For several years after the uprisings of 1968, Nietzsche came to be regarded by many of France’s most renowned intellectuals as le maître penseur of modernity. During this Zarathustran heyday, a younger Alain Badiou kept his distance from the furious accuser of Plato, St. Paul and Richard Wagner. He says it was not until the publication of Why We are Not Nietzscheans, a collection of essays from a now forgotten group of liberal celebrities, that he felt the need to read Nietzsche closely. After all, if les chiens de garde were denouncing him, surely there must be something worthwhile and maybe even great about him. Why We are Not Nietzscheans came out in 1991, the year of the fall of the USSR. Its verdict was that with Marxism out of the picture the time had finally come for a settling of scores with that other great instigator of radical thought in the West. 

French Theory, as the import came to be known in the English-speaking world, was a largely Nietzschean affair by most accounts. This was a Nietzsche of the Left—at the time any suggestion that Nietzsche was a figure of the Right was sure to elicit pitying smiles at the MLA. This once influential post-structuralist reading was preceded by an existentialist one appealing to young Americans who saw themselves as aristocratic rebels, even nihilists, contemptuous of the vacuous herd morality of post-war middle-class society. Though there were never any comparable, polarizing contentions over his status in the US of the kind that Badiou was responding to, Nietzsche is now less frequently encountered in his former academic strongholds. Without ever having been deposed from the canon, it seems he has been silently escorted from the premises. The prophet of the overman, the great excoriator of the underprivileged is no longer so welcome among the easily triggered young and their timid, demoralized preceptors. Whatever one might think of his thought and style of writing, Nietzsche’s absence from the scene is symptomatic of a troubling change in the values upheld by the educated.

Let us return to the France of 1992. If in the polemical context occasioned by noisy liberal disavowals Nietzsche now appeared in a better light, Badiou explains that the true significance of his thought only dawned on him when he experienced the explosive subjective force of Nietzsche’s final writings from the two years before his mind came to a complete stop. Nietzsche. L’antiphilosophie I, 1992-1993 is devoted almost entirely to these last writings: The Antichrist, The Twilight of the Idols, Ecce Homo, The Case of Wagner, Nietzsche contra Wagner plus a few brief missives and notebook entries.¹ The premise of these lectures is that this cluster of publications and posthumous fragments constitutes an event of immense significance. Perhaps surprisingly, they exhibit little of that characteristic vice of French Theory—exorbitant overinterpretation. As unfamiliar as the picture of Nietzsche that emerges may be, Badiou has identified an implacable logic to these hyperbolic final throes, opening up new perspectives and impetus for reading him today.           

The lectures are organized as responses to three questions:

1. Nietzsche: philosopher or “antiphilosopher?”

2. Was the twentieth century “Nietzschean?”

3. How does Nietzsche reframe the relation of philosophy to art as a figure of truth?

Let us address these in turn. In what sense did Nietzsche, for all his denunciations of the philosopher, remain one himself? Nietzsche often portrayed himself as the one true philosopher and all others before him as little better than theologians in disguise. But he also took pleasure in flaunting the protocols of philosophical argument and ridiculed the naïve fiction of mind as the mirror of being they presuppose. One might recall his polemics against Socratic-Platonic philosophy as a product of decadence, a leveling down of the vital Dionysian peaks of tragic Greek culture. Nietzsche described his alternative to philosophy as hitherto practiced as “philosophizing with a hammer.” To philosophize with a hammer is not to debate and prove but apparently to smash with declarations of extreme subjective force. Here, truth takes the form of a terrible rupture from existing discourse where the one who has dared to declare what was previously unsayable authorizes himself to also be the witness of the truth of his own declaration. The final Nietzschean discourse took the form of lucid hysteria: “I, the Truth, am speaking.” 

Conveying a genuine excitement of intellectual discovery, Badiou’s lectures end up offering no critical perspectives on Nietzsche’s writings except those that Nietzsche himself in his last writings directed with great vehemence at his early tribute to Richard Wagner, The Birth of Tragedy. Badiou characterizes The Case of Wagner and Nietzsche contra Wagner as the products of a self-undermining return to the origins of his own life-project. 

