SIX

How One Becomes
What One Is Not

(Ecce Homo)

Ecce Homo has always been the most contested and controversial of Nietzsche’s writings. Tendentiously edited and censored by his sister and Peter Gast, it has been the subject of sharp polemics among scholars who have attempted to establish an authentic text.¹ Förster-Nietzsche withheld its publication until 1905, seventeen years after its composition. As soon as it appeared there were critics who were quick to classify it as a product of Nietzsche’s madness while others, in a slightly more moderate vein, saw it as a sign of a madness about to overtake him. Alternating between lyrical passages that dwell on his experiences of ripe perfection and the sharpest invectives against his German contemporaries, the text may appear to be a melange of the most diverse elements. But whatever else it may be, Ecce Homo is a narrative account of his own life by a writer who has already tried his hand at a number of other narrative genres and has modified them significantly in the process. While this book is Nietzsche’s fullest account of his own life, it is hardly his only venture in self-description.

As a student at Schulpforta he had already composed several vitae; the imposing bulk of his correspondence contains many letters embodying rather detailed and complex autobiographical reflections that go far beyond the demands of their superficial occasions.² What is distinctive about Ecce Homo in this context is that Nietzsche is now going public; as the book’s title suggests, he is not simply making himself available but demanding attention, an attention that he claims is justified by his unique fate in which the personal intersects with historical exigencies. This theme is announced in the first sentence of the preface: “Seeing that before long I must confront humanity with the most difficult demand ever made of it, it seems indispensable to me to say who I am” (EH, 217; 6, 257). This “most difficult demand” is involved with Nietzsche’s expectation that his thought will produce unprecedented transformations:

Two related but distinct trains of thought can be distinguished in such pronouncements. The first is one which finds some support in Nietzsche’s earlier publications and notes. It is his idea of himself as the teacher of a Dionysian philosophy, centered around the doctrine of eternal recurrence; he expects that this philosophy will gradually attain a cultural ascendancy or hegemony. In Ecce Homo Nietzsche refers to such a project in his section on Daybreak. This is worth noting because Daybreak is, on the surface at least, one of Nietzsche’s least apocalyptic books; and even in this later account he describes it as lying “in the sun, round, happy, like some sea animal basking among rocks.” But Nietzsche goes on to explain that the book seeks its daybreak and “a whole world of new days” in the transvaluation of values and this gives rise to an account of his project:

What is the “great noon” to which Nietzsche refers here? The expression “great noon,” along with literary projects with titles like Noon and Eternity, begins to appear in Nietzsche’s notebooks at about the time of his first notes on eternal recurrence in 1881. As described in the text above, the “great noon” is a kind of apocalyptic moment; that is, a moment of clarity and revelation; the scales fall from the eyes so that a question of the first importance can be asked for the first time. From the beginning of the appearances of this theme, however, it is doubly determined as both a general metaphor for human enlightenment and also as a specific moment (Augenblick) in which that enlightenment occurs. Both are, of course, traditional themes that can be associated with philosophical and religious conceptions of emerging from error into truth.

The metaphorics of the “great noon” are affiliated with Plato’s myth of the cave and the sun, and the European Enlightenment. Plato’s notion of what it is to be freed from the veils of illusion is relatively timeless and ahistorical; seeing the sun is the result, for him, of a philosophical discipline and training which does not seem to be intrinsically tied to one’s historical position. At Platonic high noon, we might say, one does not look “back and far forward” at human history, but gazes at the sun itself. Beginning roughly with Bacon and Descartes, however, the figure takes on a collective, historical meaning and implies that there will be a general moment of illumination that depends on an entire society (at least its leading figures or illuminati) liberating itself from what Kant called its “self-imposed tutelage.”Nietzsche suggests an even greater degree of temporal specificity to the great noon by calling it an Augenblick. The Augenblick is the time founded from a phenomenological point of view by the blinking of one’s eyes; this sense of concrete content with sharp boundaries is not conveyed by “moment,” the usual English equivalent. What recurs in eternal recurrence are Augenblicke. And in the vision of Zarathustra where he confronts the spirit of gravity, the two stand before a gate that is inscribed Augenblick at the conjunction of two paths that stretch indefinitely into the past and the future. While the dwarf who is the spirit of gravity sees the two roads and even approximates one aspect of eternal recurrence by saying “all that is straight lies . . . all truth is crooked; time itself is a circle” he apparently does not see the Augenblick, even though it is inscribed on the gateway in front of him.

In the notes of 1881–82, the emphasis is mainly on the long process of criticism, education, and political transformation that is necessary in order to lay the groundwork for the “great noon.” In Nietzsche’s first notation concerning eternal recurrence, for example, he asks:

Here blessedness consists only in teaching eternal recurrence; the task is not obviously associated with “great events” of any immediate sort.

Ecce Homo, however, is pervaded by the apocalyptic tone in which Nietzsche calls forth “upheavals, a convulsion of earthquakes, a moving of mountains and valleys, the like of which has never been dreamed of.” The process is already underway, Nietzsche’s rhetoric suggests; whatever has to be done has already been done. The tenses of his language are the prophetic ones of the future and the future perfect: “The conquest of politics will have merged entirely with a war of spirits; all power structures of the old society will have been exploded—all of them are based on lies.” (EH, 327; 6, 366).

In Ecce Homo and in the burst of self-aggrandizing and self-promoting correspondence accompanying its composition, Nietzsche makes it clear that the event which “breaks the history of mankind in two” (EH, 333; 6, 373) is the transvaluation of all values. But that is an insufficiently precise way of putting it. What Nietzsche’s writings of 1888 show is an increasing condensation and concretization of the notion of a transvaluation, and along with this condensation there is an increased attention to the thematics of the great noon as a specific historical Augenblick. Initially “transvaluation” is a term for the general activity of criticism and teaching in which Nietzsche is engaged. Then it becomes the title, The Transvaluation of All Values, of the definitive philosophical work that he is about to write; Nietzsche expects that it will produce a much greater and more immediate impact than his earlier writings have (13, 545).

