The Forty-Nine Steps

Ecce Homo opens with disconcerting words, compared to the beginning of On the Genealogy of Morals, a work that precedes it by only a year. “We are unknown to ourselves, we men of knowledge”—these are the first words of the Genealogy, and starting there, Nietzsche quickly arrives at the conclusion that in considering the whole of our lives and being, we “miscount”; not only are we “necessarily strangers to ourselves . . . we have to misunderstand ourselves.” The argument then proceeds in the casual conversational tone Nietzsche assumed for the prefaces to his books, moves in other directions, and speaks of other things, never to return to those first remarks. Actually, these words do not sound odd to a reader of Nietzsche; rather, they seem like the momentary reemergence of a whole chain of thoughts already formulated in other writings, with restraint—as always in Nietzsche when he approaches the essential—and if anything, with a wish to conceal rather than to insist. It may also be because these thoughts were very close to confession, as shown by the use of “we”: “I say ‘we’ to be polite,” he would once have cautioned.

Now let us turn to the opening of Ecce Homo. Nietzsche starts by telling us that his writing will declare what he is and that this explanation seems indispensable to him. In other words, he will provide an answer to that very question that the man of knowledge cannot put to himself without going wrong: “Who are we really?”¹ This is truly unheard-of, and we are all the more swayed by the italicized words with which the paragraph ends: “Hear me! For I am such and such a person. Above all, do not mistake me for someone else.”² It is not the imperative tone that comes as a surprise but the claim to be able to present himself unequivocally, as well as the brusque manner, as though these words were uttered in the grip of necessity, with something immense looming and darkly suggesting “the most serious need” humanity has known. In this new act of presenting himself, one feels an approaching change, a change that turns above all against Nietzsche himself and threatens his most private self-image. He recognizes it at once: “a duty against which my habits, even more the pride of my instincts, revolt.”³

So one wonders: What was it that in the space of little more than a year—the preface to On the Genealogy of Morals dates from July 1887, Ecce Homo from October 1888—drove Nietzsche to set himself a task that he considered doomed to failure and that wounded his instincts? Had not he himself shown how suspect and degenerative such a wound could be? Was the great tree of thought, which never knows what it will bring forth, perhaps preparing a monstrous fruit, a fruit representing in miniature the tree itself?⁴ Ecce Homo has always aroused the most serious perplexities, though certainly not for these reasons. Since the book was published, people have never stopped wondering what to call it. A cosmic proclamation? A psychopathological document? A self-portrait? The loudest sort of anti-German invective? Or none of the above? But before asking these questions, which may all turn out to be beside the point, one ought to take a step back and pick up once more the ominous remains of the first questions Nietzsche himself asked when faced with any piece of writing: Who is speaking in these words? What necessity is speaking in these words?

Nietzsche’s whole life has its unfathomable aspects, but this holds supremely true for the last year of his career as a writer. The constant fluctuation of force, the cyclical mockery and exaltation, recurrent and reverberating from things close at hand, so eloquently reinstated by Nietzsche himself, to those things that lie beyond any communicable life, the very element of his thought, his grand wager—to introduce thought into the actual flow of force, to remove its last restraints and defenses against the pressure of the world, which were characteristic of philosophy before being pounded by Zarathustra’s hammer—seem to become more visible after a certain point. An irreversible transition is foreshadowed at every turn, as though everything Nietzsche had been so far was preparing to manifest itself in a new form. The first symptoms of this process can be seen in some letters written in December 1887. We see the same expression repeated to three different correspondents within the space of a week, thereby introducing the final phase: to close out his past by drawing a line under it.

For I am, almost unwillingly but in obedience to an implacable need, in the process of settling my accounts as far as people and things are concerned and of putting my whole “till now” ad acta. Almost all I’m doing now is drawing a line underneath. The violence of inner fluctuations has been terrifying all these last years; from now on, since I must reach a new and higher form, I need in the first place a new separation, an even greater depersonalization.⁵

What I’ve done in the last years has been to settle accounts, to sum up the past, and in the end I’ve freed myself from people and things and drawn a line under it all. Who and what I’ll have left, now that I must pass on to the real main point of my existence (I’m doomed to pass on to it . . .), this is now an important question.⁶

I feel like working but am in a melancholy mood and have by no means emerged from the violent shocks of these last years. Not yet “depersonalized” enough. Still, I know what is over and done with: I’ve drawn a line underneath my past existence.⁷

Nietzsche, having come to the end of his work and despite his “unconquerable mistrust of the possibility of self-knowledge”⁸—perhaps the sole critical point he shares with Goethe, the only other German he recognizes as his peer—then proceeds, by recognizing himself as object, to clash not only with his psychological acumen but with the harshest results of his thinking. Indeed, the condemnation of self-knowledge is only a corollary of the condemnation of any metaknowledge, which Nietzsche’s criticism has by now established in a theorem that is likewise a death sentence: In the effort to know its own instruments, thought necessarily destroys itself, and in particular, Western thought, the only kind that has calmly ventured on this path. Turning then to personal experience, we see that whereas Goethe, at least in his maturity, had perhaps based his wisdom (the “perhaps” is essential) on the willed preservation of the ego in its most ordinary sense (a case of sublime hypocrisy) Nietzsche, in his most productive years, had instead pursued the active destruction of the subject, following the rule of a warrior monk by his systematic undermining of every reference point and by practicing the “magic of the extreme.” So in considering this attempt at self-explanation, one would have more than ever to ask oneself, “Who says ‘I’ here?” And the answer, like the attempt itself, can only be paradoxical.

Throughout 1888, a year marked by harsh and hasty writings, the wish to establish an image of his own past will come increasingly to the fore, no longer in solitude in the darkness of the cave but now abruptly transported onto a stage as broad as the world, where Nietzsche himself will have the scandalous courage to display himself and say, “Ecce homo.” During the winter in Nice, at a low point in the usual continual fluctuations in the state of Nietzsche’s health, a secret transformation occurs, and like a negative film image what will be revealed a year later seems to become fixed in the silence. But for the moment Nietzsche is still in the cave, the site opposite to the stage. In the first months of 1888, he often, in speaking of himself, returns to the image of the Höhle (den, hollow, cave). This is for him a central and recurrent figure, and we will see it reappear amid the final signs of his life. “An animal, when it is sick, hides in its den; and so does the bête philosophe . . . inadvertently I have become a kind of cave—something hidden, which you would no longer be able to find, even if you went looking for it.”⁹ And earlier he had invited Georg Brandes to approach his “cave—i.e., philosophy.”¹⁰ From now on it is clear that in his underground work Nietzsche aims above all at separating himself from his past, certainly not at possessing it: “Basically everything in me now marks an epoch; everything mine till now crumbles away from me, and if I reckon what I have done in the past two years, it looks to me as though it has always been the same task: to isolate myself from my past and cut the umbilical cord that tied me to it.”¹¹ This, from a letter to Paul Deussen, is Nietzsche’s most explicit statement of his intentions; in the same letter the sound of the last phase could already be heard, a few words that might stand as an epigraph for the whole year 1888:

If genius includes the capacity to take oneself literally, then Nietzsche, from the moment he settles in Turin (5 April), ingeniously applies the terms of his letter to Deussen about chance and destiny. If these phrases are accurate, then they must be fulfilled in every detail, first of all in the “closest things.” From his first days in Turin we feel that Nietzsche is imprinting a positive sign, of ascendant life, on every aspect of the world surrounding him. “This is truly the city I need now!”¹³—so begins the transformation of Turin into the city of destiny. First to be transformed will be the city’s general character and its aristocratic architecture; then all the circumstances of life, the prices, the food, the climate, the theater, manifest themselves as favorable signs. But by the last letters in autumn, in particular the last one to Jakob Burckhardt, everything is transfigured. By now the will has devoured the external world, devouring itself as well, and ecstatically watches the spectacle it has set in motion. During his first days in Turin, the “human cave” crosses an already prepared threshold, which his will, in the form of chance, now reveals to him. Early in April Nietzsche receives a letter from Brandes in which the Danish philosopher informs him that he will give a course at the University of Copenhagen “on the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche.”

