am not reviving here the shoddy Nietzschean notion of the lie of life” (Écrits, p.405 [trans. Bruce Fink, p.338, “The Freudian Thing” – trans.]. Nietzsche belongs to the “line of moralists in whom a tradition of humanistic analysis is embodied” (ibid, p.407 [p.339 – trans.]).
[2] The unconscious as a language, as we say, is no longer grounded on the negation of consciousness. To be seen: how does one make the Aufhebung a universal key (of the phallus) and refuse Hegelianism at the same time? In any case, the negative remains the motor of the re-split. The passage through the signifier fundamentally changes nothing to this situation, despite the introduction of the Heideggerian apparatus (the affection of the subject of psychoanalysis or their re-splitting by the unconscious), responsible with taking up the relays of Hegelian self-consciousness.
[3] Compare to “knave-driver” of Peter Starr, Logics of Failed Revolt: French Theory After May ’68 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), p.94. – Trans.
[4] According to the barely (all-too-barely) angelic style of our duettists of the two worlds, it seems that Lacan is a “knave-hunter” (L’Ange, p.12). Elsewhere they speak of “libidinal banditry.” Knave, Nazi, the ordure, the liar – Jambet and Lardreau dispose with the whole register of Christiano-fascistic insults. Allow us to return the rudeness with means of your style: the style of the signifier. Once and for all: Nietzsche is the revealer of stupidity.
en-demic 