Abstract/Summary

This chapter of my edited book on Rand draws on Rand’s testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), her description of the individualism of one of the heroes of her novel The Fountainhead, the infamous rape scene in that novel, and the celebrated analysis of this by Slavoj Žižek. The aim is to suggest that the purity of Rand’s narratives is always compromised, not least through its literary status: Rand is constantly disavowing the narrative frame that is necessary for her philosophy to be ‘revealed’. The chapter argues that a comparable disavowal can be read in the work of her most radical of critics.