Today it is difficult to assess the enormous extent of Nietzsche’s solitude at the time. Having become a shadow for most of his old friends, a difficult and invisible man, by now accustomed to publishing his books at his own expense, accustomed too to counting his loyal readers on his fingers and having to reduce their number as each new book comes out, Nietzsche seems to have circled as far from the world as possible, to a point of insurmountable alienation, which his old friend Erwin Rohde had felt at their last meeting, in the spring of 1886: “as though he came from a region inhabited by no one else.” Brandes’s letter arrives at this point as the first outside approval, produced by chance that has become destiny, the prelude to a stage, an action addressed to the world. Then, for the whole winter, rapid signs of an approaching upheaval kept flickering in Nietzsche, to erupt in the middle of his labors. August Strindberg’s first letters in autumn represent a second threshold, where Nietzsche hears the “tone of universal history” resound and recognizes for the first time an interlocutor of his stature, and this at the beginning of his very last days in Turin, following the drafting of Ecce Homo. Between these two thresholds, spring and autumn, we have an entire cycle, a lightning advance on a single front, in quickstep, while his euphoria spirals upward. The first traces of this activity directed to the outside, the first steps of the human cave on the stage of the world, are already in Nietzsche’s letter responding to Brandes’s announcement. With this letter he enclosed a brief curriculum: three very simple pages seeking only to specify a few facts, but in them it is easy to recognize various observations that will reappear, sometimes almost word for word, in Ecce Homo, the writing of which had begun.

There is no reason to doubt Nietzsche’s statement that Ecce Homo was written with the greatest speed and assurance between 15 October and 4 November 1888. This is not to deny the results of Mazzino Montinari’s examination of the letters and manuscripts showing Ecce Homo to be a work in progress: Some fragments already appear off and on between April and October, and it is also obvious that after returning the proofs to his publisher, C. G. Naumann, on 6 December, Nietzsche went on correcting the text and writing variations on it during his very last days in Turin. So even if the outline of the work was established in a few days, one can say that many of its sentences and paragraphs had been on Nietzsche’s mind for months, up to the moment of his breakdown. Besides, there is a close connection among all of Nietzsche’s writings between April and October 1888. Each of these works is governed by the same gesture, the bursting forth of a wild theatricality, his self-presentation on the stage by concentrating his whole being in its most intense form. With Ecce Homo this impulse is fully displayed, but the style, tempo, and manner are similar in The Case of Wagner, The Twilight of the Idols, and The Antichrist—all of them composed between April and September 1888. First among them is The Case of Wagner, which Nietzsche already mentions incidentally to Peter Gast in April: “My fingers at the moment are busy with a little pamphlet on music.”¹⁴ By May the little book is finished, perhaps the most astonishing example in Nietzsche of the pure art of gesture. One might wonder why just now, ten years after his break with Richard Wagner and five years after the composer’s death, Nietzsche should feel the need to write a savage attack on him. Here too the answer involves the whole process of Nietzsche’s last phase. Indeed, as we will see, only the preexisting, albeit unformulated, thought of Ecce Homo can account for his need to write The Case of Wagner.

The first big problem that looms for Nietzsche at the beginning of his Turin spring is the acceptance of the theater, of the stage. Having thought all his life about the theater, he now finds himself faced with the imperative to practice it. And for Nietzsche, theater has always been synonymous with Wagner. The stage is Wagner, and to mount the stage himself Nietzsche must rid it of Wagner, must set down and etch the differences like scars. The tenor of the text is derisive; the action has an unseemly mobility; here for the first time Nietzsche tries out the Prado style,¹⁵ the mask of the “decent criminal.”¹⁶ The Nietzsche who is quick to assume the role of histrio [actor] raises the histrio Wagner to the sinister archetype of the simulator, that deadly category that had been on his mind ever since The Birth of Tragedy. Here, for the last time, Nietzsche stares at the features of the being who is his exact opposite, before meeting him on the same stage, his own features set firmly for the last time in a role, in the last pages of Ecce Homo. This dual movement already recalls the gesture of the tragic hero who wills “the utter collapse into his opposite”;¹⁷ otherwise, why should Nietzsche choose to present himself with the greatest theatricality, the very weapon of his antipode? Attacking, in the name of music, the perversion of the actor who makes use of music, and thereby breaking the supreme spell of decadence—this is The Case of Wagner. Using the weapons, gestures, masks, and indiscretion of the actor to make music of oneself, a monologue that forgets itself and is “the music of forgetting”¹⁸—this will be Ecce Homo.

The real response to The Case of Wagner was to come more than seventy years later. Just as Nietzsche recognized in Wagner his only existing antagonist, thereby rendering him the highest tribute, so it was to Nietzsche that Martin Heidegger devoted his most articulate piece of writing on the subject of a modern, though still untimely, thinker, paying him the supreme compliment of calling him “the last Western metaphysician.”¹⁹ And just as Nietzsche distanced himself in everything from Wagner’s opponents, so Heidegger had little to do with all the generations of critics and impugners of Nietzsche; much more important, he was the only one to respond to Nietzsche. To be sure, the style and tone are different, not to say opposed. Where Nietzsche indulged in sarcastic clowning and violent confrontation, the exacerbation of thoughts expressed quite otherwise in his private letters, Heidegger instead chose Wagnerian envelopment, the capacity to absorb any outside argument into his own idiom; for the thrust of the fencer, he substituted the undulation of the octopus. Heidegger’s praise is as lethal to Nietzsche as Nietzsche’s scorn is to Wagner. To be the last metaphysical thinker, the last tableau vivant of the West before its destiny flows into the glades of Being, revealing in the darkness what the West has never had the good fortune to see, while a Swabian shepherd leads us to the sound of spellbinding music (which, by the way, reminds us of something: perhaps the English horn of the watchful shepherd, he too the guardian of being, who forever enthralls us at the opening of the third act of Tristan?) is the most ironic nemesis that could befall Nietzsche. For Nietzsche’s intention—and he was sure he had succeeded—was to break out of the enchanted castle of metaphysics. He himself had already defined that castle, in Heidegger’s sense, one would say today, as a site of marvelous spells where the inhabitants are unaware of living under a spell. Of course, having emerged from this place, he claimed to have found not silent country paths but a desert that extends endlessly and easily swallows one up, where there is no marked goal. Heidegger has splendidly demonstrated how Nietzsche can be absorbed into Heidegger’s thought: In a grandiose historical perspective ranging from the pre-Socratics to today, Nietzsche comes to represent the last period that has a name.²⁰ The great thinkers parade in succession across the stage of the West, each quietly uttering his formula, his thought, that unique thought that belongs only to great thinkers; others have so many thoughts. On this stage Nietzsche says, “Will to Power.” His words are a seal, whereupon the curtain comes down on metaphysics; it will no longer have anything to say but will continue to act in the Gestell, Heidegger’s word for our world as the fulfillment of metaphysics.

