candidate has various names in his work: writing, différance,
and, in “Structure, Sign and Play,” Nietzschean affirmation.
Derrida poses Nietzsche against “the saddened,negative,nos-
talgic, guilty” Rousseau. Nietzsche, Derrida insists, gives us a
joyous, active innocence in place of what he sees as Rousseau’s
wan, sentimental ideal. (Though rarely cited in the sixties,
Rousseau was one of the main influences on the “back to
the garden” aspect of hippie culture.) Derrida writes, “The
Nietzschean affirmation... is the joyous affirmation of the
play of the world and of the innocence of becoming, the affir-
mation of a world of signs without fault, without truth, and
without origin which is offered to an active interpretation.The
affirmation then determines the noncenter otherwise than as loss
of the center”( 292 ).
For Derrida’s Nietzsche, then, there never has been any
center. Everything is mythos, nothing logos. Nietzsche, “no
longer turned toward the origin, affirms play and tries to pass
beyond man and humanism.” He refuses to dream, as Lévi-
Strauss and Rousseau do, of “full presence, the reassuring
foundation, the origin and the end of play” ( 292 ). Nietzsche
becomes for Derrida the one figure in Western philosophy
who wants definitively to overcome its premises, to “pass be-
yond man and humanism.” In this way, skepticism is turned
inside out, transformed into the source of affirmative, creative
force. Because the logos is dead, we find ourselves stranded in
“a world of signs without fault, without truth, and without ori-
gin.” And in Derrida’s fervent reading, this new world bears a
utopian promise. Nietzsche offers us the “innocence of be-
coming”: freewheeling, endless play without center.
Derrida borrows his powerful liberationist Nietzsche
from two earlier French thinkers, Georges Bataille and Pierre
Klossowski, who had written about Nietzsche during the 1930 s.
Writing and DifferenceandOf Grammatology 101