The plan was for a work in four parts, of which The Antichrist would be the first. But at some point during the last months of 1888 Nietzsche comes to think of the just completed Antichrist as being identical with the whole of the Transvaluation. At the same time his expectations for an immediate and explosive effect become much more specific; he wants to arrange for the book’s translation and simultaneous appearance in seven languages. In the account of Twilight of the Idols in Ecce Homo, Nietzsche says with some bravado that he proceeded immediately from the completion of that work “to the tremendous task of the Transvaluation, with a sovereign feeling of pride that was incomparable, certain at every moment of my immortality, engraving sign upon sign on bronze tablets with the sureness of a destiny” (EH, 315; 6, 355). Nietzsche’s latest and most judicious editors, Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, have decided to include the following lines in this section of the text, despite some uncertainties:

That there is some uncertainty about the phrase Beendigung der Umwertung is significant. Assuming that Montinari is right in arguing that Nietzsche did want to include it in Ecce Homo, the uncertainty evidenced by the erasures and reinscriptions which he documents contrasts interestingly with Nietzsche’s talk of writing The Antichrist by “engraving sign upon sign on bronze tablets.” Because Ecce Homo itself is ambivalent about the project of transvaluation and the appropriate text of that project, the text must appear ambivalent in respect to its general purpose. If the Transvaluation has been completed, then Ecce Homo can be read, as Nietzsche wanted us to read it, as a prelude to that work (although it could not have been read that way between 1895, when The Antichrist was published, and 1908 when Ecce Homo finally appeared). Another way of understanding the relation between Ecce Homo and the Transvaluation suggests itself, however. For a long time Nietzsche planned to write a comprehensive work, The Transvaluation of All Values, from which he expected great things. At one time he projected The Antichrist as the first of the work’s four parts. But rather than complete the work he turned to the composition of Ecce Homo which became, in effect, a substitution for a work that was never written. So the real rhythm of Nietzsche’s activities would be the opposite of that given in his bravura picture of himself as proceeding boldly and without pause from one work to the next, completing the Transvaluation and enjoying the well-deserved leisure of a god strolling alongside the Po. This actual rhythm would be one of postponement and displacement in which Ecce Homo is substituted for a book that is not written. The text which was to serve as a kind of personal appendix to the event and text of transvaluation becomes a means of not completing either. In effect, Nietzsche writes “Why I Write Such Good Books,” rather than writing his great book.

What is it about The Antichrist that might lead Nietzsche to identify it as the whole of the Transvaluation? His earlier plans are for a four-part work with a relatively systematic structure; some outlines for the parts that could have succeeded The Antichrist are preserved in his notes. Around the same time that Nietzsche came to see The Antichrist as identical to the Transvaluation he added the “Decree [Gesetz] Against Christianity’’ (now published in the Colli-Montinari edition, 6, 254). The “Decree” is a remarkable document, translated here in full (since it is not otherwise available in English):

Decree Against Christianity

Proclaimed on the first day of the year one (—on
September 30, 1888 of the false time scheme)

War to the death against depravity:
depravity is Christianity

The Antichrist

One can see why Nietzsche’s friends and later editors did not publish this “Decree” which eventually was classified along with the materials for Ecce Homo. The date, the signature, and the movement from a philosophical to a political mode of attack all confirm and intensify Nietzsche’s announced intention of “writing in letters so large that even the blind can see” or of “writing on the wall, wherever there are walls” (A, 62; 6, 253). The “Decree” itself could well be printed as a poster in large letters and pasted up on many walls. This is indeed a typical mode of communication employed by military authorities during a condition of martial law. One could imagine it being pasted up by the occupying armies of its signatory, the Antichrist. Such a use would be consistent with Nietzsche’s plan that the Transvaluation be presented as a broadside attack on Christianity; he wanted it to appear simultaneously in seven languages, in editions of one million copies each.

The last words of The Antichrist before the “Decree” are:

The theme of changing the way in which time is reckoned appears frequently in Nietzsche’s letters at this time and, of course, in Ecce Homo. The “Decree Against Christianity” shows Nietzsche struggling to employ this concept as more than a trope. He no longer limits himself to producing narratives that call the philosophical and Christian traditions into question or that offer alternative stories about human possibilities. He sees himself as “splitting the history of mankind into two” by means of the Transvaluation.

It might be noted that the idea of redating history and beginning anew has a history and tradition of its own. All of the main religions of the West have their own schemes of reckoning time. It has been typical of revolutions since the eighteenth century to adopt novel calendrical systems, demarcating a new era from the old and hated regime that has been overthrown. The French revolution, for example, introduced a new calendar in which the years and months were renamed. Nietzsche’s revision of history draws upon such precedents and upon his argument that it is Christianity, or more generally the nihilism in which it culminates, that is the most significant tendency of past history.

From this perspective it becomes clearer what the task of Ecce Homo is. The Antichrist is an attack on Christianity in the name of this-worldliness and the life of the body. But while the attack is very specific and its strategies have to do with the history of Christianity’s misinterpretations, there may still seem to be some idealism in Nietzsche’s conception of the body and this-worldly life in behalf of which he announces a “war to the death.” They must be made more concrete by being seen as particular moments (Augenblicke) of existence. More specifically, if some parallel is intended between the moment from which Christianity dates time and the moment (the fall of 1888, “by the false time scheme”) from which time is now to be reckoned, then we ought to know something about the significance of that moment. What Ecce Homo does, then, is to tell us precisely about that unusual moment. (“On this perfect day, when everything is ripening and not only the grape turns brown, the eye of the sun just fell upon my life: I looked back, I looked forward, and never saw so many such good things at once.”) The last words of the “interleaf” text, “and so I tell my life to myself,” suggest that it is this perfect moment that is the appropriate time for telling one’s own story. It is appropriate because Nietzsche’s life, as told from the perspective of this moment, exhibits those affirmative feelings—in regard to the bodily matters of climate and food and also with respect to his works and his destiny—that enable him to issue the “Decree Against Christianity.” If time is to be split into two, then the moment of the transition, at which one looks both backward and forward, must be an especially rich one. It is also the antithesis of that blank moment that Nietzche reconstructs in The Antichrist as having given rise to Christianity.

It might seem as if Nietzsche’s strategy here could be collapsed into a kind of solipsistic fetishism of the moment, such that an excess of good spirits would be sufficient to qualify him to rearrange the structure of historical time. This would be the case in an unqualified sense only if he also believed in a solipsism of the Augenblick, that is, in the total self-sufficiency and self-reference of the specific moment of experience. But in stressing the delight of the moment here Nietzsche explains that it is a vantage point from which he looks forward and backward and on the basis of which he can narrate his life to himself. Historical time is not to be eliminated but to be reconstrued, renamed, and given a new turning point. Such an enterprise requires not simply a profession of well-being but some new narratives. These have now been narrowed to two: Nietzsche’s metahistory of philosophy and religion and the account of his own life that he provides in Ecce Homo. “How is transvaluation possible?” would be the Kantian form of the question to which these two narratives would be the parallel replies.

