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Nietzsche’s Political Materialism: Diagram for a Nietzschean Politics
Nandita Biswas Mellamphy
Nietzsche invents, in a latent manner, a new discipline that we will call ‘Political
Materialism’, destined to occupy and displace the positions of ‘Historical Materialism’. He
provides his object by posing all reality (equivalent to Relations‐of‐Production and
Superstructures) as power and Relations‐of‐Power […]. Contrary to Marxism, which
perceives politics by mediation and delegation […], with the Eternal‐Return/Will‐to‐Power
ER/WP machine [dispositif] Nietzsche provides the possibility of a plastic politics, of an
internal political determination [which is] neither too broad or transcendent, nor too
narrow and restrictive, of the Relations‐of‐Power upon which practical empirical fields are
deduced, specified and qualified.1
In his very complex but novel and enlightening treatise on Nietzschean politics, the
French philosopher François Laruelle articulates a theory of political materialism in Nietzsche’s
thinking, which I will try to elucidate briefly. From the outset, Laruelle makes it clear that what
he means by Nietzsche’s ‘thinking’ does not refer primarily to what Nietzsche said or wrote—or
neglected to say or write—but rather to the way in which Nietzsche’s thinking functions, i.e.
operates. Needless to say, with this type of agenda, Laruelle’s interpretation does not focus on
the hermeneutic, exegetical or doctrinal dimensions of Nietzsche’s many explicit political
statements; indeed one of Laruelle’s main contentions is that although these signifying
elements in no way need be repressed or suppressed, they are nevertheless secondary features
of the fundamental design or layout (agencement) of Nietzsche’s thinking. The basic and most
important characteristic—the one that makes Nietzsche’s political thinking unique from
Laruelle’s point of view—is the operation of an elementary and fundamentally non‐signifying
force‐mechanics that activates the virulence of Nietzsche’s thought. To ‘philosophize with a
hammer’ and to ‘smash idols’ become the basic (that is to say, inherent and internal) political
work of Nietzsche’s elaboration of the will‐to‐power:
Where does Nietzsche’s revolutionary virulence come from, his power to destroy
ontological codes? From what he produces solely from fluent syntax […]: fluid schemas
for morphing statements […]. Our task: […] [to] take up a mechanism, at once theoretical
and practical, which fulfills the function of a Nietzschean mode of thinking that produces
materials or even ‘Nietzschean’ articulations. (Laruelle 1977, p. 74, 75)
1
François Laruelle (1977) : Nietzsche contre Heidegger: Thèses pour une politique nietzschéenne. Paris : Éditions
Payot], p. 31, 25 [all translations from the French original are mine].
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At the heart of Laruelle’s notion of Nietzschean political materialism is the contradiction
qua opposing tendencies produced by the basic mechanics of power‐quanta, or will‐to‐power.
Rather than diagramming Nietzsche’s thinking within a dialectical structure of two interacting
terms motivated by the engine of negation or negativity toward synthesis (as in dialectical
and/or historical materialisms), Laruelle conceives of a four‐fold or chiasmus—‘X’—structure:
one pole diagrams the movement of ‘mastery’ (of the will to ‘say no’, to domination leading to
the will‐to‐knowledge, to truth, to order, to form, to individualization and to unification), and
thus expresses a ‘fascistic’ tendency; the other overlapped but coexisting (yet unrelated and
unmediated) pole diagrams the movement of ‘rebellion’ (of the will to say ‘yes’ to everything,
to squander, to exceed without recuperation, to forget, to affirm). While in traditions of
dialectical materialism the engine of historical movement is the synthesis that results from the
contradictory relations between two terms, (e.g. thesis/antithesis; master/slave,
negation/affirmation), Laruelle posits that in Nietzschean political materialism, contradiction
between opposing tendencies finds no mediation at all (the only ‘relation’ is one of duplicity
rather than of duality says Laruelle), and is instead unsynthesizable, hence basically non‐
signifiable (that is, not essentially characterized by signification and not essentially given to
meaning). Using Nietzsche’s own terminology, it could be said—although Laruelle himself does
not say this—that the one Apollonian pole, driven by the “principle of individuation”2 tending
towards selection, individualization and formalization, plots the human, anthropocentric and
biological movement involved in such processes as cognition and signification; while the other
Dionysian pole is driven by the movement of overcoming the principle of individuation: that is,
of affirming and activating pre‐individual (and thus overhuman) potentialities that break up the
human, anthropocentric and biological (e.g. cognition and signification), tending instead
towards multiplicity, de‐individualization and heterogeneity. “Knowledge is a tool of power […].
