Autopsia: Self, Death, and God after Kierkegaard and Derrida 9783110205237, 9783110191288

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Kierkegaard Studies Monograph Series 17

Kierkegaard Studies Edited on behalf of the

Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre by Niels Jørgen Cappelørn and Hermann Deuser

Monograph Series 17 Edited by Niels Jørgen Cappelørn

Walter de Gruyter · Berlin · New York

Marius Timmann Mjaaland

Autopsia Self, Death, and God after Kierkegaard and Derrida Translated from Norwegian by Brian McNeil

Walter de Gruyter · Berlin · New York

Kierkegaard Studies Edited on behalf of the Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre by Niels Jørgen Cappelørn and Hermann Deuser Monograph Series Volume 17 Edited by Niels Jørgen Cappelørn

앝 Printed on acid-free paper which falls within the guidelines of the ANSI 앪 to ensure permanence and durability.

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN 978-3-11-019128-8 ISSN 1434-2952 © Copyright 2008 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, D-10785 Berlin All rights reserved, including those of translation into foreign languages. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Printed in Germany Typesetting: OLD-Media, Neckarsteinach Cover design: Christopher Schneider, Berlin

For Jens Gunnar

Preface There are certain things that can be explained, and certain things that cannot be explained. This book will deal with the latter. It is definitely a book about certain things – for example, that the reader of this book, like the author, will die. If there is one thing about which we can both be certain, it is exactly this: that we will die. But if there is one thing we can both be uncertain about, it is precisely the same fact: that we will die. Death’s certainty leads out towards the uncertain, and death’s uncertainty leads us back to the absolute certainty of our own death. In one sense, it is impossible to think death, since death eludes our thinking. It eludes experience and rational explanation. And this forces us to take detours, to circle around and circumscribe that which is impossible (or the end of possibility), yet absolutely certain: that we will die. And this can be done: to think in circumscriptions. For death leaves traces behind: in the experience of a discontinuity, of a breach, of an absence – it is all over! – in the experience of the fact that human beings die. Where others mark a conclusion, we therefore mark a point of departure: at the graveside of a dead man. Let me be the first to admit that this is not a simple topic for an academic inquiry, not even an inquiry in the disciplines of philosophy and theology. This is because the genre of a philosophical inquiry demands distance and the possibility of ascertaining the correctness of its conclusions. But on the one hand is it not always possible to hold death at arm’s length; it cannot always be pushed out into the realm of the undefined and thus uncertain. Anyone who has ever stood beside a grave knows this. And on the other hand is it difficult to define death as an object of study; we are not in a position to ascertain the correctness of death as one might do with another definition or an experience (except perhaps the experience of certain dilemmas and problems that thought seems unable to solve). But it is precisely their insoluble character that makes these problems interesting to philosophers and theologians. In my view, these dilemmas are inherent in the

viii

Preface

first presuppositions of the sciences, in knowledge, in understanding, in writing and speaking, in the construction of meaning. Neither philosophy nor theology can pass these questions by, if these two disciplines are to continue to deserve the name of the first – and the last – of the sciences. After years of wandering along the Holzwege of Kierkegaard’s dilemmas, there are many persons and institutions whom I wish to thank. They have all left their traces on the present work. First of all, I should like to thank the Faculty of Theology at the University of Oslo and the entire academic staff there, as well as graduates and undergraduates who have contributed to this work by discussing the problems and asking difficult questions. In particular, I am grateful to Professor Svein Aage Christoffersen, who has discussed the text with me over the past few years. I also wish to thank the Søren Kierkegaard Research Center in Copenhagen and its Director, Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, for the fruitful six months I was able to spend there, with many excellent discussions. Similarly, I am grateful to the department of philosophy of religion at the University of Frankfurt, under Professor Hermann Deuser, for research seminars as well as other opportunities for a critical debate about Kierkegaard’s texts. Finally, I ought to thank all the members of the Nordberg School for friendship and for academic debates on the highest level. On the institutional level, I have many good reasons to thank the Norwegian Research Council, which has financed this work, and the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), which funded a year of research in Heidelberg. I am also grateful to the Fund for DanishNorwegian Collaboration, which has given me economic support for a number of journeys to Copenhagen. I should also like to thank the IPT connected to the University of Montpellier for treating me so kindly while I was researching there in the summer of 2004. There are many people who have meant a lot to me in the course of writing this book, but only a few can be mentioned with warm thanks here: Alastair Hannay and Jon Stewart for reading my text and for academic discussions; Egil A. Wyller, Asbjørn Aarnes, and Per Lønning for drawing my attention to the one and the other; Halvor Moxnes, Rune Slagstad, Thor Arvid Dyrerud, Ådne Njå, Marianne Kartzow, Brynjulv Norheim, Espen Dahl, Synnøve Heggem, and Thorbjørn Geirbo for discussions and friendship – and that incorrigible apocalypticist, Joar Haga, for reading through my text, for his objections, for our conversations, and for what the prophet Isaiah calls “a feast of fat things, a feast of wine on the lees.” My mother Jorun, my sisters