So we could read Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo as offering an account of himself which demonstrates that transvaluation is possible in general because it is possible in his case; the explanation of why it is possible in his case will necessarily involve understanding the historical juncture that makes it possible at all. Such a reading supposes an intense degree of self-knowledge on Nietzsche’s part. It supposes that his gesture “Ecce homo!” depends on his knowing well of whom he speaks. But this text also suggests that Nietzsche cannot (and should not) have that degree of self-knowledge. The subtitle of Nietzsche’s book about himself, let us remember, is “How One Becomes What One Is.” One obvious stratum of the text assumes that the author has both become what he is and knows what he is. But in the course of explaining “Why I am so clever,” Nietzsche suggests that knowledge is not helpful in becoming what one is:

The contradiction between knowledge and becoming what one is could perhaps be softened in a certain way by suggesting that while becoming what one is, one knows oneself. Nietzsche engages in a rather constant polemic against such Hegelian views because they presuppose an impossible coincidence between knowledge and existence. In order to present themselves plausibly such conceptions must in any case allow for a becoming of knowledge; otherwise the final self-knowledge would be completely adventitious and gratuitous. We must also ask whether, according to Nietzsche, one ever ceases to become what one is (short of death) and whether one ever becomes what one finally is. For if becoming what one is is a process that proceeds indefinitely, then it is clear that, according to the text above, one ought not to have self-knowledge at any point in the process; one should rather constantly practice the art of forgetting oneself.

So we might look at Ecce Homo as containing several distinct strands of thought. According to one of them Nietzsche has come to understand what he is and can truthfully announce that he is the author of the completed Transvaluation, with the right to take his leisure like a god, strolling along the Po. But among the things that he knows is that one is always becoming what one is and that one is never really in a position to say what one is. Or, perhaps more precisely, he knows that if self-knowledge were possible it would have a deadening effect on the process whereby one becomes what one is. That is, even if a Hegelian coincidence between knowledge and being is possible, it is not to be desired; for its price is what Hegel announced in speaking of the end or completion of philosophy and what Nietzsche glossed in his untimely meditation on history: a form of nihilistic passivity in regard to the present and the future. Moreover, Nietzsche draws some practical maxims from the nescience necessary to becoming what one is that seem flatly incompatible with his implicit claim to know himself as a fatality and a destiny. For example: “The whole surface consciousness—consciousness is a surface—must be kept clear of all great imperatives. Beware even of every great word, every great pose! (EH, 254; 6, 294).” Nietzsche follows this maxim with an account of self-becoming as the slow, unconscious working of an “organizing ‘idea’ ” that operates without the knowledge of the subject. And he relates this to his own case:

But Nietzsche does not tell us when that day was, or how he knew that this newly attained level of life was the ultimate stage in the process of becoming. If we suppose that having attained this stage of “ultimate perfection” includes, among other things, being the writer who will split the history of mankind into two halves by means of the Transvaluation, then the ambivalence that we have already noted in Nietzsche’s position in regard to these roles makes his account of himself suspect in the same degree.

The intrepid hermeneut (with whom I acknowledge a limited sympathy) may at this point object that the account given so far ignores both the texture of Ecce Homo and its narrative voice. He will point out that the use of an apparently contradictory or unreliable narrator is a condition of several kinds of narrative, and that it will be a mistake to see every instance of such ambiguity as naive. And he will then proceed to show that Nietzsche does, in fact, use a whole language of duplicity or doubleness about himself. The first main section of Ecce Homo, “Why I Am So Wise,” explains that his wisdom is just to be so fortunately doubled as he is: alive as his father and dead as his mother, a decadent and beginning, sick and healthy (EH, 222–224; 6, 264–67). Yet Nietzsche does not tell us that he both knows himself and has forgotten himself, although the teaching of eternal recurrence and the frequent praise of active forgetfulness would lead us toward such a view of the Nietzschean Doppelgänger. Instead his rhetoric in the long discussion of his doubleness emphasizes that he knows his doubleness; the knowing subject then stands outside the system of doubles, rather than being opposed within the system to the ignorant or forgetful subject. Nietzsche claims not only to have an unusual system of multiple perspectives available to him but to be in a position (to have a metaperspective) that allows to him to play upon the system. For example:

Ought we, then, to read Ecce Homo as the sign of a Nietzsche who knows exactly what he is about? Derrida warns us against such a hermeneutic approach which believes that

Derrida reminds us of the oddness of seeking a definitive interpretation of those texts that display the maxim, “Facts are just what there are not, only interpretations” (WP, 481). What then is Nietzsche announcing in the text from Ecce Homo, quoted above, where he speaks of his unique capacity for a Transvaluation of Values? Both Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale here make an interpretive decision with some consequences. Nietzsche uses the term Umwertung alle Werte in the last sentence. German orthography and Nietzsche’s practice suggest that, so written, the phrase can be a book title as well as a term for a process or event. But Kaufmann’s italicizing the words, without capital letters, and Hollingdale’s use of quotation marks, again without capitals, prejudges the issue. This hermeneutic decision is repeated several times by both translators. For example, on the “interleaf” page of Ecce Homo, Nietzsche lists The Transvaluation of All Values as one of several books he has completed during the year; the English translators gratuitously translate this as “the first book” of the Transvaluation. By such decisions the tension between Nietzsche’s deferral of his grand project and his perhaps desperate claim that the project is indeed complete is softened and obscured.

Nietzsche’s systematic oscillation between knowledge and its opposite is a fundamental feature of the text. We will understand this pervading theme of doubleness or binary opposition only if we hold in parentheses, or “bracket” (to speak phenomenologically), Nietzsche’s tendency to portray himself as a master of doubleness and reversed perspectives. I am suggesting then that we might effect a doubled reading of Nietzsche’s doubleness. In addition to the untenable claims of mastery with which he presents the series of binary oppositions, Nietzsche may also be a function of a play of doubles that he cannot control. One bit of evidence that suggests such lack of control is to be found in the now notorious passage on his mother and sister that has only recently been restored to the text of Ecce Homo:

This part of the text was erased, we may plausibly infer, within a few months after the onset of Nietzsche’s madness. It is presumably one of those passages that Peter Gast eliminated from his own copy because they gave the impression of “a too great self-intoxication or of a much too wide-ranging contempt and injustice.”⁶ The variation on the family romance that surfaces here and elsewhere in Ecce Homo will concern us soon more directly, but it should be noted that this passage could be read not as (or not merely as) an instance of Nietzsche’s loss of control, but as an acknowledgment on his part that such control was not, for him, an attainable ideal. The image of the machine and of the pre-established disharmony (an inversion of the Leibnizian world-order) suggest that he is not a masterful commanding subject who can either transcend the opposition of father/mother and sister or identify only with the “good father.”

He is, rather, caught in the machine, constantly susceptible to bloody wounds, and tempted to disavow his deepest thought. Here Nietzsche has explained that in his case there is a machine or structure at work that forces him to “forget himself.” We might say that the machine of mother and sister are the Nietzschean equivalent of Christianity’s “fortunate fall”: because it distracts himself from himself, makes him forget himself, the machine saves him from knowing what he is. This is another sense in which even the parts of Ecce Homo that seem to betray the most ressentiment can be springboards for the affirmation called for by the thought of eternal recurrence. So it is that Nietzsche can describe his life as free of accidents and ask “How could I fail to be grateful to my whole life?” (EH 221; 6, 263).