The meaning of ‘knowledge’: […] the concept is to be regarded in a strict and narrow
anthropocentric and biological sense” (WP §480).
It is most important in Laruelle’s reading that both poles are operative in Nietzsche’s
thought; the one does not annul or sublate the other, but instead crosses over or perhaps—
even better—double‐crosses the other. This betrayal (or “duplicity” as Laruelle calls it) accounts
for the presence of both fascistic and subversive tendencies in a Nietzschean mode of thinking.
It is in this duplicity that Laruelle develops a theory regarding the inherently political function of
the Nietzsche’s thinking on life and will‐to‐power.
Nietzsche is, in a double sense, the thinker of fascism: he is, in a certain way, a fascist
thinker, but he first and foremost the thinker of the subversion of fascism. The Nietzsche‐
thought is a complex political process with two ‘contradictory’ poles (without mediation):
2
See The Birth of Tragedy, aphorisms 1 and 2.
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the subordinate relation of a secondary fascistic pole (Mastery) to a principal
revolutionary pole (Rebellion). Nietzsche became fascist to better defeat fascism, he
assumed the worst forms of Mastery to become the Rebel. (Laruelle 1977, p. 9) […] We
are all fascist readers of Nietzsche, we are all revolutionary readers of Nietzsche. Our
unity is a contradictory relation (a hierarchy without mediation), just as Nietzsche’s unity
is a contradictory and ‘auto‐critical’ unity. Nietzsche puts the Master and the Rebel in a
relation of duplicity rather than of duality. He liquidates the opposition of monism (the
philosophy of the Master or the Rebel) and dualism (the mediated contradiction of
Master and Rebel). (Laruelle 1977, 9)
Gilles Deleuze appears to make a similar point in his treatment of Nietzsche’s ‘nomadic
thought’, but his characterization differs quite significantly from that of Laruelle: although
Deleuze also ascribes twin characterizations—the nomad and the despot—he calls the nomadic
‘extrinsic’ and the despot ‘intrinsic’, whereas for Laruelle both poles are intrinsic and inherent
to Nietzsche’s thinking. “The nomad and his war‐machine stand opposite the despot and his
administrative machine, and the extrinsic nomadic unity opposite the intrinsic unity. And yet
they are so interrelated or interdependent that the despot will set himself the problem of
integrating, internalizing the nomadic war‐machine, while the nomad attempts to invent an
administration for his conquered empire. Their ceaseless opposition is such that they are
inextricable from one another” (Deleuze 2004, p. 259). For Deleuze both the nomadic and the
despotic mediate one another, such that for Deleuze, Nietzsche’s most profound contribution is
“to have made thought a nomadic power” (Deleuze 2004, 260). But for Laruelle, it is the
ambiguity or fundamental irreducibility/irresolvability of Nietzsche’s notion of will‐to‐power
which is described as the internal duplicity between conflicting tendencies resulting in both
fascistic and subversive expressions, that defines the inherently political aspect of Nietzsche’s
thinking.
