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Introduction
A disturbance of vision on
the Capitol: Philosophy and
the Far-Right – Towards an
interdisciplinary inquiry
Thesis Eleven
1–24
ª The Author(s) 2021
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/07255136211012615
journals.sagepub.com/home/the
Matthew Sharpe
Deakin University, Australia
On 6 January 2021, an angry mob of supporters of outgoing President Donald Trump
stormed the Capitol building. Their intention was to ‘stop the steal’, preventing the
nation’s elected representatives from ratifying the votes of the Electoral College
removing Trump from office. They had been egged on by the President, who promised
falsely that he would join them in a march down Pennsylvania Avenue to undertake the
action. Trump used stark quasi-Nietzschean or fascoid language, exhorting the crowds
that only ‘strength’, not ‘weakness’, would allow them to keep their country. Longtime
Trump ally and lawyer Rudy Giuliani called for a ‘trial by combat’ to overturn the
electoral vote, which Trump and friends had been claiming for months – starting well
before the election – had been ‘rigged’.
The spectacle of a ragtag collection of overwhelmingly white protesters storming the
US Capitol, scaling the sides of ornamental stairs, smashing windows, spraying and
being sprayed by tear-gas, and then occupying the offices and even the Senate Chamber
itself was undoubtedly shocking. For many, it represented something impossible in the
land of 1776, George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, the country whose intervention
in the European theatre in the Second World War had all-but-ensured the final defeat of
European fascism in 1945. For scholars of the Far Right, however, the events of 6
January will have been experienced differently. Unlike President-Elect Biden, who
echoed the shock that ‘this could ever happen here’, many of these scholars were surprised only that it had taken so long. This, given the rise of the online Alt-Right preceding and surrounding Trump’s election in 2016, and the growing number of citizen
Corresponding author:
Matthew Sharpe, Deakin University, SHSS Arts & Education Faculty of Arts and Education, Burwood, Mellbourne, Victoria Australia.
Email: matthew.sharpe@deakin.edu.au
2
Thesis Eleven XX(X)
militia egged on by his successes, as well as what these cohorts call the shift of the
Overton window of public debate to include Far-Right ideas long consigned to the
margins of US political life (Main, 2018; Marantz, 2020). For them, the images of
the insurrectionary take-over of the Capitol rather will have had something of the
uncanniness Sigmund Freud described upon finally ascending the Acropolis and
seeing the Parthenon in Athens: the shock of seeing exactly what you had long
anticipated, almost exactly as you had envisaged it, with the paradoxical effect that
it is even more unbelievable (Freud, 1936).
Since 2010, we have experienced a global rise of rightwing political mobilization
online and nationalist forms of authoritarian populism offline, which were long unimaginable after 1945 and the ‘zero hour’ of European fascism. The same uncanny mixture
of opposites which confused commentators and seduced many in the interwar years has
again been spreading, albeit supercharged by new media affordances, and has been
winning new generations of recruits, disaffected with the many continuing ills of the
neoliberal paradigm, particularly after the Global Financial Crisis of 2007–9: of hypertraditionalism and hyper-futurism (Fluss and Frim, 2017a), scorn for the uninitiated mob
(aka ‘normies’ or ‘losers’) and the warmest appeals to the unimpeachable virtue of ‘the
people’; claims to retake the nation and celebration for master types (or CEO-Kings;
Klein, 2019), nightmares of the genocide of populations and dreams of superhuman
imminent transcendence (Anonymous, 2019a; Le, 2018), claims to fatalistic ‘realism’
coupled with active attacks on independent (‘lying’) media and lurid conspiracism
(Wendling, 2018; Frankel, 2019; Savoulian, 2019), selective appeals to genetics and
biological claims about ‘human biodiversity’ and a scorn for modern liberal and scientific culture (Land, 2010; Kool, 2010; Feldman, 2016; Anonymous, 2019a).
Many will hold that none of this has any bearing for the academic discipline of
philosophy. On some understandings, academic philosophers address problems wholly
unrelated to political and wider subjects, and as such, should remain serenely unconcerned about these and other political developments. Like Archimedes continuing his
mathematical researches as Syracuse was stormed by the Romans in 212 BCE, let the
world perish, the search for knowledge must continue. There is a great difference
between the contemplative and active lives, as the ancients underscored. On other
understandings, philosophy sets out to understand the whole, including the natural and
the social world. There is thus political philosophy, if not always a reflection on the
sociological and political conditions in which philosophers advance their research programs. Many of the most revered philosophers, from Plato to Heidegger, present visions
of the best regime, or at least criticisms of the cultural and technological forms of
contemporary life. On such conceptions the fate of our natural environment, and of our
fellow citizens and human beings, are not beneath the philosopher’s concern.
It is with such larger and older conceptions of philosophy in mind that this special
edition of Thesis Eleven has been organized. The history of the 20th century gives us
cause for reflection as to whether the triumph of anti-liberal forces from the Right – in
what someone like former Trump advisor Steve Bannon call a transnational ‘revolution’ – is a benevolent thing, first of all for minorities and people who politically oppose
these forces, and second of all for the ordinary citizens whose allegiance or mobilization
they court. When one part of the Alt- or, in Europe, the identitarian Right openly
Sharpe
3
advertise their fascist, white supremacist, and even National Socialist allegiances
(‘1488ers’, ‘Stormfront’, ‘Daily Stormer’, and more (Bokhari and Yiannopoulos, 2016)),
appeal selectively to quasi-biological theories to vindicate racial discrimination (not to
mention what are called ‘jokes’ about genocide and gas chambers (Anonymous, 2019a;
Feldman, 2016; Wendling, 2018), and revile the political legacy of modern revolutions
(the ideas of 1776 and 1789) as well as the expansion of the franchise to include women
(after 1918) (Main, 2018), then there is something to be said for the idea that philosophers, like all concerned citizens, should not stand idly by. It is inevitable to evoke here
Theodor Adorno’s injunction that education after Auschwitz must above all be directed
to preventing its like from happening again.
The question of the relationship between philosophy and politics more widely is
almost as old as philosophy itself, although, despite the Socratic-Delphic imperative to
‘know thyself’, it has rarely become the explicit object of philosophical thematization
(see below). On one side, all political movements, even the most pernicious, trade in
competing visions of the good. Politicians who wish to make changes, and to make a case
for such changes, must appeal to normative visions whose nature and foundations philosophers have long debated. There is also a natural sense in which wisdom concerning
political matters, and human nature – core subjects of philosophical inquiry – is a desired
political commodity. All political actors presumably believe that they instantiate or
advocate for some ‘wise’ vision of what is possible, necessary, or desirable. Influential
political leaders hence typically claim privileged insight, if not a charismatic connection
with ‘the people’, or else surround themselves with advisors whom they consider wise.
At times, such counsellors have included known philosophers, like Seneca to Nero.
On the other side, philosophers remain political subjects, citizens or residents within
different political regimes. They moreover face the ongoing basic need to materially
sustain themselves and the leisure required to conduct their inquiries, whether through
private wealth or patronage, or (in the modern world) as employees of national states.