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Marianne and Siri, my brother Svein, and the rest of my family deserve thanks for solid support and encouragement; thanks to Jonas, Maria, and Tim for their great patience and for the indescribable joy they bring to my life; and to Angela for deep love, a great and patient heart, and an academic acuteness which is quite exceptional. Finally, I wish to thank my father, Jens Gunnar Mjaaland, who awakened my interest in philosophy and theology and who discussed Kierkegaard with me long before this book began to take shape. I dedicate to him this study of death, self and God, in love and gratitude, and with a living hope that we will meet again. Autopsia. The title may doubtless appear puzzling, since autopsy is most commonly known as a pathological investigation of the dead body – or a psychological analysis of the single individual. And this is a book about death, it is a book about the self, but it is also a term with a twist, and with different layers. Hence, I owe the reader an explanation. The word autopsia is Greek in form and origin and means quite simply “self-view.” Such a title may perhaps seem superfluous, since the same “self” returns in the subtitle, only with “death” following it. But perhaps it is not superfluous, precisely because death follows it. For death wedges itself in between self and self, between looking and looking, as a kind of double vision or ambivalence. For the self, death is definitively – but decisively – other, just as God is definitively – but decisively – other. The reader must judge whether this explanation is less puzzling than the title itself – and it is surely not always the cleverest person who is the first to solve the puzzle. For what if the meaning of the puzzle was that it was not meant to be solved, that it too was one of those things which are not to be explained? Whatever the relation between these things may be, when we speak of death and self-view, the essential point is precisely an ambivalence of this kind. Marius Timmann Mjaaland Chicago, Yom Kippur, September 22, 2007

Table of Contents Preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

vii

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

1

I.

Prolegomena: Discourse on Method. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

7

§ 1 Point of View: Derrida on Death and Difference . . . .

9

§ 2 Descartes on Method and Rationality . . . . . . . . . . . . .

15

§ 3 The Hegelian Method of Conceptual Aufhebung . . .

19

§ 4 Kierkegaard’s Doubt . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

23

§ 5 Unstable Signs: Derrida Detects Traces of Death in Hegel’s Semiology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

29

§ 6 The Rigor of Deconstruction: Two Texts and the Space In-Between . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

38

§ 7 Parallelogram: Kierkegaard # Derrida . . . . . . . . . . . . .

44

II. Secrets of the Self: Derrida on Madness, Death, and God

51

§ 8 Foucault on Madness, Cogito, and the History of the Self . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

54

§ 9 Splitting up the Cartesian Self from Within . . . . . . .

57

§ 10 Aporias of Death. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

66

§ 11 Khôra . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

71

§ 12 Philosophical Apocalypse . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

76

§ 13 The Two Sources: Faith and Knowledge . . . . . . . . . .

80

§ 14 Secrets of the Self and of the Other . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

83

III. Seven Perspectives on Death . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

89

§ 15 The Appropriation of Death as Problem and Aporia

91

§ 16 Death and Ontology: Kierkegaard vs. Heidegger . . .

99

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§ 17 Violence and the Death of the Other: Levinas, Kierkegaard, and Derrida . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

107

§ 18 The Terror of Sacrifice: Abraham in Late Modernity

115

§ 19 Death, Love, and the Foundations of Ethics . . . . . . .

119

§ 20 Disturbing Enigma: Levinas and Kierkegaard on the Other Side of Truth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

125

§ 21 Autopsy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

131

IV. Alterity and Autopsia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

135

§ 22 The Genre Conflict Between Psychology and Edification . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

138

§ 23 Lazarus and the Platonic Cave . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

151

§ 24 A.A: The Synthesis of the Self . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

155

§ 25 The Rupture in the Spirit. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

162

§ 26 Self-Contradictions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

168

§ 27 In the Name . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

179

§ 28 X . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

186

Dialectics of Darkness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

191

§ 29 Double Dialectics of Despair . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

192

§ 30 The Rhetorical Abyss of a “Sickness unto Death”. .

199

§ 31 Despair, Causality, Responsibility, and Origin . . . . .

205

§ 32 The Hypothesis “God”. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

208

§ 33 Doubt and Despair . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

212

§ 34 An Excess of Possibility . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

219

§ 35 The Closure and Repetition of Metaphysics . . . . . . .

230

VI. The Thanatology of the Spirit . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

241

§ 36 For or Against Hegel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

244

§ 37 The Eternal Self and the Difference of Despair . . . .

