Nietzsche contre Heidegger: Thèses pour une politique nietzschéenne

by François Laruelle

La pensée-Nietzsche introduit une coupure radicale dans notre savoir et notre pratique de la politique. Nietzsche découvre un continent spécifiquement politique, irréductible à celui de l'histoire. Il substitue à la corrélation de l'histoire et de l'économie, la corrélation des rapports de pouvoir et de la libido, comme force productive principale. Ce nouvel objet définit un nouveau savoir, tout aussi irréductible au matérialisme historique : la duplicité d'une politique fascisante manifeste, et d'une politique révolutionnaire latente, ayant pour objet le continent politique. Nietzsche est ainsi le seul adversaire sérieux de l'impérialisme et du fascisme, parce qu'il se donne les moyens de les combattre sans les falsifier. C'est cette politique révolutionnaire, en tant que limite de destruction de la domination des forces productives comme techniques, à la fois de la métaphysique et du capitalisme, que Heidegger manque dans sa réduction de la politique nietzschéenne à sa surface impérialiste : Nietzsche, penseur de la technique absolue. Par un quiproquo continu, où il tombe dans le piège de la duplicité nietzschéenne, Heidegger confond les possibilités révolutionnaires latentes de la volonté de puissance avec le techno-logos fascisant que Nietzsche dut tenir aussi pour l'abattre. La politique nietzschéenne est le remède à l'impuissance politique marxiste.

252 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 1977

About the author

François Laruelle was a French philosopher, of the Collège international de philosophie and the University of Paris X: Nanterre. Laruelle began publishing in the early 1970s and had around twenty book-length titles to his name. Alumnus of the École normale supérieure, Laruelle was notable for developing a science of philosophy that he calls non-philosophy. Until his death, he directed an international organisation dedicated to furthering the cause of non-philosophy, the Organisation Non-Philosophique Internationale.

Reviews

[Jacob · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great look at Nietzsche which builds upon and overcomes the dominant French readings of Nietzsche at the time (Deleuze, Klossowski, etc), by building out a NIetzschean concept of Machinic Materialism and Political Materialism which operate, politically, via a contradiction without mediation on the poles of power/force and the libido. Also builds the concept of the Quadriparti in an attempt to think through the process of NIetzschean overcoming in a way that doesn't reproduce dialectical thought.

With all this put forward, the second half of the text interrogates Heidegger's reading of Nietzsche to show not only where Heidegger failed, but to produce an overcoming of Heidegger which, also, doesn't merely fall into a Hegelian negation.

[Alyosha · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is not only (perhaps) the most accessible entry into Laruelle's early works, but it also best lays out the terminology, modes, and "ends" through which this early work operates. Derived from what Laruelle terms "Nietzsche-thought" - which cannot be reduced or equated to the writings which reside under the signature "Nietzsche," to any "direct" references or citations, but is instead the motive force and trajectory underwriting thought as explicated by this work - this libidial materialism (distinguishing itself from psychoanalysis and Marxism) seeks to open the way for a politics to-come, opened only in and for its coming by this very libidinal transmutation (in affirmation) of thought as such. Cutting across many elements from the tradition of thought, all the while breaking itself free from each and every one of these traditions, Laruelle's project is eminently interesting, and one can already see the germs of "Non-Philosophy" spreading their roots.

As for Heidegger, Laruelle (in his typical fashion) treats him, at once, both fairly and unfairly. Even if the reader does not agree with Laruelle's project, the critique which he poses of Heidegger's interpretation of Nietzsche cannot be denied. One needn't agree with Laruelle's "Nietzsche-thought" or machinic libidinalism to acknowledge that Heidegger ultimately faults Nietzsche for elements which are less proper to Nietzsche than they are to Heidegger's thinking itself. Still unable to tear itself from thinking oscillating around beings, presence, and an ultimately (as originary) Greek inheritance, Heidegger remains on the hither side of metaphysical thought, having opened a breach, marked a turn - yet he must cede the way for others to think and pass through, to re-turn otherwise. And Nietzsche, at the end of metaphysics (and thus already one step beyond it), marks the means by which to undertake such a transgressive step, to affirm the unforeseeable to-come, by way of returning to rethink what "his" thought affirms of this otherwise.