How Nietzsche Came in From the Cold: Tale of a Redemption
Author: Philipp Felsch Daniel Bowles (Translated by)
Publisher: Polity Press, UK
How Nietzsche Came in From the Cold: Tale of a Redemption by Philipp Felsch (trans. by Daniel Bowles) begins with a disturbing reminder of the power of interpretation and its twists of intention in the hands of malevolent forces. Both Adolph Hitler and Benito Mussolini were strong adherents of the principles of the so-called Übermensch, as laid out in the works of German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, especially in his last unfinished volume, Der Wille zur Macht. Opening Chapter 1, Felsch feeds us,
For Mussolini’s sixtieth birthday on July 29, 1943, Hitler gifted him a complete edition of Nietzsche, bound in blue pigskin. ‘Adolf Hitler to his dear Benito Mussolini,’ read the Führer’s handwritten dedication in the first volume.
Felsch wonders whether Il Duce still took succour in the Nietzsche maxim, «Live Dangerously.» Mussolini accepted all things German, and one expects that he never tried to respond to Hitler’s Nietzsche putsch by pushing back with Macchiavelli and his maxim, «Live Deviously.»
The edition didn’t get to Mussolini right away, as he had been exiled to Ponza in the Tyrrhenian Sea, and it took time to reach him. So much for his years of living dangerously. And Hitler himself was only a year away from his comeuppance when the second front opened up on D-Day on June 6, 1944. And Felsch tells of Nietzsche’s fall from Nazi grace with this anecdote:
In September, when Hitler put Italy under occupation, a Wehrmacht detachment is said to have been tasked with recapturing the volumes, but the story goes that the officer responsible obtained a revocation of the order by pointing out the expected casualties. A luxury set of Nietzsche volumes from Mussolini’s personal library with a dedication from Hitler: there could scarcely be more striking proof of Nietzsche’s political discreditation.
The volume disappeared and has yet to be found. For a time, Nietzsche’s worth plummeted, too.
How Nietzsche Came in From the Cold tells the story of how two Italian scholars helped rehabilitate his image after it was abused by the fascists and Nazis in their quest for world dominance and then return Nietzsche’s studies to preeminence in the intellectual circles of post-war Europe out of which postmodern thought reflowered — structuralism, existentialism, phenomenology, and deconstruction. Real Twilight of the Idols stuff.
Much of this revolutionary energy was described in Felsch’s previous book, The Summer of Theory: History of a Rebellion, 1960–1990. Here we are treated with the rise of the stock of Heidegger, Derrida, Sartre, Saussure, Deleuze, Foucault, Merleau-Ponty, among many others. Teeming, smokin’ Paris was back, baby!
Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari were trouble-makers. Felsch describes how they set out on a bus laden with mostly French and German philosophers to Royaumont in July 1964 to convene a meeting of Nietzscheologists. The year before, the heads of the post-war governments of France and Germany, de Gaulle and Adenauer, had met at Royaumont to sign the Élysée Treaty. Now these mostly French scholars intended to take control of the future interpretation of Nietzsche’s oeuvre from the Germans. But the feisty Italian pair of Colli and Mazzino had come on that bus of enthusiasts eager to get the program of Nietzsche revaluations up and running again, and, the reader is told, «they played an ignominious role; they had come to Royaumont as spoilsports.»
Same old, same old: Who controls the narrative and the means of ideological production roles the roost in Turkey Cockville, as Nietzsche might have put it. Nietzsche had always seen his work as «dynamite,» and its use by the insane power monsters of WW2 showed that its mojo could be wickedly co-opted. Felsch acknowledges the futility of scapegoating Nietzsche’s sister, Elisabeth, who had married a proto-Nazi and who gained control of his work after Nietzsche went insane. Her biggest mistake was putting out The Will to Power as her brother’s magnum opus when it was unfinished and edited into its eminence. Hitler, whose moustache looked like he had castrated his paintbrush and pasted it under his Nase in a rage after being kicked out of art school, saw The Will to Power as a perfect complement to his Mein Kampf shenanigans. The question was how to rescue Nietzsche’s moustache.
Nietzsche had always seen his work as ‘dynamite,’ and its use by the insane power monsters of WW2 showed that its mojo could be wickedly co-opted.
Felsch describes how the debate at Royaumont and elsewhere later was contentious, ego-driven, and sometimes stodgy and myopic. The handover did not come easy. The Germans, for instance, put forward Karl Löwith, who argued for relocating Nietzsche to the past — the one with the Idols — arguing for «exiting the disastrous upheaval of modernism and returning to a classical equanimity that viewed humankind as part of the forever-immutable cosmos.» French eyes rolled; here we go again, especially Gilles Deleuze, who at that time was attaché de recherches at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique and organizer of the colloquium, who rejected the cosmos thing and pushed «a Dionysian principle of upheaval that guaranteed the world never remained identical with itself.» Then Michel Foucault spoke and argued against over-interpretation, noting, writes Felsch,
By replacing the idea of the original text with an abyss of interpretations nested inside one another, Nietzsche, in particular, transformed for his successors the business of interpretation into an infinite task no longer backed by an originary truth.
N’est ce pas? His eyes asked. Oo da fug is diz gee? Some thought leaders from Montreal inquired.
However, Colli and Mazzino had their own take, far more accommodating to Nietzsche’s genius and plentitude. They, too, were tired of overinterpretation and the need for thought-slingers to make a name for themselves in the Wild West of postwar hermeneutics. As Felsch has it, «Perhaps because he himself acted out the antagonistic tendencies of his age, Nietzsche played the role of a canvas onto which the entire spectrum of twentieth-century ideas could be projected.» He adds the observations of Jürgen Habermas, who Felsch avers,
Nietzsche’s French interpreters, from Deleuze to Derrida, perceived the true explosive power of his thought to be located precisely in its aphoristic fragmentation, in its lack of a central viewpoint, in its transgression of the order of philosophical discourse.
Colli and Mazzino, former students and teachers, one from a proletariat background, the other with the comfort trappings of the bourgeoisie, made their way to Royaumont to take on the «big wigs» and rediscover the authentic and «true» Nietzsche.
How Nietzsche Came in From the Cold: Tale of a Redemption tells the tale of two complementary Italians in love with their brand of communism. Gramsci figures largely in their talks, correspondence, and diary entries. The chapters fly by, each adding a new flavour to the eventual sauce of their co-insouciance. Chapter sections light up like highway signs: «Beauty and Horror,» «Over the Abyss,» «Nietzsche is a Disease,» «Alone Against the Nietzsche Mafia,» and «Nietzsche’s Dirty Secret.» Excellent reading.
Nietzsche Studies are enjoying a healthy resurgence in our troubled times. Although, for how long is a true question, now that we have crossed the abyss into super AI and nano-totalitarianism. Independent scholar Glenn Wallis has a volume out, Nietzsche, Now!, that is a freshened-up look at Nietzsche, especially useful for the study of collapsing democracies. Brian Leiter has put out a more academic read with Nietzsche on Morality. And Nietzsche’s Immoralism: Politics as First Philosophy and Politics after Morality: Toward a Nietzschean Left by Donovan Miyasaki.
