A Review - “How to Philosophize with a Hammer and Sickle”
Jonas “Cuck” Čeika Remixes Marx and Nietzsche In Latest Theory Book -- @PhilosophyCuck
How to Philosophize with a Hammer and Sickle: Nietzsche and Marx for the 21st-Century Left is by Jonas Čeika (or Cuck Philosophy on Youtube). It is a good idea for a book as many people begin their philosophy journeys with an initial confrontation with Nietzsche, and many of their journeys end with Marx.
The book is a brave attempt at extracting a productive Socialism from a synthesis of Marx and Nietzsche. An attempt of glowing “populist” admiration for a Humanism that will open the space for a more universal and moral Socialist politics. Čeika argues how this egalitarianism has been violently repressed in both thinkers (and their legacies), but this X can be unlocked by creatively combining these contradictory philosophies. Therefore, the book should be a hit for anyone driven by a love for Nietzsche’s “philosophical chaos” but are still “Marx curious”.
The clear focus of the book is a vague path away from the wrongs of actually-existing-Socialism by supplementing the flawed legacy with a reassessment of Nietzsche’s anti-egalitarianism. As a result, Marxist radical state political successes, failures, and tyranny, are contrasted with Nietzsche’s “fascist” and incoherent brand of tyranny.
For Čeika, Marx and Nietzsche have suffered horrific historical surgeries and theoretical mutations; but the greatest horror was the fact they held the key to a humanism under-cultivated in both thinkers. Here he argues how these two modes of thought are victims to distortions and practical misapplications, a violence where both have been transformed into ideologies suited perfectly to modernity’s play of categories. They have been made into “transcendentalist” thinkers of “play”, be it play as reformers, social democrats, moralists, historical determinists, or nationalists.
Čeika is right in his work to be using Marx to productively critique Marx, and Nietzsche to critique Marx, and so on, and so on; however, how would these thinkers’ critique Čeika’s book themselves? As these blokes were famously some of the most vocal critics of all-time then surely, they would hate it?
Well, the book presents a doubled down double-bind crime in its attempt at synthesising Marx and Nietzsche. “It is not, as has been done before, primarily a matter of supplementing what is lacking in Marx with Nietzsche, or supplementing what is lacking in Nietzsche with Marx” [Introduction: 4]. A wishy-washy synthesis here collapses into an on-going comparison of “lacks”.
The Čeika attack is a synthesis that actualises it-self as a supplement, a supplement overlooking all the ways in which Socialism is already present in the thinker, despite their supposed “lack” (as deficient). As he puts it himself, “It is not, therefore, a matter of synthesising or supplementing, and more a matter of using each thinker to bring out what is already present in the other, but perhaps overlooked, hidden, or placed in the background” [Intro: 4]. Therefore, this Socialism is a classic example of critical theory, an idealistic negation instead of the objective “negation of the negation”.
The book offers a continuation of Cuck Philosophy popularisation via five elements: “Nietzsche, Marx, philosophy, modernity, and human emancipation” [Introduction: 9]. Unfortunately, Nietzsche and Marx here are turned into avant-garde artists. Where both are treated as substitute religions as a means for beautifying the disgusting bourgeois reality of capitalism. The thrust is directed against everything that takes itself "seriously" to radically re-distribute property via violent revolution, be it: culture, politics, or civil society. An avant-garde Socialism is offered where the Last Man of the twenty-first century has rolled onto stage.
Čeika’s big thesis is that Marx (and Engels) offer a priestly essential insight of Socialism in their Marxism, one that Nietzsche missed, or at least did not consciously or explicitly articulate it. Implicitly, Nietzsche’s unconscious later material shows an admission that the class struggle generates alienation and nihilism; “Namely, that the slave revolt, nihilism, life-denial, is inseparable from the establishment of the division of labour. Recognizing this is one of the main preconditions of a Nietzschean socialism” [V: The Division of Labour: 7].
The avant-garde Socialism presented offers neither a political nor anti-political movement. Instead, it offers a radical "philosophical non-action" via artistic militant irony. An aesthetic bourgeois mode of thought following from the bourgeois philosophical momentum of amoralist freedom of expression; a medium of expression for the "truth." Truth as an art of the ages instead of a world-historic mode of philosophical thought.
Furthermore, Čeika himself embraces social democracy and moralism; “So many people have dedicated their careers to digging up Marx’s corpse and making use of one limb or another, not to emphasize what is most powerful in him” [Introduction: 2]. How is this not projection? Since his project is of a socialism instead of communism? In his retreat from the theoretical bravery, courage, and historical successes of “big C Communism”. As Čeika misses that this is a clear and precise effort to neuter his virility, and not a move of intellectual development.
