Abstract

Taking as its point of departure Nietzsche's critique of asceticism as a self-perpetuating ethos in which all acts may be "priced" and compensated, this dissertation investigates Nietzsche's account of eternal return and Kant's account of sublimity as challenges to this ethos. It argues that both eternal return and sublimity attempt to undermine the conception of time as a linear regulation of moments of equal weight and value upon which the ethos of compensation depends. The dissertation finds that although any promise of liberation appears only to confirm the ethos, in these accounts, a subtle self-deflation operates to impair the logic of both promise and compensation. ;Avoiding the assertion of synonymy between critical terms in Kant and Nietzsche, the study is divided into two distinct parts. The first examines Nietzsche's focus on the metabolism of the ascetic ideal which traces the possibility of meaning to a gesture of retentive regulation, and the development of thinking to the contriving of equivalences. It analyses eternal return as an exaggeration of that gesture which ultimately deflates its promise, and sees in this the condition of the impossibility, rather than possibility, of meaning and thereby of compensation. The second examines the Kantian disjunction between the domain of ethics and epistemology which motivates the Critique of Judgment in light of one which operates in both spheres, that between activity and passivity. This analysis introduces an examination of the sublime as a failure to afford passage from one domain to the other and explores the terms under which that failure may be interpreted as a ruin of the conditions of its own promise