On aristocratic radicalism. Singularities of Georg Brandes, Friedrich Nietzsche and Soren Kierkegaard

This dissertation studies links between theories of individualism and ethics through the notion of "Aristocratic Radicalism," a term coined by the Danish critic and intellectual Georg Morris Cohen Brandes (1842--1927) to describe the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. Brandes was the critical discoverer of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. Though long forgotten by today's scholarship, Brandes was in his day the most influential literary critic on the European intellectual scene. A reassessment of Brandes' uninterrogated notion of "Aristocratic Radicalism" opens texts of Nietzsche and Kierkegaard to new perspectives and readings that demonstrate how these thinkers approached a critique of individualism and how these maneuvers excavate the singular ethics of the literary text.;In examining and delineating a politics of Aristocratic Radicalism, this project explores the critiques of mass culture in texts by Kierkegaard and Nietzsche as prefaced by Brandes, groundbreaking criticism. Taking as its starting point the example of Brandes as a paradigm for the intricate relationships between critics and the objects of their critical attentions, the dissertation explores how Brandes, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche all develop a critical stance on the rise of mass culture that depends largely upon recognition of a loss of singularity. Questions of the 'individual' and the 'singular' fueled a crucial conflict in nineteenth century philosophical and literary culture that was central to Brandes, investments and interventions. As writers, all three figures found themselves confronted with the impossibility of speaking to a 'single' reader, confounded by the presence and demands of a reading public. In uncovering a notion of singularity outside the tired opposition of individual and mass, the dissertation differentiates between debates focusing on the relationship between the individual and the community and an understanding of an ethics of singularity expressed in a 'literary' language that eludes the demands and expectations a reading public or of systems of fixed interpretation. Readings of Kierkegaard's En literair Anmeldelse and a range of texts by Nietzsche serve to explore how texts reflect and embody an aristocratically radical stance.