Each must pay his rates, if not his dues to established authorities (Andrew, 2004). At the
same time, philosophers have typically remained subjects of suspicion by political and
religious authorities, insofar as in their pursuits of wisdom call into question many of the
accepted visions and values of their particular communities (Strauss, 1988). There seem
inevitable reasons for this. Once philosophers proverbially ascend out of Plato’s cave,
questioning inherited common sense and laying claim to supra-political, potentially
transformative perspectives, it becomes a real question how they envisage their nonphilosophical contemporaries, as well as how those contemporaries envisage them. If the
philosopher has attained what he (most often hitherto a ‘he’) thinks is a larger, truer
vision of the human condition than his civic fellows, doesn’t he owe it to them to share
this vision, and to try to influence those within political life, the leaders, most capable of
implementing this vision? But how can he do this, and under which types of regime will
his wisdom most easily become authoritative? Might the philosopher, as the privileged
guardian of elevated insight, not be permanently prey to contempt for his benighted
contemporaries, inured within the cave of accepted endoxa? And what then if, mutatis
mutandis and like Socrates’ Athenians, many non-philosophers simply do not seem
interested in implementing a vision they don’t understand, formulated by figures,
4
Thesis Eleven XX(X)
philosophers, whose claims to authority they cannot assess and (as such) they may
understandably not trust?
The more specific question of elective affinities or disaffinities between different
modes of philosophical inquiry and far-right politics in the later modern era, however,
remains surprisingly little considered, despite the history of the 19th and 20th centuries.
It is a comforting endoxa for scholars raised in a period, now past, of taken-for-granted
liberal-democratic hegemony to suggest that radically anti- or hyper-modernist, antiliberal, reactionary, fascist, neofascist or populist politics literally ‘has no ideas’, and
certainly no philosophical ideas. Such political movements, which truly include sometimes virulent anti-intellectual components, could surely not draw on philosophical
ideas. Nor could philosophers of any importance or insight be interested in them.
Historians and students of these movements, however, know that this liberal endoxa
does not hold up to scholarly scrutiny (cf. e.g. Stern, 1992; Mosse, 1999; Griffin, 1995;
Paxton, 2004). Far-Right political agents lay claim to radical critical perspectives on
liberal, parliamentary and socialist political forms. They do so through appeals to different ethnic and national traditions and prejudices, as do forms of conservatism which
operate within the parameters of parliamentary governance. However, fascist regimes,
and most certainly German National Socialism, presented themselves less as political
parties concerned to win consensus through liberal-parliamentary mechanisms than
‘movements’ with radical (counter-)revolutionary ambitions. Their ideologues and
leaders, often men with intellectual pretentions themselves like Hitler, presented their
movements as the vehicles for the realization of a ‘worldview’ radically opposed to
liberals’ and socialists’ worldviews, and all that they enshrined. The components of these
worldviews, if not philosophical in a technical sense, nevertheless laid claim to the same
imperious scope as philosophies, as well as to the same kind of deep insight into causes
and dimensions of reality which people ordinarily do not grasp. The ideologues or
‘thought leaders’ cite and lay claim to intellectual influence by philosophical or quasiphilosophical thinkers, principally from the reactionary lineage of Archibald de Bonald
and Joseph de Maistre in France, and Donoso Cortés in Spain, as well as what is called
the German ‘conservative revolution’ hearkening back to Friedrich Nietzsche, but
including Oswald Spengler, Ernst Jünger, Carl Schmitt and Martin Heidegger (Woods,
1996; Bar-On, 2007). Fascism has been widely described as aiming at a metapolitical or
‘cultural revolution’ (Mosse, 1999; Koonz, 2005; Chapoutot, 2017), whose basic ideological parameters all have philosophical pretentions and echoes:
Ø The genesis of a ‘new man’, in contrast to the ‘last men’ decried by Nietzsche in
Thus Spake Zarathrustra (cf. Landa, 2017). This new man would be characterized
by:
martial masculinity, hardness, the glorification of sacrifice, war, combat
and struggle,
the acceptance of hierarchy or ‘rank order’,
scorn for the compromises, indecisiveness, timidity and ‘idle chatter’
characteristic of peaceable bourgeois existence.
Ø The proselytizing of long-range, quasi-mythological, eschatological conceptions of
national and cultural histories as long cycles of civilizational decline, culminating
Sharpe
5
in decadence, degeneration, and nihilism, hearkening back to idealized visions of
antiquity, and giving metapolitical form to the political ideal of ‘making [peoples,
countries, homelands, motherlands, fatherlands] great again’.
Ø What is today called a ‘populist’ dimension, valorizing a national community of
virtuous ordinary people or folk – in contrast on the one side to the soulless collectives of marketized societies, and on the other to nefarious, treasonous, rootless,
cosmopolitan ‘elites’, usually with a particular ethnically or religiously foreign
profile.
Ø Underlying this populist veneer, a fierce anti-egalitarianism (including in industrial
relations), coupled to the valorization of strength (as above), and involving strident
criticisms of egalitarian measures as molly-coddling the weak and undeserving,
principally including foreign residents, ethnic or sexual minorities, Jews, gypsies,
the unemployed, the disabled, and refugees.
Ø At the ontological level, hypostasizing pre- or non-rational forces as primary in
shaping the human condition: charisma, strength, blood, race, force, war, struggle,
decision, will, soil, place and myth, together with particular, non-sharable ethnic
and national traditions, ways of life, and heritages.
Ø In the epistemic domain:
on the one hand, hostility to rational discussion, the rule of rational law, and
deliberative decision-making, as against strong leadership, extralegal decisionmaking, and an aestheticized politics of spectacle, while:
on the other hand, ambivalence both about the modern sciences and technology:
on one side, decrying these as expressions of modern decline, levelling, and
rootless abstraction from the prerational grounds of culture, ‘strength’, etc.; on
the other side, celebrating particular (pseudo-) sciences, led by eugenics (and
today, a fixation on IQs), and the potential of technological transformation to
assist in the forging of the new warrior-worker ‘as hard as Krupp steel’ (Hitler).
Let us turn from considering the philosophical pretentions of fascism as a project of
counterrevolutionary renewal to the relationship of philosophers to different adumbrations of this project. The historical record does not bear out any allergic relationship
between philosophers and political regimes on the Far Right. Philosophers from Plato
to Voltaire and beyond have typically harbored deep scepticism about democratic
regimes, given the perceived ignorance and folly of ‘the many’. After his early faith in
Bismarck failed, Nietzsche expresses his admiration for Napoleon, Louis-Bonaparte
and Georges Boulanger (Losurdo, 2020: 539–41, 558), harbingers of 20th-century
authoritarian-populist leaders; Italian fascism was supported and informed by Giovanni Gentile (Gregor, 1999), while Italian philosopher Julius Evola (2013) proposed
to critique Mussolini’s and Hitler’s regimes from the Right, and continues to be
celebrated within the Far Right intelligentsia today; within Nazi Germany, Martin
Heidegger is only the most famous, continually influential philosopher to have supported the regime (Bambach, 2003; Faye, 2009). It is in fact a matter of documentary
record that the German Professoriate, including in philosophy, was amongst the sectors
of German society most readily ‘coordinated’ by the Third Reich after 30 January 1933
(Ringer, 1969).
6
Thesis Eleven XX(X)
In our own time, to return to our beginning, many of the ‘thought-leaders’ of the
European New Right, led by Alain de Benoist and Guillaume Faye in France (Bar-On,
2007) and Aleksandr Dugin in Russia (Sharpe, 2020), explicitly shape their visions by
recourse to philosophical thinkers led by Nietzsche, Schmitt, Evola, and Heidegger.
