Who Was Jacques Derrida?: An Intellectual Biography

(Greg DeLong) #1

finds a more profitable subject, since Nietzsche knows that
here he cannot assert his vision. He finds himself defeated by
the sheer foreignness of women, by the labyrinth of the other’s
sensibility. In recognizing Nietzsche’s troubled relation to the
feminine, Derrida does Nietzsche studies a great service. Yet
here, too, Derrida misses an important aspect of Nietzsche. In
Spurs,Derrida envisions a Nietzsche identified with the “affir-
mative woman,” a figure who knows no difference between
lies and truth and who rejoices in illusion. The “affirmative
woman” becomes, for Derrida, a near-messianic character ca-
pable of replacing the Übermensch: a notion that inspired a
generation of French feminists. But the figure of woman
praised in Spurs,and by writers like Hélène Cixous and Luce
Irigaray, offers a release from responsibility, rather than the
new vision of responsibility that Nietzsche championed. Un-
constrained by beliefs and values, she represents a spectacular
aesthetic freedom, but one that Nietzsche considered too un-
governable to be part of his wished-for future.
As Derrida himself half-admits, such adoration of a
utopian femininity remains at the furthest pole from Nietzsche’s
own attitude, which envisioned the formation of a regime
ruled by a strict (if radically innovative) hierarchy, the work of
the philosopher-prophet. In claiming that Nietzsche’s occa-
sional identification with women is basic to his philosophy,
Derrida takes a liberty: he subordinates Nietzsche’s actual an-
nounced program, his core sense of his mission, to the wilder
regions of his text. In this way, he avoids the knowledge of
Nietzsche’s character, which finally favored rule, not anarchy.


In 1980 Derrida returned to Plato in his book The Post Card:
From Socrates to Freud and Beyond.In this work, Derrida tries
his hand for the first time at creative writing: a bold but failed


Plato, Austin, Nietzsche, Freud 171

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