Category: Kierkegaard

1. You envy him, don’t you?

To find an idea for which he could live and die – this is what Kierkegaard says he hopes for in an early entry in his journal. No surprise, then, his impassioned experience of God, a few years later. He has found what he sought – or was it the idea that sought him, waited for him and then trapped him? Now his torment had a name; the idea was clothed, and he could sacrifice his life as he always wanted to it to be sacrificed.

He was the kind of young man who wanted his life to blaze into the air, who wanted to lively keenly, wholly, and for his life to be consumed. What drama! What magnificent struggle! A career spread before him; writing could bear him through hundreds of pages, opening out, in his last works, to a great attack on Christendom. Righteousness! Indignation! Kierkegaard, no longer young, was still aflame.

Was he ever certain of God? There was that first, burning experience – but then? Only the certainty of what had burned. Only the great task of writing – for now he had something to write, and that was what mattered, first of all. Something to write, something to carry him through his days and nights; a task to which to sacrifice himself, and by way of writing.

No – he was never certain, never certain enough of God, but there was writing, which compensated in some way. Writing in which he could throw himself up in the darkness as a wave bears up a ship. On what stormy waters was he tossed! What secret dramas raged within him! And Copenhagen thought of him only as that gloomy wanderer, Magister Kierkegaard, with his bent back and his walking stick.

How thrilling to be engaged, inside, by a burning idea! And then, in his last years, having thrown himself to the satires of the Corsair, there was the relief of martyrdom, for he was the kind of man who wanted to become Aristotle’s god, Aristotle’s beast: a man alone, a man all alone and cut off from life. How solemnly could Kierkegaard write of himself in his journals (‘I am a lonely fir tree’)!

You shake with laughter: I am a lonely fir tree. But you envy that solemnity. You envy his certainty.

2. To be possessed by an idea: but what when it is the uncertainty of the idea that bears you? What, further still, if it is scarcely an idea but only an open space, exposed on all sides to uncertainty? Then there is nowhere for you to rest; nothing against which to fall back – no chance of righteousness and of indignation; no rallying point to which to draw others, who, like you, are drawn to rail against the world.

To be dispossessed, then, and lacking an idea. No stars above the desert, no path among the dunes: what test is this? Forty days pass, and then another forty: you are not even being tested; no one watches for you. Lost – but are you even lost? The desert is not even a desert, but a room like any other, a room with a desk and a window.

Deleuze writes somewhere every would-be thinker (and who is yet a thinker?) should spend, as he did, eight years writing nothing in particular. Eight years, and eight times eight years – and eight times that: the desert has opened to include all space, and time is the interval of wandering.

But it is not even that you’ll write nothing at all, that you’ll stop staining silence and finally give up. Stalled writing, essays half-finished, notes towards what will never begin: why have you never known that shame which says you, and you above all, do not deserve to write? Why has the angel never stood before you with a fiery sword and said: bow your head?

Pascal (another writer): all the evil of the world begins because you cannot sit quietly in an empty room. Can you imagine it, an empty room, without a cone of light and a notebook? Can you imagine an absence that you did not defile, silence in which you did not cry out – a perfect night, closed in darkness?

Kierkegaard dreamed of the judgement – he waited for it, even as you dreamed of the book you would write against death, that great, fiery volume that would fill half the sky. It was because he was waiting that his book could draw silence around them in the night. Yes, that’s what I have decided: you write against death and Kierkegaard wrote in order to die.

3. There is another Kierkegaard, the writer who writes indirectly and not just because all writing, all language is indirect and you cannot point, as he wanted to, at the glory of God that he could not see. Wasn’t God’s glory waiting for him on the other side of writing? Waiting, but only as death – death as the end of writing.

Wasn’t he, Kierkegaard, to die at the age of 34? Hadn’t it been fated thus? Write, then; write up to the limit of death. Write of God – but indirectly. Write of the God his readers can only reach through indirection. Of God – or is of the cessation of writing that he dreams? Of God – or only the respite from writing, the completion of his authorship?