Let us look for a moment at this huge spectacle before questioning its legitimacy, an old metaphysical vice. Who could have invented it but a man of the theater, a prodigious director, who knows how to manipulate the strings of thought with the automatic perfection of the great pupper masters? And yet we know that the virtues fostered by Heidegger are sobriety, steady and solitary reflection, and silence. How can this be? Let us turn now to Heidegger’s language: From Sein und Zeit through his last writings, throughout multiple variations, we are always faced with an omnivorous organism that reduces everything to a substance homogeneous with itself. At first the movement is slow, sometimes inadvertent, punctuated with tautologies; but these tautologies, Heidegger warns us, are always something else—and so they are. They may be hypnotic devices, for in a few pages we find ourselves ensnared, sweetly drawn to precise, unforeseen conclusions of great importance, and yet not one of them has convinced us; we have not seen any gesture of persuasion. Perhaps it is the uninterrupted murmur of being that has dragged us along with its ultimate power. Heidegger’s lexicon changed several times over the course of forty years, yet the process of his writings remained the same while the spell he cast grew even greater. One would say, in short, that Heidegger’s thought, in order to act, needed all his machinery. The word is deliberate. Is it not from their equipment, the very principle of modernity, that these texts derive their strength?

Let us now look more closely at how Heidegger’s machinery works, which is above all by etymological chains. He begins by reflecting on a word. We choose the first word: “thought.” In the space of a few pages, a chain is forged on the thread of etymology, no matter whether certain or dubious: Gedanke—Gedanc—Dank—Andenken.²¹ Briefly, before our very eyes, a transformation has taken place: The indeterminate “thought” has become “grateful memory.” Take another fundamental word: “representation.” Here the chain is formed from Vorstellung, through the many compounds of the verb stellen, up to the obscure final term Gestell; the whole history of metaphysics is prefigured in this single transition. Or from Grund in the sense of “reason” and Grund in the old sense of “soil,” one jumps, through Satz in the sense of “principle” and Satz in the sense of “leap,” into the Grundlosigkeit, “the lack of foundation” of the Abgrund, “abyss.”²² It will be said that this implicit phonetic cabala has a long tradition in Germany, that Jakob Böhme and other seventeenth-century theosophists were no less daring. But there it was precisely a question of theosophy, knowledge of God—and the word “God” does not often turn up in Heidegger, though at times the adjectival form “the divine” is allowed. But that, as we know, is something quite different. And what can a phonetic cabala be without God, without a God who divinely establishes language, phýsei and not thései, against the prime axiom of Western metaphysics? It will no longer be a sophía but it will certainly still be thought, even very complex thought, in which, however, it will not be only the traditional figure of the philosopher who acts but also the likewise mysterious one of the funambulist. By now we are no longer in the promised land beyond metaphysics but in a more familiar sphere, the one Nietzsche called the sphere of the Artistik, an indispensable word, closer indeed to the life of the acrobat than to that of the philosophy professor. It is the farthest area of decadence, the seductive spot where all the treasures of the modern lie hidden, including the intoxication of nihilism. We are even very close to Nietzsche, since this is just what Nietzsche wanted to leave behind him after living to the point of exhaustion. Is not Zarathustra’s first stand-in a tightrope walker? Is it not Zarathustra himself who buries him, with immense respect, as the victim of his mortal risk? We are back to Wagner, hero of the Artistik, who wanted to be a hero of something quite different, as did Heidegger. Now perhaps we can better explain the bewitching quality of Heidegger’s etymological chains: Are they not somehow equivalent to Wagner’s compositional procedure? And was not Wagner perhaps, like Heidegger, an advocate of the authentic? Heidegger responded to Nietzsche’s stated injustice toward Wagner with a more devious injustice, by denying Nietzsche the first privilege he had claimed for himself, that of not being, by Western standards, a philosopher at all, but a nomad who plunders the crumbling temples of philosophy and then returns to his desert. The will to power is not Nietzsche’s answer to the question of Being [Sein], reduced to a question of being [Seiende], but the obscure criterion for understanding any possible answer to the question of knowledge, as a symptom of the rise or collapse of force, of the various degrees of affirmation or denial of the world. Whatever the will to power may be, it is even more obscure than the obscurity recognized by Heidegger. Nietzsche himself, by likening it to a “chimera,” warned against the dazzle of clarity. The irreducibility of this formula—and of the eternal return, which is the formula’s other version—to the basic coinages of Western thought, systematically set forth by Heidegger in the second volume of his Nietzsche, is virulently expressed in all of Nietzsche’s last writings, in the whole phase that culminates in Ecce Homo and the letters from Turin, before being lost in silence. And it is precisely this final chapter that shatters the framework suggested by Heidegger. Moreover, Heidegger was quite sparing in his references to the ultimate Nietzsche and rightly saw the question as an open one. But all of Nietzsche is an open question, and not all of his horizon coincides with that of the metaphysical theater set up by Heidegger. But one can still say that in the end Heidegger has never been more faithful to himself than in his book on Nietzsche, for there he has shown thought in progress as Andenken, “grateful memory,” bestowing on Nietzsche that singular gratitude that years before had inspired The Case of Wagner.²³ The tempo of astral friendship differs from earthly rhythms, responses roam through names, years, and things, and yet a certain order is observed in these movements. Would it not be time now to expect a Case of Heidegger?

The trail of the theatrical manifestation of this practice leads through everything that Nietzsche wrote between October 1888 and the very first days of January 1889: Ecce Homo is the only work completed in this period, and in a certain way it is the prelude to this practice. Faced with these last writings, which ought to be taken as a whole—Ecce Homo, last notes, last letters—one has only a single choice: Either to consider them as clinical material, documents of the outbreak of insanity, or to read them in terms of their own necessity, linking them on the one side to all of Nietzsche’s previous work and on the other to the silence that follows them. Here we will ignore the first possibility, not because it is devoid of interest in itself but because of its necessarily heavy-handed approach to the material it is called upon to treat. To choose the other path, however, does not mean to shun the final outcome of madness, with the excuse that one should concentrate on Nietzsche’s texts. On the contrary, it presupposes—and we will see in the end in what sense it can be demonstrated—that madness was implicit in all the activity of Nietzsche’s last years, which can even be seen as the systematic construction of madness. At this point, one might wonder what sort of madness we are dealing with, with the understanding that the word is used here as a term of convenience, taken up and left in its natural imprecision.

How does it happen that Nietzsche feels the need to write Ecce Homo? Did he not see from the beginning that the very plan of this work runs counter to his secret sense of etiquette? It is one thing to settle accounts with his past by silent study in the cave, quite another to settle them by the most exaggerated self-dramatization on the stage. This prospect opens wide for Nietzsche during his first stay in Turin. The Case of Wagner represents the removal of the first obstacle: the tracking down of theatrical falsity where it pretends not to exist and claims to present an authentic essence. Then finally the stage has been cleared: Nietzsche can appear on it to assert the need for the false theatrical, deliberately willed. But this false theatrical has to be Nietzsche himself, the real Nietzsche: “Above all, do not mistake me for someone else.”²⁴ Here a knot appears, at first sight inextricable, a new form of vicious circle. And it is precisely this knot that was succinctly put forward by Nietzsche as one of his four great “questions of conscience” in Twilight of the Idols, that is, just before Ecce Homo: “Are you genuine? Or merely an actor? A representative? Or that which is represented? In the end, perhaps you are merely a copy of an actor. Second question of conscience.”²⁵ A few lines later, having exhausted the list of “questions of conscience,” Nietzsche wrote: “Those were steps for me, and I have climbed up over them: to that end I had to pass over them.”²⁶ But Nietzsche does not tell us how he responded to his “question of conscience,” he only says he overcame it. And the answer will come in Ecce Homo, which is the theatrical event par excellence in Nietzsche’s life.

