QUOTE : There are, then, no easy answers to the questions raised by a thinker who may best be understood in performative terms. Their texts may be trying to provoke the reader to respond by, for example, saying something which the author does not actually believe. In that case, objecting to the argument merely means that one falls into the trap set by the text, in the way one looks silly by taking something seriously that is meant as a joke. One strategy is to accept that much of what is happening in Nietzsche's texts is indeed more performance than argument, but to look very carefully at the moments when performance gives way to assertion of a kind that cannot be construed as ironic or as merely performative. A further strategy is to keep in mind the ideological context of his writing. Although the Nietzsche of after the BT cannot be considered as a German nationalist, his elitism and his tendency to regard social issues as though they were biological issues - for example in relation to the idea that societies and cultures can become 'sick' - are very much part of reactionary thought in the second half of the nineteenth century. Such ideas fed into Nazism and other anti-democratic movements in the twentieth century, and are neither Nietzsche's creation, nor of any serious philosophical interest.