Can a philosopher talk about race without being racist? The case of Nietzsche is exemplary: fraudulently mistreated by his own publishers, instrumentalized by anti-Semitism and then Nazism, the philosopher’s work puts his reader in an embarrassing situation.
Developed from a conference given at theEHESS In May 2019, Marc B. de Launay’s book entitled Nietzsche and Race intends to resume the examination of the meaning, status and scope of the notion of race in Nietzsche’s thought, and this from a perspective that is both genetic – attentive to the historicity of concepts within the Nietzschean corpus itself – and genealogical – concerned with explaining how and why the philosopher could be accused of racism to the point of serving as a publicity stunt for certain Nazi doctrinaires.
The author begins by discussing the way in which Nietzsche’s reception suffered from his recovery by Nazism (introduction and chapter 1), before recalling the historical context which made such recovery possible, under the leadership of the Weimar Archives directed by the philosopher’s sister (chapters 2 and 3).
It is only by being protected against these posthumous distortions that the examination of the work itself can be carried out without prejudice (chapters 4 to 10), to first elucidate the fundamental concepts of Nietzschean philosophy which are susceptible to a racial interpretation (chapters 4 to 7) before examining Nietzsche’s use of categories of discourse related to racial, if not racist, rhetoric (chapters 8 to 10).
Genealogy of a misunderstanding
The racist and Nazi recovery of Nietzsche’s philosophy was denounced quite early after the Second World War by authors such as Adorno, Gadamer and Horkheimer. But the latter do not explain what made this instrumentalization possible. Taking up the pieces of a file already prepared on numerous occasions, Marc B. de Launay strives to determine what, in Nietzsche’s philosophy, could lend itself to confusion and therefore to fallacious theoretical and philological manipulations: the idea of the reversal of values, but above all the central place granted by Nietzsche to the body, a true “common thread” of his new way of philosophizing, constitute “the necessary support for racial thought” (p. 12). The confusions caused by certain provocative expressions of Nietzsche, which his detractors were quick to display as proof of his alleged brutalism, are in this sense removed – as is the case with the famous “blond beast” mentioned in the Genealogy of Moralitywhose philological context the author recalls (p. 14-15).
It is also important to be careful of the notion of “precursor” among those who consider Nietzsche as a proto-fascist author. Indeed, this presupposes a reconstruction a posteriori which consists in interpreting the past in terms of the future in order to see in the former signs announcing the latter. This is all the more interesting to note since this adulterated logic, which consists in making historical reality appear in the colour one wishes to give it, is very exactly the way in which the Nazis, in a manner that is both voluntarist and nominalist, leave the terrain of biological or hierarchical rhetoric whenever they please: if they decide that a certain Jewish artist is acceptable to the Reich – as reported in the anecdote, probably legendary, according to which Goebbels is said to have said to Fritz Lang: “what is Jewish, it is we who decide” (p. 24) – it is because he is ultimately not so Jewish as all that, in other words non-Jewish.
But above all, the twisting that was made of Nietzsche’s thought to integrate it into the genealogy of Nazism is due to a philological counterfeiting: moved to Weimar in 1896, the Nietzsche archives, supported in particular by Mussolini and the NSDAPare placed under the thumb of the philosopher’s sister. Under her direction, the edition of the texts gives for quotations from Nietzsche texts which are in reality quotations from other authors. Plus: collections of fragments initially intended for publication, then abandoned in their fragmentary state by Nietzsche, are published as a book by Nietzsche under the title The Will to Powera work about which the philosopher expressly wrote to his friend Peter Gast, who would nevertheless participate in the Archives: “the idea of publication is in fact excluded” (letter of February 26, 1888, cited p. 48).
A “historical philosophy”
Noting that Nietzsche’s philosophy, from Human, all too humanpresents itself as a “historical philosophy”, the author shows that the interpretation of the central concepts of Nietzschean thought cannot do without an examination that takes into account the evolution of the meaning of their acceptance according to their uses and the discursive contexts in which they are summoned. But above all, it appears on examination that, in Nietzsche’s historical philosophy, “axiology takes precedence over ontology” (note 1, p. 113), in the sense that reality is a set of interpretations in conflict, whose development does not admit of any eschatology: there is no end to history. Marc de Launay’s thesis thus consists in removing Nietzschean statements from the accusation of racism to the extent that, in racist discourse, the idea of a nature in the making disappears in favor of an ideological and rigid conception of nature, which leads to assimilating life to a force of conservation, and history to a political struggle called upon to make certain racial types triumph rather than others. However, a patient reading of the texts shows that Nietzsche’s philosophy is at the antipodes of such a conception and of the project that it carries with it.
