Excerpted from Nietzsche by Alain Badiou, translated by Bruno Bosteels with Susan Spitzer. Copyright © 2026 Columbia University Press. Used by arrangement with the Publisher. All rights reserved.

 

The following text by Bruno Bosteels has been excerpted from his “Introduction to the Seminar on Nietzsche” as featured in Nietzsche. Anti-Philosophy 1 by Alain Badiou (Columbia University Press, 2026). It is republished on Communis, under a different title chosen for the occasion, with permission from both Columbia University Press and Bruno Bosteels.

“Like the conclusion to his Saint Paul, Badiou’s Nietzsche involves a precarious balancing act, his relation to Nietzsche’s antiphilosophy being homologous to that of Nietzsche to the French Revolution: one of mimetic rivalry, combining equal portions of formal fascination and substantive rejection. In terms of ontological propositions, Badiou offers the reader two contrasting tables in which he lays out the differences between Nietzsche’s perspective and his own. But in terms of the radical appeal of the act as a purifying cut or anti-dialectical break, the reader will have a hard time deciding whether these statements are to be attributed solely to Nietzsche’s anti-philosophical madness or also to the philosopher in Badiou.”

—Bruno Bosteels

Introduction to the Seminar on Nietzsche

Within the overarching trajectory of Badiou’s prolific oeuvre, this seminar marked the first in what would become an extended series that between 1992 and 1996 included a total of four seminars devoted to as many figures of modern and ancient anti-philosophy. Aside from studying the works of the final Nietzsche, from the manic months of 1888 up to his eventual breakdown in Turin on January 3, 1889, this also entailed traversing the thought of the early Ludwig Wittgenstein that culminates in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Jacques Lacan’s late writings and seminars, and Saint Paul’s militant epistles from the New Testament. With the seminars dedicated to Paul and Wittgenstein already having been published and translated as independent books and the one dedicated to Lacan having been translated as the first installment of the multivolume edition of Badiou’s seminars with Columbia University Press, the present translation has the distinct honor of completing the cycle of seminars on anti-philosophy.[i] While chronologically the first of these to be delivered at the University of Paris-VIII in Vincennes-Saint Denis, in the order of translations Badiou’s Nietzsche indeed arrives as the last in the series now available to Anglophone readers. However, this should not make us any less surprised by the tone and tenor of Badiou’s take on the final thought of the author of The Anti-Christ and Ecce Homo. Until the early 1990s, the French philosopher in fact had adopted toward Nietzsche an attitude that ranged from relative indifference to outright hostility. And so, even or especially when Badiou’s readers had kept up with his prior writings and teachings, nothing could have prepared them for the contrast with the way Nietzsche suddenly is portrayed here as the “prince” of anti-philosophy, marked by an almost saintly combination of solitude and tenderness, and repeatedly embraced as such.

As Badiou explains in a talk from December 1992 in which he summarizes much of his then-ongoing seminar, we are meant to hear at least three things in this title of “prince” of anti-philosophy:

In “prince” I let three things resonate. First, naturally, he is its principle or its beginning. All contemporary anti-philosophy clearly depends in this regard on Nietzsche’s mad breakthrough. Second, I will say that he is the prince because the proposal of his anti-philosophy is endowed with this singular anticipation granted by the power of the poem. And, third, I will say that he is the prince because there is something princely in his manner of handling the radical peril of his act with a kind of interior saintliness, and paying with his own person when the act comes to founder.[ii]

What is more, in the prefatory remarks to present his seminar’s published version, which originally appeared in French in 2015, Badiou goes so far as to declare his profound love for the princely figure he had discovered two decades earlier in the final Nietzsche. How, then, should we understand this change of heart, if indeed it is one, from indifference and hostility to tender understanding and even love? Where does this sudden appreciation for Nietzsche come from, when for the longest time Badiou had been adamant about wanting to resist the siren’s song of what we might call “Left-Nietzscheanism” in France? Why does he now allow himself to be swayed—at least up to a point—by Nietzsche’s mad figure? Or is this change perhaps less profound than appears at first sight?

To gauge the level of change that had to take place for the 1992-1993 seminar to become possible, we may begin by considering how the young Badiou assesses the recommendation to read Nietzsche on a par with Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud. By the mid-1960s, the proposal for such a triangulation had become enormously popular in France thanks to Michel Foucault’s brief contribution, titled precisely “Nietzsche, Freud, Marx,” to the famous Nietzsche conference of Royaumont in July 1964, as well as via Paul Ricœur’s account of the same three thinkers as “masters” in the “hermeneutics of suspicion,” in the chapter “The Conflict of Interpretations” from his book Freud and Philosophy, first published in French in 1965.[iii] For Foucault and Ricœur, what all three thinkers have in common is a novel approach to the question of interpretation and its techniques: a new interpretation of interpretation—not as the restoration of a univocal meaning that would lie in wait ready to be revealed at the origin of language but as the permanent demystification of suspicious chains of signs, which are themselves only ever interpretations of earlier interpretations.[iv] The hermeneutic task thus becomes infinite and open-ended, as signs come to be interpreted as stand-ins for other signs, based on an underlying power struggle among classes, types, or quanta of libido, without ever arriving at a stable sense of what is signified.

In one of his earliest publications, the 1967 review-article of Louis Althusser’s canonical works For Marx and the collective Reading Capital, Badiou questions if it is possible, let alone advisable, to make our own this proposal to read Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud together as the agenda for any future philosophy or end of philosophy, especially considering how all three at the time are being actively re-read in France:

Can we think “at the same time” the reading of Marx by Althusser, that of Freud by Lacan, and that of Nietzsche and Heidegger by Derrida? Headline, in our conjuncture, of the most profound question. If we take these three discourses in their integral actuality, I think the answer can only be negative. Better yet: to approach indefinitely that which keeps all three at the greatest distance from one another is the very condition of progress for each one of them. Unfortunately, in our instantaneous world in which concepts immediately become commercialized, eclecticism is the rule.[v]

In the “Marx-Nietzsche-Freud” triptych, versions of which continue to be taught in popular courses at numerous American universities to this day, Badiou from the earliest point of his philosophical career thus seeks to drive a sharp wedge between, on the one hand, the pairs Marx/Althusser and Freud/Lacan, whose ideas he would continue to integrate into his own thinking without for this reason collapsing them into the fashionable amalgamations of Freudo-Marxism, and, on the other, Nietzsche/Heidegger/Derrida, whose ideas for the time being—from the late 1960s until the mid 1980s—he proposes to keep at arm’s length.

We also can think of how Badiou’s Theory of the Subject, which covers the years 1975-1979 of his seminar and offers a preliminary overview of his philosophical system before the trilogy of Being and Event, Logics of Worlds and The Immanence of Truths, rejects the Nietzschean idea of “breaking the history of the world in two” as a “leftist” deviation that would be no less ideological than its “rightist” mirroring opposite, which thinks of history as the continuous transmission or corruption of past greatness. There certainly will always be an element of destruction in the appearance of a new truth, Badiou insists in his session of February 14, 1977, making a forceful argument that he subsequently would come to rectify as part of a rare moment of self-criticism in Being and Event. But this means that the subject of a process of genuine change or event-driven transformation (the type of event which for Theory of the Subject can happen only in politics, whereas Being and Event will add science, art, and love as the three other conditions of truth) can be conceived neither in terms of an uninterrupted chain of transmission nor as a wholesale break with the past: “‘Destroy, he says’: such is the necessary—and prolonged—proletarian statement. This barbarous statement forbids us to imagine the political subject in the structural modality of the heritage, the transmission, the corruption, the inversion. But also in that of the purifying cut, of the world broken in two.”[vi]

Badiou does not mention Nietzsche by name in this context, nor anywhere else in Theory of the Subject for that matter; and it is certainly possible that in addition to the author of Ecce Homo he has in mind Althusser’s idea of an epistemological break, or cut, separating science from ideology as well as the young humanist from the mature scientific Marx. Nevertheless, throughout the late 1970s and early 1980s, he will continue targeting Nietzsche’s idea of making the history of the world explode into two halves, with 1888 as Year One to mark the threshold between the old and the new, as a type of radicalism that is both politically misguided and subjectively maddening.

In the aftermath of the backlash against May 1968 in France, many ex-“Maos” thus turn into leftist or liberal renegades over and against their past allegiances to Marx and Marxism, allowing themselves to be seduced instead by the Nietzschean image of the radical break. “They dream of a formal antagonism, of a world broken in two, with no sword other than ideology,” Badiou and his comrades of the Yenan Philosophy Group observe in 1978 in the introduction to their collective assessment in The Current Situation on the Philosophical Front. “They love revolt, proclaimed in its universality, but they are secondary in terms of politics, which is the real transformation of the world in its historical particularity.”[vii] Faced with the prompt restoration of order after the general elections of June 1968 and especially after 1972 with the parliamentary promises of the so-called “Common Program” agreed upon between the Communist and Socialist Parties as well as the Radical Left in France, these thinkers—some of who, like the former members of the Maoist Gauche Prolétarienne Guy Lardreau and Christian Jambet, would go on to cause even more of a ruckus in 1977 as part of the eclectic group of “New Philosophers”—do not abandon the dream of social change so much as they blow up the idea beyond all proportions into the mystical, messianic, or apocalyptic terms of a complete tabula rasa of the past and a novelty that would be totally out of this world.

