Becoming What One Is: Nietzsche on Self-Transformation and the Surrealist Challenge of Leonora Carrington

Central to Nietzsche’s philosophy is his exhortation to ‘become what one is.’ This exhortation is addressed to a reader who is not yet himself, but something embryonic and unformed. Against narratives of maturation that predicate a redemptive arc of progress, such as those derived from Christian morality and nineteenth century evolutionary theory, Nietzsche counsels a course of development patterned upon the metamorphosis of a fantastic creature that transforms from a camel into a lion and finally a child. In this paper, I consider his metamorphic creature as a progenitor of the strange hybrid figures that populate the imaginary of the surrealist painter and writer, Leonora Carrington. I aim to show how Carrington, whose hybrid figures express possibilities for becoming something unthinkable within the constraints of patriarchal modernity, responds to the call to become what one is in a way that puts pressure on Nietzsche’s generally antipathetic view of the ‘herd.’