Why is Nietzsche held in such high regard by Leftist theorists such as Focault, Deleazue, and others?
I'm nearly finished with the first essay of On the Genealogy of Morals and, among other things, he's literally said:
I really don't get how the fuck there's anything Left Wing about Nietzsche can somebody give me some perspective here?
Well you have to find out how much of to the left Foucault, Deleuze, Bataille etc. actually are. Which I think the answer to is not all that much.
Secondly, they all appropriate Nietzsche to create their own ideas/systems.
Adorno/Horkheimer argued that while Nietzsche was better than the other modern philosophers only selective aspects of his thought were positive (they devote to him and Sade a whole chapter in Dialectic of the Enlightenment, which is also very Nietzschean in itself).
Finally I think Guattari and Deleuze were the only ones who successfully merged Nietzsche and Marx together in creating their master work Anti-Oedipus. Since they take Nietzsche not as an authority but mutate him to create their own chimerical philosophy.
Nietzsche is very much a right wing philosopher.
I see. I'm not very well read in the French Left, so I suppose that's why I don't get their boner for Nietzsche.
But really so far Nietzsche just seems like Stirner for aristocrats. I don't really see there being even a lot of intellectual value in reading his work except to notice the problems in it.
When I read him I can't help but think of this pic
He wrote for aristocrats. The idea of the ubermench and the will to live can be applied to many ideologies. As well as the slave morality sometimes being extrapolated as being the morality that the lower class follows because the aristocrats tell them to.
Nothing about him is left wing. If you are leftist it's best to disregard his works.
Accoeding to Wikipedia (I know lol), Rudolf Rocker was influenced by Nietzche. And Murray Bookchin says the same about Emma Goldman, except in passing. It's really interesting that he's looked on as just a proto-fascist considering how many leftists were influenced by him.
See that was the other side of my OP. Rudolf Rocker and Emma Goldman were both 100 percent in favor of what Nietzsche would call "slave morality poisoning society" yet both are on the record as quoting Nietzsche. I don't get it.
The only way it works is if you take his philosophy out of its own context which defeats the purpose and waters down your own argument.
...
What are you even trying to say?
In my OP all I asked was why people who are considered to be on the Left (are Emma Goldman and Rudolf Rocker not Leftists but "leftists" according to you?) admire Nietzsche since he seems to be inescapably Right wing and if I was missing something by interpreting it this way
I can't say one way or the other definitively since I haven't actually read Nietzche, but there's at least one commentator that argues that basically Nietzche wasn't actually anti-slave morality. He was just more critical of it for reasons I can't remember. I'll post a link if I find out who it was.