Abstract
This essay is an examination of how the name 'Rousseau' serves an important ideological and rhetorical function for Nietzsche, a function that, once made apparent, can be used to make visible the relationship between Nietzsche's rhetorical strategies and his historical theory and practice. I argue that Nietzsche attempts to rewrite the history of modernity in such a way that 'Rousseau becomes a world historical error to be corrected and the 'eighteenth century of Rousseau', an aberration. Nietzsche does this, I demonstrate, by attaching a set of significations to the name 'Rousseau' such that this name marks the point in Nietzsche's genealogy at which the history of the modern liberal politics and the history of European nihilism as the consequence of Platonism and Christianity come together. Nietzsche's formula for this point of intersection is 'Rousseau idealist and canaille in one person'. My reading enacts a deconstruction of Nietzsche that unfolds how his powerful and important critique of a metaphysics of identity is inextricably attached to an antidemocratic rejection of political equality in a way that does not permit the collapsing of either of these components into the other. I argue that my explication of one rhetorical structure in Nietzsche's text, that signalled name 'Rousseau', offers a useful framework fro addressing critical questions to Nietzsche's body of work that have to do with both the politics in Nietzsche's texts and historiographical concerns about the relationship between history and rhetoric.