Nietzsche’s Last Laugh. Ecce Homo as Satire by Nicholas D. More (review)

Ecce Homo is not Nietzsche’s most popular book because its hyperbolic language as well as its self-celebrating narrator have repelled more than a few Nietzsche scholars. Some have even excluded Ecce Homo from Nietzsche’s corpus, believing this late work to be a product of Nietzsche’s illness and therefore not to be taken seriously. However, in Nietzsche’s Last Laugh. ‘Ecce Homo’ as Satire, author Nicholas D. More argues that the importance of Ecce Homo has been overlooked due to the fact that it has not been recognized as satire. More claims that “reading the book as satire makes a comprehensive understanding of Ecce Homo possible for the first time” (19) and that Nietzsche’s last book will retrospectively alter the reception of all of Nietzsche’s other books, since Ecce Homo shapes and unifies his entire philosophical corpus.

Nietzsche’s Last Laugh is divided into three parts and three chapters. In chapter one More suggests that biographical occurrences, such as Nietzsche’s lack of popularity, led him to review his books, to reflect on himself and his philosophical work and, finally, to write Ecce Homo. In the following chapter More introduces the satire genre by concentrating on four important studies: Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays, Mikhail Bakhtin’s Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Poetics, Leon Guilhamet’s Satire and the Transformation of Genre, and Howard Weinbrot’s Menippean Satire Reconsidered: From Antiquity to the Eighteenth Century. More distills from these four works prominent features that address the object, method, structure, form, and effect of satire.

The aim of the third and central chapter, “Ecce Homo as satire: analysis and commentary,” seems to be threefold. First, in order to identify Ecce Homo as satire, More refers to motifs and subjects in the text that fit his preliminary definitions of satire. Second, in order to demonstrate that reading Ecce Homo as satire is actually the portal to understanding the rest of Nietzsche’s philosophical corpus, More contends that Nietzsche treats his own writings satirically. Third, in order to argue that Nietzsche uses satire not only to subvert traditional philosophy but also to overcome his personal sufferings by mocking and, therefore, by distancing himself from his own life and experiences, More contrasts what the narrator states in Ecce Homo with biographical data of Nietzsche. For example, More takes it to be a joke when the narrator of Ecce Homo refers to his Polish nobility (69; EH 3.1.) and calls it a “false reference” (69).

Interpretations like this raise concerns because the ‘joke’ originates only in a discrepancy between alleged biographical data and the assertion of the narrator. More never raises the question whether the narrator is actually and undoubtedly Nietzsche, or which Nietzsche the narrator presents in the text. Even if the narrator is identified with Nietzsche, it would be more productive to ask what kind of prejudices Ecce Homo challenges with this assertion—which, significantly, is situated in the chapter “Why I Am So Wise,” where the narrator also states that one is least related to one’s parents (EH 3.1.). It might therefore serve a more productive notion of satire to take this reference as an opening for the reevaluation of what is generally considered essential to one’s biography and to think of Nietzsche’s self-fashioning into Polish nobility as contributing to a transformation or revision of the autobiographical form. This, in turn, would pave the way for a reevaluation of the broader question posed in Ecce Homo: how does one become what one is? These issues would require a more profound engagement with deconstructionist scholarship such as Rodolphe Gasché’s “Ecce Homo or The Written Body” and Jacques Derrida’s “Otobiographies: The Teaching of Nietzsche and the Politics of the Proper Name.”

Despite the promise that satire gives to More’s project, his autobiographical approach and his method of only applying definitions of satire to Ecce Homo...