[There is] [n]o question of taking refuge in a historical and neutral reading, nor in the
labour of a Nietzschean reading, without having to enter as contradictorily and without
mediation in an intense scene of forces, pulsions, relations of power that are no longer
textual or signifying “in the last instance” (Laruelle 1977, 11) […] If this complex relation is
regularly amputated and mutilated by interpreters, it is precisely because it accounts for
the formula by which Nietzsche has posed, a priori, the internal possibility of the
falsification of his thought, [a] constitutive falsification (Laruelle 1977, p. 14) […] Why is
our complex political conjecture where a fascistic line crosses with an otherwise
continued subversive line interested in a Nietzsche‐thinking…? Because the specificity of
Nietzsche is to tie […] this process of fascisization […] and the political and materials
conditions of its subversion […] Few have understood the meaning of the greatest of
misunderstandings, to know that Nietzsche prefers flowing with the adversary as long as
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the adversary drowns: the messenger dies in his message, this is the message of
Zarathustra” (Laruelle 1977, p. 17) […] [For] the possibility of producing, in the same
stroke, contradictory effects according to readers, the possibility of inoculating some with
fascist poison which creates for others the revolutionary remedy of resistance…for
example for the same utterances to receive a fascistic sanction (in the past) and a
revolutionary one (now), you have to go looking for it in the quadripartite operation of his
thought. This internal duplicity of the two poles in relation to immediate contradiction
and its plasticity makes Nietzsche superior to Marx for reflecting on the political problems
of our times. (Laruelle 1977, p. 28, 29)
Laruelle departs from ‘post‐structuralist’ accounts of Nietzsche that focus on discourse
and the discursive/constructivist aspects of Nietzsche’s thinking. For instance in ‘Nietzsche,
Genealogy, History’, Michel Foucault conceives of power almost entirely within the schema of
relation, the body being “the inscribed surface of events (traced by language and dissolved by
ideas)” and the task of genealogy being the exposing of “a body totally imprinted by history and
the process of history’s destruction of the body” (Foucault 1977, 148). For Foucault, the process
of bodily inscription is the “single drama” that stages the “repeated play of dominations” in the
genealogy of the human (Foucault 1977, 150), and so Foucault’s interpretation of Nietzschean
genealogy focuses on this ‘signifying’ tendency.3 In Nietzsche and Philosophy, Deleuze touches
on the non‐signifying dimensions of Nietzsche’s thinking (much more so than does his essay on
nomad thought): “Dionysus and Apollo are therefore not opposed as the terms of a
contradiction but rather as two antithetical ways of resolving it; Apollo mediately, in the
contemplation of the plastic image, Dionysus immediately in the reproduction, in the musical
symbol of the will” (Deleuze 1983, 12). But even though Deleuze recognizes the non‐mediating,
non‐discursive pole in Nietzsche’s thinking, his conception of ‘force’ still seems to privilege the
individuating, formalizing, hence discursive dimension, such that his articulation of the political
nature of Nietzsche’s thought is directly tied to its individuating and mediated tendency: “Every
force is related to others and it either obeys or commands. What defines a body is this relation
3
One can, however, detect the ‘presence’ of a non‐signifying or ‘agrammatical’ tendency in Foucault’s thought, as I
have argued (see Mellamphy and Biswas Mellamphy 2005) and as Judith Butler (1989, 1997) has suggested. While
Butler’s point is that this is an unintended consequence of Foucault’s reading, I would follow Laruelle is seeing this
as a strength and the sign of a strong Nietzscheanism in Foucault’s thinking: “The risk of renormalization is
persistently there” writes Butler in her discussion of Nietzsche and Foucault, but so is “the possibility of a reversal
of signification” (Butler 1997, 93, 94). “[P]olitically mobilizing what Nietzsche, in the Genealogy of Morals, called
the ‘sign chain’, Foucault ‘opens the way for an inauguration of signifying possibilities that exceed those to which
the term has been previously bound’, explains Butler (1997, 94). But just as we noted at the beginning of our study
that the agrammatical or affective body is neither ‘stable and self identical’ nor ‘a body prior to […] inscription’
(but rather, an ‘inherently untidy’ body inextricably bound to—double‐bound, indeed double‐crossed by—the
‘body proper’), so in this case, in this conclusion, must we note that the possibilities inherent in and afforded by
this ‘abjected’, ‘abnormal’, ‘agrammatical’ body exceed signification itself: they are, as such, an inauguration not of
‘signifying possibilities’ but of insignificant ones, of possibilities beyond signification, possibilities not yet
significant” (Mellamphy and Biswas Mellamphy 2005, 47).