Compared to such ultra-radicalism, frequently justified in the name of a Nietzschean-styled “great politics” (große Politik), any proposal to change the present world will be found wanting as mere reformism, or worse, as the revolution’s ideological betrayal and cooptation.[viii] Yet, according to Badiou, what this denigration of the pettiness of actually existing politics does in the context of post-1968 France is allow yesterday’s rebels to remain today’s unsung heroes in a revisionist rewriting of history: “In this way they would remain the heroes of the whole affair, ideally changing the defeat of their vain ambition into the noble disapproval of its stakes.”[ix] To be sure, Badiou will always prefer thinkers such as Jambet and Lardreau, who after all are driven to their peculiar brand of Manichaeism by an undeniable, if also overblown, fidelity to May 1968 and the Cultural Revolution, over the “anarcho-desiring” tendency among the likes of Gilles Deleuze and Jean-François Lyotard, for whom Nietzsche’s influence typically amounts to reaffirming the sheer multiplicity of rebellious desire as coextensive with life as such—without the need for either the despotism of the One or the decisionism of the Two. However, insofar as Jambet and Lardreau in their melancholy self-criticism push the breaking point beyond anything situated in the here and now, all the while transposing their undying hopes for revolt onto the figure of a mystical Rebel-Angel, they are ultimately as incapable of transforming this world as the final Nietzsche.[x]

In stark contrast to this rebuttal of Nietzschean radicalism, between Theory of the Subject (1982) and Can Politics Be Thought? (1985) Badiou systematically keeps investigating the proximities between Marx and Freud as the theoreticians of militant subjective interventions in response to symptomatic crises in the political and clinical fields. “Marx defines himself by listening to these symptoms according to a hypothesis of the truth regarding politics, just as Freud listens to the hysteric according to a hypothesis regarding the truth of the subject,” which allows us to redefine the dialectic outside the caricatures of the Hegelian Absolute: “Dialectical thinking thus bores a hole in the disposition of knowledge (of representations), on the occasion of a symptomatic breakthrough, which it interprets according to the regime of a hypothesis of a capacity in which the aftermath of a subject is averred.”[xi]

Even Being and Event (1988), while accepting head-on the challenge of formalizing an axiomatic alternative to Heidegger’s poetic ontology of the presence and retreat of being, to which Badiou had devoted his 1986-1987 seminar, opens with the wager that a contemporary theory of the subject can and must return to Marx and Freud:

A post-Cartesian doctrine of the subject is unfolding: its origin can be traced to non-philosophical practices (whether those practices be political or relating to “mental illness”); and its regime of interpretation, marked by the names of Marx and Lenin, Freud and Lacan, is complicated by clinical or militant operations which go beyond transmissible discourse.[xii]

What on the first page of Being and Event is traced back to the non-philosophical practices analyzed in the Marxian and Freudian doctrines later in the book will be invoked as opening a fourth orientation of thought—after the constructivist, generic, and transcendent orientations—which can be considered anti-philosophical. “It holds that the truth of the ontological impasse cannot be seized or thought in immanence to ontology itself, nor to speculative metaontology,” Badiou explains. “Its hypothesis consists in saying that one can only render justice to injustice from the angle of the event and intervention.”[xiii] Incidentally, this raises the intriguing question of why Marx and Freud, if they deserve a space apart despite the widely vaunted similarities with Nietzsche in the hermeneutics of suspicion, never receive a separate seminar in the cycle devoted to the great anti-philosophers of our time.

Nietzsche himself barely makes an appearance in Being and Event and, when he does, Badiou’s judgment of his contribution oscillates between two extremes. Insofar as the eternal return of the same, based on the newly declared truth of the death of God, involves an active affirmation of the existing world in its totality, this side of Nietzsche’s thought always risks canceling out the moment of the decision needed for a new truth to arise in the first place. “This would be one of the paradoxes of action, and its key resides in decision: what it is applied to—an aleatory exception—finds itself, by the very same gesture which designates it, reduced to the common lot and submitted to the effect of structure,” Badiou suggests in a central meditation in Being and Event, with at best only conservative politics as a result: “It is well known what kind of pessimistic political conclusions and nihilist cult of art are drawn from this evaluation of the will in ‘moderate’ (let’s say: non-Nazi) Nietzscheism.”[xiv] Inversely, insofar as the radical act of breaking history in two denies the existence of any link of the new truth to the existing world, Nietzsche’s great politics also serves as a test-case for a form of “speculative leftism” that Badiou’s theory of the event and the intervention seeks to avoid by always linking the latter to their symptomatic site in the situation at hand.

Here, we find ourselves once again before the Manichean hypostasis of the Two, which Badiou had denounced repeatedly in the case of Jambet and Lardreau:

We can term speculative leftism any thought of being which bases itself upon the theme of an absolute commencement. Speculative leftism imagines that intervention authorizes itself on the basis of itself alone; that it breaks with the situation without any support other than its own negative will. This imaginary wager upon an absolute novelty—“to break in two the history of the world”—fails to recognize that the real of the conditions of possibility of intervention is always the circulation of an already decided event. In other words, it is the presupposition, implicit or not, that there has already been an intervention. Speculative leftism is fascinated by the evental ultra-one and it believes that in the latter’s name it can reject any immanence to the structured regime of the count-as-one. Given that the structure of the ultra-one is the Two, the imaginary of a radical beginning leads ineluctably, in all orders of thought, to a Manichean hypostasis. The violence of this false thought is anchored in its representation of an imaginary Two whose temporal manifestation is signed, via the excess of one, by the ultra-one of the event, Revolution or Apocalypse.[xv]

Insofar as Nietzsche’s final gesture oscillates between the dissolution of novelty in the name of the eternal return of the same and its radicalization in the name of an absolute beginning, one of the central tasks for Badiou’s seminar will consist in unpacking this mad dialectic between the return and the break, between the circle and the act, or between the affirmation of eternity and the now of the decision, as twin figures of Nietzsche’s legacy.

However, the fact that Being and Event needed to be supplemented, not just once but twice, to belabor the idea that an event can be both radically transformative while also happening in the world, as in Logics of Worlds, just as truths are both absolute and immanent to this world according to The Immanence of Truths, suggests that perhaps Badiou’s philosophy, too, is tempted by an ultra-leftism of the Nietzschean type. False or not, maximalist, absolutist, and quasi-mystical tendencies have so often become associated with Badiou’s philosophy of the event among his critics, from Peter Hallward to Daniel Bensaïd, that repeated rightward corrections to the appearance of ultraleftism seem to have been warranted after the publication of Being and Event, making it the first volume in a trilogy: “You will see that in the end I concede to my ultraleft critics that, with regard to Being and Event, Logics of Worlds represents a kind of stroke to the right. For the nature of this gesture consists precisely in distancing myself from any miraculous interpretation of the production of truths and in drawing the notion of truth to the side of an actual material disposition, irreducible to pure eventality.”[xvi] Could this admission mean that Being and Event by itself runs the risk of succumbing to a form of speculative leftism of the kind Badiou diagnoses in the case of Nietzsche’s great politics?

Finally, still on the topic of Badiou’s critical views of Nietzsche, we might consider how as late as in his Ethics: An Essay on the Consciousness of Evil, published in 1994, he continues to warn his readers against the temptation to exaggerate the transformative power of truth to the point of destroying everything old in the name of the new. Again, as in Theory of the Subject, he admits that the elaboration of a new truth necessarily involves an element of violence or force, insofar as the existing situation is “forced” to integrate its generic extension, as if the new truth were already universally applicable in the present. However, when this operation of forcing is carried to the extreme of doing away with everything from the old world in the name of a new truth’s total power, the result is what Badiou proposes to call a “disaster,” one of the forms of Evil of which the final Nietzsche would offer an illustrious case:

When Nietzsche proposes to “break the history of the world in two” by exploding Christian nihilism and generalizing the great Dionysian “yes” to Life; or when certain Red Guards of the Chinese Cultural Revolution proclaim, in 1967, the complete suppression of self-interest, they are indeed inspired by a vision of a situation in which all interest has disappeared, and in which opinions have been replaced by the truth to which Nietzsche and the Red Guards are committed.[xvii]

To avoid the temptation of a disastrous overextension of the power of truth, Badiou—freshly armed with the conceptual apparatus of his philosophical system displayed in Being and Event—now establishes a limit-point, which he calls the “unnameable,” beyond which no truth procedure should venture, lest it turns into a form of Evil: “At least one point that the truth cannot force.”[xviii] Nietzsche’s madness, on the other hand, can be explained as the result of his falling prey to a compulsion to name even this point of the unnameable as integral to a totally new meaning of truth, swept up as the author of Ecce Homo becomes in the great noon of the “yes” to Life as the source of all evaluations, which itself cannot be evaluated.

In all these instances, from his early review of canonical Althusserianism, via the balance sheet of the post-1968 fate of French Maoism, all the way to the formulation of the ethical consequences of his philosophy in the face of Evil, Badiou invariably invokes Nietzsche’s name as the emblem of an excessive radicalism gone mad. And so, we come back to our original question: What, if anything, changes in Badiou’s appreciation of Nietzsche in the context of his 1992-1996 seminars on anti-philosophy? If, at the half-way point of this cycle, even his Ethics maintains parts of the older criticism, including as a possible form of self-criticism regarding the excesses of Maoism, could this mean that Badiou still does not identify himself as closely with the “prince” of anti-philosophy as might appear from his Nietzsche seminar, despite the openly declared love for his subject? What motivates him now to take a closer look at the thought of the final Nietzsche? Finally, if we wish to respect the polemical import of this analysis despite the loving appreciation that accompanies it, where exactly should we draw the line of demarcation between Badiou’s philosophy and Nietzsche’s anti-philosophy?

