On Nietzsche's sovereign individual

Daniel de Zeeuw. Tutorial paper. rMA Philosophy, University of Amsterdam. 03-2013.

1. Introduction 2. Conflicting readings 2.1 As model for future overman 2.2 As a type of existing modern man 2.3 Exegetical problems 2.4 Problems of transition 3. From the sovereign individual to the sovereignty of Being as subjective will to power 4. The sovereign individual overman? 5. Final remarks Bibliography

Abbreviations (of terms) SI - Sovereign individual Abbreviations (of Nietzsche's works) GM - On the Genealogy of Morals TSZ - Thus Spoke Zarathustra BGE - Beyond Good and Evil EH - Ecce Homo

1. Introduction
What or who does Nietzsche speak of when he presents the sovereign individual (SI) in the second essay of On the Genealogy of Morals (GM)? How should we interpret its achievements, its being a master of a free, enduring, yes-saying will? Seldom has the existing literature provided such apparently mutually exclusive answers to this seemingly simple question. On the one hand are those [2.1] that conceive of this individual as expressive of Nietzsche's 'ethical' ideal - his alternative to, and thus overcoming of, the man of ressentiment - the ideal of an 'extra-moral' agent, or bermensch, which sovereignly and masterfully wills only his own will. On the other hand there are those [2.2] who instead conceive of the same individual as the pinnacle of a long history of conscience-production: the mnemonic violence that inscribes the faculty of memory and reflection into the now totally predictable human animal, ending in a 'sovereign' soul ultimately responsible only to itself. After having discussed the distinct arguments attributable to each position, I will present an overview of the relevant passage and discuss some of the problems of interpretation [2.3] as well as problems that arise when reconstructing the transition from (completed) man to overman [2.4]. Thereafter I will abstract from the particular discussion concerning the interpretation of the SI passage in GM, to the broader problem concerning the role of the aspiration to sovereignty in Nietzsche's construction of the overman. In the end, this will hopefully illuminate some of the reasons for the conflictual nature of the interpretations and misinterpretations discussed in 2.1-2.4. This abstraction - or shift of focus - involves a displacement of the question of sovereignty from the level of the personal, individual agent, to the level of ontology - in the case of Nietzsche, Being as will to power. I hope to show that whilst Nietzsche indeed mocks and rejects the 'sovereign individual' - implying it cannot be an adequate model for the overman (2.2) this does not necessarily dismiss the relevance of the ideal of sovereignty. As such, it is at least possible to derive from the figure of the overman an aspiration to sovereignty on the level of being, the willing affirmation of ones own being-part of a perpetual process of 'impersonal' becoming. That is, the ideal of sovereignty is not located on the level of the individual person but on the level of an affirmation of a being-will to power. This explains the interpretational conflict to some extent, since the idea that Nietzsche in fact is governed by an 'ideal of sovereignty' remains valid, but displaced from the level of the 'sovereign individual' to the level of a selfless yet 'self'affirmative will to power. In this reading, the overman is irreducible to the SI, while it can nevertheless be conceived as the result of an aspiration to sovereignty. This interpretation differs from the radical, 'postmodern' version of 2.2, which states that Nietzsche's overman is a prefiguration of a genuinely 'post-sovereign' ideal. This I hope to show by means of a discussion of Heidegger's casting of Nietzsche as the 'last metaphysician' [3]. For it seems that for Heidegger, Nietzsche remains part of the 'metaphysical tradition', precisely insofar as his notion of an affirmative will to power (as overman), remains tied to an ideal of 'mastering' sovereignty in the way Being is essentially conceived. The self-legislation of Being as self-representing

representation (or: subjectivity) constitutes the essence of metaphysics as such, according to Heidegger. From this perspective, it becomes possible to see in how far Nietzsche's overman - a self-creating, self-legislating becoming-what-it-is (will to power) - is or isn't able to function as either (1) the protagonist of an emancipatory project that genuinely endures the naked openness of 'non-sovereignty' (being always unpredictably 'outside itself'), as Hannah Arendt would have formulated it in another context, or (2) as the autonomous, self-mastering strong individual espoused by various varieties of modern liberalism - or neither. The way one understands Nietzsche on this topic (of sovereignty-as-ideal) is crucial insofar as it results in radically different and opposed models of emancipatory agency. The main question of this paper can be put as follows, and will be returned to in [5]: if we refuse to identify the SI as providing a model for the overman, does this mean we have to relinquish of applying the category of sovereignty to the ideal of the overman as such? Or can we think sovereignty in relation to the overman on a different level than that of the individuated 'self' and its self-mastery? Does the notion of an 'impersonal taking upon oneself' make any sense in terms of sovereignty, or does it empty out all determinate content of the concept?

