- What are you doing?

- I'm working

- What kind of work?

- Thinking...

- Crime and Punishment, Dostoevsky

From the explicative and suggestive power of Marx's and Nietzsche's thought we can achieve a better understanding of what took place during and before the XIX century, what has occurred within the XX century and make use of a rich orientational source in order to confront this almost ready-to-begin century. The strategy here will be to connect, extrapolate and complement Nietzsche's reflections on nihilism from a narrative resting on my marxist interpretation.

Coincidences between them are surprising, and their differences, comprehensible, but most significative is that today - one of the most uncertain and confused moments of contemporary history - we cannot allow ourselves the luxury of adhering to one party at the expense of the other (or of becoming a victim of fundamentalist extremes) when we have found in both philosophical bodies a great visionary power in relation to our political/social/existential situation and to our historical moment. The more so when we know that - apart from bourgeois liberalism - the most significant and influential practices and thinking of this century, which is taking leave, have risen - for better or worse - from these two.

1. Nihilism

- Nietzsche, Forward of Anti-Christ, 1888

The enterprise requires a probing intellect which shrinks from no discovery; it consists in an examination of the psychological motivation of religious beliefs, metaphysical doctrines, and morality (...). - Kaufmann, Nietzsche

Even though Nietzsche's diagnostic of aspects and characteristics of nihilism is palpable throughout his published work, it is not until his posthumous fragments that he explicitly, generically and articulately elaborates on this thematic.1

In one of his posthumous fragments (1887-88), Nietzsche warns us:What I narrate is the history of the coming two centuries. I describe what is to come, that which cannot come in any other form: the advent of nihilism. This history can already be narrated: for necessity itself is here on the march. (Nietzsche: 1992: 68).

It is the narration by "the first perfect nihilist of Europe that, however, has already lived himself nihilism all the way until the end - who has it behind him, under him, outside of him..." (p. 69) Nietzsche, "first perfect nihilist," is also the first anti-nihilist.

But, what is nihilism? Or more to the point: What does "nihilism" signify today? Apart from its etymology, of the concept's presence within Greek philosophy and Buddhism, of its "logic" as a work/term/concept that contradicts itself, etc., we are here interested in what this term designates within Nietzsche's philosophical thought and how it could help us to better understand our historical moment and to catch a glimpse of the future.

2. Brief Narrative About Nihilism's History Before XX Century According to Nietzsche

First of all, to Nietzsche religion and metaphysics assume nihilist postures when they degrade this world to a mere "appearance" in relation to the other world of the hereafter, the "true world." Nietzsche seems to refer to this one as the "first" nihilism: the degradation, devaluation and negation of this world. This world of constant becoming, a passing world of continuous change, has no importance when compared with the other world of true being and eternity (Parmenides', Plato's and religion's being: for if "what is does not become, what becomes cannot be..." (Crepúsculo..., La razón en filosofía #1).

Afterwards, as reaction and reply, comes Christian morality which "prevented man from despising itself as man, from taking sides against life, against despair towards knowledge: it was a means of conservation. In short: morality was the main antidote against practical and theoretical nihilism." (Nietzsche: 1992: 32).

But from there comes about another nihilism; since "the sense of veracity, highly developed by Christianity" (p. 22) finally turns against Christian morality, it "discovers its teleology, its self-interested contemplation" (p. 32), and that such a "true world" is nothing but a mere fiction fabricated by man. All this brings about disillusion, existential pessimism and the crisis of those values considered, until that moment, as supreme, especially the most supreme of them all: the existence of God. Then, if God is nothing, if for all matters "he" doesn't exist, nothing has value or sense any more and everything is necessarily false. This "second" nihilism could be conceived as the devaluation of the first devaluation. The extreme position of "metaphysical nihilism" leads to the extreme position of what we will call her, "existential nihilism." From the "absolute morality of the suprasensible" to the "absolute immorality of nature". In conclusion: "Only one interpretation succumbed; but, since it was, in fact, taken as the interpretation, it seems as if there was no sense in existence, as if everything was in vain." (p. 33).

3. The Death of God

Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon?

- Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, V-2

Blanchot points out that "while Nietzsche has given a sort of tiresome celebrity to this dramatic event, he does not have the personal phenomenon of unbelief in mind. Kierkegaard's Christianity and, more specifically, Dostoevsky's, like Nietzsche's atheism or the young Marx's ('I hate all the gods'), belong to that turning point in the history of the world from which the divine light has withdrawn. God is dead. God: this means God, but also everything that, in rapid succession, has tried to take its place - e.g., the ideal, consciousness, reason, the certainty of progress, the happiness of the masses, culture, etc. Everything not without value nevertheless has no absolute value of its own - there is nothing man can rely on, nothing of any value other than the meaning given to it in an endless process." (Blanchot: 1977: 121) Nevertheless, continues Blanchot, that analysis "can no longer move us, so familiar has it become. What would Nihilism be? A mere humanism! Or the recognition of the fact that (deprived or freed of some absolute meaning conceived on the model of God) from now on, man must create the world and give it meaning - and from the start, this is an immense, intoxicating task." (p. 121)

Now then, in spite of the announcement of that event, its analysis, and in spite of Blanchot's analysis of that analysis, Nietzsche - in his own way of understanding/intuiting the unequal development of history and the perception of history by historical subjects - understands that God's "death" has been a "vaguely felt" event; and because of this fact, he has tried to make us feel the meaning and weight of that death (in the historical, cultural, political, ideological and philosophical sense, etc.) in order to reflect on this event and the consequent devaluation of all values considered to be supreme.

As a thinker, Nietzsche is the "consciousness" that has genealogized, psychologized, analyzed, and narrated the history that brings us to the XX and XXI centuries as the centuries of nihilism's final arrival and also the one who has offered us a perspective on the possibility of overcome it.

First, with his "positive" doctrines: will to power, the eternal return and the overman as a "new metaphysics" or "inversion of values" (sense introduced through the will to power, man as nature that rises above from the world-as-it-is in its materiality and relationship with all other forces in continual and eternal returning).

Secondly, in his cautious bet with science/technology as transforming the movement of the world beyond the necessity to interpret it. And in third place, art's simultaneously nihilist/anti-nihilist paradoxical praxis, art as ontological power in harmony with the becoming, as metaphysical-sensual sense of existence and from which life obtains its major source of support. From all these relations of powers there exists the possibility of overcoming nihilism.

Marxism too if we divest it from its "transcendental guaranties," of any exaggerated, unilateral, historicist, teleological or scientific optimism - does posit the necessity and possibility of overcoming the chaos and crisis inherent in the "last" of the class-systems (where a class functions only for-itself, to perpetuate itself and not to abolish all classes): capitalism. From another perspective, if Christianity was the answer to the first nihilism, then Marxist-Communism as a certain new-Christianity-without-God, in conjunction with the Nietzschean critique of Christianity-with-God, could be understood or taken as the answer to the second nihilism. But before we can go into some connections between Marx's and Nietzsche's thought, let's approach, in general, the problematic of God and nihilism.

