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Nietzsche and Metaphor

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The difficulty is following the reversal of sense each time cognition turns into some trick, a game that must be taken seriously to bring us back to ourselves and our needs. It used to bother me when I read Nietzsche that I would notice a spider being mentioned as if the web were the entire structure of all thought, so the spider must be God, or God is a spider that has captured humanity in order to make it pure spirit. Sarah Kofman writes:

The inversion which turns the effect into the cause and the cause into the effect, the end into a beginning and the beginning into an end, is one of man's fundamental errors: . . . the emptiest concepts, the last fumes of evaporating reality, at the beginning as the beginning. (p. 71).

Sarah Kofman's famous 'deconstructionist' reading of Nietzsche is an attempt to strip Nietzsche of the ontological framework of Heidegger. Kofman rarely speaks of Heidegger, but argues against him implicitly through her criticisms of Granier's ontological study. Through a sharp analysis of the metaphorical aspect of Nietzsche's texts, Kofman posits that he is fundamentally a psychological thinker, not a metaphysician. She insists that ontology and perspectivism are fundamentally irreconcilable, and does so with brilliant clarity and rigor. A few reservations:

1. After a sensory account of the metaphorical, Kofman writes that "images, in other words the surfaces of things concentrated in the mirror of our senses, are the original thoughts" (28). This is quite a jump in need of far more analysis.

2. Kofman fails to deal with Nietzsche's thought of thoughts, the doctrine of eternal return, which is central to Heidegger's ontological understanding of Nietzsche as the consummation of Western metaphysics.

Nevertheless, this is a compelling and brilliant text which was crucial to the post-structuralist studies of Nietzsche which were to follow.