Silentio retells the story of Abraham not from a philosophical perspective, but a poetic one. Why? Because philosophy is allied to the System, to abstraction, and Silentio is worried his book will be assimilated to the unfolding of the great impersonal Encyclopaedia. He writes of faith, but he does not do so from the perspective of one who is faithful; he is not yet Anti-Climacus. He writes in a kind of awe for what he does not have.
Might one claim Silentio places his faith in poetry? I find Edward F. Mooney’s suggestion very interesting:
Abraham’s faith will be resigning Isaac and having the expectation, strangely fulfilled, of getting him back. The artist’s faith will be resigning the immediate sense of the world, struggling with the loss this entails, yet maintaining the expectation, uncannily fulfilled, of getting it back – partly through poetic labour, through recreating experience, but partly through muse, as gift. This is what Johannes might call the faith of the poet, realised in “his faithful service”. (FT, 15)
How should one understand this service? On the same page of Fear and Trembling, he writes:
If underlying everything there was only a wild fermenting power that writhing in dark passions produced everything, be it significant or insighficant, if a vast, never appeased emptiness lay hid beneath everything, what would life be then but despair? If such were the situation, if there were no sacred bond to knit humankind together, if one generation emerged after another like forest foliage, if one generation succeeded another like singing birds in the forest, if a generation passed through the world as a ship through the sea, as wind through the desert, an unthinking, unproductive performance, if an eternal oblivion, perpetually hungry, lurked for its prey and there was no power strong enough to wrench that away from it – how empty and devoid of consolation life would be! (15)
Two things are preserved from oblivion: the hero’s deeds and the poem who celebrates the hero in song. But here the poet is only the admirer of the hero. Is Silentio simply an admirer of Abraham? But remember he claims at one point he tries to practice what he discovers in his ‘hero’ – to this extent, one might suppose him to be honest and sincere. But he remains a poet, which is to say, one whose faith is insufficiently profound, who is content to write and only to write, and whose ‘practices’, such as he invokes them, occur within the general endeavour to save the hero from obscurity. The danger is that, like the poet, we readers linger in the detour of this writing. Is the fact that is written by a pseudonym supposed to prompt us into our own imitation of Abraham? Or, moved by this text, will we only have been able to have imitated Silentio?
Notice that writing is, for Silentio, a bulwark against despair, against a never appeased emptiness which lies hidden beneath everything which eats away at the sacred bond that might draw us into a true universality. Writing is a way of breaking with the unthinking, unproductive force of oblivion which awaits each of us. But then what one wins by writing, one loses at the same stroke. Write of this blooming, radiating tree and you risk losing this same tree in its living immediacy. Perhaps this is why the poet Silentio reminds us of the silence of Abraham – and why the pseudonym’s name is itself bound to a silence that can only be indicated through writing. Like the oracle at Delphi, Silentio’s writing does not speak but gives a sign.
But hasn’t Silentio’s Fear and Trembling, by this token, already acceded to a kind of despair? Doesn’t he sigh after a world which does not yet exist? Isn’t it to seek, through writing, of a consolation that cannot be found in the world? The poet seeks what is lost in language – the real tree, not the one which has disappeared into the word ‘tree’. According to Blanchot, there is a movement in certain poets (Mallarmé, Ponge) to make language into a thing, to write with words which come together to form something absolutely idiomatic, absolutely untranslatable. But this is not quite what one finds in Silentio. He wants to celebrate Abraham, to attend to the Abraham in his singularity – or does he? Doesn’t he want, in some sense, to give himself the gift of writing – to receive, from writing’s gift, the faith that will allow him to escape despair?
What is it Silentio wants? Silence, perhaps. To indicate, by means of writing, the silence which escapes writing. But to do so by means of writing. To have faith in writing for as long as writing lasts. But then to long for what one can only defer through writing. Ah, it is bad faith itself, which is why I do not believe Silentio wants to escape what he cannot find through writing.
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