ABSTRACT
Nietzsche's critiques of Christianity and of metaphysics converge in his most audacious hypothesis: "the subject as multiplicity". The critique of Christianity leads inevitably to the idea of ressentiment, since it is through ressentiment that reactive natures manufacture "opposite values." While Nietzsche's critique of the unity of subject comes to fruition only in the relatively more speculative works of the 1880's, it depends on a sequence of thought which can be clearly traced to work on the ideas of truth and language. From the early 1870's, especially the one completed section of the Philosophenbuch, "On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense," and the lecture course on Rhetoric at the University of Basel during the winter semester of 1872–73. "Deconstruction" names a mode of criticism which attempts to discover the regulative influence of figurai strategies underlying texts – especially texts which represent themselves as strictly logical or referential in their argumentation and in their truth claims.