Even today, attested to by my own generation as well as the one before, God continues to be the first refuge for the majority and the last one for those who became disappointed with the revolutionary process and now need a strong enough myth to sustain themselves in their last years of life in order not to fall into a practical nihilism.

4. The Return of God

- Hugo Margenat

For Kaufmann, Nietzsche's greatest and most persistent problem is to "escape nihilism - which seems involved both in asserting the existence of God and thus robbing this world of ultimate significance, and also in denying God and thus robbing everything of meaning and value..." (Kaufmann: 1960: 86)

If "God's death" as diagnosed by Nietzsche a century ago had more to do with the state of civilization than with a metaphysical speculation about ulterior reality (p. 84) - one that neither negates that aspect nor Nietzsche's self-declared atheism - today it is still the same way but turned around, with "new" characteristics, or, better said, as a return to the belief of the "first" nihilism: the emptiness and disenchantment with social systems and their impotence to produce the promised happiness in this world, and the vertiginous decadence of ethical-vulgar materialism propagnated in practice by a barbarian capitalism and a crude socialism have "resuscitated" God, and a new ardor for religious faith has reappeared in all ambits of the globe. This "return" to the first nihilism does not deny either the "unstoppable movement" of the "second" nihilism, except that now both nihilisms in collision/collusion accelerate the dissolution even when the so-called new world order seeks its retardation and seems to consolidate itself. In any case, its consolidation takes place over quicksand, full of uncertainties and serious apocalyptical auguries for the coming century.

The optimism without limits in science and technology has created, effectively, the possibility of global self-destruction; state's power: a permanent and paranoid state of terror/anti-terror that justifies a strong-arm approach; and the masses - disenfranchised and substituted by intelligent-machines and the robotopian ideal - return (without ceasing to struggle for their "material" existence or confusing the stomach principle with the "soul" principle) to religious faith's refuge as answer to that "robotopian" emptiness, its telematic democracy and the chaos of criminal activity. In short, the desperate existence of "you're on your own" put in place by fin de siecle "neo-liberal" capitalism's pauperizing privatization. Of course, in a system where science and technology were to be definitively for the benefit of society - instead of perpetuating and enriching a minimal percentage of the human population and maintain in place their bureaucratic apparatus - the necessity to seek refuge within an irrational religious faith (not to be confused with spiritual necessity) would cease to have the pathological manifestations it has, and then the real possibility of overcoming class-based society would have a solid material base.

Therefore, regardless of God's "death" (should we add also the death of the State, the Party, History, ideology, art, the subject?) "he" continues to be "alive" as belief, as an ideology that persists in existing at the internal-psychological level as well as the external-social one; and its "value" objectively consists in a personal investment (in the same way you invest capital) relative to conscious/unconscious psychological desire for ontological permanence, a situation that continues to be convenient (profitable) for the socio-economic/politico-ideological necessity of dominant classes and structures within the present world arrangement.

"God"-value (as you would say exchange or use value) in social practice exists as value relative to a belief that could be merely a difference in terms of world vision among those who oppose or critically approach the status quo; or a "philosophical" distinction that does not interfere with the affirmation or unconditional defense of the status quo. And though to believe or not to believe in God has political and philosophical consequences, in ethical terms it does not determine a specific path. Or better put, the relation between moral belief and moral practice will establish a mode of being that could lead either to an activity/project of liberation, social justice and freedom or to an activity of a repressive, authoritarian and reactionary type. Capitalist God continues to be the "official" one; Communist God, the proscribed one.

We have, therefore, a nihilism of "believers" as well as an "atheist" nihilism moving in diverse degrees and levels interpolating and confusing themselves in their resemblance and common nihilist longing.

Today it is not a matter of saying Yes or No to life: you just pass through it as you pass through "Hell," "Purgatory" or "Earth Paradise" depending on how much money, fame, mundane power, success you have.

5. Experiencial Limits of Class

(...) We simply cannot be anything but revolutionaries - we shall not come to terms with any state of affairs in which the bigot is at the top. - Nietzsche, Ecce Homo

Just as, to the bourgeois, the disappearance of class property is the disappearance of production itself, so the disappearance of class culture is to him identical with the disappearance of all culture. - Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto

"All the history of culture," Nietzsche says, "represents in its integrity a diminution of that fear towards haphazard, toward the uncertain, towards the sudden. Culture signifies precisely to learn how to prevent, to learn to believe in necessity." (Nietzsche: 1992: 56) The submission to "God's finger" as ordainer becomes something not-necessary in practice: culture renders religion dispensable, but the growth/power of culture simultaneously creates a nihilist movement.

In his posthumous fragments, Nietzsche tries to take the bull of nihilism by the horns: his deep thoughts and "monologues" make us feel a relentless struggle striving for the conceptualization - or to offer us in metaphorical, allegorical images which take off first from his own person - of this phenomenon in all its manifestations and aspects (origin, development, characteristics: normal/pathological, active/passive, perfect/imperfect, etc.).

In his fragment titled "Critique of Nihilism," between 1887 and 1888, he concludes that the cause of nihilism as a psychological, mental state (or as ideology), must be looked for in the belief in/disillusion with the categories of reason: "We have measured the worth of the world by paying attention to categories that refer to a purely feigned world." (p. 65) These are three: "finality," "unity," and "being." This is due to three causes/effects:

1. teleological disillusion: there is no purpose; the becoming has no sense;

2. zero totality/generality: "unity" behind the becoming is a fiction; and

3. incredulity regarding a metaphysical world (a "true" world): there is only becoming.

From here follows active destruction: to the nihilist "the No of the act proceeds from his nature. The a-nihilation through judgment is backed up by the annihilation with the hand." (p. 67)

Now the possibility of "salvation" will depend on whether we destroy our objects of veneration or we destroy ourselves. Regarding these "categories of reason" Nietzsche proposes to us, he proposes to himself that once these three categories have been devalued, "then the demonstration of their inapplicability to the whole ceases to be a reason to devaluate the whole." (p. 76) And this is a significative and key proposition in order to be able to "collate," without deviations or distortions his subsequent (as well as previous) reflections on the value and sense of life, whether existence in a "new" world without transcendental absolutes and in a continuous incessant becoming is worth the pain or not. Moreover, on how to distinguish and use - like a good psychologist and artist - concepts once they have endured nihilization's purification and the ironic humor of the new creators of sense.

Slipping towards the social terrain of class/ideological struggle, we can also understand/explain nihilism as a particular/general process produced by all other processes under the shield of a dominant mode of production of commodities/significations, which has arrived at its historical limit transforming itself into a force that, on the one hand, reacts repressively against any dialectical aspect of liberation processes that in its flux begins to take root and achieve power; and, on the other hand, through the production and re-production of theories, the dominant, hegemonic mode of production sophistically seeks to discredit, neutralize, exterminate or "appropriate" any alternative, or to create enough confusion in order to expand its own rate of real or ideal life.