252

§ 38 Eternity Revisited . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

259

§ 39 Hypotheses. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

266

§ 40 Phänomenologie des Geistestodes (Demonic Double Game) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

272

V.

Table of Contents

xiii

§ 41 A Cross for the Speculation. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

277

§ 42 Alteropsia. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

291

VII. Hidden Ground: Holy Ground. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

295

§ 43 Kierkegaard: The Hidden God. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . § 44 Derrida: I Call Myself God. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

298 304

§ 45 Sin, Aporia, and Revelation in The Sickness unto Death . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

311

§ 46 Derrida vs. Kierkegaard on Sovereignty and Unconditional Gift. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . § 47 Derrida on Religion Without Religion . . . . . . . . . . .

318 322

§ 48 Kierkegaard on the Abyss and the Source . . . . . . . . § 49 Metaphysics Revisited . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

328 331

In the Final Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

337

Abbreviations. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

341

Bibliography. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

343

Index of Names and Subjects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

355

Introduction

Autopsia is an investigation of the relation between self and other. The other, should initially be taken in its most general sense, covering conceptual otherness, ethical otherness, religious otherness – but also in its most radical sense, as that which perpetually evades and disturbs human rationality and, as such, also any rationality based on the self. Such a passion for the other, as it occurs in death, in God, in paradox, in faith, in the absurd, in insanity, in aporias, in despair, and even in the self, establishes the crucial nexus and sufficient justification for discussing the philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard and Jacques Derrida in one work, thoroughly and at length. This is not primarily a comparative study, though; it is rather an investigation of certain philosophical problems, connected to the self, to death, and to God, taking Derrida’s and Kierkegaard’s texts as a point of departure.1 Thus the after in the subtitle: my purpose has not only been to give an account of certain opinions advocated by Derrida and Kierkegaard respectively; but also to develop a critical theory of how to reflect upon self, death, and God in the traces left in writing by the two deceased philosophers. Writing is a key word, then, because their way of thinking is intrinsically bound to writing, to written texts, to how we may deal with experiences and phenomena in scientific and literary texts. Hence, my methodical deliberations will focus on the question of how the detailed exegesis of texts lays the foundation for our own thinking. The text which is primarily in focus in my investigation is very short, in fact only two pages. It is the passage A.A at the beginning of Sygdommen til Døden (1849), 2 which is subjected to a detailed analysis in 1

2

For a comparative study of Kierkegaard and Derrida, see the thorough and passionate monograph by Tilman Beyrich Ist Glauben wiederholbar? Derrida liest Kierkegaard (Kierkegaard Studies: Monograph Series vol. 6), Berlin / New York: Walter de Gruyter 2001. All references to and quotations from the Sickness unto Death (hereafter: SUD) refer first to the page numbers in vol. 11 of Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter, Copenhagen:

2

Introduction

Chapter Four of the present inquiry. It is a passage on the self, even a theory of the self, but a theory pushing the self to its limits, to the point where it breaks down in despair – because of the other, because of a disturbing aporia of despair leaving any self ill at ease with itself and with the world. The title of my inquiry gives a signal about how death is inscribed into any self-reflection, as deeply intertwined with the problem of self. This signifies more specifically what I understand by the term autopsy or Greek “autopsia”: a continuous reflection on the self, facing the interruption of death and the problem of despair. The six other chapters, surrounding the problem of “Alterity and Autopsia” in Chapter Four, have been organized like skins around the “core of the onion” (cf. Ibsen, Peer Gynt). In Chapter Three and Chapter Five respectively, I will discuss the problems of death and despair: First, the problem of death as it occupies not only Kierkegaard but also Heidegger, Levinas, and Derrida. Taking the short discourse “At a Graveside” (1845) and the book on Abraham’s sacrifice, Fear and Trembling (1843), as a double point of departure, I follow the modern ars moriendi through one and a half centuries of reflections on death. Second, in the chapter on despair (Chapter Five), on this abyssal concept or non-concept “Sygdommen til Døden,” I rather go the other way around, by applying some analytical tools in Derrida’s thought which I find very helpful for understanding Kierkegaard and the far-reaching consequences of his thinking. In fact, this approach shows how Kierkegaard even transcends the limits of the Christian tradition, which he so eagerly defends in the name of his pseudonym Anti-Climacus. Hence, the observant reader will discover a reciprocal interest leading from Kierkegaard to Derrida and back, but the guidGad 2006, (hereafter: SKS 11), and then to the English translation in Kierkegaard’s Writings, tr. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press 1983, thus establishing a pattern for all the published writings of Kierkegaard up to vol. 11 of SKS. References to all the other works in English also follow the list of abbreviations in the bibliography. Whenever “cf.” occurs before the English title, the translation of Kierkegaard has been modified; when not, the standard translation in Kierkegaard’s Writings has been used without modification. For the Danish edition of the published works from 1850 onwards, I refer to the 3rd ed. of Samlede Værker, ed. by A. B. Drachmann, J. L. Heiberg, H. O. Lange, and Peter P. Rohde, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1962-64 (hereafter: SV3). All references to the journals are quoted and translated directly from the original version of Papirer (hereafter: Pap.). In these introductory remarks I refer to Kierkegaard as author of all the texts, but I differentiate this with regard to his pseudonyms in my textual analysis in Chapter III-VII. For more detailed information about the various works, see the bibliography.