***

We can distinguish at least two motivations for the apparent change of heart that leads Badiou to take such keen interest in Nietzsche in his 1992-1993 seminar. The first is structural and constitutive of the development of Badiou’s whole philosophy. This project, after all, is not just the proposal of one thinker’s unique philosophical system; it also entails a well-nigh epochal wager that philosophy is once more possible, precisely as a systematic endeavor, over and against its often-declared end, death, or exhaustion. Hence, it is only logical that the publication in 1988 of Being and Event would be followed in 1989 by the slender accompanying volume Manifesto for Philosophy, in which Badiou spells out the terms of this wager, just as in 1992 the collection of essays and talks titled Conditions explains how this (re)turn of philosophy relates to the current situation in each of the four truth procedures of politics, art (or poetry), science (or mathematics), and love (as treated in psychoanalysis).

This plea for philosophy as a thought-practice and an institution, if not as an academic discipline, certainly comes as a novelty compared to Badiou’s earlier work. Until the early 1980s, he placed most of his book-length publications under the Althusserian-sounding header of “theory”: Theory of Contradiction (1975), Of Ideology (1976), and Theory of the Subject (1982). Of course, these works are also without a doubt philosophical in nature, but the primacy of politics from which they depart always seeks to tear down philosophy from its lofty pedestal and drag it into the world of material contradictions and struggles in the streets: “Philosophy as partisanship. Philosophy as concentration of antagonism, in terms of worldview. Philosophy thoroughly summoned by history. The servant not of the sciences but of weaponry. Not the reign of the eternal, much less of wisdom, but the trenchant figure of the actual, of the divided, of class.”[xix] Inversely, the fact that Being and Event invites the follow-up of a Manifesto for Philosophy underscores Badiou’s role in the broader institutional consolidation of philosophy in the 1980s in France with the creation of entities such as the Collège International de Philosophie, after decades of proposals to put an end to philosophy in the name of politics, art, religion, science, or existence pure and simple. And, in Badiou’s case, this (re)appraisal of philosophy in retrospect brings with it an explicit rejection of the Althusserian category of “theory” as unstable and dangerously idealistic, due in part to a quasi-Nietzschean belief in an “absolute beginning,” the result not of a “dialectical relation” between theory and practice but the immanent product of “pure invention.”[xx]

In this context of Badiou’s (re)turn to philosophy Nietzsche also appears in a new light as a worthy interlocutor—or, rather, as an enemy worth fighting against. Despite what the author says in his prefatory remarks about the uniquely separate status of his 1992-1993 seminar, there is a profound connection between the wager that philosophy is once again possible and the need to engage polemically with the likes of Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, and Lacan. This is because no contemporary philosophy will be up to the task of thinking the truths of its time unless it also accepts to do battle with its most formidable rivals.

At first, consistent with the ancient model of his self-described Platonism of the multiple, Badiou defines the philosopher’s main opponents as sophists. If the recommencement of philosophy requires a Platonic gesture, this gesture also must include an updated version of Plato’s animosity against his dominant rivals: “Just as Plato has the professionals of sophistry, at once bullheaded and bearers of modernity, as his interlocutors, so also does the attempt to radicalize the rupture with classical categories of thought today define what is reasonable to call a ‘Great Sophistics,’ linked essentially to Wittgenstein,” Badiou proposes in Manifesto for Philosophy. This is not just a matter of polemical rage and negativity. On the contrary, modern and postmodern sophists also have crucial lessons to teach that we ignore at the risk of losing track of the intricacies of our contemporary moment: “The young Plato knew he had to go beyond the subtle wrangling of sophistics as well as be educated by it about the essence of the questions of his time. The same holds true for us.”[xxi]

Similarly, in several talks published in Conditions, Badiou suggests that we must follow Plato’s example in deciding which dialogues or treatises a contemporary philosopher should endeavor to compose: “We can, and we should, write new Republics and Symposiums for our contemporaries. Just as Plato wrote the Gorgias and Protagoras for the great sophists, we should write the Nietzsche and the Wittgenstein. And, for the minor sophists, the Vattimo and the Rorty.”[xxii] In fact, based on this confrontation with Nietzsche as one of the major sophists of the modern era, Badiou for a while toyed with the idea of treating him as the “prince” of sophistics, more so than of anti-philosophy: “The greatness of Nietzsche’s endeavor makes him what one might call the Prince (seeing ‘principle’ in Prince) of modern sophistics,” he adds in a note to the same talk from 1990 taken up in Conditions, offering the following explanation for why this project remains unfinished at the time of the volume’s publication two years later:

In this collection I had intended to include an essay on Nietzsche entitled precisely The Mad Prince, dealing with the limit of the furious Nietzschean trajectory between spring 1888 and January 1889. In this essay, the thesis I put forward is that Nietzsche was the supreme sophist – but this essay remains unfinished, since it has not yet been submitted to the test, which is always crucial for me, of its public or oral exposition.[xxiii]

The fact of the matter is that between Manifesto for Philosophy and the publication of Conditions, Badiou dramatically changes course and begins to see the anti-philosophers as worthier opponents than the sophists. In the case of Nietzsche but also for Wittgenstein and Lacan, this means that we must be able to distinguish the sophistic from the anti-philosophical elements in their thought, before asking ourselves why the latter appeal so much more to the philosopher in Badiou.

From Nietzsche’s late writings and notebooks, we know that he always favored the ancient sophists as being closer to the great Hellenistic instinct than anything infected by Socrates, whom he portrays as the rachitic instigator of “the Plato disease” responsible for two millennia of decadence in the Christian West. About Thucydides as the perfect cure for all things Platonic, Nietzsche writes for example in Twilight of the Idols, in a section titled “What I Have the Ancients to Be Thankful For”: “He represents the most perfect expression of the sophists’ culture, by which I mean the realists’ culture; this invaluable movement right in the middle of the hoax of morals and ideals that was being perpetrated on all sides by the Socratic schools.”[xxiv] But Badiou also recognizes many sophistic tendencies in Nietzsche’s own thought, most evident in his so-called critical and genealogical works from Human, All Too Human to Beyond Good and Evil. These tendencies can be classified into three categories:

At bottom, the sophistic filiation of Nietzsche can be summarized or concentrated in three points. First, Nietzsche, like the sophists, maintains a theory of the typological multiplicity of judgments. Judgments must be apprehended in the multiplicity and antagonism of the types confronted in them. Second, Nietzsche, like the sophists, supports a denigration of the dialectic. Every exposed judgment exposes itself in the power of its rhetoric. And, finally, Nietzsche, like the sophists, sustains that no truth is of the principled type and, consequently, the figure, or the path, of thinking in no way can be that of the axiom.[xxv]

How does Nietzsche proceed in his critical and genealogical analyses if not by unmasking the human type behind every moral, political, scientific, or philosophical statement? As Foucault also observed, but in his case approvingly, the question Who? remits us not so much to an individual speaker as much as to a type, which can be either active or reactive, strong or weak, healthy or sick, affirmative or resentful: “In this sense, we can hold that the whole genealogical and typifying dimension of Nietzsche is a sophistics appropriate for the nihilist sequence of the Christian world.”[xxvi] For Badiou, on the contrary, the possibility for philosophy to begin anew in the tradition of Plato and Descartes depends on our ability to delink the truth or falsity of a statement from the question Who speaks? As a model for philosophy, mathematical formalization, based on axioms and proofs that can be transmitted independently of the speaking subject, displaces the rhetorical analysis of statements, based on the multiplicity of types and forces expressed in them. Still, while reasserting the belief in universal truths, contemporary philosophy can neither ignore nor pretend to be done for good with the sophist: “The ethics of philosophy essentially consists in retaining the sophist as its adversary, in preserving the polemos, or dialectical strife. The disastrous moment occurs when philosophy declares that the sophist ought not be, the moment when it decrees the annihilation of its Other.”[xxvii]

By the time Badiou announces the topic of his 1992-1993 seminar, during the last session of his seminar from the previous year on L’Essence de la politique (The Essence of Politics), it has become clear that a purely anti-sophistic polemic faces numerous difficulties and obstacles.[xxviii] The notion of “great modern (or postmodern) sophistics,” for example, risks turning into an eclectic ragbag in which the most varied philosophical figures are indiscriminately thrown together: “Language games, deconstruction, weak thought, radical heterogeneity, différend and differences, the ruin of reason, promotion of the fragment and discourse reduced to shreds: all this argues in favor of a sophistic line of thinking and puts philosophy in a deadlock.”[xxix] From such a heterogeneous mix, philosophy will be hard put to derive the precision needed for its systematic renewal. Furthermore, several of the thinkers alluded to on this list also harbor promising elements that do not fit the composite drawing of the average sophist. If we take Wittgenstein as a test case, he is not only the author of the Philosophical Investigations that in Badiou’s eyes make him the quintessential sophist, capable of reducing truth to the felicitous or infelicitous effect of the rules of a language game and the conventions of a discursive genre whose time may have come; his early Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus also stands before us like a gem of avant-garde formalism capable of pointing to the mystical element through a radical act, at the upper limit of what language or discourse alone is capable of expressing.