2. Conflicting readings
2.1 As future overman Acknowledged as the 'conventional' reading of the SI passage, several authors have expanded on their view that the SI represents Nietzsche's positive ethical ideal taking the SI's main traits as indicative of the life of the overman - modern man being described as a slavish, passive, self-denying herd animal very much unlike the SI. Miles for example casts the SI's independence from existing values, his selfconstraint and sense of responsibility in conducting himself, as "among the central characteristics of Nietzsche's ideal 'higher type' as represented in the 'free spirit' figure appearing in almost all of Nietzsche's works" (5). The fact that Nietzsche often refers to the noble masters and blond beasts of prey as sovereign creatures seems to support this interpretation. In Owen too, the SI represents "an attitude, a will to self-responsibility, which is manifest in the perpetual striving to increase, to expand, one's powers of self-government such that one can bear, incorporate and, even, love one's fate - ones exposure to chance and necessity" (119). Ridley describes the SI as "a sort of foretaste of the (enlightened) conscience of the future" (18), as well as a strong alternative to Schopenhauer's weak morality of selflessness (Janaway, 108). He further describes the SI as involving "a journey through to the other side of internalization, where one arrives...at the superhuman itself" (145). Similarly, May (1999) suggests that "the absolutely sovereign individual is [...] none other than the bermensch: for in mastering every obstacle to promising himself, he, like the bermensch, has nothing left to overcome" (117). In Gemes and Janaway, the SI is interpreted as providing a most welcome contrast with 'modern man' - expressive of a challenge that "should awaken his [Nietzsche's] 3

readers to the profoundly disturbing possibility that they themselves are not yet persons" (337). The SI represents the 'genuine self' as Nietzsche's positive ethical ideal, an individual which possesses an enduring coordinated hierarchy of drives (336). Although rooted in 'drives' instead of 'reason', this would closely align Nietzsche with the Kantian aspiration of a genuinely autonomous person, a similarity they (338), White (2008) and Sokoloff (2006) indeed confirm. This analysis has the obvious drawback that it needs to account for Nietzsche's - often explicit - rejection of Kant's notion of moral autonomy, and of 'free will' as such. When Janaway locates an apparent paradox in Nietzsche's reflections on freedom and autonomy, on the one hand unmasking the idea of a free-willing subject behind individual acts as an illusion (I:13), whilst describing the existence of a SI as being the 'lord of free will' and autonomy, she is led to conclude that "Nietzsche must regard the sovereign individuals achievement of freedom as something other than his becoming a neutral subject with free choice" (107). But this does not push her towards abandoning the idea of the SI as Nietzsche's ideal - which would actually solve this apparent paradox. For it is a paradox only if one sticks to the idea that the SI is exemplary of Nietzsche's overman. Thus, one of the most important questions that have to be answered for those sympathetic to the reading offered in this section is the following: "why after so much denigration of the terminology of free will and autonomy does Nietzsche in the Genealogy employ it in a positive fashion?" (Gemes, 328). In my view, none of these authors are able to provide a satisfactory answer to this question. In the following section I will therefore discuss those who draw from the aforementioned denigration the conclusion that it cannot be Nietzsche positive ethical ideal at all, but rather one of the main targets of his criticism of modern man. 2.2 As a type of existing modern man The authors to be discussed in this section all express their surprise at the fact that "virtually all commentators have assumed that the sovereign individual expresses in some way Nietzsches ideal of a self-creating individual in contrast to the herd" (Hatab, 2008b: 170). Instead, these authors defend the view that the SI cannot be Nietzsches positive ethical ideal, as the latter supposedly leads to uncharacteristically Kantian results in its description. They oppose to this reading a view of the SI as a figure representative of the modern ideal of individual rational autonomy (Rukgaber, 213), subjective autonomy or liberal selfhood (Hatab, 2008b: 171-173; Acampora). The 'end of this long process' at which the SI appears is interpreted not as ahead of the present (the overman), but as realized in the present, as a type of modern man. If anything, the SI signifies Kants 'person', who must also have an 'enduring will', a subject whose actions can be imputed to him [...] subject to no other laws than those he gives to himself" (Kant, 10). The SI has the prerogative to make promises (Rukgaber, 218-220) and it is this trait that embeds it in the long and cruel (pre)history of breeding a memory and a responsible soul into the human animal, its grand finale, where the individual has internalized all the external demands and punishments inflicted upon his flesh and appears to himself as freely and autonomously giving the law to himself (Loeb, 79). It is in this sense that

