1/ Original Translation Thread: The opening pages of F. Laruelle's *Nietzsche contre Heidegger* (1977) p. 9-11: 1. Thesis 1: Nietzsche is the revolutionary thinker who corresponds to the era of Imperialism in Capitalism, and more specifically to the era of Fascism in Imperialism.
2/ Thesis 2: Nietzsche is, in a double sense, the thinker of fascism; he is, *in a certain way*, a thinker of fascism, but he is, *above all*, the thinker of the subversion of fascism.
3/ Nietzsche-thought is a complex political process with two *contradictory* poles (but without mediation), the relation of subordination of a secondary fascist pole (Mastery) *to* a principle revolutionary pole.
4/ Nietzsche *makes himself* fascist the better to overcome fascism. He has taken on the worst forms of Mastery to become its Rebel.
5/ Thesis 3: We are all fascist readers of Nietzsche, we are all revolutionary readers of Nietzsche. Our unity is a contradictory relation (hierarchy without mediation), just as the unity of Nietzsche is a contradictory and *auto*-critical unity.
6/ Nietzsche puts the Master and the Rebel in a relation of duplicity rather than duality. He liquidates the opposition of monism (philosophy of the Master *or* of the Rebel) and dualism (mediated contradiction of the Master and the Rebel).
7/ 2. So, this is hardly about you, since you, alas, are all divided. This is hardly about Nietzsche: the same brown and red thread passes within and without Nietzsche.
8/ This is about you or Nietzsche: as political subject, whom you have to become, split by the cause, Revolution or Fascism. What is a revolutionary in her relation to Revolution when she is affected by it as if by the fracture [coupure] of truth that *breaks her in two*.
9/ This is about your relation to Nietzsche and about what divides it twice: a first time according to the means and techniques that effectuate it,
10/ a second time according to the political tendency that it supposes or the fascistic or revolutionary pole whose *primacy* it indicates. Complex relation in four terms, something like a “quadripartition.”
11/ At the start, a scene that is both single and split, a scene of reading on your side, a scene of writing on Nietzsche's side, two scenes which together make but one.
12/ But these terms are too ineffective, the relation slides away elsewhere: recto scene of expression, verso scene of signifying practice. Still too idealist: scene of signifying practice or textual Domination on the one hand and, on the other,
13/ atextual forces, forces of Resistance against textual mastery which are intrinsically political. The terms, as we see, seem to matter little. If not the second, which openly acknowledges its political meaning and will function as a pivot of the quadripartition,
14/ such that Nietzschean practice will imply both an intervention or a detachment of atextual forces, of anti-signifying powers *in* the signifying scene, and a *primacy* of the relation of the terms over the terms themselves.
15/ This first relation is divided in turn according to an expressly political split that overdetermines it, but in an internal way, as if it were the relation, not its terms, that is divided:
16/ reading, writing, signifiying practice, or atextual forces can receive a fascistic usage (subordination of the revolutionary pole to the fascistic pole) or a revolutionary pole (inverse subordination).
17/ We don't know what to put under these words of force or of atextual power, nor under the categories of Fascism and Revolution, of Mastery and Rebellion, which, of course, no longer have their expected meaning.
18/ It doesn't matter: let's forget the terms, let's attempt to move into the Quadripartition as relations-of-relation, let's stretch out the political subject to the four corners of the chiasmus.
19/ It's precisely the categories of Fascism, Mastery, Rebellion that will change their political meaning according to this complex apparatus:
20/ the fascistic pole will take on the meaning of an unlimited, planetary usage of the negation and production of technical, organizational effects of power and of mastery.
21/ For the revolutionary or the rebel, a certain usage of the affirmation and production of effects of *active* resistance to all the powers that be.
22/ We do not yet know what meaning to give these aforementioned categories, if not—this is too much or too little—that the singular logic of the quadripartition wills that Mastery and Rebellion in the Nietzschean sense be determined by specific criteria,
23/ that they not be confused with what traditionally circulates under these names, and that they not be historical phenomena given immediately, but the manner for certain forces or powers to go to the end of what they can do. (End thread)
PS: the first section of the book is called Political Materialism, and the first chapter of the book is titled The Two Politics of Nietzsche. Full citation: François Laruelle, *Nietzsche contre Heidegger*. Payot: Paris, 1977.
This should read: “or a revolutionary usage”.
