Abstract

Nietzsche’s great influence on contemporary French philosophy, especially during the last decades of the twentieth century, might be considered as the main inspiration for the emergence of the so-called «philosophy of difference». This paper retraces the key moments of that influential presence, relating the event of Nietzsche’s revival in the late sixties with the effect generated in France by the powerful interpretation offered by Heidegger. An interpretation, whose hermeneutical research for the foundation and definite unity of the nietzschean thought, seemed to overlook, according to the young generation of French philosophers, the untamable plurality of meanings within Nietzsche’s texts, as well as the potentiality that his radical thinking entailed in creating new ways of philosophizing.