counterpart and counterpoint. Whereas the appeal from conceptual knowledge to a higher form of understanding has a meaning and must be heard.
Yet Nietzsche did not exhaust the list of myths, manipulations and blackmails bound up with the exercise of logos, power and cognition. He could not have known them all in his day, and some of them might have turned against him. The myth of the Titan – the modern Prometheus – who breaks the great social and political machine, a myth that exalted the modern working class, Nietzsche took up in his own way when he sought to ‘philosophize with a hammer’. Similarly, with the opposite and corollary myth of the clever little imp who somewhere disrupts a little cog in the same machine, so that it comes to a halt and stops functioning,28 the forces of negation (protest, contestation) are themselves dislocated. But this remark leads on to a different story …
10) To continue the confrontation between the members of the Hegel-Marx-Nietzsche triad, in other words, between the three dominant thoughts on the modernity that they each sought to grasp, we have to do away with political encumbrances and hypotheses. This point deserves close attention.29
a) Hegel and Hegelianism may be charged with reaction pure and simple. A rightist politics that saw itself not just as Realpolitik but as theoretically true, would be justified in Hegel by analysis of the ‘real’, of the nation and the pays réel, the necessary institutions. This would also legitimate both state and state apparatuses, along with political apparatuses in general and the predominance of the statesman over all other ‘moments’ of knowledge, culture, etc.
Now, there is this in Hegel: theorization and rationalization of the political act. There is in him the justification, along with the state, of a ‘state of things’ in which the totality of the real comes to a halt, stagnates and is blocked.
If there was only this in Hegel, would he merit the present confrontation? Would there be ground and cause for a hearing? No. First of all, Hegelianism contains, together with this theorization, the confession and denunciation of this ‘state of things’. It makes possible an analysis. Second, Hegel, who sought to be and believed himself a defender of freedom, also rejected and rebutted this extreme case: stagnation, the display of the accomplished. He conceived a compromise that would bring harmony between authority and freedom. Only the liberal state left room for its ‘moments’ and for the flexibility of its members. It alone was able to regenerate itself, re-produce itself with an inherent dynamism, a vitality both immanent and rational. For Hegel, obsolescent recourse to fait accompli, to unrestrained violence, indicated that the final equilibrium had not been achieved; it was either incomplete or had failed. If, in the last century and a half, the state has revealed its ‘worst side’, which Hegel had theorized, we cannot make Hegel’s doctrine responsible. A symptom more than a cause or a reason, Hegelianism cannot be got rid of as easily as something like the legal historicism of Savigny, for example. It can be used (and certainly has been) to justify sticking to the past, in terms of historicism, nationalism, even chauvinism. These interpretations and alterations are part of the file, but they do not prevent us compiling this.
b) The same is true of Stalinism for Marx. If there is a ‘revisionist’ ideology in relation to Marx’s thought, it is certainly this dark cloud. True, the Stalinist mystifiers launched the ‘revisionist’ epithet to cover up their own ideological operations (based, it goes without saying, on the economic, social and political ‘reality’ of the USSR after Lenin). The Stalinists cleverly muddied their tracks, for example by describing Hegel as a ‘philosopher of feudal reaction’, whereas they themselves were Hegelians and even super-Hegelians. If the class struggle after a proletarian revolution leads to a strengthening and increased centralization of the state, this may be a ‘historical necessity’, but it has nothing in common with the thinking of Marx. Still more: if this thesis is true in the theoretical sense of the term, then so-called Marxist thought collapses. It crumbles into pieces, even if well-intentioned people gather up the pieces and try to reconstruct something with the debris.
Against this pseudo-theory we can cite so many texts by Marx, Engels and Lenin that they would fill volumes. Moreover, the violent controversies aroused by Stalinism and the anti-Stalinist opposition have revealed a contradiction internal to the revolutionary movement and the workers’ movement itself. This already appeared with Saint-Simon and Fourier. The latter was happy to dispense with the state, whereas Saint-Simon no less happily contradicted himself, at one point demanding a state that would be effective because run by the ‘industriels’ (producers and scientists), elsewhere the replacement of state constraint by the direct administration of things. This contradiction erupted in Europe around the year 1870. When political historians and publicists tenderly examine the workers’ movement, with a view to eliminating or at least attenuating its contradictions, they overlook the double process that led in France to the Commune and in Germany to the Social Democratic Party. The French movement resolutely attacked the state and demolished it in 1870, when the workers of Paris set out to ‘storm the heavens’. German socialism, in contrast, influenced by the Hegelian Lassalle, accepted and integrated the state. An integration which, as we know, was envisaged by the great political strategist Bismarck. Do we need to recall once again the content of Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Programme, in which, despite a cautious formulation that hardly mentions the Paris Commune, Marx’s full approval of this is clear enough, in what was his political testament? The contradiction is manifest even in the thought and work of Marx.
Hence the terrible bitterness of the last line of this text: ‘Dixi et salvavi animam meam.’ (‘I have spoken and saved my soul.’)
If state socialism has triumphed in the workers’ movement, and in the world, this means that the workers’ movement has abandoned both Marxism and Leninism; that it has succumbed to Lassalleanism; that Marxism has become an ideology, a philosophy serving the state, a public service in the Hegelian sense. Marx holds no responsibility for this situation, other than having left in obscurity a conflict of decisive importance.
c) The same holds, finally, for Nietzsche and Hitlerian fascism. A forced falsification twisted Nietzsche’s texts, pulling them towards fascist ideology. True, ambiguous fragments are not lacking. In his analysis of the will to power, Nietzsche expresses admiration for questionable heroes: adventurers, condottieri, conquistadores. Marx might equally be classified as an anti-Semite on the basis of his text on the Jewish question! Developing a radical critique, a fundamental refutation, a refusal and rejection of the libido dominandi, Nietzsche envisaged all its aspects, all its masks, both political and otherwise: imperial and imperialist action, Machiavellianism, warlike ambition and activity, as well as goodness, charitable action, ‘good works’, even renunciation and humility.
As for Nietzsche’s success, in other words, the reception of his theoretical analysis as ideology, this underwent a change of sign: anarchists and immoralists at the turn of the twentieth century, then fascist politicians, and today philosophers, so-called ‘Nietzscheans’, have all contributed to his misunderstanding. These errors of interpretation have to figure in the file. They are not directly imputable to the author.
This rejection of political appreciation implies a devaluing of politics as such, something we should emphasize. The political criterion, which during the Stalinist and fascist period was presented as absolute, is in no way definitive. It changes and falls. For a short space of time, it took on a ‘total’ appearance because imposed by the double means of ideological persuasion and violence. It then induced errors whose derisory character was later apparent.
11) ‘Is it out of a mania for triads, or a caricature of the supposedly triadic model, that you focus here on just three bodies of work, three thinkers? What leads you to place Hegel, Marx and Nietzsche at the gateway to modernity and as its guiding lights? Why not others?’
It is free for anyone to claim that shadows and the realm of shadows came to an end with Freud, Heidegger, Lenin or Mao Zedong, or even Wilhelm Reich, Georges Bataille, etc.
Let
