Using the Political Nietzsche: Hope or Despair?

Using the Political Nietzsche: Hope or Despair?

Jonathan Murphy

12/9/2005

Nietzsche

Dr.Shapiro

Using the Political Nietzsche: Hope or Despair?

Understanding Nietzsche's political theory is no simple task. Perhaps because of his lack of faith in "philosophical system-building" as Daniel Conway describes it, Nietzsche doesn't take a traditional tact in explaining his politics. Nietzsche's writing style and the deconstructive nature of his thought are not conducive to that kind of logical structure. Also, the aphoristic structures of the volumes most relevant to political and moral issues don't lend themselves to the kind of argument that most students of continental philosophy have come to expect. These difficulties have led some to dismiss Nietzsche as either politically irrelevant or altogether hostile to politics and political structures on the whole. The Nazis took advantage of these misunderstandings, aided by the intentional distortion of Nietzsche's ideas by his anti-Semitic sister after his death, to rationalize their fascist reign of terror and genocide. Tragically, the political Nietzsche was seen in this light by many people for much of the second half of the twentieth century. Contemporary scholars have, however, been able to see past this nearsighted and twisted application of Nietzsche's thought (which fails to address his hatred of anti-Semitism, rejection of nationalism and distaste for German volk culture) and looked hard at his work for a coherent political philosophy, with intriguing and controversial results.

These intrepid scholars have surely spent countless hours trying to discern theory of Nietzsche's politics understanding out of the textual jungle of aphorisms and that make up Nietzsche's writing. One of them, the anti-authoritarian philosopher Gilles Deleuze, characterizes Nietzsche as a "war machine" set against humanity's painful cycle of existential failure in his essay "Nomad Thought". He emphasizes Nietzsche's conception of the exteriority of experience and distrust of the interior life, precipitated by the normalizing technocratic machinery of the state and culture. Deleuze formulates a revolutionary ideology of style as politics to escape this repressive machinery and overcome the state of misery that characterizes human existence. Wendy Brown, building on Deleuze, paints Nietzsche's political philosophy as withholding the possibility for the revitalization of democratic society, which is contemporarily in decay, by genealogical Nietzschean critique in her