Thus, from this perspective, we can catch a glimpse of how a dominant class' illusion/disillusion about eternity or permanence leads to propositions of terminations, to confuse the relative end of an ideology/culture in dominance with the absolute end of culture/ideology, and even of humankind. Only that these propositions are always made from an ideology and a class (or a class sector) in particular, and never in its own name but in the name of humanity, of totality, even when the currentideological modality proposes the (metaphysical) negation of totality.2

We can also point out that today it is not enough to say that the topic of nihilism in Nietzsche's philosophy can only be understood in relation to his cardinal themes: the will to power, overman, ressentiment, perspectivism, and above all, the eternal return. It is necessary to remind ourselves, following the above thought, that to the bourgeoisie and their intellectuals it becomes difficult - if not impossible - to separate their class' interests from the interpretative interests in relation to Nietzsche's work, and they cannot pierce through their ideological-political limit of their own nihilist "myopia": they do not see very well the relation: social system-ideology-science-nihilism. Very few of them live the philosophy the way Nietzsche lived his, and the "topic" of nihilism is only that: a topic. For all matters, a dead topic. Consequently, those "alternatives" proposed by an intellectuality under nihilism's anesthetic effects, and which cannot interpret nihilism as the effect itself of the old system that inevitably (re)produces it, are alternatives full of ressentiment, alien and neglecting the demanding needs of components of the social body. In the "best" of cases, their ressentiment or illusion/disillusion is an exercise of impotence. In the "worst," a collaboration between allied circles and the dominant power. Both are - unconsciously or consciously - secretions of a tired body which in its decadence neither can nor wants to accept its limit or allow others to move history forward. But it happens that history is ironic, and active forces, demolishing and constructive forces, spring from the least expected of places, and they avail themselves of "counter-opposed means"...

6. The Unexpected

(...) at the start, it is characteristic of reactive forces to deny the difference that originally constitutes them, to reverse the differential element from which they are derived, and to give it a deformed image. (...) an active force becomes reactive when reactive forces separate it from what it can do. (...) in each case this separation rests on a fiction, a mystification, or a falsification. (...) Nietzsche calls that force active which goes right to the end of its consequences. - Deleuze, Active and Reactive

It could be adduced that Marx's and Nietzsche's philosophies are irreconcilable because while Marx positions himself against class exploitation and oppression, and works/lives for a theory of the proletariat as revolutionary subject, as that social class which has the potential to transform itself and simultaneously transform class-based society into an equalitarian, communist society, etc., Nietzsche lives at "6,000 meters high" from the class struggle, "supra-historically" piercing through class views and choosing "physiological" types, an aristocracy of the spirit and a superior new man who should "tragically" accept/overcome the world's incessant and infinite becoming, as well as the finitude of all particular life. However, Nietzsche's and Marx's thought complement each other in various epistemological, historical and cultural aspects, in spite of their diverse/ divergent ways of valuing: their admiration for classic antiquity; their critique of metaphysics/idealism, platonic as well as German; the relations of power/truth, praxis/ knowledge; the materialist approach to history; the artistic base of their models for a new or superior human being in its integral and full development; their polemic, "arrogant," sarcastic sytles: if an ironic Marx expressed that he was not a "marxist," a sarcastic Nietzsche preferred to be taken as a "buffoon" rather than to be "sanctified."

In the same way, both were well ahead of their historical epoch and they leave us a crushing, demolishing critique and valorative analysis of history and ideologies. Also their visions of the future have many times been unilaterally developed as prophecies characterized by literariness or reduced to literal interpretations. For example, the enthusiastic marxist optimism that annunciated (we annunciated), at the international level, the end of capitalism and socialism's definitive triumph in this XX century. And in Nietzsche's case, on the one hand, the nazi distortion and appropriation of him as their philosopher of aryan supremacy (even when Nietzsche was in reality one of the severest critics of Germany, German statism and the feverish anti-semitism of the period before Hitler); on the other hand, his philosophy arriving at a pessimist/apocalyptic vision of existence; and in a third case, as a springboard to a kind of irrationalist post-modernism that, in the most paradoxical and sophist manner, returns to a nihilist metaphysics.

Yet, an intergral reading, beyond sanctification or demonization, would show us that both of them announce, explicitly or implicitly, a global system necessary for the ulterior creation of the "non-system," "non-state" realm of freedom/power and an overcome human being.

Moving across the last luster of the XX century, we find ourselves with two situations that, no matter how ironic in relation to these prognostications, do not cease to reinforce them.

The first one refers to those different/diverse socialisms of marxist orientation that functioned (seeing themselves) as the transition between capitalism and communism, but that later on, after their failure, end up either in a "return to capitalism" or in a "retro"-historical mixture of socio-economic formations that (according to each ideological persuasion) could be explained from various perspectives:

1. The premature seizure of power by Leninism under "insufficient" and not yet matured conditions for the construction of socialism under the global hegemony of capitalism; therefore, it is necessary to go through all the capitalist trajectory before constructing its negation and surpassing it.

2. The communist leadership "treachery."

3. The "imperfection" of marxist theory in part or in its totality; or its distortion.

4. The irony of revolutionary processes which Marx and Engels lucidly warn us of their last years.

Likewise, the debate could be reduced in terms of the theoretical origin of marxism; the Trotsky/Stalin struggle (permanent revolution vs. socialism in one country); Chinese/Soviet rivalry; the bleeding of socialism in its armamentist competition with the capitalist superpowers, etc. However, capitalism's and representative-bourgeois-democracy's apparent "victory" over "communism" could be understood as a Pyrrhic victory (or how aspects of "atheist" and the "believers" in nihilism collide among themselves); and that only points towards failure and toward the acceleration of the crisis and the nihilism diagnosed by Nietzsche.

In this second case, the crisis of rationality and modernity as occidental culture/civilization - creature and "last" connector of all previous cultures/civilizations - has been interpreted, simultaneously or unilaterally, as the "definitive" end of the grand metaphysical illusion and/or as the turn or moment of "post-modernism's" grand simulacrum: modernity's own sublimation (confused, false consciousness) as "liberation" from rationality; and which, in its body's delirium as vigourous, destructive and unstoppable force, expresses its desire to be (reifying, deifying itself) but eluding the problem of nihilism, without reversing its material conditions or its values, producing in such a way the contrary effect: the sharpening of the problem.

In short: "post-modernism" as a confused moment of modern nihilism on its way to world "perfection" and in the definitive colonial-global expansion of the capitalist mode of production.

Both socialism as transition to communism (recognizing its achievements) and "post-modernism" as "trans-social" and "supra-historical" ideology (recognizing its liberating and analytical force) seem to consist more of "inventions," quixoticism and ravings than of a real-developed-process. As a consequence, it is difficult to establish, in their unequal development, up to what point they have concretely overcome the old, or how much they are just a simulacrum. Or how far "backwards" we have been launched (supposing we were heading "forward") and how much we have been unnecessarily delayed.