Julian Göpffarth (2020a, 2020b) has documented the extent to which Heidegger’s
thought is explicitly celebrated and appealed to by leaders within the German AfD (Alt
für Deutschland), as well as the European youth movement Generation Identitaire.
Within the American Alt-Right, Richard Spencer, Gregory Johnson, Mike Cernovich
(Marantz, 2020), and Jason Jorjani (Fluss and Frim, 2017b), as well as thinkers of what is
called the ‘dark enlightenment’ (Nick Land), have been educated in philosophy at
leading universities in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada and elsewhere (BarOn, 2007; Fluss and Frim, 2017a, 2017b; Beiner, 2018), and pepper their discourses with
philosophical citations. Former Trump advisor Steve Bannon has claimed to be inspired
by Julius Evola and called Heidegger ‘my guy’ in interviews (Göpffarth, 2020a); former
Trump speech writer Darren J. Beattie, likewise within the inner circle of the outgoing
presidential administration, completed his PhD at Duke University on Heidegger’s
thought (cf. BBC, 2018).
‘The return of the Far Right’ (Beiner, 2018), ‘fascist creep’ (Reid Ross, 2017),
‘authoritarian populism’ (Morelock, 2018), ‘neo-reaction’ (Anonymous, 2019b) –
whatever we call the global reemergence of forms of Far-Right political movements,
increasingly willing to actively challenge liberal-democratic governance – make difficult debates timely which, even two decades ago, had little urgency about them. What is
the relationship between philosophy and the Far-Right, historically and today? How
could a philosopher, a seeker of wisdom, ever embrace Far-Right ideas? Why should we
suppose this to be any more scandalous than philosophers engaging Far-Left positions?
Why do the would-be ‘thought leaders’ of the Far-Right today internationally continue to
only embrace certain philosophers and their ideas, but not others? Is it possible and
legitimate to suppose that thinkers opposed to Far-Right politics can borrow premises
from these thinkers, as many putative ‘Left Nietzscheans’ and ‘Left Heideggerians’
continue to do, while rejecting their conclusions, and continuing to defend, if only
implicitly, post-enlightenment values of liberty, equality, and respect for all peoples
which these thinkers scorned? Or in doing so, do we not necessarily find our own
positions drawn into unwitting proximity to modes of thinking justifying forms of
political violence and prejudice, at the same time as we close ourselves to the normative
resources of opposing traditions of philosophical and political thought?
This special edition of Thesis Eleven is shaped by the conviction that in the period of
Trumpism the continuing failure to consider these uncomfortable questions is no longer
innocent, but has become important, as one small component of the larger project of
understanding and opposing the rise of the Far-Right in the first decades of the new
millennium.
Towards a mapping of the field
There is at this time little if any dedicated literature on the relationships between
philosophy and the Far-Right (cf. Altman, 2010, 2012; Bambach, 2003; Faye, 2009;
Sharpe
7
Knowles, 2019; Losurdo, 2001, 2020). Literature on the Far-Right and historical fascism
is concentrated in the disciplines of political science and history. Within the former,
there is a concern to understand Far-Right forms of rhetoric, argument and ideology
which verges into analysis of philosophical ideas. However, political science addresses
Far-Right politics as a multi-dimensional, social, cultural, economic, political, historical,
as well as ideological phenomenon. Within the disciplines of history and intellectual
history, there are extensive literatures addressing the intellectual precedents for, and
origins of, fascism and National Socialism, as well as exploring the intellectual parameters of the postwar Far-Right, after the defeats of the Second World War (Stern, 1961;
Mosse, 1964).
However, philosophy and philosophers in the liberal-democratic postwar nations have
up until 2020 rarely examined the ideas of the Far-Right. As we’ve indicated, the
principal presupposition here after 1945 was the understandable, comforting but questionable thought that regimes which had performed such barbarous crimes as National
Socialism could have been motivated by no elevated or at least far-ranging ideas of any
kind (cf. Koonz, 2007). The emergence in the last decades of the philosophy of race has
seen dedicated work on the racial perspectives of philosophers appealed to by, or directly
embroiled in, the interwar fascist regimes (Bernasconi and Cook, 2003; Taylor et al.,
2018). This literature has also, rightly, highlighted continuities between the ideas concerning race which informed the Nazi’s policies of enslavement and mass murder and
wider Western prejudices and discourses concerning non-European peoples. In doing so,
however, its object has not been to understand the wider constellation of ideological and
political ideas that specifically define the Far-Right. This includes the explicit claims of
proponents that their aim was to overturn large parts of the Western legacy giving rise to
the ‘ideas of 1789’ and later modern multi-culturalism, which they considered to be
‘decadent’, ‘nihilistic’, ‘Judaized’, and so on (Chapoutot, 2014, 2017).
There is thus a dearth of philosophical literature on the ideas of the Far-Right, let
alone considering the complex interdisciplinary question of how philosophical ideas can
and do influence political movements. By contrast, one of the most marked phenomena
of the period has been the mainstreaming of study of philosophers who either were
claimed by the interwar Far-Right movements as inspirations, in the case of Friedrich
Nietzsche, or who actively supported National Socialism, in the cases of first Martin
Heidegger, and more recently Carl Schmitt. Scholars from the liberal nations, working in
many cases under the influence of what is called ‘French theory’ (thinkers led by
Deleuze, Derrida, Foucault, and Lyotard) have argued that it is possible, in different
ways, to accept the premises provided by the thinking of these figures, without accepting
Far-Right conclusions. More strongly, they have claimed that Far-Right interpretations
of these figures – including in Schmitt’s and Heidegger’s cases, their own selfinterpretations – are illegitimate, unfounded, scandalous, or worse. So, in one recent
popular article on Nietzsche’s uptake by the Alt-Right, the author expresses the
exasperated view that if Nietzsche is again being appropriated by the Far-Right globally,
‘it can happen to anyone’ (Hendricks, 2017). Often, this proprietorial exasperation gives
way to polemical anger against unaccountable renderings of ‘bad Nietzsche’, and an
almost sanctimonious or ironically priestly tone, as in the following representative
passage:
8
Thesis Eleven XX(X)
Ever since his death in 1900, Nietzsche’s work has been riffled through, savaged, and pulled
apart to support all kinds of causes that mostly do not respect him or the integrity of his
work. He was a controversial thinker, and his work lends itself to dramatic and melodramatic statements about the end of Western civilization, the end of Christendom, the end of
morality, and other ‘end’ tropes normally expressed in a foundationalist sense . . . Yet
against the spirit of Nietzsche’s work [for the authors identified with a broad ‘anti-foundationalism’: MS], statements made in his name are often incendiary, bending his ideas and
distorting them to give expression to one ideology or another. Actually, the process is
offensive and shows little respect for Nietzsche, the classical scholar, or for his work. In
these circumstances, the rag-and-bone would-be scholars lift something from Nietzsche’s
opus to proclaim support for their own political views . . . Given Nietzsche’s own sophisticated views on interpretation, this is a travesty based on a fundamental misreading and an
implicit theory of interpretation we can call ‘literary fundamentalism’ – ‘words mean what
they say’, a kind of literalness that today in the world of literary analysis stands as an
obviously crude and nasty understanding that upholds the position and power of the
interpreter of the word. (Peters and Besley, 2020: 7–8)
In the ‘Heidegger case’, comparably, leading Heideggerian Thomas Sheehan
responded to the publication in 2014–15 of Heidegger’s infamous Schwarze Hefte containing open, virulent antisemitic statements by levelling a striking attack on the French
scholar, Emmanuel Faye, labelling him in print a ‘fraud’ (Sheehan, 2015; cf. Faye,
2020). Faye, on the basis of archival research, had done as much as anyone outside of
Heidegger’s inner circle to publish his Nazi-era writings some ten years before, and
expand the discussion on these subjects (Faye, 2009 [2005]). Nevertheless, since the
mid-1980s, with the appearance of Heidegger’s rectorship speech in the 50th anniversary
of its first delivery in 1983, the Heidegger estate has published more and more of the
materials from 1933–6, containing Heidegger’s political speeches and lecture courses
from this period, as well as his correspondence and then his Black Notebooks (Sharpe,
2018). These confirm, and in some cases arguably radicalize, Faye’s 2005 claims about
the depth of the imbrication of Heidegger’s hoped-for ‘second beginning’ of Western
thought with his aspirations for the Third Reich, as well as his ‘ontological negationism’
concerning the Shoah in the immediate post-war. We have already commented on
Heidegger’s renewed uptake by Far-Right thinkers today led by Dugin in Russia, and
within the circles surrounding the AfD, who embrace those elements of Heidegger’s
thought progressive interpreters continue to wrestle with.
