Daniel Tutt's How to Read Like a Parasite
Keep your filthy Nietzsche out of my Marx, heathen!...
Daniel Tutt: HOW TO READ LIKE A PARASITE — Why the Left Got High on Nietzsche. London: Repeater, 2024.
Nietzsche is a real reactionary because his forward is backward. And because he is a reactionary, the future will despise him. The future is not Nietzsche's!
— Kurt Eisner
While the vast majority of letters from Silent Friends concern novels, we have covered a theoretical text every now and then. And this very recent book is not a typical work of philosophical commentary, but something at once more polemical and more populist.
Daniel Tutt’s How to Read Like a Parasite comes from Repeater books, who have the market cornered on that sort of “pop theory” reading material, after its founding editors split from Zer0 back in 2015. It’s an explicit polemic against Nietzsche’s ideas and their use by radical thinkers from a leftwing perspective, and for that reason, it was anticipated with curiosity by your host and others.
At the personal level I don’t really have a relationship to Nietzsche to speak of: I didn’t read him till his major works were assigned in a graduate seminar that included Heidegger and Kenji Nishitani. My own opinions are the basic ones shared by many others: that Nietzsche’s writings are the OG edge lord expressions of a reactionary and proto-fascist thinker.
But it’s also true that he left his stamp on many thinkers and artistic trends that came after his death in 1900. Tutt’s book contains many examples: Jack London, Gilles Deleuze (the influential anarchist philosopher who did much to rehabilitate Nietzsche), Jacques Derrida, Huey Newton, and Wendy Brown. There’ll be no argument here that disputes Nietzsche’s position as one of postmodernism’s master-thinkers.
However, one limitation of Tutt’s presentation that presents itself early on has to do with his assessment of leftwing history, and the definitions of socialism and being a progressive/reactionary that are at stake.
“There is a dominant view that socialism is forever cursed by the experience of the Cold War, during which the ‘socialism in one country’ model under Stalin's rule in the USSR is thought to have represented the final blow to the Marxist view of history and society.” Tutt's mainline type of academic Marxism takes up this inaccurate assessment from pro-imperialist commentators, condemning Stalin as a consummately Nietzschean figure, rather than part of the main sequence of revolutionary proletarian leaders.
But Tutt isn't apologizing for "totalitarianism" either: "we instead understand socialism as a set of demands within liberal capitalist social life that emerge from below, specifically from the broader working class." Here the reformist direction, improving conditions under so-called liberal democracy rather than transforming the state system and destroying private ownership.
The democratic socialist frame of reference creates problems for our prosecution case of Nietzsche as a reactionary; more on this later.
Tutt shares his personal reading experience with Nietzsche; he was struck by the philosopher's rapid mood swings in his writing. Nietzsche has a "Janus-face," like a father figure who is both a guide and an ogre. His gnomic texts cultivate a future audience or community of disciples — philosophers of the future — and as he does so his register flips between kindly wise man and narcissistic cult leader. “While some of his aphorisms exhibited a softness and admiration for beauty, they would suddenly turn on a dime and he would switch up his emphasis and begin to demand that the reader be prepared to enact cruelty and brutality toward the degenerate and the weak.”
Considering these oscillations and other aspects that stamp Nietzsche as an arch reactionary, Tutt proposes we read like parasites. Parasitical reading is in opposition to the hermeneutics of innocence that characterizes the reception of Nietzsche in 20th century after World War 2. “The hermeneutics of innocence tends to read Nietzsche as driven by profound existential suffering, and individualizes the thrust of Nietzsche's genius, thereby missing the touchstone point of social and political concern that drives his thought.”
Nietzsche's philosophical defenders take up his moral and ethical critique of Christianity, for example, without recognizing those moral and ethical dimensions as the rhetorical cloak for a political project — namely, the bourgeoisie's project to repress the working class, whose first historical experiment in proletarian dictatorship emerged with the Paris Commune of 1871, shortly before Nietzsche began his publishing career.
Nietzsche conceptualized ressentiment as “the primary affect involved with any revolutionary uprising from below” in Tutt's definition, is one tool that obscure Nietzsche's hidden political core. While the masses are steeped in ressentiment, deprived of the mastery enjoyed by the nobles, the nobility themselves have earned their dominant spot in life above the mob because they have the pathos of distance. Nietzsche was aware that the actual sanguinary aristocracy was in decline: “it was this class and its relationship to the capitalist class that had to be rethought and preserved.”
After ressentiment, Tutt devotes the third chapter to perspectivism, of Nietzsche’s core doctrines along with the will to power. He introduces the concept in the context of the reading by the French philosopher Alain Badiou.
