Dmitri Safronov

Having started with a harsh critique of the “contemptible money economy” (UM III, SE 4), Nietzsche subsequently travelled back in time in order to discern the origins of its values and to formulate goals that would “transcend money and money-making” (UM III, SE 6). Having traced the “greed of the moneymaker” back to the ressentiment of the “ascetic priest” (GM III 10–5), Nietzsche’s genealogical inquiry culminated in his discussion of the slave revolt in morality. A particular feature per-taining respectively to the domains of material debts and moral guilt was their reli-ance on an enduring revaluation of values. The manner in which Nietzsche connects the moneymaker’s world of material debts to the priest’s domain of the slave morality reveals a number of striking structural parallels to Plato’s, and to some extent Aris to-tle’s, discussion of the uneasy accommodation between democracy and moneymak-ing. Highlighting and exploring these similarities, which remain largely overlooked in the current scholarship, adds to our understanding of Nietzsche’s undertaking.

History in Turmoil announces modernity in terminal seizure: small-h history collides with capital-H History. Beneath war, market convulsion, algorithmic acceleration, and ideological frenzy yawns the structural fracture—the severance of humanity from nature and from its own agonistic soul. With Nietzsche, Heidegger, Koselleck, and Žižek as charges, this essay contends that liberal techno-capitalism—metastasising into digital neo-feudalism—cannot metabolise its antagonisms and thus weaponises them as crusades of “good” against “evil”. Polarisation spirals. Machination consolidates. Meaning evaporates. We inhabit the monstrous site where democracy, capital, progress, equality, freedom—the West’s sacred words—reveal themselves as engines of self-annihilation. “Salem” names an endemic pathology of punitive consciousness: a civilisation incapable of reconciliation externalises its fracture as purge. If this circuit is not shattered, history will not warn—it will detonate. The question is not whether turmoil advances. It is whether we can ground the abyss before it claims us, or whether, like the Titanic’s revellers, we are already toasting the iceberg.

This essay begins with a warning: Nietzsche has not been understood. What parades as interpretation is John Sallis’ “deceptive intelligibility” – a hall of mirrors masquerading as clarity, engineered to bury Nietzsche’s philosophical sabotage. Nietzsche’s thought, like quantum theory, explodes causality, truth, and identity – not metaphorically, but ontologically. His aphorisms do not simply describe the world; they interfere with it. They collapse the observer into the observed, entangling meaning with force, knowledge with will, thought with becoming. He is not a philosopher of answers but of ruptures – epistemic fractures that reverberate across disciplines and time. Art, science, philosophy and myth combust into co-authored vortices – no maps, only collisions of perspective. From Heraclitus to Heisenberg, from tragic myth to wave-particle paradoxes, Nietzsche’s legacy emerges as a gravitational field – disabling our coordinates, annihilating philosophical ground. The five outstanding explorations of Nietzsche’s philosophy reviewed here do not explain Nietzsche; they accelerate his destabilizing charge, colliding at the edges of interpretation to generate new hybrids of thought. Against the fixity of meaning, Nietzsche offers a reality in superposition. The question is no longer what Nietzsche meant, but how much conceptual collapse we can endure when we stop containing him. To understand Nietzsche is not simply to interpret, but to embrace Nietzschean singularity.

Nietzsche’s trenchant critique of modernity culminates in the famous call for the “revaluation of all values.” Early on in his work Nietzsche urges us to “set goals beyond gold and gain.” Exploring the subject of money within Nietzsche’s oeuvre reveals that his revaluational project and his passionate plea to “formulate goals” that would “transcend money and money-making” are by no means discrete undertakings. Quite the opposite, Nietzsche’s revaluation grows out of his stated objective to transcend the value horizons demarcated by money, which represents the archetypal value of secular modernity. In his assessment, money’s rise to prominence in the wake of God’s death exposes society’s declining health and conceals money’s ouroboric rondure. Nietzsche’s prescient examination of money’s psychology relies on the same method of genealogical scrutiny he applies to the critique of slave morality. It contains several messages which ring with pertinence in today’s world.