In Ecce Homo, then, Nietzsche faces the task of being the narrator of his own life. Just after expressing his gratitude (as above) he says “and so I tell my life to myself [Und so erzähle ich mir mein Leben).” Such a narrative will be told by an imperfect narrator and its content, Nietzsche’s life, can not be a complete, well-rounded totality, but is a structure (perhaps a “machine”) that will generate indefinitely many variations on the basis of certain fundamental oppositions. The principles of such a narrative will be radically distinct from the Aristotelian conception of development as the actualization of a given potential and they will also differ from the Hegelian spiritualization of Aristotle in which, through dialectical reversals, every increase in actualization is accompanied by an increase in self-consciousness. I will shortly be sketching a more detailed analysis of the structure or machine that both generates Ecce Homo and is its theme. At this point I want to suggest the need for such an approach by considering a recent plausible construal of Nietzsche’s “How One Becomes What One Is” which emphasizes unity and coherence.

In a chapter of his book with the same title as the subtitle of Ecce Homo, Alexander Nehamas offers such a construction of Nietzsche.⁷ His interpretation draws upon many of Nietzsche’s writings and concentrates on Ecce Homo only as the final exemplification of a principle of self-creation that is attributed to Nietzsche on the basis of his other works. Nehamas proposes that we begin by noting the apparent conflict between Nietzsche’s motto: “Become who you are,” and two principles to which he is said to subscribe: (1) that the self is something which is created, rather than discovered, and (2) that there is no soul or substance that anchors self-identity, but, rather, the personality is to be construed as simply the sum of its various activities of feeling, willing, thinking, perceiving, and so forth. Nehamas thinks that the spirit of “Become who you are” can be reconstructed along the lines of a maxim from The Gay Science: “One thing is needful—To ‘give style’ to one’s character” (GS, 290; 3, 530). The twist which Nehamas proposes is to abandon any Aristotelian or Hegelian conception of a final state of style, and to concentrate on the process itself:

According to Nehamas, Nietzsche’s conception of becoming oneself then involves not a substantial but only a formal or aesthetic conception of unity. It is not a question of identifying the individual who successfully completes such a process in terms of an enumeration of specific instances or kinds of thought, desires, and actions, but “self-creation . . . appears to be the creation, or imposition, of a higher-order accord among our lower-level thoughts, desires, and actions.”⁹ In the place of a final or achieved substantive state we have instead the intention that one’s future development of self-creation be in accordance with certain very general expectations:

Nehamas recognizes that such a whole-in-process ought, from a Nietzschean perspective, to be such that it can be affirmed wholeheartedly by the creator-in-process. The highest degree and test of affirmation is the willing of eternal recurrence: the desire that one’s life, should it recur, be precisely as it has been. Where, asks Nehamas, can we find a concrete model of such a personality whose desirability is based not on moral virtue but on the more formal or aesthetic characteristics connected with total integration? The answer is to be found, he suggests, in the fact that Nietzsche models his conceptions of self and character on the basis of literature. A great literary character, on this view, is one who is all of a piece; a narrative will show such a character as ultimately including and comprehending that which might have initially seemed to be accidental or inconsistent. “Become who you are” requires that we not only become such characters but that we be their authors as well.

Nehamas’s understanding of how Nietzsche saw that process is worth quoting because it includes an interpretation of Ecce Homo that appears to contrast strongly with the one developed here:

Nehamas’s way of putting Nietzsche together again is attractive, for it manages to preserve some of the traditional values of coherence and integration while acknowledging Nietzsche’s critique of substance and identity. Yet the structural (or machine) model of the self that governs Ecce Homo is, I believe, more radical and not subsumable under even such a generously expanded conception of the unity of the “figure or character or author or person.” But Nehamas’s approach is specially interesting because it employs a narrativist model to make sense of becoming what one is; this helps to make it clear both that such models are internal to Nietzsche’s philosophical and literary practice, and that our perspective on that practice must be interrelated at many levels with our understanding of those narrative models.

Nehamas is surely right in supposing that if the view which he ascribes to Nietzsche is indeed his understanding of “how one becomes what one is,” then Ecce Homo should exemplify that conception. But does Ecce Homo sustain such a reading? Nehamas does not offer a more detailed reading of the text (on whose subtitle he comments) than the one just cited. Even the specific meaning of that motto is, however, in question. A close reading of the text would begin by asking why Nietzsche speaks of becoming what one is rather than of becoming who one is. In fact, he uses the more personal form in several earlier books; Nehamas assumes that the various formulations are equivalent and goes on to read them all as if they were in the personal mode. If we attend to Nietzsche’s language, however, we see that what one becomes is a “what,” a something, rather than a “who.” If we were to look for literary models of what it is like to become what one is rather than who one is we would look to examples of figures who become uncanny, monstrous, or Doppelgängers rather than to those who become complete characters. We would think not only of modernist and postmodernist dissolving figures such as those in James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, or Thomas Pynchon but of more classical examples of the contradictory, the multiple, and the grotesque such as Gargantua and Don Quixote. Here too one might wonder how it is that Nietzsche has helped to inspire writers like Roland Barthes, who offer powerful readings of texts that we might take to exemplify classical conceptions of character (such as Balzac’s) in which character is not after all a unity but at most a shifting function of codes or figures of speech.¹²

If Nietzsche employed literary models, which ones did he appropriate? And what understanding of literature governed his appropriation of them? Certainly Nietzsche’s most extended treatment of “literature” is in The Birth of Tragedy. There he is as explicit as possible in depicting the individual within tragic drama as an Apollonian illusion. Because of the interest in the “family romance” theme in Ecce Homo, this approach to the Oedipal theme could be an indication of what literary models are relevant to that text and how they are understood. After Nietzsche has explained the primacy of the chorus and the Dionysian experience of the loss of self, he goes on to comment on that which is apparently clear and well-formed:

Here Nietzsche describes the Sophoclean hero as luminously intelligible, and so we might take his analysis as supporting Nehamas’s conception of character. But to the extent that he is analyzing literature Nietzsche is radically dislocating and de-emphasizing the role of character in drama.

