68/ It is important that Nietzsche invest politically from the start the necessary means for reading him or reading whichever author, that he relate the signifying or hermeneutic arrangements of the text to power relations.
69/ But what derives from this is even more important: this new relation, which overdetermines the first, which is thoroughly political, and which contains a double usage of power relations or two possible political worlds.
70/ We will not explicate this new relation and its unity with the first here, albeit this essay develops some of their effects. In what form?
71/ If this complex relation is regularly amputated and mutilated by interpreters, this is precisely because it accounts for the formula by which Nietzsche has a priori posited *the internal possibility* of the falsification of his thought,
72/ a constitutive falsification, in this sense “willed” by him, and yet willed against his interpreters rather than against him, forcing him to perish with them as well as with the adversaries. This is what he calls: “the most dangerous misunderstandings” [fn 1].
73/ [Footnote #1: Title of a text cited by Pierre Klossowski in *Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle*, trans. Daniel W. Smith. U of Chicago P: Chicago, 1997, p. 85-86.]
74/ This is the formula for the repression in which his interpreters are therefore interested.
75/ The reason for the greatest misunderstanding will develop in *the co-belonging of fascism and its revolutionary critique, of Mastery and Rebellion, a co-belonging which is specific to Nietzsche and is the object of a veritable historical break in our knowledge of politics.*
76/ This essay has no other object: to systematically explain the possibility of a misunderstanding about the politics of Nietzsche, a misunderstanding which is itself of political origin:
77/ how do interpreters, friends, or adversaries allow themselves to be caught in Nietzsche's fascist appearance and reduce his hidden aspect—rebel, let us say provisionally, to all “visibility”—to the “visible” part?
78/ What is visible (dominant) of power is always mastery. Nietzsche thus accepts the madness of the Antichrist, and this is more than a reversal of the madness of Christ dying for humanity's sins: to assume fascism in history the better to overcome it.
79/ Why this appearance, this semblance of mastery? Given the fluidity of the internal relations of the Quadripartition, it is impossible to organize them and to master them if not by appearance starting from one of the four terms.
80/ No doubt, one term is more important, namely the only one that can affirm the Quadripartition as relations: it constitutes the *knot* in which are recut all these relations that break the subject of power in two.
81/ But if it is important, this is not due to its mastery over the others (although the main term of the opposition, it is rather dominated by the secondary) but instead due to its resistance to the others, its own manner of unsettling their organization into a system.
82/ Something in “Nietzsche” resists the historian's codes, the rhetorician's formal methods, the fascist's prophetic ravings, the clumsy apparatus of the classical revolutionary, something that no longer returns with the religious belch of the Christo-leftist.
83/ In this quadrature, what is it that resists in this way and, through its resistance, makes text and thought move in a circle of Eternal return? This is the subversive pole of Nietzsche-thought:
84/ never given in the surface of the text, no longer localizable by a labor of the signifier, never decipherable by the Marxist political grid, never interpretable as historical meaning. It will however no longer be said, in the manner of modern structuralists,
85/ that this revolutionary pole, both the part and “whole” of the ERS/WP, is absent or excluded, that it is effective due to its absence, its repression, its invisibility.
86/ This pole actively resists (i.e. without representing the adversary in an image or a law), this pole forces all the rest of the Nietzschean assemblage [dispositif] to move precisely because it resists the latter.
87/ It is starting from this resistance that its active absence must be rethought and rewritten as *absance* (why not?), as in?visibility, etc. [fn. 2]
88/ [Translator's note: this is a neologism modeled after Derrida's différance, capturing the silent difference of the a/e in French in the simple graphic shift of e-->a. The coinage of “in?visibility” may be modeled after Deleuze's ?-being in *Difference and Repetition*.]
89/ Nietzsche invents a new concept of revolution as active resistance to the powers that be, the politics, if it can be called this, of the *resistant quarter* rather than that of the excluded quarter.
90/ The consequence of this is that the whole remainder of Nietzsche-thought, all of it that becomes visible according to traditional criteria—i.e. nearly “all” of the “doctrine”—is elevated to the state of ideological, relatively (for the revolutionary pole)
91/ necessary and objective appearance (thus from the point of view of the Quadripartition and its criteria, not from that of the traditional interpreters).
92/ The other consequence is that this political objective appearance can only be that of Mastery, namely that of its extreme historical form, Fascism.
93/ We never stop saying with and more so *against* those who more or less overtly consider that Nietzsche is compromised *with* fascism and not just compromised *by* it,
94/ that his revolutionary power is to have succeeded in elevating fascism to the state of transcendental objective appearance,
95/ to have been able to turn Mastery into an ideological and ultimately positive appearance, and to turn the ideological appearance into a radically materialist usage.