If we were to conceive "historical socialism" (i.e., "real socialism") as a process where a "pseudo-marxism" dominated, and "post-modernism" as cultural ideology with a "pseudo-nietzschean" "axis," what could the relation Marx/Nietzsche3 potentiate for the future society/ culture? How could we "rescue" the work of these two thinkers that today are, on the one hand, discarded or treated with disdain, and, on the other, either fetishized or stripped of their revolutionary character and their dangerousness by the academy.

This would not be a matter of taking sides for its own sake (Nietzsche: "Each one takes sides, the philosophers included.") or being "political" within an orthodox genealogical/tribal direct line. It is more a matter of our own political overcoming and, in such a way, being able to overcome the capitalist/socialist variations of political economy by resolutely passing through - without hesitations - the "unforeseen" situation where we need (it has become inevitable) this "return" in order to come back with more strength than ever before through the road of communism and freedom, since the most important thing, what is worth, what is decisive, is to transform and invert reality before we can force it and/or baptize it with the names of the future.

As illustrative point, it is necessary (for the matured intelligence of the interdisciplinary, operative working class), in theoretical as well as practical terms, to re-approach:

1. The conception of communist society (what does it mean? how will it be?), as a little bit exhausted, vulgarized, ridiculized, and set against itself; and

2. The unilateralization - demonization or acritical glorification - of Nietzsche's "political"-philosophical thought.

Marxist interpretations that usually privilege the concept of equality over difference vulgarize the communist conception and reduce it in spite of the dialectical-materialist base that posits difference and unequal development of processes as a universal aspect of all things. Secondly, the simplistic unilateralization of the Nietzschean notion regarding the "herd morality" draws a reductive judgment which privileges the élite, the exceptional individual, and social hierarchy in spite of the fact that Nietzsche himself emphatically warned us that this morality is to be found in all classes, all places, and at all levels; it concretely refers to hostility towards life and negation of everything natural-material of this world in favor of the "other world"- a moral which is the product of weakness, dishonesty, decadence, bad and guilty intellectual conscience, it is justified (by all religious morality) in the false presupposition and self-deception of metaphysics as idealist interpretation of the world. Furthermore, today, within the precipitated dislocation of processes in relation to ideologies (the facts and deeds in relation to the ideal that represents them), everything contributes to the massification of nihilism: science, technology, the means of communication, drugs, etc. Thus, "herd morality" of the masses and the élite alike - in its schizoid existence and mutation - defines itself more in terms of its "vulgar materialism" than its "religious/ metaphysical idealism".

With this in mind, we can relate the nietzschean critique of "herd morality" to the problematics of equality/difference in communist society.

Ressentiment, which in Nietzsche is the frustrated manifestation of the will to power in those who cannot achieve satisfaction with their own selves, takes place consciously or unconsciously.4 Those who claim "equality" (and those who use it as demagogy) from their own resentful impotence view equality as a state of things to be achieved without effort, sacrifice, without overcoming their own resented condition, without internal/external struggle. It is an idealist or vulgar equality, based on personal or "team" interests without the aspects of reciprocity and difference.

Difference and reciprocity are consubstantial aspects to equality as the basic fundament of a society that needs to overcome concepts and practices based on absolute ideological categories (tribal, religious, classistic, metaphysical, "scientific", cultural). Social equality is the basic fundament for recognizing the right to difference without restraining the other (person/group). My difference in the context of social equality is the respect for the other's difference. Part of my freedom is the healthy development of my difference and the duty to defend individual and collective freedom.

For example, these variations of the socialist/communist mottos (of Christian origin; see Acts 2:44-45 and Acts 4:32-35): from each according to capacity, to each according to necessity or from each according to commitment, to each according to necessity, establish, from the beginning, that relationship between freedom/will and necessity, and how these reside in quantitative/qualitative degrees of difference and not in a homogenized content, something which is difficult to conceive by the human mind unless it idealizes itself (to deceive itself with its own capacity to idealize itself); or rather, unless it becomes the crude, negative product of ressentiment (which also conceives the contrary extreme: the inevitability of society divided in social classes and its fateful fatidic and idiotic consequences). The motto's second version could be interpreted in the sense that commitment and necessity are not separated from each other but exist in reciprocity and interdependency determined by difference. Each one would be different according to commitment (the attained power of an individual, in nietzschean terms), and this should determine each one's necessity. Or vice versa. Equality is a relation of forces between the commitment of different singularities in relation to the plurality's necessity to level up, and the recognition that necessity is always different, relative, qualitative, etc. It is a dialectical equality in the sense of unequal development of processes and things. Such a concept/notion escapes and refuses to anchor in the homogenization of the "masses" or the mechanic uniformation of individuals and the subject (singular/plural/multiple).

It does not matter how far away communist society could be; it is necessary to continue its conceptualization at the heat of real processes and against its loss of prestige, its demonization, fear, or in the best of cases, as an unreachable chimaera. Communist society will be the product and will be constituted by real individuals and structures, not by ideal ones, and by complex and contradictory processes; but it will be a unique opportunity for human-overcoming in harmony with everything else.

The overcoming of a concept of equality idealized or reduced to a vulgar collectivism, and the overcoming of a concept of individuality as elitist individualism or divorced from any collectivity and reciprocity, may not seek (or depend on) a "synthesis" or "syncresis" of those "positive" aspects of these two philosophers but the reconstructive improvement in practice (any practice) of complementary aspects with the strength to overcome faults, unilateral emphases heated by momentaneous enthusiasm, or that same dragging force of metaphysical mode of thinking adjacent in both philosophical bodies and its continuators. This overcoming should not seek either to de-problematize conflictive aspects within each one or between them.

Marx and Engels posited, in The Communist Manifesto, that in communist society "the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all" (p. 31); Nietzsche, in his first work, The Birth of Tragedy, already pre-conceived the necessity of dialectical unity between Apollonian individuation and Dionyssian collectivity.

There is no doubt that the coming of a future egalitarian society will depend on the solidification of exceptional individuals committed to the collective, as well as the active force (quantity/quality) which only a collective can achieve. The requirement of communism's consolidation as base for the human-overcoming-in-harmony-with-nature strives for the consolidation of the healthy individual, truly free. There will be no definitive post nor beyond as long as capitalism is in place. What there is is continuous struggle, liberation processes and praxis of liberty without having to wait for an ideal state.

Corretjer, poet-thinker and one of our most exemplar revolutionaries, expressed it in this manner: "in matters of politics, as in matters of love, one has to know how to wait." The key is to know how. To know how to wait is to recognize the need for processes to mature, to be completed, as well as to work continuously (theoretically, practically) to fight the crisis and construct the new at all times without having to "wait" (or "despair") for the coming of a generalized crisis or "ideal revolution." That is the difficult and delicate lesson of historical processes up to the present, garnered by the most experienced and lucid minds, by a "hierarchy" that has more to do with giving than receiving, and in no way with class privileges. Here the motto would be: from each according to his/her will to freedom and attained power, to each according to capacity, ability, dedication, limit, etc.

