How To Read Like A Parasite:Why The Left Got High On Nietzsche

Description

A how-to guide for the left on how to overcome Nietzsche's divisive and damaging influence.

''Exemplary… Tutt’s evaluation of the consequences of Nietzschean politics is more lucid than Left Nietzscheans might wish.'' — Ray Brassier, author of Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction

How to Read Like a Parasite overturns the whitewashed and defanged version of Nietzsche that has been made popular by generations of translators and academic philosophers who have presented his work as apolitical and without a core reactionary agenda.

The central argument of the book is that Nietzsche’s philosophy does have a center, and that the left learns a great deal from Nietzsche when we read him as driven by a highly sophisticated reactionary political vision that informs all his major concepts and ideas.

The most important Nietzschean concepts — from perspectivism, ressentiment, eternal return to the pathos of distance — are analyzed in the historical context in which Nietzsche lived and wrote, and several case-studies of prominent left-Nietzscheans from Jack London, Gilles Deleuze, Wendy Brown to Huey Newton are discussed.

How to Read Like a Parasite makes a persuasive case for how we can overcome Nietzsche’s damaging influence on the left, showing us how to read and understand his work without becoming victims of it.

About the Author

Daniel Tutt is a philosopher and educator based in Washington, DC. He writes on Marxism, philosophy, and psychoanalysis and has taught philosophy at George Washington University, the Washington, DC jail and Marymount University. Tutt is a podcaster with Repeater and Zer0 Books. His first book, Psychoanalysis and the Politics of the Family (2022) is published with the Palgrave Lacan Series and has been hailed by philosopher Isabel Millar as “essential reading.”