What does it mean to remain true to an authors thought? Is it to repeat verbatim what they say or to repeat the gesture of their thought? Is is the letter or the spirit that is most true?
‘Every great man nowadays has his disciples, and it is always Judas who writes the biography.’
(Gilbert in Oscar Wilde’s The Critic As Artist)
‘One repays a teacher badly if one always remains a pupil only.’ (Thus Spoke Zarathustra, On the Bestowing Virtue 3)
In his foreword to Ecce Homo Nietzsche repeats the claim found in Zarathustra that one repays a teacher badly if one remains a student in order to preface his readers—namely, us—with a caution for how we should read and learn from Nietzsche. To be a disciple it is not enough to merely follow in the teachers footsteps—to walk a path already walked—but to become ones own in order to walk a path the teacher no longer can. A pupil must overcome his teacher. We must overcome Nietzsche. But this can not happen if we are Yes-saying asses’, one must also have the strength to say No. It is for this reason Nietzsche ends his foreword by declaring: ‘Now I bid you lose me and find yourselves; and only when you have all denied me will I return to you.’ Remarkably, it is only when we deny Nietzsche that we can repeat the spirit of his thought.
Must one betray in order to remain faithful?
How does one prove fidelity to the event that is Nietzsche?
In ‘Who is Nietzsche?’, Badiou inverts Nietzsche’s declaration in suggesting that ‘Nietzsche is someone that one must at once discover, find, and lose.’ One must, ‘of course’, lose Nietzsche because anti-philosophy itself must be lost once philosophy has established ‘its own space.’ Badiou wants to overcome Nietzsche—the archetypal anti-philosopher—for the sake of philosophy. However, philosophy, as Badiou conceives it, accepts the demand made by anti-philosophy which states ‘the new duty of philosophy, or its new possibility in the figure of a new duty’ but for which must also put itself to death or silence. Nietzsche’s madness. Wittgenstein’ silence. Lacan’s final muteness. Philosophy is proving fidelity to the demands of anti-philosophy which itself could not complete. It is a betrayal in the name of fidelity. If one were to be the Yes-saying ass of anti-philosophy, one would not be able to carry out its demand and fall prey to its fate in silence.
The great difficultly, Badiou concludes, is not to understand Nietzsche but to know, philosophically, how to lose him. But is every denial of Nietzsche not a sure way of finding his spectral return?
Another well-known example of betrayal is the inversion Marx performs of placing Hegel back on his feet. No longer does Hegel walk abstractly on his head but concretely with his feet. The question is whether Marx remained faithful to the spirit, rather than the letter, of Hegel’s thought?
In Marx and Engels The Holy Family, they criticised the reception of Hegel among their peers. In one passage they remark on the irony with which Herr Szeliga perverts the real movement of Hegel’s speculative thought in his attempt to rid Hegel’s thought of mysticism and sophistry by appealing to the immediacy of the empirical. The advantage of Hegel’s ‘masterly sophistry’, as Marx and Engels presents it, Hegel gives a ‘real presentation, embracing the thing itself, within the speculative presentation’ of his otherwise imaginary process of the self-creation of the mind, of the Absolute Subject. ‘This real development within the speculative development misleads the reader into considering the speculative development as real and the real as speculative.’ Precisely because Szeliga’s have no ‘hypocrisy or dissimulation’ he negates the speculative development along with the real development within it. Szeliga effectively threw the baby out with the bath water. With his ‘laudable honesty’ he nowhere develops any real content and appeals to immediacy, the ‘eye in its naked beauty.’ By getting rid of the sophistry of the speculative process, Szeliga ‘falls into the most irrational and unnatural bondage to the object.’
In denying Hegel’s ‘sophistry’, Szeglia had unwittingly also denied the real gesture of Hegel’s thought. Later on, in his postface to Capital, Marx reminisces on his criticism of the mystificatory side of Hegelian dialectics when it was still the fashion. However, in its mystified form, ‘the dialectic became the fashion in Germany, because it seemed to transfigure and glorify what exists.’ Marx says the ‘ill-humoured, arrogant and mediocre epigones who now talk large in educated German circles’ began to take pleasure in treating Hegel the same way Moses Mendelssohn treated Spinoza, as a ‘dead dog.’ Against his peers, then, Marx took it upon himself to openly avow himself as the pupil of Hegel in his attempt to overcome the ‘mystification which the dialectic suffers in Hegel’s hands’ by discovering the ‘rational kernel’ within it. The dialectics revolutionary essence refers to the necessity of the role of negation and destruction of what is, i.e., the mystificatory and conservative side of the dialectic which, as Engels puts it, sanctifies the status quo. Thus the spirit of the dialectic betrays itself, which Marx and Engels proved fidelity towards.
The method of betrayal Deleuze offers comes from what he refers to as buggery, which involves ‘taking an author from behind and giving him a child that would be his own offspring, yet monstrous.’ His own offspring, not Deleuze’s. It is not enough to merely destroy the authors thought beyond recognition but to produce something novel from within their thought. Yet monstrous. The offspring produced is an uncanny double of the original. Deleuze clearly wants to remain faithful. ‘It was really important for it to be his own child, because the author had to actually say all I had him saying.’ Nietzsche was an exception of sort, for Deleuze, since ‘he gets up to all sorts of things behind your back.’ Nietzsche returns to us. Deleuze’s betrayal is, moreover, a betrayal of the role of interpretation itself, of staying ‘true’ to the text. Reading a text is not an act of interpretation but an art of experimentation. Not to answer the question ‘What does it mean’ but ‘How does it function’, ’What does it do’, ‘Does it work, and how does it work’, ‘What does this reading serve’. Interpretation often falls prey to the presupposition of utility: ‘This is true because it does this.’ We don’t know what a text can do.
Deleuze’s buggery was a response to the academic superego which bludgeoned students to death with the history of philosophy, the Oedipal injunction: ‘You can’t seriously consider saying what you yourself think until you’ve read this and that, and that on this, and this on that.’ It performs, as Deleuze thinks, a repressive role in philosophy that never inspires invention and real thinking, qualities found in the history of philosophy that wouldn’t exist if the Oedipal injunction to read the history of philosophy was absolute. Deleuze’s alternative was to see the history of philosophy as a history of buggery or immaculate conception. A very different history to be traced.