Despair leads to a pessimist scepticism with respect to the future (a future not linked to the present), and to a cynical-apathetic conformism with respect to the status quo, regardless of the masks worn. Nietzsche's anti-metaphysics and Marx's dialectical materialism affirmatively value the moment, the present, the becoming, not as fatal conformism, but as that which in the last instance exists counterposed to the self-interested promise of an other ideal, an eternal, fictitious world. Similarly, they do not sacrifice this humanity for a future one. What happens is that vis-a-vis what we have inherited from the history of class societies and from metaphysical/existential nihilism, it is necessary, in order to overcome these conditions of existence, not only to struggle against such a state of affairs but to accept the struggle's consequences. More still, as this Corretjer's verse affirms, "life is all struggle"; and also, suffering and joy go together, interconnected, overdetermined; and to promise one without the other is an ingenious or perverse promise coming from ressentiment or dominant ideology.

7. The Counterposed Means

What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers.

- Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto

Every strong culture is founded in a synthesis of values and goals, but whenever this synthesis is dissolved, "everything which causes comfort, healing, calm, anesthesia, appears on the first plane under a diversity of religious, or moral, or political, or aesthetic disguises, etc." (Nietzsche: 1992: 46)

Neither capitalism nor modernity has been able to produce their "perfect" grave diggers. All of them have been "incomplete" though the species has been founded and improved to the point that today it would be a difficult job to distinguish or identify (perhaps in degrees) those who under multiple disguises "condemn" or "celebrate" the crisis ("but, what crisis?"), or better still, whether in fact there is any difference between condemning and celebrating. Or if we are really disposed - beyond any intellective, intellectual, "artistic"; beyond the ink and the paper, the image, the gesture or discourse - to decisively enter the crisis.

The simulacral nature of representative democracy in full decadence has infected the way we respond and has forced and made necessary the increment in the development of "occult," "histrionic" powers: today we do not know for sure who's who in the world of alternatives. This situation on the one hand weakens trust and, on the other, strengthens the capacity to resist in order to survive the state's vigilance, and strengthens the ability to operate, "infiltrate," to pass unnoticed. But we know very well that the pose, to make believe to the other that we are (something) we really are not, a yearning for individual/ collective status as ontological value of the empty carapace, the peacock-feigning as projection of impotence; to invent a "fool's" power, an "imaginative," "lucid" way out but without real risk in relation to the effort that demands will, discipline, organization, dedication, health, vision, confidence in one's own power, and self-overcoming - this is altogether a different matter (though not separated) from that other need for self-preservation that every part and member has in order to maintain and better the whole.

Moribund capitalist-modernity responds to the "unstoppable nihilist movement" with a "grand style" to cause delay: a "virtual" inversion of values, beliefs and representations (where "opposites," "overcoming," etc., take place only in the ideological mirror); and self-illusion (names take over the real-concrete; its becoming is "fictitious," "literary," "textual," "discursive," and it takes place as simulacrum but it "takes place" all the same). That grand style assumes in its discourse its own negation; it sees itself as nihilism's overcoming. A false negation that baptizes itself with the name of the future, or posterity.

We are in the stage where the epigone of that grand style has been the United States as European nihilism's relay, beginning about the middle of the XX century: pragmatic nihilism making use a la yankee of European nihilism.5 Today, its own "strength" begins to break it open and dilute it. The moribund resists, but it also longs for the end - not wanting it, wanting it -; and for that longing for the end, Nietzsche points out, you have to give it what it desires. but we don't want the new conditions to become spoiled; premature death is not desireable if we want the grave diggers to become hard once and for all, and perfect themselves in great numbers.

And so nihilist crisis has its grand value:I do celebrate, not condemn, its coming:

I believe that one of the biggest crises is taking place, a moment when man reconsiders himself in the most profound form: whether man recovers or not, is a question that concerns his strength: it is possible... (Nietzsche: 1992: 66)

Of course, if asked, an intellectual or political ideologic representative of bourgeois democracy, transnational capitalism and anti-communist neo-liberalism would tell us, with confidence and conviction, that Nietzsche, after all, in his "madness," was right, that he was a prophet of the great conflagrations of the XX century, never seen before in human history. But, in the end, "democracy" prevailed over fascism and communism, and that (now switching to a right-wing Hegelian discourse) there is no beyond of the capitalist system; that this one has proven to be the best system of all socio-economic systems, the only one that is logical as well as rational and real; that capitalism contains all previous stages overcome; that in capitalism exists the "everyone's will" as well as "general will;" that "America" is the land of the present and of the future; that, in short, capitalism is the Absolute, and the only thing left is for it to think itself (to love itself, etc.) since there is nothing else. Everything has come to its end, to its completion.

But for those who have understood that the ideological debate and the political struggle between bourgeois capitalist democracy and socialist bureaucracy has remained in the vicious circle of political economy; and the cultural debate in the "modernism"/"post-modernism" duality - leaving this debate behind, under, outside, they would say, with a bit of ironic mischief, that what has ended is the first century "prophesied" by Nietzsche but not the crisis. The crisis has put on make-up, has put on another mask, but it continues there, becoming, deepening, extending itself, approaching thus this second century-chapter.

In a fragment previous to the one cited above, Nietzsche has explicated the value of the crisis in more details:

... it purifies... it reunites... elements with similar affinities and makes them mutually corrupt,... it assigns common tasks to men with counterposed ways of thinking... [it offers]... the incentive for a hierarchization of forces from the point of view of health: getting to know those who command and those who obey... beyond all existing social orders. (p. 39)

Nihilism in its "post-modern" stage offers us that new opportunity - after the failed experience of the communist revolution's first socialist stage - to perfect the necessary type of grave digger, the new subjectivity. In this new coming period - the second century after Marx and Nietzsche - those richer in health, those certain of their power and who represent the best of strength attainedby humanity until now (p. 40), will be the product of this test of fire. They will be the ones who have left behind, under, outside of themselves, the metaphysical/messianic residues of the old epistemology, of the old morality, and are piercing through, at the same time, the false/hypnotic antitheses (modernism/postmodernism; capitalism/bureaucratic socialism; market economy/ planned economy; material incentives/spiritual incentives; living subject/dead subject; individuality/ collectivity; the Apollonian/the Dionyssian; dictatorship/democracy; national state/civil society; politics/---?; etc., etc.). And, simultaneously, they are taking, appropriating, everything that is healthy, durable, within the new/ epochal knowledges/practices.

They are the ones who take in good spirits "capitalism's return," the one-more-time as necessary medicine, without hypocrisies or spurious sentimentalisms, without having to suffer that poor and subtle pessimism of the believers of "socialist faith," "radical faith," of all our good militants who, at the first indication of defeat become frustrated, or they take off their mask, or accommodate themselves - with the same "conviction" - to the new "version" of the events.

