March 27, 2023
De Launay, a philosophy researcher at the French National Centre for Scientific Research, denounces German philosophers Theodor W. Adorno, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Max Horkheimer for failing to explain why Nietzsche became an “object of obsession... for the Nazis” in this disappointing English-language debut. The Third Reich warped Nietzsche’s ideology to reinforce its visions of racial superiority, the author writes, and to that end corrupted the philosopher’s idea of the “will to power,” which was intended to denote an individual’s self-determination, as a Nazi justification for domination. Tracing Nietzsche’s posthumous Nazi reception partly to his antisemitic sister (who selectively edited Nietzsche’s unpublished writings to highlight racist themes), De Launay contends that Nietzsche called Jews “beyond any doubt the strongest, toughest, and purest race now living in Europe.” In fact, he envisioned a “dawn of a new conversion of values” that would negate both Jewish and Christian identities altogether, obliterating “the rigid traditions of given national identities and heritages.” Despite some excellent kernels of insight, De Launay’s dense, specialist writing (“The causality that Nietzsche believes in is that of will over will. But this causality is positioned in opposition to simply mechanistic causality”) is too often impenetrable. It’s an admirable project let down by its execution.