For Badiou, Nietzsche's philosophy can be understood from the following claim: to evaluate any historically existing statement, you can only do so by identifying the kind of power that is exempted from the statement. Moreover, any statement can only be evaluated from the power of the perspective of the one who uttered it. Nietzsche's philosophical method is thus based on the premise that “there are only relations of power!” Importantly, this means that there is no protocol for an intrinsic evaluation of statements whatsoever; that is, any evaluation of a statement implies the identification of the type of statement that supports it, and therefore of the kind of uttering power engaged with therein. A statement is always the summarizing of an investment of power, and the type of investment of power in any truth claim in question can be evaluated based on the statement. Anti-philosophy in a Nietzschean mode is thus understood through perspectivism and the "will to power."
Nietzschean perspectivism may be one of the most influential ideas taken up by the champions of postmodernism, especially in the rhetoric of identitarianism. If you accept that there’s only a plurality of perspectives, then it casts doubt on our own thoughts and theorizations. As Nietzsche wrote in Item 335 of The Gay Science:
Selbstsucht nämlich ist es, sein Urtheil als Allgemeingesetz zu empfinden; und eine blinde, kleinliche und anspruchslose Selbstsucht hinwiederum, weil sie verräth, dass du dich selber noch nicht entdeckt, dir selber noch kein eigenes, eigenstes Ideal geschaffen hast[.]
(For it is selfishness in a person to regard his judgment as universal law, and a blind, paltry and modest selfishness besides, because it betrays that you have not yet discovered yourself, that you have not yet created for yourself any personal, quite personal ideal.)
It’s not hard at all to go from here to a general skepticism of truth that runs through postmodernist styles of thought. There are no things, only our interpretations of the things; everything is a text. 150 years after Nietzsche’s writings, it’s become standard wisdom in undergrad seminars that everything in the world, including history, is a text requiring interpretation, conditioned by prejudices of some nature. And our understanding of morality, pain, and suffering are fundamentally relative.
These are the points that the late Italian philosopher Domenico Losurdo hit in his massive study Nietzsche, the Aristocratic Rebel. Losurdo points to the passage above while arguing that Nietzsche’s perspectivism is his way of refuting the need to realize equality in the realm of epistemology: the toiling masses are used to their pain, and the thin aristocratic layer suffer from regarding the pain of the poor, in their “pathos of distance.” It’s all relative, you see.
The aphorism Nietzsche’s passage comes from makes it clear that he is attacking the ability of scientific knowledge to do anything more than interpret its observations, as well as attacking the notion of universal truth, which postmodernist thinkers of the 20th century would later take up. It illustrates the subjective idealism and pragmatism that animates his writing.
In Tutt’s book, perspectivism is part of Nietzsche’s general reaction to the workers’ movement, to deny the “proletarian” truth of the resentful masses and its challenge to the aristocracy’s truth.
Our argument is as follows: Nietzschean perspectivism was an attempt to tame and limit the masses' demands that the promises of the French Revolution be fulfilled. After all, what is the epistemological basis — the truth — of the people's or the collective's demands for full equality, liberty, and fraternity? Perspectivism was developed as a political epistemology in reaction to the egalitarian demands that emerged out of the French Revolution and which were accelerating in Nietzsche's time, from the worker uprisings of 1848 to the Paris Commune of 1871. Nietzsche developed perspectivism in the maelstrom of these political upheavals, and these events shaped its direction.
Later on, Tutt says: “Perspectivism is a polemical alternative to the crisis of the class struggle that weighed on bourgeois intellectual, cultural, and political life. It is not apparent to most readers of Nietzsche, but as the core of his doctrine of perspectivism is a vision of the subject, or the agency of the self, in which heredity and aristocratic rank can again re-emerge to determine the individual's instincts.”
For Nietzsche, there isn’t a class struggle of the many producers against the few exploiters. Rather, the division of labor that grows along with the development of society’s productive forces is, in his world, a stark divide between the labor of the masses and the leisure time — which Losurdo identifies in his book with the Latin term otium — of the aristocrats who are privileged with having time to actualize themselves, and to struggle to secure more of such leisure time, the “otium et bellum.”
The preservation of otium, Tutt says in Chapter 4, “was a political objective of the class Nietzsche fought for in the Franco-Prussian War, the Prussian Junkers, which was composed of minor aristocrats and landed nobility. Losurdo points out that ‘otium et bellum’ (which can be translated as 'struggle in the cause of leisure') stood as the mantra of the Prussian Junkers. To struggle and toil in the cause of otium is a motto that should be placed at the very center of Nietzsche's political community-building effort. But crucially, the struggle for otium in the name of the interests of the Prussian aristocracy would be modified by Nietzsche into the idea of struggle for, as he puts it, 'those whose lives have turned out well,' to quote Nietzsche's later dedication to The Will to Power, written in the spring of 1888.”
