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On Sovereignty And Overhumanity Why It Matters How We Read Nietzsche's Genealogy 11:2, Christa Davis Acampora

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There is nearly unanimous agreement, among those who bother to pay attention to Nietzsche's anomalous claim about the "sovereign individual" in the second essay of On the Genealogy of Morals that the "sovereign" is Nietzsche's ideal, and many more still take sovereignty as the signature feature of the overman Nietzsche heralds in his Thus Spoke Zarathustra and other writings. I describe the reception among Nietzsche scholars as "nearly unanimous" because there has been at least one cry of dissent: that issued by Lawrence Harab. Curiously, his brief but incisive comments about the problematic nature of several readings along these lines …