Kant's categorical imperative is said to smell of cruelty (II:6). Hatab conceives of the SI as the 'ideal person' of modern contract theories la Rousseau. It is in liberal contractual relationships between creditor and debtor (the origin of the concept of guilt) that promises are made (II:5). In this interpretation, too, Nietzsche is said to present a critical parody of the Kantian 'sovereign subject', the 'free' self-legislative conduct of an autonomous and rational agent, departing from the ethics of custom towards the pure disinterested realm of practical reason. This individual has 'forgotten' - and only in that precise sense transcended - the cruel, socio-psychological (pre)history that was needed in order to produce such sovereign wills, as well as the 'unfreedoms' that underlie its freedom. In the SI, slave morality has been completely internalized and integrated into a new 'instinct' which it calls its 'conscience'. 2.3 Exegetical problems The passage that mentions the SI appears in the second section of the second essay. The following paragraph lists the most significant characteristics of this 'late fruit' (the SI) to which 'the tree' (society and its morality of custom) reveals itself to be only the means to. The SI, it is said: is free from the morality of custom and thus an autonomous, extramoral1 individual; has an independent, enduring will; has the prerogative2 to make promises; has a proud consciousness and awareness of his power (e.g. over 'destiny'), freedom, and superiority over those less sovereign, as well as a feeling that in him 'man' is completed; is a master of free will and self-mastery; has his own standard of value; has the privilege of responsibility; has a conscience that has become his dominant instinct.

