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

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.

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 actor thus continues to reappear at the center. We met him at the beginning as the protagonist of decadence, that is, as a historical figure, but by now it would seem that his presence cannot be eliminated, since decadence itself has turned out to be something more than a historical process that can be engulfed by time. Decadence is produced by the action of our consciousness and is the direct operation of thought. The Dionysian man, the man defined by his capacity to emerge from himself through metamorphosis, now becomes a special example of life, a happy exception. And to what will the Dionysian man return when he is once more within himself? Haven’t we seen that the subject himself is a simulation?

“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.