Death: it is of that which he dreams. To die – to fall into the arms of God. To finish writing, to die – but meanwhile there is the great forward-streaming of a writing that is never simply a means. To write: isn’t this what he meant by the sickness unto death? Isn’t this what is meant by anxiety? Writing itself; writing lost in itself; writing that doubles itself up, congeals, and expels its writer into the desert.

It is there you will meet him, the one who is not Kierkegaard, there where the darkness becomes a desert and both of you wander without an idea in your head. No, not that one, writer of his books, but the other one, the wanderer, the double who was lost as soon as there was writing. The ‘other’ Kierkegaard for whom God was never God and Regine never real.

4. Perhaps it is of Kafka I am writing, not Kierkegaard. From the journals: I want to die in my books, whilst my characters live. And Basho’s last haiku – dying in the field, my dreams wander on. Perhaps it is only the silhouette of a writer who dies in our place. A silhouette: not you and not me – the one who opens each of us lie a door to let the darkness open out.

What are you writing, with the darkness pulled around you like a cape? What are you writing in that cone of light? Whisper it; say, I am dead. Say it again: I am a dead man. For it must begin with death, writing. You must have already died. You must have seen the world with death’s eyes and wanted the angel with the sword to come again.

Who was God, and who was Regine? What was that city – Copenhagen? You never lived; you never wrote. I see a cone of darkness within a cone of light. I see the notebook shut and the pencil falling from your hands.

I’ve been rereading Kierkegaard alongside Geoffrey A. Hale’s excellent book Kierkegaard and the Ends of Language.

Commenting on Kierkegaard’s later texts, Kafka writes to Brod:

They are not unequivocal, and even when he late develops a kind of unequivocality, even this is only part of his chaos of spirit, melancholy and faith…. Besides, his compromising books are pseudonymous and pseudonymous nearly to the core. They can, in their totality and in spite of their contents, just as well be understood as the misleading letters of the seducer, written behind clouds.

Written behind clouds. How to take the heteronyms seriously? One might dissolve their identity into Kierkegaard’s, following Kierkegaard’s own remarks in Postscript. For doesn’t he provide the key to his works when he writes:

The contents of this little book affirm, then, what I truly am as an author, that I am and was a religious author, that the whole of my work as an author is related to Christianity, to the problem of ‘becoming a Christian’, with a direct or indirect polemic against the monstrous illusion we call Christendom, or against the illusion that in such a land as ours all are Christians of a sort.

But one should also remember what A. writes in Either/Or: that it is ‘characteristic of all human endeavour in its truth that it is fragmentary, that it is precisely this which distinguishes it from nature’s infinite coherence, that an individual’s wealth consists specifically in his capacity for fragmentary extravagance …’. A. versus Kierkegaard? A. is a heteronym; we know who should win. But this is to resolve the problem in advance. The problem: it is not merely A.’s texts which are fragmentary, but all texts. No text can guarantee its meaning once and for all.

Whence the temptation to resort to the psychobiographical, whereby it is the unity of a life behind the writer that matters most (there are dozens of commentaries of this kind). Kierkegaard would be the exemplar, whose work and life are bound under the heading of an existence – whose existence is his testimony and which the reader must learn to imitate in turn. Thus is his existence bound into a living coherency. A. anticipates this: ‘because of the disjointed and desultory character of unfinished papers, one feels a need to poeticise the personality along with them’.

The poeticisation of the author will not resolve the problems of authority. Rereading the passage from Point of View of My Work as an Author, it is clear that here it is not a question of a poeticisation, but a testament, and a fragmentary one. As Hale argues, it is not a question of thereby grasping the truth of Kierkegaard’s work, ‘it offers no revelation of a hitherto unacknowledged secret; it does not attempt in this way to correct an otherwise misled readership. In it the author never explains or supplies the meaning for texts previously written’.