Although, Čeika is clearly right that Marxism has become a legitimisation mechanic for any critic of the status quo. However, everyone on Twitter today is a Nietzschean in his sense of the word; on Twiter all are critical, all are transcending values, all have an eye toward the infinite (an infinite of internet (re)creation).
Accordingly, Čeika’s book turns Marx and Nietsche into “Gutai” artists (”embodiment” of art made “concrete”). For instance, his work resembles Kazuo Shiraga’s “performance paintings,” which involved painting while writhing around half-nude in mud, or painting with his feet. Shiraga wanted to be understood as a literal embodiment of the painting relation (paint-brush-canvas). Or as Jiro Yoshihara, the founder of the avant-garde Gutai group, offered in his 1956 manifesto: “Gutai Art does not alter matter. Gutai Art imparts life to matter.”
What is important for Čeika is the “right” presence of mind in the chaos – the right level of Marx and Nietzsche – a golden mean. In the middle of a homicidal chaos, Čeika offers a calmly excited Lebensphilosophien for the times. A demand from existence (Dasein) that requires an absolute simultaneity with the tendencies of its own time— an avant-garde existentialism.
An avant-garde socialist mode of thinking is grounded in a structural “lie”. It remains an external symptomatic truth synthesising M-N-M’; a logic that moves entirely within opposing processes, time-leaps, and multiple points because its structural essence cannot be abbreviated to a universal equivalence. The thing itself of avant-garde socialism actualises in its execution by automatically placing oneself beneath the plane of Marx and Nietzsche, within a place destabilising unity of the plane – one’s own ego.
Čeika argues that Marx and Nietzsche both emphasised the importance of aesthetic sensibility, but more importantly, both understood that capitalism undermines this sensibility. This position is tragic because Nietzsche did not comprehend capitalism at any level comparable to Marx, and his retreat to the aesthetic and personal was a sign of political-economic naivete. Čeika argues Nietzsche’s critique of the ascetic ideal balances out Marx’s political-economic missteps.
Čeika has simply rehabilitated the philosophical impulse of the critical arts and culture wars; “The goal is to bring out, by means of a cross-examination, the immense critical power already present in each thinker — this requires only a little push” [Intro: 4]. He offers here a will to “truth” via an ambiguous rehabilitation of political-economy’s most ambiguous Notion: Socialism. This “Socialist” turn is one removed from the history of Marxist-Leninism; it becomes a Notion persisting either everywhere (or nowhere); a Notion persisting as capitalist shadow; a Notion submerged under aesthetics and elitist vanities.
An act of violence that equates art with "arts and crafts", a diversion from political reality (organisations threatening the legality of the state) instead of a political-economic project of innocuous decorative art. For Čeika, “The theory and the practice are a continuous whole, and either one in isolation is necessarily incomplete” [Intro: 5]. Here Marxist theory is castrated by “practical effects” of transforming social relations. Here even Mao and the Cultural Revolution are reduced to a post-modern record breaking ballet performance (a performative moralistic Socialism).
Čeika behaves ambiguously toward fascism, as he negates it only through an anti-fascist logic of "aesthetic resistance." With a Nietzschean reading, it offers sceptical (cynical, realist) elements, elements that lean toward the pre-fascist aesthetics of annihilation, a creative destruction that wants to enjoy the intoxication of demolition to the full.
Čeika is not promoting fascism of course, but he is pushing social democracy to preserve the status quo against the present crises (and conveniently any theoretical future crisis). A social democracy in the most aristocratic form, where it favours the “Liberal subject” who can “code” and “decode flows” of meaning and grant significance at their own desire. A “socialism” that Marx and Nietzsche would find to be a performative show to signify one’s own social status as freedom.
Čeika’s speculative thesis resembles the typical conservative/reactionary approach (accelerated under Fascist thought) of shifting emphasis away from class struggle toward an external threat to the property order, a non-People within the order of the People, these people are life-deniers and threats to the order, and the class struggle is a distraction from this easier threat (be it “antihuman”, degenerate gypsy, Jew, and so on). An obfuscation of class struggle as primarily determining social relations, a struggle requiring bourgeois property appropriation and slave revolts is dismissed in favour of a struggle against externalities as a unified class of threats to the societal Whole.
Consequently, this avant-garde is a negative of the conservative approach that reinforces the conservative approach. It is conservative as it desires a reality smacked of the rawest of negativity – a negation of the decaying Absolute order. A Socialism that should embrace the contentious observer, the pacifists, or the liberal anti-communists. Even if enemies are idealists who happen to negate reality. This avant-garde approach comes from stripping Socialism of its dialectical-materialist motor (Communism).
