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In his Nietzsche I&II, published in 1961 from heavily edited lecture manuscripts, Heidegger presents an interpretation of Nietzsche s nihilistic project as the necessary end and completion of western metaphysics, overturning but inevitably failing to go beyond Platonism and the first beginning . But in those early lectures, available unedited in the Gesamtausgabe, Heidegger displays a much more open attitude towards nihilism s possible status as an expression of post-metaphysical thinking. A close reading of passages from the 1936/37 lecture transcripts which were omitted from the edited volumes will demonstrate that, at least during these first moments of his determined Auseinandersetzung with Nietzsche, Heidegger seriously considered nihilism s potential as a way of thinking capable of exposing human being to a fundamentally definitive need for otherness, which might serve to displace a thinker s sense of self and prepare him an entirely different way of thinking about his own condition of being-in-the-world and being in general. I attempt to isolate and develop this potentially radical sense of nihilism from out of the ambiguous stance that Heidegger takes towards Nietzsche s thinking in the first of his lectures on the great nihilist.