This gives us a way of reading Kierkegaard’s remark: ‘What I write here is for orientation. It is a public attestation; not a defence or apology. In this respect, truly, if in no other, I believe that I have something in common with Socrates’. To attest, here, is not give the keys to the work to the reader. There is an orientation, true, but the texts remain. This is why Kierkegaard writes in ‘My Activity as a Writer’:

Without authority to call attestation to religion, to Christianity, is the category for my whole activity as an author, integrally regarded. That I was “without authority” I have from the first moment asserted clearly and repeated as a stereotyped phrase. I regard myself preferably as a reader of the books, not as the author.

A reader, then, who can only provide an orientation. Should one, then, take indirect communication as the key to his work? This is to lead to another temptation: Kierkegaard is praised by some commentators as a great poet before he is a great philosopher or a great theologian. But this is to confine him to prevent the possibility of a thinking-writing, of a writing which thinks in the author even as it renders authority ever incomplete. True, the poet is one for whom language does not have to be universal, conceptual. Nevertheless, the poet is condemned to language, and hence to meaning.

How, then, to think this indirection? What Kierkegaard stages is a relationship between text and reader such that meaning depends upon their relationship. This is not to make meaning entirely dependent upon the reader, relativising it to a particular perspective. Language is more than that perspective, even if, as this more, it can only be figured as difference or alterity even if it becomes necessary to invoke an outside which resists inclusion in any particular reading even as, in its exteriority, it only exists for itself as refusal to offer itself once and for all. Infinite interpretability: it is to this the finitude of language condemns us. It is the fact that the work happens in a contract between book and reader and that the work breaks that contract.

Then who is the author?

An author is often merely an x, even when his named is signed, something quite impersonal, which addresses itself abstractly, by the aid of printing, to thousands and thousands, while remaining itself unseen and unknown, living a life as hidden, as anonymous, as it is possible for a life to be, in order, presumably, not to reveal the too obvious and striking contradiction between the prodigious means of communication employed and the fact that the author is only a single individual….

A mere x – a pseudonym. Read the journals and you’ll find Kierkegaard knows this:

The difficulty with publishing anything about the authorship is and remains that, without my knowing or knowing it positively, I really have been used, and now for the first time I understand and comprehend the whole – but then I cannot, after all, say I…. But this is my limitation – I am a pseudonym.

As Hale comments, splendidly:

Language and subjectivity remain irreconcilable, and this irreconcilability itself exceeds the delimitations of cognition. It cannot itself be known within language, because it is already the effect of language. Language produces the subject as its own excluded outside. (28)

Then irony cannot cover this notion as long as it refers to an underlying subject who would know, all along, what he or she was doing. Irony is dependent on the finitude of language, upon language as excess or outside and upon the communication in which the reader is exposed to the work as it gives and withholds itself.

The author is merely an x – but then, in encountering the text, isn’t the reader likewise an x? Doesn’t the communication which reaches between writer and reader do so as between one x and another? Behind the clouds – there where the texts meets and breaks from the reader, where the contract is shattered. Where writer becomes reader and the reader becomes x.

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.

Few things are more pleasant than finding another volume of the International Kierkegaard Commentary has appeared on the new books shelf in the library. Each focuses on a particular text; the one I am reading at the moment is on Fear and Trembling, and corrects some misreadings. It is worth drawing out a couple of points here.

Johannes de Silentio, pseudonymous author of Fear and Trembling, admires Abraham and celebrates his faith. Abraham left his native land out of faithful love for God. He is also capable of faithful hope – promised a great succession, he did not waver – he waited, and Sarah only bore him a son when she was ninety years old. And when God asked him to sacrifice his son on Mt. Moriah, Abraham’s knew that what was sacrificed would be returned to him; he knew he would receive anew what he was prepared to lose by his own hand.