Firstly, the fact that all abovementioned (pre)historic labor appears as simply the means to the SI as its end, seems to suggest its affiliation with the figure of the overman.3 For in a strong sense, only the overman would justify what has to be only the means to it (nature's 'paradoxical task'), i.e. the history of breeding a predictable,
The translation of bersittlich as extra- or supramoral leads to confusion. It should be translated as extra- or supraethical, meaning: released from the morality of customs, not from Morality (in the modern, Kantian sense): "we should note that it is Kant who would declare rational autonomy and moral custom to be mutually exclusive" (Hatab, 2008b: 171-2. See also Rukgaber, 222). In this case, the overman would not only be bersittlich, but especially also bermoralisch ('beyond morality') in a 2 Acampora as well as several others have argued that the phrase das versprechen darf can also be translated as being permitted or allowed to, instead of having the right or prerogative to, promise (Hatab, 2008b: 172). The former translation would capture a passivity of the SI and the extrinsic origin of the right to make promises. 3 For the problems concerning the terminology of 'means' and 'ends' as a problem of transition, see 2.4.
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docile, civilized human animal. The overman must be, as the sense of all this suffering (II:24). For Nietzsche argues that not the suffering itself, but the senselessness of suffering, constitutes the main agony of humanity, and which instigates its quest into the meaning of suffering as in some sense is the raison d'tre of culture as such, a collection of 'necessary self-deceptions' (II:7). Secondly, the fact that the SI is said to be independent, with an enduring, supra-ethical will, as well as employing his own standard of value, seems to suggest its 'nearness' to the figure Nietzsche conventionally opposes to the type of men produced by the hegemony of ressentiment formations: the 'free spirits' and 'masters' that appear as contrast-figures throughout Nietzsche's oeuvre.4 On the other hand are those characteristics that point more to the reading offered in 2.2: his being allowed to make promises, the privilege of responsibility, his having a conscience - i.e. those dispositions described in the GM as a stage in the cruel history of mnemonic breeding that almost constitute what it is to be 'human'. However, the fact that the SI is said to have an independent, enduring will as well as his own standard of value, are most problematic for this reading. For aren't these precisely the dispositions Nietzsche always speaks so highly of? Nevertheless the authors quoted in 2.2 interpret these character traits in a distinctively 'Kantian fashion' - the ideal of autonomous self-legislation and the experience of a strong, moral, 'good' will. We seem to have reached an impasse where there are as many arguments in favor of an interpretation of the SI as expressive of Nietzsche's ideal as there are arguments against it. In the case of its proud awareness of its own free powers, it is clear that the SI is certainly not the type of 'moral' man that Nietzsche refers to as "a tame and civilized animal, a household pet" (I:11). Whereas the SI is said to have a 'proud
The metaphor of the tree and the 'late' or 'ripe' fruit has puzzled many authors trying to makes sense of the SI passage in relation to Nietzsche's 'ethical ideal'. Is the fruit (the SI) still hanging on the tree, or has it already fallen from the tree? It seems that the latter is more likely (see quotation at the end). The falling of the fruit from the tree is the relational figure that captures both the fact that the SI is the ultimate product of the tree (a continuity), whilst also parting from it (a break). The separation from fruit and tree seem to suggest the transition to overhumanity. However, it can also signify the actual, already realized state of modern, individualist societies Nietzsche so despised, where everybody individually appears 'freed' from previous social and religious straitjackets and appeals only to its 'own' Reason, while actually reproducing the latter's oppressive logic internally (as the sovereign selfdisciplining of egotistic individuals). It is this 'secularization' of the ascetic-religious (and thus nihilist) logic that Nietzsche charges Kant of having committed in The Critique of Practical Reason. For if the tree strictly signifies the vicissitudes of the morality of custom, modern (but obviously not yet over-) man can also be said to be 'fallen' from this tree. In this case, the fruit (the SI) would be expressive not of a future overman but of an existing type of modern man. Hatab derives the latter interpretation from the use of the 'present tense' in the passage. (Hatab, 2008b: 171). In other works, the use of the tree/fruit metaphor appears as well. The falling of the fruit is expressive of an age of corrupt individuals. The following passage supports the interpretation of 2.2 - the SI's are the fallen fruits (individuals) expressive of 'the autumn of a people': "When 'morals decay' (Sitten verfallen)' those men emerge whom one calls tyrants: they are the precursors andthe precocious harbingers of individuals. Only a little while later this fruit of fruits hangs yellow and mellow from the tree of a people - and the tree existed only for the sake of these fruitsThe times of corruption are those when the apples fall [fallen] from the tree: I mean the individualsCorruption is merely a nasty word for the autumn of a people" (GS, 23; KGW 5.2:70-2).
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consciousness', the tame variety of the civilized animal is "taught to be ashamed of all his instincts" (II:7). For example, while Schopenhauer's ascetic protagonist says 'no' to life and to himself as well (Preface:5), the sovereign individual says 'yes' to himself: "to be answerable to oneself, and proudly, too, and therefore have the prerogative to say 'yes' to oneself - is, as I said, a ripe fruit, but also a late fruit" (II:1). Now, it becomes clear that when the self-denying ascetic type of man is seen as the archetypical figure of 'slave morality' and the history of civilization as a whole, the sovereign individual can easily appear as its positively charged alternative, the overman.5 In his famous work on Nietzsche however, Deleuze discusses the higher men that appear in TSZ and who admire the ye-a (or 'yes') saying ass and recognize it as their superior (170). Deleuze points out how the ass is ultimately part of slavenihilism, since what it always says 'yes' to is actually the nihilistic reality of the 'no'. The ass affirms, but it affirms only the negative, not yet affirmation itself (178). He views Nietzsche's treatment of the ass as a criticism of affirmation as the acceptance of responsibility (one of the main characteristics of the SI). In this case, the SI's saying 'yes' to himself is a yes to the no that he is, but precisely for that reason also close to the genuine self-consummation of nihilism in the overman. But first, according to Deleuze's interpretation, man must also learn and dare to say 'no' against the 'no', the double negation that ultimately turns into an affirmation of affirmation: "to affirm is not to take responsibility for, to take on the burden of what is, but to release, to set free what lives" (185).6 In this light, the 'yes-saying' of the SI alone cannot be a sufficient condition for equating it with Nietzsche's 'positive ethical ideal'. Again, it may seem that the ascetic, reactive man described later in GM is a corruption of the SI and thus the real 'antithesis' of the overman - and that consequently the overman implies a reversal of this perversion, a return to the acquisitions of the SI. Zamosc sometimes seems to argue for this reading. However, the overman is conceived as the absolute overcoming of man, while the SI is clearly part of (the history of) man, qua breeding of a promising, predictable animal.
The breeding of the human animal and his 'ethos' has resulted in different types of man - from the self-sacrificing herd animal to the sovereign individual, master over himself and others. All these types occupy different strata and positions in the (pre)historic matrix of will to power relations - positions corresponding to distinct strategic investments. Similarly, conscience itself goes through a series of qualitative metamorphoses relative to its application in this matrix. In Nietzsche and Philosophy, Deleuze schematizes the different types of men that are produced by civilization. These in turn are categorized as either active-affirmative or reactive-negative. It seems that Nietzsche presupposes a given distribution or quantum of powers invested in human bodies - it is this given quantum that determines whether the civilized animal will develop into an ascetic or a sovereign individual. Thus, an alternative to a chronological approach to e.g. the transition from conscience to bad conscience would be a 'topological' or 'typological' approach. 6 We are reminded of a passage in the Preface (2) to the GM, which seems to break with the notion of the autonomous self, like and responsible only to itself: "We have no right to stand out individually: we must not either make mistakes or hit on the truth individually. Instead, our thoughts, values, every yes, no, if and but grow from us with the same inevitability as fruits borne on the tree all related and referring to one another and a testimonial to one will, one health, one earth, one sun".
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Deleuze recognizes the problem, when he states that "on the one hand, Nietzsche's critique is not directed against an accidental property of man, but against his very essence [...] yet, on the other hand, Nietzsche speaks of the masters as a type of human being that the slave has merely conquered, [...] of the free and sovereign individual as the human product of this activity that the reactive man has only deformed." (167 - my emphases). The same ambivalence that appears when one attempts to think the SI as overman, appears in Nietzsche's description of the 'higher men' in TSZ. The higher man exhibits a double aspect: he represents "both reactive forces and their triumph". Accordingly, he is treated by Zarathustra in two ways, "sometimes as the enemy [...] sometimes as a host, almost a companion who is engaged in an enterprise close to that of Zarathustra himself" (Deleuze, 166). This brings us to the problem concerning the ambivalence of the transition from the last types of man to the overman. 2.4 Problems of transition How to conceive of the transition from the highest of modern man to the overman? Is it a radical inversion of the hitherto existing state of affairs, a 'simple' negation by means of an opposite principle? Is it due to a simple positive alternative to the vicissitudes of history up until now? Nietzsche is often clear that those varieties of 'utopian idealism' are not applicable to the overcoming of man. For what must be overcome (nihilism) is able to be overcome only by nihilism itself (the established state of affairs) - not by am alternative that appears out of thin air. Thus the transition always has a deeply ambivalent, even paradoxical character: going beyond nihilism by means of a nihilism, which by so doing reverses itself into its opposite: affirmation of affirmation. This means that if one rejects the idea that the SI represents Nietzsche's ethical ideal, but and sees the latter as something to be overcome, this does not yet imply that the overman has the opposite traits of the SI: irresponsibility, unfreedom, etc. This points to an important 'ambiguity' in distinguishing the overman from the being that has been overcome and is one the reasons that the SI constitutes such a controversial and difficult to interpret figure in the secondary literature on Nietzsche. This also means that we cannot say that what follows from the fact that the SI is "the kind of self-regulating animal that is required for the essential functions of culture" is that "it cannot be taken to be his ideal in any simple or straightforward sense" (Pearson in Nietzsche, 2007: xxiii). Because this would presuppose that Nietzsche 'simply' opposes his ideal to all processes of cultural formation and breeding as such. The overman would be free from such violent, self-regulating functions of cultural breeding. But it seems that Nietzsche is concerned more with authentically appropriating and - in so doing reconciling itself with - or reallocating these violent expressions of will to power in a different project of life-affirmation, instead of committing to the naive ideal that they can be abolished as such. Similarly, although like Acampora, Loeb embraces the idea that "overcoming the sovereign individual is what Nietzsche envisions" (Acampora, 157), he rejects the