What then is the critical scholar to make of this conjuncture? Domenico Losurdo has
noted, in his long work on Nietzsche (2020: 711–45), the startling contrast between the
post-1950, Left-Liberal readings of Nietzsche as an individualistic, aesthetic, and apolitical thinker within the discipline of philosophy, and his reading by historians and
intellectual historians of the 19th and 20th centuries. The politics of interpreting
Nietzsche and Heidegger seems in some measure to reflect the clash between disciplines,
at the same time as, especially in the case of Nietzsche, one of the more exciting
dimensions of his work was its challenge to the insulation of philosophy from philology,
history, psychology, literature, and some of the natural sciences of his day. Let us begin
with this contrast of the faculties or disciplines.
Sharpe
9
Many academic Nietzscheans tend to dismiss or relativize Nietzsche’s more extreme
claims as metaphors or more or less innocent provocations to shake us up. At issue are
his plentiful statements about the basis of ‘Great politics’ in ‘physiology’, the place of
cruelty, terribleness, war and ‘evil’ in the culture of master morality and transvaluation
of morals, the biological or psychopathological bases of different philosophical and
religious positions, and in his last period, the need for eugenic programs to engender the
Overman and annihilate the misrathenen, and more. By contrast, intellectual historians
read Nietzsche’s philosophical positions as belonging within a post-Darwinian context in
which forms of eugenics, including negative eugenics (sterilizing or even killing the
weak and sick), were being widely discussed in intellectual circles (Richter, 1911;
Holub, 2018; Losurdo, 2002: 582–5; Moore, 2002; Stone, 2002); and in which, in
addition, the ruling classes were deeply unsettled by the emergence of the modern labour
and feminist movements, at the same time as traditional and theological vindications of
challenged social hierarchy (the death of God) were no longer ‘live’ possibilities (e.g.
Mayer, 1981, 1988; Hobsbawm, 1987: 252–3, 302). Far from reading Nietzsche’s aestheticism, and his admiration for great art and great individuals, as inconsistent either
with the older aristocratic lineage linking otium et bellum in the master classes, or with
the fascist project, they understand the place of what Walter Benjamin (1969 [1935])
called ‘the aestheticization of politics’ (and of war) within the Far-Right imaginary
(Losurdo, 2020: 672–91, 711–45).
What this disparity shows are the continuing differences and tensions between philosophy and the other human sciences. But when what is at issue is not simply the
question of how to read and debate philosophical ideas and figures of identification, but
how these ideas and thinkers shape the areas of historical and political existence studied
by these other disciplines, the questions posed by this ‘conflict of the disciplines’ become
acute. At a basic level, for philosophers (or anyone else) to be able to assess whether the
thought of some philosopher or philosophical school made possible, (was) influenced,
shaped, or even determined the formation, development, actions and ideological statements of Far-Right political movements or actors presupposes that we have adequate
understandings not simply of the philosophy at issue, but also these political realities. I
might for instance declaim that Albert Camus’s philosophy reflects ideas present in
relativity or particle physics. But if I have only the most cursory knowledge of particle
physics (true), then my statement will have no epistemic value, and shouldn’t be taken
seriously, least of all by physicists (also true). The same will of course go for claims that
Nietzsche’s ideas ‘have nothing to do with fascism’, or that Heidegger ‘was not a Nazi’.
Unless the statements are informed by a knowledge or knowledges concerning fascism
and National Socialism, they will necessarily only reflect the partial ideas about these
subjects of the enunciators themselves, together with their evaluative positions. But the
question of the political salience of philosophical ideas is a political question, requiring
political knowledges. Likewise, the question of the political influence of ideas on historical movements is an historical question, requiring historical knowledge of those
movements, as well as the ideological utterances of advocates, activists, and (once in
power) their historical leaders. We may wish to attempt as philosophers to insulate a
philosophy from its own political and historical reception, including by arguing ‘with
Heidegger against Heidegger’ and his own reception of his own ideas (cf. Fried, 2015).
10
Thesis Eleven XX(X)
But this attempt must involve the criticism both of the historical agents, in this case FarRight actors, who have taken certain philosophical ideas to legitimate their actions, as
well as the historians and political scientists who take this ‘misreception’ as an historically real datum which needs to be accounted for. Our attempts to ‘save’ a favoured
philosopher hence tend to push us towards insulating philosophy from the other disciplines in ways which bring with them myriad other epistemic and sociological
questions.
In the case of Far-Right political movements, including Nazism, which was
responsible for initiating the Second World War, genocide and mass slave labour across
Europe, there are additional complications, which need to be thematized. For here, there
will be understandable concerns authors face in proclaiming on the relationship between
a philosopher they have devoted professional energies to, and such dark political phenomena. After 1945, for a long time, the crimes of the Nazis made any public allegiance
to, or taking seriously of, Far-Right ideas impossible. In this conjuncture, it became
imperative for liberal-leaning scholars attracted to aspects of the positions of thinkers
claimed by fascists, or who actively supported these regimes, to stridently distance their
ideas from any connection to these movements. Logically, a series of apologetic possibilities opened up here, which the critical reader sees duly occupied in the history of
scholarship on these thinkers since around 1950, when Heidegger’s ‘come-back’ in
France was initiated, and Nietzsche’s ‘de-Nazification’ was initiated in the anglophone
world in particular by the work of Walter Kaufman.
With reference to the ancient rhetorical texts, these might be called 20 apologetic
topoi, grouped under eight subheadings.1
Discrediting dissenting views
i. Either silencing or ignoring, including not teaching, translating (see iv.), or
denouncing as barbarous misreadings the vast number of Far-Right, fascist, and
National Socialist uptakes of Nietzsche in the interwar period, as well the postwar
and contemporary Far-Right literature which continues to appeal to Nietzsche,
but also Heidegger, Schmitt, etc., alongside Evola, Guenon, and others (e.g.