Introduction

3

ing principle of our investigation is connected to the topics already mentioned. In the chapters preceding and following these, I am predominantly occupied with questions of rationality, i. e., what rational basis we can develop by means of Derrida and Kierkegaard respectively for philosophizing on problems that, taken strictly, evade rational certainty and human knowledge. In Chapter Two, I analyze some of Derrida’s essays in order to give a systematic account of his quite unsystematic way of thinking, often called deconstruction. Deconstruction is not one thing, and certainly not one method, but nevertheless there are striking similarities in the way Derrida approaches texts and basic phenomenological questions, such as the impact of death on thinking, the problem of the cogito when faced with the possibility of madness, and the question of how we relate texts, passions and thoughts to that all-encompassing possibility called “God.” Chapter Six, following the chapter on despair, also has a theoretical purpose, but one concerning Kierkegaard’s rationality in his critical dependence on Hegel. This is a question often heatedly debated in the secondary literature, but my conviction is that the Derridean parallel may open up quite new perspectives even on that old and tense debate. Chapter One and Chapter Seven are not as closely connected as the other chapters surrounding Chapter Four, but still there is a line going from the discourse on method and rationality in the first chapter, all the way through the five subsequent chapters, to the discourse on how we may reflect philosophically upon the concept of God, without forgetting that this concept belongs to those things which we cannot master intellectually, i. e., cannot grasp or understand in a strictly rational sense. Autopsia can in fact be read as a continuous meditatio mortis. Although only Chapter Three deals with death, strictly speaking, I have there applied no less than seven perspectives on death, and these can be regarded as a key to understanding the entire structure of the book: appropriation, ontology, alterity, self, dialectic, truth – and autopsy (self-view). The seven perspectives give us the framework for a differentiated analysis of the two texts “At a Graveside” and Fear and Trembling in relation to Heidegger, Levinas, and Derrida. At the same time, however, these seven perspectives also provide the basis for the division of the inquiry into seven chapters, and for the further division of each chapter into seven paragraphs. Paradoxically enough, it is precisely because death and the “sickness unto death” belong to the great darkness in a human person,

4

Introduction

and thereby elude any unambiguous explanation and systematic rationalization, that I have found it necessary to give my inquiry an articulation and structure which are as systematically rigorous as the material allows. The articulation into seven chapters and forty-nine paragraphs is established as a scheme or raster for this investigation. A systematic structure of this kind may seem excessively rigorous in an inquiry with such an indefinable character, and it would of course have been possible per se to organize the whole work differently. The structure is arbitrary; and yet it has taken on a very precise function in this context. I have organized the book in this way because I have sensed that it is only through a systematically rigorous analysis that we can do justice to the complex optics of the problems. Thus, the seven various perspectives have taken on a decisive role in helping me hold fast to the complexity and the interplay between rationality and counter-rationality which find expression in thinking about death and the “sickness unto death.” The theme of this inquiry also creates its greatest challenge: viz., to write about certain problems for thought – death, “sickness unto death,” despair, insanity, the other, God – which both Derrida and Kierkegaard analyze on the presupposition that they elude a distanced, academic analysis. Both the texts themselves and the specific character of the problems suggest a double strategy: (i) a systematic analysis of the texts, but (ii) with a particular focus on those aspects of the text which elude a consistent and systematic analysis. The analysis of broken texts demands no less analytic rigor than the analysis of systematic and stable texts; indeed, the demand for rigor grows in proportion to the complexity and instability in the texts. Just as the texts demand analytical and logical rigor, the problems which occupy us demand a constant alertness to those aspects of the problems which elude conceptual definition and force the collapse of one particular concept or idea about the self, thereby shattering the structures we have been able to point out in the systematic analysis. The focus of this inquiry, for example, on the problems of death and the sickness unto death, will repeatedly disturb and break up the systematic textual analysis. This duality becomes clearly visible in the pivotal Chapter Four, “Alterity and Autopsia”: the systematically constructed anthropology in the introductory chapter A.A of The Sickness unto Death clashes with a disturbing element which rebounds on the construction of the anthropology and makes the model unstable and contradictory. In this case, one cannot make a clear distinction between content and

