 Nietzsche is the most powerful intellectual influence on our times in ways that everyone is really unaware of. The degree to which it has penetrated daily life so that it has come to seem American common sense. So much carried, for example, by German sociology in the United States. Words like lifestyle and so on, which are really new words, are just the use of the word value. That's all Nietzsche. So Nietzsche, in a way, is immediately recognizable, but it's so recognizable that it's alien. It's necessary to think through what the consequences of Nietzsche are. What the use of this Nietzschean language means for what the consequences are for our life. I think for our own activity of self-consciousness, the study of Nietzsche is central now. I think part of the success of Nietzsche in the United States has come from its assimilation into Marxism. The great movement between Nietzsche is clearly a right-winger. If you forgive that crude formulation, it is important that one recognize that. Because Nietzsche is so elusive that one has to stick on things that are really clear and which they will understand. He will come back to this, but he's against democracy. He's against notions of human rights. Above all, and perhaps this would be allowed for some of the best discussion in class, if one of the best one means most heated, he's absolutely against the equality of women. Feminism in regards to that is absolutely essential. I'll try to explain why and there are some good remarks here that one can refer to. Nietzsche is a figure who said, Modernity means democracy and ultimately socialism is, on the one hand, the decadence of man, necessarily the decadence of man, and leads to, or is not really leads to it, is the true expression of nihilism, the real belief in nothing, and that it is the deepest and perhaps fatal misunderstanding of the nature of things, and hence particularly of man. And it is one of the great achievements of the left to have incorporated Nietzsche. Because if you hear Nietzsche talk, I think you'll see it's mostly on the left today. That's been since the Second World War, the whole school of criticism called deconstructionism is nothing but that. You see deconstructionism, I mean in the simplest sense, it's a circus act. You cut the woman up into pieces, you know, the magician, you know, and then you put her back together, you know, that's what they do to Nietzsche, they kind of put her back together and he's a leftist after the circus act. And I think the simplest way in which Nietzsche moved to the left, Nietzsche's description of modern man, which is very impressive, can be easily assimilated to Marx's understanding of the board as well. It's much profounder, obviously. We can say, well, Nietzsche says this is the last man, this is what we are heading to. Marx says, no, this is a stage, we're going to get beyond it, you know, in real, you know, after the revolution. And this has allowed the left to, at least to make the plausible case, because this is a description of the man of our times. And that's the bourgeoisie, that's what we have to get rid of, because he ended up with, you know, much more easily allowed for the revolution. And precisely because Nietzsche is a much profounder describer, spectator of man than Marx, takes much more seriously the intimate experiences, which somehow the economic explanation does not. Without the Nietzschean element, Marx, how should I say, without the Nietzschean element, I think that Marx would have, Marxism would have died completely, that the appeal of contemporary Marxism is the appeal of Nietzsche.