'Various kinds of madness': the French Nietzscheans inside America

Drawing comparisons with the introduction of deconstruction to America and its perceived discontinuity with North American intellectual traditions, this paper discusses the arrival of a different strain of poststructuralism in America, the French Nietzscheanism of Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Félix Guattari and Jean-François Lyotard. It isolates the presence and function of American oppositional discourses, such as the countercultural or anti-psychiatric, within French Nietzscheanism and asserts there exists a more intimate link between these French and American oppositional discourses than is customarily assumed. French Nietzscheanism entered America via the Schizo-culture conference, organized by Sylvère Lotringer in Columbia, 1975. The examination of this neglected, though intriguing event produces a valuable snapshot of the transition that oppositional discourses on both sides of the Atlantic underwent as the sixties gave way to the seventies.