96/ The possibility of this understanding must be grasped in the functioning of Nietzsche-thought in general and via the case of Heidegger's interpretation,
97/ which conjugates the greatest proximity to the truth of Nietzsche and necessarily its greatest, most ingenious falsification. [fn 3]
98/ [Footnote #2: We haven't finished exploring anti-Niezschean farce. It arises from a shred of courage enriched by Lacanian teaching: *L'Ange* (Lardreau and Jambet).
99/ Anti-Nietzscheanism inspires fairly dissimilar literatures (albeit not without communication, if we consider the role played by Heidegger in Lacanism): on the one hand, systematic, grandiose misinterpretations, along with Heidegger's memorial faithfulness;
100/ on the other hand, aggressive stupidity, the bowels abounding in insults, which make *L'Ange* into an anthology of traditional misinterpretations (which are sublated, merely *sublated* or idealized misinterpretations of Lacanism)
101/ perpetrated on Nietzsche and which prove—big surprise, this is furthermore what Nietzsche wanted, among others, to prove—that the angel thinks basely.
102/ The theses stated here *for* Nietzschean politics are partly destined to reestablish its truth, i.e. to unmask, up to and including Heidegger, the empirical forms of the most dangerous misunderstanding.]
103/ No psychological, historicist, ethical, or political critique (in the banal sense) of the interpretation and thought of Heidegger. The Heidegger case is valid due to the geniality in the political exploitation of Nietzschean understanding,
104/ it marks *the gathering together of the essence of this misunderstanding* and consequently the point of possible transmutation of the relation of falsification to Nietzsche into a relation of authentification,
105/ starting from which a turn-about (Gegen-Kehre) of Heidegger can begin toward Nietzsche.
106/ The turn-about then designates a complex operation that consists on the one hand in *reversing* (Um-kehre) the Heideggerian interpretation, in subordinating ontologico-existential thought to the Nietzschean Break
107/ (which is formulated later on as “politico-libidinal”), and, on the other hand but simultaneously, to *re-inscribe* (Uber-kehre) this Nietzsche-thought in its veritable space, which is that of a politics of Rebellion or of Resistance.
108/ Why is our complex political conjuncture, which is criss-crossed by a continuous line of fascisization and a differently continuous line of subversion, *interested* in Nietzsche-thought?
109/ Because Nietzsche's specificity is to *bind*, more intimately, more irremediably than Marx knew how for reasons pertaining to the insufficient historical development of capitalism, this process of fascisization,
110/ which is henceforth manifest as our horizon, and the political and material conditions of its subversion.
111/ A little nearer to fascism, a little further away from fascism, in a relation of dangerous but authentic co-belonging, Nietzsche had to incur the risk of having to embrace the adversary in order to smother him.
112/ Nietzsche's interpreters are the blind victims of this risk, more so than he himself, since he is its consenting victim.
113/ Few have understood the meaning of the greatest misunderstandings, namely that Nietzsche prefers to flow with the adversary, provided that the adversary drowns: the messenger dies in his message, this is the message of Zarathustra.
114/ All these historians, these Marxist or Christian critics who accept the shameful task of making him die again, don't they merely account for the fact that they are cruelly trapped by their victim?
115/ This is what is cheerful in the sleepwalking of Christians and Marxists, the enormous psychodrama that they play out before us by believing to put Nietzsche on trial, and where they only expose how little yet they have overcome the fascism in themselves. [end subsection 5]
Should read: consists...in re-inscribing...
116/ 6. Thus, to think the possibility of subversion, not of mastery in general, but of mastery specified as fascism, the possibility of Revolution, it takes no less than four terms organized into two worlds—or rather, into two poles or two tendencies.
117/ The whole problem is not to think with bricks: this is to posit Mastery and Rebellion as two worlds transcendent to one another in the gnostic and Manichean manner [Footnote #3: Cf. *L'Ange*].
118/ Mastery and Rebellion, Fascism and Resistance form the figure of a chiasmus and only involve relations-of-relation. This is why they have to become worlds, there is a becoming-world of fascism, which is produced, never given, or which forms a process.
119/ For example, the affinity between the signifier and Mastery does not become a “world”, that of Mastery, except when the signifier is taken in hand, as is the case in psychoanalysis,
120/ by the nihilistic power that leads signifying mastery to the end of what it can do and makes it enter into a process of fascisization.
121/ In the same way, there is merely an affinity, not identity, between what Nietzsche calls “forces” *as such*, which are non-signifying elements, indeed anti-signifying agents, and the sole affirmative tendency capable of making them go to the end of what they can do:
122/ to constitute a revolutionary “world”, to become an “autonomous” process of rebellion.
123/ Perhaps it will be necessary to avoid speaking of “world” to designate the two poles, processes, or tendaecies that co-belong within the Quadripartition, and to find another word to designate the universal moment that they fully contain [Footnote #4].
124/ [Footnote #4: this will be the term full Body, or Body-of-the-Other, or political Continent, etc. The second section examines several terms for this single function.]
