the left can reclaim Nietzsche via Bataille & Deleuze
also there is a left beyond “Marxism”
Marxism implies a dialectical philosophy focusing on economic primacy (yes I know this is broad), and usually implies a dialectical method by way of Hegel
Post-structuralists, e.g. Deleuze are anti-Hegelian.... Freud, Lacan, Marcuse, view society through a psychoanalytic framework as opposed to economic, though all are “Marxist”, and Nietzsche, who is not a leftist is completely anti-dialectic, as with Bataille, who is an ultra-leftist of the Radical Evil variety, like Sade
Anyway, point is there’s plenty of philosophy that is either leftist and not Marxist or not leftist but still foundational for leftists (Nietzsche? Spinoza?)
philosophy
yes...a philosophy of prrraaaaxxxxxiiiiiisssssss
Gilles Deleuze was a French philosopher who, from the early 1950s until his death in 1995, wrote on philosophy, literature, film, and fine art. His most popular works were the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus, both co-written with psychoanalyst Félix Guattari. His metaphysical treatise Difference and Repetition is considered by many scholars to be his magnum opus. An important part of Deleuze's oeuvre is devoted to the reading of other philosophers: the Stoics, Leibniz, Hume, Kant, Nietzsche, and Bergson, with particular influence derived from Spinoza. A. W. Moore, citing Bernard Williams's criteria for a great thinker, ranks Deleuze among the "greatest philosophers". Although he once characterized himself as a "pure metaphysician", his work has influenced a variety of disciplines across the humanities, including philosophy, art, and literary theory, as well as movements such as post-structuralism and postmodernism.
deleuze is more popular in the anglosphere than he is in france iirc
If those philosophers would really be relevant wouldn't then they have effected revolutions?
Ditto to everyone writing here, he’s a whole bag of chips. In a sense, yeah, he was the first radical atheist incel edgelord, but he had his heart in the right place. He saw the hypocrisy and injustice in contemporary society and thought “this is fucked up! If xianity led us here than fuck that shit.” And I really vibe with that. With the Christian slave revolt stuff, it’s kind of reductionist; but the thought experiment is a good one: the Christian virtues (humility, chastity, poverty, etc.) are inversions of Pagan virtues (self-confidence, fecundity, prosperity), and believing that you’re Gods chosen cuz ur a poor, destitute serf probably takes the sting out a little bit. I think his idea of “transvaluation of all values” can jive with Marxism, namely that our world requires flipping the script on what’s ethical, moral, and valuable if we’re going to survive and thrive. Yeah, he’s really big into the “lone super rocking dude against the idiot masses” thing, but I figure that’s cuz he didn’t have a lot of friends, and thought most people were stupid. Also, he probably had debilitating IBS all his life, which kept him bed-ridden for long periods of time. So, when ur reading his stuff, it’s from a guy who’s been stewing on all these ideas while wracked in pain, and then it subsided enough for him to write it all down as quick as possible before he succumbs again. I stan ole Freddy N.
Which aspects did you find incompatible? Both Marx and Nietzsche pioneered different analytic approaches (dialectical materialism and genealogy respectively), they don't have to be mutually exclusive and in fact can be combined or complimentary. Deleuze & Guattari here are the clearest example: not only do they consciously weave Marx and Nietzsche together, they also add a critique of psychoanalysis, combining this way perhaps 3 most significant philosophical breakthroughs in 19-20th c Western philosophy.
I'd be very interested to have a look if you don't mind telling what exactly you are reading. He called Judeo-Xtian morality a "slave revolt" or something like that in the Genealogy of Morals because he considered it a moral system that deadens rather than promotes life, so it's not the same domain as talking about revolutionary slave revolts. And really not sure about what you mean by charitable works. I'd say even from an orthodox Marxist perspective charity does not fix inequality because it treats symptoms of poverty and not their root causes.
You have to remember that Nietzsche was writing in an era when the alternative could've been comparative eugenics. George Bernard Shaw writing in the same time period didn't just toy with eugenic ideals he embraced and extended them as socialist.
Instead of calling for the physical elimination of degenerates Nietzsche promulgated a theory of Züchtung (breeding) that espoused a moral transformation of society in a lamarckian psychological not biological evolutionary way . To Nietzsche, the value of choice in making sociocultural changes lies not in defining the other as alien and ultimately inferior and worthy of destruction, but recognizing that bad traits are inherent throughout a cultural landscape and choosing instead to confront those systems and values that produce bad traits.
Good post. As paradoxical as it sounds Nietzsche offers a powerful critique of any sort of insular parochialisms that are so common among reactionaries. Paraphrasing Zarathustra but he says something along the lines that 'the greatest friend is also the greatest enemy' and that they should 'offer a whole different world' to you. Plus things like the genealogical method lends itself well to asking the fundamental question of: what produces people to be the way that are--a question that is necessary for any socialist, anti-capitalist understanding of the world.
There is a lot to be said about Nietzsche, how to understand his work, and what we can do with it. I would be hesitant to completely dismiss everything with just an offhand comment on a niche website. I guess the main problem we are faced with with Nietzsche is that on the one hand these works are supposedly existential in the sense that they deal with a fundamentally human condition (the becoming-reactive, the problem of nihilism, etc.) that almost becomes a liberatory-sounding project of something that is 'beyond' the all-too-human. On the other hand you have Nietzsche the person whose aristocratic ideals, and parasitical-Bourgeois intelligentsia class position bleeds through onto almost every page (see Lukacs' The Destruction Of Reaon). Suffice to say that it demands some work--and luckily there is a lineage of leftists inspired by Nietzsche (Bataille, Deleuze, a whole bunch of anarchists, et. al.)
Losurda thought he was the foremost anticommunist in philosophy, a revolutionary elitist if one could exist
Nietzsche was no marxist, but I think there is a lot to some of what he says.
Beyond Good and Evil is fleshes out a pretty good theory of cultural hedgemony when it says that those in power define morality to suit what is beneficial to them, which I think makes a lot of sense.
His Genealogy of Morals is an interesting story, could make the case it's dialectical but it's also completely idealist.
http://www.ruthlesscriticism.com/Nietzsche.html
I don't recall much of this article but the general bet is that philosophers past Hegel are slams poster board BITCH(es).
