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 inte...