If becoming what one is is something like the way in which a literary text becomes what it is, why not consider the entire dynamics of the text? Indeed, as Nietzsche goes on to describe the uncanniness of the Oedipus figure, it is difficult not to be reminded of his use of the Oedipal motif in The Genealogy of Morals as well as in the themes of Ecce Homo itself. Nietzsche’s account of Oedipus the character does not suggest any special interest in him as a unified or integrated figure; rather the accent is on the uncanniness of the man whose existence challenges our tendency to see humans (and other things in the world) as individuals; the legend of Oedipus suggests that “where prophetic and magical powers have broken the spell of present and future, the rigid law of individuation, and the real magic of nature, some enormously unnatural event—such as incest—must have occurred earlier as a cause.” Nietzsche’s comments on the aged Oedipus of Oedipus at Colonus again emphasize a paradoxical duality with no hint that it is aufgehoben in a higher unity: “the hero attains his highest activity, extending far beyond his life, through his purely passive posture, while his conscious deeds and desires, earlier in his life, merely led him to passivity” (BT, sec. 9; BW, p. 68). Nietzsche also claims that until Euripides “all the celebrated figures [Figuren] of the Greek state—Prometheus, Oedipus, etc.—are mere masks of this original hero, Dionysus” (BT, sec. 10, BW, p. 73). Dionysus, the god of many forms, constantly torn apart but reappearing in new guises, seems to be at the opposite pole from the organically unified character or the uncanniness of an Oedipus. The question has a special poignancy because Nietzsche may be credited, along with Freud, for having effected a transformation in the relative weight which our culture ascribes to Oedipus and other figures of Greek myth. George Steiner has convincingly displayed that the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were more attracted to Antigone (and her conflict with Creon) than to father Oedipus.¹³ Steiner credits Freud with having produced the displacement. But The Birth of Tragedy should probably be seen as the first radical revaluation of the Antigone and Oedipus myths. Antigone is referred to only once, and there is no analysis of her character or destiny; Oedipus, on the other hand, is the constant paradigm of the tragic hero and Nietzsche introduces his discussion of others such as Hamlet by noting their resemblance to Oedipus or their exemplification of an Oedipal uncanny knowledge (BT, 4, 7; 1, 38, 52). Nietzsche takes Oedipus to be the emblematic figure for philosophy in his sketches for an uncompleted book, “Oedipus: Soliloquies of the Last Philosopher.” That sketch begins with an expression of total solitude anticipating both some of the self-descriptions in Ecce Homo and Zarathustra’s complex form of internal conversation:

Freud is quoted as having said that Nietzsche had more self-knowledge than any man that ever lived.¹⁴ This remark could be interpreted in two senses. It might be construed on what was earlier called a Hegelian model in which it is supposed that a kind of absolute self-knowledge is possible in principle and that we can evaluate people in order to discover to what extent they approximate this ideal. Or one might interpret it in a radically Socratic sense, according to which genuine self-knowledge must confess that it is in some respects blind, partial, forgetful, poetic, and constructive. Moreover, it cannot claim to know precisely in what respects it does not know itself or what the limits of its self-knowledge are. This last proviso would make Freud’s conception of self-knowledge distinct from both the Hegelian and radical Socratic versions. Jacques Lacan has shown it is possible to articulate a powerful understanding of Freud and psychoanalysis that acknowledges the intrinsic limits of self-knowledge and self-consciousness. On this view the unconscious is the “language of the other”; that is, my thoughts and intentions always escape me because they are always already embedded in a language that exists prior to me and which I cannot deliberately control. From this perspective both the Hegelian conception and somHe no longer wails for thee slightly weaker versions of the principle of self-knowledge are forms of the imaginary, that illusion of self-sufficiency and wholeness which the child first constructs in his or her desperate struggle with the chaos of raging instincts, sensations, and demands. According to Lacan every person exemplifies some intersection of such an imaginary conception of the self with two other levels or dimensions of physical interaction with the world. These are the symbolic and the real. The real is that which imposes itself on the subject regardless of the subject’s desires and independently of any mediation. For example, my bodily constitution and my place in history are aspects of the real which I can neither choose nor avoid. It would be a terrible fate to live in such a way as to oscillate between the grandiose fantasies of the imaginary and the harsh lessons and perpetual shocks administered by the real. In fact our world is also constituted by a linguistic, symbolic dimension.

Lacan finds the paradigm of our entrance into the symbolic in Freud’s account of the child who, anguished by the periodic disappearance of his mother, comes to play the game of fort /da. He no longer wails for the mother but symbolizes the alternation of her presence and absence by his feigned loss and retrieval of some toy. Submitting himself to the linguistic world that surrounds him, the child has subordinated his original desire to the generalized system of socialized desires that is implied in language. What he desires is simultaneously altered and made expressible by his coming to play his first language-game. As Lacan describes this epochal transformation,

Lacan’s adaptation of Freud’s narrative should itself be taken as emblematic of the category of the symbolic rather than as the discovery of a specific ontogenetic pattern which each human being must traverse in a rigorous order. The symbolic is at least potentially public; for each subject (or speaker) it embodies what Lacan calls “the desire of the other.”

Let us consider the text of Ecce Homo as a constellation of the dimensions of the real, the symbolic, and the imaginary. We will be struck immediately by the blatant role of the imaginary. The usual forces that tend to soften or obscure the expression of a grandiose, exalted conception of the writer’s self are absent and we have an author who openly glories in telling us “Why I Am So Wise,” “Why I Write Such Good Books,” and “Why I Am a Destiny.” At the same time Nietzsche is concerned with the question of the commensurability of this conception of himself with his linguistic, symbolic persona, that is, with the body of thought and discourse constituted by the books he has written (or has still to write). He acknowledges that “I am one thing, my writings are another matter” (EH, 259; 6, 298). Nietzsche is not content to retreat behind his writings; it is in fact his writing, as an historical event, that requires the self-revelation of the author. But he also fears that neither he nor his writings nor, consequently, the connection between them can be understood by his contemporaries. Both points are made in the first sentences of Ecce Homo:

As we have seen, Nietzsche thinks of himself as posing the most difficult demand by means of a book, The Transvaluation of All Values. Ordinarily, one might suppose, a text can be accepted or rejected, understood or misunderstood, without a necessary reference to the person of the author. But since the projected aim of the Transvaluation is to “break the history of mankind into two” by teaching a radical form of this-worldliness and self-affirmation, it is important to show Nietzsche’s affirmative relation to his own texts, since it is he who occupies the juncture at which this historical break occurs.

Nietzsche’s strategy in disclosing himself is a double one of deferral and seduction. Deferral, because Nietzsche explains himself as the author of the Transvaluation before that work has been written; it may be his discomfort with this strategy that finally leads him to identify the Transvaluation with the (already written) Antichrist. Seduction, because Nietzsche appeals to us, his future readers, to demonstrate our superiority to his shallow contemporaries by understanding him. If we have understood him, and if there is an essential connection between what he is and the event or operation of transvaluation, then we may suppose that we have also understood the latter, even if there is no Transvaluation—which was the pre-text of the seductive strategy. Moreover, Nietzsche continues to up the ante in Ecce Homo, explaining the difficulty of understanding his work in terms that should delight the reader who comes to feel that he has indeed attained some understanding:

We might say that Nietzsche uses the symbolic order with the purpose of seducing the reader into an imaginary conception of him or herself. That is, if the seduction is successful the reader will agree with Nietzsche that “having understood six sentences from Zarathustra would raise one to a higher level of existence than “modern’ men could attain” (EH, 259; 6, 299).