Bar-On, 2007). In Nietzsche’s case, there has under this topos been the attempt to
save Nietzsche by blaming his sister for the Nazi appropriation of his writings,
including claims (which have now been decisively refuted; Holub, 2002;
Losurdo, 2020: 711–15) that she tried to play up, not down, her brother’s antiSemitism, and play down, not up, his anti-Germanism.
ii. Either silencing, denouncing as incompetent (if not themselves ‘fascistic’) or
ignoring progressive, anti-fascist scholars who argue for real and important links
between Far-Right political movements and these thinkers, for example Bourdieu, Farias, Faye on Heidegger, or Lukacs, Losurdo, Beiner, and others on
Nietzsche. One variant of this position (see below) is to claim that only established experts can be licensed to comment on, and perhaps even to understand, the
‘almost mystical, hieratic’ utterances of the philosopher (Rockmore, 1997: 22).
But such positions will usually appeal to versions of the remaining 18 topoi,
insofar as further reasoning is presented.
Sharpe
11
Editing and edifying the subject
iii.
Ignoring or suppressing discussion of passages in these authors which point
clearly and distinctly to messianic, violent, fascist and Nazi aims, such as the
creation of a new man or superman, the permanent need for slavery to enable
high culture (cf. Losurdo, 2020: 100–7, 383–96, 409–22), political deployment
of eugenics, the need to sterilize or annihilate the decadent, the ontological
basicness of violence, war and struggle to reality (or ‘the essence of truth’), the
naturalness and desirability of rank ordering and the decadence of modern
egalitarian, liberal, democratic, and socialist ideas and politics, the basis of
philosophical, intellectual, political and artistic productions in sub-rational,
physiological (or even, in the later Nietzsche, psychopathological; cf. Losurdo,
2020: 625–6) forces not subject to refutation, the undesirable racial attributes of
the Jews (including, in Heidegger’s Black Notebooks, their cunning cleverness,
invisible global influence, etc.), and more. The effect of this is necessarily
paradoxical: Nietzsche, for example, is celebrated as radical and pronounces
himself dynamite and an anti-Christ; Heidegger as the discloser of the truth of
Beyng forgotten at least since Heraclitus. Yet apologetic interpreters commit to
reading them as relatively benign figures whose more radical statements must be
read as innocuous or unrelated to their philosophies, and only their more
innocuous statements taken as literal or expressive of their true positions.
iv. In addition, the selective publishing, editing, compiling, and non-translation or
innocuous translations of texts,2 as well as the exclusion of certain texts (e.g. the
Black Notebooks) from properly ‘philosophical’ status. Most notably, there is the
case of the publication of Heidegger’s Nazi-era works all decades after his death,
with the Black Notebooks only being made public in 2014/15, and recent claims
that the latter are ‘private’, without wider bearing, despite being published in the
Gesamtausgabe. In Nietzsche’s case, we find comparable disputes surrounding
his sister, Elizabeth’s, editing and publishing of her brother’s work, led by Will to
Power, after his breakdown and death (cf. Holub, 2002; Losurdo, 2020: 711–15).
v. Finally here, the insulation of Nietzsche’s and Heidegger’s texts from their
contexts, central to the discipline of intellectual history, and arguably to the
discernment of authors’ intentional meanings (cf. Holub, 2018; Bambach, 2003;
Faye, 2009). Although Nietzsche was a ‘master of suspicion’, reading the texts of
adversaries as reflective of historical, political, moral, and psychophysiological
determinants, the tacit model here is of the great thinker who transcends all such
worldly, contextual determination. The ‘untimely’ label Nietzsche gave to his
second published work is hence taken on Nietzsche’s word, and as an interpretation of his work whole-cloth, despite his immersion in the philosophical,
literary and scientific literature of his time, and engagement in the sociopolitical
concerns of his day, from the Franco-Prussian war and the Paris Commune to the
inner workings of the House of the Hohenzollerns (cf. Losurdo, 2020: 26–8, 526–
33). In the case of Heidegger, his celebrated claim that all we need to know about
Aristotle is that he lived, worked, and then died is applied to the German philosopher, without acknowledging that there can be historical and political reasons
12
Thesis Eleven XX(X)
why a thinker who had publicly supported Hitler’s Gleichschaltung might wish to
minimize the effects of the times on their work.
Metaphorizing and selections
vi.
The arguments that apparently-directly political statements concerning, for
example, ‘the annihilation of the enemy’ (in Heidegger) or of ‘the many too
many’, ‘those who have turned out badly’ (in Nietzsche), denouncing modern
political forms as nihilistic or decadent, etc. are somehow intended only
metaphorically, in order to describe what are in fact supra-political, ontological
(in Heidegger’s case) or ethical (in Nietzsche’s case) claims. Such arguments
themselves operate with, and presuppose, the decontextualization of v.
vii. The argument that the same statements are ‘taken out of context’ or ‘cherrypicked’ from Nietzsche and Heidegger, although in each case, critics argue that
other confirming statements in the same texts and oeuvres, as well as in the
debates surrounding the appearance of the texts (see v.), set out contexts which
in fact it is the apologists who are selectively negating (cf. Dombowsky, 2004,
2014; Landa, 2017; Losurdo, 2020). There are also hermeneutic issues, if a
statement is sufficiently inflammatory and extreme, that it becomes difficult to
as it were ‘find’ a context which could possibly soften its explosive contents.
Finally, here, we would still need to ask why only some philosophers, appealed
to by the Far-Right, felt motivated to include radically inhumane statements in
their published as well as unpublished remains, the like of which we do not find
in other recognized philosophers.
viii. The adducing of seemingly and actually contradictory statements and positions,
such as Nietzsche’s criticism of Bismarckian Germany after around 1875, or
Heidegger’s claims that biological racism is a product of modern Technik, and
concluding that these statements, interpreted in a liberal direction (when, for
instance, Nietzsche’s anti-second Reichism is explicitly tied to his hostility to
modern democratic politics and the democratization of education, and doesn’t
preclude continuing hopes for a redeemed Germany; Losurdo, 2020: 191–200,
225–39, 273–82, 520–3, 753–9), are sufficient to establish the entire political
perspective on these authors, without co-presenting and considering these
passages alongside darker, and contradictory statements on the same subjects
more troubling to the ‘hermeneutics of innocence’ (Losurdo, 2001).
Dividing the subject
ix.
The periodization of the thinker in question, so one period only can be assigned
blame for undeniable proximities and cross-overs with troubling political ideas
and prescriptions, while scholars remain ‘safe’ to work on other periods (with the
interesting cost that one must suppose more or less radical ‘breaks’ in thinkers’
works). In the case of Nietzsche, one could for instance assign any Judaeophobia
we find to the early period of the association with the Wagners, or any radical
Sharpe
x.
13
eugenic positions solely to the late (post-1882/3), as against early or middle
periods. In the case of Heidegger, the principal post-structuralist position before
the Black Notebooks was to assign ‘blame’ for Heidegger’s politics on the early
Heidegger, sanctifying his post-Kehre thinking as a source of criticism of the FarRight (see xvi. below) (Ferry and Renaut, 1990).
