ABSTRACT
There are many women in Nietzsche's texts. There is the old woman, the sceptic and the enigmatic love object, or woman as masquerade. There is The Woman, the jouissance of which is Lacan's God – the Truth behind the veil. There is the other as object of evaluation and there is the reactive, castrating feminist. This chapter explains Nietzsche's feminist, although his other women will necessarily enter the scene. For it is Nietzsche's anti-feminism which has attracted the more black and white responses from commentators. Contemporary feminists, for all their differences, seem to share a discomfort with the assumed authenticity of the rational subject as he is positioned at the norm of a politics of equality. Woman is socially inscribed as the ambiguous point against which the subject identifies himself.
