Ecce Homo: How One Becomes as Queer as One Is

poetry.rapgenius.com

Written in 1888, Ecce Homo - Nietzsche's intellectual autobiography - wasn't published until 1908. It met with a hostile critical response and was dismissed by many as little more than a testament to the author's incipient madness. Throughout most of the twentieth century it continued to occupy a tenuous position in his works, often being held up as a prime example of both his stylistic strengths and weaknesses. It has only been during recent decades that the text has finally gained the readership and attention that it deserves.

       

Although Ecce Homo provides Nietzsche’s own important if somewhat idiosyncratic summary of his earlier writings, what I like most about this late work is that it is the book in which Nietzsche finally becomes what he always wanted to be: a comedian of the ascetic ideal. Via a mixture of mockery, parody, and paradox, Nietzsche teaches us mistrust of morality and all universal truth claims and he revels in his role as a philosophical joker.

But Nietzsche also concedes that he is a décadent – perhaps the first perfect décadent – and it is this mixture of comic persona with corruption which persuades me that whilst there is something Nietzschean in Oscar Wilde's Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young, there is also something outrageously Wildean about Nietzsche and his aphorisms.

Although neither man knew of one another, they were, I think, more than mere contemporaries; they shared a common genius and had a similar ethical, intellectual, and erotic project; namely, the queering of modern European culture or what Nietzsche terms the revaluation of all values. 

       

In Ecce Homo, Nietzsche finally throws off all restraint – not from madness, but from the joyful realisation that “life is much too important ever to talk seriously about it”. His final work is an extravagant exercise in style and subversion, combining gay science with elements of camp performance. He not only finally reveals the multifaceted-man that he has become, but, like Wilde, he demonstrates his ability as a writer to sum up “all systems in a phrase, and all existence in an epigram” – even his own. 

And this is why he is so clever and writes such excellent books.