This link drawn between Nietzsche and the Prussian Junkers, or big landlords, is very much right. Indeed, a different kind of presentation might even put this in the center. What we’re talking about when we talk about ideology is this sense of being a conceptual and rhetorical “representative” of a class project. Because it’s ideology it is a subjective kind of determination. And that leaves the possibility open for Nietzsche’s bourgeois though to grip the minds of a different social class. As Tutt writes:
Nietzsche appeals to a particular class of readers who have an ambivalent and often detrimental relation to the working class and to the wider class struggle. Nietzsche tends to appeal to what in Marxist class theory is called the petit-bourgeoisie, a contradictory class position defined by its non-relation to productive labor. [...] Nietzsche's philosophy gives fodder to a class of intellectuals who are fed up with the contradictions of their own class and the decadent culture in which they operate. Nietzscheanism is a philosophy perfectly suited to a de-classed radical philosopher, ideal for petit-bourgeois thinkers who are hungry for a critique of their culture, their class, and 'the system' that will effectively not change anything.”
Nietzsche’s ideas are red meat for the personal and professional interests of petty-bourgeois intellectuals, including “Marxist” ones. The German socialist Karl Kautsky hit on precisely the same point back in 1903. Intellectuals rely chiefly on their own resources, their knowledge and personal ability. The free play of ideas is their key to success, or so it seems. Discipline is for the masses or the factory workers.
In this light, for Kautsky,
Nietzsche’s philosophy with its cult of [the] superman for whom the fulfilment of his own individuality is everything and the subordination of the individual to a great social aim is as vulgar as it is despicable, this philosophy is the real philosophy of the intellectual; and it renders him totally unfit to participate in the class struggle of the proletariat.
If there’s a core reason for why “the Left” gets high on Nietzsche, it’s in these values of subjective truth and self-fashioning above all else. These doctrines are pursued while turning away from socialist struggle or really any large scale program of liberation, a point reinforced by later thinkers likes Michel Foucault.
While these core insights from the book are valuable, thinks got considerably more questionable in the later chapters that bring together Marxism and Nietzsche’s thought. The most discouraging sign was Tutt’s resource to using the most watered down conceptualization of “false consciousness” that’s in the literature.
An ideology of false consciousness is one in which the dominated class develops an imaginary relationship toward their real conditions of social existence. False consciousness was summed up by the American novelist John Steinbeck when he remarked that “socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat, but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.” False consciousness involves an imaginary covering-over of social reality, and there is no more effective force for such a process of covering-over than religion.
False consciousness in Marx and Engels didn’t mean anything so simple as, false ideas propagated by the ruling class. It doesn’t refer to a form of consciousness at all (as if there are true and false consciousnesses). A given form of consciousness (political, legal, moral, scientific, artistic, philosophical, spiritual, etc.) is false if and when it locates its social motives in the movement of thought itself, and not in society.
Tutt’s description really from Louis Althusser’s famous definition of ideology: the representations of individuals’ imagined relationships to their conditions. Considering the criticisms raised against unfortunate errors in Tutt’s citation work, the kind of blending of primary with mediating secondary sources in the Marxist half may apply to the Nietzsche half as well.
In any case, the watered down version of Marx combined with the reformist version of socialism identified above, Tutt’s conception of being a reaction has a very limited scope that’s easy to refute. Nietzsche is a reactionary for Tutt, not because his thought opposes the direction of social production toward a new society, but because he’s simply against political change. Nietzsche however heralds coming transformation in certain ways that make him different from a simple status quo conservative.
Tutt is basically right to locate the source of Nietzsche’s “paranoia” that fuels his hermeneutics of suspicion in the “long arc of revolutionary history.” I just wish the argument could be stronger, more rigorous, and incorporating more class analysis. Marxists in academia need to start raising their standards, even if it means for the moment Quixotically acting as if the surrounding liberals will take them seriously.
Furthermore, postmodernism must be destroyed.
See Lukács: “Nietzsche as Founder of Irrationalism in the Imperialist Period,” which is a chapter from The Destruction of Reason (1952).
For Devin Goure’s ongoing critical commentary of Tutt’s book (from an anti-Marxist perspective), and a presentation of the Great Nietzsche Debate, start here.
For a relatively even-handed reading of the Nietzsche Debate, with recent books briefly discussed, see Duncan Stuart’s letter “Nietzsche and Us” on Exit Only.
For more Nietzsche commentary on the Sub, check out “Nietzsche’s ‘Live, Laugh, Love’” on The Missing Ear.
Tutt’s book may well be in dialogue with an earlier title on Repeater’s list: Jonas Ceika’s How to Philosophize with a Hammer and Sickle.