From Will-to-Power to Free Play of Signifiers: Nietzsche at the Threshold of Metaphysics

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Introduction

Friedrich Nietzsche believed he had “shattered the old tables” of Western thought, yet Martin Heidegger famously christened him “the last metaphysician of the West” (Heidegger, 1991/1939, p. 8). Jacques Derrida later inherited both positions, arguing that Nietzsche simultaneously seals and unsettles the metaphysical edifice. This essay reconstructs that triangle: Nietzsche’s attempted break, Heidegger’s consummation narrative, and Derrida’s doctrine of closure and play. By doing so, it examines one of the most influential interpretive disagreements in twentieth-century thought and situates Nietzsche as a pivotal figure in the fate of metaphysics.

Nietzsche’s Ambition to Overcome Metaphysics

Late in Twilight of the Idols Nietzsche writes that the “true world” has finally become a fable, and with it “the apparent world” also vanishes—incipit Zarathustra (Nietzsche, 1889/2005, p. 170). By collapsing both poles, the German iconoclast tries to end the dualism of appearance and reality that had structured philosophy since Plato. His intertwined doctrines of will to power and eternal return aim to replace static essences with ceaseless becoming. The will to power destabilizes fixed substances in favor of perspectival force, while the eternal return radicalizes temporality by affirming cyclical repetition without a metaphysical telos. In doing so, Nietzsche thinks he has executed “the death of God,” freeing valuation from any transcendent anchor and inaugurating a revaluation of all values.

Heidegger: Consummation, not Liberation

Heidegger applauds Nietzsche’s diagnostic brilliance yet insists the operation remains intramural. In the Freiburg lectures of 1939 he concludes:

“Nietzsche … is the last metaphysician of the West. The age whose consummation unfolds in his thought … is a final age.” (Heidegger, 1991/1939, p. 8).

Why “final” rather than “dead”? For Heidegger, will to power absolutizes the modern subject’s drive for mastery, while eternal return freezes becoming into a guaranteed presence. Instead of dismantling the metaphysical will-to-ground, Nietzsche radicalizes it. Metaphysics therefore reaches its telos—self-totalization—yet still forgets the more originary question of Being itself. For Heidegger, this culmination signals not an escape but an exhaustion, after which a non-metaphysical beginning might be prepared through a different, more originary thinking.

Derrida: Closure Without End

Where Heidegger sees Nietzsche as a terminal intensification of metaphysics, Derrida reconfigures that closure as a moment of textual disruption. In Of Grammatology he cautions:

“There is no sense in doing without the concepts of metaphysics in order to shake metaphysics. We have no language—no syntax and no lexicon—which is foreign to this history.” (Derrida, 1976, p. 19).

Closure, then, is not a terminus; it is the moment when the system turns back on itself, revealing internal fault lines. Nietzsche becomes exemplary because his feverish style—aphorism, inversion, satire—performs that self-undoing. Derrida singles him out again in “Structure, Sign and Play,” noting that destructive discourses cannibalize one another:

“Heidegger, considering Nietzsche … as the last metaphysician, the last ‘Platonist’” (Derrida, 1967/1970, p. 251).

When Heidegger fixes Nietzsche as the endpoint, he unwittingly shows that endpoints are always textual effects produced from within the heritage they categorize. For Derrida, the metaphysical system does not end but folds upon itself, endlessly iterated through play and difference.

Play Against Consummation

At stake is the interpretation of difference. Heidegger treats Nietzsche’s difference from prior thinkers as a final intensification; Derrida treats it as différance—a spacing and deferral that prevents any closure from being absolute. If metaphysics is an edifice, Heidegger wants to move beyond its last wall, whereas Derrida descends into the joints, prying the stones apart by exploiting their own masonry.

Nietzsche’s flamboyant rhetoric facilitates this strategy. When he declares that “truth is a woman” (Spurs, p. 51), Derrida reads the quip as a signal that meanings seduce, disguise, elude capture. The Übermensch, once a metaphysical summit for Heidegger, becomes for Derrida another mobile metaphor circulating inside an endless chain. Even seemingly transcendent concepts reveal their textuality when subjected to Nietzsche’s playful force.

Synthesis: Three Positions on the Same Threshold

Question	Nietzsche	Heidegger	Derrida
Goal	Replace static being with creative valuation	Reveal the consummation of onto-theology	Expose the play that undoes every ground
Status of Metaphysics	Obsolete burden	Completed but still dominant	Inescapable yet iterable
Key Figure	Will-to-power / Return	Last metaphysician	Strategist of play

All three thinkers stand on the same brink yet describe it differently: Nietzsche as a leap, Heidegger as a culmination, Derrida as an interminable spiraling. What distinguishes them is not the threshold itself but the conceptual vocabulary used to articulate its status.

Conclusion

Calling Nietzsche “the last metaphysician” was never simply a verdict; it was an interpretive wager. Heidegger’s label tries to arrest Nietzsche inside a narrative of closure so that a “second beginning” can be announced elsewhere. Derrida recuperates that designation only to show that every closure harbors a movement of dissemination—the very dynamic Nietzsche’s prose exemplifies. In deconstruction, therefore, Nietzsche is both finish line and starting gate: the thinker whose attempt to abolish metaphysics ends by giving us the strongest proof that no thought can leap entirely free of its own linguistic scaffolding. The real break, if such exists, lies in recognizing that there is no outside—only shifting points of leverage within the play of signs.

Notes

1.      Page numbers follow the English translations cited below; original publication years appear in parentheses.

2.      GA 6.2 refers to Gesamtausgabe vol. 6, part 2.

References

Derrida, J. (1970). Structure, sign and play in the discourse of the human sciences (A. Bass, Trans.). In R. Macksey & E. Donato (Eds.), The structuralist controversy (pp. 247–272). Johns Hopkins University Press. (Original work presented 1966)

Derrida, J. (1976). Of grammatology (G. C. Spivak, Trans.). Johns Hopkins University Press. (Original work published 1967)

Derrida, J. (1978). Spurs: Nietzsche’s styles (B. Harlow, Trans.). University of Chicago Press.

Heidegger, M. (1991). Nietzsche: Volumes III & IV (D. F. Krell, Trans.). HarperOne. (Lectures delivered 1936–1940).

Nietzsche, F. (2005). Twilight of the idols (D. Large, Trans.). Oxford University Press. (Original work published 1889).