Domenico Losurdo - Nietzsche, the Aristocratic Rebel: Intellectual Biography and Critical Balance-Sheet (2020) (original) (raw)
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Unifying, Comparative, Critical and Metacritical: Domenico Losurdo's Nietzsche as Aristocratic Rebel
Preprint of extended review essay* of Domenico Losurdo;'s Friedrich Nietzsche: Aristocratic Rebel, translated by Gregory Benton (2019/20). Part 1 examines Losurdo's interpretation of Nietzsche as "the greatest reactionary among philosophers, and the greatest philosopher among reactionaries." It details Losurdo's specific unifying and contextualising methodologies which re-place Nietzsche in his times and context, and read him as a coherent philosophical thinker, not inconsistent provocateur or conceptual artist, willing to think through to its roots what it would mean to overcome Judaeochristian morality. Part 2 looks at how Losurdo's reading of Nietzsche, and the distinctions he makes between Nietzsche' s different texts and developments, enables us to at once comprehend and challenge hegemonic liberal Nietzsche interpretations. By reading the whole of Nietzsche's corpus, and paying Socratic attention to the distinctions the German philosopher himself introduces, Losurdo shows the need to proceed carefully before asserting Nietzsche’s anti-Germanism (excluding Nietzsche 1 (of Birth of Tragedy), and in no way relevant to 20th century debates), his 'feminism' (contradicted by his hostility, especially in the later works, to women's movement, as well as his echoing standard misogynist tropes of the period) his anti-Statism (always qualified, never anti-military), his famous anti-Christianity (not in the early period, never politically unconditional), as well as his celebrated, putative, post-Kaufmanian “individualism” and an "aestheticism" tied to traditional understandings linking "otium et bellum" (leisure and war). Finally, Losurdo gives a discerning reading of Nietzsche's complex relationship with the people of the Torah who gave us both the masterly books of the Kings and the egalitarian "slave" morality of the prophets, presaging Jesus, Paul, and modern progressivist nihilism. Closing remarks show how, as well as reestablishing Nietzsche's continuing influence on the Far Right, reading Nietzsche with Losurdo can help students understand many of the core convictions of the latter: that the poor, unfortunate and weak, like violence and exploitation, will always be with us, so it is unnatural to support progressive political change (2.5-6, ch. 12); that herd animals profit from being ruled harshly, even by Napoleon-like Caesarist figures (BGE, 199; GS 40);; that educating the masses too much is unwise if one wants a well-ordered, hierarchical society (12.4); that concessions to welfare from below do not satisfy but will only stimulate further demands; that demands for [social] justice, rooted in pity or compassion, are fictions which always and only express envy and resentment against “the strong” (7.11; 8.1; 14.3; 21.1-4); that low voter turnout in representative elections should lead to the limiting of the franchise or suspension of the constitution (9.1); that social conflict and even war should sometimes be welcomed as a means to harden and make the way straight for the master[s] who can best advance society (later period, 11.5); and that rather than holding onto illusory “life-denying” ideals, one should have the honesty to confront these harder truths without apology or a guilt reflecting slavish values (10.5). [*preprint only-accepted for publication with Critical Horizons, 20/21]
Translator's Introduction, Nietzsche, Philosopher of Reaction: Towards a Political Biography
Draft of translator's introduction to Nietzsche, Philosopher of Reaction: Towards a Political Biography, a translation of a short text by the late Italian scholar, historian of ideas and philosopher, Domenico Losurdo which will appear later this year or early 2023 with Historical Materialism. Losurdo's work originally appeared in Italian in 1997 bearing the title Nietzsche: Per una biografia politica (Roma: Manifesto Libri, Orme, 1997). Five years later, in 2002, Losurdo would publish his far longer study, Nietzsche, il ribelle aristocratico: Biografia intellettuale e bilancio critic (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 2002). Losurdo's great book on Nietzsche represents arguably the most significant challenge to regnant liberal, postmodernist, and feminist interpretations of the latter's work, by recourse to the methodologies of contextualising intellectual history and critical hermeneutics. Yet, despite the book's immense scholarship, weight of evidence, and intellectual significance, it would take nearly two decades for Nietzsche, il ribelle aristocratico to appear in English translation by Gregor Benton in the Historical Materialism series at Brill. Sadly, Losurdo himself would not live to see its appearance in print, passing away in June 2018. The reader of his shorter, earlier extended essay on the German philosopher of the Second Reich will however get a very clear picture of Losurdo’s larger interpretive orientation. The striking challenge his reading of Nietzsche represents to many better-known works published or translated in the Anglosphere over the last five decades is also trenchantly clear in the less than 100 pages of this work. The aim of making this work available to anglophones was to make Losurdo’s critical work, on this philosopher who continues to animate such different cohorts as academic left-liberals and far right activists, accessible to many more people, and facilitate more balanced debates surrounding everything Nietzsche thought, wrote, and has wrought. [Author's copy, do not cite]
timneal.net, 2021
Friedrich Nietzsche is one of those thinkers who has inspired many young adults. He is the type of author who is carried in the pocket of the thoughtful, socially awkward teenager. The copy in the pocket will be doggy-eared, the spine well creased, and the text generally battered from many trips inside satchels, backpacks, and jacket pockets. There are many different authors who have captured the hearts and minds of many different people, but I suspect Nietzsche has collected a readership more dedicated than most. A part of Nietzsche's success is not just his ideas, but the way he communicates those ideas.
