Thread by @theory_talk

Let’s start a little reading thread: this is the first thesis of dozens throughout the book, each chapter usually developing at least 3. This is the beginning of chapter 1 (there is no preface or introduction beforehand). This first section is titled: Political Materialism.

Laruelle will coin several variations of different “-pensée”s. Here, it is nietzsche-pensée, in Philosophie II and III, as evidenced by the Dictionary of Non-Philosophy, he will also discuss what he calls “world-thought” (synonym for philosophy in its must general form).

Here are the first three theses, the last of which indicates our being-compromised in the elaboration of Nietzsche-thought: Laruelle’s indications of the plural “vous” (which only the plural adjective “partagés” makes clear) means this is a collective affair (Lar too)

1: The “vous” is still plural here.
2: Reference to Nietzsche’s claim of having broken history in two.
(Badiou has written on this).
3: “quadriparti” has political connotations of the political “Parti” (see my translator’s footnote).
4: our doubly divided “rapport” to Nietzsche.

The terms don’t help to situate any of these binaries, which have to be thought quadratically through the “primacy of the relations of the terms over the terms themselves”.
A specifically Simondonian (and Deleuzian) way of thinking the ontological dignity and rank of relations.

It’s all a queston of “usages” around orienting political “poles” of the quadratic/chiasmatic setup (or dispositif)

...and what’s at stake in the different usages are the “negating” and “production” of “effects”, one pole of which designates “active” effects in resistance to “dominant powers”, rather than investing in their will to power

All of this leads to scrambling the received codes under which we inherit these terms; the “fascistic” and “revolutionary” poles (Mastery and Rebellion) is subject to a Spinozistic criterion alone: “the manner for certain forces or powers to go to the end of what they can do.”

We cannot hide away in the Nietzschean text qua text because we are “contradictorily and without mediation” entering into outlets that are “in the last instance” atextual or a(nti)-signifying. A selective reading of Nietzsche’s fascistic elements (Heid) and vice versa is 1-sided.

1: Nietzsche is not and individual but an operativity of effects
2:Those effects are generated by the political machine that Nietzsche is (“the Nietzsche Machine”)
3: The reference to “infernal machines” most likely refers to Cocteau’s play of the same name

The machine is determined by the relations, not the terms. This is why its a question of an immanent, fluid syntax and mot a question of ideological “readings”.

Ultimately one piece of the machine stands out as “a strange surface of apprehension”, and it is the code name of a “political conspiracy” [complot politique]: Eternal Return of the same and Will to power. (In French, Volonté de puissance, what is literally “willed of capacity”).

These other, more standard ways of “reading” and “interpreting” Nietzsche should not be repressed [Lar will say this of non-philosophy per philosophy in later works]...

...for it is “the Will to power that interprets”. This is the second, materialist rule of studying Nietzsche’s text, after the first syntactic rule. Toward immanent reading/interpering/relating practices.

A double movement—the minimal units must be related to power relations, and while a purely textual reading can never remain neutral, there also has to be a working-through of the text, a labor with it and of it.

This is the end of subsection 3, the first half of this first chapter. This is the minimalizing ground-clearing that Laruelle requires before moving forward with what is at stake in Nietzsche-thought

Approaching Nietzschean auto-critique in a non-idealist way...requires subordinating these oppositions to “forces”, i.e. partial organs of power...

...due to the relation’s principally political dynamics, taut between a fascistic pole of condensation and a subversive pole of dissemination

The four terms of the chiasmus/quadripartition (fascistic/revolutionary, mastery/rebellion) but must be related to the “complex unity of the problematic”

The linguistic power of exploting Nietzsche’s (or any author’s) text is contaminated from the start politically, especially for Nietzsche, because the relation is constitutively political.

When fascism and revolution are no longer considered definable externally but from the aspect of “each going to the end of what it can do”: ERS/WP as selectivity of the extremes (cf. Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition, p. xx, 6, etc. —ctrl+f search for “selection”).

Nietzsche “wills” his own falsification against his interpreters [“have I been understood?”]; here Lar quotes from Klossowski’s Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle; the co-belonging of the terms of the quadrature that forms a “break in our knowledge of politics”.

The goal of the book Nietzsche contre Heidegger is provisionally defined here: how does Nietzsche crucially and successfully “assume fascism in history the better to vanquish it”? (Etymologically, vanquish means “to overcome” in its Proto-Indo-European root *weyk-).