latter's interpretation of Nietzsche's ideal as implying a 'simple' return to the actively forgetting animal that radically breaks with the cruel history of breeding a human animal described in the second essay. Rather, we must acknowledge how "these very same instruments are the means whereby Zarathustra achieves his goal of destroying all human ideals hitherto and of erecting new ideals that will promote life" (Loeb, 75). In other words, the SI too is an important stage that leads up to the possibility of the overman, neither identical too it nor its simple 'other'. Rather, according to Loeb, "Nietzsche depreciates the sovereign individual because he is not responsible and autonomous enough" (79). The overman grows from out of these violent formations, and can only appropriate them when he understands himself to be the pinnacle and potential sense of this process. Only then does he genuinely 'go beyond it'. This is one of the problems with the interpretation discussed in this section, when it is argued that because the SI is the end result of a long process of breeding a predictable and docile animal, the SI cannot be Nietzsche's positive ideal. This conclusion conceives of the transition from last man to over man as a breaking with this process as such, instead of breaking with it in the sense of an appropriation or reversal that is at the same time a qualitative transformation and redirection. Not acknowledging this would introduce an idealist-eschatological component to the coming of the overman that seems foreign to Nietzsche. It is in this sense that his views are very much unlike those of for example Rousseau or other romanticists, who idealize 'nature' against the perversions of 'civilization'. For example, in GM the 'originally' forgetful human animal that must be exposed to a violent mnemonics is described as a "partly dull, partly idiotic, inattentive mind, this personification of forgetfulness" (II:3). Of course the noble masters, who commenced such violent mnemonic breeding projects, receive more sympathy than their descendants - the priests. The difficulty here is to think the SI not as a straightforward model for Nietzsche's ideal, but as a condition of possibility that still has to pass through several important transitions in order to genuinely go beyond itself, towards the emancipation from 'man' as such. The ambivalence of this transition is one of the reasons for the conflicting interpretations of the SI discussed above. The problem of transition returns in Heidegger's notion of 'consummation', which I will no address.

