Reflections on Nietzsche and Anarchy

So many young people have read Nietzsche between 1890 and 1914 — those who have died for the homeland and those who have presided over the national massacres and even those who profited from these carnages!

Why has Nietzsche had so many bad disciples — so many disciples — so many Nietzscheans who have recreated in his name everything that Nietzsche himself had destroyed? Nietzschean patriots, big bourgeois Nietzschean, Nietzschean merchants, Nietzschean moralists…

I reread Nietzsche. Certainly, he is still far from me, but he is a hundred million leagues closer than all those “disciples” who boast of him.

So?

Eh! precisely as with Han Ryner, but in the opposite sense.

Nietzsche, like Han Ryner, has spoken an old language — and so he still has the air of speaking for the men of his time. Neither Ryner nor Nietzsche has created his language. Both have expressed themselves in terms of common humanity — and yet I believe that both are exclusive uniques, incomparable personalities.

Nietzsche has expressed himself in terms of common force, as Han Ryner has done it in terms of common right.

To sing his will, his power, Nietzsche has touched the string of the old will, of the ancient power — that of the species — as Ryner, in order to sing his spirit, his idealistic harmony, has not been able to avoid the organs of the Holy Spirit, the ancient plainchant of humanitarian idealism, the voice of God.

And yet the warrior Nietzsche has nothing in common with the national warriors, just as the peaceful Han Ryner cannot be confused with the international pacifists of peacetime. But both can claim the paternity of one or the other — because both have spoken to their respective precursors with words that they do not disown, with music that could still carry them away.

Nietzsche et Han Ryner point beyond their actual achievements — but they require something that would push them to the farthest point, someone to cut the old cords that still moor each in their ports — home ports. And then, in their company, what voyages — Oh, Psychodorus! Oh, Zarathustra !

* * * *

Nietzsche is a precursor of Individualism; he is not an individualist, nor even a Dionysian: he is a bacchanalian. This explains, even more clearly than Nietzsche’s lapses, the misreadings of the Nietzscheans.

Here is the essential thing that the Nietzchean does not understand: A possession only exists on the condition of being my possession, as I want it and when I feel it in the harmony of my self. The good that I conquer, myself, for myself, is my good. But the good that I conquer as a soldier, for the homeland, is not only no longer a good, a possession for me, but also makes me feel more of a slave, for this good makes me feel more deeply—I, who have conquered it—my submission—I who let it be stripped from me by the Homeland.

And so it is for the love of danger, the pleasure of fighting… These are bacchanalian enjoyments—intoxications, if I do not feel them in the fullness of my being, as a stimulant necessary to the free play of all my faculties. If I do not master them in order to make them serve my creative sense in life, these intoxications carry me outside of my individual harmony. They tend toward my destruction.

As Nietzsche conceives it, the feeling of power tends inevitably toward a feeling of powerlessness. In dominating, Nietzsche makes domination an end: He sets his sights on a kingdom. He means to be the sovereign in relation to some subjects. He puts himself at the mercy of the kingdom. He must reckon with the subjects.

If I exercise my domination — I who claim to recognize and exercise no power but that within myself — it is in order to attain the possession of myself, the mastery of myself. I only dominate in the service of my creation. My aim is my the satisfaction of my hunger. My end is the song of my enjoyment, and I take delight in living only in the agreement of all my possibilities: idea and acts, sensations and imaginations, present perceptions and hypotheses regarding my future…

My harmony is the condition of my power. No one can strip it from me. What I seek to dominate is everything that tends to escape my art, everything that does not harmonize with my music, everything that does not respond to the surge of my love. I dominate in order to make mine. In dominating I take, I clasp to my heart. That which is given to me, I take entirely, respecting it. That which is refused to me, I break. Toward myself, I press the whole world—to crush it,—I clutch. I dominate in order to dominate myself.

