The 6os had been the years of the ruin of 'dialectical materialism', which had lost all of its claws one by one; it had had to cede the terrain to 'Nietzscheanism', which, in turn, began to crumble. Hegel, Marx and Nietzsche certainly had nothing to do with this; but every great thought, as acute as it might be, will always perish in the hands of overzealous devotees. And there was no shortage of the latter: a vagabond Nietzscheanism that roamed from Zarathustra to the CFDT, a fashionable Nietzscheanism for the most enlightened -- as indispensable to Parisian diners as the hostess's entremets -- and finally, a postmodern post-Nietzscheanism for the most retarded and provincial, weary of 'grand narratives' and of all the 'outdated campaigns' they'd always been too scared to join. The Cyber-Wolf style, apolitical and blase, began to spread: how to resist the delicious frivolity of those who strove to 'shit on the negative', who believed they had finally found the secret of permanent jubilation, and who claimed to be cultivating orchids in the desert without bothering much about the thorny problem of irrigation? Marvellous Gardeners of the Creative, who wanted to take off before having learned to walk, and who had forgotten that freedom, unless it is reduced to nothing but whim and daydreams, is also the concrete -- and often arduous -- mastery of the conditions of freedom. The neoliberal Counter-Reformation was to wreak its revenge without making any concessions to the Gardeners of the Creative. Every idea, even the most generous, would e mercilessly turned inside-out like a glove, chewed up only to be belched back up in the form of a nightmarish replica, just as the Evil Fairy of the fable makes her victims spew up toads and vipers as soon as they open their mouths...The Gardeners of the Creative had basically sought to play Nietzsche against Hegel, and often against Marx. But they had chosen the wrong target: it is neither Hegel's owl nor Marx's mole, nor Nietzsche's camel that surprises us at the turn in the road: it is Malthus, peddler of the most nefarious conservatisms, always smiling and affable, who stands watching the suckers haggling over the libertarian gimcrackery of nomadism and chaotizing.
Gilles Chatelet, To Live and Think Like Pigs, pg. 21-22, 24