But the real Nietzsche is far more complex than the one that
Derrida, following Bataille and Klossowski, depicts. He is not
the brave, festive inhabitant of a cosmos without truth. In-
stead, Nietzsche has a political program for the future: one that
involves not abolishing the category of the true, but formulat-
ing a new truth and a new order of society.^6 As with Plato, the
Nietzschean revolution will be activated by the philosopher-
lawgiver: Nietzsche’s Übermensch,or overman. (I will return to
this subject when I consider Derrida’s Spurs,his major state-
ment on Nietzsche, in chapter 3 .)
In 1966 , the same year as the Johns Hopkins conference,
Derrida delivered an exciting lecture on Freud at the Insti-
tut de Psychanalyse in Paris. His talk, called “Freud and the
Scene of Writing,” was published later in the year in Tel Quel,
and then reprinted in Writing and Difference.Derrida’s Freud
exhibits a partiality similar to that of his Nietzsche. Both,
in the Derridean view, discover an inherently powerful, self-
sustaining region of signifying: the Freudian unconscious and
Nietzschean aesthetic play. In both cases, Derrida de-empha-
sizes these thinkers’ concerns with educating the psyche (in
Freud, through therapy; in Nietzsche, through philosophical
inquiry). He also discards their interest in how the social order
is formed and governed: crucial for both the pessimist Freud
and the world-remaking Nietzsche. In Freud as in Nietzsche,
Derrida recognizes a prophetic element. The traumatic en-
counter with reality basic to Freud’s theory will attain a sig-
nal importance for Derrida, as a way out of the self-enclosed
philosophical tradition that Derrida has spent his energies
dissecting.
It was in many ways appropriate that Derrida, still early
in his career, tackle Freud, assessing his potential for philoso-
phy. In the sixties and seventies, psychoanalysis flourished in
102 Writing and DifferenceandOf Grammatology