Tucked away amongst Friedrich Nietzsche's unpublished manuscripts is a small fragment of text, neatly enclosed in quotation marks: "I have forgotten my umbrella." The remark stands on its own, devoid of contextualising information and just as perplexing to the Nietzsche devotee as it is to the lay philosopher. In his slim volume Spurs: Nietzsche's Styles, Jacques Derrida interrogates this fragment for every shred of meaning - or not-meaning - it may hold, leading readers through a labyrinth of possibilities:

“Could Nietzsche have disposed of some more or less secret code, which, for him or for some unknown accomplice of his, would have made sense of this statement?” 

Or perhaps,

“What if Nietzsche himself meant to say nothing, or [at] least not much of anything, or anything whatever? Then again, what if Nietzsche was only pretending to say something? In fact, it is even possible that it is not Nietzsche's sentence...” 

Almost gleefully, Derrida references scholars who, convinced that Nietzsche's words represent "an aphorism of some significance," are confounded at every turn. Frustrations around the essential unknowability of this text are perhaps compounded by the prosaic nature of the object in question, for, as Derrida writes,