Thread by @DevinGoure

All right, it’s time to talk about the elephant in the room, and the elephant is Domenico Losurdo’s Nietzsche: The Aristocratic Rebel. Hopefully the first in a🧵series picking apart the book’s arguments, I’ll start w/ an overview and Losurdo’s reading of The Birth of Tragedy.

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There’s no denying the truly impressive volume of detailed historical research that went into Losurdo’s book on Nietzsche. Insisting upon a primarily historical interpretive strategy is a big part of what distinguishes Losurdo from other critics of Nietzsche’s philosophy and 2/

politics. Losurdo takes aim at a “hermeneutics of innocence” that, on his view, unjustly absolves Nietzsche of responsibility for the role his thought eventually played in fascism due to its failure to situate N’s reactionary political views in their proper historical context. 3/

But the core thesis of the book is actually far more sweeping than this. Losurdo’s argument, in brief, is that the historical interpretation is the *only* way to discover the real systematic unity of Nietzsche’s philosophy, which for Losurdo lies in a counterrevolutionary 4/

project of radical aristocratic revanchism, a thoroughgoing rejection of modernity. Crucially, however, Losurdo’s goal is *not* simply to have done with Nietzsche. Instead, his argument is that Nietzsche presents a formidable challenge to progressive ideals that needs to be 5/

taken seriously, and that his hermeneutic strategy is the key to uncovering this challenge: “It is now clear: to be able to appreciate Nietzsche as a great philosopher, one must first defend him against his apologists.” Harrison Fluss glosses this point nicely in the intro to 6/

the English translation: “the challenge [Nietzsche’s] perspectivism poses to progressive ideas is remarkable and potentially devastating…his challenge should force us to come to grips with the history of progressive ideas, and their philosophical foundations.” 7/

I wholeheartedly agree with this assessment. The problem is that this is where Losurdo’s book decisively fails. Instead, Losurdo submerges any reconstruction of the substance of Nietzsche’s philosophy in a strategy of historical triangulation, where the philosophical content 8/

vanishes behind an all-encompassing picture of Nietzsche as a representative of a particular strain of reactionary politics. Still worse, to get here we have to accept a series of interpretive decisions that are, at best, deeply questionable. First, we must accept not just 9/

that Nietzsche’s unpublished fragments provide important context missing from the published work, but the much, much stronger claim that the Nachlass holds the key to his true philosophy, even to the point where the published work is treated as a deliberate deception. 10/

Losurdo replaces a hermeneutics of innocence with a hermeneutics of paranoia, one that goes well beyond the work of reading Nietzsche against Nietzsche into the conspiratorial portrait of a man who masked his true political ambitions beyond a philosophical facade. The opening 11/

chapter on Birth of Tragedy serves as an instructive example of how this reading plays out and why it fails. Losurdo’s strategy is to claim that Birth cannot be understood based on philosophy or aesthetics, which leaves us with history as the *only* way to make sense of a 12/

text that supposedly can’t be understood on its own terms: “The Birth of Tragedy cannot really be recuperated by attributing to it the merit of having contributed to a more adequate historical understanding of Hellenism,” and after only 4 pages Losurdo has concluded that 13/

“Just like aesthetic categories, psychological categories too are unable to explain the genesis and significance of The Birth of Tragedy.” My purpose here isn’t to pass final judgment on this claim, but to note that Losurdo has not even approached an adequate consideration 14/

of the aesthetic and philosophical concerns of Birth before making this sweeping claim. No mention has been made of Schopenhauer’s metaphysics, questions of affirmation and pessimism that dominate much of Nietzsche’s philosophy are quickly passed over in apparent confusion, 15/

and the Apollo/Dionysus distinction that Nietzsche will continue to return to all the way through Twilight of the Idols is construed as a product of purely political motivations. Still worse, Losurdo seems unable to recognize Nietzsche’s concern for reconnecting art to 16/

life and truth, rather than relegating it to merely “aesthetic” status, as anything other than a political strategy. Losurdo’s strategy is to produce a sloppy, partial, and cursory attempt to reconstruct Nietzsche’s work on its own terms, then take his own poor reconstruction 17/

as evidence that only a historical explanation will help. And we certainly get one: Birth of Tragedy, it turns out, was primarily motivated by Nietzsche’s anti-revolutionary sentiment, specifically directed at the Paris Commune. There’s just one problem with this reading, 18/

which Losurdo waves away with a truly mind-blowing caveat: “It is indeed true that the gestation of the Birth of Tragedy started before the Paris Commune.” Started? In his notebooks from 1869 and 1870, we see Nietzsche already working out the core problems of Greek tragedy, 19/

pessimism, and Schopenhauer’s metaphysics; “The Dionysian Worldview”, written in 1870, is essentially an early draft of the first part of Birth that already discusses all of the themes Losurdo believes were first motivated by Nietzsche’s hatred of the Paris Commune. His 20/

failure to mention just how extensively Nietzsche had worked on all of these questions well before March 1871 isn’t just poor scholarship. It’s fundamentally dishonest. Again and again, Losurdo grasps feebly for a philosophical interpretation, then proffers a far less 21/

plausible historical reading on the basis of the barest discussion of the “great philosopher’s” actual philosophy. The result is an unconvincing exaggeration of occasional statements in Nietzsche’s unpublished work, which are presented as the key to unlocking an otherwise 22/

unintelligible text. For example, the idea of a “new party for life,” mentioned once in Ecce Homo and once in the Nachlass, receives an entire chapter from Losurdo, and the term appears over 100 times throughout his book. When you start to pick at the arguments, the 23/

evidence supporting Losurdo’s hyperbolic reading becomes quite thin. This is a missed opportunity. If we accept that Nietzsche is an important thinker who poses a real challenge to progressive ideas, we need to reconstruct the best possible case for his arguments and show 24/

why they fail. My strong feeling is that Losurdo’s book, far from staging this important confrontation, actually rules it out entirely. Losurdo is in a double bind: if Nietzsche really is important enough to merit his 1000 page book, then this strategy of historical 25/

triangulation won’t work; but if it does work, then we aren’t left with anything valuable in Nietzsche that might have merited the critique in the first place. It does not surprise me, then, that Losurdo’s book has become a mainstay for Marxists who are eager to do exactly 26/

what Losurdo claims *not* to be doing: to avoid a valuable encounter with an important thinker whose arguments demand a thoughtful response.

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