125/ Be that as it may, the reason for Nietzschean revolutionary power begins to appear: Rebellion and Mastery are merely in a relation of positive disjunction, without mediating negativity: the opposites of contradiction are front against front.
126/ They are not above all exclusive to one another, they have nothing to do with closed entities, essences transcendent to one another in the onto-theo-logical or gnostico-Christian manner: their relation of co-belonging is *a relation of duplicity rather than duality*.
127/ Thought is here on the precipice where everything can be lost or gained.
128/ On the one hand, Nietzsche does not give himself terms, he produces flowing functions susceptible to destruction, he liquidates monism (philosophy of mastery, even when it is a question of the master-proletariat), for example that of the signifier,
129/ he gives himself a relation, a duality, if it can be held, but of forces or of powers, that which reduces every quality to duplicity (even the signifier is reduced to the state of force or of power). What is important here?
130/ What's important is that it thereby straightaway cleaves Mastery or puts Mastery in a relation of exteriority, of contradiction without mediation, to a force of resistance, to an agent of rebellion.
131/ In a first time, it is therefore, if you will, “dualistic”, and dualism is the point of view of the agent of resistance.
132/ If the Master is monistic and attempts to inernalize the Rebel in the image or representation that is made of her (this image is his mastery, thus his lie, what Nietzsche calls his falsification of the adversary),
133/ *the Rebel is confused or identified with his imageless repulsion of the Master*.
134/ Rebellion is not a term, an essence, or a world transcendent to the Master and indifferent, like the Master himself is, to this relation of transcendence: the Rebel is *nothing but this relation* of repulsion or resistance to Mastery.
135/ By definition, the Rebel neither internalizes, reflects, nor mediates the Master—all operations which define mastery (every image or generality is a dominant power).
136/ On the other hand, Nietzsche liquidates everything else, one comes to see simple dualism indirectly, complicit with monism and Mastery: because the being of the Rebel is confused with its relation of active resistance (of difference) to the Master,
137/ it is not exterior to this relation of exteriority, it is this contradictory exteriority exerting itself [s'exercant] or insisting “itself” [“s'”insistant] without mediation. [Footnote #5]
138/ [Footnote #5: the *s'* here obviously designates the political subject, re-split by the Revolution as cause, subordinated to the subversive pole.]
139/ Nietzsche surmounts dualism, simple *reaction* to Mastery, through a relation of duplicity: the agents of rebellion are differential or nothing but relations.
140/ The history of humanity is at the same time, in the same gesture, a single and split history, duplicitous rather than dualistic: history(ies) of the oppressed and/or the oppressors.
141/ Dualism is always a reaction, a passive flight facing the Master, the philosophy of those who have not been able or succeeded in becoming Masters, the politics of those who recognize themselves as defeated.
142/ Duplicity is the thought of the active defeated, of the *active Rebel* who thinks the history of humanity as chiasmus and his *own* history as the impossible quadrature in which the circular history of mastery is inscribed.
143/ Duplicity then designates a type of universal relation formulable as *inclusive disjunction* (contradiction without mediation):
144/ the Master assimilates the Rebel, appropriates or includes him by law and grace united, but the active Rebel distinguishes himself from the Master, refuses to be recognized as defeated or posits an image of himself,
145/ because he does not recognize himself—this is his activity—and because his only representation of himself would suffice to make him reenter under the law and make him become...dualistic.
146/ he politics of the Rebel as resistant excludes the overly massive disjunctions of dualism, i.e. that which remains synthesis through which mastery includes the adversary.
147/ Having supposed, through paralogism, that *desire* is confused with the given sex, Revolution with sexual rebellion, identities which found the eternity of mastery, dualism must then massively cut, abstractly and transcendently separate sex and desire
148/ (there will be a specific desire of the Rebel that will not be sexual), sex and rebellion (rebellion without relation to sexuality, contrary to “discourses of liberation”).
149/ Sometimes the whole of desire will be the Master, sometimes there will be a desire that will escape from the Master. Sometimes every discourse will be the master's, sometimes there will be an autonomous discourse of the Rebel.
150/ Sometimes discourse and desire will be assimilated, sometimes they will be distinguished: the whole of desire to the Master, but not the whole of discourse.
151/ The Rebel as resistant leaves the dualist to his prophesies and his hesitations, he contents himself with fleeing straightaway from disjunctions, clefts, re-splits—but without negativity, thus excluding the signifying re-split—into the closures of mastery.
152/ He refines all the dualist's transcendent and barely guaranteed disjunctions, such that his Rebel part is confused with a simple partition, but without negativity, thus without elementary or minimal term,
153/ and thus inaccessible to the law of the signifier, which it undoes or against which it resists: having in some way defeated signifying mastery on its terrain...from a completely different terrain. [END CHAPTER 1]
Should read: sometimes the whole of desire will be the Master’s.
Should read: *the politics of the Rebel
Should read: of différance
