In reading Nietzsche, one would never have thought to find Adorno pitted on the side of Nietzsche, but this is what one sees in the very first section of “Anti-Nietzsche” was a condemnation of the aesthetic as an attempt to defend other privileged but arbitrary notions of value. Anti-Nietscheanism is predicated first on seeing the manifestation of the aesthetic as a means of returning to “value” and defining power as the sovereign value over power. Bull’s thesis then proceeds wildly from there, but it is based on four premises that many readers of Nietzsche have wanted to avoid: that the “Will to Power” was a legitimate text despite the editorial hand of Nietzsche’s sister, two that we should take Nietzsche at his word at all times (like Italian scholars like Domenico Losurdo do), three that the reason why there are no anti-Nietzscheans is that both the Heideggerian readers of Nietzsche (Luc Nancy, Jacques Derrida, etc) and the other left readers of Nietzsche (who are rarely, if ever mentioned despite their influence such as Foucault, Bataille, Klossowski) apparently miss, and, four, that we need a leveling “negative” ecology that favors the Nietzsche’s positive ecology that privileges embracing the sub-human.
While well-written and interestingly, if idiosyncratically argued, Bull can’t seem to focus on his thesis long enough to fully develop what it means to read against Nietzsche to read as a sub-human. Not just to reject to Nietzsche’s vision of excellence, but to reject the domain of excellence itself. It seems like Bull cannot establish what this would mean except for a quip about letting the animals retake the art museums, or embracing the teaming mass of life under purely extra-utilitarian grounds, embracing the great beast and falling towards humanity. He briefly hints that some of this is implicit in Gramsci, and the idea of passive revolution (which Gramsci saw as tending either fascist or, as Trotskyists would put it, Bonapartist) as a means of embracing the non-heroic. The implications for this Bull doesn’t seem to be willing or perhaps able to articulate: What would such a political program look like? Is this a very complex restatement of the idea of the noble savage? Is this embracing a kind of Marxism beyond the proletarian to the bestial? It’s hard to say, and Bull doesn’t necessarily.
Yet hitting on the relationship between aesthetic value and economic value seems to be an articulation that is stated much more clearly and less abstractly in Pierre Bourdieu idea’s around social capital, but Bourdieu’s work doesn’t have the hints of an nihilistic, philistine, and hyper-egalitarianism with the non-human. Perhaps Peter Singer’s idea of the expending circle of empathy to all of life may apply here too, but then there is still a value there, so that isn’t as radical as Bull seems to want the negative ecology to be either. Oddly, so sub-humanism seems too demanding for even Bull to completely articulate.
Symptomatic Commentary 