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Identity on Credit: Ajax, Achilles, and the Modern Self with Fredrik Westerlund

Acid Horizon

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What happens when the self we imagine drifts further from the one we actually live? In this episode, philosopher Fredrik Westerlund joins Craig and Nicholas de Warren to explore his concept of “identity on credit,” where our sense of self is built on promises yet to be realized. From Sophocles’ Ajax to Nietzsche, Deleuze, and Scheler, we trace how recognition, resentment, and failure shape the modern psyche. Together we ask whether it is possible to live beyond the creditor–debtor logic of identity.

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7 Comments

@albanbokshi4818 1 year ago

This was such a great episode! Looking forward to a follow-up and the book itself.

@LandELiberation 1 year ago

Great episode, I think this raises a really interesting idea; that Ajax as a play (I would argue) is consciously anti-achillean. Ajax conceives of himself as the rightful heir to the social position of Achilles, represented by his armour. But for Aeschylus, living right at the birth of Athenian democracy (and I think a cross veiw of his other surviving works) is eternally concerned with the roles and limits of the citizen (aristotles attitude to theatre is very much in this vein) and as such he seems to very clearly see the problematic elements of Achilles as you outline and I think the play is him symbolically closing the door on this kind of hero within the polis, in favour of the model of the hero as self-sacrificing that sparked Nietzsche's own ressentiment so

@daniel-zh4qc 1 year ago

Acid horizon is da bizzy best

@IanFrantz 1 year ago (edited)

I'm there. Swirling within penumbra and the ineffability of the transcendent.

It's not "hocus pocus" and it all sounds so crazy except it isn't. You can live in the ways described.

Cory Anton's book "How Non-Being Haunts Being" and James Hampton's art helped me break through.

@tegan2mares 1 year ago

Thanks for the conversation, extremely interested
.... A contract - like structure..... Perhaps coming from our framework of Consent -- questions of empowerment and submission -- this is what I'm writing and thinking through.