Thus, there comes a moment in Badiou’s thinking of the early 1990s when the portrait of the great modern sophists sketched out in Conditions demands to be split further into opposing, if not irreconcilable trends. Here is one such portrait:

Who are the modern sophists? Modern sophists are those who maintain, in the school of the great Wittgenstein, that thought is caught in the following alternative: that it either consists in effects of discourse, in language games, or that it consists in silent indication, in the pure “showing” of that which is subtracted from language’s grasp. Sophists are those for whom the fundamental opposition is not between truth and error, or errancy, but between speech and silence, that is, between that which can be said and that which it is impossible to say.[xxx]

Now, if the former terms in this fundamental opposition fit the sophistic label, the latter are better described as engaging the power of an anti-philosophical act, irreducible to the clutches of language, discourse, or interpretation alone. Similarly, Nietzsche’s final obsession with the efficacy of his own thinking—an obsession that Badiou will interpret as key to a non-pathological understanding of Nietzsche’s madness—also cannot be reduced to an effect of language in the infinite play of interpretations, since it is that which breaks with interpretation in the name of something like an unprecedented act or event.

Finally, perhaps the most damning objection against turning philosophy’s polemical rage primarily against the sophists holds that they do not make for interesting opponents either to Plato or to Badiou: “What we target in sophistics is the fact that, beneath its subversive appearance, in terms of thought it authorizes only a technical variant of the conservation of linguistic and political resources. Sophistics is not worth the effort.”[xxxi] Far more provocative, even in the work of the same thinkers previously considered mere sophists, is the simultaneous presence of a radical act. “I would say that this puts us right at the heart of our analysis of Nietzsche,” Badiou remarks in his 1992 talk. “Because his singularity lies entirely in the concept he has of the philosophical act. Or, to use his own language, of the power of philosophy.”[xxxii]

Thus, if between Being and Event and the earliest talks included in Conditions, Badiou declares programmatically that he will seek his opponents among the modern sophists because this is what Plato teaches us, by the time this collection appears in print the target has shifted to the anti-philosophical tendencies in Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, and Lacan. When looked at from this new angle, the polemic in each of the three cases becomes much more challenging because the anti-philosophical act in numerous ways appears as the greatest rival for the philosopher’s idea of the event—for instance, in the case of Ecce Homo. “The act is an event. And this event is an absolute break, of which Nietzsche is the opaque proper name,” Badiou proposes: “It is to this correlation between an act with neither concept nor program and a proper name, one which is his only by chance, that we should tie the famous title from Ecce homo, ‘Why I am a Destiny.’ I am a destiny because, by chance, the proper name ‘Nietzsche’ comes in to link its opacity to a break without program nor concept.”[xxxiii]

A second motivation for the change in focus away from the sophists, which furthermore may explain why Badiou begins his cycle of seminars on anti-philosophy with Nietzsche, is more arbitrary and contingent, not to say purely anecdotal: the publication in 1991 of a collective volume by a group of French philosophers—all of them fervent defenders of liberal democracy and enlightened humanism against what they decry as the nefarious influence of the author of Beyond Good and Evil—under the title Why We Are Not Nietzscheans. Edited by Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut, the perpetrators of an older polemic against la pensée ’68 translated as French Philosophy of the Sixties: An Essay on Antihumanism, this set of solemn anti-Nietzschean pronouncements immediately puts Badiou in an embarrassing position. “Did I not explain, some years before the manifesto of the assassins for morality, why I was not Nietzschean? This took, moreover, the form of a precise statement: one according to which Nietzsche was the founder of modern sophistics,” he explains in his talk from December 1992. “No doubt Pavlov’s saliva theory has foundered together with the socialist states. However, I confess that it is with a conditioned reflex that, seeing how Misters Ferry and Renault raise high the standard of anti-Nietzscheanism, I tell myself that, by force, I must be Nietzschean in some way or another.”[xxxiv] Badiou therefore decides to take a closer look at the one figure in the Marx-Nietzsche-Freud triad for whom, throughout most of his thinking life, he had reserved a mixture of indifference and scorn. And he does so knowingly under the hypothesis that he may have to declare himself a Nietzschean.

 

***

To take the full measure of this turnaround beyond Badiou’s own trajectory, we must—in a second approach—consider the uses to which Nietzsche had been put especially in the aftermath of May ’68 in France. Foucault had already indicated the path to follow by ending his talk at the 1964 Royaumont conference with a clear distinction between the infinite play of interpretation, for which he credits Nietzsche, and the closed semiology to which Marx’s thought would have become reduced in the orthodoxies of Marxism:

A hermeneutic that in effect falls back on a semiology believes in the absolute existence of signs: it abandons the violence, the incompleteness, the infinity of interpretations in order to enthrone the terror of the index or to suspect language. Here we recognize Marxism after Marx. On the contrary, a hermeneutic that wraps itself in itself enters the domain of languages which do not cease to implicate themselves, that intermediate region of madness and pure language. It is there that we recognize Nietzsche.[xxxv]

Far from being a recent phenomenon, this anti-Marxist mobilization of the author of On the Genealogy of Morality is almost as old as the entire field of Nietzsche studies in Germany, France, or Russia. Marxists like Franz Mehring and Georgi Plekhanov, already in the 1890s, warn against the nefarious influence of the Nietzsche cult around them. And in France, even though Nietzsche’s famous biographer Charles Andler was a socialist in the vein of Jean Jaurès, the stage would soon be set for the fundamental ideological battle that would rage throughout the twentieth century. As the right-wing nationalist and later Nazi collaborationist Drieu la Rochelle proclaims in June 1933: “In any case, the successes obtained by anti-Marxism in the last few years in Central Europe and no doubt secretly in Russia commit us to propose this formula: Nietzsche against Marx, Nietzsche succeeding Marx, Nietzsche as the true prophet and inspirer of post-war revolutions.”[xxxvi] What changes dramatically after World War II is the astonishing number of writers, artists, and intellectuals who proclaim themselves at the same time leftists, anti- or post-Marxists, and Nietzscheans.

About the pitfalls of these repeated flirtations with Nietzsche’s great politics on the part of the self-described Left, nobody has been as blunt and systematic as the American communist thinker Geoff Waite. Taking seriously Georges Bataille’s statement from the mid-1950s according to which “Nietzsche’s position is the only one outside of communism,” Waite engages in an unforgiving polemic with the full range of “Left-Nietzscheanism” since the end of the nineteenth century to reveal the astonishing paradox at the heart of this ill-construed ideological formation:

The basic paradox remains, the paradox that Left-Nietzscheanism exists at all. How could it overlook—read and yet not read—Nietzsche’s persistent attacks, in print as well as in notebooks, against his mortal enemy, variously described as “Christians,” “Platonists,” “the masses,” “newspaper readers,” “beer drinkers,” “cigar smokers,” “women,” “Wagnerians,” “decadents,” “anarchists”—but most especially as “socialists” and all other “preachers of equality”? To turn the question around: How was Nietzsche able to calculate that he could enlist precisely these people to his cause, against their own best interests?[xxxvii]

The key to understanding this otherwise inexplicable paradox consists, on the one hand, in Nietzsche’s esoteric and subliminal use of rhetoric and style to seduce his readers into participating in their voluntary servitude as if it were a liberatory practice reserved for the select few of whom they invariably believe to be part, while subconsciously accepting the sacrifice of the “decadent” and “ill-bred” masses; and, on the other hand, in the process of what the Italian communist thinker Antonio Gramsci called “passive revolution,” or “transformism,” by which Nietzscheans in the name of a seemingly liberal or even leftist but actually proto-fascist critique of morality and the state helped along the general drift of the twentieth century from the Left to the Right, of which we in the new millennium are living the tail end: “To see and grasp Nietzsche with Gramsci’s help as a fascoid-liberal revolutionary is to begin to resolve the paradox—the apparent contradiction—of the existence of Left-Nietzscheanism—in the face of Nietzsche’s own published contempt for democracy, feminism, socialism, and the like, including his ambivalence toward the in fact dubious brand of European and German liberalism he encountered in the 1870s and 1880s.”[xxxviii]

How, then, does Badiou position himself in this century-long tradition of Nietzsche studies and the question of Left-Nietzscheanism? Aside from shorter commentaries on readings by Foucault, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Sarah Kofman, whose Explosion I: On Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo had just come off the press in 1992 (the sequel, Explosion II: Nietzsche’s Children, would not appear until after the conclusion of Badiou’s seminar, in 1993), he focuses his polemic on two landmark interpretations of Nietzsche in France and Germany: Gilles Deleuze’s Nietzsche and Philosophy (1962) and Martin Heidegger’s lectures and treatises from 1936-1946 thoroughly reworked in his two-volume Nietzsche (published in German in 1961 and translated into French in 1971 by Pierre Klossowski). What these two interpretations have in common, beyond the fact that according to Badiou they similarly fail to acknowledge the exact nature of Nietzsche’s final act of breaking the history of the world in two, has to do with how they define the philosopher of the overman in relation to the dialectical and metaphysical tradition that also produced the work of Marx and Marxism.

