Race, Class and Tragedy: Nietzsche and the Fantasies of Europe

This essay revisits Nietzsche’s meta-political (or archi-political) speculations about Europe through the interlocking prisms of class and race. It explores the extent to which something like a ‘class racism’ – or, in Domenico Losurdo’s formulation, a ‘transversal racism’ – can be seen to operate in Nietzsche’s anti-democratic visions of European unification. In a concluding section, it traces elements of Nietzsche’s later problematisation of a European ‘great politics’ in the often-neglected political dimension of his writings on Ancient Greek tragedy and the cultural necessity of slavery, while also touching upon the way in which these writings have served as a resource for anti-colonial poetics.