Yet Nietzsche’s strategy is patently disrupted by the effects of the real. Because of his breakdown in January 1889, Ecce Homo was not published until 1905, and then in a version bowdlerized by Peter Gast and Elizabeth Förster-Nietzsche. The Transvaluation as originally projected was never written but some of Nietzsche’s notes were published as The Will to Power in a context suggesting some of the grandiose claims that their author had made for the other project. The text we have of Ecce Homo is questionable; Nietzsche’s most thorough and conscientious editor, Mazzino Montinari, concludes that “It is certain that Nietzsche left behind a completed Ecce Homo, but we do not have it.”¹⁶ Not only did the event that was to consist in the appearance and effect of the Transvaluation never occur, but the small book which was to accompany it was defaced by the very “infernal machine” that Nietzsche had described in the manuscript that he sent to the printer.

Aiming at a world-historical event of his own devising, Nietzsche was overcome by the real in the form of history. His sister had learned the techniques of imperialist profiteering and the big lie of the publicist while working with her husband in a scheme to create a German colony in Paraguay. With the husband’s suicide and the collapse of the colony, she returned to Germany and applied some of the same methods to building an institution around her brother’s work. Since that was a more genuine capital investment than the first and because the market had been primed, the second venture met with much greater success.¹⁷

This is the aspect of the real that impinges most obviously on Nietzsche. But as an analyst of himself, as a teller of his own tale, Nietzsche also undertook to explain the nuanced ways in which climate, surroundings, and cuisine provided the conditions of his moods and his work. In the long-suppressed passage dealing with his mother and sister he begins by saying that he will touch on the question of race, and claims Polish descent through his father. The Germans, he suggests, cannot understand him because they are genealogically disposed against all Witz and high spirits. In this approach to the real, however, Nietzsche embeds it in a symbolic structure of binary oppositions, to which we may now turn our attention. These positions can be understood both synchronically as the different sides of Nietzsche the Doppelgänger and diachronically as the alternating phases of his career. In every case, however, it seems to be a matter of something analogous to the child’s fort! /da! game. Nietzsche plays a game with his own life by telling his life to himself. He is not simply doubled, but the observer of the doubles. He knows, as part of this game, that should the “good” side be eclipsed it will not be so forever. And he claims to gain strength from the very alteration. In recounting his miraculous recovery in 1880 at the age of thirty-six (the same age at which his father died—“I am already dead as my father”), Nietzsche sketches the typical dynamics:

We should not misconstrue this movement of exchange and oscillation as a dialectical process, however. For while claiming that the illness of 1880 sharpened his dialectical skills, he adds that “my readers know perhaps in what way I consider dialectic as a symptom of decadence; for example in the most famous case, the case of Socrates” (EH, 223; 6, 265). Dialectic would create synthesis and totalities, it would exploit contradictions in order to press on toward a full and integrated account of things. One becomes what one is non-dialectically, by the play and intensification of one’s various (here doubled) propensities.¹⁸

Consider a partial list of these pairs of inclinations, heritages, circumstances, and surroundings that weave their way through Ecce Homo:

In Nietzsche’s need to construct a narrative around these various polarities we may find an instance of the procedure that, according to Claude Lévi-Strauss, is typical of all mythical thinking. On Lévi-Strauss’s view la pensée sauvage or “untamed thinking” is constantly faced with the task of reconciling, compromising, or coming to terms with such opposed elements, aspects, or tendencies. He suggests that thought when left to itself (unconstricted, for example, by science or dialectic) will deal with these oppositions by creating a narrative myth.¹⁹ In a celebrated account of the Oedipus myth, for example, Lévi-Strauss detects a structure of oppositions beneath the narrative sequence of events as they follow one another in the story. One set of incidents exemplifies the overvaluation of family ties (e.g., Oedipus’ incest with Jocasta) while anther exhibits their undervaluation (e.g., Oedipus’ parricide of Laius); similarly, one set of incidents involves the view that man is born of the earth and another set supposes that he has a higher origin. A story like the Oedipus myth enables its audience to think these oppositions or contradictions in a way that they could not do without the story.

In Ecce Homo Nietzsche tells the story of his life, then, as a structured play of these binary oppositions. That is, he not only tells us the story, as a Bororo native might relate a myth to a Lévi-Straussian anthropologist, but like Lévi-Strauss Nietzsche simultaneously offers a structural analysis of the story that is told. Alexander Nehamas concludes his account of “How One Becomes What One Is” by finding an analogous, yet significantly distinct, concentration of functions:

Nehamas’s claim should be revised by representing Nietzsche not as a self-created character but as a text, and not as an omniscient and omnipotent author but as a structuralist critic who aims at revealing the laws of the text’s transformations.

We do not know exactly what was contained in the manuscript of Ecce Homo which Nietzsche sent to the printer. In addition to the manuscript which Nietzsche’s sister prepared for the first publication in 1908, there is also a copy made by Peter Gast in February 1889, just after Nietzsche’s collapse. This copy is almost identical with the one used in 1908. But, as Gast reported to Franz Overbeck when he sent the manuscript to him, that copy had already been edited:

There is no way of knowing just what these passages were, except for the section on Nietzsche’s mother and sister that was eventually retrieved from Peter Gast’s Nachlass. Elizabeth also acknowledges that a number of passages, supposedly characteristic of delirium, were destroyed shortly after the collapse because she feared that on Nietzsche’s recovery (which she claimed to have expected) he would be terribly hurt by seeing what he had written. As Montinari observes, there are some final entries preserved in Nietzsche’s notebooks that might be indicative of the kinds of materials deleted from Ecce Homo by Gast and Elizabeth; but any effort to reconstruct a “complete” Ecce Homo must be a very speculative endeavor. These last notes deal with such social and political topics as the psychology of Jews and antisemites; the possible receptivity of the “officer class” to Nietzsche’s thought; a hope to enlist the financial support of Jewish bankers in an anti-Christian campaign; and attacks on Bismarck, the Hohenzollerns, and the German Reich; they announce Nietzsche’s readiness for war and his willingness to rule the world.

Montinari remarks that “despite all of the omissions, additions and other changes, the printer’s manuscript of Ecce Homo can be read effortlessly as a continuous text” (14, 458). But what a strange text this must be if it can appear complete when it is actually fragmentary. One wonders, if the text were actually “complete,” whether it would appear even more fragmentary. This is the undecidable question around which editorial (and consequently hermeneutical) controversies have revolved in recent Nietzsche scholarship. Erich Podach articulated one of the options in his edition of Nietzsches Werke des Zusammenbruchs: “One thing is certain: Nietzsche left behind no completed Ecce Homo, but we have one.” Podach means to suggest that the various editorial efforts have produced a relatively unified text from an incomplete and disordered one. Montinari’s reply is: “One thing is certain: Nietzsche left behind a completed Ecce Homo but we do not have it.”