For Deleuze, Nietzsche is the quintessential anti-dialectical thinker, insofar as the dialectic from Socrates to Hegel has expressed a reactive and nihilistic type of evaluation. “The dialectic is the natural ideology of ressentiment and bad conscience. It is thought in the perspective of nihilism and from the standpoint of reactive forces. It is a fundamentally Christian way of thinking, from one end to the other; powerless to create new ways of thinking and feeling,” Deleuze concludes: “There is no possible compromise between Hegel and Nietzsche. Nietzsche’s philosophy has a great polemical range; it forms an absolute anti-dialectics and sets out to expose all the mystifications that find a final refuge in the dialectic.”[xxxix] For Heidegger, on the other hand, Nietzsche’s thought of the will to power and the eternal recurrence of the same marks both the completion and the beginning of the end of the metaphysical tradition in the West. However, Nietzsche’s attempt at overcoming nihilism, like Marx’s attempt to put the Hegelian dialectic back on its feet, remains trapped in the snare of metaphysical prejudices: “Absolute metaphysics, with its Marxian and Nietzschean inversions, belongs to the history of the truth of being. Whatever stems from it cannot be countered or even cast aside by refutations. It can only be taken up in such a way that its truth is more primordially sheltered in being itself and removed from the domain of mere human opinion.”[xl]

Immediately after World War II, with Jean Beaufret as his loyal disciple on the other side of the Franco-German border, Heidegger thus initiates a combined re-reading of Marx and Nietzsche that appears ideally geared toward his newfound audience in France. Both in his 1946-1947 “Letter on ‘Humanism’” sent to Beaufret and in his 1966-1969 seminars in Le Thor in Southern France, where a young Giorgio Agamben in his mid-twenties joins the renowned poet-convener René Char, Heidegger is eager to suggest a “fruitful dialogue” with Marx based on the latter’s discussion of history and alienation, but only if Marx’s materialism is simultaneously shown to remain indebted to a humanist-productivist prejudice inherited from Hegel: “The modern metaphysical essence of labor is anticipated in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit as the self-establishing process of unconditioned production, which is the objectification of the actual through the human being, experienced as subjectivity.”[xli] Derrida will reiterate this interpretation, for example, in his 1964-1965 seminar Heidegger: The Question of Being and History at the École Normale Supérieure, in the same year and the same place as Althusser’s seminar in preparation for the collective volume Reading Capital: “Marx, in his concept of labor, however profound the penetration of historicity allowed by it, would have remained a heir to Hegelian metaphysics, in the form of the subjectivizing voluntarism […] and ultimately of a humanist anthropologism.”[xlii] The key difference is that while for Heidegger Nietzsche marks both the fulfillment and the end of the modern metaphysics of the subject in the guise of the will to power as the will to will, for Derrida and his disciples Nietzsche’s style of philosophizing resists this Heideggerian interpretation while at the same time promising to offer the twentieth-century reader an escape hatch from the class essentialism, historical determinism, and party vanguardism that the author of Beyond Good and Evil helps denounce in Marxism, if not already in Marx himself.

Thanks in large part to Heidegger’s peculiar way of placing Nietzsche in the history of being, and then with renewed fervor in the wake of the defeat of May ’68 in France, numerous self-described leftists jump on the occasion to salvage Nietzsche’s thought from its Nazi appropriation, as if only Hitler’s followers (or, before them, Nietzsche’s sister Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche) had been responsible for posthumously infecting the author of The Will to Power with the venom of racism, biologism, anti-Semitism, and social Darwinism, while mobilizing his aphoristic brilliance in the service of a life-affirming “Yes” to creativity, desire, and rebelliousness in a writerly style. This is how one of the contributors to the volume Why We Are Not Nietzscheans describes the panorama, trained as his generation was under the watchful eye of Foucault, Deleuze, or Derrida: “Nietzsche’s oeuvre seemed to be at the same time the continuation of ‘great philosophy’ and the privileged instrument of thought’s emancipation from the entirety of the ‘metaphysical’ tradition, and it was in this that it seemed to answer to the two ambitions which dominated French philosophy of these days,” but with the added advantage over other admired models such as Freud or Marx in that, “having been often disdained by the preceding generation, he was not compromised in the debates the latter had been passionate about (such as the dialogue between phenomenology and ‘Hegelian’ or ‘humanist’ Marxism), and he was the inventor of an unprecedented form of ‘philosophical writerly style’ which seemed destined to establish new links between thought and literature.”[xliii]

In this way, with the 1972 Nietzsche aujourd’hui (Nietzsche Today) conference in Cerisy-la-Salle marking the culminating moment with the participation of a Who’s Who list of (still mostly only male) German and French philosophers, including Karl Löwith, Eugen Fink, Deleuze, Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard, Nancy, and Kofman, the incongruous compound of “Left-Nietzscheanism” continues to spread like a contagious disease—despite the never-ending contempt of this one-time army volunteer in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-1871 for everything that he thought reeked of socialism, communism, or the egalitarianism of the Paris Commune. As Deleuze also observes: “In a single polemic Nietzsche encompasses Christianity, humanism, egoism, socialism, nihilism, the theories of history and culture and the dialectic itself,” which not even Marx’s materialist inversion of Hegel is able to rectify: “The dialectic has fewer adventures than avatars; naturalist or ontological, objective or subjective, it is, Nietzsche would say, nihilistic in principle; and the image that it gives of positivity is always a negative and inverted one.”[xliv]

In fact, the “new” Nietzsche reception of the 1960s and 1970s in France combines a polemical attack against the Hegelian and Marxist dialectic with an attempt to find the German thinker innocent of the charge of being a proto-fascist thinker. In a long talk first delivered in 1976 in Charlottesville, Virginia, Derrida raises the issue of how to handle not just the Nazi recuperations of Nietzsche’s work but also Heidegger’s relation to Nazism. The most appropriate response to these polemical issues for Derrida is never simply to excuse the philosophers in question, nor should one reduce them to the horrors of Hitlerism. When Nietzsche in a youthful text like his 1872 lectures On the Future of Our Educational Institutions, composed but not published while he was still a philology professor in Basel, speaks of “great leaders” (die grossen Führer), “obedience” (Gehorsamkeit), and “serviceability” (Dienstbarkeit) in ways that anticipate some of Heidegger’s infamous words from his 1933 Rectoratsrede “On the Self-Affirmation of the German University,” Derrida insists that we must pay close attention to the logic of the text that like a programmed machine allows both reactionary and emancipatory uses of the same words. Even if some of these uses may be manipulative perversions of the author’s supposed intent, the textual possibility for such a perversion would still have to be accounted for in the most rigorous terms: “The question that poses itself for us might take this form: Must there not be some powerful utterance-producing machine that programs the movements of the two opposing forces at once, and which couples, conjugates, or marries them in a given set, as life (does) death?”[xlv] The need to answer this question necessarily takes us beyond the realm of books of theory or philosophy and allows Derrida to offer a striking variation of his own on the eleventh of Marx’s “Theses on Feuerbach”:

The “programming machine” that interests me here does not call only for decipherment but also for transformation—that is, a practical rewriting according to a theory-practice relationship that, if possible, would no longer be part of the program. It is not enough just to say this. Such a transformative rewriting of the vast program—if it were possible—would not be produced in books (I won’t go back over what has so often been said elsewhere about general writing) or through readings, courses, or lectures on Nietzsche’s writings, or those of Hitler and the Nazi ideologues of prewar times or today. Beyond all regional considerations (historical, politico-economic, ideological, et cetera), Europe and not only Europe, this century and not only this century are at stake. And the stakes include the “present” in which we are, up to a certain point, and in which we take a position or take sides.[xlvi]

Beyond the anecdotal provocation of the volume Why We Are Not Nietzscheans, these are the high stakes behind the polemic in which we should situate Badiou’s Nietzsche. What Derrida suggests based on the fate reserved for Nietzsche’s proper name at the hands of twentieth-century Nazi ideologues can be generalized into an issue that according to him pertains to the very structure of philosophy in relation to the theory-practice question and its left-right interpretations since at least Hegel:

We are not, I believe, bound to decide. An interpretive decision does not have to draw a line between two intents or two political contents. Our interpretations will not be readings of a hermeneutic or exegetic sort, but rather political interventions in the political rewriting of the text and its destination. This is the way it has always been—-and always in a singular manner—for example, ever since what is called the end of philosophy, and beginning with the textual indicator named “Hegel.” This is no accident. It is an effect of the destinational structure of all so-called post-Hegelian texts. There can always be a Hegelianism of the left and a Hegelianism of the right, a Heideggerianism of the left and a Heideggerianism of the right, a Nietzscheanism of the right and a Nietzscheanism of the left, and even, let us not overlook it, a Marxism of the right and a Marxism of the left. The one can always be the other, the double of the other.[xlvii]

Here, we are approaching a major crossroads in the articulation of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud—with Derrida raising the issue of whether a Heideggerian reinterpretation might also reshuffle the left/right alignments around the author of Ecce Homo, to the point where “all statements, before and after, left and right, are at once possible (Nietzsche said it all, more or less) and necessarily contradictory (he said the most mutually incompatible things. and he said that he said them).”[xlviii] But does this argument hold up to scrutiny? Can Nietzsche and Nietzscheanism be made to say everything and its opposite—on the Left as well as on the Right? Or should we hark back to Badiou’s original argument according to which Marx/Althusser and Freud/Lacan must be kept strictly separate from Nietzsche/Heidegger/Derrida?

