In July 1964, the eminent French historian of philosophy, Martial Gueroult, opened a five-day conference on Friedrich Nietzsche at the Royaumont Abbey just north of Paris. The conference was co-organized by Gilles Deleuze, who invited presentations from both younger philosophers like Michel Foucault and Gianni Vattimo, as well as from distinguished senior philosophers, including Jean Wahl, Jean Beaufret, Karl Lowith, and Gabriel Marcel. Deleuze was then concluding a four-year position at the CNRS (Centre National de Recherche Scientifique) and preparing to assume the position of professor of philosophy at the University of Lyon. Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morality had appeared on the agregation de philosophie in 1958 and 1959 (for the first time since 1929) while Deleuze was teaching future agreges at the Sorbonne. In his brief opening remarks, Gueroult emphasized the centrality of the question of values in Nietzsche's philosophy and invoked the three metamorphoses from Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra-the soul becoming first camel, then lion, then child-concluding that Nietzsche's philosophy, "with all its power of destruction," must ultimately be thought of as tending toward affirmation.Wahl had recognized the centrality of the question of value for Nietzsche in his long review essay for the Revue de Metaphysique et de Morale of Deleuze's 1962 monograph, Nietzsche and Philosophy, published the year before the Royaumont conference.(1)The bulk of Wahl's lengthy review is a detailed and laudatory account of Deleuze's book that foregrounds the stark difference Deleuze draws between Nietzsche and Hegel. However, while acknowledging that Deleuze's book will take its place alongside the most important books on Nietzsche by Karl Jaspers, Martin Heidegger, Eugen Fink, and Lou Salome, Wahl remains cautious regarding Deleuze's systematic elucidation of Nietzsche's thought, and he challenges Deleuze's interpretation at several points. While some of these critiques verge on being simply dismissive-Wahl archly notes that Deleuze's critique of Hegel's "work of the negative" as a manifestation of the "will to nothingness" is as "superficial" as the Marxist critique-he focuses his attention on two "difficulties," or "dangers," in Deleuze's interpretation. The crux of Deleuze's reading is the inevitably positive sense of the affirmation that conjoins will to power and eternal return, and the consequent overcoming of nihilism. Wahl worries that the various formulations of this affirmation given by Nietzsche (and Deleuze) retain negativity in various ways, and he discerns a dialectic at work in this retention. Wahl's concern is not strictly scholastic, however; he worries also about the consequences if one were to accept and follow out Nietzsche's affirmation. Where Nietzsche and Deleuze see the promise of a liberated existence in the affirmation of the superhuman, Wahl cautiously notes that such a promise must be balanced against the atrocities of the twentieth century, seeming to implicitly note at least an affinity between Nietzsche's philosophy and its most monstrous misinterpretations. And, in the notably sharp conclusion to his review, Wahl wonders whether the theory of the superhuman, "a theory that is as close as possible to the concrete," might "ultimately be founded on an essentially abstract and formal act of affirmation."(2)Wahl's presentation at Royaumont can be read as the obverse side of his critique of Deleuze's interpretation of Nietzsche.(3) The disjointed style, the repeated invocations of the title as an alibi for what sounds like disorganization, the disavowal-the refusal even to name the superhuman-and the abrupt nonconclusion are the necessary performative correlates to the claim that the importance of Nietzsche's philosophy is to be found in the multiple expressions of the states of soul that animate him. The superhuman, the one whose affirmation conjoins the will to power and the eternal return, is the figure that Nietzsche invokes to ground and unify these expressions and, in so doing, risks resolving the imminent dialectic of order and disorder in favor of the former. In a key passage of his talk, Wahl states that rejecting a dialectical Nietzsche does not yield pure disorder; that "the idea of relentless rigor ... should be united with the idea of multiple perspectives." With such a reading, the order of the concrete would be thought as such, always stopping short of drawing these perspectives into a whole.Wahl's auditors were quick to challenge his rejection of Nietzsche's crowning thought. Jean Beaufret's intervention challenges Wahl with a different interpretation of the eternal return, one that understands the return thermodynamically, as qualitative return to (and repetition of) a "zero state" rather than the recapitulation of what has occurred. Wahl's literal incomprehension at this point-and his ultimate attribution of this interpretation to Beaufret and, pointedly, not Nietzsche-is evidence of an important disagreement. A second significant moment in the discussion occurs when Jacob Taubes asks whether, in effect, post-structuralism might have run its course (in 1964!), and whether the time hasn't come to think Hegel against Nietzsche, to think system against the opposition to, and rejection of, systems. Wahl responds ingeniously by refusing the opposition and taking sides with that arch-antisystemic thinker: Heraclitus.In Wahl's interpretation, Nietzsche is an irreducibly contradictory thinker in whom conflicting states coexist in a tension without resolution, in which order is imposed even as chaos is affirmed. The question of order in Nietzsche is the questionability of the affirmation that links the will to power and the eternal return in the figure of the superhuman. To affirm that figure is, for Wahl, to side with a dangerously militant side of Nietzsche that risks both surreptitiously reintroducing a formal theorizing analogous to the Hegelian dialectic and, more seriously, that may fall on the wrong side of the balance book of the twentieth century. The challenge of bearing these tensions, of living these "aporias," was enough to drive Nietzsche mad.As Wahl says: it's difficult to sign "The Crucified."