C. Stephen Evans is right to maintain note that ‘Johannes says that the ‘irrational’ or ‘absurd’ aspect of Abraham’s faith is not his willingness to sacrifice Isaac, but rather Abraham’s ability to receive Isaac back joyfully after having been willing to sacrifice him’ (17). Unlike the ‘knight of resignation’, who would have simply resigned himself to obeying God, giving up the finite and the temporal for the sake of the infinite and the eternal, Abraham is a ‘knight of faith’. What does this mean? He is able to make a leap of faith beyond rational calculation – beyond what appears to be good or right. He knows he will receive Isaac back, whatever happens. He is capable of a faith which is more that simple obedience.

But Silentio, who appears to be so perceptive, is a ‘lower’ pseudonym – he is not yet a Christian like Anti-Climacus. As such, his viewpoint is partial – doesn’t another pseudonym (admittedly, he too is ‘lower), Johannes Climacus, note that Fear and Trembling only ‘used sin incidentally’ (CUP, 240)? One must read Fear and Trembling in the context of Kierkegaard’s authorship as a whole, remembering the position of the pseudonyms in his overall strategy.

This advice also goes for those who are horrified by what they take to be the moral nihilism of Fear and Trembling. Read Works of Love, as Evans suggests and it is clear Kierkegaard does not think one’s duties to God ‘could replace or compete with duties towards one’s fellow humans’; he quotes Kierkegaard: ‘God is not a part of existence in such a way that he demands his share for himself; he demands everything, but as you bring it you immediately receive, if I may put it this way, an endorsement designating where it should be forwarded, for God demands nothing for himself, although he demands everything from you’ (159). Why, then, Johannes’s suspicion of the ethical? Because the ethical is not the ultimate modality of existence. Yes, to become religious means one must leave the ethical behind – but then, through God, the ethical is received anew as it is grounded in dogmatics, in revelation.

Fear and Trembling is, to be sure, the work of one who is in some sense removed from the ethical sphere, but he is not yet religious, which means he has not yet passed through despair. It is only from his partial perspective that it appears that Abraham chooses the absurd. However, as Kierkegaard maintains in his journals, ‘When the believer has faith, the absurd is not the absurd – faith transforms it …’ (JP, 1:10). Silentio’s book is a despairer’s book – for doesn’t he find in Abraham the infinite that he feels is somehow missing in himself? I a reminded, in Silentio, of the kind of despair analysed in The Sickness Unto Death which springs from a lack of attachment to the world, a lack of definition or finitude; the temptation to fantasy and imagination. Is it coincidence that Silentio sees himself as a poet? Of course not.

Only the Christian, according to Anti-Climacus, can understand the significance of the sickness unto death and can be led from despair to be born anew. But what of the non-Christian? Some types of aesthetic despair involve an attempt to overcome despair, to die to it, without this ever being possible. It remains sheer sickness unto death – a dying without terminus. Anti-Climacus gives us a clue to the interpretation of ‘Guilty/Not Guilty’ – Quidam’s Diary of Stages on Life’s Way: Quidam is wrong to believe his despair springs from his relationship to the young woman; it is just a symptom of a broader despair, a broader misrelation in the self. And one might make an analogous claim about the young man of Repetition (but what should one claim about Frater Taciturnus and Constantin Constantius, whose fictions they are?)

Beabout reminds us of the pseudonym Judge William’s typology of the aesthetic sphere of existence from Either/Or; it involves 1) living for physical beauty, 2) living for wealth, honor, fame, one’s beloved, 3) aiming at developing one’s talents, 4) living for hedonistic pleasure, 5) living for self-reflective enjoyment, and 6) despair. As Beabout comments, ‘At the first five of the stages, or so the judge seems to say, one is not conscious of being a self. Properly speaking, there is no misrelation in the self in these stages since there is no self’. The sixth variety of aesthetic existence is familiar from Either/Or and Repetition: there is no self yet, only the potentiality to be a self. One is not yet able to be able as a self; nothing is possible for you as a self …

