1. Mask Behind a Mask. . . Nietzsche's power extends itself into all sorts of curious places in philosophy, and this seems to be the case more in France than anywhere else. It is not necessary to recount the conscious and unconscious transvaluations of Nietzsche we see in philosophers as diverse as Foucault, Deleuze, Cixous, and Derrida. But it may be timely to make some remarks about Nietzsche's usefulness in understanding Sartre, and this may in turn strengthen Sartre's familial connections with the philosophers just named, at least with Foucault, despite Foucault's oedipal protests. The motivation may be predominantly archival rather than more strictly philosophical; to help complicate Sartre's position in the history of philosophy as we near the end of the twentieth century, and to complicate it not by overcoming Sartre but by pointing to traces of Sartre's overcoming of his own reactivity, the vehicle for which is Marx, but the contours of which link him to the less conceptually confining Nietzsche. As an individual writer, Sartre's personal project dissolved at his death, but his writing remains in all of its positivity to be rewritten, which is to say that traces ofSartre can be turned to his advantage, or to ours. More specifically, I would like to suggest that the later Sartre provides resources for transvaluing the earlier Sartre, by which I mean not that the later Sartre is an improvement over the earlier-on the contrary-but that, through Nietzsche, the Critique of Dialectical Reason offers tools for opening up or problematizing the prominent existential confines of Being and Nothingness. If there is a justification for this maneuver, it is that in the long run, Being and Nothingness had far more determinative effects on the formation of French philosophy after Sartre than did the Critique. Put differently-simplistically, strategically-Nietzsche has won out over Heuel and Marx. So, rather than getting caught up in a debate about the differences between the early existential Sartre and the later Marxist Sartre, I would like to begin grafting aspects of both Sartres in order to suggest a different composite. Working backwards, then, the integrity of the Sartrean text might suffer as a result of this Nietzschean imposition, but that is the cost of Sartre's overcoming. In fabricating an account of its own disciplinary heritage-in constructing an account of the history of modern philosophy-academic philosophy links Nietzsche with existentialism, and thus with Sartre; along with Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky, Nietzsche's name enhances the existentialist pedigree, and thus Sartre's. The material for this linkage is there for the taking, even if competing dimensions of the mad professor Nietzeche clearly clash with it.l Here, the obvious existential emphasis would have to do with freedom, individualism and, perhaps, absurdity, and this linkage is familiar enough that I need say no more about it: However, and beyond existentialism-an official signifier with which Sartre himself became increasingly less comfortable2-there are other aspects of Sartre that may be illuminated through reference to Nietzsche, reference that might be tougher to make or at least seem more obscure, particularly given Sartre's unhesitant faith in dialectics, the logic in which the constitution of identity seems to be embedded both in Being and Nothingness and in the Critique of Dialectical Reason. The reference to dialectics is not a stray example in the context of positioning Sartre historically, either, particularly since dialectics is a formal philosophical technique for addressing and disciplining power, from a Foucauldian standpoint nothing other than a way of forcing meaning through a domestication of conflict, an historically cast prejudice that is ironically unhistorical. Or, as Nietzsche writes, Dialectic and faith in reason still rest on moral principles.3 Intoxication by dialectic: as the consciousness of exercising mastery over oneself by means of it-as a tool of the will to power. …