Historical Materialism, 2025
This essay [#2021, author's copy, unformatted, awaiting final copy edits and publication in HM 2025-do not cite] addresses Domenico Losurdo’s response to the metaquestion of why, if Nietzsche was an avowed aristocratic radical, he can continue to be received as a liberal or even democratic thinker, whose appropriation by the far right sparks outrage in some scholarly enclaves (i.). This essay considers what I take to be the key idea underlying Losurdo’s Nietzsche’s “theoretical surplus” (ii.), which allows Losurdo both to explain the attraction of many broadly on the non-socialist Left to Nietzsche, and to show that this attraction is nevertheless mistaken, hermeneutically, as well as leading them into inescapable proximity with radically reactionary modes of social thought. Having introduced the distinction (iii.), I will apply it to a rich section of Dawn (iv) and show the work it can do, before showing the distance it allows us to re-establish between Nietzsche and a progressive thinker he admired, namely Voltaire (v.).
Anti-Nietzsche : A Critique of Friedrich Nietzsche
Nietzsche’s irrational doctrines have contributed to the emergence of self-destructive extremism on both the right and left ends of the political spectrum. The realization of his Übermensch ideal is not about achieving greatness as an individual but rather about greatness as a collective whole, specifically as a European empire. His philosophy stands in stark contrast to genuine conservatism, which is rooted in Christian principles. Keywords: conservatism, perspectivism, traditionalism, New Right, identitarian, postmodernism, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Heraclitus, extremism, antisemitism, will to power, logos, Christianity.
The Politics of Reading Nietzsche
Political Studies, 1998
Over recent years, an extraordinary number of interpretations of Nietzsche's work has appeared. I ask why he has become such an important ®gure in contemporary political debate and whether any dominant concerns can be elicited from the diverse readings of his texts. My response to both questions is that because Nietzsche has been identi®ed, by Habermas among others, as the founding father of poststructuralism, this is where debate between postmodernists and their critics is being staged. I distinguish between recent philosophical and political interpretations but argue that in both cases, what is at stake are political questions regarding authority, legitimacy and consensus. In the latter part of the article I consider attempts at reconstructing a postmodern politics out of Nietzsche's philosophy, but express some doubts about such a project.
Nietzsche in His Time: The Struggle Against Socratism and Socialism
Historical Materialism Journal , 2020
Review essay of Domenico Losurdo’s groundbreaking biography and historical study of Nietzsche's life and times, The Aristocratic Rebel: Intellectual Biography and Critical Balance-Sheet. Originally published in Italian in 2002, this in-depth biographical portrait offers up an entirely new way of reading the legacy of Nietzsche’s impact on social and political thought. Losurdo presents an argument often neglected, if not outright ignored by philosophers, literary theorists and general readers of Nietzsche; namely that he is best read as a deeply political and reactionary thinker who, over the course of four key stages of his career, develops a reactionary political agenda that is inseparable from the development of his moral and metaphysical thought.
Nietzsche and the Engine of Politics
In this essay I provide an interpretation of the Übermensch in light of the cardinal conceptual and methodological importance of physiology in Nietzsche's thinking-not as an ideal type but as the ongoing overhuman process of physiological overcoming in which even the 'human being' is to be taken beyond the framework and typological construct of 'the human'. I argue that Nietzschean physiology is not primarily concerned with the language of man and its paradigm of the speaking or thinking subject, but rather with an overhuman physis and physiology of forces that make use and abuse of the human-in addition to nonhuman formations-as its material and medium of inscription hence articulation (a type-writing rather than a type, in this sense). Nietzsche privileges physis (growth, will-to-power) over logos (speech, human reason) in his physiology, and hence a-signifying forces over forces of (human, all too human) signification. In posing the political question of rule in terms of the physiological question of the production and direction of will-to-power, the overhuman appears to be Nietzsche's strategy for radically rethinking the place and the fate of human life-forms in relation to wider non-signifiying, nonconscious, non-human, often inhuman as well as transhuman 'form-shaping forces'. In the present arguments, I draw largely from François Laruelle's little-known tour-de-force, Nietzsche