The Nietzscheans of the post-war French Left, beginning with Gilles Deleuze, did not pose the question of the epochal character of his thought, of the Nietzschean aspect of the century. This problem had German origins and conveyed an understanding of Nietzsche’s centrality in shaping an alternative modernity of the radical Right. György Lukács, Leo Strauss, Ernst Jünger and Karl Löwith all held that Nietzsche was the key to understanding National Socialism as a response to the impending end of Christianity, aristocracy and bourgeois society itself. While Badiou poses this German question, like the French Nietzscheans, he ends up giving short shrift to its conception of a counter-revolutionary, even proto-Nazi Nietzsche. Accordingly, he folds his second question into his third: how did Nietzsche reframe the relationship of art to philosophy, and to criticism more generally? Badiou sees Nietzsche’s epochal significance as an instigator of modernism in his rejection of the Hegelian verdict on the end of art as a figure of truth, of its definitive subordination to criticism. In its aesthetic attitude, the century was Nietzschean. 

This insatiable occidental will to knowledge, Nietzsche declared, must now come to know itself.

Now that Christian truthfulness has drawn one conclusion after the other, in the end it draws its strongest conclusion, its conclusion against itself; this occurs, however, when it poses the question, “what does all will to truth mean?” … And here again I touch on my problem, on our problem, my unknown friends (—for I as yet know of no friends): what meaning would our entire being have if not this, that in us this will to truth has come to a consciousness of itself as a problem?⁷

As a traditional philosopher in a sense, Heidegger was indifferent to the significance of the intensities of Nietzsche’s language and tried to distill from it flat-footed ontological claims. For Heidegger, Nietzsche’s teaching of the will to power simply radicalized and never questioned Western man’s metaphysical drive to make being transparent to representation. For the interpretation of being as a hierarchical configuration of warring interpretations of being is but the last, final principle of metaphysical intelligibility. In attempting to establish the Archimedean perspective on the relativity of all perspectives, Nietzsche radicalizes the nihilism from which we were supposed to be delivered by concealing its essence. Nihilism is, by its proper definition, incapable of reversing itself and affirming new value orientations. Why? In their particularity such new values would necessarily fail to satisfy the occidental will’s nihilistic craving for universality, for what is beyond every local perspective. Radical nihilism seeks the absolute. For Heidegger, Nietzsche’s significance was to bring to the limit the nihilistic crisis of metaphysics by concealing its essential incapacity to posit new values—to set a new direction—with a flamboyant, anti-foundationalist rhetoric of the world as an interpretive Kampfplatz. Heidegger concludes that the most radical event in the history of being, the re-encounter of a people with the question of being, cannot be grasped as an affirmation of new values.

The only other interpretation Badiou considers is Deleuze’s, which he sets up in opposition to Heidegger’s. In Badiou’s retelling, Deleuze rejected Heidegger’s reading of Nietzsche’s philosophy as preparing an advent of new values. Instead, more enigmatically, Nietzsche’s philosophical contribution is seen to lie in the stature he accorded to “proper names.” This philological practice looks to discover who it is that speaks and names.

Who uses a particular word, what does he apply it to first of all; himself, someone else who listens, something else, and with what intention…Asking which one is beautiful, which one is just and not what beauty is, what justice is, was therefore the result of a worked-out method, implying an original conception of essence and a whole sophistic art which was opposed to the dialectic.⁸ 

The great common names—the true, the just, the beautiful, but also democracy, freedom and all the rest—are now all busted flushes in the pseudo-individual world of fabulous wealth and celebrity. In the world of the herd, the explosive yet silent revelation of one’s own absolutely irreducible subjectivity is held to be political in the most eminent sense of the word. 

We have just entered into great politics, even into very great politics…I am preparing an event that will most likely break history into two halves to the point that one will need a new calendar with 1888 as Year 1.⁹  

The event turns out to be Nietzsche himself, in a deadly serious, weird parody of the second coming. Badiou maintains that the event in question is measured by the standard of the French Revolution that he maintains was the only previous undertaking to have attempted to constitute a new calendar beginning with a Year 1, choosing to disregard this more obvious parallel to the splitting into two of history affected by Christianity. 