In this line, arguing especially in Nietzsche’s case that there is no ‘one’
Nietzsche (see xx.), in the sense of a philosopher with a more or less
coherent, large-scale vision of the world, human history, nature and human
nature, etc. The evident costs of this apologetic move include arguably
demoting Nietzsche’s status as a thinker, given that coherence is widely
considered an intellectual virtue, especially one pertaining to great philosophers capable of seeing farther and deeper than other mortals.
Insulating the philosophy/er
xi.
xii.
xiii.
Arguing that there is no connection between Heidegger the man and Heidegger
the thinker, so his troubling political statements should be insulated from any
connection with his National Socialist politics.3 In the case of Nietzsche, one
might propose that troubling doxa hail from his sister’s influence (see iv.), that of
Wagner (who was soon shrugged off, see ix.), or even his later madness. There is
again an evident cost here, especially with philosophers like Nietzsche and
Heidegger whose appeal in no small measure lies in their appeal to the possibility of forms of authentic modes of existence. This cost was pointed out by
Hans-Georg Gadamer (at Givsan, 2011: 21): one finds oneself in the tricky
position of defending (for example) Heidegger’ greatness as a thinker, whilst
arguing that this greatness did not carry into his political thinking and actions.4
In a cognate manner, arguing that at least some philosophers’ epistemological,
metaphysical, ontological, or aesthetic views have no relationship with any
determinate political stance, and certainly not any Far-Right position. One
instance of this is Peter Trawny’s claim (2015b) for Heidegger’s anti-Semitism
as ‘Being-historical’, which implies (contra Jean-Luc Nancy and others) that it is
elevated and of philosophical value, in contrast to the more ‘vulgar’ or ‘banal’
anti-Semitism of the Nazis (see v.). This position faces real problems in the facts
that, as we saw before, Far-Right politics nevertheless involves the valorization
of prerational data such as will, decision, struggle, instinct, race, heritage, as well
as affinities for eschatological narratives of historical decline and rebirth. These
are both differentiating features which in fact few philosophers share, and many
dispute.
Claiming that historical study of philosophers’ political words, deeds, and
stances necessarily precludes serious engagement with or understanding of their
thought. The preeminent case of this might be the criticism of Victor Farias’s
groundbreaking 1987 work on Heidegger and Nazism, in which critics pointed to
errors of philosophical interpretation to discredit Farias’s work as a whole
(see ii.). Here as elsewhere, despite Nietzsche’s own interdisciplinarity, interpreters can support this insulating gesture by pointing towards distinctions in
14
Thesis Eleven XX(X)
Nietzsche’s work between scholars and philosophers (in Beyond Good and Evil,
§§204–213) and to Heidegger’s ontological positioning of the philosophy of
Beyng as thinking a determinative domain (Beyng) at once prior to and inaccessible to scientific objectification. Heidegger himself claimed that ‘he who
thinks greatly must err greatly’ (cf. Trawny, 2015a), turning this divide between
historical action and philosophical thought to apologetic purpose after 1945.
Reframing the predicate (‘fascism’ and ‘Nazism’)
xiv.
Moving as it were from subject to predicate, accepting partial interpretations of
‘fascism’ or ‘Nazism’ which enable these thinkers to be safely insulated from
any ‘contamination’ with these movements; for instance, the idea that fascism
and Nazism were solely nationalist regimes (while pointing to Nietzsche’s
hostility to Bismarckian Germany after around 1875 (cf. Losurdo, 2020: 191–
200, 224–39, 329–38), or that they were ‘metaphysical’ or ‘humanist’ (cf. Ferry
and Renaut, 1990), or that Nazi racism was only and ever biological (whereas
Heidegger was critical of post-Darwinian biology as an incarnation of modern
Technik) (cf. Bernasconi, 2000).
xv. Denouncing the fascists/Nazis as entirely ideas-less, anti-intellectual barbarians,
while stressing the real intellectual or literary-rhetorical credentials of
Nietzsche, Heidegger, Schmitt et al., making any intersection between their
thought and Far Right politics seem impossible – as above, ‘it could happen to
anyone’ (Hendricks, 2017), when it remains a matter of historical record that
Far Right thinkers continue to not appropriate Montaigne, Spinoza, Lessing,
Kant, Cicero, Aquinas, Habermas, Voltaire, Diderot . . .
xvi. Relatedly, contending that fascism and Nazism were ‘too democratic’ (see v.),
in the sense of too populist, and hence vulgar, whereas Nietzsche, Heidegger,
and Schmitt, were highly educated men whose works, avowedly esoteric, can at
most be understood by a small number or ‘happy few’ ‘free spirits’, experts, etc.
There are evident difficulties that exponents of this position face, insofar as they
also claim progressive or broadly left-liberal or left-libertarian perspectives. For
this apology appeals to the avowed elitism of these thinkers, and their antidemocratic animus towards the ‘herd’, ‘masses’, ‘many too many’ . . .
xvii. Once more in the case of Heidegger, accepting his own reading of National
Socialism, and critique of Nazism after 1945, namely that it was not a failed
attempt to smash the modern constellation of ideas enshrined in the bourgeois
revolutions, as well as their immanent challengers in forms of socialism and
feminism, but paradoxically too modernist (rational, technological). This has
the effect of presenting the postwar Heidegger as ‘anti-Nazi’ (see vi.). Analogous arguments can take form with Schmitt, who also survived the war, and
Ernst Jünger (who was never in fact a member of the NSDAP).
Relativizing and sanitizing the Far-Right
xviii. In conjunction with this, again following the later Heidegger, relativizing the
distinction between Far-Right and other political regime-types with recourse
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15
to some deeper historico-philosophical category, like the slave revolt in
morals, slave morality, instrumental reason, Western metaphysics, ontotheology, Technik/Gestell, racism . . . One also points here to the real ills of the
liberal-democratic world, including principally the technologies for surveilling and controlling subjects and the natural world. These arguments have the
consequence of minimizing any pejorative charge that attends thinkers’
invocations by, or participation, Far-Right politics, at the price of relativizing
‘ontic’ political differences between different regime types, the need for
fascism to enshrine a counter-revolutionary overthrow of liberal-democratic
political forms, the deadly enmity of Nazism towards the liberal West and
Soviet East, etc.
xix. One argues that Nietzsche and Heidegger belonged to the German ‘conservative revolution’ (Woods, 1996), which included thinkers who were claimed
by, or else members of, the NSDAP in Germany, but which was nevertheless
putatively deeply opposed to Nazism. This latter view is contested by scholars
of fascism such as Roger Griffin (1995: 351–7). It usually depends upon
versions of xiv–xvii., all of which are far from universally accepted in
scholarship on fascism and National Socialism.
Relativizing interpretation per se
xx. Perhaps the most radical (as it were ‘nuclear’) move is to take Nietzsche’s own
‘perspectivist’ statements as license to argue that there can be no more or less
complete, determinate or veridical interpretation of these thinkers’ works at all,
let alone any favoring radical political stances. This means their texts are in
effect ‘tool-boxes’ or palates of textual colorings with which the interpreter can
paint whate’er s/he pleases. This position faces several deep problems. It disallows advocates to consistently exclude Far-Right interpretations of these
thinkers, although it is often used exactly as a putative means to do this. It
disqualifies claims that these thinkers’ texts, as against any others, could be
‘great’, or amount to specifically ‘philosophical’ works, rather than aesthetic
objects. It runs up against these thinkers’ own statements concerning the
superior insight granted them by their key notions like will to power, the historicization of moralities, eternal recurrence . . . and in Heidegger’s case, the
truth of Beyng, the history of (the forgetting of) Beyng, and more; as well as
their epistemic bases for criticizing earlier and other philosophies and claiming
the superiority of their own.
