J. Avery Dawson

Each of Kierkegaard's pseudonymous authors address the question of the existing individual and what it truly means to be a self. This article discusses the existing individual as depicted by the pseudonymous authors, focusing on motion, activity, and repetition. In particular, this article seeks to pinpoint the motion and activity of the self through Kierkegaard's notion of repetition, contending that repetition is a decisive action brought forward discontinuously through a breach in time's succession. I address the self's movement forward in four sections. In the first I introduce the overarching distinction between the motion of existing individuals and empirical objects, distinguishing the character of my investigation. After clarifying this distinction, the second section focuses on Anti‐Climacus’ conception of the self as activity (a positing of the synthesis), revealing that for an existing individual the self is not given but a task to be actualized. The final section first details the positing of the synthesis as repetition and second contends that, through repetition, the inner workings of the self reveal its activity as a discontinuous breach in time that occurs by virtue of the eternal.

ABSTRACT Where Being and Event was a book of meta-ontology, demonstrating how things be, Alain Badiou tells us that Logics of Worlds is an objective phenomenology demonstrating how (and what) things do. As such, it should also be considered a book about power: how objects function in their worlds, how change is possible, and what the event does to worlds and the objects in them. Attending to this, this article shows two conflicting forms of power emerge in Logics of Worlds, the power of appearance and the power of change. In this article, the author argues their incommensurability suggests an overall failure of a consistent account of power from Badiou.

Each of Kierkegaard's pseudonymous authors address the question of the existing individual and what it truly means to be a self. This article discusses the existing individual as depicted by the pseudonymous authors, focusing on motion, activity, and repetition. In particular, this article seeks to pinpoint the motion and activity of the self through Kierkegaard's notion of repetition, contending that repetition is a decisive action brought forward discontinuously through a breach in time's succession. I address the self's movement forward in four sections. In the first I introduce the overarching distinction between the motion of existing individuals and empirical objects, distinguishing the character of my investigation. After clarifying this distinction, the second section focuses on Anti‐Climacus’ conception of the self as activity (a positing of the synthesis), revealing that for an existing individual the self is not given but a task to be actualized. The final section first details the positing of the synthesis as repetition and second contends that, through repetition, the inner workings of the self reveal its activity as a discontinuous breach in time that occurs by virtue of the eternal.

In this article, I demonstrate that Friedrich Nietzsche offers us a unique form of hermeneutic critique. In particular, I contend that when reading Nietzsche’s perspectivism and will to power in light of each other, they provide us with the tools to overcome habits of interpretation through the concepts of genealogy and creative hermeneutics. I show this in three sections. In section one, I introduce Nietzsche’s perspectivism and situate it within his concept of the will to power. In doing so, I demonstrate that interpretations exist amidst a complex field of agonistic, reciprocal relations in life’s constant production of meaning. In section two, I then analyze how certain interpretations sediment into habits, forming harmful blind spots in interpretive activity. Such habits, Nietzsche shows, when privileged as prima facie ‘True’ and left uncontested exclude different ways of interpreting and existing, stagnating the production of meaning and denying the agonistic conditions of life. In the final section, I argue that Nietzsche critiques such habits in the two directions of genealogy and creative hermeneutics. Through the backward approach of genealogy, Nietzsche problematizes the habit, excavates its lowly origin, and deconstructs its supposed universality. Through the forward approach of creative hermeneutics, he overcomes and reinterprets them out of their origins, experiments with difference and multiplicity, and engages in an ongoing critique to open up new perspectives.