Nietzsche and the Dionysian

A few weeks before going completely insane, and even in seeming premonition of that occurrence, Friedrich Nietzsche completed the final revisions to what would be his last original book1, Ecce Homo, a brilliant retrospective of his life and work, completed in 1888 but not published for another ten years. He signed it, “Dionysus versus the Crucified,” thus affirming the centrality of the Dionysian to his life’s work, a notion that appeared in his first book and which would recur in some form in everything he ever wrote.