The question of the theater in Nietzsche is quite other than one of aesthetics. If anything, it is the very question of knowledge that opens out in it. Ever since his notes from the period of The Birth of Tragedy (1869–71), Nietzsche had acknowledged the antithesis that was to torture him to the end: the one between the Dionysian man and the actor. It is the Dionysian man who generates the tragedy, the man who is able to experience it in its endless metamorphosis. But alongside this ecstatic being looms a shadow, which will always accompany him: the actor. In him, “this world midway between beauty and truth manifests itself as a game with rapture, no longer being totally swallowed up by it. In the actor we find the Dionysian man, the poet, singer, and instinctive dancer, but as an imitation of the Dionysian man.”²⁷ “We no longer believe in this language, we no longer believe in these men, and what otherwise moved us as the most profound revelation of the world, now strikes us as a repulsive masquerade. . . . We feel something similar to a desecration.”²⁸ The actor appears here as a parasite drawing substance from the sacred power of the transformation. He is the very doubt that undermines the tragic affirmation, the constant possibility of emptying it, and he empties as well any human action through simulation. From the time of these early observations until 1888, Nietzsche will never stop thinking about the actor. And for him, Wagner will be the most potent catalyst, the one who will truly show him the extent of the terrible trap concealed in the question.

Moving ahead by eighteen years to consider the situation of Nietzsche’s thought on the eve of Ecce Homo, we see that in the course of many transformations the initial terms have been in a sense reversed. The critical point in this evolution was the moment when the problem of the actor came in contact with Nietzsche’s radical gnosiological criticism, already set forth in Human, All Too Human and carried relentlessly forward to the end. The first thesis Nietzsche wanted to refute was the fundamental one of all Western thought, affirming truth as adaequatio rei et intellectus. Nietzsche’s dogged inquiry tolerates no doubts on this point: Every form of representation is a necessary falsification, which immensely reduces reality but presents itself to us as if it comprised the whole of reality. This intrinsic falsity of representation is, moreover, our greatest organic defense, for without it we would only be the chaotic movement of the will for truth, which is basically suicidal will. The dilemma of knowledge is posed in these terms: Either thought wants everything (and then it kills the subject that thinks it), or thought renounces everything (and then it kills life). For Nietzsche, this would hold true for all Western philosophy beginning with Socrates.

Representation is thus a feigned relation with reality: This is the only basis of our knowledge, and it is arbitrary besides. If the unconscious simulation manifested in cognitive activity is defined by its character of necessary incompleteness in reproducing what it simulates and at the same time by its claim to be at all moments the whole of what it simulates, then the man of representations is first of all the actor—a passive actor who does not know and must not know he is such. This, of course, applies not only to his relation with the world but, primarily, to the subject’s relation with himself; or rather, here simulation appears in its pure state, since it lacks any possibility of verification. The subject himself, in fact, is the first simulation, the one that makes all the others possible, a simulation characterized by maximum persistence. At this point, it is already clear that the more Nietzsche pushes on with his criticism of the actor, the more he is obliged to grant him importance and the closer he brings him to the center of the very nature of man. Eventually the terms have switched positions: No longer is it the actor who grows like a parasite on the trunk of the Dionysian man; on the contrary, it is the Dionysian man who can reveal himself only on condition that he don the garb of the actor, in a certain way grow over him. As Nietzsche proceeds with his devastating inquiry into the gnosiological question, he shows with increasing clarity that knowledge is primarily a comedy of knowledge, an ineradicable theatricality that operates within the individual, constantly reproduces itself in solitude, and must reproduce itself for the economy of life to be maintained. Here it is not even a question of tracing “what really happens.” About the “inner process,” about the ground—if there ever is a ground—what little Nietzsche had to say is obscure. But the upheaval produced by his thought lies in his having considered thought itself as exteriority, pure symptomatology, a series of gestures, like nature itself. Here is the question that Nietzsche raises: “To what extent can thought, judgment, all of logic be considered as the outer aspect, or symptom, of a much more inner and fundamental occurrence?”²⁹ The answer is: completely. “The world of thought only a second degree of the phenomenal world.”³⁰ This is the final limit of Nietzsche’s gnosiological criticism: to turn all knowledge and thought inside out, presenting it as a continual surface across which the fabric of nature extends, something that serves for manifesting a process but never for making a judgment back from the process to its beginning; thought belongs to the circle of signs. One does not, therefore, in the face of knowledge, now raise the question of truth: Is it correct or incorrect? Knowledge cannot even insist on the standard of correctness. The question is instead the very question of the theater: What and how much reality is knowledge capable of asserting and supporting? How much reality does it exclude?

The theatrical nature of Western thought, the continuous identity of its scenario, its look of a game in which the pawns always move on the same chessboard—these result from the implicit acceptance of a rule: that the primum is always in the midst of the numbers, that the origin lies along the way and asserts itself all the same as origin, while the origin can only lie outside the chessboard, the chessboard being already the dispersion. But the other, complementary rule of the scenario is that the dispersion never be stated as such, that it always be reabsorbed into something, that the game not be uninterrupted, as called for by its nature, that it always stop at some opportune point in the game itself. If philosophy is thought that starts from zero, thought without foundation, then Western philosophy is thought that starts from zero and always manages to establish a primum. But there is no path between zero and one. Nietzsche has given away the rules of this game and is therefore the great traitor of Western thought.

When Descartes, with his genius for the falsely self-evident, stated in his Regulae ad directionem ingenii that the operation of knowledge should be preceded by the enumeration of the facts pertinent to the problem,³¹ the model latent in all Western thought came to light for the first time in the crudity of a practical suggestion. The device of enumeration is certainly not a calm measure of the intellect; it has immense power, a power that still suffuses scientific thinking. To require that the facts be enumerated is the first step leading to the much more rigorous requirement of a formal system. But with this step, exclusion is already admitted; the renunciation of the whole and the practice of simulation is explicitly introduced: Given an enumerable set of facts, simulation is the process that allows one to consider that set equivalent to the whole of the problem raised. Descartes is said to have merely revealed a model already latent in the dominant line of Western thought, its appearance being only a transition in the progressive manifestation of a single potential: formalization. Nietzsche, in the course of his criticism of knowledge, his inquiries into the “secret history of philosophers,” sniffed out this identity of place in Western thought, this constant complicity of the most diverse speculations, and he gave it a name, implicating all of it in a single vicissitude: the history of nihilism. And formalization is only another name for nihilism.

If the common feature of metaphysics, the index fossil of the West, is precisely the tacit claim that thinking about the world can and should present itself as a formal system, and if, for this very reason, even thinking about God, which would seem to be exempt from this compulsion, has been increasingly transformed in our history from theosophy, as exegesis of a given and unattainable word, into theology, the rudiment of a deductive argument and chain of proofs, then it is no wonder that philosophy professors are scandalized over the numerous contradictions found in Nietzsche’s writings. In fact, the sense of contradiction in Nietzsche is quite new; he is speaking by now from somewhere else. His argument may be incongruous, but it can no longer be refuted because it is incongruous: Here it is not a question of incorporating the contradiction into a lax and disguised formal system, as it is in the grandiose attempt of German idealism and especially of Hegel. Here the contradiction is stated as an independent and unrelated power, which does not expect to be justified; it is the very game of thinking that wants it and continues to insist on it. Nietzsche represents the advent of thought that has no wish to expend itself in the construction of formal systems, conscious or unconscious. Such thought cannot, nor does it want to, provide proofs; rather, it offers itself as pure imperative, a succession of forms, basically unaware at every step of what has gone before and what follows. What can such thought do with its contradictions? Maybe it forgets them.