24/ 3. Be that as it may, these four terms are indissociable, you compromise and you crucify just as they crucified Nietzsche. No possibility of taking refuge in a historicist and neutral reading, no possibility of fleeing into the labor of Nietzschean writing,
25/ without also having to enter contradictorily *and without mediation* into an intense scene of forces, drives, relations of power that are no longer textual or signifying “in the last instance.” No possibility of denouncing, like Heidegger, the fascistic positions of Nietzsche
26/ (for this is indeed what he does: technical machination, worldly planification, planetary organization, exaltation of raw energy) without piling on the limits that affect them (without mediation) with their own subversion, counter-tendency, or militant critique.
27/ One does not enter into Nietzsche as though into a bourgeois institution, a Marxist apparatus, a historian's corpus, or in the manner in which certain naive interpreters enter into the Eternal Return as though into a windmill.
28/ Nietzsche is not an individual, but more so a psychologist, an artist, etc., more so complete works, a labor of writing, sufferings, several themes, sources, and premeditations.
29/ In the sense in which we talk about logical or mathematical machines, reading automata, calculators, infernal machines, there is a “Nietzsche Machine,”
30/ Machine here first means a set of relations (of power) without terms, criss-crossed in a chiasmus or a problematic. Afterwards, all its cogs are flowing relations, vanishing syntaxes.
31/ Whence the great (syntactic) rule that a political intervention in Nietzsche must oppose—with its limitless consequences—“readings” and their ideological prejudices:
32/ there are only relations to be produced, hierarchies, disjunctions, breaks [coupures], inclusions, reversals, re-inscriptions: there is no doctrine, for Nietzsche-thought is a question of immanent syntax and the flowing matter proper to this syntax.
33/ Ultimately, one piece of the machine is more visible than the others, and this piece serves as the machine's surface of apprehension.
34/ A strange statement is inscribed there, which is neither its social reason in the manner of multinational businesses of imperialism (IBM, ITT), nor the name of its inventor (Turing machine), nor even the denomination of a Party machine (PCF, PS, UDR, etc.),
35/ [Translator's note: ITT is the name for the former International Telephone and Telegraph Inc.; PCF is the French Communist Party; PS is the French Socialist Party; UDR is the Union of Democrats for the Republic.]
36/ which is instead the code name—one which is itself archaic as well as misleading—of a political conspiracy: ERS/WP (Eternal Return of the same, Will to power).
37/ The *possible* type of opposed but complicit approaches are well known, among which are divided the interpreters of the history of philosophy, and among others those of Nietzsche:
38/ historicist reading of themes and signifieds, hermeneutic interpretation of meaning, deciphering of signifying scenes, of formal, rhetorical, and philological codes, lexicological quantification, discursive statements and non-discursive institutional formations, etc.
39/ Other apportionments, other oppositions are possible. It is not a question of massively repressing them, the techniques they make possible are necessary.
40/ But they are abstract and superficial to fairly various degrees, according to whether they recognize or not, partially or systematically, not only the preceding syntactic rule, but the second great (materialist) rule of the study of his text posited by Nietzsche:
41/ “it is the Will to power that interprets.” According to whether they relate Nietzsche to himself and to this four-term layout based on this rule of recurrence,
42/ or according to whether they impose on him their merely technical criteria from outside, taken from already constituted theoretical fields.
43/ The technical means must be tied together in the political quadripartition. Inversely, the political evaluation of Nietzsche is inseparable from these procedures and their technical apparatuses.
44/ There is neither—if not merely by abstraction of one term at the expense of the others—a uniformly fascist Nietzsche empowered or compromised by those who want to compromise him, nor a monolithically revolutionary Nietzsche.
45/ That “Nietzsche” functions implies that the abstract reduction of his thought, for example in the single signifying scene of the ERS, cannot fail to reconstitute a Nietzsche of the Master, a nihilistic and *consequently* fascistic Nietzsche.
46/ We must from the start relate the *minimal units* (signifying, rhetorical, thematic, etc.) to power relations, which are the agents of Nietzschean politics.
47/ Inversely, the massively fascistic or revolutionary images of Nietzsche that would not pass through a labor of the text, of the aphorism--be they textual forces related to atextual forces in the last instance--would remain ideological falsifications. [End of subsection 3]
48/ 4. It is still necessary to posit—in conformity with the internal criteria of the quadripartition or of Nietzschean auto-critique, i.e. in a non-idealist way—the first relation with which everything begins.
49/ Not to posit it in a manner external to Nietzsche: relation of a reading to a writing, of an expressivity to a labor of the signifier, of a history of themes to the articulation of the metaphorical scenes of the ERS.
50/ All these oppositions still define—despite themselves but relative to Nietzsche-thought—criteria from outside. This is merely a subordination that does not hang over it or mutilate it:
[Translator’s sidenote: this term is in quotation marks because the word in French is “quadriparti”, and the word “parti” is the word used to designate political parties (or to designate a course of action).]