Introduction

5

form, between the problem which is being discussed and the way in which the problem shatters language from within. Thus, there are some aspects to these problems which rebound both on Kierkegaard’s text and on our analysis, breaking up the systematic structure of the treatise and the logical grip of the analysis. In this context, however, our methodological challenges are not to be understood merely as a necessary evil. On the contrary, they have played a central role in the formulation of the problems discussed. The inquiry takes its point of departure in a number of topoi to which late-modern philosophy has devoted considerable attention, especially as we find it in Derrida’s texts, viz., thinking death, the limit drawn between madness and rational thinking, the experience of aporias; and the relationship between philosophy and religion, i. e., the possibility and impossibility of conceiving “God” and relating to God as the other. Finally, to address the question of discipline, this is through and through a philosophical investigation, according to its topic, method, and rationality. But it is a philosophical work dealing with questions which today are sometimes considered to go beyond philosophy, or even to be something other than philosophy, e. g., psychology, religion, literature, rhetoric, and theology. Accordingly, we have not allowed the inquiry to become disciplined by certain strict borders sometimes given to the discipline of philosophy, concerning its form as well as its content. Still, it is unquestionably a philosophical inquiry, even though it sometimes questions the foundations of philosophy itself – if there still is such a thing as philosophy itself. To formulate some problems, as we have done here, is a way not only to comprehend, but also to anticipate the text. Hence, the problem functions as a way in, a gate or opening into complex realities that are to be the object of a theoretical analysis. At the same time, however, the problem is a way out – a loophole to which one can retreat from the insoluble element of the problem, from the experiences, difficulties, and aporias, and look at the dilemma from a safe distance. Both are necessary; but it is also necessary to point out that this is what we are doing, since the entire inquiry is concerned with certain things that cannot be explained.

I. Prolegomena: Discourse on Method

Je ne philosophe que dans la terreur, mais la terreur avouée, d’être fou. Jacques Derrida

8

I. Prolegomena: Discourse on Method

Many bitter fights have been fought about the question “who is right”: the modernists or the postmodernists. Jacques Derrida has in these discussions alternately been hailed and despised for being a “postmodern thinker” or even the postmodernist par excellence. For several reasons, however, I find this description somewhat problematic (even if Derrida himself is not in the least to blame for it). When such an attribution is problematic, it is not primarily because the terms “postmodern” and “postmodernism” were coined a decade after Derrida had written his most epochal texts about deconstruction, différance, and textual theory1 – for these terms might well have been appropriate descriptions of his writings anyhow – but because his philosophical project has such deep roots in the entire epoch which begins with Descartes: a critical examination of the presuppositions, language, and method of philosophical discourse. Besides this, the claim is dubious because it often presupposes that one can draw a clear boundary line between modernism and postmodernism, where “modernism” stands for a continued attempt to achieve clarity, meaning, and interconnection, and “postmodernism” “dissolves meaning to such an extent that it becomes difficult to maintain it as a position.” 2 Presumably, it is the polyvalence and indeterminacy that more committed modern scholars find it difficult to relate to; but this is a poor argument for excluding certain thinkers from the category of modernity. The attempts to expel “postmodernism” and deconstruction from modernity, as if this involved a paradigm shift, seem to be rather less appropriate.3 Given these reservations concerning the label “postmodern,” Derrida can nevertheless aptly be called a postmodern thinker, if one take into account how his philosophy has functioned as a catalyst for the entire postmodern departure. Still, I prefer in this context to refrain from any attempt to draw a clear line between modern and postmodern and stick to the more general description of the situation as “late modern,” since this captures the tensions that can be seen within 1

2

3

Cf. Jean-François Lyotard The Postmodern Condition (Orig. La condition postmoderne: rapport sur le savoir (1979)), tr. by Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi, Manchester: Manchester University Press 1984. On ambivalence and instability, cf. pp. 53-60. Cf. Jan Inge Sørbø “Postkritisk hermeneutikk: Rekonstruksjon eller dekonstruksjon?” in Tegn, tekst og tolk. Teologisk hermeneutikk i fortid og nåtid, ed. by JanOlav Henriksen, Oslo: Universitetsforlaget 1994, p. 262. This, for example, is what Habermas does in his critique of Derrida, although he does not criticize him for being a “postmodernist”: cf. Jürgen Habermas Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag 1985, pp. 191-218.