“Since each thing is so connected with everything, to try to exclude any one thing means to exclude everything.”³³ In this sentence Nietzsche presented his fulcrum, his gesture that compels him to seek beyond the man of decadence. The direction of this search, however, reveals at once that it is a matter not of replacing one image of man by another but of denying man himself. Indeed, exclusion is not a temporary or secondary characteristic of knowledge but what defines it. We cannot help excluding, even if we consider knowledge a fiction, because our bodies cannot do otherwise. Hence the despair of nihilism: One recognizes the illusory nature of knowledge but cannot give up knowing; one lives in a compulsion to know, and such knowing is groundless. At this point it would no longer be possible for Nietzsche simply to counter, as he did in the period of The Birth of Tragedy, with the antithetical image of the Dionysian man. The analysis has already been pushed too far along the suicidal path where one has to verify knowledge, and there are no more exits. To abandon the man of decadence means by now to abandon man. It is now that the eternal return appears in a flash. And it will be the basis for the enigmatic image of the superman, the metamorphosis of the Dionysian man: the being who proclaims the eternal return and lives it.

Above the rubble of knowledge and the fragmentation of chance, the sun reaches the “moment of the briefest shadow,” the Panic clarity of noon; as the true world and the apparent one are engulfed, the fable goes on telling stories about its fate: The “escutcheon of necessity” appears from the sky, and the world asks to be expressed in another language.³⁴ First in the guise of his double Zarathustra, then, with Ecce Homo, presenting himself as the double, Nietzsche abandoned the path of philosophy with an abrupt gesture, the ongoing result of his vision of the eternal return. The fact that Nietzsche himself did not write much about the eternal return, despite the supreme importance that that doctrine assumed in his thought; moreover, the fact that what he did have to say in no way justifies making any unequivocal statement on the idea of the eternal return, since it combines other, often incompatible elements, whereby the argument would appear at times as a chain of proofs based on scientific fact, at others as instant certainty—all this would suggest that we are in the presence of something that can be approached only on its own terms. Actually, the eternal return is not a thought that can be added to another thought but a practice that overturns the very state of thinking about the world as the sole imperative making it possible to endure the whole of existence. Nietzsche’s attack on representative thought was now concluded: By its very nature, any representative thought is forced to exclude some parts of the world; it is obliged to build a lazaretto where that part of existence not admissible in good society must live. This is above all pain, constantly opposed by thought in an effort at anesthetization (and this effort is almost the definition of the modern), and time, which thought keeps separating from itself, thus laying the foundations for revenge. Anesthetization of pain and evocation of revenge: this is the final residue left by thought after Nietzsche’s disrespectful inquiry. These two features already comprise all of metaphysics; the attack on Christianity and morality will be only a derivation from them.

Now Nietzsche’s aim is to abolish the permanent structure of Western thought: the clash between ego and world. Nietzsche wants to emerge from representation, but by rejecting the Vedantic path of identification, he maintains all the terms of the confrontation and illuminates and preserves the biological need for representations, while transporting them into another space, which is no longer that of knowledge or of any kind of objectivity. Now it is the sea of force, where each epistemological gesture, the feat of a fictitious subject, becomes a savage wave amid the immensity of others. We are made not for knowing but for acting as if we know—this “as if” is the necessary guarantee of thought, but it is a guarantee that has always had to remain unconscious because to acknowledge it is unbearable. For the bête philosophe it means paralysis and derision. Nietzsche chooses to put this “as if” at the center of the action and insists that the action be exalted by it, because only now does it lose all reference and appear in its pure form as an aggregate of signs that do not, cannot, and do not even want to know their origins. With this last transition to the wholly groundless will, the world is once more an enigma, an enigma composed also of its various solutions.

But how do we emerge from the circle of exclusion? Let us go back to where we started: “Since each thing is so connected with everything, to try to exclude any one thing means to exclude everything.” Given this necessary connection of everything, each instant will therefore include within itself, in extremely abbreviated form, all preceding ones. And yet we live it as a separate entity, bowing in this to the constraints of representation. To bow instead to the necessity of the whole, we should, in opposition to our immediate impulse, discover a practice that allows us to live the abbreviated whole in the instant. And this practice is only one: to live the instant as if it were to be endlessly repeated, that is, recovering in the necessity of an unlimited future, in which the same is repeated, the unlimited past of the necessity that has constructed the present instant. This practice is the eternal return. Thought has shed its skin. It is no longer a subject representing the world, but it is as organ of the world that it asserts itself, and therefore the world in its entirety. But this transition has occurred by making use of the specific means of representative thought. In order to approach necessity, thought has need of simulation—is this not the practice of the eternal return?—just as it had needed it to defend itself from necessity itself. The world is two-faced at every point: Its elements remain constant, their use is forever twofold. Perhaps never before has this suspicion come to light as it does in Nietzsche, and not by chance in theatrical form. The attack on representative knowledge, accused of being unable to recognize necessity, does not lead to not knowing or to the construction of another kind of knowledge; rather, the very elements of representation and its process—simulation—are now turned toward necessity and converge on the closest approach to the affirmation of necessity: the eternal return. “To stamp on becoming the nature of being.”³⁵

Ecce Homo is the work that Nietzsche devoted to destiny. The subtitle—How One Becomes What One Is—already offers the book as an education in destiny. This important notion, continually impoverished by the West throughout its history and finally relinquished to the exclusive use of palm readers and sentimentalists, resurfaces in Nietzsche with both its archaic and its newest features, since now the context in which the notion thrived has disappeared; to conceive destiny amid chaos is a task that thought sets itself for the first time with Nietzsche. Fate and History and Free Will and Fate—these are the titles of two school themes by the eighteen-year-old Nietzsche. We find in them a transparent prefiguration of the final Nietzsche, as though with a steady but unwitting hand he was already outlining his thought as destiny. Even at that time, Nietzsche, in his invincible determination, could not conceive the will except as “fatal will,” or rather, as the “supreme power of fate.”

And the will sought in Ecce Homo is no different, except that now, having completed the circuit, Nietzsche wants to bring his thought closer to a practice, insisting that his own destiny be visibly configured in his writing and recognized as such by the world. In this intention, Nietzsche dealt with the penultimate consequence of his thought, obeying his impulse with the “ancient sovereignty of mind.”³⁶ Now that thought has abandoned the claims of representation and has itself become a fragment of the world, the task can now be only to discover its own necessity. But if this task presents itself as the story of one’s life, it obliges one to describe and enumerate oneself. The word defining the thought that Nietzsche wanted to avoid here reappears. But this time enumeration is not reduced to a mere practical measure. Here, on the contrary, it becomes an insolent challenge: to express one’s destiny by gathering what one has casually squandered in life under the sign of necessity. The threat that we feel hanging over this enterprise is analogous to the ancient tradition about the baleful nature of the census. Nietzsche simultaneously approaches the utmost consistency and the utmost contradiction—a word that here does not designate a logical objection but nefas [the impious] itself.

Ecce Homo is constructed as a set of superimposed impossibilities: to don the garb of the actor (that is, of the person with no destiny) to tread a huge stage and present the figures of one’s own destiny; to point to Dionysus with the same words, ecce homo, used for Christ dressed up as king (“And the soldiers platted a crown of thorns, and put it on his head, and they put on him a purple robe”);³⁷ to say simultaneously “I am dynamite,” and “I am a nuance”;³⁸ to pass through one’s destiny as a familiar place and even open the doors casually on one’s future; to prepare humanity for “the most difficult demand ever made of it”³⁹ with a short book of indiscreet autobiography, thus indulging in one of the most obvious vices of decadence—all these discordant and misleading characteristics, by their very excess, end by convincing us that Ecce Homo is exactly what it promises to be, a sort of prodigious compendium of a polymorphous being who offers us a complete explanation and enumerates not only all the passages but all the gestures of his destiny. The mosaic of quotations from previous works inserted into Ecce Homo thus reveals in hindsight its formal justification, instinctively chosen by a great “fanatic for expression”: to enclose in a single frame the entire repertory of tones and nuances, to compel oneself for the first time to make a frontal presentation. In Ecce Homo “I’ll be seen completely all at once,”⁴⁰ and this because, as Nietzsche was to write a month later, “now I no longer write a line in which I don’t appear completely on the stage.”⁴¹ In this sense Ecce Homo is one of the outstanding successes in Nietzsche’s work. Its lightness and flexibility of language, its capacity to move simultaneously and continuously on many levels, its combination of opposing rhythms—the aristocratic lento of certain abrupt openings, the nervous prestissimo, the judgment expressed in a staccato drumbeat—are the signs of maturity, of the grand style that embraces and holds in its grasp the discordant forms of a man who, like few others, was able to pass through the whole circle of appearance. A perfect work—but what occurs in Ecce Homo is also something quite different. The great changes of madness unfold in the hidden chamber of this work, something mysterious haunts these pages, and the mystery is destined to remain such. This will come as no surprise to a reader of Nietzsche: That his book of maximum exposure should also be one more cave, perhaps more inaccessible than the others, is part of Nietzsche’s game.⁴² And Ecce Homo may even be a sign of modesty, the distraction of a masquerade to cover a discreet event that requires obscurity and silence: Nietzsche taking leave of himself.

