What Labels Me Negates Me

This line is attributed to Søren Kierkegaard's journals and reflects his sustained critique of categorisation as a form of existential reduction. To define a person by a label — a profession, a nationality, a philosophical system — is to substitute a concept for the irreducible individual. In Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1846) and throughout the journals, Kierkegaard insisted that genuine selfhood is achieved only in the first person, in passionate subjective commitment, not in third-person descriptions or category memberships. A precise primary source for this exact wording has not been confirmed.