Transvaluations: Nietzsche in France, 1872-1972 (review)

In a letter to his friend Heinrich Köselitz, Nietzsche described himself as “a battlefield more than a human being.” Douglas Smith appropriately frames his survey of Nietzsche’s reception in France with this image, noting that several significant transformations mark the first hundred years of Nietzsche’s French reception. Perhaps more to the point, Smith argues that the contesting readings of Nietzsche’s works represent other conflicts, both philosophical, institutional, and political. The result is an interesting, albeit selective, narrative that seeks to tell a coherent story of the twists and turns in Nietzsche’s French reception from 1872—the year The Birth of Tragedy was published—to 1972—the year of the Nietzsche conference at Cerisy that Smith takes as the apogee of the sixties Nietzsche revival. As Smith wisely notes, Nietzsche’s works lend themselves to widely divergent readings; he also implies the same may be true of the history of his reception.

Several interpretive assumptions guide Smith’s narrative; three are most central. First, the “transvalutions” of Nietzsche’s works are themselves supported by Nietzsche’s own “continual interrogation of identity—of the self, of the nation, of culture” (7). As Nietzsche continually called identity into question, the identity of his own texts were contested, and Smith shows how the political and philosophical left and right exploited Nietzsche’s reliance on metaphor to give themselves the task of constructing a coherent meaning for Nietzsche’s texts, a task discharged with progressively “closer,” more “immanent” readings of those texts.

Smith’s second assumption concerns the shifting privilege given to Nietzsche’s two major themes, as the century witnesses a transformation from an emphasis on will to power to eternal recurrence as the central theme. This transformation is conjoined with another, as attention to the ethical questions posed by Nietzsche’s works is replaced by questions concerning Nietzsche’s relationship to the history of metaphysics as its end or reversal. For Smith, these transformations reflect a shift from Nietzsche’s early reception—framed primarily by European political events (first the Franco-Prussian War, then the two World Wars)—to his later reception, framed primarily by French responses to German philosophy. This leads to Smith’s third and guiding assumption, namely, that Nietzsche’s French reception has throughout been a response first to Hegel and then to Heidegger.

Smith’s narrative unfolds in five chapters. The first focuses on the “early reception” (1872–1929) and divides neatly into two periods: an initial period emphasizing Nietzsche’s biography (as friend of Wagner, follower of Schopenhauer), and a second period dominated by questions of national interest that move from valorization of Nietzsche’s polemics against German culture to his vilification as a reflection of Prussian militarism. The second chapter discusses Nietzsche’s reception vis-à-vis National Socialism: here we see the first tension between readings centering on eternal recurrence vs. those focused on will to power, as the French right followed the vitalist Nazi emphasis on will to power, while the left (Lefebvre, Bataille) drew greater attention to eternal recurrence.

The third chapter is somewhat unexpected, as it follows the Nietzsche-Hegel connection invoked by the “left” readings’ attention to contradiction to a discussion of decolonization that focuses on Sartre, Fanon, and Lévi-Strauss before concluding with an oddly situated discussion of Foucault. While much of this chapter is quite interesting, the attempt to read the disagreements between Sartre and first Fanon and then Lévi-Strauss as, in some sense, playing out a relationship between Hegel and Nietzsche (universal/particular) seems forced at times. In addition, Foucault’s reading of singularity as a way of reading Nietzsche into Fanon both mutes the substantive differences between Fanon and Sartre and insufficiently appreciates the depth of Nietzsche’s impact on Foucault’s early work (for example, there is no discussion of the role Nietzsche plays in The Order of Things).

The final two chapters focus on post-1960s reception. In the fourth chapter, Deleuze’s...