They are the ones who will know how to "forget" the spirit of ressentiment (justified or not), the herd morality and the nihilism of the "scoria" ("The most unhealthy species of man in Europe (within all classes)") (p. 38-39), becoming an active, powerful force, since "there is nothing in life that possesses value outside of the degree of power." (p. 37)

This new subjectivity's task consists in expurgation of all nihilism but also the passing through and making use of it until the "end" in order to overcome not only metaphysical and existential nihilism but to develop/to perfect even more the worldly-affirmative thought of Marx, Nietzsche, and the subsequent "schools." A healthy subjectivity neither needs to posit false problems nor to introduce other meanings than those of existence itself. It suffices with the "balsam" of art as the concrete space of liberty without having to resort to extreme dogmas or to evade the crisis with an "imaginary" where desire, desirability, become risible, pathetic, due to its lack of realism in deeds. And so, herd morality, in politics and the cultural sphere, ends up being patronized, licked by the capitalists, their "intelligentsia," their mode of diluting the dilutive.

8. The Eternal Return

I always tell the truth; even when I lie, I tell the truth. - Scarface, Oliver Stone

Yes, yes, it is over, but it all starts again, and again, and again.. - Last Tango in Paris, Bernardo Bertolucci

Let's now return, from a materialist, dialectical, and artistic view of existence and the world, to that spiritual and intellectual necessity which the individual/social body has to think, imagine, and symbolize its own self.

For Nietzsche, the powerful ones are "those who have erected into law the names of things"; among them, "the greatest artists of abstraction are the ones who created categories." (Will to Power, I 133) That is to say, the philosophers. Specifically: metaphysicians. These "artists," as we know, have "created" also, by ricochet, "the crisis of rationality" which accelerates nihilism's movement.

In spite of this, Nietzsche understands the importance and need of categories for the existence of a strong and powerful enough culture in order to overcome nihilism. But this time around, besides using homeopathic and counterposed means, the "new philosophers" will accomplish the task by understanding that those fictions would only attain value to the degree that they function as life's affirmative power, even when they violently force reality and even when they won't go in tune with practicability, security in relation to danger, and the pleasure principle, or self-preservation, of one particular subject.

In a fragment written between '87 and '88, Nietzsche exclaims: "Falsity is power... Art and nothing but art. It is the great possibilitator of life, the great seducer which incites living, the stimulator to live..." (Nietzsche: 1992: 155)

Now it is not about metaphysical "truth" or "non-truth" but about the degree of power and health, and in knowing that we are dealing with fictions (or historical, social, cultural constructs) and not with essences that exist as such in reality. If we talk of "essences" it is only to refer to the relations of forces in each new arrangement. And regarding the demand or desire for permanence: permanence as "the being of becoming," "to imprint the becoming with the character of being," will only be reached by the power of art.

Wouldn't this position be considered similar to that of Kierkegaard's (Nietzsche first heard of Kierkegaard in 1888)? From an anti-hegelian, religious-metaphysics Kierkegaard posits that it is indifferent if one worships God or an idol since God's existence (let's say, "divine truth") is immaterial and what counts is the individual's relationship with something unknown. He says: "An objective uncertainty held fast in an appropriation process of the most passionate inwardness is the truth, the highest truth attainable for an existing individual." (Clark: 1985: 490).

Among the pragmaticians, Pierce, for example, "democratizes" the concept of truth by concluding that this is "the opinion destined to be ultimately accepted by all of those who investigate." (Russell: 1995: 442) From this "truth" to the "truth" of contemporary surveys there is only one step. On the other hand, William James points out that an "idea is true as long as it is believed to be beneficial to our lives". (p. 434) On the belief of God, he says: "If the hypothesis of God [or Santa Claus] works satisfactorily in the most ample sense of the word, it is true." (p. 435) For James, theory and truth are instrumental and respond to their practical effects: if an idea works successfully, it is "true."

As therapy, these positions are one thing, but as philosophy, they are something else. The "will to believe" as "will to truth"?

To Marx and dialectical materialism, truth is not "therapeutic" but revolutionary: it goes to the root of contradictions in order to resolve them and not to remain a mere ideology, psychology or pragmatism. There are no objects, phenomena or processes in constant and absolute stability. There is never, in any system, a complete correspondence between all sub-systems and elements that compose it. Relative as well as "absolute" truth are levels or forms of objective truth or of our knowledge of the objective material world. Thus, there is no ultimate or final culmination which the world or humanity is supposed to reach, call it Spirit or Absolute Idea.

Communism itself is not an ultimate end but a means for the realization of human beings in all aspects and capacities. In reality, there are no metaphysical mysteries or the need for mysterious metaphysics. It suffices with materialist sciences and other forms of knowledge of human activity. Knowledge is acquired in practice, in the interaction between the perceiving subject and the thing perceived. It is an interaction between two bodies, in which one is as active as the other. What is perceived depends on both. We need to interpret and comprehend the world but what is most necessary, important and relevant is to change it. Then, once every trace of religions and metaphysics is removed, it will no longer be necessary to merely interpret the world as human, but to make it human through revolutionary activity. Only when an individual has ceased to be property of the State can a private individual appear as the true human being. In order to surpass or to sublate the private person or the mere citizen it would be necessary to revolutionize private and public life from top to bottom.

In Nietzsche, however, the problem of truth revolves closely in relation and in counterposition to metaphysics, and more specificall, to platonism. His philosophy, he says, is a "reverse platonism." Contrary to the great philosophers before him (Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Hegel), Nietzsche does not stop within an Absolute or within the idea of a Supreme Creator but instead, incarnated by the original philosophical spirit, he goes to the last consequences in his investigations about the "truth." Nietzsche is the new Socratic gadfly who "does not conform to any party line who would follow 'the truth into all hide-outs' and die rather than cease philosophizing" (Kaufmann: 1960: 352) From there comes his "self-nihilization" as will to truth, and how this one responds to the will to illusion and the will to power.

The will to power, which manifests itself in all forms of human activity, could as well aspire to "mundane powers" (to dominate others through economic, political, military, ecclesiastic means, etc.), to hide existence's crudity with velleities or pious lies, as it could also aspire to psychologize/investigate ideologies (values, beliefs, representations) sustained throughout history as absolute truths. And from this critique, to begin to forge a culture that departs from that unconcealment, understanding power as a creative second nature, of self-realization, which requires self-discipline, self-overcoming and overcoming of all ressentiment.

But the majority - in its current state - needs certain fictions in order to achieve its maximum power of self-realization. We should not fool ourselves about this. Necessity is different and relative. There are degrees and limits, as in the number of truths an organism can tolerate at a given moment. From this perspective, James' "will to believe" can be conceived as "beneficial" and even as "charitable." Nietzsche, at his private level, was also benign and charitable. He advised, for example, his old Sils-Maria neighbor to continue believing in God, in the importance of that belief.

Is this the way, then, in which Nietzsche conceives the "will to illusion"? Or should we say that if "truth" is "will to power" at the service of this life, on the other hand, it still has an aspect that continues in the terrain of metaphysics even when it surpasses metaphysics itself? What happens is that his gaze returns to art as the activity that overcomes philosophical-metaphysical truth; but by counterposing art to nihilism he does not make an equivalence between art and "truth" but a valuation of art as an affirmative power of life. And - contrary to the philosophers mentioned above - we do not philosophically deceive ourselves with a "will to believe" or "to not-believe;" instead we accept and confront existence as it is but by raising ourselves over the state of nature and social systems, introducing meaning and goals, and above all, by recognizing art's fundamental role.

