How to Read Like a Parasite by Daniel Tutt

Author:Daniel Tutt
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781915672261
Publisher: Watkins Media
Published: 2023-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Deleuze’s Nietzsche: The Counterculture Rebel

One of the most influential incorporations of Nietzsche on the left is found in the work of post-war French philosopher Gilles Deleuze. Deleuze’s embrace of Nietzsche is different than that of any of the thinkers on the left we are discussing in this chapter in that he sought to center Nietzsche as the primary philosopher. But Deleuze read Nietzsche in a highly idiosyncratic and singular way as offering a toolbox of concepts for experimentation. Deleuze affirms that the greatness of Nietzsche is not found in how he interprets history or philosophy and nor does he offer any source of meaning. This leads Deleuze to develop a highly creative appropriation of Nietzsche, which he applies to the history of philosophy, and places Nietzsche at the center of his political thought.

We will begin by assessing Deleuze’s Nietzsche in an essay called “Nomad Thought,” published in 1962, the same year as his major work Nietzsche and Philosophy. In it, Deleuze lays out the political function of his Nietzsche more explicitly than in any of his other works. “Nomad Thought” is Deleuze’s Nietzschean manifesto, a text that celebrates Nietzsche as the pre-eminent thinker of the counterculture, usurping both Marx and Freud in importance for the left. Deleuze declares Nietzsche the most vital philosopher for liberation. Just six years after this essay was published, the May ’68 uprising occurred. Deleuze begins the essay by arguing that it is Nietzsche’s method and style that makes him so revolutionary:

It is at the level of methodology that the question of Nietzsche’s revolutionary character arises: the Nietzschean method itself makes the text something about which we should no longer ask ourselves, “is it fascistic, bourgeois or revolutionary rather it is a field of per se”; externality where fascistic, bourgeois and revolutionary forces confront one another.46

It is important that we identify what Deleuze stresses as most vital in Nietzsche’s thought. For Deleuze, the will to power reduces relations to what he calls their “disembodied forces,” which means that Nietzsche’s style becomes a “political instrument” for decoding repressive social codes imposed by the family and capitalist social life. Thus, it is not a synthesis of Marx with Nietzsche that Deleuze is after. “Marx and Freud may be the dawn of our culture, but with Nietzsche, something altogether different occurs: the dawn of a counterculture.”47

In Deleuze’s view, Nietzsche is all the left needs. And it is Nietzsche’s style that is the key to his liberatory offerings, specifically his use of the aphorism. The aphorism is so valuable because it represents a play of impersonal forces that is “always outside the others.” Nietzsche’s aphorisms “mean nothing” and “signify nothing,” and thus have no more a signifier than a signified element. Nietzsche’s dramatic personae, the Antichrist, Zarathustra, and Dionysus, are transhistorical figures who are invoked as “neither signifier nor signified elements, they are rather designations of intensity upon a body which can be the body of the Earth, the body of the book, but also the suffering body of Nietzsche: I am all the names of history.

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