Nietzsche on the Origin of the State

Nietzsche (GM II 17, transl. H. B. Samuel):

I used the word “State”; my meaning is self-evident: namely, a herd of blond beasts of prey, a race of conquerors and masters, which with all its war-like organisation and all its organising power pounces with its terrible claws on a population, in numbers possibly tremendously superior, but as yet formless, as yet nomad. Such is the origin of the “State.”

We heard of these “blond beasts” in GM I 11:

It is impossible not to recognise at the core of all these aristocratic races the beast of prey; the magnificent blond beast, avidly rampant for spoil and victory; this hidden core needed an outlet from time to time, the beast must get loose again, must return into the wilderness—the Roman, Arabic, German, and Japanese nobility, the Homeric heroes, the Scandinavian Vikings, are all alike in this need. It is the aristocratic races who have left the idea “Barbarian” on all the tracks in which they have marched; nay, a consciousness of this very barbarianism, and even a pride in it, manifests itself even in their highest civilisation (for example, when Pericles says to his Athenians in that celebrated funeral oration, “Our audacity has forced a way over every land and sea, rearing everywhere imperishable memorials of itself for good and for evil”).

The “barbarians” that so endangered the Western Empire in its last days, the pressure of whose bearing down hastened the Empire’s collapse, were the same blond beasts that reached a cultural pinnacle in the Middle Ages and revived the Empire in December 800.

GM II 17 continues:

That fantastic theory that makes it begin with a contract is, I think, disposed of. He who can command, he who is a master by “nature,” he who comes on the scene forceful in deed and gesture—what has he to do with contracts? Such beings defy calculation, they come like fate, without cause, reason, notice, excuse, they are there as the lightning is there, too terrible, too sudden, too convincing, too “different,” to be personally even hated. Their work is an instinctive creating and impressing of forms, they are the most involuntary, unconscious artists that there are […].

This “instinctive creating and impressing” is utterly different from the laboured inauthenticity of the theatrical totalitarian state, discussed by Susan Sontag in “Fascinating Fascism” (NYRB, 6 Feb., 1975). This instinctiveness is the hallmark of the self-regarding master; but the camp staginess of twentieth-century fascism only reveals, with their deep and manifest ressentiment, its distance from the thinker whose memory it presumes to invoke.

GM II 17 continues:

[T]heir appearance produces instantaneously a scheme of sovereignty which is live, in which the functions are partitioned and apportioned, in which above all no part is received or finds a place, until pregnant with a “meaning” in regard to the whole.

Douglas Smith (Penguin, 1996) translates “scheme of sovereignty” as “structure of domination”: a sort of emblem of how Nietzsche’s readers have changed in these last decades—and how they in turn have changed Nietzsche.

Addendum, Jan. 2020: https://ferguscullen.blogspot.com/2020/01/herrschafts-gebilde-schemes-of.html. On Herrschafts-Gebilde.

The impact of this line of thinking on the conservative revolution in Germany is discussed in Mohler’s book (transl. Devlin, Radix, 2018), pp. 179–81.

Susan Sontag on Aestheticised Politics

Susan Sontag in “Fascinating Fascism”, NYRB (6 Feb., 1975):

Although Triumph of the Will has no narrative voice it does open with a written text that heralds the rally as the redemptive culmination of German history. But this opening commentary is the least original of the ways in which the film is tendentious. Triumph of the Will represents an already achieved and radical transformation of reality: history become theater. In her book published in 1935, Riefenstahl had told the truth. The Nuremberg Rally “was planned not only as a spectacular mass meeting—but as a spectacular propaganda film […]. The ceremonies and precise plans of the parades, marches, processions, the architecture of the halls and stadium were designed for the convenience of the cameras.” How the Party convention was staged was determined by the decision to produce Triumph of the Will. The event, instead of being an end in itself, served as the set of a film which was then to assume the character of an authentic documentary. Anyone who defends Riefenstahl’s films as documentaries, if documentary is to be distinguished from propaganda, is being ingenuous. In Triumph of the Will, the document (the image) is no longer simply the record of reality; “reality” has been constructed to serve the image.

The ceremonies that are the subject of TW are themselves the “transformation of reality: history become theater [sic]”; “‘reality has been constructed to serve the image.” This is politics as total artwork (Gesamtkunstwerk), or “politics in the grand style”. Aestheticized politics is inauthentic because enacted with its sense-reception in mind, guiding that enactment. It’s misleading; or it contains a lie.

Bear in mind David B. Hinton’s response to Sontag (NYRB, 18 Sept., 1975) re. her claim that “the Party convention was staged was determined by the decision to produce Triumph of the Will”:

Riefenstahl filmed just one Rally in entirety; the buildings were designed to stand for centuries. As can be seen in Speer’s memoirs or in any objective appraisal of Nazi art and architecture, the raison d’être of that architecture existed quite independently of its cinematic possibilities.

And:

Riefenstahl has stated in later interviews that planning for the film did not commence until she arrived in Nuremberg a week before the Rally started.

And on what Sontag seems to wish to pass off as Riefenstahl’s letting something slip in a pre-denazification text (“In her book published in 1935, Riefenstahl had told the truth. The Nuremberg Rally “was planned not only as a spectacular mass meeting—but as a spectacular propaganda film […]. The ceremonies and precise plans of the parades, marches, processions, the architecture of the halls and stadium were designed for the convenience of the cameras”), but which Hinton discovers is an unattributed paraphrase (not the first in Sontag’s essay…) of Kracauer:

Even more astonishing, however, is Ms. Sontag’s use of a purported quote from Riefenstahl’s 1935 book, Hinter den Kulissen des Reichsparteitag Films. Sontag uses the quote in an attempt to use Riefenstahl’s own words to disprove some of her later statements. […] I can personally attest to having studied the book from cover to cover in a vain attempt to find this statement. The quote was familiar, however, and I finally did find it, though not in Riefenstahl’s book. In his famous book, From Caligari to Hitler, Siegfried Kracauer makes this statement (his own, quoting no one): “The Convention was planned not only as a spectacular mass meeting, but as spectacular film propaganda” (Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler, Princeton University Press, p. 301).