larly change[s] transgressions into ‘false exits’” ( 135 ). Derrida
here follows Foucault in his suspicion of the liberationist,
utopian element of the counterculture of the sixties. The grim,
inescapable system cannot be overturned. But it can be ren-
dered absurd, cast in a radical new light. Derrida winds up his
essay by calling on Foucault’s favorite deity, the overman of
Nietzsche, who dances joyously on the grave of conventional
pieties.
We have escaped Heidegger for the more daring and
iconoclastic Nietzsche. Heidegger, in the series of Nietzsche
lectures he gave in the midst of World War II, vainly tried to
imprison Nietzsche in the tradition of metaphysics: Derrida
sets him free. “His laughter then will burst out,” Derrida says of
the overman. “He will dance, outside the house, the aktive
Vergesslichkeit,the ‘active forgetting’ and the cruel (grausam)
feast of which the Genealogy of Moralsspeaks. No doubt that
Nietzsche called for an active forgetting of Being: it would not
have the metaphysical form imputed to it by Heidegger” ( 136 ).
Derrida gives us this faintly barbarous picture of a Nietzschean
escape from metaphysics in order, once again, to join ranks
with Foucault, for whom Nietzsche is the god of the unimag-
inable future: of the exciting, threatening, apocalyptic—and
impossible—hope for escape from all that imprisons us. Der-
rida, at the end of “The Ends of Man,” underlines the radical
derring-do of his tone by dating his text “May 12 , 1968 ,” a cru-
cial day of the Paris students’ rebellion. He concludes by hoist-
ing his essay directly over the revolutionary bonfire.
“The Ends of Man” is dramatic in its ambivalence. As so
often, Derrida seems to have it both ways, stirring us with a
sublime, drastic image—the Nietzschean overman dancing at
his cruel feast—and, at the same time, reminding us of the
need for Talmudic focus on the cherished writings of his fa-
Writing and DifferenceandOf Grammatology 137