Alan D. Schrift
In the 1960s, a philosophical revolution took place in France that would change the course of French philosophy for the remainder of the twentieth century: in 1966, Michel Foucault published The Order of Things1; in October of that same year, Jacques Derrida presented âStructure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciencesâ2 at an important conference on structuralism at Johns Hopkins University that, for all practical purposes, marked the beginning of the end of structuralismâs reign as the dominant intellectual paradigm in France; the following year, Derrida published Of Grammatology, Writing and Difference, and Voice and Phenomenon3; and the year after that, Gilles Deleuze published Difference and Repetition4 and Spinoza and the Problem of Expression5âhis two doctoral thesesâfollowed in 1969 by his next major work, The Logic of Sense.6 What these events announce is, among other things, the French philosophical turn away from phenomenologyâs three HsâHegel, Husserl, and Heideggerâand toward what Paul Ricoeur first called the masters of suspicionâNietzsche, Freud, and Marx.7 What these events also announce is a desire to move beyond the hegemony of structuralism in the late 1950s and early 1960s by means of the affirmation of a new style of philosophical thinking that would set the philosophical agenda in France and beyond for the remainder of the century in terms of what we, outside France, refer to as âFrench poststructuralism.â
Though perhaps not so obviously, these events also direct our attention to the centrality of Nietzscheâs thought in the emergence of poststructuralism. Returning to those foundational events in poststructuralist French philosophy mentioned above, Nietzscheâs philosophical importance for this emergence becomes apparent when one attends to the way Foucault situates Nietzsche in opposition to Kant in The Order of Things,8 Derrida situates Nietzsche in opposition to LĂ©vi-Strauss in âStructure, Sign, and Play,â and Deleuze situates Nietzsche in opposition to Hegel in any number of his works.9 Nietzsche was not, of course, first âdiscoveredâ by the French in the 1960s, as there was considerable interest in his thought early in the twentieth century.10 But this earlier interest was located primarily outside the university, especially at the most prestigious of French universitiesâthe Sorbonne/University of Parisâand, when in the university, outside the faculty in philosophy. To cite just one example, in the 1902â1903 academic year, Professor of German Literature Henri Lichtenberger taught the Sorbonneâs one full-year course in the German Department on Nietzsche; it would, however, not be for almost 60 years that a philosopherâJean Wahlâwould offer, in JanuaryâMarch 1959, an entire lecture course devoted exclusively to Nietzsche in the Sorbonneâs Department of Philosophy.11
Nietzsche in the Works of Foucault, Derrida, and Deleuze
Although Nietzscheâs works had been almost completely ignored by the French philosophical establishment, this changed in the 1960s, as we can see by looking in more detail at the works by Foucault, Derrida, and Deleuze mentioned above. Foucaultâs interest in Nietzsche began long before his genealogical works of the 1970s.12 When asked in 1983 about his relationship to Nietzsche, he responded that like many others, he was drawn to Nietzsche because he âwanted a way out of phenomenology.â13 He read Nietzsche, âcurious as it may seem, from the perspective of an inquiry into the history of knowledgeâthe history of reason.â14 Reading Nietzsche, he continues, was âthe point of ruptureâ15 for him insofar as Nietzsche showed that âThere is a history of the subject just as there is a history of reason; but we can never demand that the history of reason unfold as a first and founding act of the rationalist subject.â16 Nietzsche showed, in other words, the way beyond the phenomenological, transhistorical subject, a subject that, in his âIntroduction to Kantâs Anthropologyâ and The Order of Things, Foucault traces back to Kant. âThe Order of Things asked the price of problematizing and analyzing the speaking subject, the working subject, the living subject.â17 And it was Nietzsche, according to Foucault, who was the first willing to pay this price:
Perhaps we should see the first attempt at this uprooting of Anthropologyâto which, no doubt, contemporary thought is dedicatedâin the Nietzschean experience: by means of a philological critique, by means of a certain form of biologism, Nietzsche rediscovered the point at which man and God belong to one another, at which the death of the second is synonymous with the disappearance of the first, and at which the promise of the superman signifies first and foremost the imminence of the death of man.18
