Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche by Henri Lefebvre

Author:Henri Lefebvre
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books

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The Nietzsche File

1) Less bulky than the file for Hegel or Marx? Seemingly not. More surprising? Certainly, since ‘Nietzscheanism’ has been associated with literary and poetic madness, full of wild rhetoric and lacking any connection to social action and practice.

At the start of the twentieth century, a girl from the bourgeoisie who took a lover and intended to ‘live her own life’ would quote Nietzsche.1 In those days, in France, ‘Nietzscheanism’ stood for a kind of anarchistic leftism that would give birth to rowdy children.2 In Germany and Austria, in the 1890s, Strauss and Mahler respectively dedicated to Zarathustra and Nietzsche musical works in a heroic and heavy style. Later on, in France, the ‘reception’ of Nietzschean doctrine (if this word can be used) would run in diametrically opposing directions – Gide and Drieu La Rochelle, for example, left and right. Nietzscheanism then meant an elitist attitude, the (supposed) formation of a new aristocracy.3

On the subject of Friedrich Nietzsche, it is necessary to distinguish between posterity and influence. In the first case, his work entered into what he himself would have called the genealogy of certain men, thinkers, poets, men of action. In the second case, one misunderstanding followed another, and the influence spread in a chain of ignorance; a ‘proper reading’ of Nietzsche would have dissuaded many would-be disciples! The same could be said of Marx (but is there one proper reading and other bad ones?).

Certain filiations particularly deserve to be studied, in several different lights. For example, the relationship between Nietzsche and Georges Bataille, or between Nietzsche and Hermann Hesse, or between Nietzsche and Robert Musil. The Glass Bead Game predicts what happens to a society when an esoteric knowledge claiming to be absolute possesses prestige and seeks power. What does happen? It is held by a caste that resembles a monastic order; this order, dominant in one region (Castalia) but not the whole country, comes into conflict with the state and ‘reality’. This knowledge is refined and perfected, becoming truly total (mathematical, linguistic, musical, historical, etc.). The result: a no less total failure. The Hegelian thesis of the primacy of knowledge turns back against philosophy and the philosopher. Hermann Hesse, however, retained from Hegel his elitism, the role of logos and of linguistics as the primordial science, and he attached to music, as did Nietzsche, a value equal to and rivalling that of knowledge. As for The Man Without Qualities, this great book is pervaded by a very Nietzschean irony. A response to Stirner, and still more individualistic than ‘the ego and its own’, the man without qualities has them all, but does nothing with them and can do nothing with them, in the Europe of 1913.

Anyone who has the full Nietzsche file to hand and browses it attentively will find it full of surprises. He will note that General de Gaulle, the famous and influential French statesman of the mid-twentieth century, attributed to Nietzsche a fearsome importance and responsibility, despite committing an unbelievable blunder about the poet-philosopher’s thought.

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