It is worth recalling Anti-Climacus’s typology of despair. First of all, there is the despair which springs from a sense of infinitude and possibility – a lack of attachment to the world, a lack of definition or finitude; the temptation to fantasy and imagination. Secondly, and conversely, there is the despair of finitude and necessity – too much attachment to the world; one’s existence is defined by tasks and duties; the temptation to join the crowd or the mass; fatalism, determinism. Thirdly, there is also a despair which is as it were ignorant of itself, of its true nature. This seems to be linked, fourthly, to a general weakness, whereby one does not have the strength to become a self. The despair of youth, sighing over a future; the despair of age, sighing over lost youth. Here, one might despair over everything earthly – a despair, here, of one’s incapacity to escape despair. One senses the infinite, the eternal, in as it were its negative aspect (one is suspended between the two sides of the self). This is what Anti-Climacus calls indesluttede, which is translated, somewhat awkwardly, as inclosing reserve, in which the self is as it were shut up in itself. Inclosing reserve admits of degrees – it is possible to do so whilst retaining ordinary relations with the world, but it can also become more severe. Then, fifthly, there is the defiant, demonic despair of one who rejects God.

Presumably, Judge William has already passed through despair and chosen himself. Nevertheless, there is a suggestion that he, too, despairs, since he still does not understand that his will lies in God’s gift. Am I right to think he will not allow himself to be born out of despair – to have done with the sickness unto death? As Anti-Climacus argues, death, for the Christian, is no longer simply opposed to physical life. It is possible to die into a new life: to die through despair and to be born anew. Then Judge William despairs even if this despair does not manifest itself directly (see the third type of despair in the previous paragraph). – I should reread the pages on marriage from Either/Or. Broadly, crudely, I venture that the Judge is not aware of his despair because of his relationship with his wife which in some respect shelters him from God. This, no doubt, is too quick – but Quidam’s Diary, placed after the long letter from the Judge in Stages on Life’s Way, perhaps attests to a despair of which the Judge is not yet capable.

Ah, the mysteries of Kierkegaard’s authorship. It would be pleasant to enter this labyrinth and spend a life wandering its byways. And with what result? True, a life pleasantly spent is already a great deal – and perhaps it is enough. But there is the leap beyond commentary through which one might be able to write, just to write, a ‘work of philosophy’. Is this possible? It is a false alternative; remember the great commentaries which are more than commentaries – Heidegger’s lectures, for example. But what would it be to start a book in your own name? Perhaps there is a kind of despair, a doubt (fortvivlelse), fostered by academia: one is never able to start, to resolve to start, to bring oneself into the beginning that would allow a work to be born. Having finished my book review, and with only the task of writing an abstract between me and the drafting of my second book, I wonder whether the pleasantness of writing conceals a kind of despair. Isn’t academic writing – the apparent proficiency of writing – already a ruse and an alibi?

Rereading Kierkegaard’s early pseudonymous texts is of course a delight – but it is frustrating, too, because one knows one is one is not in possession of the full picture. There are so many clues and intimations. Read The Sickness Unto Death and things become clearer, although this text, written by the ‘higher’ pseudonym Anti-Climacus, is condensed and difficult. Anti-Climacus – this name is mean to suggest the Christian Johannes Climacus (another pseudonym) was trying to be: not ‘anti-‘, then, but ‘ante’, before, in anticipation. The Sickness Unto Death is an urgent text; though dense, it aims to communicate simply and directly. (Why, then, a pseudonym necessary?)

In the text as in others by Kierkegaard, the task is to delineate what it means to become a self; it is necessary to actualise what you are as yet only in potential. To become a self is a matter of relation, of joining the two sides of the human being – the finite and the temporal with the infinite and the eternal; the physical and the necessary with the psychical and freedom. This is possible only through despair, which translates the Danish fortvivlelse. Beabout, whose study is immensely helpful, observes the etymological link of tvivl, doubt, with fortvivlelse. But if it is doubt that is at issue here, this is a doubt concerning one’s existence. Beabout: ‘Just as in English there is an etymological connection between doubt and double, and in German there is a connection between Zweifel and zwei, there is a connection between the Danish tvivl and the concept “two,” though it is not as obvious in Danish as it is in English or German’.

