Golden Calf: Deleuze's Nietzsche in the Time of Trump (original) (raw)

Reading (draft only of accepted paper) of Deleuze's Nietzsche and Philosophy, in the light of the generation of post-post-structuralist writings of Ishay Landa, Don Dombowsky, Ronald Beiner, William H.F. Altman and Geoffrey Waite, which take seriously Nietzsche as a political philosopher in the grand (post-Platonic) style, not an apolitical individualist. Given the increasing use of Nietzsche again to justify far right political prescriptions and programs, the essay analyses: how does Deleuze's landmark book address the issue of Nietzsche’s far right appropriations and the textual bases for these appropriations, from German through Italian, Romanian, Belgian, Russian, French, American and even Australian far right thinkers, historically and today? Therefore how, if at all, can Deleuze’s exuberant celebration of Nietzsche’s work be squared with any meaningfully post-enlightenment, Leftist position, beyond a quasi-libertarianism with few concrete institutional implications? Part 1 analyses what we call "four causes" operating in Deleuze, to avoid raising the political implications of Nietzsche's radical anti-egalitarianism; and Part 2 analyses how the fallacy of equivocation operates in Deleuze's reading of the eternal recurrence which enable him to at once invoke and not invoke the eugenic program of the 'new party of life' in Nietzsche's later work. Conclusions reflect on what a critical confrontation with Nietzsche might mean in the time of Trump et al, and the reemergence of authoritarian ethno-nationalism. We finish with Thomas Mann.