Critique, Metacritique, and Making the (World of) Difference

Abstract This essay addresses Losurdo’s response to the metaquestion of why, if Nietzsche was an avowed aristocratic radical, he can continue to be received as a liberal or even a democratic thinker, whose appropriation by the far right sparks outrage (Section 1). This essay considers what I take to be the key idea underlying Losurdo’s Nietzsche’s ‘theoretical surplus’ (Section 2), which allows Losurdo both to explain the attraction of many broadly on the non-socialist Left to Nietzsche, and to show that this attraction is nevertheless mistaken, hermeneutically, as well as leading them into inescapable proximity with radically reactionary modes of social thought. Having introduced the distinction (Section 3), I will apply it to a rich section of Dawn (Section 4) and show the work it can do, before showing the distance it allows us to re-establish between Nietzsche and a progressive thinker he admired (and whom the author is presently working on), namely Voltaire (Section 5).