The Nietzschean, on the contrary, dominates for the sake of dominating. There is a theory of art for art’s sake that does not conceive of artistic creation as an individual pleasure of the artist, the flower of a life, the gift of the individual to themselves, but as one of the anonymous expressions of the aesthetic function. “Art is an end in itself.” For Nietzsche, in the same manner, it is power that becomes the supreme end. His theory is that of “power for its own sake.” What do the forms of domination and their consequences matter, for those who dominate as well as for those who are dominated? It is above all a question of dominating. Domination becomes, in the end, his ideal, his religion, his mania. He gives himself to it, sacrifices himself, loses himself, destroys himself. It is for domination that he dominates: and in this the Nietzschean seems no more an individualist than the believer who submits for the sake of submission, according to the Christian ideal of universal submission.

* * * *

To dominate simply for the sake of it does not make you any more the master of your life than making art for its own sake makes you the creator of your art. Here you do “do art,” but you create nothing. There you do not dominate, but command.

My individualism—and that is to say my harmonious egoism—does not accommodate itself to command any more than it does to obedience. If I do not want to command, it is from love of myself, in the same way that I do not wish to obey. It appears to me as disagreeable, as repugnant to see obedience as to be obedient myself. That is why I do not command: in order not to bring into my vision a spectacle that disgusts me.

My feeling of power, I feel it most completely, most intensely, most harmoniously, when I am in the state of Anarchy, that is to say without command or obedience.

To command means to give an order. The one who commands (even to a single person) establishes a social order. By commanding, they lay the foundations of government.

Not desiring any social authority, I would refrain, first of all, from demanding of anyone the recognition of an order. In order not to submit to the command of others, I begin by not ordering myself. For the exercise of authority justifies in the slave the desire to commander to master, arouses his will to be master and ends, sooner or later, by making a master of the slave.

In order not to risk even an earned obedience I refuse myself every command.

When I require something and it is denied to me, I do not ask anyone to execute my will; I execute it myself — for example, I can kill — I execute, but I do not order execution.

In executing, I do not enact a rule, I do not impose a law: I accomplish an act—my act.

In executing, I remain anarchist.

In killing, I do not command anyone to die and no one commands me to kill. I could be forced to kill in order to remain anarchist. What I kill is that which contributes to the archy that wants to destroy me. I kill in order to save myself. I kill that which blocks the road of my life, that which hides the sun from me. I do not kill for the pleasure of killing, but for the pleasure of living.

* * * *

By giving (by imposing) a law to other men, I bind myself, I immobilize myself, I deny my turbulent individuality—just as much as by accepting (submitting to) the law of others.

The master must count on the obedience of his subjects, as the slave must count on the authority of his master. The master is at the mercy of his slave, just as the slave is at the mercy of his master. They are bound to one another. Still the slave can renounce his master, for it is not he who has chosen the law to which he is subject; but the master, creator of the law that rules the slaves, cannot renounce his slave.

The master is subject to the society of the slaves. The master lives on slavery much more than the slave himself.

As an anarchist, I rebel against the society of slaves and against the society of masters. Through individualism I am anarchist. Through anarchy I am revolutionary. Nietzsche, who only saw in individuals “the promoters of intellectual colonization and of the new formation of the links of State and Society,” held well back from forecasting the overthrow of the principle of authority, the abolition of the regime of exploitation. The success of a revolution would perhaps have seduced him, but he would have been too afraid of demonstrating weakness of soul by concerning himself with those who still make demands.

Hypnotized by the lone genius of force, Nietzsche, whom so many anarchists would read and love, would not glimpse the creative power of the anarchist idea. And wasn’t he much closer to the dictators of the proletariat than us, libertarians, the one who wrote these lines: “…We count ourselves among the conquerors, we reflect on the necessity of a new order, and also of a new slavery — as for every strengthening, for every elevation of the type “man,” there must be a new variety of enslavement [1] » ?

The Nietzschean Kibaltchiche in the service of the government of Moscow…, that is the “morals in action” of Nietzscheanism.

André Colomer.

[1] Nietzsche: The Gay Science.