second volume,The Enigma of Woman,released in 1980 ,am-
plified Derrida’s work, establishing the study of gender in
Nietzsche as a crucial field for Continental philosophy.
Derrida and Kofman together pioneered an approach
that allowed Nietzsche, in his creative originality, to question
Freud, rather than to be reductively subjected to Freudian cat-
egories. Nietzsche the misogynist feared the castrating woman,
the joyless feminist who, he insisted, ought to be raising chil-
dren rather than penning angry polemics. But Nietzsche’s fear
of feminism did not prevent him from celebrating woman
at other points in his work as a creature who is inherently
much stronger and more enlightened than her male opponent.
Nietzsche was, then, both misogynist and antimisogynist.
In line with his reading of the woman question in
Nietzsche, Derrida treats the philosopher’s opinions in other
areas as exploratory and often self-contradictory. Derrida
sides with Nietzsche’s wild streak, the philosopher’s Dionysian
proliferation of images and stylistic gestures, against Heideg-
ger’s staid Apollonian effort to pin Nietzsche down and iden-
tify him with two central ideas, the will to power and the eter-
nal return.
Yet slighting the programmatic aspects of Nietzsche, as
Derrida does, has its price. In 1968 , in the conclusion of “The
Ends of Man,” Derrida had invoked Nietzsche’s overman as a
figure who promises the “active forgetting of Being,” home-
lessness, and a nonplace beyond metaphysics. But Nietzsche
actually conceives of the overman as the prophetic bearer of a
new relation to our lives, a way of teaching humanity to con-
ceive a new beauty, not a way of estranging us from the world
as Derrida suggests.
Seeking a new era, Nietzsche aims to vanquish the self-
hatred that he claims was established by the Christian idea of
Plato, Austin, Nietzsche, Freud 169