On the one hand, the will to power (chapter 4) is a heuristic hypothesis intended to explain why there is becoming and not being: the world of the will to power is a game of struggling forces that cannot know a state of equilibrium corresponding to any end of history. Nietzsche, thinker of theagonedramatizes the tension between antagonistic principles such as Dionysus and Apollo without there ever being any question of a definitive triumph of the former over the latter. The ebb and flow of the will to power cannot therefore produce, either on the biological or cultural terrain, a pure, fixed and final race:
If we project this conception onto the terrain of the “racial” debate, and assuming that Nietzsche understood the notion of “race” in the sense of raciology or in the sense that certain anthropologists have been able to give it (which is obviously not the case, the author specifies in a note), the “bodily” dispositions observable superficially are, like the “cultural” or mental backgrounds that we suppose them to have, subject to the “historical” fluctuations of the “wills to power” in conflict (p. 59).
On the other hand, and consequently, Nietzsche’s evolutionism is opposed to that of Darwin (chapter 6), or at least to a Darwinian vulgate which would make the instinct of conservation the principle of all life. Even if Nietzsche borrows, in order to develop his evolutionary philosophy, from the biology and physiology of his time (pp. 65-66), it is for auxiliary purposes which do not respond to a naturalist and reductionist program. From this point of view, “(a) ‘species’ (…) or what Darwin would call a specific ‘variety’, is in no way a guarantee of long-term stability” (p. 93).
It is therefore not surprising to observe, with supporting texts, that the superman (chapter 5) is in no way a new species, any more than he is the end of a teleological story or the terminus of a story that would end with him – the “last man” who is precisely the grimacing face of the bourgeois individual of whom the superman is the antithesis. There is every reason to think that the superman is an ethical ideal type, that of “an individual in whom thefat love would be absolutely spontaneous” (p. 81) because it supports the thought of the eternal return (chapter 7).
Race and culture
In what contexts, in what sense and for what purposes does Nietzsche therefore call upon the notion of race (chapter 10)? This is particularly apparent when reading the eighth section of Beyond good and evil (chapter 8), in contexts where the notion always appears as a synonym for “social group”, “people” or “lineage” (p. 163):
“race” always refers to a cultural configuration (Greek, European), to a culture (Romanity), to a nation (French, German, English), to a lineage or a “caste” which is also transnational or transcultural (p. 166).
It is true that, as a result, the meaning of the term race becomes so fluctuating that it becomes difficult to define its contours exactly, as evidenced by the salutary effort made by Marc de Launay to define the semantic status of terms relating to Judaism in Nietzsche’s thought (chapter 9). In short, race would be in Nietzsche a writing convention participating in a zoological rhetoric of the time which would have for him only a strictly cultural meaning – as the author writes to contest the “incriminating” interpretation of Domenico Losurdo (note 1, p. 136). If there does exist, contrary to a received idea, a Nietzschean politics, it is a cultural politics (originally linked to the position of Theodor Mommsen (note 2 p. 121)):
Just as “morals are only the gestures of passions (Beyond Good and Evil, §187)”, national temperaments have their symbolic language in the music they produce. Thus “political” reflection is immediately framed by a cultural policy, that is to say by a general economy of values (p. 122).
The central argument that runs through Marc de Launay’s argument is convincing, even if some points might deserve to be clarified in detail. The fact that Nietzsche, for example, is not a materialist physiologist should invite us to ask ourselves why exactly he is so interested in biological theories and racial ideologies such as Francis Galton’s eugenics, an interest that is part of a breeding project (Preparation) nourished upstream and whose hereditary dimension, even if it is situated on an axiological level, cannot be dismissed out of hand on the grounds (debatable) that Nietzsche does not adhere to the Lamarckian principle of the heredity of acquired characteristics (note 1, p. 89). More generally – and even if there is always some injustice in holding the gaps in a work that cannot claim to be exhaustive – the evocation of the biologists and theorists of biology that Nietzsche frequented, the discussion of certain aspects of Nietzsche’s secondary literature, could have given a firmer strike to the thesis of the work, to reveal, in opposition to these types of discourse, the specificity of Nietzsche’s language.
It is true that this has already been done elsewhere. From this point of view, the strength of Marc de Launay’s thesis consists in showing that, by reading Nietzsche’s philosophy as a “perspectival historicism”, one can no longer subscribe to the idea that the concept of race has a substantial meaning in him. Opening the concept of race to its Nietzschean historicization in order to put it into perspective to the point of dissolving it in the constellation of its terminology is valuable in tearing it away from its racist, biological or doctrinaire understanding. One might think that this quality carries with it a defect: the title of the work, ultimately, disappoints its promise. But in reality, between “Nietzsche and race”, one of the two members of the alternative has been defeated by the other: reinterpreted by Nietzsche along an intellectual itinerary foreign to any spirit of system, the notion of race no longer has, for the philosopher, the meaning of a biological or metaphysical hypostasis. Our desire to fight it out, our desire to know what exactly is the relationship between Nietzsche and race, is thus satisfied in its very disappointment, in any case for the reader who would have approached the work with the idea, scholastically metaphysical, that it would be a question of examining a relationship between two substantial realities.