Together, variants of these 20 positions, several of which are typically combined (as
we’ve indicated), constitute what Losurdo (2001, 2020) has called ‘the hermeneutics of
innocence’. To inventory them is not to assess them all with the same brush, as we hasten
to specify. We can well suppose that most advocates would for instance want to deny or
at most vindicate i–iv. by recourse to the other 16 arguments, whereas they will want to
present arguments for the validity or force of v.–xx. To fully critically evaluate these
latter 16 topoi is a task far beyond this Introduction. They raise larger, real and hard
16
Thesis Eleven XX(X)
questions in hermeneutics (v.–x., xx.), metaphilosophy and concerning philosophy’s
standing in the ‘division of the faculties’ (x –xiii.), in particular political science and
fascist studies (xiv.–xix.). We restrict ourselves here to just a few directive reflections,
towards any future research program on philosophy and the Far-Right.
The presence (and present hegemonic status) of this hermeneutics of innocence within
philosophy, and its almost-complete absence within other disciplines which study the
Far-Right, presents itself as its own datum for philosophical and interdisciplinary metareflection in the period of Trumpism and the threat posed by the renascent Far-Right
globally. Given the anti-scientism of much Far-Right thinking, one can for instance
wonder whether the absence of Far-Right thinking, and much more limited uptake of
philosophers like Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Schmitt in the more empirically-grounded
human sciences is significant. Today, we know that Far-Right politics is accompanied by
a plague of inter-nesting, but sometimes mutually-contradictory conspiratorial narratives, which include ‘post-truth’-ist claims that climate science and medical science in
the period of COVID-19 are in fact based in well-funded lies (cf. Savoulian, 2019). FarRight thinkers after the Second World War also felt it incumbent upon themselves for a
long time to drop any reference to select positive sciences led by eugenics, because of
their implication in the Nazi disaster. The philosophically-sophisticated advocacy of a
figure like Alain de Benoist after 1970, for instance, draws upon selected sociotheoretical, anthropological, and political-theoretical sources, but its pitch and appeal
is discernibly philosophical, and characterized by the highest intellectual sophistication
(e.g. Bar-On, 2007). Given the absence of agreed epistemic standards for theoryformation in philosophy, due both to one of philosophy’s continuing tasks being to
ask epistemological questions, but due also in no small measure to Nietzsche’s and
Heidegger’s influence in continental philosophy (see xx.), it seems reasonable to
suppose that philosophy has represented the shortest disciplinary bridgehead to having
Far-Right ideas taken seriously in the liberal universities after 1945. The relative
preeminence of philosophically-trained ‘thought-leaders’ of the global nouvelle and
Alt-Right would bear this supposition out (see above).
Pierre Bourdieu entitles the first chapter of Homo Academicus ironically ‘A Book for
Burning’ (1988: 1). The text begins with an apologetic reflection on the need for academics to apply the same methodologies they use to analyse other subjects to themselves
and their own intramural workings. Yet Bourdieu recognizes that this is unlikely to be
taken too well by all of his colleagues. In a way for which we could seek Nietzschean and
Foucaultian analogies, Homo Academicus nevertheless understands academics as
embodied, engaged, social beings whose intellectual work is carried out at the intersection of various forms of social, political, reputational, monetary, and institutional
capitals (Bourdieu, 1988: 73–127), but who too often imagine that these factors somehow do not apply to their productions. The conditions that accordingly govern which
utterances are possible, reputable, and publishable, in the academic discipline of philosophy are not solely ‘philosophical’ or ‘intellectual’. Academics in this as in other
disciplines face competition to gain and maintain positions, publish their research in
prestigious journals, attract the ‘best’ students, court the ‘best’ referees, win the highest
salaries, work at the ‘best’ universities, and publish their monograph-length studies with
the ‘best’ publishers. All of this, unless one supposes implausibly that even ordinary
Sharpe
17
scholars (as against ‘great philosophers’) are untimely and unaffected by their material,
sociopolitical and historical surrounds, means that the kinds of work published, and the
kinds of ideas countenanced in philosophy and legitimated by publication, will be
overdetermined by factors which philosophers (as it were) live, but do not characteristically study.
In the case of thinkers like Nietzsche and Heidegger, for instance, socio-material
conditions have emerged since 1960 wherein scholars can make careers by becoming
commentators on these thinkers’ oeuvres. Dedicated journals and book series are given
over to interpreting their work. As Tom Rockmore observed (1997: 21–4) in his study of
the Heidegger case many years ago, this persona of the ‘expert commentator’ is shaped
by such conditions: one’s professional reputation and one’s material remuneration
become contingent on the continuing favorable reception and reputation of one’s master
thinker, what Bourdieu calls ‘the defence of the corps’ (Bourdieu, 1988: 128). Rockmore
hence writes, and his words are more pertinent today than in the 1990s, when the Far
Right largely remained marginal:
In the present, overheated atmosphere, in which the political stakes are high, in which
scholarly careers are tied to the defense of Heidegger the man and above all Heidegger the
thinker . . . it would be illusory to suppose that even the best possible study could produce
widespread assent, least of all among Heidegger scholars who, following the master’s lead,
have already worked out various strategies for damage control . . . in short, like the master
himself, wherever possible they will continue business as usual. Yet to do so, to fail to
confront this problem [of the relationship between Heidegger’s thought and Nazism] clearly
reflects badly not only on Heidegger’s philosophy but on philosophy in general. (Rockmore,
1997: 299–300; see 21–4, 288, 291–3)
As Rockmore observes, scholarly subcommunities wherein only established experts
are licensed to speak and control the means of publication and refereeing threaten to
become closed ‘bubbles’, as we might put it today in the age of social media (Rockmore,
1997: 21–4). An older metaphor is that of the halls of mirrors, where commentators read
and approve only positions with which they largely already agree, with dissenting voices
which could challenge orthodoxy excluded, and potential initiates the only permitted
outsiders. This will especially be the case when the issue of the political valences of a
philosopher’s thought are at stake, and their putative links to the Far Right: ‘what at best
is a strategy for access to [e.g.] Heidegger’s position through expert analysis turns into a
strategy to prevent those outside of the Heideggerian fold from criticizing his thought’
(Rockmore, 1997: 23). In the present period, we can see in fact that this cloistering can
go one step further, as professional scholars of Nietzsche and Heidegger have largely
ignored engaging with their uptake by contemporary Far-Right ideologues in the US,
Russia, and elsewhere (see i. above).
