seascapes. Nietzsche, like Plato, plays the rebel psychologist
among philosophers: he specializes in detecting the personal
motives of the great thinkers as they build their theories. Der-
rida finds no use in such psychological insight; instead, he fo-
cuses on the liberating potential of Nietzsche’s words. By the
early seventies, Derrida is no longer resoundingly prophetic, as
in his treatments of Nietzsche a few years earlier; but he does
continue to see in Nietzsche a new freedom.
In 1973 , in an anthology entitled Nietzsche aujourd’hui
(Nietzsche Today), Derrida published “The Question of Style,”
an essay derived from his contribution to a Nietzsche confer-
ence at Cérisy-la-Salle the previous year. Derrida retitled his
piece Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styleswhen it was issued in book form
several years later. Derrida had finally turned his attention
to the German thinker who was to dominate French philoso-
phy in the 1970 s, as Marx, Hegel, and Heidegger had domi-
nated it in previous decades. Heidegger, especially, was still a
name to conjure with in the bookstores and cafés of Paris, but
Nietzsche’s star was rising. Derrida aided this ascent, as did his
friend Sarah Kofman, a brilliant young philosopher, and the
influential theorist Gilles Deleuze. A celebrated essay by Fou-
cault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” also played a role in the
canonizing of Nietzsche as the most radical of spirits. David
Allison’s anthology The New Nietzsche( 1977 ) gathered many of
these pathbreaking French interpretations and presented them
to an eager American audience.
The complicated nature of Nietzsche’s opinions shows
up in the many-faceted, even contradictory, way that later eras
inherited his thought. Nietzsche, in the years between his
death in 1900 and the end of World War I, was adopted as a
hero by readers of radically divergent political leanings, from
anarchists and socialists to right-wing nationalists. He also,
Plato, Austin, Nietzsche, Freud 165