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cultural and political contexts? The open-ended nature of his legacy, its
ability to transcend our conventional categories of Left and Right, of
progress and reaction, rationality and irrationality, secularism and reli–
giosity must surely be borne in mind when we reexamine the emotion–
ally charged question of Nietzsche's "responsibility" for the
catastrophes of the century that has just ended . So, too, we need to be
aware that Nietzsche's aphoristic style, his prophetic aura and unsys–
tematic method lent itself to arbitrary selection to suit the requirements
of his readers. As far back as
1932,
the radical German Jewish satirist
Kurt Tucholsky quipped: "Tell me what you need and I will supply you
with a Nietzsche citation.... " That health warning remains apposite
even today.
An instructive example of such fluidity and the shifts in intellectual
fashion is the way in which contemporary deconstructionist, post-struc–
turalist, neo-Heideggerian, and Marxist critics regard Nietzsche as the
quintessential prophet of postmodernity. Reflecting the current condi–
tion of radical epistemological indeterminacy, they now seem eager to
embrace his insistence of the illusory, metaphorical nature of truth. The
fragmentary open-endedness of Nietzsche's texts, once so derided by the
Left, currently enhances his importance as a cultural critic of modernity,
whose work completes and in some respects supercedes that of Marx.
This is especially the case in France where Nietzsche belatedly became a
godfather of postmodern consciousness through his influence on the
writings of the late Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze,
Jean-Franc;:ois Lyotard, and others. The erosion of belief in a stable and
unified truth, a radical conception of culture that emphasizes pluralism,
heterogeneity, contradiction, desire, difference, and a subversive critique
of reason paradoxically led to this postmodern, philosophically liberat–
ing Nietzsche-one very different from the image that used to prevail on
the orthodox Marxist Left.
True, there were precursors of this trend even in the
1930S
who
argued against the stereotypical denunciation of Nietzsche as a fascist
philosopher and reactionary class-enemy of socialism. One case in point
was Georges Bataille, a left-wing existentialist thinker, who already in
1937,
along with a number of other prominent French intellectuals,
sought to rescue Nietzsche for the anti-fascist cause. Bataille emphasized
the "anti-political," anarchist strand in Nietzsche which was oriented
towards the sovereign, free-thinking individual, the affirmation of the
body, the sense of eternal flux in nature, and the revulsion against col–
lectivist ideologies such as Pan-Germanism, fascist racism, and Nazi
anti-Semitism. Another early postwar defender of Nietzsche was Albert