In another fragment of '88, which refers to The Birth of Tragedy, the Nietzschean interpretation of art, of the symbolic, swims in the waters of ambivalence as that which crosses the code's sea and the arbitrariness that rationalism imposes, and installs us in a dialectics where art is as nihilistic in its purification of "truth" as well as "metaphysical" in its affirmation of life:

This book is, thus, then, even antipessimist: namely, in the sense that it points out to something that is stronger than pessimism, more divine that "truth": art. No one, it seems, would take the word in such a strong way in the name of a radical negation of life, of a truly No-doer, more than a No-sayer to life, than the author of this book: only that he knows - he has lived it, perhaps he has not lived any other thing - that art is more valuable than "truth" ... "art as the true task of life, art as metaphysical activity"... (Nietzsche: 1992: 157-58)

Art as supreme will to power in struggle with itself, negating and being violent against "finite," mortal life as strongly as it affirms it. Existence as art, creation of oneself or, we could add, as continuity of life by other means, especially in adversity or solitude. Or, perhaps, art as the only possible and realizable "eternal return," beyond, different, indifferent, to religious, metaphysical, scientific "truth," piercing through them.

Once here, the excess of enthusiasm and narcissist impulse (its "fanatic," resented side) would not think twice to exclaim that the demand for the "new philosophers" should be overcome with the demand for the "new artists," in the assumption that art would not only be thought of as necessary but as sufficient to life, and self-sufficient. That would be another metaphysical illusion leading, through another path, to nihilism and a superficial aesthetics, removed from human existence's problematic and the infinite and indefinite contradiction which the becoming is. Furthermore, the artist who removes him/herself from the philosophical, political thought becomes unilaterally "ludicized" and ends up as a buffoon, in the literal, pejorative and pitiful sense of that term. This path will not render him/her necessary to life but instead it will transform him/her into a new social parasite, snobbish, decadent, and "platonic," joining the contemporary apathetic-cynical ones for whom any form of "truth" ceases to have importance in relation to the vulgar pragmatism that characterizes them.

With these suggestions we could conclude, but how to explain, reconcile, today, those Nietzschean postulates (ambiguously? ambivalently? positivistically?) on art as "will to illusion," "falsity"-that-is-the-power, true "metaphysical activity," and then, to counterpose art to nihilism which is, anyway, the culmination itself of falsity and metaphysical illusion? How could we maintain that art is the eternal return resolutely understood from materialism's point of view if Nietzsche has judged the eternal return as "the most extreme form of nihilism: nothingness (the 'absence of meaning') eternally!"?

It is worth saying that to unravel (or to try to) these very obscure, difficult, paradoxical and hostile-to-logic instances, it is not only necessary to continuously insert oneself deeply in Nietzsche's work but also to have towards him great appreciation and gratitude for his undertaking, to the point of madness, such a battle inside thinking's and existence's labyrinth. "To think is to love," said Pessoa.

And logic, even for the philosophers of logical analysis, also has its limit. The mind, in its activity, forges forms which approximate the phenomena and physiological, psychological, cognoscitive, social, cultural processes, etc. That does not mean that those forms are the "truth" or reality itself.

Metaphysics in general - idealist as well as materialist, and in its rationalist or empiricist variants - substitutes reality for its abstractions and categories. Its fictions and lies have dominated philosophical thought as unquestionable "truths." Art, on the other hand, does not seek to substitute reality but it is a movement that springs from reality, and its becoming is "parallel" to reality, symbolically transforming and inflicting violence upon it, piercing through concept and metaphysical and logical categories so that knowledge could be as complete as possible. Art is neither reality nor philosophical or scientific truth or falsity but instead its mode of forging forms, fictions, provides us another perspective on the truth/falsity relation.

Nietzsche, from a philosophizing which is closer to the dialectics of art and symbolic means of expression, enters, in the following fragment of '88, into this disturbing relation between "will to illusion" (art) and "will to truth" (religion, metaphysics, science):

The will to appearance, to illusion, to deception, to becoming, to change, accounts as the most profound and original, most "metaphysical" than the will to truth, to reality, to be: this last one is itself merely a form of the will to illusion. (p. 158)

It is "obvious," then, that as a concrete-real and concrete-abstract manifestation of will to power, the will to illusion is the "mode of production" that moves back and forth within religion, metaphysics and science, which Nietzsche catalogues as will to truth.

The characterization of will to illusion as "most profound and original, most 'metaphysical'" suggests not only that any search for/belief in truth springs first from this will to illusion, but that this one is always more profound and more creative of meaning, of the mythical, symbolic, than is metaphysics as idealist philosophy, religion as creator of dogmas, and science as "blind" unveiler, transformer and transgressor of reality. The "will to illusion" is more ancient and more permanent in its activity. By understanding these relations we can also differentiate between the metaphysics of art and the art of metaphysics; the eternal return as real/historical/ suprahistorical activity of art, and the eternal return as religious mythology/belief in reincarnation or transmigration of souls, eternal life in another world, etc.

There is another thought which brings us through a different path. In a fragment Nietzsche says: "All creation is communion. The thinker, the creator, the lover are one." (Will to Power, IV 596) This statement has, without a doubt, a self-referential ground, but it can be interpreted as those aspects that constitute the psychological subject; or, in terms of his first models for the "overman": the unity in an individual of philosopher, artist and saint. However, more than anything else, it indicates that these capacities exist connected, in metamorphosis and continuous conflict; and though we would have to add that, dialectically speaking, there will be a certain dominance (fluxing, "rotative") of one aspect over the others, only that individual who can reunite the dialectical harmony of these three aspects, in intensity, altitude, and duration, called as he/she may be called ("philosopher," "artist," or "revolutionary"), could overcome the modern "specialist" as well as the "fragmented post-modern" subject; that is, if we take the cognoscitive process as an integral one that relies on the total body (individual/collective).

From this interpretation, it would not be necessary to overcome metaphysics "metaphysically" but to make use of multiplicity within the integral, of plenitude and amplitude in order to distinguish roles and enrich the whole.

If we feel - in spite of appearances, the ascending exhaustion or emptiness of religion, metaphysics and science - the need for spiritual values, goals and meanings of existence, we cannot but see in art the only activity capable of spiritual sustenance of life which introduces meaning in this world, from this world, by this world, for this world. A healthy sustenance. A remedy and balsam that in relation to metaphysical "truth/falsity" we do not have to merely understand or take as "will to illusion" but, moving beyond Nietzsche, as an epistemological leap which returns differently and more powerful; a wisdom which is, historically, more ancient than religion, science and philosophy, and now re-supplies itself with the "best" of these practices in order to widen its technique, its thematics, its "totalizing" power; and it is, also, what we can properly call the supra-historical.

Art has the capacity to dialectically reunite the concept and the symbolic, dialectical materialism to artistic sensibility, and at the same time, to be the only liberty outside of all codes, logic, or dialectics, which has meaning and, paradoxically, protects and shelters these as necessary "fictions" (or activities). Art as the only knowledge which can overcome the nihilism inherent in every quietism, in every will to truth or fantasy, in every loss of control of science and technology. By being more inclusive than philosophy itself, and "making use" of it, it overcomes philosophy as dead discipline, as academia's cadaver, and impels, at the same time, a new vigor. In an art that philosophies, "nihilist" activity is always affirmative, and "metaphysical" activity takes place as the materialist glance of the world. Here, fiction is health and power, a continuation of life by other means and not confusion with life or another imagined suprasensual existence. Any other reality is always and only an aspect of total reality, and it is always at hand, concretely or abstractly, as part of the total becoming of the internal/ external world.

Finally, if we depart from the Nietzschean critique of philosophical metaphysics and his designation of art as the true metaphysical activity, it would always be as a sensual metaphysics. If philosophy came about as "synthesis" of myth and science, and metaphysics as product of philosophy; and if since then all the trajectory of knowledge - overdetermined by and correlative to all its components - has traveled in circles or spiral lines, in relative and uncertain progress, stagnation, retrogression, once more art surges not as absolute or sovereign but as limit and a piercing-through of all other knowledges or ideologies.

In an uncertain place now, Nietzsche said that man is the only animal who makes promises. Following this thought, religious man promises eternal life; the scientist, evidence of all knowledge and infinite progress; the philosopher, knowledge of truth and totality or the impossibility of all this; the politician, justice, equality, peace in order to avoid war or war in order to obtain peace.

Art, however, does not promise anything but instead is in its non-being the closest and most paradoxical form of the becoming, the limit-praxis of liberty and knowledge; a space where the will to power struggles and plays with itself (thinks, loves, creates), where it becomes a screen that symbolically shows what becoming is in its simplicity and complexity, impositive freedom which seduces the thinker, the lover and the creator.

To Nietzsche's question - on how the eternal return would be thought by the most temperate, those who have no need of extreme dogmas, the ones who do not only admit a good portion of the haphazard and the absurd but love it all the same - there is no other answer than revolution as purifier of society and destroyer of despotism and the intolerance of dominant classes and their herd morality; and art, which always returns - historically, supra-historically - in order to affirm/purify revolution. Art as "pioneer" of knowledge, the body's individual/collective detachment which as spearhead pierces through all nihilisms, and surges, paradoxically, as revolution's balsam and the only attainable, receptacular conception of the eternal return.

All translations are the responsibility of the author.

(Ed Note: This article was originally written in Spanish and translated into English by the author.)

Notes

1. Regarding the evaluation of Nietzsche's work it is important to establish a differential relation of purpose between the work Nietzsche finished and approved for publication and his posthumous work. However, the most important/significant/valuable thing in relation to philosophy as constant and alive movement is not the polemical matter of whether his posthumous writings are less or equally or more valid than his finished work, but how these in their heuristic and extrapolated potential are useful in order to continue the development of philosophical thought in relation to its own problematic as well as in relation to our contemporaneity and the connections between past, present and future. That is, in the same way as part of these notes reveal how Nietzsche arrived at his "final" points of view, in that same way they can help us in ours, or simply be our dialectical relay even when other parts remain undeveloped; or when the planned context might have changed some of the meaning these notes seem to have when isolated.

2. Departing from Marx and Deleuze, we can suggest that Nietzsche is, in great part, an ideologically reactive socio-cultural force that has activated itself as inverse image of its own social class and is another important chapter of its necessary self-destruction so that the new can come about: the new society, the new power, the new knowledge.

3. At the individual level as well as in political or cultural movments the streams where convergence/divergence between Marx's and Nietzsche's thought have taken place are probably more than we may suspect; and they are manifested in unpredictable/irreducible changes of direction. Let us think only in the following streams: Nietzsche-Freud-Dada-Marxism-Surrealism; Nietzsche-Existentialism-Sartre-Marxism-Anarchism; Marx-Nietzsche-Freud-Althusser; Marxism-Existentialism-Che-Theology of Liberation; Marx-Nietzsche-Postmodernism; Marx-Nietzsche-Durkheim-James-Dewey, etc. At the individual level, among the most influential theoreticians/philosophers today, the relation Marx/Nietzsche can be found in Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, Guattari, Baudrillard, Lyotard, etc., sometimes in a persistent way; at others, with ruptures.

4. Deleuze says: "Ressentiment, bad conscience, and nihilism are not psychological traits, but the foundation of humanity in man. They are the principles of human being as such. Man is the 'diseased skin' of the earth, the reaction of the earth." Active and Reactive, p. 96.

5. This does not mean that the instrumental or pragmatic philosophy of Williams, Dewey, etc., is nihilistic, but that U.S. nihilism is fundamentally pragmatic.

References

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Blanchot, Maurice, 1977."The Limits of Experience: Nihilism" in The New Nietzsche: Contemporary Styles of Interpretation, ed. David B. Allison, 121-127. New York: Dell Publishing Company.

Bogomolov, A.S. 1985. History of Ancient Philosophy: Greece and Rome. Moscow: Progress Publishers.

Clark, Gordon H. 1985. Thales to Dewey. Jefferson, MD: The Trinity Foundation.

Deleuze, Gilles. "Active and Reactive" in The New Nietzsche, 80-106.

-- "Nomad Thought" in The New Nietzsche, 142-149.

Derrida, Jacques. "The Question of Style" in The New Nietzsche, 176-189.

Heidegger, Martin. 1980. "Nietzsche as Metaphysician" in Nietzsche: A Collection of Critical Essays, 105-113.

Kaufmann, Walter. 1960. Nietzsche. New York: Meridian Books, Inc.

-- 1968. Basic Writings of Nietzsche. New York: Random House.

Marx, Karl, and Engels, Fredrich. 1973. The Communist Manifesto, New York: International Publishers.

-- 1976. The German Ideology, in The Collected Works. vol.5. New York: International Publishers.

Marx, Karl. 1964. The Economic and Philosohic Manuscripts of 1844. Edited/Introduction by Dirk J. Struik. New York: International Publishers.

Nietzsche, Federico. 1968. Estudios Sobre Grecia. Madrid: Aguilar, S.A.

-- 1973. En torno a la voluntad de poder. Barcelona: Ediciones Península.

-- 1980. El anticristo. México: Editores Mexicanos Unidos, S.A.

-- 1980. Crupúsculo de los ídolos. Madrid, España: Alianza Editorial, S.A.

Nietzsche, Cruz Vélez, Heidegger y Meléndez Acuña. 1992. Fragmentos Póstumos/A propósito de Friedrich Nietzsche y su obra.. Bogotá: Editorial Norma. S.A.

Rakitov, Anatoly. 1989. The Principles of Philosophy. Moscow: Progress Publishers.

Russell, Bertrand. 1995. Historia de la filosofía occidental (tomo II: la filosofía moderna). Madrid, España: Editoriales Espasa Calpe, S.A.

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