Nietzsche, Adorno, and the Musical Spirit of Ressentiment and Redemption

Chapter 3 Nietzsche, Adorno, and the Musical Spirit of Ressentiment and Redemption

Nancy S. Love

1 The Return of “Bad Nietzsche”1

I did not expect to revisit the ties between Nietzsche, Marx, and critical theory more than three decades after I first published Marx, Nietzsche, and Modernity (1986).2 Yet the current political context makes this return most relevant. Link- ages between Nietzsche and Nazism have resurfaced, despite multiple decades of scholarly attempts to sever them.3 The rising tide of hate speech and hate crimes in the United States and Europe today (Potok 2017) is partly fueled by a self-proclaimed Nietzschean will to (white) power. The British racist skinhead band Skrewdriver’s lead song, “Hail the New Dawn,” named after Nietzsche’s book, Morgenröthe: Gedanken über die Moralischen, continues to sound a clari- on call to white supremacists (Donaldson 1984).4 In his autobiography, Arno Michaelis, a former racist skinhead and lead singer of the white power band, Centurion, writes: “Hearing that song [Hail the New Dawn] enticed me down a path rife with violence, hate, death, and imprisonment that I had narrowly escaped” (2012: 103). Banners displayed recently on many U.S. college and uni- versity campuses in conjunction with #ProjectSiege, an initiative of Identity Evropa, a white supremacist hate group, proudly state “A New Dawn is Break- ing Rise and Get Active” (Anti-Defamation League 2017; Bawab 2017; Southern Poverty Law Center 2017). William Pierce, former leader of the National Alli- ance and founder of Resistance Records, once the major distributor of white power music in the US, traces the spiritual roots of his “cosmotheism,” a racial religion that stresses the “cosmic stakes of the fight for white survival,” to

1 The phrase “bad Nietzsche” comes from Sean Illing 2017. https://www.vox.com/2017/8/17/ 16140846/nietzsche-richard-spencer-alt-right-nazism. 2 The discussions here of Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals and creditor/debtor relations draw on this earlier work. 3 The now classic example is Walter Kaufmann’s Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Anti- Christ, 1974. 4 The English translation is The Dawn of Day (or Daybreak): Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality.

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Nietzsche’s philosophy of the will to power. Pierce claims that Nietzsche ex- pressed “the necessity for our race to begin ascending…the Upward Path once again” (Quoted in Strom 2012). Ben Klassen, founder of the World Church of the Creator, invokes Nietzsche to attack Christianity as a religion that denies the natural law of survival of the fittest, espouses life-denying virtues of compas- sion, equality, and sacrifice, and undermines white racial loyalty, unity, and, most important, pride. He also blames a Jewish media conspiracy for white “brain pollution” and claims “The main problem is to straighten out the White Man’s thinking and get him back to sanity” (1973: book 1, chapter 1). Richard Spencer, architect of the alt-right, stated in a recent interview, “You could say I was red-pilled by Nietzsche,” a term from The Matrix, which refers to a process of awakening and transformation (Quoted in Wood 2017). Spencer praises Ni- etzsche for his critique of democracy and Christianity, defense of aristocratic values, and embrace of heroic men, such as Napoleon and Wagner (Harkinson 2016). Multiple posts on Stormfront, until recently the major white supremacist website, invoke the Nazi’s critique of degenerate music in discussions of how Wagner – unlike Nietzsche – capitulated to the Jews (http://www.stormfront. org). Sean Illing (2017) sums it up best: “‘Bad Nietzsche’ is back, and he looks a lot like he did in the early 20th century when his ideas were unjustly appropri- ated by the (original) Nazis.” Let me state clearly up front that Nietzsche’s critiques of anti-Semitism and European nationalism provide ample evidence that fascist politics is in- consistent with his philosophical commitments.5 Yet, once again, scholars must ask: What continues to prompt such readings of Nietzsche’s philosophy? Do they arise from the spirit of ressentiment he criticized or from something else? The question is particularly vexing today given the prominence of identity politics across the political spectrum. In Breitbart’s “An Establishment Conservative’s Guide to the Alt-Right,” Allum Bokhari and Milo Yiannopoulos (2016) argue that “The politics of identity, when it comes from women, lgbt people, blacks and other non-white, non-straight, non-male demographics is seen as acceptable – even when it descends into outright hatred. Any discus- sion of white identity, or white interests, is a heretical offence.” They and the alt-right, more generally, challenge this perceived double-standard:

5 Nietzsche’s sister, Elizabeth Forster-Nietzsche, who married Bernhard Forster, an avowed racial nationalist and anti-Semite, bears primary responsibility for the association of his philosophy with German National Socialism. Although some of Nietzsche’s ideas, such as his distinction between master and slave morality, lend themselves to such readings, Nietzsche never intended his philosophy to support fascist regimes. See Yimiyahu Yovel 1994.