fragmented and the cryptic as the basis for imaginative new-
ness seems relatively thin. (In later years Derrida suggests that
the secret of the inmost self is similarly cryptic and therefore
resistant to analysis.) Derrida seems to have lost conviction in
the Nietzschean overman, praised in “The Ends of Man” a few
years earlier: the overman has yielded to a humble umbrella.
In SpursDerrida makes much play with the idea of the
umbrella, which unfolds its fabric in order to protect, perhaps
even to disguise. In this way, Derrida brings this modest object
close to Nietzsche’s image of woman as a goddess-like being
wrapped in illusory veils. But the umbrella is also phallic, hard
and aggressive. This is the potentially dominant aspect of
the feminine that Nietzsche feared. Women seemed to him
tougher than men, more knowing.
Here we must swerve back to psychological reading and
recognize that Nietzsche remains bound to his peculiar anti-
feminine pathology. In his madness, Nietzsche poignantly de-
clared that “‘I’ is every name in history,” implying that his own
perspective, his discipline of strong reading, colored all he saw;
but also, conversely, that every individual, throughout all
history, has a similarly strong perspective. Nietzsche cannot
be removed from his personal bias and translated into an im-
personal theory. In an important sense, the bias makes the
thought.
Derrida’s reading of Nietzsche influenced Sarah Kof-
man, a fellow member of GREPH, the informal organization
of philosophers that they and others had formed in 1975 .Kof-
man was a gifted philosopher who, afflicted by suicidal de-
pression, was to kill herself at the age of sixty, on Nietzsche’s
birthday. Her first book on Nietzsche,Nietzsche and Metaphor,
appeared in 1972 , the same year as the Cérisy symposium
where Derrida delivered the lecture that became Spurs.Her
168 Plato, Austin, Nietzsche, Freud