Two Ears for Ecce Homo: Consensus Hermeneutics and Derrida’s Double Reading

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 interpretive vectors. Derrida does not relativize Nietzsche’s work. Instead, he shows why even a careful reconstruction of intention must be supplemented by an analysis of textual potentiality—what he calls its dynamis.

I. The Consensus Reading: Nietzsche’s Programmatic Prologue

1. The stated purpose of the prologue

The traditional reading of the Ecce Homo prologue is relatively stable. Nietzsche begins with a striking assertion of the need to identify himself because his contemporaries have failed to hear him: “Verwechselt mich vor Allem nicht!” (“Above all, do not confuse me!”). Here he positions himself as the antithesis of prevailing moral norms, a disciple of Dionysus rather than a saint. His intention is not to improve humanity but to expose the fiction of its idols.

2. Zarathustra as the apex

Within this opening framework, Nietzsche elevates Zarathustra to the summit of his intellectual production, calling it “das größte Geschenk,” the greatest gift he has offered. He situates this achievement in the rarefied “Höhenluft” from which he believes he writes, thereby linking his philosophical voice to the solitude and severity of high mountains.

3. The transitional exergue

The prologue culminates in the celebrated paragraph beginning “An diesem vollkommenen Tage…,” written on his forty-fourth birthday. Nietzsche looks back on his life with rare composure and announces that he can now narrate it. Scholars typically regard this exergue as a hinge between the prophetic tone of the prologue and the reflective mode of the subsequent chapters—a farewell to the past and a threshold to self-interpretation.

4. Derrida’s first step: the necessary reproduction

This consensus reconstruction exemplifies what Arthur Bradley (2008) calls the first stage of Derrida’s double reading, which “reproduces, as faithfully and rigorously as possible, what is generally agreed to be the author’s intention.” Without such fidelity, interpretation would collapse into arbitrariness. Derrida accepts this step as indispensable.

II. Derrida’s Second Reading: Borderline, Signature, and Dynamis

1. The “dynamis” of the border

Yet Derrida insists that reading cannot stop at intention. Turning to the prologue in Otobiographies, he reflects on “the dynamis of that borderline between the ‘work’ and the ‘life,’ the system and the subject of the system” (Derrida, 1984, p. xv). This borderline is “neither active nor passive, neither outside nor inside,” a zone of virtual and mobile potency. What Derrida locates here is a structural potential that belongs neither to psychological intention nor to the semantic surface: a textual dynamis capable of generating meanings the author does not anticipate.

2. Signature, credit, and iterability

Several motifs in Nietzsche’s prologue illustrate this logic. When he writes that he lives “auf meinen eignen Credit hin,” on his own credit, Derrida reads this as more than an autobiographical remark. It is a contractual gesture: a signature that opens a line of credit whose validation depends on future readers. The life that Nietzsche narrates becomes a promissory note, its authenticity deferred to those yet to come.

Likewise, the birthday exergue is not simply a hinge. It functions as a ritual scene of self-constitution: the burial of his forty-fourth year seals the identity that will recount the story. These performative elements belong neither solely to Nietzsche’s conscious aim nor to forces external to the text; they inhabit the dynamic interval where form shapes, displaces, and transforms the authorial subject.

3. Aristotle’s dynamis as a conceptual analogue

Here an Aristotelian analogy clarifies Derrida’s position. For Aristotle, dynamis signifies a structured potential. It is real but internally limited. Derrida implicitly adopts this framework: a text can engender multiple legitimate interpretations depending on its internal economy, but it cannot sustain every possible reading.

Deconstruction, therefore, opposes both naïve intentionalism and free-floating relativism. The second reading is circumscribed by what the text itself permits: tensions, paradoxes, iterability, and subtle traces that reach beyond declared meaning while never abandoning the letter of the work.

4. The political fate of Nietzsche’s name

Derrida’s reflection on the political destiny of Nietzsche’s name underscores this point. When he notes that the author predicts his name will one day be linked to something “monstrous,” Derrida does not treat this as prophecy or confession. Instead, he reads it as a sign of the text’s openness to future appropriations. Such appropriations are not mere distortions; they arise from the text’s structural features—its naming practices, its modes of repetition, its performative signatures. Nietzsche does not intend these uses, yet the text’s dynamis renders them possible.

III. Why Double Reading Is Necessary

1. The limits of intention alone

These observations reveal why both stages of reading are indispensable. The traditional interpretation successfully reconstructs Nietzsche’s deliberate self-presentation and clarifies the rhetorical framework of the prologue. Yet intention alone cannot explain the text’s complex afterlives, its contradictory effects, or its susceptibility to later appropriations.

2. The limits of structure alone

Conversely, Derrida’s second reading depends on the first. Without a rigorous account of Nietzsche’s stated aims, the analysis of textual potentiality would drift into speculation. The two readings must operate together: one grounded in intention, the other attentive to what exceeds it.

Conclusion

Ecce Homo demands a double reading. A faithful reconstruction of Nietzsche’s intention illuminates what he sought to affirm. A second reading, attentive to the text’s internal dynamis, reveals how the work surpasses the author’s own horizon, generating meanings that are simultaneously constrained and unpredictable. This dual optic neither collapses into relativism nor retreats into strict intentionalism. Instead, it offers a more supple method capable of doing justice to the singular force of Nietzsche’s final work—its excesses, its textual intricacy, and its unsettling futurity.

References (APA)

Bradley, A. (2008). Derrida’s Of Grammatology: An Edinburgh philosophical guide. Edinburgh University Press.

Derrida, J. (1984). Otobiographies: The teaching of Nietzsche and the politics of the proper name (A. Ronell, Trans.). Oxford University Press. (Original lecture delivered 1979)

Nietzsche, F. (1988). Ecce Homo. In G. Colli & M. Montinari (Eds.), Kritische Studienausgabe (Vol. 6). de Gruyter.