The question of the relationship between philosophy and the Far-Right is hence real,
complex, political and polemical. Its different adumbrations demand an interdisciplinary
research program, drawing on history, intellectual history, political history, political
science, philosophy, sociology, and philosophy, and asking a series of intersecting
guiding questions, which we can picture in Figure 1,
18
Thesis Eleven XX(X)
The commentator who enters into this research program can expect that this inquiry,
which within the present academic dispensation does not command high reputational,
symbolic, or institutional capital, will experience the forms of discrediting and even
would-be exclusion of ii. above. If they do nevertheless undertake this research, it will be
because of a wider awareness that the demands of academic positioning and status
cannot be absolute for the lover of wisdom who is also a citizen. Socrates holds in jail,
and refuses to leave Athens for Crete, even though the opportunity is present. There is
hence the need to balance reading thinkers who are established authorities with due,
which is to say critical, respect, and the understanding that these thinkers’ importance
will in many cases derive from the effects their thinking has had (and continues to have)
on the extra-mural, sociopolitical world, and different non-academic actors within it.
This research will hence involve an intellectual practice of honoring these thinkers by
situating and critiquing them, rather than saving them from critical engagement at the
cost of denaturing them and denying the full range of their texts’ perlocutionary effects.
The directions for such research, as per Figure 1, would seem to necessarily be plural
and inter-disciplinary. Because of the nature of the subjects of study, which include
political forces and realities, the philosopher who would attend to the politics of her/his
discipline must acquire political knowledge, not simply of the Far Right historically and
today, but of her/his own position of enunciation, within particular institutional dispensations, and subject (as such) to determinate influences which can become objects of
self-reflection. There are different forms of micropolitics within academia, in neoliberal
regimes as much as in the more extreme historical cases of the Nazi or Soviet academies.
It was Nietzsche who commented that independent thinkers must prepare themselves in
advance to be misunderstood, even if we might want to baulk at claims that they should
wish to be misunderstood, not least with one eye on the ethico-political implications of
this hybris.
Synopsis
The articles collected here hail from two public events in November 2019. The first event
specifically addressed philosophy and the Far-Right. The second, more interdisciplinary
event looked at the global dimensions of the return of the Far-Right in the new millennium, bringing together historians, philosophers, critical theorists, criminologists, and
political scientists. The opening two papers are the keynotes from those two events; the
first, by Ron Beiner, outlines many of the claims of Beiner’s 2018 study Dangerous
Minds: Nietzsche, Heidegger and the Return of the Far Right, with a focus on Nietzsche
and his Alt-reception; the second, by Tamir Bar-On, author of Where Have All the
Fascists Gone? (2007) and other leading studies on the French nouvelle droite, gives a
close analysis of the ‘Charlottesville Manifesto’ issued by Richard Spencer, fatefully, at
the time of the Charlottesville ‘Unite the Right’ rally which would lead to the murder of
one young anti-fascist protester.
Matthew Sharpe’s paper, which comes next, proposes a critical reading of Deleuze’s
influential study Nietzsche and Philosophy in the age of Trump, drawing on the growing
body of non-post-structuralist, political readings of Friedrich Nietzsche as an ‘aristocratic rebel’. It asks how Deleuze deals with the many ‘hard’ passages in Nietzsche’s
19
Figure 1. Philosophy and the far right, an interdisciplinary research prospectus.
20
Thesis Eleven XX(X)
works damning liberalism, socialism, democracy, egalitarianism and feminism, and
praising war, martial valor, and selective ‘breeding’, and then asks what the appeal of
these same passages to today’s New Far -means for the stocks of Left Nietzscheanism
and the Left more widely.
The final two papers come from the second event, and reflect its interdisciplinary
character. They bring to bear different perspectives on today’s return of the Far-Right.
Geoffrey Boucher’s paper examines critical theoretical understandings of the Far-Right,
focusing in particular on the psychodynamics at play in supporters’ deep existential (and
libidinal) investments in these movements, their leaders and ideologies. The contribution
by Imogen Richards, Maria Rae, Matteo Vergani and Callum Jones takes an interdisciplinary, including quantitative, look at the spread of Far-Right philosophical ideas,
especially those drawn from Right-wing receptions of Nietzsche, in two outlets (XYZ and
The Unshackled) in the Australian ‘Alt-media’.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship,
and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this
article.
Notes
1. Here, thanks are due to Ishay Landa, William H.F. Altman, Darius Khor, Ronald Beiner and
Adam Knowles for comments, criticisms, and suggestions.
2. Consider for example Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil §61, wherein the value of religion as a
means of ‘breeding’ (Züchtungs) is involved, a subject of ongoing discussion after Darwin’s
work had opened up the possibility of deliberately taking charge of human reproduction in
order to produce ‘better’ progeny. Nietzsche writes: ‘The philosopher as we understand him, we
free spirits –, as the man with the most comprehensive responsibility, whose conscience bears
the weight of the overall development of humanity [Gesammt-Entwicklung des Menschen], this
philosopher will make use of religion for his breeding and education work [Züchtungs- und
Erziehungswerke], just as he will make use of the prevailing political and economic situation.’
Helen Zimmern’s translation gives: ‘61. The philosopher, as WE free spirits understand him –
as the man of the greatest responsibility, who has the conscience for the general development of
mankind – will use religion for his disciplining and educating work, just as he will use the
contemporary political and economic conditions. The selecting and disciplining influence –
destructive, as well as creative and fashioning – which can be exercised by means of religion is
manifold and varied, according to the sort of people placed under its spell and protection.’ In
this way (‘disciplining’, ‘disciplining influence’, which of course do not involve anything like
the control of births and marriages, for Züchtungs), Nietzsche’s text is rendered ‘untimely’, not
by his own agency but that of his translators, who remove his text from its post-Darwinian,
potentially troubling context. Hollingdale gives ‘breeding’ in his translation, but his Nietzsche
Reader (1977) – and the role of edited selections in the popular and scholarly transmission of a
thinker is worth study – includes in its 240 selected fragments only BGE 61 and Anti-Christ
3–4, where this subject is also discussed, albeit in the latter in striking-enough terms: ‘The
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problem I raise here is not what ought to succeed mankind in the sequence of species (–the
human being is an end–): but what type of human being one ought to breed, ought to will, as
more valuable, more worthy of life, more certain of the future. This more valuable type has
existed often enough already: but as a lucky accident, as an exception, never as willed. He has
rather been the most feared, he has hitherto been virtually the thing to be feared – and out of fear
the reverse type has been willed, bred, achieved: the domestic animal, the herd animal, the sick
animal man – the Christian . . . ’ (at Hollingdale, 1977: 246–7). Little wonder that many English
readers find it outrageous when Nietzsche’s belonging in the post-Darwinian context, and his
reading of and appreciation of figures like Galton, is discussed. See Losurdo (2020: 352–82,
543–6, 582–606).
3. One variation on this is that, in the time after 1933, philosophers ‘had no choice’ but to support
Nazism in Germany. This position must reckon with the historical data that nevertheless people
did resist Nazism, and many paid for it with their lives, while others sought or were compelled
to go into exile due to their political convictions or racial heritages.
4. One variant of this position suggests that Heidegger, as a philosopher (see xv), was an innocent
unworldly thinker who foolishly burnt his hands on the cauldron of political life, before
returning to his apolitical mountain heights (Arendt, 1971).
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Author biography
Matthew Sharpe teaches philosophy at Deakin University and is the father of two children. He is
the co-author of Philosophy as a Way of Life: History, Dimensions, Directions (Bloomsbury, in
press, with M. Ure) and author of Camus, Philosophe: To Return to Our Beginnings (2015/16).