Supposing Truth is a Woman – What Then?

Abstract

Nietzsche’s analysis of the self-poisoning of ‘the will to power’ and his insistence upon overcoming its ideological outcome (the dogmatist’s fake ‘Truth’) by recognizing the ‘un-truth’ of a ‘logic of contamination,' demonstrates that he understands ‘truth’ as a paradox. What may one accordingly expect in answer to the question (‘Supposing truth is a woman - what then?') posed in the preface to Beyond Good and Evil (1966)? Supported by Derrida’s Spurs: Nietzsche Styles, I argue that Nietzsche could have drawn two radically different analogies between paradoxical ‘truth’ and ‘women.' However, due to the very kind of ideological conditioning (here patriarchal), which his ‘free-thinking’ resists in principle, he explicitly draws only one, hazarding a self-betraying performative contradiction.