3. From the sovereign individual to the sovereignty of Being as subjective will to power
I believe Heidegger's reflections on Nietzsche as the 'last metaphysician' of will to power, are partly able to explain some of the underlying reasons for the conflicting interpretations discussed in the previous sections as well. This concerns the status of sovereignty in Nietzsche's ontology of will to power and eternal recurrence vis-vis the status of sovereignty on the level of individual selfhood. By analyzing Heidegger's conclusions, we can see a certain shift in the way sovereignty as ideal can be attributed to Nietzsche and the figure of the overman - from its attribution to

the personal self (the SI), to the attribution of sovereignty to an impersonal, transhuman will to power itself conceived as 'subjectivity', active through and by means of what used to be understood as a definite 'self'. The claim that Nietzsche is a metaphysician appears rather odd at first. Nietzsche infamously criticized the metaphysical endeavor as expressing a nihilistic and slavish reversal of life-affirming values and impulses. One would think that in the Nietzschean affirmation "Being is Becoming", nihilism is effectively overcome (the idea that the world qua becoming, is not). There is no longer any 'meta', no 'beyond' or 'after' physics - only the immanent and singular unfolding of will to power. Not so, according to Heidegger. This is possible only on the condition that he conceives of the essence of metaphysics differently: not in terms of the negation of the existing world in a tranquil beyond, but rather as the particular determination of the essence of Being as subjectivity. The affirmation of the will to power and eternal recurrence so becomes expressive of the 'consummation' of metaphysics, one that conceives of Being as the self-legislated 'will to will', or, subjectivity: "subjectivity as the Being of beings means that outside the legislation of self-striving representation there may 'be' and can 'be' nothing that might still condition such representation" (Heidegger, 222). In this case, Nietzsche's search for the overman expresses the metaphysical project par excellence: a project of self-mastery that is "inextricably bound up with the domination and violation of Being as a whole" (White, 1997:179). The notion of will to power, rather than delimiting the claims of human mastery over nature and others, or relativizing the role of the human subject by subordinating it to the greater powers that animate it, actually "conducts subjectivity to the unrestricted plenipotence of the exclusive development of its proper essence. Now subjectivity as will to power simply wills itself as power in the empowering for overpowering" (Heidegger, 226). The notion of Being as subjectivity (or 'subiectum', that which under-lies and under-stands) cannot be separated from this logic of mastery. Thus, according to Heidegger, Nietzsche is the last in a long chain of great metaphysicians that commenced with Descartes. What connects these two philosophers is the enduring attempt "to ground the metaphysical ground of man's liberation in the new freedom of self-assured self-legislation" (Heidegger, 100). Nietzsche consummates metaphysics whilst remaining within it, insofar as metaphysics conceives the essence of Being to consist of 'subjectivity' (sovereign, self-legislating representation). Nietzsche is the last metaphysician, according to Heidegger, insofar as the "inversion to the subjectivity of will to power exhausts the final essential possibility of Being as subjectivity" (Heidegger, 225). Consequently, the ideal-figure of the self-creating overman too remains within metaphysics, insofar as the metaphysical notion of being as self-legislating subjectivity is exhausted in the overman's affirmation of the will to power and