§ 1 Point of View: Derrida on Death and Difference

9

modern rationality. In a late modern situation, Derrida can be seen as the spokesman for a radicalization of the modern project itself, originating from a problem in phenomenology and philosophy of language, viz. the question of the extent to which the meaning of texts, and indeed meaning in general, is born of the presence and intention of the subject, or whether it is not rather derived from a distinction between presence and absence over which the subject has no control. This first chapter contains a discussion of questions traditionally belonging to the prolegomena, i. e. concerning method and rationality. After a brief presentation of Derrida’s doubt on the foundations of modern rationality, I go back to the “father of doubt” (Descartes) and the “master of dialectics” (Hegel) in order to sketch the tradition of modern rationality, as well as the continuous doubt on this rationality following the modern tradition from its very beginning. Kierkegaard gives the question of doubt some characteristic twists with reference to Descartes and Hegel in an unpublished work from 1843, and the Kierkegaardian point of view leads us back to Derrida and his deconstructive reading of Hegel in “Le puits et le pyramide.”4 I will take this essay by Derrida as an opportunity to outline my own point of view on the matters of method and rationality in late modern philosophy, and finally discuss the relationship between Kierkegaard and Derrida through the optical lens of a parallelogram. That will serve as our discours de la méthode – and thus clarify some presuppositions for the continuous reflection on doubt, method, and rationality running through the entire study.

§ 1 Point of View: Derrida on Death and Difference With his point of departure in a linguistic-philosophical skepticism, Derrida identifies the problematic aspects of some monolithic traits in modernism, certain ideas about logical connections, about the construction of meaning in general, about intentionality, the criteria of truth, demands for consistency, definitions of the distinction between meaning and nonsense, between the signifier (Fr. signifiant) and the signified (Fr. signifié), between writing and speech, etc. He sees these 4

Jacques Derrida “Le puits et le pyramide” in Marges de la philosophie, Paris: Éditions de minuit 1972, pp. 79-128. English translation: “The Pit and the Pyramid” in Margins of Philosophy, tr. by Alan Bass, Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1984, pp. 69-108.

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I. Prolegomena: Discourse on Method

as constantly recurring themes throughout this epoch – and they have been taken over to a significant extent from earlier epochs. However, this skepticism is expressed from the interior of modernism, as an identification of problems from within, above all in the critique of the logocentricity of western philosophy. This tends to be followed by the admission by Derrida himself that he belongs to the same logos and the same philosophical tradition. Even though he questions some of its presuppositions, he has no illusions of inventing a point of view outside of or prior to the philosophical, i. e. even metaphysical, tradition he belongs to. From time to time, Derrida is accused of a self-centered relativism, perhaps especially in an ethical and political context. 5 One reason for this accusation is that Derrida points to a chronic indeterminacy in philosophy. It is claimed that his thinking is not given any clear normative direction, and ends up as a non-binding “game.” In Derrida’s philosophy, an important role is played by the game of language, which often wrestles with an indeterminate presupposition or aporia. But this is not an abolition of responsibility; rather, it is another way of establishing responsibility.6 What is involved is a broken responsibility which is not unambiguous, precisely because the situation to which it must relate is complex (at any rate, if one must take into account the fact that the responsibility concerns persons who are otherwise and thus very different from oneself). For it is not only the intention that is ethically relevant; it is also the indeterminate element in every ethical situation that makes the actor absolutely responsible. Transferred to texts, it is not only the supposed intention that makes a text meaningful, but also the indeterminate or inexplicable element in the text that opens up a space for interpretation. This is why I believe that Andrew Cotrufello makes a good point when he describes as follows the relationship between Derrida and two of his foremost critics: Despite evidence to the contrary, Habermas, Gadamer and their followers insist that deconstruction implies an affirmation of indeterminacy and thus the complete inability to make political judgments. These critics argue for a politics based on an ideal of consen5

6

Cf. e. g. Graham Ward “Questioning God” in Questioning God, ed. by John D. Caputo, Mark Dooley, and Michael J. Scanlon, Bloomigton / Indianapolis: Indiana University Press 2001, pp. 274-287. For example, Derrida can see death as the indefinable origin of a responsible self: “For it is indeed a matter of care, a ‘keeping-vigil-for,’ a solicitude for death that constitutes the relation to self of that which, in existence, relates to oneself” (Jacques Derrida The Gift of Death, tr. by David Willis, Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1995, p. 14).

§ 1 Point of View: Derrida on Death and Difference

11

sus, and they take to task philosophers such as Derrida who do not share their consensus that consensus is a goal that no one needs to be coerced to accept. By calling nearly every position substantively different from his own a ‘performative contradiction,’ Habermas exhibits the very sort of normative violence that deconstruction questions.7

In Derrida’s texts, we find a particularly clear polemic thrust against the anti-metaphysical/post-metaphysical thinking in various forms of logical and structuralist positivism. By means of a few simple analytic procedures, he attempts to show how the criticism of metaphysics adopts an understanding of language and signs and of intentionality in the relationship between language and writing precisely from that “metaphysics” which this criticism thinks it does not need.8 Derrida therefore translates and develops Heidegger’s “destruction” of metaphysics by means of a “de-construction” – not only of metaphysics, but also of structuralism and phenomenology, and especially of their understanding and construction of truth.9 7