Badiou maintains that Nietzsche was not a counterrevolutionary. Yes, he denounced the French Revolution but only for being far below what it claimed to be—the breaking in two of world history. In Nietzsche’s eyes, the Revolution’s fearsome egalitarian prescriptions merely secularized the old Christian values, the so-called slave morality, with its hunger for justice and revenge.

The “equality of souls before God,” this falseness, this pretext for the rancunes of everything low-minded, this explosive concept, ending in revolution, a modern idea, and the notion of overthrowing the whole social order—is Christian dynamite.¹⁰

Nietzsche will attempt to build his own explosive concept. 

I am a bearer of glad tidings as no one ever was before; I am acquainted with incredibly elevated tasks, where even the concept of these tasks has been lacking so far; all hope had disappeared until I came along. And yet I am necessarily a man of disaster as well. Because when truth comes into conflict with the lies of millennia there will be tremors, a ripple of earthquakes, an upheaval of mountains and valleys such as no one has ever imagined. The concept of politics will then have merged entirely into a war of spirits, all power structures of the old society will have exploded—they are based on lies: there will be wars such as the earth has never seen. Starting with me, the earth will know great politics.¹¹

Badiou offers his own translation of a magnificently menacing formulation from Ecce Homo: “je conçois le philosophe comme un terrifiant explosif qui met le monde entier en péril.” The formulation distills Nietzsche’s maximalist conception of the vocation of philosophy. The forging of new values out of the ruins of old values mimes the legislative acts of the revolutionary pouvoir constituant by which a people that counted as nothing declares itself to be an absolute sovereign power. 

Yet Nietzsche also professed to despise the bad theater of revolutionary agency that pretends to destroy the old regime by tearing down its statues and replacing its symbols with new ones. His contempt for this sterile spectacle is expressed in his characterization of the firehound Thus Spoke Zarathustra, symbolizing the plebeian form of the event. The firehound, says Zarathustra, is the “demon of revolt and the dregs,” the belch of uprising before which the bourgeoisie trembles.

And just believe me, friend Infernal Racket! The greatest events—they are not our loudest but our stillest hours. Not around the inventors of new noise does the world revolve, but around the inventors of new values; inaudibly it revolves.¹²

Which is not to say that classical wars and revolutions are devoid of historical significance for him, for in passing through the ordeal of a revolutionary overturning, the old order of church and state will be reborn into a new life. 

But this advice I give to kings and churches and to all that is feeble with age and feeble in virtue—just let yourselves be overthrown! So that you might come to life again, and to you—virtue!¹³

It seems clear that for Nietzsche the program of the reversal of metaphysics is finally only a fulfillment of metaphysics, i.e., he was aware of doing what Heidegger claims he unknowingly did. He aimed to provoke a restoration. 

But if revolution is ultimately only ever a return to the origin, how could it also be an event of authentic innovation? In the final analysis, Badiou holds that Nietzsche eventually came to the view that the most radical version of the act of breaking history in two has nothing to do with taking over a sovereignty, or replacing a reactive sovereignty with active sovereignty. The corollary of the maxim “God is dead” is “the State is dead,” the state being understood as a coercive hierarchy of values. To the extent that these late writings have previously been accorded any significance, it is usually because in them Nietzsche denounced German nationalism with unparalleled ferocity. Nietzsche came to see the new German Reich as a spiritual by-product of the exhaustion of the immense cultural possibilities that had taken shape when Germany was politically powerless and divided. Reversing the young Hegel’s dictum, Nietzsche held that there must be no state in Germany.  

But if Nietzsche’s previous appropriation of the language of sovereignty conveyed the idea of a power capable of constituting new values, the rejection of this figure of sovereignty suggests that the act cannot be conceived as the positing or legislation of new values. As we saw, Nietzsche grasped the truth that Heidegger attempted to employ against him in interpreting him as an unquestioning radicalizer of metaphysics. New departures in thought and politics cannot take the form of occupying the space opened up by the death of god, i.e., of the idea of new human truth cast in the image of the old onto-theological one. 

Where does this leave us? Nietzsche’s idea of the archipolitical act oscillates then between a radical expansion of the scope of politics to shape the whole order of human things, and the abandonment of all politics for a purely subjective destiny, just as the revolutionary state seeks to become total and also to wither away. Seen in this light, the archipolitical act is ultimately also a withering away of all values, not the creation of new ones. If valuing is an all-too human striving for interpretive mastery within a hierarchical configuration of valuations, the one whose act breaks history in two turns out not to be the master of interpretation, but the one who leaves this configuration in a silent, explosive gesture. Heidegger failed to recognize the sovereign legislation of new values is not Nietzsche’s last word for this gesture of mastery is partly undone by another which both supplements and opposes it: the abandonment of one’s own time for the timelessness of an eternal here and now. He describes this passage as the act of creating objects that break the teeth of time.

The doctrine of the eternal return was Nietzsche’s first take on this horizon of the immortal. But this doctrine presupposed the repetition of an antecedent event—the miracle of the birth of tragedy, and the collapse of this prospect of a repetition imparts a specific intellectual form to Nietzsche’s last testaments. It is worth noting then that the expression, “Eternal Return,” tends to disappear from Nietzsche’s vocabulary in winter 1886-87, and the same fate befalls the “Will to Power” at the end of 1887. “The Overman” starts dropping out much earlier, soon after Thus Spoke Zarathustra, from 1884 to 1885. All these terms were too tied to the idea of a sovereign refoundation of the lost world of tragedy. 

Nietzsche claims the act which breaks the history of the world in two will not be theatrically staged. While all modern revolutions have heretofore been noisy theatrical farces—color revolutions, so to speak—the archipolitical gesture is the gesture through which thought leaves the scene to begin changes that cannot be represented as agency theatrically conceived. Here Nietzsche’s repudiation of Wagner casts him in a role uncannily prefigurative of the director of Hollywood blockbusters.

He begins by thinking of a scene that will have an absolutely certain effect, a real actio with an haut-relief of gestures, a scene that will knock people over—he thinks this through in depth, this is what he derives his characters from. Everything else follows from this, in keeping with a technical economy that has no reason to be subtle.¹⁴ 

But wasn’t tragedy theater? Aristotle tell us it originated as dithyrambs, the mythic world of the Greeks shaped into a wild choral music. (Nietzsche, like Hegel, was utterly dismissive of the dreary Norse mythology in which Wagner set his work.) This music can only be imagined, however, for we have only the faintest idea of what it might have sounded like. Nietzsche held Euripedes responsible for destroying Attic tragedy by supplanting this imagined music with theatrically staged critical discourse on myths. Euripides found an ally in this destruction of the mythical rooting of thought in philosophy, in Socrates, for theater and philosophy both assume the rational transparency of the world arising out of the death of the mythic heroic world in catastrophic encounters of men and gods. But this mythic-heroic culture—its vision of the legendary wars of the past—from which Greek tragedy arose, was already dying in the time of Aeschylus. One could even say that classical tragedy modified inherited myths to convey an experience of the deliverance of a people from a world of gods, demigods and heroes, the cycle of ancestral doom. Nietzsche failed to see that Greek tragedy was from its origins staging a dialectic of enlightenment. 

In The Birth of Tragedy, he had declared Wagner the Aeschylus of the German people. Even then he was convinced that tragedy reborn would differ from what it originally had been in that it would now be necessary for this rebirth to find support in a doctrine of the return. But if the original Dionysian music animating classical tragedy had its origins in myth, how could the music of tragedy be reborn in the nineteenth century so long after the death of these old gods, and in the dying time of the Christian God? Later, an embittered Nietzsche came to the conclusion that he had cast the composer in an impossible role: modern music cannot reverse the ancient sequence and generate myths out of itself and no doctrinal support for this impossible genesis of new myth will be of any help. The Wagnerian enterprise offers a simulacrum of a myth tailored to a psychology of decadence. 

Would you believe that stripped of their heroic finery, every single Wagnerian heroine comes to resemble Madame Bovary.¹⁵

What Nietzsche took for a beginning, or at least as a promise of the beginning, was really the completion of nihilism, in other words; he says of Wagner exactly what Heidegger would say of Nietzsche himself. There is obviously a pattern here. Nietzsche’s archipolitical act lost its grounding in an expectation of a return of tragedy, and of Germany as the site of this return. Nietzsche came to see himself as the site of this impossible event. Madness: in the endless circle of creation and recreation, there is also a cutting in two, since the one who has created a world of his own can rightfully recreate it, but now without a foothold in an antecedent, foundational event. 

But even at this point, an affirmation surges forth in his Dionysian Dithyrambs: “debris d’étoiles, de ces débris, j’ai bâti un univers”(Badiou’s translation). This debris of stars that once shone in the firmament of men is all that remains of the broken-down old values of religion, philosophy and progress. One has philosophized enough with a hammer, and all these sick and dying stars have been smashed. What remains is finitude in its most fallen forms. It is now time to freely build up a universe from these ruins, like the savage bricoleurs described by Lévi-Strauss compelled to make an order out of the shattered fragments of ancestral myth.

The Wagner of the Gesamtkunstwerk, operatic herald of a resurrection of German gods, is actually the highest miniaturist in musical history, a connoisseur of the tiniest infinities. Here Nietzsche’s acute intuition anticipates Pierre Boulez’s conception of Wagner’s musical genius—the virtuoso mastery of the microcellular level in tone, color, and inflection. If modern art has a potential greatness, it is the greatness of the small, and not the illusory, grandiose promise of a return of tragedy. Wagner’s inability to be the German Aeschylus closes this horizon for good. 

These last writings on Wagner make clear the force of his break from his earlier ambition to consider the political from a purely aesthetic perspective. This romantic aestheticization of the political had taken the form of portraying Germany as a new Greece in keeping with the defining tenet of German philhellenism. From the late eighteenth century, and with renewed intensity from the 1790s in the response to the course of the French Revolution, Germans of the idealist era came to think of Greek tragedy as the highest form of art, conveying an experience of the terror of destiny amidst now broken dreams of restoring ancient civic virtue. This was a new experience of a caesura of ancient and modern, and at the same of an epochal nexus upon which a new, modern tragic consciousness became possible. Unsurprisingly, Nietzsche had a scant, tendentious understanding of this French Revolutionary context in which a rebirth of tragedy in Germany became conceivable, though it was Hölderlin, his childhood hero, who had announced this dark rose dawn. Like many readers of Nietzsche, Badiou does not take into consideration this preceding German discourse on ancient and modern tragedy but with less justification as it directly pertains to his conception of the mimetic-antagonistic relation of Nietzsche’s act of epochal division to the Revolution.  

Nietzsche came to denounce his earlier view that Wagner’s national German art presaged the return of tragedy. But in declaring war on Wagner and Germany, he felt compelled to go to the root and repudiate Greek tragedy as the pinnacle of art. He then comes to hold up the classical theater of France as an alternative model, trumpets the superiority of the imperium romanum over the little world of the Greek polis, and professes a higher opinion of the best Latin writers—Sallust above all—over any Greek. In other words, he rejected, point by point, the most cherished beliefs of German philhellenism going back to the eighteenth century. I will put Germany, he says, in a corset of iron. For Badiou, Nietzsche’s rejection of this specific German form of aestheticization of the political exonerates him from the charge of having been the spiritual instigator of fascism, a proto-Nazi.

And yet Nietzsche cleaved to an idea of art as the highest form of thought even in the face of crushing disappointment. For Hegel, at the conclusion of history, art continues but has ceased to be a figure of truth, and this closure of its philosophical significance is what he meant by the end of art. Nietzsche could be said to have anticipated and incited the modernist revolt against this historicist conception of an end of art. The modernism of the last century was, in this sense, arguably Nietzschean: contra Hegel, it raised the claim that art will rise to a new peak and once again change what is even meant by truth, while philosophy and criticism must follow and take heed. Of course, Badiou himself is not a Nietzschean, and the modernism of the last century is long gone. Is there any prospect of the rebirth of art at its peaks, as a refiguration of the experience of truth? I suspect Badiou would see himself as the sort of philosopher who might lend support to such an impossible enterprise. What forms might this reconstitution of the autonomy of art assume, what would be the politics of this ricorso, and of what antecedent epoch or event? 

By any standard, these lectures constitute an extraordinary contribution to our understanding of Nietzsche, reframing our picture of him in the light of these incendiary, often beautiful, final writings. Why did Badiou decide to not have them translated into English? It is clear from these lectures that for all his sympathy, he never intends to convince us that we should now become Nietzscheans. Decades after the fall of Marx—the name of that other attempt to break history in two—he seems to have concluded that the siren call of anti-philosophy must be more firmly resisted, though with our warmest sympathies. 

Endorsing an aristocratic idealism has tempted many a good mind. Often under the shelter provided by a communist vocabulary, this was the stance taken by the surrealists, and later by Guy Debord and his nihilist heirs: to found the secret society of the surviving creators. It is also the speculative vow of the best of the Heideggerian legacy: practically to safeguard, in the cloister of writings wherein the question abides, the possibility of a Return. However, since such preservation—which sustains the hope that the intellectual and existential splendours of the past will not be abolished—has no chance of being effective, it cannot partake in the creation of a concept for the coming times. The struggle of nostalgias, often waged as a war against decadence, is not only endowed—as it already is in Nietzsche—with a martial and “critical” image, it is also marked by a kind of delectable bitterness. All the same, it is always already lost. And though there exists a poetics of the defeat, there is no philosophy of defeat. Philosophy, in its very essence, elaborates the means of saying “Yes!” to the previously unknown thoughts that hesitate to become the truths they are.¹⁶  

This is a now unfamiliar, though very welcome conception of philosophy as the true gay science. How does it relate to conditions here and in the so-called West more generally? In the introduction, the dispiriting climate of the subaltern revolt in morality was mentioned in passing, and Nietzsche is now probably best remembered for having supposedly anticipated this world in his disturbing characterization of the Last Man, though here race and gender would add a few period touches to the account. At the same time, Nietzsche could be seen as having contributed to the ascendancy of the new values, for is not the quintessential form of its discourse “I, the Truth am Speaking”? Every great tendency of thought—and especially the ones that aim to break history in two—bears some responsibility for the specific forms of vulgarization that befall it. If we cannot be Nietzscheans, perhaps we may still befriend him and celebrate his pitiless and martial spirit of objectivity.  

1. Alain Badiou, Nietzsche. L’antiphilosophie I, 1992-1993 (Domont: Fayard, 2015). ↩︎
2. Pierre Klossowski, Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1969), xiv. ↩︎
3. Louis Althusser and Étienne Balibar, Reading Capital (London: Verso, 1970), 17. ↩︎
4. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, trans. Maudemarie Clark and Alan J. Swensen, (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1998), 85. ↩︎
5. Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson(London: Continuum, 1983), 4. ↩︎
6. Nietzsche, Genealogy, 116. ↩︎
7. Ibid., 117. ↩︎
8. Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, 74-6. ↩︎
9. Nietzsche, draft of a letter to Brandes, December 1888, in Alain Badiou “Who is Nietzsche?,” The Warwick Journal of Philosophy 11 (2001): 4. ↩︎
10. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols, and Other Writings, ed. Aaron Ridley and Judith Norman (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005), 66. ↩︎
11. Ibid., Ecce Homo, 144. ↩︎
12. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, ed. Adrian Del Caro and Robert Pippin (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006), 104. ↩︎
13. Ibid. ↩︎
14. Nietzsche, The Case of Wagner, in The Anti-Christ, 249. ↩︎
15. Ibid, 250. ↩︎
16. Alain Badiou, Logics of Worlds, trans. Alberto Toscano (London: Continuum, 2009), 3. ↩︎