Safronov’s Nietzsche’s Political Economy is a pioneering appraisal of Nietzsche’s critique of industrial culture and its unfolding crisis. The author contends that Nietzsche remains unique in conceptualizing the upheavals of modern political economy in terms of the crisis of its governing values. Nietzsche scrutinises the norms which, not only preside over the unfathomable build-up in debt, the proliferation of meaningless, impersonal slavery and the rise of increasingly repressive social control systems, but inevitably set these precarious tendencies of modern political economy on a collision course liable to culminate in an unprecedented human and environmental catastrophe. Safronov explores the core themes of Nietzsche’s political economy—debt, slavery, and the division of labour—with reference to the influential views of Adam Smith and Karl Marx, as well as against the backdrop of the Long Depression (1873–1896), the first truly international crisis of industrial capitalism, during which most of Nietzsche’s work was completed. In Nietzsche’s assessment, modern political economy is predicated on the valuations that diminish humankind’s prospects and harm the planet’s future by consistently enfeebling the present, as long as there is profit to be made from it. Nietzsche’s critical insight, which challenges the most fundamental tenet of modern economics and finance, is that in order to build a stronger and intrinsically more valuable future in lieu of simply speculating on it, as though the liberal Promised Land could descend upon us like the manna from heaven at the wave of an invisible hand [of the market], it is necessary to walk from the future we dare to envisage resolutely back to the present we inhabit to determine what demands achieving such a vision would impose upon us, instead of embellishing the ‘here and now’ by cynically discounting the future to the [net] value of the present while disparaging, disowning and rewriting the past to unburden ourselves of its troubling legacy, as we continue to frivolously squander its capital to the alluring tunes of the ‘sirens who in the marketplace sing to us of the future’. The enabling mechanism for changing our valuing perspectives, Nietzsche tells us, lies dormant in us and it must be unlocked before it is too late.

Nietzsche is a silent interlocutor in Francis Fukuyama’s polemic The End of History and the Last Man (1992). But Fukuyama, I argue, ignores the rationale behind Nietzsche’s critique of the liberal worldview and misinterprets his call for the revaluation of all values. By exploring the relations between the end of history, the last man and the need for revaluation, this chapter aims to reconstruct the relevant aspects of Nietzsche’s critique of liberalism, which challenges the political vision of The End of History. I contend that Nietzsche’s exposure of the conceptual and value inversions as central yet perilous sources of legitimacy in modern ‘industrial civilization’ continues to resonate today and deserves critical attention.

Guided to the notion of the eternal return by the philosophical intuitions of the Greek antiquity, Nietzsche turned to the physical sciences of his day in order to further his inquiry. This extensive intellectual engagement represented a genuine attempt to investigate the possible continuity of meaning between the mythical tradition, on the one hand, and the rational-empirical (i.e. scientific), on the other. In particular, Nietzsche was intrigued by the manner in which the relationship between myth and science played out in the wide-ranging debates on the eternal recurrence and entropy. Obscuring the view, however, lay the debris of metaphysical imports into the discourse of secular modern science. In the course of his ambitious undertaking to disentangle physics from metaphysics, Nietzsche discerned a possibility for synthesising the scientific explanation for his ‘fundamental conception’ (EH: Z, §1) with the mythical wisdom of the ages. His inferences proved nothing short of explosive. The doctrine of the eternal return of the same, instead of the docile cosmic torpor, urged the radical revaluation of all values. The measure of the eternal return’s power was to dissolve its impersonation – the Übermensch – into a form of well-being. Nietzsche was convinced that his ‘mightiest idea’ (NF-1881:11[148]) illuminated the path we must follow lest we wish to incur the full force of the ‘frightening wisdom of Silenus’ (BT: §4).

Nietzsche is absent from today’s growing debate on slavery past and present. In this article I argue that his views on the subject add a pertinent, if challenging, dimension to this wide-ranging discussion. Nietzsche’s analysis is capable of contributing to our understanding of this multifaceted phenomenon in a number of respects. I look at Nietzsche’s use of the controversial notions of slavery, understood both historically and in the context of modern society, to explore such central concerns of political anthropology as the nature and role of leadership, and the questions of development and inequality. The key focus of Nietzsche’s examination concerns slavery as an enduring facet of human existence. He sees it becoming an important hallmark of the industrial culture as a barometer of modern society’s physiological well-being, as well as acting as the repository for its externalities. Nietzsche’s genealogical inquiry leads him to explore the psychological content of slavery and to conceptualise it in terms of human vulnerability, which increases susceptibility to exploitation. In these respects, Nietzsche’s views resonate with pertinence today and deserve closer critical attention and scrutiny – something Nietzsche would undoubtedly welcome.