him here, and place him in the dominant constellation?
Freud’s thought and his psychoanalysis acquired much of their strength from being connected with clinical observation, with a therapeutic practice. Often effective, but sometimes in vain or even worse, this medical practice has a ‘real’ existence. It is a real gain that it brought sexuality, so long a blinkered zone, into language and conceptual thought. As for practice, the connection of Marxist thought and revolutionary practice (attempts, defeats) gives it a good position to reply to ‘practicists’. Only Nietzschean thought suffers from the comparison, being linked only to a practice of speech. Unless it is placed in relationship with the mediocre practice of writing. Psychoanalysis, for its part, led to a trade, a profession with its place in the social division of labour, and tending from the start towards institutionalization. In such a situation, partial (clinical) practice gave birth to an ideology that seeks to justify it by overstepping it. By tackling every problem, it seeks to be total.
Hence the weakness of psychoanalysis: a formless mixture of a linguistic technique with fragmentary cognitions (connaissances), and with representations proclaimed beyond their sphere of validity (by reduction and extrapolation). This ideology conveys its own myth, the unconscious, a box of tricks that contains everything put into it: body, memory, individual and social history, language, culture and its results or residues, etc. Finally, and above all, Freud only grasped, described and analysed the libido sentiendi. Psychoanalysis after Freud only indirectly tackled the libido dominandi, so profoundly explored by Nietzsche. It completely neglected the libido sciendi, the domain of cognition, the social status of knowledge. Why? Because Freud, though influenced by Schopenhauer’s deep-going studies, never abandoned the Hegelian schema of knowledge. He thus failed to recognize the great underground tradition, the clandestine legacy that made for the greatness of European thought and through which the dead or rotten branches of logos were given new life. Psychoanalysis does not go as far in its analysis as had Augustine, Jansen, La Rochefoucauld, Pascal and Nietzsche. When Freud had to face the terrible discovery that sex and sexuality led only to failure, drama and pathos, thus the pathological, he took up the very old theme of concordia discors or discordis concors – adding very little to this besides the clinical effort to cure neuroses. Do psychoanalysts succeed in this? Do they control the terrible negative power of language – by means of language? That is a different matter.
If understanding perceives desire at the lowest depth of ‘being’, it puts in question understanding itself. For Nietzsche, who pursued this line of questioning to its end, the great desire whose potential energy was hidden in the total body (and not in sex alone), this great desire that becomes ‘supreme grandeur’, born from the body and in the body, reveals itself as dance, song, then desire for eternity, eternal itself. It has nothing in common with the poor sexual libido, nor even with Platonic eros. ‘Meine weise Sehnsucht’, says Zarathustra: ‘my wise yearning’: wisdom embraced, desire across the mountains, desire on trembling wings, this ardent reason shouts and laughs.
In the investigation pursued here, it would be interesting to study the movements that shake religions and religious institutions, in particular the Catholic Church, rather than psychoanalysis, a ‘modernist’ ideology that is somewhat arrogant.
Would not Nietzsche himself have seen the success of psychoanalysis as a further symptom of decadence? An aggravated sickness? A form of European nihilism? Certainly. There is something morbid about this new avatar of Judeo-Christianity, which seeks to recycle itself by making up for the curse cast on sex, but preserves in its language and concepts all the ‘signs of non-body’. Psychoanalysis, as theory and ideology, practice and technique (of discourse), has succeeded neither in restoring the total body nor in preventing the phallic from assuming an ‘object’ existence.30 Besides, the ideological breakthrough of psychoanalysis continues to obscure Nietzschean thought by relegating it to a blind zone that replaces another blind zone, that of sex, a zone that is nothing other than the libido dominandi. As a result, psychoanalysis as ideology serves the established order in a number of ways: by hindering the critique of the state and power, by displacing thought and substituting another centre, etc.
‘Why not Heidegger?’, a questioning voice demands, rather malevolently. For several reasons, this philosopher does not figure in the constellation here. He followed the triadic model in the most naïve manner: Being, its eclipse, its resurrection or resurgence. This history of Being (the creative power, the word, the spirit) was seen as original by people unaware of Joachim de Fiore’s ‘eternal gospel’. It obscured the more concrete history offered by Hegel and Marx, without attaining the force of Nietzsche’s critique of history. Heidegger’s philosophy, a dissimulated theodicy, hardly secularized, tends to rescue the philosophical tradition without passing it through the sieve of radical criticism. Heidegger eludes the notion of metaphilosophy despite touching on it. He substitutes for it an ontology said to be fundamental, a variant of metaphysics whether we like it or not. True, he makes a contribution to the critical analysis of modernity, being one of the first to have perceived and foreseen the ravages of technology and understood that domination over nature (by means of knowledge and technique) becomes domination over people, and does not coincide with appropriation of this nature which it tends to destroy. Heidegger speaks (writes) an admirable language, almost too fine, as for him the dwelling of Being – what saves it from endless wandering – is language (the word) and constructions (architecture: temples, palaces, monuments and buildings). From this ‘admirable’ idea (we use the word ironically) the philosopher draws a disturbing apology for the German language. This prevents him from a radical critique of Western (European) logos, despite bordering on this. What he says of Nietzsche and against Nietzsche does not convince – that Nietzsche went too far and too deep, that he followed the mirroring surfaces of consciousness, veridical and deceptive – any better than his predecessor.
As for other contemporary ‘thinkers’, what have they done except launch into circulation the small change of Hegel, Marx and Nietzsche – along with some counterfeit coins …?31 This judgement may seem severe. Actually, there is nothing pejorative about it, it simply means that theoretical struggles and ideological tests do not pass without harm.
12) The same voice is raised again: ‘You only include German thinkers. Are you not concerned at privileging unduly a particular culture and language? And by what right do you refuse Heidegger what he dares to demand, precisely this privilege?’
Marx gave a peremptory reply to this argument in outlining the course of his own reflection and that of Hegelian thought. Because of Germany’s economic and political backwardness in the first half of the nineteenth century, German thought kept a distance that enabled its philosophers to understand what was happening in England (economic growth, capitalism, the bourgeoisie) and France (the political revolution, the formation of the nation-state with Robespierre and Napoleon). The great Germans were able to bring to language and to the concept what was happening and being done elsewhere. In uneven development, the ‘bad side’ (sometimes) has its productive counterpart.
This privilege of distance came to an end with the economic and political rise of Germany – as Nietzsche saw very well in 1873, with his Untimely Meditations. Marx, who continued in a conflictual relationship with the great German tradition, had already left his homeland, which was only able to view him by way of a crucial misunderstanding (Lassalleanism, state socialism, the fetishism of the state). Where is the sharpest critique of Germany to be found? In the works of Marx and Nietzsche. They spoke as connoisseurs, Nietzsche being inspired more than Marx by French thought – not the official Cartesian tradition but the underground currents. Marx, as we know, received his main impulse from the great English writers Smith and Ricardo.
As for France, why not boldly recognize the turn taken by French thought after Saint-Simon and Fourier? Cartesian rationalism was weakening, but it resisted and put up a counter-attack. We know all too well that this dethroned universalism threw off its grafts – dialectic, radical criticism and self-criticism, etc. – in a chauvinistic nationalism.