Before recapitulating history and all that said “I”—the last days in Turin—Nietzsche recapitulated his own history, reviewing his whole past, as the saying goes, in the hour of his death. There is no intention in all this, only a temporary submergence, the biological foreshadowing of great transformations, like dreaming of the dead: “Indication of violent changes.—If we dream of people we have long since forgotten or who have for long been dead, it is a sign that we have gone through a violent change within ourself and that the ground upon which we live has been completely turned over: so that the dead rise up and our antiquity becomes our modernity.”⁴³ In Ecce Homo Nietzsche dreams of himself as dead and looks at himself, the posthumous man, with a posthumous gaze before his flight into all that is other has begun. To evoke the whole image of one’s own destiny means to evoke one’s own death. This anticipation of destiny is the transgression that transforms fas into nefas, what is lawful into what is unlawful. At the end of his journey, in Ecce Homo, the very book devoted to destiny, the will to destiny is transformed in Nietzsche into the will to nefas, and even Nietzsche, who had been able to dissolve the superstition of facts in the theory of knowledge, falls under the spell of destiny as fact. In Ecce Homo he dares to set down the facts of his life as destiny, before preparing, in his last days in Turin, to make his actions coincide directly with destiny itself. This movement violates the law implicit in the notion of destiny—namely, that the time required to anticipate oneself is, at the most, equal to the time needed for the anticipated event to take place. Only Friedrich Hölderlin found a word for this impulse to violate fate for the love of fate. Nietzsche did not name it because he was to die of it.

The sin of Oedipus, according to Hölderlin,⁴⁴ is neither the murder of his father nor incest. It is in questioning Tiresias that Oedipus evokes the real nefas in his life. Oedipus sins because “he interprets too infinitely,” as if it was he who first experienced the exaltation Nietzsche felt when a world subject to infinite interpretations was thrown open by his own provocation.⁴⁵ For this reason as well, Oedipus has become one of the primordial emblems of the West. Infinite interpretation is the savage, brutal power that bursts secretly into history with the classical age in Greece. Oedipus, from the start, is unable to discriminate in the presence of the oracle: He thus finds the twofold solution that once and for all indicates our ultimate ambivalence. First, the solution that allows him to escape death at the hands of the Sphinx; then, the solution, torn from the soothsayer, that will sentence him to death. Only Oedipus succeeds in avoiding death from the oracle, and only Oedipus finds himself subject to a death sentence by the oracle. The indissoluble link between the two solutions governs the whole space of thought as solution, within which we still find ourselves. Hölderlin writes that Oedipus ought to have interpreted the oracle in this way: “Establish, in general, a pure and rigorous judgment, maintain good civil order.” Oedipus rejects generality; he wants the particular, the person. But what is the real difference between the two interpretations? That the first relinquishes a private solution and settles for the first derivation from the oracle, while the second gives itself over to an indefinite process, which will stop only when the particular is irreparably unveiled? To be sure—but there is also another, less obvious difference. The interpretation offered by Hölderlin is a response obedient to tradition, to an exegetic orthodoxy, whereby any interpretation is the reading of a sign that represents the state of the world, a process involving always and solely images of the whole. Oedipus’s interpretation, on the other hand, looks for a chain of fragments. Even an exegetic orthodoxy can allow an indefinite series of superimposed levels of interpretation. But between them there must always be a homology, without gaps. Oedipus pursues a series of fragments that have only a single tie, the most particular and thoughtless: Each one points endlessly to the next. And this is the crux: Oedipus chooses the path, blasphemous and at the same time priestly (“But Oedipus in response at once, as priest”), of infinite interpretation, but he rejects its inner law: the endless, boundless, unstoppable multiplication of signs, now no longer subject to a judgment, orthodoxy, that could halt their proliferation. Thus for Oedipus it is not his interpreting but his sin that becomes truly infinite. Oedipus chooses the path of no appeal because there is no judgment, but nevertheless he still violently craves judgment; thus there is no way to appeal his sentence, and he is condemned to execute it himself on his own body. With Oedipus’s judgment on himself, a new image of ruin is born, to be reproduced through metamorphosis right down to ourselves, down to the most awkward, most vacuous “coming to awareness”—a final, modest echo of that original “almost shameless effort to take hold of oneself, the mad wild pursuit of a conscience.”

“Empedocles, long disposed by his feelings and his philosophy to hatred for culture and to contempt for every well-determined occupation, every interest directed at different objects, the mortal enemy of every one-sided existence,” seems to us a man who suffers because “as soon as his heart and mind grasp what exists, they become bound to the laws of sequence.”⁴⁶ The opposite extremes of nature and art—or, in Hölderlin’s terms, of the organic and the aorgic—live in this man in their most exacerbated form. He is, as Nietzsche writes of himself, under cover of the language of the feuilleton, “at the same time a decadent and a beginning.”⁴⁷ Empedocles is by nature a poet, but he is not destined for poetry. “The destiny of his time, the violent extremes in which he had grown up, did not require song. . . . the destiny of his time did not even require true action, which has an immediate effect and is a help. . . . it required a victim, in which the whole man became actually and visibly the one in which the destiny of his time seems to dissolve, in which the extremes of his time seem truly and visibly to be reunited in one.”⁴⁸ But let there be no misunderstanding: The victim must not simply suffer the penalty, otherwise we are back in the Christian circuit of revenge. The victim must be guilty, he must be the one who collapses in his own guilt. And precisely this was Nietzsche’s great obsession, expressed for the last time in Ecce Homo: “not to take the punishment upon oneself but the guilt, only this would be truly divine.”⁴⁹ The mysterious sin of Empedocles is that he makes destiny too visible, dissolving it prematurely in the too intimate reunion of extremes:

