American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and His Ideas

by Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen

For Derrida, following Nietzsche, the hunt for origins had come to an end, because origins are simply that which we ourselves create, and then impute meaning after the fact. We found foundings, we do not find them. Likewise, when we read Nietzsche, as Derrida would do in his analysis of Ecce Homo, we can no longer expect to locate the author, or his intended meanings, in the text. When we do, we enlist a rough-and-ready proper name, “Nietzsche,” to do the work for us. By drawing from Nietzsche’s ideas about language, extending the implications of his “death of God” to the “death of the author,” and showing the utter instability in the simplest acts of reading, Derrida offered a new textualist Nietzsche, who left “traces” of dissimulation in his wake.4 The readings of Nietzsche’s texts, like the readings of the Declaration of Independence, Derrida argued, are never static.