Čeika offers his position as “fragments” forming a historical “continuity” of intertextuality (contingent inter-locking historical concerns), a historical avant-garde fantasy where solutions are offered as the fantasy; what hopefully manifests is particular interpretation of Marx and Nietzsche that can finally provide: “/…/ a particular route towards human emancipation” [Intro: 9]. Čeika reduces Marx and Nietzsche to idealists who at best exemplify utopian socialism of humanity-wide emancipation (via the fragments of financial capital?).
Čeika sees this as all the Nietzschean aspects of Marx that have been purposefully denounced, overlooked, or ignored throughout the failures and deformations of Marxism in the twentieth century; “I propose a Nietzschean Marxism, which, paradoxically, comes to be more Marxist than many forms of Marxism claiming to be Marx’s direct heirs” [Intro: 2]. While the Marxist tradition explicitly follows the philosophical and scientific essentialism of German Idealism; a grounding Absolute whereby “historical knowing” = the Absolute as objective (an infinite that creates more but not many).
Čeika has presented a sceptical show of performative theory. A show, like a Youtube essay, an edu-tainment performance leading to a struggle of realism, a struggle that arrives via an unhappy consciousness directed toward sovereignty; despite sovereignty being asserted an inner insignificance and futility. His semiotic “scepticism” accompanies a risk of suicidal inclinations and hysterical reaction that can be demonstrated through a resurrection of "grand meaning" in the political spectacle to replace the long-felt nothingness left by the “death of God”; a lifeless everyday ego expressing itself as a search for a tyrannical master .
Čeika’ project is thus to restore the “human element” within Marxism via Nietzsche’s anti-humanism, since Nietzsche offers the best modern anti-humanist philosopher. Čeika offers an indeterminate negation of anti-humanism, where he does not return to humanism; but arrives at a negation where: “Our philosophy not only centres the concerns of everyday, living, suffering human beings; it exists and develops through them” [Intro: 2].
For the Čeika procedure of synthesis is an avant-garde deception as the deception is fundamental to the mystique of the avant-garde. Deception and bewilderment belong together and produce a provocative wake-up effect – but not a solution. Čeika builds a particular deception-as-realism; one that demonstrates a technique of deception, exposure, and self-exposure. Consequently, a methodology of deception whereby Nietzsche and Marx are combined into a solution for the “lack” of post-modernity.
Čeika reveals how modern ideology requires Nietzsche and Marx to function, since the modern subject needs to be self-duped. One must establish values and simultaneously act as if one believed in them. A self-dissolution of notorious meaning swindles as with avant-garde art theory of deception: “deception as theory in action”. Since even the Masters of suspicion Marx and Nietzsche knew that without a “theory of bluff” to explain revelation and deception, then a modern subjectivity cannot be located or even grasped abstractly.
Čeika uses Nietzsche to excavate Marxism, by arguing how there is an inexorable pleasure of X that a thinker arrives at when creatively playing with a combination of dialectics and psychotic perspectivism. A concrete and abstract “play”; for Čeika: “If aesthetics is essential to life affirmation, then limitless life-affirmation entails limitless aesthetics. One refers to the same thing, whether one calls it the abolition of art as a distinct sphere, or the unification of art and life”.[V: Aesthetics: 3] Hence, why Nietzsche and Čeika miss how the social relations are integral to generating the subject grounded in aesthetics.
For Čeika, philosophy continues “to challenge” as its essence; “If it ends at all, it will end beyond all books, where the philosophical problems brought up here are tackled at their source: the social relations that produce and maintain them” [A Preface to the Ending]. Čeika deploys the trick of the artist, by arguing the irony-aesthetic pursual leads to a beyond the pleasure principle, an X that provides transcendence found within the everyday social relations; for him the proletariat are: “/…/ pursuing it as life’s most sacred and valuable component, but in reaching towards it, they found themselves obstructed at every step, and found the aesthetic itself constantly undermined, denigrated, and degraded” [V: Aesthetics: 1].
Čeika simply tries to obfuscate any affirmation of reality that side-steps merely "aesthetic thinking". For him, the cultural superstructure must be annihilated so that this vital-dynamic element can step into the foreground; “One could even argue that it wasn’t aesthetic creativity that posed a false start in their careers, but, on the contrary, that theory was a detour taken by them when aesthetic fulfilment was obstructed” [V: Aesthetics: 1]. Things have to collide, but here for Čeika things are not proceeding nearly as horribly as they aesthetically should.