8

9

Andrew Cotrufello “Jacques Derrida” in Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. by Edward Craig, vol. 2, London: Routledge 1998, p. 899. In his critique of Derrida (and of every attempt to make Derrida’s philosophy a starting point for a reading of Kierkegaard), Eivind Tjønneland pays particular attention to the intentionality of texts: see Ironi som symptom. En kritisk studie av Søren Kierkegaards “Om Begrebet Ironi,” Bergen: University of Bergen 1999, pp. 3-4 (cf. also the German ed. Ironie als Symptom: eine kritische Auseinandersetzung mit Søren Kierkegaards Über den Begriff der Ironie, Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang 2004, pp. 6-7). He devotes one and a half pages to a critique of Derrida’s “economy of différance” and concludes that it cannot be employed in his analysis, since it “makes it impossible to talk about intentions in a text” and to distinguish between dialectic and unconscious contradictions in the text. He is certainly right about the potential for employing Derrida’s “economy of différance” in his own analysis, and I can sympathize with the critique of différance as an ironic analytical instrument within American deconstructionism. He is however wrong in his general criticism of a lack of intentionality in Derrida. Derrida’s point is not to reject the intentionality of texts per se, but to call into question the idea that the author’s intention is the genesis of meaning. In his essay “Le puits et le pyramide” (to which I shall return shortly), Derrida does exactly this; he makes an explicit distinction between the intended Aufhebung of contradictions by dialectic and some unintended internal contradictions in Hegel’s Enzyklopädie. Hence, there is no lack of intentionality, but a critique of naïve and undifferentiated understanding of what this intentionality refers to, e. g. the “true” or “authentic” intention of the author. Accordingly, when Tjønneland writes that it “may seem arrogant to dismiss so briefly a thinker of Derrida’s stature,” I am once again inclined to agree with him – especially when the critique is so extraordinarily undifferentiated. “The ‘rationality’ – but one ought perhaps to abandon this word, for the reason which will appear at the end of the present sentence – which commands writing, when this is enlarged and radicalized in this way, has no longer come forth from a logos, and it inaugurates the destruction – not the demolition, but the de-sedimentation, the

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I. Prolegomena: Discourse on Method

In one sense, this is a very weak position: Derrida gives way to metaphysics, and he sees the necessity of speaking the dialect of metaphysics and of studying in detail the texts of metaphysics and the history of philosophy, for only this kind of detailed study of the texts allows him to demonstrate an inherent contradiction in the text or a difference which the author appears to have overlooked, or else has wished to neutralize in a consistent and coherent meaning. Taking his point of departure in such a detailed study of the texts, Derrida then lets the texts wrestle with a “difference” which he claims is antecedent to the presence, is more fundamental than the author’s intention, and more original than the structuralist distinction between the signifier and the signified.10 He attempts in one way or another to open up the possibility of different interpretations of one and the same text, by breaking open from within the clôture (“closure”) of the text around one specific meaning. Paradoxically enough, this means that Derrida can employ fewer reservations than philosophers with a more modernistic attitude, when he quotes texts about metaphysics and discusses metaphysical problems. We can therefore say that metaphysics makes a comeback within Derrida’s deconstruction, inter alia through his affirmation that metaphysics was never completely absent, not even in the modernistic critique of metaphysics. However, the understanding and the reading of texts about metaphysics have changed. Derrida describes a philosophical situation in which everything is changing. This is why metaphysics makes its comeback in the form of a repetition of metaphysical problems; but this repetition itself always contains a difference (différence), a dislocation, and a deferral (différance) of the meaning of the text. Derrida emphasizes that philosophical texts are also literary texts. Accordingly, he focuses particularly on the rhetorical and literary qualities of the texts, and especially on how metaphors, antitheses, and structures in the text help in the construction of meaning.11 For all we know, these may be strategies which the author has employed

10 11

de-construction – of all those meanings which have their source in the meaning of logos, especially the meaning of truth” (Jacques Derrida De la grammatologie, Paris: Éditions de minuit 1967, p. 21). Translator’s note: When not indicated otherwise, all translations from French, Norwegian, Danish, and German editions are made by the translator, Brian McNeil. Cf. Derrida De la grammatologie, pp. 89-95. Cf. e. g. the essay “La mythologie blanche” in Jacques Derrida Marges de la philosophie, Paris: Éditions de minuit 1972, pp. 247-324.