1: The knot (or node) of the quadripartition recuts [recoupe] and recoups all the relations.
2: Something in “‘Nietzsche’” resists the various ways in which his name might have currency in methods of reading and inscribing his name (one should think of a Nietzsche effect)

To parse the “belch of the Christo-leftist” takes at least two things:
1: An allusion to how Nietzsche will sign his last letters, post-collapse, as Dionysus-Christ;
2: in reference to Jambet and Lardreau’s L’Ange, which will get discussion in the upcoming paragraphs

My translator’s footnote is important for understanding *absance* (read Derrida’s coinage of différance) and “in?visibility” (I wager the guess that it is from Deleuze’s coinage of ?-being in Difference and Repetion, p. 64, 202, 203, 205).

Revamping a concept of Hegel’s, Laruelle describes the “doctrine” of Nietzsche—the traditionally visible part—for the revolutionary pole is “ideological, relatively...necessary and objective appearance”.

This political objective appearance in its extreme historical form is Fascism. Lar sees Nietzsche compromised *with* (not by) fascism, in order to elevate it qua transcendental appearance and reveal it qua ideological appearance, then subject it to a “radically materalist usage”.

Here is where Heidegger’s name first enters the text, but he will not become explictly juxtaposed with Nietzsche until part 3 of this book 150 pages later. The footnote here, though, seems to indicate the more immediate (in time) specter of this misreading: L’Ange.

Here is the long footnote. It’s clear that Laruelle has no patience for Jambet and Lardreau “Anti-Nietzscheanism” (against “desire” i.e. Anti-Oedipus). Laruelle gives us a hint, too, in his formulation of his theses: a polemics against Heidegger’s most insidious misunderstanding.

This foreshadows the advent of a Nietzschean uni-versalization of textuality/politics that Laruelle calls “politico-libidinal”. It is a question of the proper version of the adversion and perversion of Heidegger’s “Nietzsche” (H’s text on FN tells us more about H than FN anyway).

Part of this is a long series of puns involved in overcoding and translating some Heidggerian “Turn” locutions: Gegen-kehre, Um-Kehre, Über-kehre, but the issue is deadly serious, insofar as Heidegger tends to emphasize a polemically fascisizing reading of Nietzsche

Nietzsche-thought demands to be dealt with because his specificity is “to bind...this process of fascisization...and the political and material conditions of its subversion”. The risk is to embrace the adversary the better to smother him.

“Nietzsche prefers to flow with the adversary, provided that the adversary drowns”. As Laruelle points out, crucifying Nietzsche, the Marxist or Christian critics (Jambet and Lardreau et alia) show “how little yet they have overcome the fascism in themselves”. End of subsection 5

The last subsection begins with a summary of the overarching theme elaborated in the previous 5 subsections.

A minuscule polemic against the complicity of psychoanalysis and signifying linguistics (this polemic will form the substance of the first two chapters for Guattari’s Machinic Unconscious 2 years later).

The signifier taken exclusively and to the end of what it can do leads to a process of fascisization; for forces (non-signifying elements and anti-signifying agents), taken to the end of what they can do leads to “an ‘autonomous’ process of rebellion”.

Here’s the footnote alongside this quest for a better word than “world” (or becoming-world, as he says above); note the distinction between Lar’s footnote and my translator’s note.

This notion of a relation of duplicity rather than duality, which shipwrecks monism and skywrecks dualism, is the subversive seed that Nietzsche plants in all the simple binary terms by which thought becomes concretely manipulable

Time to saddle up, strap in, roll the dice, amor fati...the word precipice [crête] means less a perilous edge and more of a dizzying height; it is gravity itself, and not a simple misstep, that becomes dangerous

“master-proletariat” perhaps looks misleading in translation; in the French “prolétariat-maître”, which makes it clear that this is a question of a duplicitous (dual) relation, not an oxymoron of master as adjective describing proletariat. The rest of the passage describes this.

This description of the non-reflexivity of the Rebel qua Rebel really echoes with Jean-François Lyotard’s description of the minoritarian qua minoritarian: cf. vastabrupt.com/2018/03/12/lyo… over @vastabrupt , also translated by @tadkins613

A question of rereading the history of humanity as duplicitous. This is to hypercomplexify Rousseau’s Origins of Inequality with Nietzsche’s breaking of history in two.

Here is the footnote explaining what Laruelle is emphasizing with this reflexive formulation. Again, notice the distinction between Lar’s note and mine

As you may have seen, throughout, I have opted translating Rebel pronomially as “she” and Master pronomially as “he” when this was necessary. Obviously, in French nouns already have genders, so their pronouns are arbitrary; here, I kept one for each to retain consistency.

Here, Foucault can be brought into dialogue, for as he wrote a year earlier in History of Sexuality, vol. 1 (1976), where he warns us of being too celebratory in the rise of discourses of liberation. “Tomorrow sex will be good again”, as Foucault mocks

Here is the closing lines of chapter 1. Please visit fractalontology.wordpress.com/2018/05/06/new… for the standalone text

unroll please, and hopefully this layout will work