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between dominant and dominated forces. Every relationship of forces constitutes a body—
whether it is chemical, biological, social or political” (Deleuze 1983, 40). Although Deleuze does
aver that every body “is always the fruit of chance” (1983, 40), his conception of the mechanics
of active and reactive forces is fundamentally relational such that ‘chance’ becomes ever‐
mediated in the process of bodily individuation. For Laruelle, however, the non‐signifying,
subversive pole of Nietzsche’s thought is not mediated by the other individuating pole; in fact,
for Laruelle, this is precisely why it can be dominant in its activity of subverting signification.
Deleuze’s conception cannot give autonomy to the non‐discursive.
A revealing expression of the consequences of Deleuze’s schema can be found in
‘Nomad Thought’, where he writes that “if Nietzsche does not belong in philosophy, perhaps it
is because he is the first to conceive of another kind of discourse, a counter‐philosophy, in
other words, a discourse that is first and foremost nomadic, whose utterances would be
produced not by a rational administrative machine—philosophers would be the bureaucrats of
pure reason—but by a mobile war‐machine” (2004, 259). By contrast, in Laruelle’s diagram,
what is truly unique about Nietzsche’s thinking is the autonomy and non‐mediated power of
the non‐signifying pole that nonetheless disrupts and infects the expression of every signifying
and informational event. “From the outset, it is necessary to think the possibility of mastery
outside of (or apart from) discourse, not only as force, but as power of resistance or power of
the Other, so as to not fall back under the law of the signifier with a exoteric concept of power
and libido (natural energy)” (Laruelle 1977, p. 58).
Let us turn to the question of which ‘materials’ would constitute a Nietzschean
‘materialism’, and ask how this materialism could be conceived as inherently ‘political’.
According to Nietzsche, “all organic functions can be traced back to this will‐to‐power” (BGE
§36); will‐to‐power can neither be conceptualized monadically nor reductively, as in
materialistic atomism in which the source of causation lies is some kind of indivisible substance
or monad (“as an atomon”: see BGE §12), nor can it be conceptualized in terms of a deductive
nomological model (e.g. a universal law): rather, for Nietzsche will‐to‐power is nothing other
than the play of unequal and colliding force quanta, the transient but ongoing “establishment
of power relationships” (WP §630), i.e. the struggle “between two or more forces” (WP §631)
of “unequal power” (WP §633). Forces are not knowable “in themselves” but only in their
effects (“Has a force ever been demonstrated?: no, only effects translated into a completely
foreign language”; WP §620). Forces can only be known—‘unified’, ‘signified’—because they
have “form‐shaping” tendencies and capacities (WP §686); they are not ‘things’ but the
movement of pre‐individual affective ‘potentialities’; they are the condition for the formation of
what we call ‘things’. By ‘pre‐individual’, I borrow a term from Gilbert Simondon to describe the
differential but latent fund qua information that continuously modifies biological and psychical
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processes of individuation. Christoph Cox has used the term ‘pre‐individual’ to characterize
Nietzsche’s musical ontology in which the “genesis of Individuals” arises from Dionysian “pre‐
individual forces and materials” (2006, p. 500) that are not inherently subjective or objective
but out of which the struggle for individuation arises:
[O]ut of the simplest forms striving toward the most complex, out of the stillest, most
rigid, coldest forms toward the hottest, most turbulent, most self‐contradictory, and then
returning home to the simple out of this abundance, out of the play of contradictions
back to the joy of concord, still affirming itself in this uniformity of its courses and its
years, blessing itself as that which must return eternally, as a becoming that knows no
satiety, no disgust, no weariness: this, my Dionysian world of the eternally self‐creating,
the eternally self‐destroying (WP §1067).
