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“originary” operations (I put that word within quotation marks for reasons to appear
later) with regard to a sense that they do not first have to transcribe or discover, which
would not therefore be a truth signified in the original element and presence of the logos,
as topos noetos, divine understanding, or the structure of a priori necessity. To save
Nietzsche from a reading of the Heideggerian type, it seems that we must above all not
attempt to restore or make explicit a less naive “ontology,” composed of profound onto-
logical intuitions acceding to some originary truth, an entire fundamentality hidden
under the appearance of an empiricist or metaphysical text. The virulence of Nietzschean
thought could not be more completely misunderstood. On the contrary, one must
accentuatethe “naiveté” of a breakthrough which cannot attempt a step outside of meta-
physics, which cannot criticizemetaphysics radically without still utilizing in a certain
way, in a certain type or a certain style of text, propositions that, read within the philo-
sophic corpus, that is to say according to Nietzsche ill-read or unread, have always been
and will always be “naivetés,” incoherent signs of an absolute appurtenance. Therefore,
rather than protect Nietzsche from the Heideggerian reading, we should perhaps offer
him up to it completely, underwriting that interpretation without reserve; in a certain way
and up to the point where, the content of the Nietzschean discourse being almost lost for
the question of being, its form regains its absolute strangeness, where his text finally
invokes a different type of reading, more faithful to his type of writing: Nietzsche has
written whathe has written. He has written that writing—and first of all his own—is not
originarily subordinate to the logos and to truth. And that this subordination has come
into beingduring an epoch whose meaning we must deconstruct. Now in this direction
(but only in this direction, for read otherwise, the Nietzschean demolition remains dog-
matic and, like all reversals, a captive of that metaphysical edifice which it professes to
overthrow. On that point and in that order of reading, the conclusions of Heidegger and
Fink are irrefutable), Heideggerian thought would reinstate rather than destroy the
instance of the logos and of the truth of being as primum signatum:” the “transcendental”
signified (“transcendental” in a certain sense, as in the Middle Ages the transcendental—
ens, unum, verum, bonum—was said to be the “primum cognitum”) implied by all cat-
egories or all determined significations, by all lexicons and all syntax, and therefore by
all linguistic signifiers, though not to be identified simply with any one of those signi-
fiers, allowing itself to be precomprehended through each of them, remaining irreducible
to all the epochal determinations that it nonetheless makes possible, thus opening the his-
tory of the logos, yet itself being only through the logos; that is,being nothingbefore the
logos and outside of it. The logos ofbeing, “Thought obeying the Voice of Being,” is
the first and the last resource of the sign, of the difference between signansand signatum.
There has to be a transcendental signified for the difference between signifier and
This does not, by simple inversion, mean that the signifier is fundamental or primary. The “primacy”
or “priority” of the signifier would be an expression untenable and absurd to formulate illogically within the
very logic that it would legitimately destroy. The signifier will never by rights precede the signified, in which
case it would no longer be a signifier and the “signifying” signifier would no longer have a possible signified.
The thought that is announced in this impossible formula without being successfully contained therein should
therefore be stated in another way; it will clearly be impossible to do so without putting the very idea of the
sign into suspicion, the “sign-of” which will always remain attached to what is here put in question. At the
limit therefore, that thought would destroy the entire conceptuality organized around the concept of the sign
(signifier and signified, expression and content, and so on).
[In Latin, respectively: being, unity, truth, goodness.]
Postface to Was ist Metaphysik?(Frankfurt am Main, 1960), p. 46. [What is Metaphysics?,trans.
David Krell in Basic Writings(New York: Harper & Row, 1977).] The insistence of the voice also dominates
the analysis of Gewissen[conscience] in Sein und Zeit(pp. 267 f.).