This passage follows by one page a reference to Kantâs formulation in his Logic (first published in 1800) of anthropologyâwhich asks the question âWhat is Man?ââas the foundation of philosophy. Remembering that for Foucault, it was Nietzsche who showed that there is a âhistory of the subject,â when Foucault speaks of the âdisappearanceâ19 or the âdeath of man,â20 he is not putting forward some kind of antihumanism. Instead âmanâ names a certain conceptual determination of human being that comes to be the privileged object of Kantian philosophical anthropology.21 Only by understanding Foucaultâs talk of âmanâ as designating a foundational concept of Kantian anthropology can we make sense of his provocative claim that âman is a recent invention, a figure not yet two centuries old.â22 While âmanâ has been privileged in the discourse of the human sciences since Kant, and continues to operate as the transcendental subject of phenomenology, Foucault locates the beginning of this end of man in Nietzscheâs doctrines of the Ăbermensch and eternal return, as we see in his final reference to Nietzsche in The Order of Things, where he couples Nietzscheâs death of God with the death of man:
Rather than the death of Godâor, rather, in the wake of that death and in profound correlation with itâwhat Nietzscheâs thought heralds is the end of his murderer; ⊠it is the identity of the Return of the Same with the absolute dispersion of man.23
Nietzscheâs importance in The Order of Things is not restricted to his showing the way beyond Kantian anthropology. In addition, it is âNietzsche the philologistâ who is credited with being the first to connect âthe philosophical task with a radical reflection upon language.â24 This is why, in The Order of Things, Nietzsche figures prominently as the precursor of the episteme of the twentieth century, the episteme that erupted with the question of language as âan enigmatic multiplicity that must be mastered.â25 For Foucault, it was Nietzsche, in other words, who recognized that a cultureâs metaphysics could be traced back to the rules of its grammar, and who recognized that it is merely a linguistic prejudice that leads to the metaphysical error of adding a doer to the deed.26 Whether it be the structuralists, who all based their theories on the view of language as a system of differences, or Heidegger, who saw language as the house of being, we can understand why Foucault could regard the question of language as the single most important question confronting the contemporary episteme. And insofar as Nietzsche viewed our metaphysical assumptions to be a function of our linguistic rules (grammar was, as he wrote in The Gay Science, âthe metaphysics of the peopleâ27), we can understand why Foucault traces the roots of the contemporary episteme back to Nietzsche.
Turning to Derrida, in Of Grammatology he credits Nietzsche with radicalizing âthe concepts of interpretation, perspective, evaluation, differenceâ28 and, in so doing, contributing âa great deal to the liberation of the signifier from its dependence or derivation with respect to the logos and the related concept of truth or the primary signified, in whatever sense that is understood.â29 It is his radicalization of perspective, evaluation, difference, and especially interpretation that motivates Derrida to position Nietzsche as the alternative to LĂ©vi-Strauss in âStructure, Sign, and Play.â There Derrida shows several ways that LĂ©vi-Strauss seeks to undermine and decenter a classical philosophical oppositionâa structureâonly to end up recentering that opposition/structure by appealing to the necessity of a center that he knows is not there. For example, Derrida examines LĂ©vi-Straussâs retention of the opposition between nature and culture as a conceptual tool whose use is methodologically necessary even as its truth value is negated. This opposition, which predates Plato in the form of the physis/nomos opposition, is not just one opposition among others. Instead, all anthropological theorizing and data acquisition turn on the opposition of nature/culture. According to Derrida, in LĂ©vi-Straussâs first book, The Elementary Structures of Kinship,30 he begins by defining nature as that which is universal, spontaneous, and independent of any particular culture, while culture is what depends on a system of norms that regulate society and can and does vary from one social structure to another.31 But shortly after affirming this opposition, LĂ©vi-Strauss discovers a âscandalâ32 within this framework: the incest prohibition, which is universal while being at the same time a norm, whi...