In this article I present a close reading of Section  in Søren Kierkegaard’s The Concept of Anxiety. After an introduction which alludes to the literary fiction of Jonathan Franzen, the article turns directly to Section , in which Kierkegaard’s pseudonym, Vigilius Haufniensis, unfolds the phenomenon of anxiety as the original experience of existential freedom. In the first step of the argument, I argue that the transition of the human being from its natural state into an existence of ethically qualified freedom is a process which must be understood as a peculiar self–disturbance at the heart of subjectivity. In a second step, I claim that this self–disturbance is connected to the essential normativity of language that human beings always already find themselves in. In a concluding discussion, I suggest the interpretation that the linguistically self– disturbance of a human self implies an ethical requalification of the possibilities of one’s past as well as of one’s future.