Shortly before writing Ecce Homo, in a passage in Twilight of the Idols where a fragment of Human, All Too Human⁵² clearly reappears in different words, Nietzsche described in his terms this way of dying, but he kept completely silent about the tragic mechanism that would prepare it for him. His words are a defense of the construction of death: “then a real farewell is still possible, as the one who is taking leave is still there; also a real estimate of what one has achieved and what one has wished, drawing the sum of one’s life. . . . One never perishes through anyone but oneself. . . . From love of life, one should desire a different death: free, conscious, without accident, without ambush.”⁵³ To have so altered the terms of an indiscreet Rousseauian autobiography, the height of decadence, into one of the unknown “hundred tragedies of knowledge” is the wonder of Ecce Homo. In this transformation no term is lost. From start to finish, the text thrives on the bitterest contradiction; the two theatrical twins, the actor and the Dionysian man, divide the last scene between them. The contradiction appears above all in the alternation of two opposite gestures that run through the whole text, leaving doubts as to which of the two, if either, will prevail in the end. We recognize in them the transposition of a similar dual movement in Zarathustra, the movement that at the same time made that work “a book for everyone and for no one.” The first gesture appears immediately in the opening appeal of the work: “Hear me! For I am such and such a person. Above all, do not mistake me for someone else.” Nietzsche does not customarily ask to be heard, and this is doubtless something, as he says, his pride instinctively rebels against. But the course of his movement now requires such a gesture: Once he has decided, in the will to nefas, to take literally his transformation of representative thought into a practice (and his practice is the presage of the eternal return), once he has recognized the absolute theatricality of thought, the stage of the world opens for Nietzsche, and then we also witness—with surprise, given Nietzsche’s distaste for any kind of propaganda in itself—the determined effort to prepare the public for Ecce Homo. We see the birth of the idea of having the book appear simultaneously in four languages, the choice and sovereign courting of translators, the announcement of the book itself as a decisive fact of history. In this view, Ecce Homo becomes an event of “great politics,” an initial skirmish in the “war of spirits.”⁵⁴ This also accounts for the stupendous anti-German fury condensed in this book, more than in any other of Nietzsche’s works. There is little to add, after a hundred years, to the clairvoyant precision with which Nietzsche treated the German spirit. As in the case of Wagner, here too he was able to choose something that deserved his fury: Germany as the ultimate bearer of the great thought of the West and therefore the origin of its corruption and a dismal end—the only possible interlocutor and antagonist for his words, as time has shown all the more clearly.

The second gesture, on the other hand, never manifests itself in explicit statements, but it is constantly asserted in the form. Only with the final dithyramb does it flare up in its violence. But there was already a trace in a few words at the beginning (“and so I tell my life to myself”), where the public has now vanished and the telling of Ecce Homo means talking to himself in the solitude of the monologue. And a monologue is exactly what the whole form of Ecce Homo will turn out to be. Nietzsche, to be sure, will don an actor’s costume in these pages, since it is also his own, but unlike his antipode Wagner, he will not thereby try to become an expert operator on the sensory apparatus. That is not what interests Nietzsche. His art is something else, discreetly, almost fleetingly, hinted at in a few writings from the last years; indeed, he called it “monological art,” the art of one who speaks with the void in front of him, the art of one who has created the void in front of him: “I do not know of any more profound difference in the whole orientation of an artist than this, whether he looks at his work in progress (at ‘himself’) from the point of view of the witness, or whether he ‘has forgotten the world,’ which is the essential feature of all monological art; it is based on forgetting, it is the music of forgetting.”⁵⁵

Such a conception hurdles the usual boundaries of art in one leap; nor does it try to establish others. Nothing would be so deadening as to treat it in terms of aesthetics. Of course, if ever a writer’s oeuvre could be considered, in its entirety, as an example of monological art, it would be that of the man who stated the formula, the work of Nietzsche himself. Whichever way we move in it, backward, forward, sideways, we hear a sound that may also be private, the echo of a vast monologue, a counterpoint of musical phantasms that pass across years and contradictions. Destiny does not ask of us consistency; it imposes its own, while thoughts and wishes serve it as pretexts. In the face of the overwhelming degradation of thought reduced to prosthesis, almost all the organs in direct contact with the world having been amputated (all that remains, upright on the head, is the defective antenna of thought about thought, metathought, while immediate thinking has atrophied), Nietzsche appears as a tree that grows “not in one direction but equally upward and outward and inward and downward,”⁵⁶ able to forget the trunk in every branch and each branch in the trunk, a power of expansion, the power of great form, governing what is written, experienced, dreamed. As the last example, not by chance a literal monologue, we discover the tumultuous loquacity of Ecce Homo, which overcomes all obstacles and concentrates too many things in every nuance, in a steady erotic connection with language, only possible by starting from perfect solitude. There, every visible interlocutor disappears, and nothing remains but the labyrinth of the monologue, the sound of inner voices in endless pursuit of each other: Zarathustra, the Cynic, Ariadne, Wagner. This premise alone can allow Nietzsche such felicity in the indiscreet task of judging himself.

Many signs show that Nietzsche clearly felt the fatal significance of Ecce Homo. In two letters to Gast in November, five days apart, he already, unexpectedly, ends by asking his friend to give his words a “tragic meaning.”⁵⁷ And yet so far nothing seems to threaten him; Nietzsche is in a period of unprecedented creative fervor: “I go on and on, ever more, in a tempo fortissimo of work.”⁵⁸ At the beginning of December, Strindberg’s letter discloses the first interlocutor; now that Nietzsche has begun to turn so violently outward, he proclaims himself and wants to proclaim himself to the world. In these same days, Nietzsche once more revises the manuscript of Ecce Homo, weighing it “on a golden scale.” After sending it back to Naumann, he writes to Gast, “This work literally breaks the history of humanity in two!”⁵⁹ Before entering the series of enigmas of his last days in Turin, Nietzsche again twice mentions with obvious clairvoyance, what he has accomplished with Ecce Homo and what remains to be fulfilled. “Meanwhile I don’t see why I should hasten the course of the tragic catastrophe of my life, which begins with Ecce Homo,” he writes abruptly in a letter to Gast otherwise devoted to the subject of operettas, and this theme, too, as we will see, is coded.⁶⁰ Finally, on 27 December, he writes to Carl Fuchs, “All things considered, dear friend, from now on there’s no point speaking and writing about me; with Ecce Homo I have put ad acta the problem of who I am. So there will no longer be any need to worry about me, only about the things for which I’m here.”⁶¹

The first active signs of delirium, which would last until Franz Overbeck’s arrival in Turin on 8 January 1889, now began to manifest themselves in Nietzsche. A number of letters from these days, sent to friends and political leaders, are variously signed “Dionysus” or “The Crucified” or “Dionysus the Crucified.” Only the letter to Burckhardt, the longest, is signed “Nietzsche.” In order to fathom the meaning of these “notes of madness,” one must grasp what has happened with Ecce Homo: Nietzsche, ever the posthumous man, has now become posthumous, has buried himself (“This fall . . . I twice witnessed my funeral”),⁶² and he now reveals the comic finale of the tragedy. But what in ancient Greece had been the satyr play now reappears, in the Europe of Le Figaro (“Of course, I maintain close relations with Figaro”),⁶³ in the guise of perfect frivolity. “That the most profound spirit should also be the most frivolous, this is almost the formula of my philosophy.”⁶⁴ In his new mask as “jester of the new eternities,” Nietzsche comes forth with a series of dreadful witticisms, culminating in the sublime sarcasm of the second letter to Burckhardt, which ends as follows: “You may make any use of this letter which will not degrade me in the eyes of the citizens of Basel.”⁶⁵ As the final consequence of his practice, Nietzsche loses his mind and his name; he strips himself of a mode of expression that coincided with his person.

