Hearing Nietzsche: Derrida, Ecce Homo, and the Reader of the Day After Tomorrow

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 of Zarathustra, and the readers he expected to understand him.

A Difficult Legacy

Early reception of Ecce Homo was anything but charitable. Readers recoiled from chapter titles such as “Warum ich so weise bin” (“Why I am so wise”) or “Warum ich so klug bin” (“Why I am so clever”), interpreting them as symptoms of mania. Even sympathetic interpreters treated the text as a psychological curiosity. Only later did scholars attempt to organize a more sober reading, viewing the Prologue, the table of contents, and the Exergue as rhetorical devices rather than literal statements. Today, the prevailing view is that Nietzsche shaped Ecce Homo as a retrospective interpretation of his works, accompanied by a stylized self-portrait.

Yet even this more generous account often overlooks Nietzsche’s mistrust of scholars. In Ecce Homo he mocks “die Gebildeten,” the educated tourists who pass through Sils-Maria without understanding him. Nietzsche viewed scholars as guardians of conceptual rigor but also as undertakers of thought, turning living ideas into rigid taxonomies. He insisted that philosophy demands exposure to “a strong air,” a realm of risk and solitude, rather than the safety of academic consensus. With this in mind, the early misreading of Ecce Homo becomes almost predictable. The book was never meant for the custodians of received opinion, and Nietzsche knew it.

Derrida’s “Otobiographical” Nietzsche

"I shall start with the preface to Ecce Homo which is, you could say, coextensive with Nietzsche's entire oeuvre, so much so that the entire oeuvre also prefaces Ecce Home and finds itself repeated in the few pages of what one calls, in the strict sense, the Preface to the work entitled Ecce Homo" (Derrida, 1984)

Derrida intervenes in this history by shifting attention away from questions of pathology or sincerity. In Otobiographies, he describes Ecce Homo as a work organized by the logic of the signature. Nietzsche’s repeated insistence—“Hört mich! Denn ich bin der und der. Verwechselt mich vor allem nicht!” (“Listen to me! For I am so-and-so. Above all, do not mistake me!”)—is not a confession but a performative gesture that produces a certain “Nietzsche.” The identity announced in the Prologue is not pre-existent; it is articulated into being.

For Derrida, Ecce Homo is an otobiography: a writing of the self in which the “I” emerges through acts of naming, titling, and invocation. The “Inhalt,” often overlooked, becomes central. The flamboyant chapter titles are not jokes or marks of madness; they shape a legend. Nietzsche openly admits his pleasure in striking headings, and Derrida takes him at his word. The titles function like miniature myths, generating the figure the book then interprets. Likewise, the Exergue—its pastoral image of a perfect day, a “Sonnenblick” falling across a life—does not testify to psychological intensity but establishes a mythic frame. Nietzsche places his own story under the sign of ripeness and harvest, as though his life were an artwork reaching completion. Derrida reads this as a self-canonization, not a loss of control.

By viewing Ecce Homo as textual invention rather than confession, Derrida offers a perspective that diverges sharply from traditional scholarship. The book becomes a meditation on how a name is made, how an author constructs a lineage, and how writing produces an identity that exceeds biography.

Zarathustra and His Misreaders

Nowhere is Nietzsche’s self-staging more visible than in his treatment of Also sprach Zarathustra. In Ecce Homo, he calls it “das größte Geschenk,” the greatest gift ever bestowed upon humanity, written with a voice that carries across ages. He describes its “halcyon tone,” its gentle slowness, its refusal to preach or demand belief. For Nietzsche, Zarathustra embodies the highest affirmation: a style that mirrors the concepts it proclaims—eternal recurrence, the Übermensch, the death of God.

Yet within academic circles, Zarathustra is often regarded as an eccentric work whose prophetic style has aged poorly. Its symbolic language, dramatic monologues, and mythic figures sit uncomfortably beside the argumentative rigor valued in philosophy departments. Many scholars prefer the more analytical clarity of Beyond Good and Evil or On the Genealogy of Morality. The prophetic voice, which Nietzsche considered essential, is precisely what makes academics suspicious.

But this tension was anticipated. Nietzsche repeatedly claimed that his audience had not yet arrived. “Nur den Auserwählten gelangt es,” he says of Zarathustra: it reaches only the chosen. Derrida extends this idea by suggesting that Ecce Homo invents its own ideal reader—a listener who can hear the halcyon tone and understand that the text performs an identity rather than describing one. Academic resistance, therefore, may reflect less a defect in Zarathustra than a limitation of scholarly reading practices. Nietzsche’s prophetic style challenges the very norms through which academia secures authority.

Conclusion

Seen through Derrida’s lens, Ecce Homo is neither a confession nor the residue of collapse but an experiment in self-making. Nietzsche uses titles, mottos, and lyrical framing to create a figure capable of bearing the weight of his own thought. He elevates Zarathustra because it expresses that figure more fully than any other work. If academics hesitate before this book, it may be because Nietzsche designed it for readers willing to breathe “a higher air”—readers who do not confuse the living pulse of thought with the safety of conceptual monuments. Ecce Homo still calls for such readers today.

References (APA Style)

Derrida, J. (1984). Otobiographies: The Teaching of Nietzsche and the Politics of the Proper Name (A. Ronell, Trans.). University of Nebraska Press.

Nietzsche, F. (1969). Ecce Homo (W. Kaufmann, Trans.). Vintage. (Original work published 1908)

Safranski, R. (2002). Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography. W. W. Norton.

Young, J. (2010). Friedrich Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography. Cambridge University Press.