Geoff Waite

"But think back now over the entire, long, virtually interminable extent of Nietzsche/s corpse, as Nietzsche's Corps/e begins to conclude...." (385) I had to laugh as I read that, because four hundred pages of body text, plus another 150-odd of smaller-typeface endnotes (the author noted an aspiration to a one-to-one ratio between body text and annotation), had taken me six months of careful, if not quite continual, reading to digest. It seemed as if the book, as much as its object, had invoked the interminability of an ewige Wiederkunft.

Geoff Waite hates Nietzsche with the kind of passion that I must suspect of being founded in a prior love. In Nietzsche's Corps/e he identifies himself with a Althusserian Marxist position opposed to what he diagnoses as: the deliberate viral influence of Nietzsche's corpus, acting through a corps of intellectuals, toward the ultimate reduction of the masses into a state perinde ac cadaver. (The Jesuit allusion is far from accidental; see 313-315.) He is professedly paranoid in his treatment of Nietzsche, the "Nietzsche industry," and "technoculture" on the cusp of the 21st century.

With respect to Nietzsche and his intentions, Waite aptly faults "scholarly" or "philosophical" readers of Nietzsche who confine themselves to the oeuvre written for publication. Nietzsche's workbooks and private correspondence--all now published in German, Italian, and Japanese, though not in English, Waite notes--are indispensable in light of such declarations of estoeric mode as the conclusion of "On Redemption" in Thus Spoke Zarathustra: "But why does Zarathustra speak otherwise to his pupils -- than to himself?" (This passage is surely Nietzsche's equivalent of the fourth chapter of the gospel of Mark.) In particular, Waite claims a central position for the early unpublished essay "The Greek State," in which Nietzsche affirmed "the necessary Greek triad: 'slavery,' 'esoteric writing,' 'the esoteric doctrine of the relation between the State and genius.'" (300)

Waite enters the argument regarding Nietzsche's sexual appetites armed with some intriguing evidence. But he did not impress me with his repeated references to homosexuality and sadomasochism as if those were self-evidently "bad things."

As far as the "corps" is concerned, Waite does not confine himself to any particular textual lineage of Nietzsche interpretation, since he is out to resist them all. He comprehensively examines both right-wing Nietzscheans and left-wing "Nietzschoids," usually with penetrating criticisms of the latter. He recommends Leo Strauss's Thoughts on Machiavelli as a manual for reading Nietzsche, and I plan to take him up on this recommendation. Pierre Klossowski's readings of Nietzsche also win serious points--with caveats--from Waite.

Waite's notion of the corpse breaks out of the ivory tower and indicts the emerging cyber-society as being in thrall to Nietzsche's agenda, with targets in popular culture such as William S. Burroughs, Phillip K. Dick, David Cronenberg, and William Gibson. I can't help but suppose that the later cinematic VR explosion (for which The Matrix was a flagship) brought him into a righteous near-panic! Nor must today's smartphone-wielding hordes console him.

The entire enterprise of Nietzsche's Corps/e is taken up in the wake of the "death of communism" and in the face of Bataille's declaration that Nietzsche's is "the only position outside of communism." Waite allies himself with Gramsci and Althusser, and gives Lenin the final word of his epilogue. (The penultimate one goes to Nietzsche.) And yet for all that he offers a "strong rival conspiratorial hypothesis" to the "conspiracy theory" informing Nietzsche's writings (67), Waite fails to persuade me of the goodness of Communism or the badness of "Nietzchean/ism."

Ultimately, I am very glad to have read this book, and I would encourage anyone with a serious interest in Nietzsche to tackle it.… (mais)

A Promissory Note That Will Likely Never Be Made Good, July 23, 2006

This book is hands down the most intelligent left-wing book on Nietzsche in existence! Waite correctly dismisses the playful postmodern Nietzsche of dance and mask worshipped by soi-disant intellectuals and thus gets far closer to the heart of Nietzsche's purpose than they ever do. Waite is unafraid to ask the question who should rule. Also, unlike virtually all 'leftish' Nietzschean commentators Waite is very familiar with the esoteric nature of Nietzsche's writings. He has married the politico-philosophical esoteric readings of Leo Strauss with the revolutionary ideals of Marxism and has given us the only left reading of Nietzsche that is worth reading twice. It now seems, ten long years after the publication of this book, that this marriage between Marxism and esotericism is going to produce no heirs. Which is a pity; I would very much like to have seen a comparison of the dialectical method and the esoteric method that is not simply a hatchet job. By that I mean I would very much like to have seen a study that compares esoteric and dialectical thought written by someone who is adept -and recognized as such by all practitioners- in both these extraordinary philosophical methods. ...But it now seems likely that this will never be. Why?

I would begin to answer that question by noting how remarkable it is that the none of the earlier reviews of this extraordinary book even mentioned Leo Strauss. But, as anyone who has read this book knows, the Straussian understanding of philosophical texts is crucial to Waite's argument. So why this silence among reviewers? One of the problems, if not the main problem, is that in a propaganda war one is at pains to either downplay or ignore the acute contributions to thought of ones enemies. The danger, intelligently alluded to in an earlier review, is that rather than making 'Nietzscheanism' weaker, all Waite has done, by making Nietzsche seem so intelligent and interesting, is make him stronger. In a similar manner and for similar reasons, much of the left would rather ignore Strauss, or excoriate him, rather than present him in an intelligent manner.

Now, these are tactical issues that I do not pretend to be competent to judge, but I will point out that all tactical concerns are temporary and local. If the Marxist-esotericism that Waite here pioneers is a genuine contribution to thought (i.e., if both the esoteric reading of texts à la Leo Strauss and Marxist dialectic are indeed genuine contributions) then it would be sheer madness to ignore either Waite or Strauss. It was Merleau-Ponty, I believe, who once observed quite correctly, in the heat of a similar ideological confrontation, that 'we must not leave our enemies any good ideas'. If Merleau-Ponty is correct in this, that it is always a long-term strategic mistake, for what is at bottom momentary tactical considerations, to ignore genuinely intelligent contributions of enemies then Waite's contribution has been foolishly ignored by the left. But if you believe that long-term strategy is trumped by tactical concerns than Waite's book, regardless of the accuracy of his esoteric reading of Nietzsche, must be ignored.

For myself, a mere observer of this conflict, I continue to hope for a confrontation and/or dialogue between the two greatest 'schools' of political philosophy - the dialectical and the esoteric - that is rigorous, critical and informed. ...But who ever really gets what they want?… (mais)