| Review of: | The Seduction of Unreason: The Intellectual Romance with Fascism from Nietzsche to Postmodernism by Richard Wolin |
|---|---|
| Reviewed By: | Johannes Fritsche |
| Reviewed in: | Constellations |
| Date accepted online: | 02/11/2007 |
| Published in print: | Volume 14, Issue 1, Pages 147-156 |
Book Reviews
Postmodernism, as it emerged in the 1960s in France, reacted against Sartre's humanism and an ossified Marxism and instead gave, as Wolin quotes Chantal Mouffe, "a new 'articulation"' (4) to counter-Enlightenment thinkers, most notably Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Schmitt. After discussing the issue of National Socialism in others of his numerous books and articles, which have demonstrated his fluency and knowledge in philosophy, the arts, other cultural matters, and politics on both sides of the Rhine, intellectual historian Richard Wolin now focuses on the other leg of postmodernism, Nietzsche.
According to Wolin, the postmodernist strategy has thoroughly failed. The movements that brought down the Soviet bloc were inspired by precisely that tradition of reason and civil rights that postmodernists usually regard as "a fundamental source of tyranny and oppression" (21). Conversely, at the end of the twentieth century counter-Enlightenment thinkers have returned to their original site, so to speak; that is, to the right. What is more, postmodernism has played into the hands of the new nationalist and fundamentalist movements. For the eye of the needle of this new articulation has eroded the "'democratic minimum"' (xiv) and destroyed the Enlightenment universalism that alone can counter violent particularisms. These theses determine the order and trajectory of Wolin's study. Framed by an introduction on the notion and history of counter-Enlightenment since Joseph de Maistre and a conclusion on opinions about the United States among Europeans from Cornelius de Pauw in 1770 to Žizek and Baudrillard's comments on the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, the book consists of two parts, one on Germany and one on France. In the first part, Wolin discusses Nietzsche, C.G. Jung, Gadamer, and the German New Right, and in the second, Bataille, Blanchot, Derrida, and the French New Right. In both parts, he situates the texts within the political and social currents of their time, as against the deconstructionist procedure of isolating them from their contexts.
Wolin sketches a history of Nietzsche interpretation from Adolf Hitler's visit to the Nietzsche Archive in 1933 to the French postmodern interpretation and beyond. The postmodern Nietzsche rejects the notion of truth. He is primarily concerned with aesthetics and issues of style, and is ethically and politically a tolerant relativist whom even Richard Rorty "could wholeheartedly embrace" (33). According to Wolin and the most recent literature, however, Nietzsche was always concerned with truth, and he tried, as Wolin discusses mainly with reference to his theory of eternal recurrence, to transform his "unabashed embrace of hierarchy, violence, and the virility of the 'warrior type,' combined with his visceral distaste for the values of altruism and political egalitarianism," into a political program (53) - which, of course, made him an appropriate hero for the German National Socialists and the Italian Fascists. Such Nietzschean evaluations were, as Wolin shows with reference to his biography and the key concepts of his theory, also at work when C.G. Jung reconceived Freud's "analytic project in an avowedly Counter-Enlightenment spirit" (80) and aligned his cause with the National Socialists to the extent that, in 1946, the British Foreign Office even considered trying him as a war criminal. Pointing to a "Copernican turn" (89) in the most recent literature on intellectual collaboration with the Hitler regime, Wolin shows how Gadamer's 1934 text on Plato and his 1942 talk in Paris on Herder executed National Socialist propaganda, and how counter-Enlightenment thinkers are also present in Gadamer's oeuvre after the war. Finally, they recur - not in their postmodernist but in their original clothing - on the German New Right, as well as among former leftists turned right, such as Botho Strauß.
Georges Bataille - "a rite of passage" (155) for Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, and other postmodernists - developed the notion of a revival of enchanted ecstatic communities that, in its celebration of sacrifice and war, closely resembled the efforts of his contemporary fellow Nietzscheans in Germany. Wolin shows how Bataille abused his source, Marcel Mauss's famous book,
As postmodernism became more and more marginal in France from the end of the 1980s on, Derrida made an effort to bring it back onto the map by discussing political texts and topics. As Wolin shows with reference to Derrida's paper "The Force of Law" and his book on Marx, Derrida ignores all the recent work on democratic theory; his insistence on the irreducibility of the singular and his hostility toward universalistic criteria of judgment and justice - despite his experiences in Prague in 1981 (253-5) - bring him close to Schmitt's decisionism and propel him into the Manichean position of expecting qualitative change only from without. What is more, these moves reveal that postmodernism's heart, the notion of difference, had been emptied out all along. As Foucault's reduction of discursive strategies to power and his "strange fascination with Iran's 'revolution of the Mullahs"' (270) show, postmodernism was ethically vacuous, and "the vacuity of 'difference' as an ethical paradigm became painfully apparent" (270) in political developments in France. For in the 1980s the French New Right replaced biological racism with a cultural racism that appropriated the language of identity politics and the "right to difference" for its xenophobic agenda, as is shown in a nutshell by de Benoist's statement that "'the people must preserve and cultivate their differences .... Immigration merits condemnation because it strikes a blow at the identity of the host culture as well as the immigrants' identity" (268).
Wolin backs his claims about the authors and political and social movements and phenomena he discusses with the latest scholarly French, German, and English literature, much of which has already been written with a view to postmodernism. He also respects the fact that, as one can learn especially in the books of Hans Blumenberg, identical sentences and motifs can have very different functions within different paradigms without being in any way causes of a transition from one to another. Still, due to the nature of the project, the discipline of history of ideas, and Wolin's way of practicing it, his book will probably draw a lot of criticism from different corners. Some will regard the socio-historic-political narratives and biographies through which he zooms in on the texts as too long, others as not detailed enough. Some will argue that he should have taken into account additional aspects of the texts discussed, some that the assumptions that, for him, constitute postmodernism, the left, or the right are just too limited, as can be seen most clearly in his rather wholesale identification of the right and the left. For some, his verdicts about the deeds of individuals and the functions of trends will display the same lack of