Tonight, I went through old manuscripts, trying to restore them to life – to repeat them anew. It was thrilling at first, but then these ‘literary’ texts began to bore me. They were failures; I knew that, which is why I never tried to publish them – at least, under my own name. Then I remembered the book I was reading the other day: what could be more apt: Kierkegaard’s Repetition.
Repetition is a novella of sorts, comprising general reflections by one Constantine Constantius and the letters written to C. C. by a young man. We learn from those letters that the young man fell in love, but that no relationship was established between him and his beloved.
Who does he adore? One might think he adores adoration – loves what enables him to love. He loves her as the occasion of his love. But thereby he loses the one he loves – indeed he never loved her. As occasion, she is nothing; if he writes of her, writing out of his adoration, it is only to imprison her in a kind of ideality. She is ideal, not real; as the object of his love, as his beloved, she exists only as an archetype who belongs to an eternal past.
He is linked to her by recollection, Erindring (related to the German Erinnerung) -literally internalising. The poet has not reached her; recollecting, he plunges into himself; he is lost. His relation to the beloved is a pseudo-relation, or at least it is one which falls, with him, into his past and to the ceaseless recollection of an archetype which inhabits the past. But then the young man wonders whether this experience is a kind of ordeal – perhaps, he thinks, it is analogous to what Job underwent. And didn’t Job receive everything anew after the ordeal? He kept faith – and thus if he had 7,000 sheep before his trial, he had 14,000 after; if he had 500 yoke of oxen beforehand he had 1000 after. Remembering the time when Job was rebuked in the form of a thunderstorm, the young man writes, ‘I am waiting for a thunderstorm – and for repetition’ – What does he want? To to receive himself anew.
What has lost? His own past, his own future. Better: he has lost possibility, the chance of transformation. And what does he seek? Gjentagelsen (repetition, literally re-taking): to take his life again – to receive it anew. He wants possibility – he wants the momentum which will carry him into the future. This is how he would break from recollection, Erindring. And break he does (or at least this is what we learn from his correspondent, C. C., who later claims that the young man was a fiction, C. C.’s own creation. Do not believe him. For they are both diners and discussants, as real as one another, at the symposium in the first part of Stages on Life’s Way.)
We know, perhaps, where this is leading: the original state precedes the original sin. Thereby, the relationship to God is received anew through the incarnation and atonement of Jesus Christ. Yes, this would be a Christian repetition – a restoration – to which the repetition of the young man can only approximate. But we might speculate that Kierkegaard himself may have thought he could win back his former beloved – Regine Olsen – at the time he wrote this little book, but that he learnt, as he finished it that she was engaged. He ripped up the last pages of Repetition and wrote them again – the young man, the poet, also finds out his beloved is engaged and rejoices in that fact. Is it this which makes Repetition so peculiar? According to some, in one draft, Kierkegaard had meant the young man to commit suicide. Now this would have been more satisfying, I think, although the book would be less of an enigma.
Here is the enigma: the young man writes: ‘I am myself again. Here I have repetition; I understand everything, and life seems more beautiful to me than ever. It did indeed come like a thunderstorm’. Then he didn’t achieve repetition by establishing a real relationship with his beloved, who was already lost to him. What he was seeking, and what he found, was the one for whom possibility was possible. But this does not convince. I think the young man wanted his beloved before he wanted himself – that he sought, first of all, a relation that was not a self-relation. He sought, I think, the newness or novelty that comes from without – the shattering experience of the Other – and the book should have ended, perhaps, with this experience or his suicide. The Other? His beloved perhaps – but why not God? Remember C. C. writes that if the young man were religious, he would never have become a poet. But what kind of judge is C. C. – whose name suggests the inability of movement, of momentum, of transformation?
The young man, by contrast, is nameless. He has no name, it is suggested, because he has no grip upon the present not foothold on the future. He is not-yet, pure potential. But when he regains the power to repeat – when repetition allows him to seize, once again, upon possibility – he presumably regains his name, too. Well, the text doesn’t tell us, and the young man disappears from the stage. A question – I ask this not of Kierkegaard’s text, but more generally -: is there a repetition which reaches beyond both recollection and the pristine innocence which is recovered in the relationship to God? A repetition, then, that restores not a name, but a namelessness, not possibility, but impossibility. A thunderstorm without cease, from which no deliverance comes.
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