“How to Read Like a Parasite” is a guide for how to overcome Nietzsche's deleterious influence on the left.
“How to Read Like a Parasite” overturns the whitewashed and defanged version of Nietzsche that has been made popular by generations of translators and academic philosophers who have presented his work as apolitical and without a core reactionary agenda.
The central argument of the book is that Nietzsche's philosophy does have a center, and that the left learns a great deal from Nietzsche when we read him as driven by a highly sophisticated reactionary political vision that informs all his major concepts and ideas.
The most important Nietzschean concepts-from perspectivism, ressentiment, eternal return to the pathos of distance-are analyzed in the historical context in which Nietzsche lived and wrote, and several case-studies of prominent left-Nietzscheans from Jack London, Gilles Deleuze, Wendy Brown to Huey Newton are discussed.
“How to Read Like a Parasite” makes a persuasive case for how to overcome Nietzsche's deleterious influence on the left. It is sure to provoke a passionate debate and shape how the left comes to understand Nietzsche.