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eternal recurrence: "lodged in its supremacy [freed from all 'transcendent' moral and religious beyonds] will to power as consummate subjectivity is the supreme and only subject, to wit, the overman" (Heidegger, 226). The overman is he who affirms himself qua being the eternal return of will to power, or "the will that commands itself as the Being of beings". Now, "the will is now pure self-legislation of itself: a command to achieve its essence, which is commanding as such, the pure powering of power" (224). Only as overman is modern subjectivity "in the sovereign and wholly developed fullness of its essence - the Being of all beings" (222). Heidegger returns to Nietzsche the latter's own criticism of modern man and society: the Feuerbachean secularization or anthropologization of a now-dead God, the earthly preservation of the God-form. Man has taken the empty place of God as sovereign master of all Being, as a godly man. For Heidegger, the overman remains part and parcel of this process (which for him constitutes the essence of nihilism). The overman thus fails to achieve its own goal: the overcoming of nihilism. Heidegger himself of course conceives of his ideal of 'Gelassenheit' as the genuine overcoming of metaphysics/nihilism, an ethical stance where "the individual is to relinquish all willful and self-assertive attitudes, since the latter can only prevent the individual from attending to the original disclosure of Being" (White, 1997:180). The current text is not the place to enter into that discussion. The reason for discussing Heidegger's interpretation of Nietzsche was to show how Heidegger traces and displaces the problem of sovereignty, from a consideration of an individual ethos, to the level of ontology, or: the way one (re)constructs the Being of beings.

4. The sovereign individual overman?

The reading of SI offered in 2.1 positions sovereign individuality as the signature feature of Nietzsche's overman. Following the opposite reading offered in 2.2, sovereign individuality cannot express Nietzsche's model for the overman, but rather represents the modern ideal of subjective autonomy Nietzsche was highly critical of. Here, the overman instead represents "the overcoming of the ideal of humanity as sovereign" (Acampora). Hatab too states that "the coming sense of valuation is [...] post-rational, post-autonomous, post-sovereign" (Hatab, 2008a: 78). If sovereignty is taken in the sense of self-sufficiency, as expressive of the ideal of being a causa sui - criticized as the desire to bear the entire and ultimate responsibility for ones actions oneself, and to absolve God, the world, ancestors, chance, and society" and the attempt to pull oneself by the hair out of the swamp of nothingness into existence" (BGE:21) - Nietzsche indeed seems to oppose such a notion of individual sovereignty: "Nietzsche questions any sense of sovereignty in the sense of self-sufficiency when accounting for human action (in keeping with amor fati): Nothing stands on its own, either in ourselves or in things [...] we are not the work of ourselves" (Hatab, 2008b: 175).

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White (2008) describes the 'postmodern' appropriation of Nietzsche (e.g. Derrida) as one that reads Nietzsche as rejecting not only the sovereign individual qua ideal, but the ideal of sovereignty as such. In this reading "the whole language of 'sovereignty' [...] with the associated ideas of 'individuality' and selfhood, is deeply suspect and reflects a mythology of mastery and self-presence that it would be better to abandon" (177). Heidegger however showed that the problem of sovereignty can be relocated on a different level that of an individual or collective ethos. The question is whether the ideal of sovereignty is valid on this level. A third alternative would thus consist of rejecting the interpretation that finds in the SI the model for an overman-type ideal, whilst not rejecting the possibility that Nietzsche nevertheless remains committed to some aspiration to sovereignty on a different level than that of the proud individual described in the GM. In Nietzsche and the Problem of Sovereignty (2007), White seems to go in that direction, when he states that the postmodern perspective on Nietzsche mentioned above "remains incomplete, since it is entirely silent about the possibility of sovereignty" (179). He attempts to 'save' the concept of sovereignty from Heidegger and related 'postmodern' criticisms, by faulting the latter for interpreting the overman not in joyful self-affirmative terms, but "in purely slavish terms - as calculation, ordering and control - and as a result, the only solution he [Heidegger] can offer is one of quietism" (180). This reading supposedly prevents "the possibility of an individual ideal [of sovereignty] that would not reduce to individualism" (181).7 Whether correct or not, White positively references Foucault's later writings, which, while not providing a theory of sovereignty, "does allow us to think the individual as a 'fold' within the field of power that may cultivate itself so as to resist power's control" (185). In this interpretation then, Nietzsche, like Foucault, "tries to think through the possibility of sovereignty as a valid ideal even within the overall context of history and nature" (9), i.e. beyond the figure and presupposition of a selfsufficient, highly individuated self.

