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anarchistic anti-theism refuses to submit to God as Master, nor to
any other as Master. Yet according to Kierkegaard’s diagnosis of
such defiant despair, the self which refuses all external powers and
wills to become its own Master is itself doomed to internalise and
thereby to enslave itself to the power dialectic of Master-Slave.^99
Such a self is essentially master over nothing (reflecting its cre-
ation ex nihilo) because it has become enslaved to the unrealisable
ideal of mastery, of power, of itself.^100 Even without the archē of
God or the other, the anti-theist cannot escape the fall into slav-
ery at the hands of its own self. For Kierkegaard, unless the self
becomes itself as Spirit, one will always deprive oneself of one’s
own freedom because one is fatally flawed by the desire to master
oneself. Even the single anarchist cannot become free from this
self-enslaving power of the self—the despair which Kierkegaard
names as the sickness unto death.
Anti/Conclusion: Neither/Nor?
“Do I step forward as one who in God’s behalf, so to speak, has
orders to reduce Christendom in rank? O, no, I am without author-
ity. Stirred by the ideal myself, I find a joy in being reduced in rank
myself, and I strive “without authority” to stir others to the same.”
—Kierkegaard, Journals and Papers^101Kierkegaard’s verdict is intense. Anti-theism is made possible by
divine freedom; but it expresses itself as despair, and despair is a
turning away from freedom—a turning inward into nothingness.
The anarchic self is never free from itself; autonomy descends into
self-incarceration. Under the heteronomous rubric of Kierkegaard’s
diagnosis, Proudhon’s anti-theism discovers itself inscribed within
the categories of “defiance” and “demonic rage”, under the bond-
age of which the self labours in the unfreedom of “despair”.^102
The despair of defiant anti-theism is demonic: “the will of unfree-
dom”.^103 But Kierkegaard is himself open to the inverted wisdom
of the demonic enemy. What is more, Kierkegaard identifies the
despair of offense as symptomatic of a rise in consciousness from
spiritlessness to Spirit itself.^104 As such, there is hope that for dia-
logue beyond this apparent impasse. It is, furthermore, pertinent to
the anarchē of Proudhon’s position that while anti-theism refuses