“The Magic of the Extreme”: Hyperbolic Rhetoric in Ecce Homo

Ecce Homo has always been an embarrassment. Nietzsche himself was embarrassed by how quickly he wrote it, but the embarrassment has featured more generally in its reception, for to generations of his editors and publishers, translators, commentators and other readers it has been the most awkward of his works. Until relatively recently Ecce Homo was routinely dismissed as tainted by Nietzsche’s incipient madness. This chapter follows the example of Kofman and Ridley and argues that Ecce Homo is far from being a document of insanity, and that despite its rhetorical excesses it shows Nietzsche to be still very much in control. The chapter contends that Ecce Homo is indeed an unbalanced, unstable, excessive text, yet even here Nietzsche is still rigorously pursuing the same philosophical themes that characterise his mature work as a whole.