Who Was Jacques Derrida?: An Intellectual Biography

(Greg DeLong) #1

achievement of certainty. In her role as the Dionysiac artist,
freely manipulating appearance and reality, woman escapes all
the clumsy denunciations that philosophers, from Socrates on
(and including Nietzsche himself at times), cast at her.
What Nietzsche sees as woman’s disregard for truth be-
comes her triumph over the philosophers, who cling to pon-
derous, inflexible ideas of certainty. Feminine deception turns
out to be more actively in the service of life than the dogmatic
philosopher’s rigid beliefs. Life itself is a woman, Nietzsche an-
nounced: a shimmering, ever-changing being whom one loves
because of her exciting and unreliable nature.
Freud remarked that Nietzsche might have had more
self-knowledge than any other man of the nineteenth century.
Derrida in Spursis careful to note Nietzsche’s advanced con-
sciousness of his own sensibility, his addiction by turns to both
nuance and brutal hyperbole. But Derrida’s governing empha-
sis is on the uncontrollable nature of Nietzsche’s oeuvre, the
way it far exceeds the original intentions of its author.
Nietzsche’s psychological insight has a limit, according to
Derrida: he cannot understand himself, because “Nietzsche” is
merely a name attached to a vast series of words. Here is Der-
rida’s familiar skepticism again, poised against the image of
Nietzsche as a personality. But now the skepticism has been
turned inside out, so that (Derrida implies) it has freeing
imaginative potential. “I have forgotten my umbrella,” scrib-
bled on a random scrap of paper, was one of the seemingly
trivial statements found among Nietzsche’s effects after his
death. What if, Derrida suggested, all of Nietzsche’s work
could be compared to “I have forgotten my umbrella,” a re-
mark whose context we remain utterly ignorant of? Even
such an incidental note to oneself may have untold sig-
nificance (in Nietzsche’s case, as in ours). This reliance on the


Plato, Austin, Nietzsche, Freud 167

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