5. Final Remarks
What are the reasons for the conflicting interpretations discussed in 2.1 and 2.2? Is it the result, as Bataille (1993) contends, of the tendency of scholars "to retain only one aspect of Nietzsche, suiting the one who assumes the right to choose" effectively exploiting the text's 'multi-layered irony'? Do one or the other make the mistake - one that Thomas Mann believed he did not make - of reading Nietzsche literally? In any case, it depends on ones 'connotative' reading of the passage in which the SI is presented, i.e. whether we should read the applauding, seemingly affirmative remarks about its characteristics literally or 'ironically'. The latter would imply that Nietzsche does not (from his perspective) describe the SI, but describes the way the SI understands and regards himself, so that "it is only the SIs self-deceived
While White indeed refuses both the 'liberal-Kantian' reading of the overman-as-SI, as well as the reading of Nietzsche overman-ideal as a critical project of overcoming sovereignty as such, he fails to duly acknowledge that and why the SI cannot function as a model for the figure of the overman (White, 189; Rukgaber, 231). Because he partly holds on to the reading of the SI offered in 2.1, White does not quite free himself from a 'liberal' conception of sovereignty.
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self-representation that is the ideal of individual autonomy" (Rukgaber, 214). This distinction is quite important when considering whether those values attributed to the SI (autonomy, free will, responsibility, etc.) are positive parts of Nietzsche's revaluation of all values and the corresponding overman, or part of the very values in need of revaluation, of 'overcoming', e.g. Nietzsche's contemporaries. The terminology of the passage indeed seems to point in the direction of an interpretation of it as a self-description, and in that sense a parody: the SI 'calls it' his conscience, has a proud 'consciousness and awareness of' his power, freedom and superiority, has the 'feeling' man is completed in him. If this were the case it would support the thesis that the SI isn't constitutive of Nietzsche's positive ethical ideal. On the other hand, we have seen that Nietzsche's vocabulary as a whole nevertheless strongly suggests an ideal of sovereignty. In 3 and 4 I've tried to show how it is possible to separate the notion of sovereign individuality (as it appears in GM) from a notion of sovereignty as an appropriation of ones being-will-to-power, as the moment of affirming the affirmative nature of will to power itself. I have discussed three positions: one that identifies the overman with the SI, one that denies any relation, or reconstructs the SI as the overman's 'significant other'. The latter sometimes even presents the overman as expressive of a post-sovereign ideal. A third interpretation is possible, by distinguishing the level of the individuated person (where Nietzsche can indeed be said to argue for a form of postsovereign individuality), from the level of an immanent field of impersonal forces. There, the ideal of sovereignty could apply, in the affirmation of the eternal recurrence of these forces of which 'it' forms a part. Whereas the 'liberalindividualist' interpretation of Nietzsche's overman equates it with the SI too quickly, the 'leftist' or 'postmodernist' appropriation of the Nietzschean figure of the overman (Deleuze being perhaps the exception) too quickly disposes of the idea that the ideal of sovereignty plays a role in Nietzsche's work at all. Alternatively, the ideal of sovereignty in Nietzsche is acknowledged, but rejected for its "nostalgia for an impossible mastery" (White, 186). If one would like to save the concept of sovereignty in reconstructing Nietzsche's ideal of the overman, one needs to recognize its displacement, from the sovereignty of a clearly delimited and individual 'self', to an impersonal, selfless sovereignty of will to power in all its manifestations. The (in)dividual, in this case, would sovereignly 'let himself be determined to determine', fully affirms himself as becoming determined to determine: amor fati. The question is whether this use of the term 'sovereignty' can be made to make sense of at all or must be replaced by another terminology, since the delineation of an 'inside', whose autonomy is determined in inverse proportion to its dependence on an 'outside', can no longer be assumed. To refuse identifying the SI as the overman is to problematize clich notions of a self-governing artist-nobility to come (perhaps closer to Ayn Rand's Americanized

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pseudo-libertarian protagonists), and to articulate and make productive his criticisms of the subject and the ideal of sovereign selfhood, a rethinking of sovereignty on a level other than liberal 'ontologies of self'. Now the question can be raised, whether the figure of the overman represents a model for a type of becomingsovereign that proceeds by means of appropriating and redesigning the impersonal force differentials in and through which one finds oneself and through which one can appropriate its existence to become what it is. Following Heidegger's analysis, which says that in Nietzsche's ontology of 'will to power' and the ideal-figure of the overman that 'wills to will', the metaphysics of Being as subjectivity is consummated, we can now see how the ideal of sovereignty in Nietzsche perhaps pertains not to the sovereign individual mentioned in the second essay of GM, but to the appropriation of 'what one is' but still must dare to finally become - an agonistic unfolding of unindividual, 'artistic' configurations of affirmative-active types of will to power. The question then becomes: how to think sovereignty outside of the category of the individual and the personal? How to conceive of an 'impersonal sovereignty', a self-less self-determination? In this scenario, this is the challenge the figure of the overman dares us to accept.

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