ABSTRACT
I argued in chapter one that Kierkegaard's pseudonym Anti-Climacus both substantially anticipates, and effectively challenges Nietzsche's ideal of sovereign individuality. Whereas Nietzsche attributes a personal telos to each of his exemplars to found the project of each becoming 'what [he] is', Anti-Climacus suggests that this telos is in the end opaque, and that therefore that 'masterly project' is improperly founded. Whereas Nietzsche depreciates the holding of unconditional values, insisting that his exemplars maintain complete sovereignty over their 'experiments', Anti-Climacus indicates that such 'experimental virtues' threaten the integrity of the self s endeavours, and thereby also that of the self itself. And whereas Nietzsche puts forward an ideal of personal autarky, Anti-Climacus emphasises the selfs inability to 'stand firm' apart from an active recognition of what I called its axiological and volitional passivity. In general, then, AntiClimacus' critique of the Nietzschean project of'becoming what one is' finds it beset by real and seemingly unavoidable instabilities. Rather than discovering in the sovereign individual a magisterial integrity, Anti-Climacus maintains that that individual will instead be left with an amorphous, disunified self: precisely the last kind of self, in fact, to be afErmable in the way Nietzsche desires.1
