Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche. Henri Lefebvre
the economic, social and political ‘reality’ of the USSR after Lenin). The Stalinists cleverly muddied their tracks, for example by describing Hegel as a ‘philosopher of feudal reaction’, whereas they themselves were Hegelians and even super-Hegelians. If the class struggle after a proletarian revolution leads to a strengthening and increased centralization of the state, this may be a ‘historical necessity’, but it has nothing in common with the thinking of Marx. Still more: if this thesis is true in the theoretical sense of the term, then so-called Marxist thought collapses. It crumbles into pieces, even if well-intentioned people gather up the pieces and try to reconstruct something with the debris.
Against this pseudo-theory we can cite so many texts by Marx, Engels and Lenin that they would fill volumes. Moreover, the violent controversies aroused by Stalinism and the anti-Stalinist opposition have revealed a contradiction internal to the revolutionary movement and the workers’ movement itself. This already appeared with Saint-Simon and Fourier. The latter was happy to dispense with the state, whereas Saint-Simon no less happily contradicted himself, at one point demanding a state that would be effective because run by the ‘industriels’ (producers and scientists), elsewhere the replacement of state constraint by the direct administration of things. This contradiction erupted in Europe around the year 1870. When political historians and publicists tenderly examine the workers’ movement, with a view to eliminating or at least attenuating its contradictions, they overlook the double process that led in France to the Commune and in Germany to the Social Democratic Party. The French movement resolutely attacked the state and demolished it in 1870, when the workers of Paris set out to ‘storm the heavens’. German socialism, in contrast, influenced by the Hegelian Lassalle, accepted and integrated the state. An integration which, as we know, was envisaged by the great political strategist Bismarck. Do we need to recall once again the content of Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Programme, in which, despite a cautious formulation that hardly mentions the Paris Commune, Marx’s full approval of this is clear enough, in what was his political testament? The contradiction is manifest even in the thought and work of Marx.
Hence the terrible bitterness of the last line of this text: ‘Dixi et salvavi animam meam.’ (‘I have spoken and saved my soul.’)
If state socialism has triumphed in the workers’ movement, and in the world, this means that the workers’ movement has abandoned both Marxism and Leninism; that it has succumbed to Lassalleanism; that Marxism has become an ideology, a philosophy serving the state, a public service in the Hegelian sense. Marx holds no responsibility for this situation, other than having left in obscurity a conflict of decisive importance.
c) The same holds, finally, for Nietzsche and Hitlerian fascism. A forced falsification twisted Nietzsche’s texts, pulling them towards fascist ideology. True, ambiguous fragments are not lacking. In his analysis of the will to power, Nietzsche expresses admiration for questionable heroes: adventurers, condottieri, conquistadores. Marx might equally be classified as an anti-Semite on the basis of his text on the Jewish question! Developing a radical critique, a fundamental refutation, a refusal and rejection of the libido dominandi, Nietzsche envisaged all its aspects, all its masks, both political and otherwise: imperial and imperialist action, Machiavellianism, warlike ambition and activity, as well as goodness, charitable action, ‘good works’, even renunciation and humility.
As for Nietzsche’s success, in other words, the reception of his theoretical analysis as ideology, this underwent a change of sign: anarchists and immoralists at the turn of the twentieth century, then fascist politicians, and today philosophers, so-called ‘Nietzscheans’, have all contributed to his misunderstanding. These errors of interpretation have to figure in the file. They are not directly imputable to the author.
This rejection of political appreciation implies a devaluing of politics as such, something we should emphasize. The political criterion, which during the Stalinist and fascist period was presented as absolute, is in no way definitive. It changes and falls. For a short space of time, it took on a ‘total’ appearance because imposed by the double means of ideological persuasion and violence. It then induced errors whose derisory character was later apparent.
11) ‘Is it out of a mania for triads, or a caricature of the supposedly triadic model, that you focus here on just three bodies of work, three thinkers? What leads you to place Hegel, Marx and Nietzsche at the gateway to modernity and as its guiding lights? Why not others?’
It is free for anyone to claim that shadows and the realm of shadows came to an end with Freud, Heidegger, Lenin or Mao Zedong, or even Wilhelm Reich, Georges Bataille, etc.
Let us look at Freud and his work. Why not include him here, and place him in the dominant constellation?
Freud’s thought and his psychoanalysis acquired much of their strength from being connected with clinical observation, with a therapeutic practice. Often effective, but sometimes in vain or even worse, this medical practice has a ‘real’ existence. It is a real gain that it brought sexuality, so long a blinkered zone, into language and conceptual thought. As for practice, the connection of Marxist thought and revolutionary practice (attempts, defeats) gives it a good position to reply to ‘practicists’. Only Nietzschean thought suffers from the comparison, being linked only to a practice of speech. Unless it is placed in relationship with the mediocre practice of writing. Psychoanalysis, for its part, led to a trade, a profession with its place in the social division of labour, and tending from the start towards institutionalization. In such a situation, partial (clinical) practice gave birth to an ideology that seeks to justify it by overstepping it. By tackling every problem, it seeks to be total.
Hence the weakness of psychoanalysis: a formless mixture of a linguistic technique with fragmentary cognitions (connaissances), and with representations proclaimed beyond their sphere of validity (by reduction and extrapolation). This ideology conveys its own myth, the unconscious, a box of tricks that contains everything put into it: body, memory, individual and social history, language, culture and its results or residues, etc. Finally, and above all, Freud only grasped, described and analysed the libido sentiendi. Psychoanalysis after Freud only indirectly tackled the libido dominandi, so profoundly explored by Nietzsche. It completely neglected the libido sciendi, the domain of cognition, the social status of knowledge. Why? Because Freud, though influenced by Schopenhauer’s deep-going studies, never abandoned the Hegelian schema of knowledge. He thus failed to recognize the great underground tradition, the clandestine legacy that made for the greatness of European thought and through which the dead or rotten branches of logos were given new life. Psychoanalysis does not go as far in its analysis as had Augustine, Jansen, La Rochefoucauld, Pascal and Nietzsche. When Freud had to face the terrible discovery that sex and sexuality led only to failure, drama and pathos, thus the pathological, he took up the very old theme of concordia discors or discordis concors – adding very little to this besides the clinical effort to cure neuroses. Do psychoanalysts succeed in this? Do they control the terrible negative power of language – by means of language? That is a different matter.
If understanding perceives desire at the lowest depth of ‘being’, it puts in question understanding itself. For Nietzsche, who pursued this line of questioning to its end, the great desire whose potential energy was hidden in the total body (and not in sex alone), this great desire that becomes ‘supreme grandeur’, born from the body and in the body, reveals itself as dance, song, then desire for eternity, eternal itself. It has nothing in common with the poor sexual libido, nor even with Platonic eros. ‘Meine weise Sehnsucht’, says Zarathustra: ‘my wise yearning’: wisdom embraced, desire across the mountains, desire on trembling wings, this ardent reason shouts and laughs.
In the investigation pursued here, it would be interesting to study the movements that shake religions and religious institutions, in particular the Catholic Church, rather than psychoanalysis, a ‘modernist’ ideology that is somewhat arrogant.
Would not Nietzsche himself have seen the success of psychoanalysis as a further symptom of decadence? An aggravated sickness? A form of European nihilism? Certainly. There is something morbid about this new avatar of Judeo-Christianity, which seeks to recycle itself by making up for the curse cast on sex, but preserves in its language and concepts