The pre‐individual is not an undifferentiated state but precisely a differential collision
between a dominating or mastering tendency and a subordinating tendency. This pre‐individual
force‐mechanics—which constitutes the will‐to‐power—is the basic, immanent, matter of
phenomenal reality and that which gives statements and discursive formations their signifying
charge and political effects. Of the published works, it is in the Gay Science that we find the
clearest articulation of these points:
Origin of knowledge.—Over immense periods of time the intellect produced nothing but
errors. A few of these proved to be useful and helped to preserve the species: those who
hit upon or inherited these had better luck in their struggle for themselves and their
progeny. Such erroneous articles of faith, which were continually inherited, until they
became almost part of the basic endowment of the species, include the following: that
there are enduring things; that there are equal things; that there are things, substances;
bodies; that a thing is what it appears to be (GS §110) […] Those, for example, who did
not know how to find often enough what is "equal" as regards both nourishment and
hostile animals—those, in other words, who subsumed things too slowly and cautiously—
were favoured with a lesser probability of survival than those who guessed immediately
upon encountering similar instances that they must be equal […]. In order that the
concept of substance could originate—which is indispensable for logic though in the
4
“[T]he individual is to be understood as having a relative reality, occupying only a certain phase of the whole
being in question—a phase that therefore carries the implication of a preceding preindividual state, and that, even
after individuation, does not exist in isolation, since individuation does not exhaust in the single act of its
appearance all the potentials embedded in the preindividual state. Individuation, moreover, not only brings the
individual to light but also the individual‐milieu dyad. In this way, the individual possesses only a relative existence
in two senses: because it does not represent the totality of the being, and because it is merely the result of a phase
in the being's development during which it existed neither in the form of an individual nor as the principle of
individuation” (Simondon 1992, p. 300). Also see Gilbert Simondon, L'individuation à la lumière des notions de
forme et d'information (Grenoble: Éditions Jerôme Millon), 2005.
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strictest sense nothing real corresponds to it—it was likewise necessary that for a long
time one did not see nor perceive the changes in things. The beings that did not see
precisely had an advantage over those that saw everything "in flux" (GS §111) […] We
have arranged for ourselves a world in which we can live− by posi ng bodies, lines,
planes, causes and effects, motion and rest, form and content; without these articles of
faith nobody now could endure life. But that does not prove them. Life is no argument.
The conditions of life might include error (GS §121).
The instinct for self‐preservation motivates the will‐to‐knowledge and accounts for why,
in Nietzsche’s thinking of force, reactive forces gain expression and can dominate over active
forces. “All thought, judgment, perception, considered as comparison, has as its precondition a
‘positing of equality’, and earlier still a ‘making equal’. The process of making equal is the same
as the process of incorporation of appropriated material in the amoeba” (WP §501). Making
things ‘equal’ and ‘substantive’ allows endurance beyond the particular life‐cycle of an
organism, and although this permits the development of the ‘organs of knowledge’ (WP §480),
it is generally a condition of distress which curtails the instinct for the expansion of power. A
basic premise of Nietzsche’s ‘naturalism’ would be that “in nature it is not conditions of distress
that are dominant but overflow and squandering, even to the point of absurdity. The struggle
for existence is only an exception, a temporary restriction of the will to life”; “growth and
expansion […]—in accordance with the will‐to‐power” “is the will of life” (GS §349). Hence
‘culture’ can become “transfigured physis” (UM III §3) to the extent that, following Laruelle’s
chiasmus diagram, the force‐mechanics of the Dionysian pre‐individual, a‐signifying tendencies
of will‐to‐power continuously subvert the mastering, signifying, individuating Apollonian
tendencies of the will‐to‐knowledge. “In order for a particular species to maintain itself and
increase its power, […] a species grasps a certain amount of reality in order to become master
of it, in order to press it into service” (WP §480).
Knowledge is a product of experience, but unlike Kant—who claimed that knowledge
was the product of transcendental faculties like understanding, reason, imagination—for
Nietzsche, knowledge is product of will‐to‐power, which is, moreover, not just sense‐data qua
lived experience (as in phenomenal empiricism) because sense‐data is already a ‘translation’ or
‘transcription’ of pre‐individual force‐mechanics. While interpretations of Nietzsche often
characterize his thinking within a philosophy of subjectivity, the subject is a fiction of the will‐
to‐knowledge’s mastering tendency towards signification. It is will‐to‐power that interprets, not
a subject: “The will‐to‐power interprets (—it is a question of interpretation when an organ is
constructed—): it defines limits, determines degrees, variations of power” (WP §643); “[t]he
mistake lies in the fictitious insertion of a subject” (WP §632). “Linguistic means of expression
are useless for expressing ‘becoming’; it accords with our inevitable need to posit a crude world
of stability, of ‘things’, etc. […] There is no ‘will’: there are treaty drafts of will that are
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constantly increasing or losing power” (WP §715). Humans are animals that communicate
linguistically and symbolically, but from the physiological view of will‐to‐power, language and
knowledge are already ‘translations’ (übertragen) or modifications of a process in which
collisions of force‐quanta are represented and signified as nerve‐stimuli, then as image and
then as concept. “First images … Then words, applied to images. Finally concepts, possible only
when there are words—the collecting together of many images in something nonvisible but
audible (word)” (WP §506). “I am afraid we are not rid of God because we still have faith in
grammar” (TI ‘Reason in Philosophy’, §5).
The chiasmus structure (the duplicitous but non‐mediated poles of mastery and
subversion) also apply to cognitive processes which are, according to Nietzsche, largely being
‘directed’ by non‐cognitive events. Even the ‘inner world’ of subjective perception, as such,
should be treated as a phenomenality (WP §477), effects of the two complicitous tendencies. In
such a schema, ‘becoming‐conscious’ would imply the tendency toward mastery (e.g. of
unifying ‘consciousness’ as ‘thinking’ and ‘knowing’), which is a ‘fascistic’ reactive tendency in
Laruellian terms, whereas the opposing tendency is oriented toward actively subverting,
complexifying, and breaking up the dominating tendencies of consciousness: “everything that
enters consciousness as “unity” is already tremendously complex” (WP §489); “[e]verything of
which we become conscious is arranged, simplified, schematized, interpreted through and
through—the actual process of inner ‘perception’, the causal connection between thoughts,
feelings, desires, between subject and object, are absolutely hidden from us—and are perhaps
purely imaginary” (WP §477). Moreover, the granularity of the active, non‐cognitive subversive
tendency is finer than its cognitive counterpart; the coarser cognitive tendency accomplishes its
‘mastering’ function by ‘making equal’ (that is, schematizing, organizing, simplifying, making
familiar) dynamic differences of fine detail so that the organs of sense‐awareness can
accomplish their representational functions. “The entire apparatus of knowledge is an
apparatus for abstraction and simplification” (WP §503); only those perceptions that are useful
to the organic development of the species are selected to become‐conscious; “this means: we
have senses for only a selection of perceptions—those with which we have to concern
ourselves in order to preserve ourselves.” (WP §505)…”We have projected the conditions of our
preservation as predicates of being in general.” (WP 507); “The coarser organ sees much
apparent equality”; “the spirit wants equality, i.e., to subsume a sense impression into an
existing series”…”the will to equality is the will‐to‐power—the belief that something is thus and
thus (the essence of judgment) is the consequence of a will that as much as possible shall be
equal” (WP §511).
Will‐to‐power is not transcendental (e.g. it does not have its source in innate ideas that
exist in the mind prior to experience), nor is it merely sensual/empirical (e.g. it is not derived
from the senses and the senses alone). Rather, will‐to‐power is immanent, im‐mediate, proto‐
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material (conceptualized here as conditioning materiality rather than as constituting the
substance or content of matter, or hyle, that subsequently fills in form, or morphe), and I would
argue that Laruelle’s quadripartite diagram structure—cross‐referenced with the Simondonian
account of the pre‐individual—best accounts for the active and autonomous forces of
subversion that are the really dominant and virulent powers and which make Nietzsche’s
thinking unique in the history of western political thought. Will‐to‐power is the Dionysian pre‐
individual or latent tendency that resists and subverts the dominating tendency of the
Apollonian principle of individuation, and which—in so doing—continuously asserts itself as
active rather than reactive. To assert the primacy of the mastering pole over the subversive
pole—that is, to see them as dialectically mediated—would be to fall back into a reactive view
of will‐to‐power: will‐to‐power as the will‐to‐knowledge. Rather than think of will‐to‐power as
the dialectical relation of a dominating force over a dominated one (especially since we cannot
think of the Apollo‐Dionysus relation dialectically since the Dionysian, as the pre‐individual, is
involved on an ongoing basis modifying the Apollonian principle of individuation at every
moment), Laruelle thinks of individuation as non‐mediated duplicity or affirmation of a
primarily active subversive tendency modifying a secondary dominating, formalizing/signifying
tendency.
Let us stretch the political subject to the four corners of the chiasmus. It is precisely the
categories of Fascism, of Mastery, of Rebellion that will change the political sense in
function of this complex machine: the fascistic pole makes sense of an unlimited,
planetary use, of negation, and the production of effects of technical, organizational
powers and of mastery. The revolutionary or rebel, [makes sense] of a certain use of
affirmation and of the production of effects of active resistance to all dominant powers
(Laruelle 1977, p. 10‐11).
Libidinal determination presupposes a matter that ‘individuates’ or determines Relations
of power, contradictory if you like, no longer passing further by a specific form. This
materialist determination of Relations of production is made however, at once, short of
and beyond species and genre, of form, essence and quality. What then individuates
contradiction? The determination of contradiction is made no longer from form
(transcendental in Althusser, and rationalist in other Marxists), but from what we will call
the Other or Difference, and which Nietzsche provided the compositional formula…within
the affinity or correlation of two characteristics at once syntactical and materialist:
activity as instrinsic definition of power or rather of Relations of power; affirmation as
intrinsic definition of libidinal material or rather of the relation that constitutes all
material determination (Laruelle 1977, p. 33).
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Laruelle offers a different dynamics from which to diagram will‐to‐power’s mechanism
in the form of a chiasmic, X‐structure, rather than a dialectical one; this is a superior model
because it accounts for the productions of individuations (will‐to‐power’s ‘form‐giving’
capacity) based on the concurrence of two overlapping but unmediated tendencies which could
account for the fact that in Nietzsche’s thinking, it is the reactive that comes to dominate in the
history of western societies. Will‐to‐power is an internal pre‐individual differential im‐
mediation, not an external law subjecting organisms as in Darwin’s theory of natural selection
nor a dialectical law driven by negation and negativity; in Laruelle’s schema, the will‐to‐life (the
primacy of an a‐signifying pole) is not propelled by negation and reactivity, but rather by
affirmation and activity. The internal structure of will‐to‐power is already political insofar as it
already always tends toward mastery as well as the opposite tendency, subversion. This is why
both tendencies are wholly present in Nietzsche’s published and unpublished works, and why
the question of ‘politics’ cannot be merely resolved by placing Nietzsche’s statements within
the context of the right/left spectrum of political ideologies (e.g. yes Nietzsche was a fascist
because he was a Prussian sympathizer; no Nietzsche was really a democrat because he is a
rebel against authority, etc.). This ascription of Nietzsche as either ‘fascist’ or ‘democratic’
misses the point of the inherent and internal political materialism at the heart of will‐to‐power.
One can and must always detect both the tendency towards mastery (reactivity) as well as the
tendency to subvert or rebel against mastery (activity).
Although Laruelle’s interpretation of Nietzsche was written before the formal exposition
of his concept of ‘non‐philosophy’,5 it does share with non‐philosophy the propensity to refuse
the philosophical ‘decision’ (either/or) structure of western thought, in order to articulate how
the decision (between fascism and subversion for example) comes to be structured in
Nietzsche’s thinking. And while Deleuze’s account would describe the nature of the human
subject as the outside folded in (following the logic of the ‘fold’), that is as an immanently
political, social, embedded subject, Laruelle uses the concept of the ‘chiasmus’ to describe the
destiny of the human subject as distended and pulled apart between two non‐mediating poles
or tendencies of Mastery and Subversion. In qualifying Nietzsche’s thinking as political
materialism, Laruelle’s aim is not to deny that there are both fascistic and subversive
tendencies in Nietzsche—mastery and resistance to mastery—but to affirm the double‐dealing
(duplicity) of both tendencies which produces a text, a thinking that cuts and cleaves rather
than conserves and preserves. The political agents are the impulses that vie with one another
5
See for example: François Laruelle (2011): Philosophies of Difference: A Critical Introduction to Non‐Philosophy.
Laruelle (1999): “Summary of Non‐Philosophy”. John Mullarkey and Anthony Paul Smith (2012): Laruelle and Non‐
Philosophy. Ray Brassier (2003): “Axiomatic Heresy: The Non‐Philosophy of Francois Laruelle”. Anthony Paul Smith
(2010 ): “The Philosopher and the Heretic: Translator’s Introduction”.
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11
to produce political effects in human subjects. Force is not fundamentally mediated by
representation (it is the active discharging of energetic materials) but from the point of view
that sees the will‐to‐knowledge and mastery as primary—e.g. a dialectical point of view which
is necessarily a ‘reactive’ perspective—force is always subject to representation, be it physico‐
mathematical or logico‐grammatical, and the question of politics becomes secondary to and
mediated by the discursive. Thus the thrust of Laruelle’s interpretation of Nietzsche’s political
materialism is to resist and subordinate the ontologico‐existential reading in favour of one that
is politico‐physiological or materialist and which sees in Nietzsche’s thinking a mechanism that
‘cuts’ and cleaves a subject (Laruelle 1977, 17). “The political—la politique—is no longer an
instance, nor an object, nor a practice, it is a Continent, this is Nietzsche’s good news: it is co‐
extensive, but transversally, to instances, to practices, or to instruments…It belongs to the
internal working of objects and their libidinal nature ‘in the last instance’, without constituting a
grounding‐practice (politics par excellence) nor a grounded and derived practice (class struggle
grounded on the struggle of economic classes)” (Laruelle 1977, 23). According to Laruelle,
Nietzsche’s will‐to‐power must be understood as the “production, reproduction and
destruction of political agents, that is to say, of the partial organs of power (which Nietzsche
calls paleonymically forces)…the task is to produce political agents (partial organs of power)
with fascistic or critical functions (properties, uses or effects)” (Laruelle 1977, 23). The internal
political definition of will‐to‐power as pulsions or forces are the real political agents of and in
Nietzsche’s thought.
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Abbreviations of Nietzsche’s Texts
BGE Beyond Good and Evil
BT The Birth of Tragedy
GS The Gay Science
TI Twilight of the Idols
UM Untimely Meditations
WP The Will to Power
Nandita Biswas Mellamphy (Western University, London)