On the one hand, based on his arguments from Manifesto for Philosophy and Conditions, Badiou no doubt would see in Derrida’s claim a sophistic reinterpretation of an author whose explosive anti-philosophical potential he prefers to garner for the sake of a systematic renewal of modern post-Cartesian philosophy. In this sense, contrary to Derrida’s reluctance, we are always bound to decide. Besides, even if in good Bartleby fashion we would prefer not to, Nietzsche’s choices may already have decided for us. And the German thinker’s choices—about this there can be no doubt—have been remarkably consistent throughout his conscious life: “Nietzsche does have one and only one truly basic, remarkably rigid and nonnegotiable center and intent. It is to re/produce a viable form of willing human slavery appropriate for post/modern conditions, and with it a small number of (male) geniuses equal only among themselves.”[xlix] This is the real programming machine that like a computer virus runs in the background of every Nietzsche application. Any attempt to deny or diminish the consistency of Nietzsche’s arguments in favor of the hierarchical order of rank, including the need for slavery and euthanasia for the weak, decadent, and ill-bred races or castes, wittingly or unwittingly risks buying into their esoteric agenda in the name of pluralism, perspectivism, and what Waite describes as “left-fascoid” Nietzscheanism.

On the other hand, does not Badiou in his Nietzsche seminar also hint at a proximity between the generic affirmation of all that exists, via the eternal recurrence of the same, and the mysterious fifth system of government—after timocracy, oligarchy, democracy, and anarchy—in The Republic, which the French philosopher in his “hyper-translation” of Plato’s dialogue proposes to call communism? Could the well-known anecdote about Nietzsche’s appreciation for the market woman in Turin who picks out the best grapes for him signal a communist type of generosity? Badiou will suggest as much in his seminar when he attempts to reconcile the radical break of the act with the circle of the eternal return of the same. He even proposes that Nietzsche, after formulating his doctrine of different forms of sovereignty with which to replace the discipline of sociology, intimates a form of “non-state sovereignty,” as if to approximate the notion of a “non-state state” which Marx in The Civil War in France sees prefigured in the Paris Commune.[l]

Could Badiou be falling for the seductive power of Nietzsche’s elitism as an aristocratic form of communism? After all, in his version of Plato’s Republic, the French philosopher argues that the hierarchical view of the Greek city-state, in which a life based on communist principles is reserved exclusively for the guardians, can be universalized into a form of “popular aristocratism” or “egalitarian aristocratism.”[li] Could this constitute the basis for a communist reinterpretation of what the Danish thinker Georg Brandes, already in 1887 and with his subject’s enthusiastic approval, had called Nietzsche’s “aristocratic radicalism”?[lii]

There is a limit, though, to what we posthumously can put in Nietzsche’s mouth. Contrary to Derrida’s claim that Nietzsche said everything and its opposite, there is one type of statement we will never find in the German thinker’s writings, which is an argument for communism or socialism—other than as a useful breeding ground for subduing the working masses to prop up the creative elite who in his version of great politics will become the earth’s dominant race. Of course, we can always insist with Kofman and other well-intentioned Nietzscheans that the repeated mentions of “race” or “blood” in this context should be understood genealogically or typologically and not biologically, based on a noble sense of distinction: “It is precisely this sense of distinction or distance that keeps him from sticking to a biological point of view, that of blood and race, in the vulgar and racist sense of the word (even if the use of these terms is not innocent, they ‘remain’ as such and are susceptible to being misinterpreted by a less noble type).”[liii] However, throughout his life and with growing intensity during the frantic end-stage as witnessed in the posthumous notebooks, Nietzsche also consciously planned for the possibility that his future readers would swallow wholesale his esoteric message about the order of rank to be imposed on the human species, including at the necessary cost of millions of racialized sacrificial victims, as if it were merely the latest gospel that teaches a few geniuses how to live dangerously. After a widely celebrated argument in favor of infinite interpretation, for instance, Nietzsche adds an ominous passage in On the Genealogy of Morality that most of his readers prefer to ignore:

The amount of “progress” can actually be measured according to how much has had to be sacrificed to it; man’s sacrifice en bloc to the prosperity of one single stronger species of man—that would be progress . . . —I lay stress on this major point of historical method, especially as it runs counter to just that prevailing instinct and fashion which would much rather come to terms with absolute randomness, and even the mechanistic senselessness of all events, than the theory that a power-will is acted out in all that happens.[liv]

Finally, if there is one event for which the German thinker felt nothing but horror and which may have driven him politically and ideologically from beginning to end, it is the 1871 Paris Commune. As the Italian communist historian Domenico Losurdo proposes, Nietzsche’s first book, his 1872 The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music, might as well have been subtitled The Crisis of Culture from Socrates to the Paris Commune. But an anti-communist, anti-socialist, and anti-egalitarian agenda is part and parcel of Nietzsche’s thinking until the end: “Starting, like many of his contemporaries, from the denunciation of the revolutionary cycle from 1789 to 1848 and from the proto-socialist movements of the Paris Commune, the philosopher submits this tradition’s principal theoretical categories to a severe critique: the idea of the human being as such, historical progress, and equality.”[lv]

Paying scant attention to matters of content, Badiou views Nietzsche’s relation to the legacy of the French Revolution as one of formal imitation and rivalry, as can be seen in his obsession with a new calendar complete with 1888 as Year One and the threat of bringing out the heavy artillery against the antisemites or the Hohenzollern as his private version of the Terror. Nietzsche’s great politics, thus, becomes at least formally synonymous with revolutionary radicalism, even if the French Revolution itself will be evaluated as having remained a type of petty politics:

Nietzsche adopts with regard to the revolutionary act a rapport of formal fascination and substantive repulsion. He proposes to render formally equivalent the philosophical act as an act of thought and the apparent explosive power of the politico-historical revolution. In this sense, though it is difficult to perceive, I hold that there is a primordial suture to politics at work in the Nietzschean setup. The philosophical act is, I would say, archi-political, in that it proposes to revolutionize all of humanity on a more radical level than the calculations of politics. From this let us retain that archi-politics does not designate the traditional philosophical purpose of finding a ground for politics. The logic, once again, is one of rivalry and not of founding oversight. It is the philosophical act itself that is archi-political in the sense that its historical explosion will show retroactively that the political revolution proper has not been truthful or authentic.[lvi]

In his 1992-1993 seminar, Badiou proceeds much in the same way as how he will read the act or the event three years later in the seminar that will form the basis for his book Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism. Here, too, he abstracts from the content of the Pauline message, which depends on faith in Christ’s resurrection, to focus on the universal form of the apostle’s fidelity to the event as a model for the militant subject worth reactivating today. “I am not the first to risk the comparison that makes of him a Lenin for whom Christ will have been the equivocal Marx,” Badiou writes. “Let us say that, for Paul, it is a matter of investigating which law is capable of structuring a subject devoid of all identity and suspended to an event whose only ‘proof’ lies precisely in its having been declared by a subject.”[lvii] Even if we consider Christ’s resurrection a mere fable, this should not be an objection to our adopting Paul’s militant theory of the act or event as it pertains to the generic conditions of a truth’s claim to universality: “That the content of the fable must be abandoned leaves as its remainder the form of these conditions and, in particular, the ruin of every attempt to assign the discourse of truth to preconstituted historical aggregates.”[lviii]

And yet, just as Nietzsche’s act tragically ends in the maddening circle between the announcement of its imminence and the declaration of its arrival in the figure of Zarathustra or Dionysus, the troubles derived from the fact that Paul bases his doctrine of the intervening subject on the mere fiction of an event, instead of placing himself under the condition of an actual truth procedure, will come back with a vengeance in the end. To be sure, the Pauline event’s fictitious dimension should not keep the philosopher from absorbing all the necessary lessons learned along the way about the event or the subject’s invariant traits: “That the event (or pure act) invoked by the anti-philosophers is fictitious does not present a problem. It is equally so in Pascal (it is the same as Paul’s), or in Nietzsche (Nietzsche’s ‘grand politics’ did not break the history of the world in two; it was Nietzsche who was broken).”[lix] The tendency to depict the event as a “pure act” or an “absolute beginning,” though, is a central part of what characterizes an anti-philosophical as opposed to a philosophical approach for Badiou. It leads to the great politics of speculative leftism, in the case of Left-Nietzscheanism, or to the ultra-Pauline heresy of Marcionism, which manipulates the apostle’s texts to present the gospel as an absolute beginning. Based on the fable of a truth-occurrence or its sheer announcement, the anti-philosopher at best becomes the theoretician or poet-thinker of a radical Manichean break—without being involved in either the material elaboration of an actual truth procedure, in the way of a militant subject, or the conceptual generalization of its empty formal matrix, as what a philosopher would pursue. “Paul is not a philosopher precisely because he assigns his thought to a singular event, rather than a set of conceptual generalities,” Badiou concludes. “That this singular event is of the order of a fable prohibits Paul from being an artist, or a scientist, or a revolutionary of the state, but also prohibits all access to philosophical subjectivity, which either subordinates itself to conceptual foundation or auto-foundation, or places itself under the condition of real truth procedures.”[lx]

Like the conclusion to his Saint Paul book, Badiou’s position in his Nietzsche seminar involves a precarious balancing act. I would summarize this by saying that Badiou’s relation to Nietzsche’s antiphilosophy is homologous to Nietzsche’s relation to the French Revolution: it is a relation of mimetic rivalry, combining equal portions of formal fascination and substantive rejection, even as the philosopher’s free indirect style of presenting his arguments often makes them indistinguishable from his adversary’s. In terms of ontological propositions, Badiou can offer the reader two contrasting tables in which he lays out the differences, thesis by thesis, between Nietzsche’s perspective and his own. But in terms of the radical appeal of the act as a purifying cut or anti-dialectical break, the reader will have a hard time deciding whether these statements are to be attributed solely to Nietzsche’s anti-philosophical madness or if they also hold for the philosopher in Badiou.