In the first kind of despair, there is only a negative relationship between these two poles – we might recognise, the form of existence with characterises the aesthetical sphere. To step into the ethical sphere, choice is necessary – one has to choose to choose oneself, to draw upon a power of freedom that was previously unsuspected. In this way, the two sides of the human being are dynamically joined: a self is born in their union. One should remember Judge William’s admonishment to the aesthete in Either/Or: choose yourself. But then Kierkegaard shows us that the Judge, who presents himself as one who has made a choice – who has chosen to choose himself – does not grasp the origin of this capacity. The self does not give birth to itself; is not born through an act of will. If it produces itself, this is only by actualising a latent self-relation. But the relation itself was created; it owes itself to a transcendent source. To step into the religious sphere is possible only insofar as the self relates to God. God was there before (ante) everything. The self achieves itself in this relation and thus it is free to be itself.

To remain in despair is to forgo this possibility. Despair happens when the self does not relate to itself properly as a self. Only the religious sphere is without misrelation. Misrelation, then, is irresoluteness: the inability to decide, to leap ahead. But what if one cannot become a self through an act of resolve? What if the resolve itself fails, or meets with no help from above? What if the self itself dissolves in an experience of the infinite? Then the relation which would allow one to leap out of despair is subject to an indefinite detour and it is as if God has a demonic double. This, perhaps, is the ‘doubling’ that only the doubter (the despairer) experiences: the bifurcation which makes the leap of faith, the saltus mortale (is this how you spell it?), a death leap. For the Christian, one might die to one’s old life and be reborn – dying is a passageway. But for the non-Christian?

A blog for Saturday night? But I’m too tired. I was going to write about Kierkegaard’s Stages on Life Way (I sense he is going to become as important here as Tarkovsky …) The most pleasant sight: Stages on Life’s Way on my office desk. There it is, a handsome paperback, deep blue with a line profile of Kierkegaard’s face on the front. London, 1993: that’s what I wrote on the title page. I want to write about the novella ‘Guilty/ Not Guilty’ that is part of this volume …

There are various kinds of melancholy in Kierkegaard. Melancholi is the word that, perhaps, characterises Repetition – it is not yet the religiously impelled Tungsind of Stages on Life’s Way. Do not translate Tungsind as depression. Well, like Repetition, ‘Guilty/ Not Guilty’, which is also known colloquially as Quidam’s Diary, after its ostensibly narrator, is framed as a psychological experiment – in this case, by Frater Taciturnus. There are various distancing effects – the diary itself is said to date from 1751, and to have been disovered in a trunk at the bottom of a lake. Furthermore, it comprises ‘morning’ entries – written one year after the events it reports, and ‘midnight’ entries, far more gloomy.

Just as with Repetition, this is a book about love, about the failure of love. But the failure, according to Quidam, arises out his religiosity. For Quidam, even if he is not religious yet, is struggling to be so – struggling, that is, with the Tungsind that, as Frater Taciturnus points out is ‘the condensed possibility that must be experienced through a crisis in order that he can become clear to himself in the religious’. Quidam, the Diarist, wonders whether or not he is guilty of torturing himself for the sake of a religious vocation from which marriage would have debarred him. But does he ever become religious? He wavers; he indulges himself; he does not struggle to reach the actuality of the religious life.

A crucial expression: Indesluttedhed, inclosing reserve. The full sentence from which I quoted above reads: ‘His inclosing reserve is eesentially a form of Tungsind, and his Tungsind in turn is the condensed possibility that must be experienced through a crisis in order that he can becomc clear to himself in the religious’ (427). This is what characterises the Diary itself – it leads nowhere; Quidam despairs, but despair does not carry him forward. It is as though he remains in the thunderstorm of Repetition – a thunderstorm which never ends even as it appears to bestow the future. Some would argue that the Diary is boring; I do not find it so. There is little drama here – or at least the drama is unresolved. But I like reading these pages in the same way as I enjoy the pages of the unexpurgated diaries of Anais Nin – a strange taste, I know, but like many of the books and films I like its turmoil, its movement in itself is such that it does not permit resolution.

