I want to write here about the political uses made of Nietzsche, about what Nietzsche says about politics (broadly understood), and about the politics of reading and writing about Nietzsche. Twenty-five years ago few people would have cared. Nietzsche was a minor figure, stimulating to adolescents, without rigor, a bit silly. Now he is a minor industry in the intellectual professions. Everyone is writing about Nietzsche, some their third or fourth book. Articles appear everywhere: The bastions and inner walls of the most analytic redoubts have fallen,- journals of literature both learned and popular vie for text. Nietzsche seems inexhaustible - he is available, it seems, to everyone. Everything in Nietzsche seems living. Yet if everything is living, everything about Nietzsche also seems fragile.

I want also to say something here about the various claims that have been made on Nietzsche. I do not want so much to argue that Nietzsche is or is not the ally of a particular political persuasion as much as to investigate why he lends himself to such a wide range of positions, and what it means about a writer that he can be subject to so many varying claims of political allegiance. Most importantly, I wish to raise the question of what it means for a writer, such as Nietzsche, to resist the currently available political identities.