Notes

[i] See Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, trans. Ray Brassier (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003); Wittgenstein’s Antiphilosophy, trans. and with an introduction by Bruno Bosteels (London-New York: Verso, 2011); and Lacan, trans. Kenneth Reinhard and Susan Spitzer, with an introduction by Kenneth Reinhard (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018). For a general introduction to this part of Alain Badiou’s work, see Bruno Bosteels, “Radical Antiphilosophy,” in Radical Philosophy, ed. Peter Klepec, special issue of Filozofski Vestnik 29.2 (2008): 155-187.

[ii] Alain Badiou, Casser en deux l’histoire du monde? (Paris: Les Conférences du Perroquet, 1992), 24. Nietzsche publicly rejected the image of himself as a prophet, a martyr, or a saint, as when he writes in Ecce Homo: How to Become Who You Are: “I am a disciple of the philosopher Dionysus; I would rather be a satyr than a saint,” in The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols, and Other Writings, ed. Aaron Ridley and Judith Norman, trans. Judith Norman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 71. In his correspondence from the final year before his mental breakdown, however, he happily reports that on the streets and marketplaces in Turin people would treat him as a prince and greet him as a saint: “And the people of the neighborhood always saw him alone, a book in his hands and his briefcase hung from his shoulder, so wise, so gentle, so courteous to those slight folk, who nicknamed him ‘il piccolo santo; il piccolo santo,’” as discussed in Guy de Pourtalès, Nietzsche in Italy, ed. and trans. with an introduction by Will Stone (London: Pushkin Press, 2022), 43. And in a letter to Meta von Salis from December 29, 1888 about the influence he exerts on people in Turin: “With every glance I am treated like a prince,” in Selected Letters of Friedrich Nietzsche, ed. Christopher Middleton (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1969), 343 (Letter 198). In The Gay Science, Nietzsche gives himself the title of Prinz Vogelfrei, “Prince Free-as-a-Bird,” incidentally the same notion that Karl Marx used for the proletarianized workers, “free” to sell their labor power in the wage system. See Friedrich Nietzsche, “Appendix: Songs of Prince Vogelfrei,” in The Gay Science, ed. Bernard Williams (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 249-260.

[iii] See Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Freud, Marx,” in Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, ed. James D. Faubion, trans. Robert Hurley and others, Volume Two of The Essential Works of Michel Foucault, 1954-1984, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: The New Press, 1998), 269-278; and Paul Ricœur, “The Conflict of Interpretations,” in Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, trans. Denis Savage (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), 20-36.

[iv] Jacques Derrida also alludes to these “two interpretations of interpretation,” without in his case wishing to decide between them, in the conclusion to his canonical paper first presented in October 1966 at the famous symposium on structuralism at the Johns Hopkins University, “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” in The Structuralist Controversy: The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man, ed. Richard Maksey and Eugenio Donato (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University, 1972), 247-264; also included, without the discussion, in Writing and Difference, trans. with an introduction by Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 292-293.

[v] Alain Badiou, “The (Re)commencement of Dialectical Materialism,” in The Adventure of French Philosophy, ed. and trans. with an introduction by Bruno Bosteels (London-New York: Verso, 2012), 142 n. 14. Badiou himself had taught a course on “Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud” in the 1966-1967 academic year, when he was an assistant professor at the University of Reims. See the account of one of Badiou’s students who attended this class and as a result became actively involved in a Maoist splinter group in the same city, in Rémi Hess, Les Maoïstes français: Une dérive institutionnelle (Paris: Anthropos, 1974), 192.

[vi] Alain Badiou, Theory of the Subject, trans. and with an introduction by Bruno Bosteels (London: Continuum, 2009), 131. Several years later Badiou will correct himself on this point: “I went a bit astray, I must admit, in Theory of the Subject concerning the theme of destruction. Back then, l still supported the idea of an essential link between destruction and novelty.” See Alain Badiou, Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham (London: Continuum, 2009), 407; and, for further discussion, see the chapter “Lack and Destruction,” in Bruno Bosteels, Badiou and Politics (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), esp. 106-109.

[vii] Badiou, “The Current Situation on the Philosophical Front,” in The Adventure of French Philosophy, 6.

[viii] In the extensive bibliography on Nietzsche’s great or grand politics, see above all Karl Jaspers, “Great Politics,” in Nietzsche: An Introduction to the Understanding of his Philosophical Activity (1936), trans. Charles F. Wallraff and Frederick J. Schmitz (Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 1965), 249-284; Michel Haar, “Institution et destitution du politique,” in Par-delà le nihilisme: Nouveaux essais sur Nietzsche (Paris: PUF, 1989), 219-74; and Hugo Drochon, Nietzsche’s Great Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016). For an earlier study of this aspect of Badiou’s Nietzsche seminar in dialogue with Pierre Klossowski, see Bruno Bosteels, “Nietzsche, Badiou, and Grand Politics: An Antiphilosophical Reading,” in Nietzsche and Political Thought, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson (Cambridge: Bloomsbury, 2014), 219-39; and compare, in the same volume, Vanessa Lemm, “Nietzsche’s Great Politics of the Event,” in Nietzsche and Political Thought, 179-195.

[ix] Badiou, “The Current Situation on the Philosophical Front,” in The Adventure of French Philosophy, 7. For a critical review of Guy Lardreau and Christian Jambet’s L’Ange: Ontologie de la revolution (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1976), see Badiou, “An Angel Has Passed,” in The Adventure of French Philosophy, 203-222.

[x] For the polemic against the “anarcho-desiring” tendency, see Badiou, “The Flux and the Party: In the Margins of Anti-Oedipus” and “The Fascism of the Potato,” in The Adventure of French Philosophy, 171-201.

[xi] Alain Badiou, Can Politics Be Thought?, trans. with an introduction by Bruno Bosteels (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018), 38 and 88. Compare with Badiou, Theory of the Subject: “Even though psychoanalysis and Marxism have nothing to do with one another–the totality they would form is inconsistent–it is beyond doubt that Freud’s unconscious and Marx’s proletariat have the same epistemological status with regard to the break they introduce in the dominant conception of the subject” (279-280, see also 125-131).

[xii] Badiou, Being and Event, 1.

[xiii] Ibid., 284.

[xiv] Ibid., 202-203.

[xv] Badiou, Being and Event, 210. Elsewhere I develop a reading of Badiou’s philosophy in relation to its own temptation of speculative leftism. See my “Conclusion: The Speculative Left,” in Bosteels, Badiou and Politics, 273-286.

[xvi] Alain Badiou, “Épilogue,” in Autour de Logiques des Mondes, ed. David Rabouin, Oliver Feltham and Lissa Lincoln (Paris: Éditions des archives contemporaines, 2011), 173. For criticisms of Badiou’s miraculous or absolutist concept of the event, see Peter Hallward, Badiou; A Subject to Truth (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 284-291; and Daniel Bensaïd, “Alain Badiou and the Miracle of the Event,” in Think Again: Alain Badiou and the Future of Philosophy (London: Continuum, 2004), 94-105.

[xvii] Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, trans. and introduced by Peter Hallward (London-New York: Verso, 2001), 84.

[xviii] Badiou, Ethics, 85. The notion of the unnameable, together with the framework that defines fidelity to an event primarily in terms of its name, will be completely abandoned beginning with Logics of Worlds, where Badiou redefines the process of elaborating a truth no longer in terms of its name and the unnameable but in terms of its minimal or maximal consequences. In an interview with Peter Hallward and myself, he admits that the positing of an unnameable limit-point marked a rare concession to the logic of finitude: “The general idea is to substitute, for the overly moralizing idea of a totality marked by an unnameable point, the idea (which is far more closely linked to the concrete practices of truth) of a field of consequences whose logic must be both reconstructed and respected,” in “Beyond Formalization: An Interview with Alain Badiou,” in Bosteels, Badiou and Politics, 350.

[xix] Badiou, “The Current Situation on the Philosophical Front,” in The Adventure of French Philosophy, 1.

[xx] See Badiou’s talk at Princeton University on the fiftieth anniversary of Reading Capital, “The Althusserian Definition of ‘Theory,’” published in The Concept in Crisis: Reading Capital Today, ed. Nick Nesbitt (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017), 21-34.

[xxi] Badiou, Manifesto for Philosophy, 97-98. Later in the same text, the author adds: “What a modern philosopher retains of the Great Sophistics is the following: Being is essentially multiple” (103, trans. modified). In other words, if Badiou’s philosophy presents itself as a Platonism of the multiple instead of the One, this is in part thanks to the lessons learned from today’s sophists—following, among others, Nietzsche’s model. But, as we will see, the author of Ecce Homo is not just a sophist; and he is more interestingly read as an anti-philosopher.

[xxii] Badiou, “The (Re)turn of Philosophy Itself,” in Conditions, 21. The backdrop for this polemic is still political: “Where might the renegade subjectivity come from? This question sits at the origin of my speculative obstinacy. A bit like Plato’s question, in the twilight of the Greek city: where do the sophists come from?” in Badiou, “Épilogue,” Autour de Logiques des Mondes, 179.

[xxiii] Badiou, “The (Re)turn of Philosophy Itself,” in Conditions, 290-291 n. 6.

[xxiv] Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols or How To Philosophize with a Hammer, in The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols and Other Writings, 225.

[xxv] Badiou, Casser en deux l’histoire du monde?, 19.

