From Will-to-Power to Free Play of Signifiers: Nietzsche at the Threshold of Metaphysics
Egon’s Nietzsche. AI art 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 tr...