One might propose a common-sensical way out of the dilemma. Let us suppose that Nietzsche has recovered from his “breakdown” (to translate Podach’s Zusammenbruch) and that he had decided to revise the manuscript of Ecce Homo a final time. Might he not have produced a version close to the one that we have now which has been mediated to us by Nietzsche’s sister and Peter Gast? After all, one might say, Nietzsche was like other authors in so far as he frequently revised his works in order to produce a total effect, avoid unnecessary digressions, and so on. But the hypothesis of a recovered Nietzsche is radically unclear. Would part of such a recovery have been the abandonment of the conviction that he was on the verge of presenting humanity with its greatest challenge ever? Would he, upon recovering, have continued to identify the whole of the Transvaluation with The Antichrist or would he have realized that there was more work to be done? Would he have maintained the radicalism of the “Decree Against Christianity” (newly restored by Montinari) which concludes The Antichrist? That declaration is issued as “promulgated on the day of salvation, on the first day of the year one (September 30, 1888 of the false mode of reckoning time)” and it is signed by “the Antichrist.” Would Nietzsche also have recovered from his own view of himself as constituted by the alternation of illness and recovery? Questions such as these are unanswerable because they require us to operate with reduced and oversimplified conceptions of the very opposition between health and illness which Nietzsche calls into question in Ecce Homo.

We may simply need to recognize that conventional editorial ideas of completeness and incompleteness are inapplicable to Ecce Homo. Montinari’s tendency is to defend the coherence of the “complete” text, which he thinks is the background for the one that we have, by appealing to Nietzsche’s changing but knowable authorial intentions. He makes a number of editorial decisions, for example, that are based upon Nietzsche’s late identification of The Antichrist as the whole of the Transvaluation. This allows for a certain coherence and simplification, but it also depends upon not attending to Nietzsche’s thesis in Ecce Homo that one becomes what one is only by not knowing what one is. Surely this principle applies to authorship as well as to other modes of activity or becoming oneself. To become an author requires that one not know oneself, or forget oneself, as an author. Of course an editor might simply reject the principle, treating it as just one linguistic expression within a more complex text. But then one wonders whether something has gone wrong with a reading that would so compartmentalize Nietzsche’s concern with doubleness. Perhaps we should say that the text of Ecce Homo that Nietzsche prepared is both complete and incomplete, as is the one that we have.

So it is not self-evident that Nietzsche has been successful in producing a total structural analysis of his own story and of the multiple myths which it intersects. He is too much given over to the imaginary for such a task, which may be impossible in any case. Let us consider Nietzsche’s constantly repeated assurances that his life has reached a point of perfection and peacefulness. Knowing what was to happen just two months after such assurances, we may wonder at their force and at Nietzsche’s need for repetition. The opening of the short “interleaf” may, however, stand for a number of such claims:

The typical elements in these many expressions of well-being could perhaps be sketched in the following way, and can be seen in the paradigmatic text above: a feeling of ripeness or pregnancy; a sense of extended horizons, expressed through metaphors of large, open spaces; and a framework having to do with privileged but recurring temporal events or phases (here the autumn and his birthday). One of Nietzsche’s key words for such moods, experiences, and moments is “halcyon.” In Ecce Homo Nietzsche praises Zarathustra as not only the best of his books but as the highest and deepest book that there is and as the greatest gift ever given to mankind (EH, 219; 6, 259). In describing the great good spirit of that book Nietzsche refers to it three times as “halcyon.”

Since Nietzsche takes Zarathustra to be his emblematic book and since he employs this term in his most intimate accounts of this prized, inspired creation, we may hope that it will help illuminate the structure of the narrative that he constructs about himself. The concept—actually a myth or mytheme—is worth exploring because it contains, amplifies, and connects the typical elements in Nietzsche’s claims to peacefulness. It is the symbolic form (or one symbolic form) that allows him to escape from the solipsism of the imaginary and the horrors of the real. In order to articulate the myth it will be necessary to examine the set of meanings both philologically and in terms of Nietzsche’s imaginary (in the Lacanian sense) picture of himself. But first we should read the three references to the halcyon in Ecce Homo. In the Preface Nietzsche explains that “Among my writings my Zarathustra stands to my mind by itself” and suggests how important it is that we not misconstrue it as a prophetic book. Instead, “Above all one must hear aright the tone that comes from the mouth, the halcyon tone, lest one should do wretched injustice to the meaning of its wisdom” (EH, 219; 6, 259). In the long commentary on Zarathustra that comes later Nietzsche recounts his experience of inspiration in composing its first three parts in separate periods of ten days each. After the first two parts were finished, he relates: “The next winter, under the halcyon sky of Nizza, which then shone into my life for the first time, I found Zarathustra III—and was finished” (EH, 302; 6, 341). Here the reference seems to be to an accidental accompaniment of writing (Nizza’s climate); as we will see, however, dates, places, and Nietzsche’s feeling of deep intimacy with his natural surroundings are essential to his conception of himself as halcyon. The last use of the term in Ecce Homo comes in Nietzsche’s attempt to explain how, in Zarathustra, man is overcome at every moment and the Übermensch has become real:

It is also worth mentioning that a draft of the chapter “Why I Am a Destiny” makes explicit the self-identification as a “halcyon figure” (Halkyonier) that is latent in the passages above:

As a classicist who inscribes the riddle of Ariadne and Dionysus in Ecce Homo, Nietzsche must be supposed to have been aware of the story of Alcyone (from whose name “halcyon” is derived) and of the notion of the halcyon days associated with that myth. The fullest version is perhaps to be found in Ovid. Alcyone was the daughter of Aeolus, the king of the winds. Her husband, Ceyx, was drowned on a sea voyage undertaken despite Alcyone’s warning. From the shore she saw his body floating on the waves and, as she leapt into the water to join him, the gods transformed her into a sea-bird. Ovid explains the results of the transformation:

The original halcyon days were that period of a week or two after the winter solstice when the halcyon bird (or kingfisher) was believed to lay its eggs in a floating nest. The winds were stilled and this peaceful interlude between the storms of the winter was a boon for sailors. The image of vast calm seas suggests “the width of space” and “accessibility for what is contradictory” that Nietzsche invokes in his account of Zarathustra’s halcyon tone. The time of year also coincides with the composition of Zarathustra III “under the halcyon sky of Nizza” and with Nietzsche’s frequent praise of January as a time of fresh life. And it suggests a possible connection between Nietzsche’s mania of late December 1888 to early January 1889, and the recurrence of the halcyon days. The traditional “halcyon days” would have ended around January 3, the day that Nietzsche collapsed in the street in Turin.

