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Nicholas D. More. Nietzsche's Last Laugh. Ecce Homo as Satire. Cambridge, United Kingdom; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014. x + 224 pages.
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...