“Don’t read books!”⁶⁶ is one of the last entries in Nietzsche’s notebooks. Every line of the so-called notes of madness sets up vibrations with the rest of his work. Each sentence seems to be uttered under the seal of his previous thought, but the form of that thought is no longer apparent; its structure has been submerged. In the second and lengthier letter to Burckhardt, Nietzsche’s language seems to consist wholly of what before had lived in its interstices: the burst of irony, the riddle, the sudden disguise. The fabric of his thinking is no longer visible. What has happened? Meanwhile, one can see that Nietzsche’s perfect duality is maintained to the end: The Dionysian man is now Dionysus himself; the actor has become the feigned madman. Every symptom can still have a double interpretation, and every interpretation now lacks any foundation. If, then, one would like a true picture of what happens in Turin, seen from the standpoint of the actor, there is no point leafing through the various pathological explanations that have been proposed. Nietzsche himself comes to our aid, in a passage about the modern artist written precisely in 1888:

The actor is a coward not because he takes leave of himself but because he returns to himself (in self-defense he has persuaded himself that he has an identity), because he makes a distinction between the stage and offstage, and because he comes to a halt—like the process of knowledge, by its nature regressus in infinitum, which instead always stops at some point: “What stops movement (to a presumed first cause, something unconditional, etc.) is laziness, weariness.”⁶⁹ In obeying the suicidal will to truth that he had recognized as a will hostile to life, as the destruction of life itself, Nietzsche in his last year was increasingly forced to realize the letter of his thinking, which is moreover the most radical cancellation of the letter and thus also of the being who thought it. This affirmation of the letter accordingly requires that the declarative form of thought disappear. Thus, the notes of his madness can be considered as the last experiment in a way of thinking that in them denies its own form. This experiment puts life at stake: “To make an experiment of one’s very life—this alone is freedom of the spirit, this then became for me philosophy.”⁷⁰ In this final practice, all of thought becomes silent monologue, interrupted at intervals by forceful epigrams, just as the self-generation of the world is a soliloquizing and inaccessible activity, which proclaims itself only at intervals in fragments of forms. Any other disappears. Thus each of the letters seems to imply a thought, as though the addressee knew it already. It is impossible to bring them together in a consistent argument, these scattered tesserae of a vast mosaic, which has never been shown because it could not be and did not want to be shown.

More than thirty years after stating that the chief task of Nietzsche’s thought is the abolition of identity, “disindividuation,”⁷¹ Pierre Klossowski finally worked out a complete, convoluted, and masterful development of his theses on Nietzsche, creating a design with the “Turinese euphoria” as its center—corresponding to the hypothesis of departure, according to which Nietzsche’s thought “rotates around delirium as around its axis”—and with the vicious circle precisely as its circumference. The first commentator on the theology of the circulus vitiosus deus,⁷² Klossowski is also the first to tackle the last letters from Turin as a form of thought and to try to reconstruct, at least in part, their inner connections and progression. Previous attempts are valid at most as conscientious documentary evidence. Klossowski’s intention, in a way the opposite of Heidegger’s, is to remove Nietzsche from any context and to try, instead, to reconstruct his thought as the unique sign of something distinctive and incommunicable. In pursuit of this goal, Klossowski has made a number of memorable discoveries, but in the final analysis it appears that Nietzsche, that most elusive of human beings, has once again refused to be pinned down. Swayed by the impetus of his commentary, Klossowski also attempts a reading of the Turin messages. But what particularly distinguishes these messages is that, in their extreme transparency, they refuse to be read: Illusory statements, random outbursts—in them the discriminating play of truth and simulation comes to nothing. At this point, any reconstruction of their inner movement, as though one were dealing with some other text by Nietzsche, seems doomed from the start. And we see this confirmed when Klossowski subtly tries, for example, to explain the allusion to magic in the second letter to Burckhardt (“from time to time there is magic”)⁷³ by tracing it back to what is also the biographical labyrinth of Ariadne-Cosima Wagner and Dionysus-Nietzsche.⁷⁴ For the first time, we feel that there is an unbridgeable gap between this short text and not only this explanation but any other as well. No commentator will ever emerge from that labyrinth. Madness may simulate, even with virtuosity, the language of reason (“We artists are incorrigible”),⁷⁵ but where the play of truth and simulation has been forever suspended, there is no way for reasonable language to exercise its interpretation in accordance with the discipline of philology. “O Ariadne, you yourself are the labyrinth: it is no longer possible to get out of it.”⁷⁶

With Ecce Homo, Nietzsche had been prematurely separated from his own identity, which, according to the doctrine of the eternal return, is nothing but a cyclical syndrome. In Nietzsche’s previous thinking, the will to everything, the condemnation of exclusion, required each state to affirm in itself the succession of all other states and thus deny any claim to exclusivity. Nietzsche is now governed by a literal application of this doctrine, having been compelled to establish the image of his destiny in Ecce Homo, and it drives him to wander in a vast series of states, the plural destiny that follows the collapse of his own individual destiny. “We should not desire a single state, but we should want to become periodic beings: become, that is, equal to existence.”⁷⁸ In this fragment, Nietzsche provided perhaps the most concise formulation, without naming it, of the eternal return. To abandon the state of one’s identity is a particular instance of the process described: It means to put oneself into the cycle of the whole, which must come back to that identity, but only after completing its period, that is, passing through the chain of all other states. The sequence that now opens out is that of all simulations (“What is disagreeable and offends my modesty is that at bottom I am every name in history”):⁷⁹ Man, who is nature but who by nature denies being so, must simulate nature in order to rediscover that he himself is nature. The being who has become equal to existence generates the world from himself: The signs of this process are distributed throughout the last letters from Turin. “Siamo contenti? son dio, ho fatto questa caricatura” [Are we content? I am the god who has made this caricature].⁸⁰

In August 1889, on one of her visits to the clinic in Jena, Nietzsche’s mother realized that her son had secretly taken a pencil and some paper from her: “When I said to him jokingly, ‘My old Fritz, you’re a little thief,’ he whispered in my ear, with a look of satisfaction, as we said goodbye, ‘Now I have something to do when I hide in my den’ (Nun habe ich dich etwas zu tun, wenn ich in meine Höhle krieche).”⁸¹ Höhle, as we have already seen, is a key word for Nietzsche. Zarathustra’s cave, philosophy as a cave, the den where the wounded beast hides, as does the bête philosophe—Nietzsche’s remark to his mother evokes a chain of thoughts and in the end recalls the lone man who in Nice silently separated himself from his past. After a year on a huge stage, he went back into hiding. The “shining constellation” had passed forever: “a premonition that the end is near, like the prudence animals have before they die: they go off by themselves, become still, choose solitude, hide in caves [verkriechen sich in Höhlen], and become wise. . . . What? Wisdom as a screen behind which the philosopher hides from—spirit?”⁸²

Once again, if Ecce Homo is a work intended to show “how one becomes what one is,” if the madness in Turin is primarily the manifestation of a practice constructed by all of Nietzsche’s previous thought, it will come as no surprise to find a text from the beginning of this journey that already seems to delineate all its phases in happy ignorance. I refer to the 1873 dissertation On Truth and Lying in the Extramoral Sense, where in a few brilliant pages, which remain among Nietzsche’s finest, the arduous process that we have been following seems to take shape before our eyes. There, simulation, as a dominant force of the intellect, is already affirmed from the start: “The intellect as a means for the preservation of the individual reveals its principal forces in simulation.” Mask, stage, and performance are recognized at once as constituent elements of knowledge; the truth itself as “a mobile army of metaphors”; veracity is defined as the obligation to “lie in accordance with a fixed convention.”⁸³ Man appears as a metaphorizing being: “that instinct for constructing metaphors, that basic instinct of man, which we cannot leave out of account at any moment since we would thereby leave man himself out of account.”⁸⁴ There it is stated that the simulative laws of knowledge are already given in the construction of language, where all the categories—subject, predicate, cause, and so on—are prepared, categories that knowledge would claim to establish by means of language. Knowledge is a templum, a columbarium, a sepulcher. Knowledge makes it possible to avoid pain.⁸⁵ Dumbfounded, we peruse these pages, recognizing in the swift progress of the argument the endless underground passages that Nietzsche would spend fifteen years digging after drafting this text. It all proceeds with fatal assurance. So might we not find foreshadowed there not only the intermediate writings but the dissolution of Nietzsche’s thought as well? We do indeed: After describing the history of knowledge as the history of concealed simulation, Nietzsche offers us another possibility, a perpetual alternative to knowledge as a defense against the world and the threat of being crushed by it. It is the path of active, self-aware, playful simulation, the one he himself would later follow. And here we find perhaps the only adequate description that could apply to Nietzsche’s final state, as it appears in the notes of his madness: