Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche. Henri Lefebvre
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d’état and knowledge: Jansenism against Louis XIV. Jansenism, however, was not confined to the thought of Cornelius Jansen, Saint-Cyran, Pascal and Port-Royal. It passed into literature: in Racine, and above all in La Rochefoucauld. Augustinian libido was referred to as ‘self-love’ in this author’s Maxims, which cruelly analyse all forms of self-love to denounce its detours and masks: ambition, the search for pleasure, curiosity.19 La Rochefoucauld, a sophisticated duke, was well acquainted with worldly society and knew what should be known about it. He was a Jansenist by both heart and spirit. This ‘moralist’ destroyed the social world [le Monde]: the court, courtiers, royal power. To official knowledge, the Cartesian (state) logos, he opposed the asceticism of a non-knowledge full of bitter clarity. Nietzsche both read and reflected on La Rochefoucauld’s Maxims. Not only did he know them but he imitated them. The aphorisms of Human, All Too Human (first volume 1877–8; second volume 1879) extend to the modern age the harsh analysis, intrepid penetration and sad knowledge of the French ‘moralist’ (who might be more properly called an ‘immoralist’). They have the same frame of mind, the same pointedness and alacrity. If Nietzsche revealed the libido dominandi, self-love as ambition and struggle for power, it was to denounce it down to its roots. The Protestantism of this son of a pastor drew nourishment and strength from a Jansenism diverted from its aim and its meaning, and soon turned in protest against those who destroy the ‘world’ but do not know what to do with the debris.
So much for the ‘sad science’. As for The Gay Science (1881–2), it has a close origin and a (dialectically) opposite meaning.20 Outside of Greco-Roman logos (logic and law) and Judeo-Christian morality (the hatred of pleasure, enjoyment viewed as sin and defilement), what did the West invent? A madness that gives meaning to actions and things: individual love, mad love, absolute love. But the West misunderstood, ignored and crushed the best that it had. Southern French civilization – that of the Midi and King Sun – which assimilated images, metaphors and concepts from the Arabs of Andalusia as well as from Celtic legends,21 brought courtship into love, which did not just mean respect for the beloved ‘being’ (the individual, the person), escaping the ancient status of beautiful object, but the sharing of pleasure. The ‘gay science’ was not simply a rhetoric of love, or a way of assembling words. It was the art of living in and through love: the art of joy and amorous pleasure. The lover, in the act of love, honours his lady. He serves her instead of using her for his sexual need. Respect for the beloved being – the beautiful woman – not only meant refusing to consider her as an object, not only submitting to her will and even her caprices, but also giving her control of physical pleasure. Courtly and absolute love proclaimed itself above ambition and power, beyond the will to power. The ‘libido sentiendi’ was redeemed, purified by passion. Desire was once again infinite, as it no longer had a finite object before it but a divine being, ‘deus in terris’: beautiful, active, sentient and conscious. The ‘gay science’ supersedes sin and redemption. It rediscovers the innocence of the body and great health. It contains a deeper understanding [connaissance] than the bitterness of critical analysis, and ‘truer’ than the ‘pure’ knowledge of the learned. Better than work, and more than knowledge, it gives meaning and value to events, actions, things. It is a constant festival.
Nietzsche brought together ‘gay science’ and ‘bitter science’, superseding the one with the other, subordinating lucidity to joy22 without losing it, and likewise knowing [connaître] to living. From their conflictual unity he sought a third term that he believed would arise: a poetic life of the flesh to transcend both the ‘sad science’ and the ‘gay science’.
Living and lived experience forcefully reassert themselves, with violence if need be. Against whom and against what? Against the coldest of cold monsters, the state. Against sad (conceptual) knowledge, against oppressive and repressive violence. Against the everyday, against unacceptable ‘reality’. Against labour and the division of labour and the production of things. Against social morality and constraints, those of a society without civilization that seeks to perpetuate itself by any means. Around 1885, shortly after Marx had died, Nietzsche the poet, Nietzsche the megalomaniac, cried out his anguish and his joy. He wanted to save the world and Europe from the barbarism they were falling into. Western society, that of logos (Greco-Roman: logic and law) and morality (Judeo-Christian: Puritanism), had become monstrous beyond belief, beyond all measure. Production for destruction, making children for wars, accumulating knowledge to dominate peoples, Nietzsche saw these absurdities in Germany under the sign of reason. He sensed, denounced and stigmatized the fundamental error, philosophically consecrated and legitimized by Hegel: the conjunction and fusion of knowledge and authority, abstract cognition and power, in the state and the state model of modern society. Today, he would see the destruction of nature (both outside and within ‘man’) as a manifestation of the will to power in all its horror, rather than its negation. And the same with the potential self-destruction of the human species (nuclear danger, etc.).
The West had tried out its values, in an immense assertion: logic, law, state (Hegel), work and production (Marx). The result tended to prove the failure of the human race. The reverse and counterpart of this colossal assertion was a hidden nihilism and a malevolence pertaining to pathology. European nihilism was not the product of critical thought, but of its ineffectiveness. It did not come from the rejection of history, nation, homeland, but from the defeats of history. Its secret, its enigma? They lie in the assertion itself, that of logos, an assertion that appears full yet reveals its emptiness.
Did Nietzsche ignore work, industry, the working class, capitalism and the bourgeoisie? He speaks little of these directly. He speaks of them only through the critique of culture and knowledge. If he dismisses them from his field, it is because in his view none of these terms, none of these ‘realities’, contributes a perspective other than nihilistic. Where Hegelianism had seen the triumph of reason, where Marx saw the conditions of a different society, Nietzsche perceived only a ‘reality’ that he did not strive to recognize at such, except to refute and reject it. For it would tumble into mud and blood.
Should Nietzsche be defined as anarchistic? Yes and no. Yes, as he rejects en bloc the ‘real’ and knowledge of the real considered as higher reality. Yes, as with him subversion is distinguished from revolution. No, as he has nothing in common with Stirner or Bakunin, who define themselves by a consciousness, a knowledge (not political in the case of the former, basically political with the latter). Anarchists remain on the ground of the ‘real’: of what and whom they combat. They want to see and possess a ‘property’, albeit unique, or expropriate those who possess ‘reality’.
Nietzsche wanted to supersede the real – transcend it – by poetry, appealing to carnal depths. Did he struggle for the oppressed? No. According to him, the oppressed have often, if not always, lived better, in other words, more intensely, more ardently, than their oppressors: they sang, they danced, they cried out their pain and their fury, even when subject to the ‘values’ of their conquerors. In their own way, they invented. What? Not what would bring down their masters and overturn the situation, but something else, closer to Dionysus, god and myth of the earth, of the vanquished, of the oppressed (women, slaves, peasants, etc.).
For Nietzsche there is thus an inaugural act: redemption, supersession. Renouncing the will to power after having experienced it, thus renouncing the political acts by which oppression and exploitation are maintained – this is how the initial act is placed in perspective. Will to live? This remains derisory if one (the ‘subject’) sticks to an intuition, an intention – which dismisses voluntarist and vitalist philosophy: Schopenhauer, Stirner and many others. Classical tragedy marked the place of redemption; it repeated the sacrifice of the hero to show how his fate is accomplished and what leads him to his loss; it redeemed the spectator-actor from the obscure wish expressed in wanting power. As a popular festival, it opened up new possibilities: in Greece, urban life and rational law supplanted custom. Music offers the example of an ever prodigious metamorphosis, transforming anguish and desire into joy, in the course of a purification deeper than Aristotelian ‘catharsis’. It creates meaning. The ‘subject’? This preoccupation of the philosophers proves derisory. There is no other subject than the body; but the body has its depth, and music is born from it and returns to it, with its sounds more luminous than light that speaks only to