For Nietzsche, then, the halcyon is not only the time of perfect weather or, more generally, a time of great peace, calm, and good cheer. It is also a time within a cycle that includes both an emergence from a period of storms and an expectation that the wild forces will be set loose once more. As a cyclical myth, Alcyone’s story is appropriate for the philosopher of eternal recurrence in several ways. It is a form of periodicity which, like the cycles of the day revolving around the poles of noon and midnight in Zarathustra, can offer an image of recurrence itself. It also suggests a way in which Friedrich Nietzsche can “tell the story of his life” in such a way as to affirm a career regularly bedeviled by illness and renewed by convalescence. Eternal recurrence, Zarathustra says, involves the idea that every moment of joy is so necessarily connected with every moment of suffering that to affirm any joyous moment is to affirm all moments of the cycle.

What the halcyon myth enables Nietzsche to do is to effect a connection between his own cycle of health and illness and the cosmic, this-worldly cycle of eternal recurrence. Many of the high and low points that Nietzsche records are indeed clustered around the winter solstice, December 21, and the ensuing halcyon days. In verses from the Gay Science included in Ecce Homo Nietzsche blesses the “Sanctus Januarius” of 1881 and alludes to the legend of Saint January (a Christian halcyon?) whose blood is believed to liquify and revive each January. Nietzsche’s greatest moments of exaltation, toward which Ecce Homo seems to build, occur in December 1888; the final storm, we might say, breaks out savagely at the close of the halcyon days on January 3 or 4, 1889. Ecce Homo has been thought by some to foreshadow that collapse with its megalomaniacal tone; but to the extent that Nietzsche thinks the halcyon myth he evades the traps of the purely imaginary.

In the play of doubles which the text of Ecce Homo presents, the halcyon theme is, we might say, its own double. Taken superficially, Nietzsche’s pride in the “calm seas” of his life would seem to be a perfected form of self-assurance (cf. EH, 255; 6, 294). Yet if these calm seas are the seas of the halcyon days then they are opposed or doubled by death and turbulence. The myth, then, is another form of fort! /da! play and another way that Nietzsche has of being a Doppelgänger. In this instance, however, we seem to be dealing not with Nietzsche as the structuralist critic of his own text but with a Nietzsche caught between the seductive sense of wholeness and power characteristic of the imaginary, on the one hand, and, on the other, the play of language in which preverbal desire has been recast and is available only as a trace or residue. Perhaps Nietzsche’s anticipation of the great noon when there will be a general acceptance of eternal recurrence should be seen in turn as a mapping of the halcyon days onto history’s longue durée; and the age of great wars which he believes that he is ushering in would be a corresponding extension of the storm following the sea-bird’s peaceful brooding time.

What should we make of this mythic narrative? Clearly it is only one strand that might be read in Nietzsche’s last texts. Perhaps I have invented it, succumbing to the seductive temptation always hovering around Nietzsche’s writings to believe one has found a clue to the structure of the labyrinth. Surely it would be a mistake to suppose, as so many writers have done, that because we find a myth in Nietzsche we can characterize his entire works as a modern restoration of the mythical. Nietzsche tells too many stories to allow us to do that; there is always a plurality of stories in different modes: myth is only one form of Nietzschean narrative. To the extent that it is there, it functions as part of a set of myths (Zarathustra, Sanctus Januarius, Dionysus and Ariadne, the halcyon) that are not to be integrated into any comprehensive metanarrative. Nor should we suppose that such a mythical level must be the deep, intended meaning of Nietzsche’s writing. It is more like a dream that is neither fully remembered nor analytically understood, but which coexists more or less easily with other strata of the texts. In the case of Ecce Homo such dreams demonstrate the inability of Nietzsche, and perhaps of any writer, to establish a comprehensive mastery over the language, rhetoric and narrative with which he works.

That such dreams should surface in Ecce Homo, designed as it is to prepare the way for a Transvaluation of All Values, may, however, have a more specific significance. The thought of the transvaluation, I have suggested, is increasingly condensed into the appearance of the book, The Transvaluation, and the attached “Decree.” The great noon is increasingly concretized as a moment (Augenblick). In The Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life, Nietzsche had defined strength as the ability to maintain, simultaneously, a sense of the historical and of the unhistorical.

To return to Zarathustra’s visionary confrontation with the spirit of gravity, we might say that health is defined as the ability simultaneously to live in the Augenblick (the inscription unread by the dwarf) and to project oneself as far as possible along the two paths of past and future that seem to run endlessly away from the gate of the Augenblick in opposite directions. But it is not clear how such health is to be achieved, maintained, and preserved. Nietzsche’s last writings suggest not an ultimate strength that holds both in a simultaneous balance, but rather an oscillation between one and the other. At one moment all is to be condensed, radically, into a single moment or great noon that will split history into two; at the next moment Nietzsche is “all the names of history.” But the reasons for Nietzsche’s failure to maintain a balance are obscure and they do not necessarily lead to the conclusion of the general impossibility of the project. We might ask what would happen to Nietzsche’s version of the project, for example, if he had been able to decouple the conceptions of eternal recurrence and of the great noon. One side of the thought of eternal recurrence, clearly present in Nietzsche’s texts, is that it is a thought addressed to the individual in his “loneliest loneliness, (GS, 341; 3, 570). We need not attribute a conception of an ultimate, integral individual to Nietzsche in order to see that the rhetoric of that demon’s challenge to think the eternal recurrence focusses the question of the abysmal thought on a set of particular experiences rather than on history as a whole. And certainly no suggestion is made that there must be a general, collective experience or understanding of eternal recurrence at any time. It is not clear why eternal recurrence, as a counter-thought to the historically oriented metanarratives of the West, should require either a cadre of teachers of the recurrence or an expectation of a great noon consisting either in the general acceptance of the thought or in some world-shaking announcement (such as the appearance of the Transvaluation) that would provoke such an acceptance. Yet there are signs of a kind of hallucinatory fusion of the thought of eternal recurrence with a new metanarrative of the great noon in Nietzsche’s notebooks, in entries that are roughly simultaneous with the first appearance of the thought of recurrence itself. This may suggest some reflections on just how deeply the metanarrative impulse is rooted in the Western mind; it may be that, as Derrida has suggested, such conceptions are not to be rooted out all at once, but to be attacked obliquely with a complex strategy that is constantly vigilant in seeking out new disguises of the idea under attack. That Nietzsche was not altogether successful in his own struggle with metanarrative ought not to distract one either from the serious nature of the challenge or from the exemplary character of his own battles and skirmishes with the worldview that is structured by first and last things.