English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
The subhuman comes from Lothrop Stoddard, not from Nazism 1:30 So now we're going to examine the Nietzsche case, since we're tackling the letter U with, well, I'm very bad at German, Übermensch, the superman. Yes, there we go, so. Well, you're generally quite critical of Nietzsche, but not simply critical.
2:00 You're also a great reader of Nietzsche. Yes, yes, yes. An affection for him. And an affection, even if you sometimes call him a bit the great ninny. Yes, he's the great ninny for me. The great ninny. But ultimately, what is this logic of the superman? And is there an actual becoming, here again, in today's actuality, of this Nietzschean concept of the superman? I can't know how topical your question is. Few people know what I'm about to say, I'm not inventing it, I owe it to Domenico Losurdo, you may know this Italian philosopher who had the genius of a water-diviner, he's a tracker of documents, he knows.
2:35 He was the one who knew Nietzsche best in Europe, at the textual level, it's him. And Losurdo, precisely, taught me — I didn't know it — that the notion of sub-men, super-men and sub-men go together: if there are super-men, it's because there are sub-men, the Germanics and the Slavs, for example, or the "white negroes," as Éclair called the French, interesting. Well, that doesn't come from German Nazism — where did the Nazis borrow it from?
3:05 So, remember this name well: Lothrop Stoddard. Let me spell Lothrop for you. L-O-T-H-R-O-P. Look it up on Google, you'll learn a thing or two. He's an American from the late 19th, early 20th century. Hyper-racist, but the way people from the Midwest can be, you see what I mean, deeply so. He had one obsession: the underman. So the word in English existed as "sub-man," underman, before the German Untermensch. And it's Rosenberg who read this man's writings and imported the term. It's interesting — now it's America that dominates, America which for me is an enlarged Germany, a bit like Magna Graecia was for the Athenians, that's another debate. It's a woman, my German ex-wife, who made me understand that well, she knows America and Germany well, but it holds up so well. I'm talking about WASP America here, not about Chicanos or Blacks. So according to Lothrop Stoddard, there's a notion of sub-men, and what's comic — it's appalling, these notions, when you see the results, but what's comic on a second level is seeing that the examples he gives, first and foremost as sub-men, are the Indians. Of course, in the United States, a good Indian is a dead Indian, there's already the genocide.
4:15 And then it didn't stay there — the Americans weren't stupid enough to go for the Final Solution, they're not as clumsy as the Germans. The Germans, who swing things around, they didn't end with the final solution, they did the initial solution. You liquidate whoever's there first, and afterward you talk, you invent — once you've landed on virgin land, rifle in the right hand, Bible in the left, and then as you advanced across virgin land that was just asking to welcome us. Well, so according to Lothrop Stoddard, the sub-men are the Indians, the Blacks, of course, and there's a third thing, and a bit the Asians who were starting to form worrying minorities on the Pacific coast for the West.
4:58 There are no Jews. Indeed, this isn't old Europe with its Jewish ghettos and such threatening us. We really see here the relativity of things. The notion of sub-men was formulated for the first time by someone who doesn't even put Jews among the sub-men, but who does put Indians, Blacks, Asians. Now I haven't told you the best part yet. We're really in the process of explaining the question about the superman. The best part is that he says, and one must add to these Undermen — these three colors that just came up — the white socialists who support them.
5:28 The guy is so stupid, he lets the cat out of the bag, you'll see, he admits it's not about color or physical traits at all. Because if I'm a white man who militates, say, against the Vietnam War or for the emancipation of the African people or against slavery of Blacks, I'm an underman just as much as Blacks or Indians. It's quite extraordinary, this story. First thing, so, poor Nietzsche — I'll still give him this credit — when he thinks of the superman, he's not thinking of what Göring made of it. It's not the paratrooper in Nietzsche, it's rather a dancing Zarathustra, it's really a spirit of lightness, we have to be fair to Nietzsche.
The superman, pity, and Nietzsche's reactionary origin 6:11 But still, what he leaves as a legacy, what's worrying in Nietzsche — what's the anti-value par excellence in Nietzsche? It's pity. If you start feeling pity, it means you're still a bit of a sub-man on the edges, or rather that you're still a man, or to take a title from Nietzsche, you're still human, all too human. And that's terrifying, the consequences that had — not for poor Nietzsche, who surely couldn't have withstood a quarter of the tortures the Americans inflicted in Vietnam and that we trap ourselves with, or the ones they inflict now, through proxy countries, torturing their enemies through the Egyptians or Iraqis as intermediaries. So the story of the superman is not only complex but it's also somewhat illuminated by Lothrop Stoddard — S-T-O-D-D-A-R-D — I'm spelling it because it's worth looking him up — and above all, I note that in Nietzsche's rejection of humanism, somewhere we shouldn't forget that he volunteered to go fight the Commune, the young Nietzsche, not yet very known, not known at all, he wanted to go smash Communards.
7:21 When they saw at the recruitment office what state he was in, they made him a stretcher-bearer and so on, not even at the front, he had rather poor eyesight and all that, there you go. So at the start he comes from the old reactionary European right, which — I don't even hold it against him, there can be geniuses in the old reactionary European right, there have been, you see, literary, musical, pictorial geniuses, whatever. But he comes from that right.
7:51 And I prefer the exemplary path of a Thomas Mann, who starts from exactly that same milieu, who in his youth was a German reactionary — everyone was antisemitic, I'm not even talking spontaneously about going as far as genocide, simply anti-progress, anti-French-Revolution, etc. And who made this journey, Thomas Mann, who nonetheless saved honor by saying, in the end, after the war, that Germany's problems will never be resolved until Marx and Hölderlin have been reconciled. So there it is, the superman is that typical dream of imaginary fantasy, believing there will be a threshold where suddenly I'll transcend all the ties binding my leg that I currently have with my scruples of "moraline," as Nietzsche would say, of man, etc.
Parsifal, the horse of Turin, and the future of man 8:36 And it's terrifying as a notion, especially if it falls into hands less — that's why I want to conclude on this — less pitiful, I'm playing on the word, than Nietzsche's, let me explain. Because he, who has pity as his main anti-value, who reproached Wagner for having put compassion into his testament Parsifal — the hero who has compassion, what a decline, whereas Siegfried, him, he strikes into the crowd, he kills the dragon, he shatters Wotan's spear, and there you go.
9:09 How did his madness declare itself? When he saw a mistreated horse in Turin. What displacement would a psychoanalyst have seen? Everything he had said against man, who is insufficient, who should be an object of derision — when you look with the eyes of the superman, man should be an object of derision, the way the ape is for us today an object of derision, that's what he says in Zarathustra. And now this man, this figure of the crucified Christ, of suffering humanity, is suddenly embodied by this mistreated horse.
9:43 From where he took advantage of it, to the point of planting a kiss on it — that's when the stretcher-bearers, the nurses came. One had to have started there. I can't answer your question better than that, Jérôme. Now I'll conclude on a punchline. It's a current topic, Jérôme. There you go, on the topic. I'll conclude on this: we mustn't fool ourselves either. Man is a moment in an evolution. That's clear. He won't remain forever as he is. But let's stop talking about "super" and "sub," because we come back a bit to the qualities from the previous letter — it's dangerous because there are value judgments in these qualities, it could be a terrifying evolution, it could be beneficial, but what's certain is that he won't remain as he is, just as domestic squabbles had to be settled differently in the Neanderthal era than in a modern bourgeois-bohemian household — I find that nicer, I don't say that ironically, it's nicer for the woman. Thank you.