Often I will lay a book like Blanchot’s The Last Man open in a room as though the room itself could read it – lay it there and come to it, read a few pages and then return later that day or the next. The same with the book translated as Waiting for Oblivion, although the small typeface makes it much less pleasurable to read. (On that subject – didn’t Kafka ask that his book be printed in a very large typeface? Think of some of the Calder editions of later Beckett – remember how marvellous those pages look, with a typeface so enormous that a piece of 1000 words is stretched over 20 pages.)

To remain in possibility: what Quidam evades is his guilt, which he cannot, according to Taciturnus, grasp through comprehension. His inclosing reserve has led him too far, but it has not yet led him far enough. He is suspended – he has not decided. Here I remember what Heidegger calls the Nothing which is encountered, if that is the right word, only in a kind of hovering or indecisiveness. You are unable to decide; you hover, exposed. Who are you? No one at all, or no one yet.

I love the books where one finds this shifting locus, this opening which has not coalesced into a self. I love the books in which an event does not happening – does not round itself off into an ending. For a long time, I kept a record of the books I read (I used to read a great deal). But then, in 1993, I found myself merely rereading; rather than read new books, I read and reread books like Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet – the same with Stig Dagerman’s A Burnt Child. In those years, when I was unemployed, or able to find only casual labour, I was able, for the first time, to appreciate Beckett’s Trilogy, and in particular The Unnameable. I am not writing this to retrace my autobiography (how boring!), but only to note, for myself, when a new kind of reading became necessary. I remember going to Denmark that year, and taking several volumes of Kierkegaard with me. Was it to prepare to apply for postgraduate study? It must have been then that I encountered Bataille and Blanchot for the first time, authors I have been rereading ever since.

Where was I? Quidam, Frater Taciturnus writes, is a fiction – a venture in experimental psychology. With the creation of Quidam, one can study ‘the normal in the aberration’ (398). The young man of Repetition was also said to be a fiction (C. C.’s) (contrary to what I wrote yesterday, he should not be assumed to be young man of ‘In Vino Veritas’, which is to say, real). Then Quidam, like the young man, is the fiction of a fiction – an experiment conducted by a heteronym. Why did this become necessary to Kierkegaard? Behind all this, there is the story of his own broken engagement which should be explored in detail (it remains mysterious, however). I will not try to solve anything today … it is already late, and there will be time, later, to bring myself once again into the strangeness of an oeuvre which struggles against itself, swarming, as if it was the author of Repetition and Stages on Life’s Way who was unable to decide to decide, or to bring himself into a decision and not just his heteronyms and his heteronym’s fictions. Kierkegaard’s irresoluteness – that’s what fascinates me.

Last night, I ended by writing of a repetition through which nothing is given back. Now I know that this repetition is there in Kierkegaard’s great oeuvre – it is as though the text is more irresolute than Kierkegaard will allow. A reading of Kierkegaard has begun to open itself to me. Doubtless, though, it will remain sheer possibility, and I, like Quidam, will accomplish nothing. Still, isn’t this the peculiar joy of blogging – of writing without responsibility? Of writing without having to condense what I write into a paper or a book? Blogging is writing’s drift, an irresoluteness without momentum. Remain in the thunderstorm, then. Tungsind is without issue; but writing’s melancholy is also writing’s joy.

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.

Notes written in the margin of John Lippitt’s Humour and Irony in Kierkegaard’s Thought:

Irony: to say the opposite of what you mean (Quintillian)? To oppose the inner to the outer (Kierkegaard)? The danger of irony is that one it can run away with you. You have to know what your position is – you have to be sure what it is you mean; only then you can ironise responsibly. You must have made an – inward – resolution. Thus Socrates, according to Plato’s Symposium, says the following ‘most ironically’:

Dear Alcibiades, it looks as though you are not stupid, if what you say about me is true and there really is in me some power which could made you a better man: you must be seeing something inconceivably beautiful in me, enormously superior to your good looks. If this is what you see and you want to exchange beauty for beauty, you mean to take a huge advantage of me: you are trying to get true beauty in exchange for seeming beauty – ‘gold for brass’.

Vlastos comments Socrates’s indirect message is as follows: ‘You must be stupid if you think I’m falling for a deal like that, in which you gain far more (edification from the man you take to be the wisest in Athens) than I do (the fleeting pleasures of sex).’ Lippitt comments in turn: ‘A vital part of Vlastos’s point here is that there is no will to mislead or deceive here at all on Socrates’ part. Rather, Alcibiades (and the reader along with him) has been left on his own to ‘put two and two together’ by himself. (141).

Kierkegaard:

Particularly in our age, irony must be commended. In our age, scientific scholarship has come into possession of such prodigious achievements that there must be something wrong somewhere; knowledge not only about the secrets of the human race but even about the secrets of God is offered for sale at such a bargain price today that it all looks very dubious. In our joy over the achievement in our age, we have forgotten than an achievement is worthless if it is not made one’s own. (Concept of Irony, 327)

One has to make it one’s own – once again, a kind of autonomy is at issue. Still, is there an experience of unmastered irony – the joy of losing one’s autonomy, of abandoning any claim to seriousness or responsibility? How to construct a bridge from this to the irresponsibility of literary or poetic speech? I’m too tired to do it tonight (what a copout) …

To go by another name – it is tempting, sometimes, to write under another name, relieving oneself of the burdens of an identity that has become onerous. Here, I think of Kierkegaard’s practice of indirect communication. It was necessary, he thought, as an author troubled by what he saw as an excess of reflection and irony in the age in which he lived, to publish many of his books under pseudonyms (the word heteronym is, I think, better, for there are many names, each of who indicates an attitude, a style of existing, a way of living and writing.)

These heteronyms would leave in the works they were supposed to have composed a ‘stinger’ that was supposed to stir the reader into a sense of the fragility and precariousness of their own existence. No doubt it was, for Kierkegaard, a question of communicating a Christian message, of leading his reflective and ironical readers to God, and his work, if we read his later overviews of his own creative endeavour, was intended to systematically expose the weaknesses of various ‘spheres of existence’.

But these books are readable by a non-Christian audience, which is to say, they communicate in a manner that is so indirect that the message never actually gets through. The ‘medium’ interposes itself; the fictional character Johannes the Seducer of the first half of Either/Or troubles the fictional young aesthete, A., who is supposed to have created him. He troubles us, too. But despite this, ‘The Seducer’s Diary’, the fictional story A. relates, is, with A.s’ essay ‘Crop Rotation’, the most attractive section this volume. B., Judge Vilhelm, whose fictional letters are gathered in the second half of Either/Or, is simply a windbag. And the Jutland Pastor, who has the ‘Last Word’, the ‘Ultimatum’, which is appended to the end of the second half of Kierkegaard’s book, seems to speak from another era.

What does it matter? The same point was made about Milton, who was able to describe the fires of hell in a much more exciting way than the splendours of heaven. There are always ‘minor’ ways of reading ‘major’ authors – or more precisely, we shouldn’t let the notions of ‘literature’, of the ‘canon’ or ‘culture’ distract us from the works themselves.

No doubt. But there is, perhaps, a deeper way of understanding the meaning of ‘medium’. Before or beyond Kierkegaard’s heteronyms and to the lives to which their names are linked, there is an indirect communication with respect to which it can no longer be a question of taking another name. This is a true heteronym – I am ‘other named’ as my writing reveals in its sonorities and rhythms, in its nuances and musicality, not another meaning, but the ‘other’ of meaning.

A book, and especially a literary book, is always more than a medium through which something might be communicated. It is also the body of words themselves in their resistance to mobilisation, that is, to the sense their author and their readers would discover in them. This is a writing that passes outside every attempt to enclose it, a writing that describes a line along the outside, un-naming me as I write.