The eternal return elevates one’s actions to the perspective of eternity, like with Kant’s morality, one generates an eternal reality at every step. Nietzsche proclaimed the eternal return as his highest formula of affirmation, a tragic heroism; “If it were possible to witness in one image the entirety of the history of emancipatory struggle, could any socialist look at it without being moved to tears? Endure it without being overwhelmed to the point of madness?” [V: The Eternal Return]. In this project of avant-garde Socialism individuals consciously execute an inversion of the modern ego-world subjectivity that is not “madness”.
The synthesis poses a self-sufficient creative artist (genius) who can merge Marx and Nietzsche. Čeika presents himself as the worldly thinker (philosopher), the expansive entrepreneur-of-thought who consciously lets one’s-self be driven by the given data but is to humble enough to presume one’s self as a world-driver, or not. “The tendencies which move towards socialism and life-affirmation already exist,/…/”; “At the same time, there is nothing inevitable about such development, as countertendencies always threaten to crush the seed before it grows” [A Preface to the Ending].
If what drives us is brutal, then brutal must be us. Čeika does not look onto an ordered rational cosmos of exploitation, but he is the One who can order the cosmos to minimise exploitation but retain the gains. For over-man Čeika, “All we need is to kindle the tendencies of affirmation, to further them, and unleash their unfolding until they realize their most joyful potential” [A Preface to the Ending].
Čeika offers not a synthesis; but a procedure of "reflected negation" of Nietzsche back to Marx. This is not a synthesis. In other words, a technique of disordering meaning, a nonsense procedure. A circuit of M-N-M’. Wherever firm "values" and “higher meanings” of deeper significance emerge, then avant-garde Nietzsche and Marx Socialism unifications are there for a disordering of this meaning, a disordering of this promise of more .
A provisional negative philosophy of the “Positive” (Yes) is attempted in Čeika avant-garde Socialism. One that refers, to the concrete, momentary, comical, and creative energy of the theory-curious subject (as individual). The Positive (vital X) holds for the being-the-world, an X which one (as subject) treats X as a malleable reality. A play of the Real via irony. Čeika offers an X even more for the lived moment, in which the miracle of an eternal, fleeting present, and the existentialist paradox of the inner "duration" is realised, an X of data is simultaneously permeated and untouched by worldly turbulence.
Surprisingly, Čeika sees any continuation of German idealism, a: "nauseous mystification of things". While the Čeika “Yes” to reality is a realisation that does not concern itself with the opinion of experts, connoisseurs, snobs, and critics, Čeika offers an emancipation for amateurs that assumes that the Real joy is found in creating something more important than the successful result. A philosophical ability that is simply an embellishment of genuineness.
It is not the lasting works that count, but the moment of their intensive realisation to the consumer. His avant-garde approach provides an explicit technique in the disappointment of meaning —and thereby stands in a broader spectrum of semantic cynicisms with which the demythologization of the world and of metaphysical consciousness that reaches a radical final stage: the liberal freely oscillating between Marxist (socially valued Absolute action) and Nietzschean (anti-social egoistic development) modes of thought.
Čeika goes as far to make the argument that even Marx’s Communism does not deal with history via broad sweeping positive intervention on behalf of essentialism, “/…/ Marx and Nietzsche, much less their historical influence, can in no way be filtered down to some essence. There is no purification process for history, no honest way of escaping its transience and complexity” [IV: Historical Philosophy, Philosophical History: 3]. Two paths of play are always offered, two directions of theoretical intrigue coalescing as synthetic socialism.
The first aspect reveals strong destructive tensions, hate and haughty defensive reactions against the internalised fetish of the proletariat as political actor. A play of considerable projection of dynamic affects, affects of contempt and disappointment, self-hardening and loss of irony. While the atmosphere of the second is playful and productive, childlike, ironical, sovereign, unchangeably realistic and poetically wise. Consequently, it is not easy to separate these two paths of play offered within the book.
Čeika’s offers an avant-garde Socialism of logical positivism, a manoeuvring the post-modernist and structuralist malaise of Westernism. Here the process of the Whole is a self-obliterating of its own ground. Thus, Čeika embraces happily Nietzsche’s worst aspect, which is to retreat from the embracing of the objectivity in the “actual”. An embrace of the transcendental pivot toward a “play” of “wicked thoughts”; a play where there are no rational formulas of worldly totalisation except the tautological logic that grounds their anti-essentialism – a formula of faith.
In conclusion, the book seems like an attempt to portray a Marxism for post-modernist/anti-essentialist intellectuals; a bad infinity that creates “many but not more”; intellectuals standing on the sideline quibbling over “purity”. Both the work of Marx and Nietzsche are made to work like a trash compactor in the depraved Western superstructure of Categories.