Nietzsche's Corps/e: Aesthetics, Politics, Prophecy, or, The Spectacular Technoculture of Everyday Life (review)

Intriguing, idiosyncratic, and often maddening, this is an important book for all those readers living in the intersection of the Venn circles: “postmodernist” on the one hand and “hopeful, left-wing” on the other—if there aren’t many there, so much the worse for the end of this millennium. Geoff Waite has obviously been in thrall to Nietzsche, but seems to have freed himself with the aid of social commitment to a vaguely post-neocommunist vision of a better future. Recognizing the ascendancy of Nietzsche’s star and the eclipse of marxism, he awaits further revolutions in thought, meanwhile bringing to bear a thorough knowledge of the current enthusiasms for Nietzsche, his own private communism, and a wide-ranging familiarity with contemporary popular music. It all makes for a weird book, in the best sense of the word. This, Waite claims, is a book from nobody’s point of view (6).

Despite that clever assertion, the author’s point that “Nietzsche/anism” (xi) names the ideological mystification of late capitalism is an inescapable refrain running through this lengthy study. Waite has much less to say in criticism of late capitalism or even the spectacular technoculture of everyday life (which phrase looms so portentously in his title) than he does about Nietzsche’s association with them. But even if we take Waite’s thorough understanding of capitalism’s current incarnation for granted, there is an irony in the book’s packaging. One of the distinctive features of late capitalism is surely its imposition via trendy marketing techniques of books laden with theory and covered by postmodern artworks—Josef Beuys’s in this case. And whatever the sum and consequences of Waite’s criticisms of Nietzscheanism, as a commodity this book presents itself as a part of the current vogue of Nietzsche.

At the front of his book, facing the prologue, Waite employs a reproduction of a painting by Mark Tansey, Utopic, in which portraits of the postmodernist triumvirate of Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche are represented on the background in descending order of size. In fact, Waite’s whole project is to cut Nietzsche down to size, not only by making many silly references to the size of the philosopher’s penis, but also by denigrating Nietzsche’s influence on modern thought and culture. If, as it seems, Waite’s deepest objection is that Nietzsche has become institutionalized as a progressive thinker in the works of influential postmodernist writers, it is an ironic juxtaposition: unlike Marx’s and Freud’s works, Nietzsche’s have never been employed as the basis of an actual orthodoxy or used as a measure to censor other views. There are no political parties, states, or institutes of Nietzsche, as there have been marxist parties and states or institutes of psychoanalysis to enforce orthodoxy.

Waite calls for a “communist” cultural politics that will interpret and expose the esoteric Nietzschean semiotics that he sees lurking under the surface of our postmodern “spectacular technoculture.” He urges all-out combat against this nefarious Nietzscheanism that has, he argues, wrongly claimed to be leftist (think of the gauchisme of post-1968 France). Unfortunately, he remains obscure about the tactics of such a campaign. Waite reviews a long list of leftist writers who invoke and celebrate Nietzsche, but who, he asserts, have not read their philosopher as deeply as have certain right-wing writers like Heidegger.

Waite reminds readers that Heidegger was indeed a fascist, a sensible gesture after the long era of French thinkers responding to Heidegger—especially the Heideggerian reading of Nietzsche—in ways that have been commonly regarded as wresting Nietzsche’s legacy from his Nazi admirers. The peculiarly French “Left” mediation of Nietzsche was inaugurated in 1962 by the publication of Nietzsche et la philosophie by Gilles Deleuze. Since that time an imposing array of French and French-inspired texts have promoted the idea...