Nietzsche on Language

Ecce Homo , surrealist style.Generated with DALL·E. Introducing Nietzsche Students frequently ask where to begin with Friedrich Nietzsche. Many teachers propose Beyond Good and Evil , On the Genealogy of Morals , or even Thus Spoke Zarathustra . Rarely does one hear a recommendation to start with Ecce Homo , a dizzying late work composed shortly before Nietzsche’s collapse. At first glance, the text reads like a catalogue of bold declarations and flamboyant self-presentations—hardly an intuitive starting point for newcomers. Yet Jacques Derrida suggests otherwise. In Otobiographies , he claims that the preface to Ecce Homo is “coextensive with Nietzsche’s entire oeuvre,” that Nietzsche’s complete body of writings “prefaces Ecce Homo and finds itself repeated in the few pages” introducing the book. Derrida’s remark invites us to reconsider whether this disconcerting autobiography might, under the right circumstances, serve as a legitimate point of entry. This essay explores th...

A Perfect Day for Harvest ,  in the style of Van Gogh.  AI image    Listen! for I am such and such a person When Ecce Homo finally appeared in 1908, it bewildered almost everyone who read it. Its first words—“Ich muss sagen, wer ich bin” (“I must say who I am”)—seemed to confirm what many already believed: that Nietzsche had fallen into delusion shortly before his collapse. Yet this verdict, stamped early on by biographers, has shaped the book’s reputation more than anything inside its pages. Ecce Homo has often been treated as a late aberration, a strange mixture of boastfulness and confession, rather than as a deliberate philosophical act. Derrida’s interpretation in Otobiographies unsettles this assumption. He argues that Ecce Homo is not a transparent unveiling of the author but a crafted performance—a self invented through titles, vocatives, and signatures. Taking this insight seriously opens a different way of approaching Nietzsche’s book, his exaltation ...

Vorwort Why is it that the book Nietzsche esteemed above all others is the one his readers most readily sideline? Few claims in contemporary Nietzsche scholarship have become as widespread, and as rarely examined, as the judgment that Thus Spoke Zarathustra is overrated. One often hears that the book “has not aged well,” that its lyrical voice obscures its philosophical force, or that its prophetic tone feels excessive to modern sensibilities. According to this now-familiar view, posterity has quietly consigned Zarathustra to the margins of Nietzsche’s work, preferring the sharp polemics of Genealogy or the crystalline aphorisms of Beyond Good and Evil . What makes this consensus puzzling, however, is that it stands in stark opposition to Nietzsche’s own evaluation. In Ecce Homo , composed during a remarkably lucid and productive period, he describes Zarathustra as “the greatest gift that has ever been bestowed upon humanity.” How can contemporary readers diverge so dramaticall...

Introduction Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo has long occupied an uncertain space in modern intellectual history. Scholars typically read the prologue as an idiosyncratic yet intelligible self-portrait: a rhetorical gesture through which Nietzsche identifies his philosophical mission and reasserts interpretive authority over his earlier works. This view forms a broadly shared consensus: the book is both autobiography and philosophy, both retrospective commentary and self-stylization. Yet this apparently stable interpretive ground is precisely what Jacques Derrida unsettles in Otobiographies , where he invites us to attend not only to what Nietzsche explicitly declares but also to what emerges in the borderlands between signature, date, name, and text. Derrida’s approach enacts what he elsewhere calls “double reading”: the duty to reconstruct the author’s stated intention, coupled with the necessity of uncovering the textual forces that exceed it. The following pages juxtapose these two inte...

Masks. AI image   Introduction: Living on One’s Own Credit Nietzsche opens the preface of Ecce Homo with a provocative demand: “I must confront humanity with the most difficult request … it seems indispensable to me to say who I am.” This insistence on wer ich bin , immediately followed by the disarming remark “I live on my own credit … perhaps merely a prejudice that I live,” becomes, for Derrida in Otobiographies , the privileged scene where authorship, identity, and the proper name begin to unravel. The preface is not an introduction but a miniature of Nietzsche’s entire oeuvre, a place where every motif in his writing returns condensed and intensified. Derrida reads this threshold, and the pages surrounding it, as a drama of masks, signatures, and contracts whose stakes are nothing less than the possibility of life as testimony. Saying “Who I Am”: The Preface and the Exergue Derrida remarks that the preface to Ecce Homo is “coextensive with Nietzsche’s entire oeuvre.” E...