Credit, Name, and Mask: Derrida’s Deconstructive Reading of Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo

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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.” Everything Nietzsche has written appears in rehearsal here, in this short sequence where he announces a self yet simultaneously casts doubt on the existence of that self. He claims he has not left himself without “testimony,” yet laments that no one has seen or heard him. His declaration “Ich lebe auf meinen eigenen Kredit hin” reveals a peculiar logic: he lives by a confidence he grants himself, a credit extended without witness or guarantor. This attempt at self-grounding immediately destabilizes itself when he adds that it may be only a “prejudice” that he lives at all.

Derrida dwells not only on the preface but also on the enigmatic exergue that follows it: a single page dated on Nietzsche’s forty-fifth birthday, placed between the declaration of identity and the first chapter. Dated pages are signatures, and signatures presuppose the survival of the signer. Here Nietzsche writes under the sun at midday, “the perfect day when everything is ripening,” a moment without shadow that recalls the noon of Zarathustra. In this vanishing instant, he “tells his life to himself” (Und so erzähle ich mir mein Leben), reaffirming his existence as if sealing a vow. Derrida interprets this midday as the fleeting limit where affirmation occurs—“yes, yes”—a point where life is rededicated to itself and the possibility of autobiography is staged. But this point is impossible to inhabit: it is neither in the life of the author nor in the body of the book, neither outside nor inside. It is the hinge at which the signature both anchors and eludes identity.

The Proper Name Between Life and Death

Nietzsche’s insistence that he must say who he is conceals a deeper fissure. When he adds, “Above all, do not mistake me for someone else,” Derrida hears a confession: the proper name cannot secure identity. “Friedrich Nietzsche” can function as pseudonym, mask, and homonym; it travels independently of any bearer. For Derrida, the signature is always the mark of a dead man because only names inherit. The one who signs does not receive the return of what is signed, “the name is always and a priori a dead man’s name.” Nietzsche’s fear of being taken for “someone else” arises from this structural detachment: the name already belongs to others, to the future, to readers who will counter-sign it only when its so-called owner is gone.

Derrida highlights a decisive moment in the chapter “Why I Am So Wise,” where Nietzsche describes his parentage as a riddle: “already dead as my father … still living and growing old as my mother.” Derrida treats this not as biographical data but as a symbolic articulation of divided origin. The paternal line corresponds to death, the patronym, the juridical frame of identity; the maternal line marks survival, the “living feminine,” the force that outlives and exceeds. The “I” that says ich bin der und der is the fold between these two incompatible genealogies. Identity arises only through this inner rupture. The proper name, instead of gathering the self, exposes its double birth: descent from death and from life, from the dead father and the surviving mother. “I know both; I am both,” Nietzsche writes—an admission that the self exists only as difference.

Credit, Contract, and Counter-Signature

The vocabulary of debt—credit, prejudice, testimony—pervades the preface, and Derrida insists it is not metaphorical. When Nietzsche claims to “live on [his] own credit,” Derrida reads this as a unilateral pact: a secret contract drawn up with himself, without witness, whose validity depends entirely on its future reception. The “I-live” becomes a hypothesis awaiting verification, a promissory note whose redemption depends on others who may decide, after his death, to honor or repudiate it. Until his name acquires recognition, life itself remains suspended. Hence Nietzsche’s unsettling conclusion: “I am convinced that I do not live.” What appears as self-affirmation is instead a wager on posterity.

For Derrida, autobiography is therefore inseparable from the reader’s ear, the capacity to hear and receive a voice that cannot vouch for itself. Nietzsche himself acknowledges this when he writes that some of his works “will be born only posthumously” and that future institutions will be needed to teach and interpret them. The autobiographical gesture depends on this future ear, on the institution that will one day provide the counter-signature his contemporaries refused. Only when the author is dead does the signature begin to function.

Masks, Surplus, and the Living Feminine

Nietzsche’s text is populated by figures—Zarathustra, the immoralist, the free spirit—each functioning as an alternative signature. Derrida sees in these masks a circulation of symbolic capital, a surplus produced by the name itself. Yet this surplus obeys the logic of the supplement: it compensates for an originary lack while also threatening to eclipse what it supplements. Every mask enriches and imperils the identity it seeks to affirm. When the return no longer reaches the living person—when the name circulates without the bearer—gains turn into losses. The proliferation of signatures reveals the fundamental instability of naming; the self emerges only in the interplay of these masks, never behind them.

This economy of masks intersects with Derrida’s reading of the living feminine. The maternal line embodies survival, the remainder that exceeds any fixed identity. Autobiography, then, is not simply a narrative of life; it is the performance of survival, the attempt to bind oneself to the force that carries life beyond the subject. The proper name marks where this attempt both succeeds and fails.

Conclusion

Derrida’s reading of Ecce Homo shows that Nietzsche’s attempt to say “who I am” culminates not in the revelation of an essence but in the exposure of a structure. Identity is split from the start, suspended between the dead father’s name and the mother’s ongoing life, between the solitary signature and the ear of future readers. Nietzsche’s self-credit takes the form of a contract that cannot be validated while he is alive. His masks generate symbolic surplus that both sustains and undermines him. The declaration of selfhood becomes a performance shaped by risk, delay, and the impossibility of securing the “I” that speaks.

In Derrida’s hands, Ecce Homo ceases to be autobiography and becomes instead the demonstration of why autobiography is never simply the story of a life. It is the space where naming falters, where the signature detaches itself, and where the self emerges only through the very fault lines that prevent it from ever being fully present. Nietzsche’s credit is honored only after death, when the name circulates freely, bearing the trace of a life that could never coincide with itself.

Bibliography

Derrida, Jacques. Otobiographies: The Teaching of Nietzsche and the Politics of the Proper Name.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. Ecce Homo.

Kofman, Sarah. Nietzsche and Metaphor.

De Man, Paul. “Autobiography as De-Facement.”