[xxvi] Ibid. On the question Who?, Foucault says: “One does not interpret what is in the signified, but one interprets after all: who posed the interpretation. The basis of interpretation is nothing but the interpreter, and this is perhaps the meaning that Nietzsche gave to the word ‘psychology,’” in “Nietzsche, Marx, Freud,” 279.

[xxvii] Badiou, “The (Re)turn of Philosophy Itself,” in Conditions, 19 (translation modified).

[xxviii] See Alain Badiou, Le Séminaire, L’essence de la politique, 1991-1992, ed. Isabelle Vodoz (Paris: Fayard, 2018), session 15, June 10, 1992.

[xxix] Badiou, “The (Re)turn of Philosophy Itself,” in Conditions, 19. This list contains allusions to Ludwig Wittgenstein, Jacques Derrida, Gianni Vattimo, Jean-François Lyotard, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, and Jean-Luc Nancy.

[xxx] Badiou, “The (Re)turn of Philosophy Itself,” Conditions, 6; Manifesto of Philosophy, 116-117.

[xxxi] Badiou, “Logology Against Ontology,” in The Adventure of French Philosophy, 318. This paper is a critical review of the work of Barbara Cassin, a longtime collaborator of Badiou’s and an expert on ancient and modern “sophistics” (la sophistique, in Cassin’s coinage, which should not be translated simply as “sophistry”). See Barbara Cassin, Sophistical Practice: Toward a Consistent Relativism (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014); and for the ongoing polemics with Badiou, see Alain Badiou and Barbara Cassin, There’s No Such Thing As a Sexual Relationship: Two Lessons on Lacan, trans. Susan Spitzer and Kenneth Reinhard (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017).

[xxxii] Badiou, Casser en deux l’histoire du monde?, 7.

[xxxiii] Ibid., 10.

[xxxiv] Ibid., 6. See Why We Are Not Nietzscheans, ed. Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut, trans. Robert De Loiza (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1997); and compare with Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut, French Philosophy of the Sixties: An Essay on Antihumanism, trans. Mary H. S. Cattani (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1990). A quarter century later, Ferry and Renaut’s collection of anti-Nietzscheans would meet with its rebuttal from a group of devout Nietzscheans of Deleuzian, Foucaultian, and Derridean descent in Pourquoi nous sommes Nietzschéens, ed. Dorian Astor and Alain Jugnon (Paris: Les Impressions Nouvelles, 2016).

[xxxv] Foucault, “Nietzsche, Marx, Freud,” 278.

[xxxvi] Drieu La Rochelle, “Nietzsche contre Marx” (June 1933), in Socialisme fasciste (Paris: Gallimard/Nouvelle Revue Française, 1934), 69, also quoted in Aymeric Monville, Misère du nietzschéisme de gauche: De Georges Bataille à Michel Onfray (Brussels: Aden, 2007), 15.

[xxxvii] Geoff Waite, Nietzsche’s Corps/e: Aesthetics, Politics, Prophecy, or, the Spectacular Technoculture of Everyday Life (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), 337.

[xxxviii] Ibid., 369-370. For similar criticisms, which are becoming the new international consensus against Left-Nietzscheanism, see Domenico Losurdo, Nietzsche, the Aristocratic Rebel: Intellectual Biography and Critical Balance-Sheet (2002), trans. Gregor Benton, with an introduction by Harrison Fluss (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2021); Nicolás González Varela, Nietzsche contra la democracia: El pensamiento politico de Friedrich Nietzsche (1962-1972) (Barcelona: Montesinos: 2017); Daniel Tutt, How To Read Like a Parasite: Why the Left Got High on Nietzsche (London: Repeater, 2024); and Mehdi Belhaj Kacem, Nietzsche et la psychose occidentale: Du nazisme au transhumanisme (Marseille: Fiat Lux, 2024).

[xxxix] Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson, foreword by Michael Hardt (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 159 and 195.

[xl] Martin Heidegger, “Letter on ‘Humanism,’” in Pathmarks, ed. William McNeill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 256. See also Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, trans. David Farrell Krell, 4 vols. (San Francisco: Harper, 1991).

[xli] Heidegger, “Letter on ‘Humanism,’” in Pathmarks, 259. See also Martin Heidegger, Four Seminars, trans. Andrew Mitchell and François Raffoul (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012), 32-33 and 52.

[xlii] Jacques Derrida, Heidegger: The Question of Being and History, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 22 (translation slightly modified). Compare with the later mobilization of Nietzsche’s heterogeneity of styles and “woman” over and against Heidegger’s still-metaphysical hermeneutic in Jacques Derrida, Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles, trans. Barbara Harlow (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1979), esp. 81-84 and 108-139; and “Interpreting Signatures (Nietzsche/Heidegger): Two Questions,” in Looking After Nietzsche, ed. Laurence A. Rickels (Albany: SUNY Press, 1990), 1-17.

[xliii] Philippe Raynaud, “Nietzsche as Educator,” in Why We Are Not Nietzscheans, 141-142. For a sample of the “new” Nietzsche interpretation with which Raynaud engages in a relatively sober and fair polemic, see above all the proceedings from the 1972 conference Nietzsche aujourd’hui, ed. Maurice de Gandillac and Bernard Pautrat, 2 vols (Paris: 10/18, 1973), partially translated in The New Nietzsche: Contemporary Styles of Interpretation, ed. David B. Allison (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1985).

[xliv] Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, 164 and 217 n. 15. We should not forget the real target behind this polemic: “Nietzsche’s adversary is socialism. And it is because he instinctively understands that the dialectic is the thought proper to socialism (from the dialectic of that stone carver Socrates onward) that he targets the dialectic. This is something Deleuze has perfectly understood,” as Monville argues in Misère du nietzschéisme de gauche, 60.

[xlv] Jacques Derrida, “Otobiographies: The Teaching of Nietzsche and the Politics of the Proper Name,” trans. Avital Ronell, in The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation, ed. Christie V. McDonald, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Schocken Books, 1985), 29.

[xlvi] Derrida, “Otobiographies,” 30 (translation modified). Marx’s “Theses on Feuerbach” had been the topic of the first sessions of Derrida’s lecture course in 1975-1976, in a running dialogue with Gramsci and Althusser that ultimately leads to a renewed engagement with Heidegger. See Jacques Derrida, Theory & Practice, ed. Geoffrey Bennington and Peggy Kamuf, trans. David Wills (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2019), 1-38.

[xlvii] Ibid., 32; also quoted in Monville, Misère du nietzschéisme de gauche, 41. This is not a new way of approaching Nietzsche’s political interpretation. In the second issue of Bataille and Klossowski’s journal Acéphale (1937), dedicated to “Nietzsche et les fascistes. Une réparation,” we can read in the subsection “Gauche et droite nietzschéennes”: “In a certain way there has formed a Nietzschean Left and Right, in the same way that previously there was formed a Hegelian Left and Right” (5). A footnote then offers a longer list of proponents of this argument, from the right-wing Drieu La Rochelle to Nietzsche’s socialist biographer Charles Andler: “Is there not a right-wing and a left-wing Hegelianism? There can be a right-wing and a left-wing Nietzscheanism. And it seems to me that already Stalin’s Moscow and [Mussolini’s] Rome, the latter conscious and the former unconscious, present these two Nietzscheanisms,” as Drieu La Rochelle had written in Socialisme fasciste, 71, cited in Acéphale 2 (1937): 12 n. 7.

[xlviii] Derrida, “Otobiographies,” 15.

[xlix] Waite, Nietzsche’s Corps/e, 232.

[l] See below, Session 5, January 13, 1993.

[li] Alain Badiou, Plato’s Republic: A Dialogue in 16 Chapters, trans. Susan Spitzer, introduction by Kenneth Reinhard (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 147 and 247. See also Badiou’s defense of the oxymoron of “communist aristocracy” as opposed to Jacques Rancière’s symmetrical oxymoron of “ignorant master,” in Badiou, “Jacques Rancière’s Lessons,” in The Adventure of French Philosophy, 110-111.

[lii] Georg Brandes, Friedrich Nietzsche: An Essay on Aristocratic Radicalism, trans. A. G. Chater (New York: Macmillan, 1909). In a letter from December 2, 1887, Nietzsche had written to Brandes: “The expression ‘aristocratic radicalism,’ which you use, is very good. That is, if I may say so, the shrewdest remark that I have read about myself till now,” in Selected Letters of Friedrich Nietzsche, 279 (Letter 160).

[liii] Sarah Kofman, Explosion I: De l’Ecce Homo de Nietzsche (Paris: Galilée, 1992), 190-191. In a footnote, Kofman presents the Nazi exploitation of Nietzsche as one such misinterpretation.

[liv] Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson, trans. Carol Diethe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 52 (Second Essay, aphorism 12), also partially quoted in Waite, Nietzsche’s Corps/e, 279.

[lv] Domenico Losurdo, Nietzsche e la critica della modernità: per una biografia politica (Rome: Manifesto Libri, 1997), 11 and 39. This book offers a short preview of Losurdo’s massive Nietzsche, the Aristocratic Rebel. For Nietzsche’s horrified take on the form of the Commune, see for instance On the Genealogy of Morality, 15 (First Essay, aphorism 5).

[lvi] Badiou, Casser en deux l’histoire du monde?, 11.

[lvii] Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, trans. Ray Brassier (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 2.

[lviii] Ibid., 6.

[lix] Ibid., 108.

[lx] Ibid.

Feature image: A drawing of Friedrich Nietzsche by Edvard Munch. Munch Museum. Wikimedia Commons.

Bruno Bosteels