§ 1 Point of View: Derrida on Death and Difference

13

in order to stabilize the meaning of the text and make it unambiguous and consistent. But unlike the structuralists, Derrida is concerned to trace lacunae in the text which have clearly escaped the author’s notice, and which sometimes contradict the explicit intention or conclusion of the text. Hence, Derrida takes a particular interest in inherent contradictions in the text which break up from within the construction of meaning. This strategy of reading, in the encounter with philosophical, literary, psychological, legal, and religious texts, is generated by the hypothesis that meaning in general cannot be derived from an original presence in the form of the intention of the subject/author, but is rather born of an original trace or an original difference: The unheard-of difference between the apparaissant [that which appears] and the apparaître [the event of appearing] is the condition of all the other differences, of all the other traces, and it is already a trace. Accordingly, this latter concept is absolutely and de jure ‘antecedent’ both to every physiological problem connected with the nature of the organic trace left on the brain, and to every metaphysical problem connected with the meaning of that absolute presence whose trace we must decipher. In reality, the trace is the absolute origin of meaning in general. Once again, this amounts to the affirmation that there is no absolute origin of meaning in general. The trace is the différance [deferral] which opens up the apparaître and the signification.12

The trace is described as the absolute origin of meaning in general, and this means that there is no determinate origin of meaning in general. Derrida claims that the trace is antecedent to the meaning as the difference which opens up meaning in general, but which cannot itself be defined. If the meaning is derived from the trace in every case, it follows that writing bestows meaning thanks to an absence – the absence of a definitive meaning and of an unquestionable presence. In language, there is a continuous interplay – taking the form of a continuous discontinuity – between presence and absence, between “is” and “was,” as well as between “is to come” and “could have been.” Given our purpose to examine Kierkegaard’s texts, we must ask whether Derrida’s deconstruction of intention and presence results in a weak subject, as long as the subject of the text is not seen as the absolute master over his choices and over the meaning these express. Derrida does question the traditional position of the subject, and hence he weakens the modern understanding of subjectivity. On the other hand, the reader (“that single individual”) plays a significant and even more independent role in interpreting texts deconstructively. Like Descartes’ subject, it can be said to receive its strength and its absolute greatness by means of self-doubt, by means of the insight into its own 12

Derrida De la grammatologie, p. 95.

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I. Prolegomena: Discourse on Method

inadequacy and mortality.13 Still, this is exactly the point were Derrida gives a different impression of the Cartesian cogito: The question about truth is always at the same time a question about the subject’s own lack of truth and limitation. The limitation of the subject, like the limitation of reason and of explanation, is not something Derrida wishes to exclude from thinking; on the contrary, he seeks to reflect on these boundaries too, thereby drawing them into thinking, into the text. This applies to death as a boundary, as well as to the boundary of insanity, i. e. of insanity as a boundary on the intellect. And this applies in fact to every otherness of this kind, which is not born of reason itself. When the texts wrestle with an otherness which cannot be explained within a self-justifying rationality, a foreign element and an ambiguity enters the text, which the interpreting subject cannot control, and indeed which this subject ought not to be able to control. We find therefore in Derrida an interesting point of view for a latemodern reading of Søren Kierkegaard’s texts. One could of course also take one’s point of departure in Gadamer’s hermeneutics or in analytical philosophy, but their primary demand for consensus (in the case of Gadamer) or for consistency (in the case of analytical philosophy) reveals a monolithic tendency which makes them less interesting as a starting point for reading Kierkegaard. In deconstruction, we find a fragmentation of thinking, and a calling into question of the boundaries, which can accommodate paradoxes, the problem of repetition, and an explicit resistance to any system of thought. That is why I see this as a constructive avenue of approach to texts of Kierkegaard which deal with death, with the self, and with the other – with a clear attack on certain monolithic tendencies in modernity. In other words, I believe that one can see some common traits in Kierkegaard and Derrida which define the point of departure for the present study. Derrida could be said to define a philosophical counterpart to Kierkegaard in contemporary philosophy, both with regard to the question of how one can approach the texts and as a point of reference for a critical view of modern rationality within modernity. My interest in the relation between Kierkegaard and Derrida further embraces the contents of what they write, since it will be seen that the two authors take up many of the same questions, even if in a somewhat different way. I shall therefore examine in greater detail the relationship between the two philosophers in this first chapter, which consists of the prolegomena to the work, analyzing the specific traits of their method 13

Cf. Derrida Marges de la philosophie, pp. 142-164.

§ 2 Descartes on Method and Rationality

15

and rationality. Some of these are even taken up as guidelines for my own investigation. I begin by presenting briefly two philosophical positions which are important both for Kierkegaard and for Derrida, viz. the Cartesian doubt, which signals the beginning of the modern epoch, and Hegel’s dialectic system and method, which is most certainly one of the high points in the epoch. I will then show how Kierkegaard employs the philosophical doubt as a protest against the Hegelian Aufhebung in the fragment De omnibus dubitandum est (1843). This is followed by two paragraphs in which I discuss methodic problems posed in Derrida’s philosophy, with particular emphasis on a text about Hegel’s semiology. Derrida discusses how death and the machine evade the movement of Aufhebung and thus create a chronic resistance and a revolt within the Hegelian dialectic. Finally, I wish to specify the function that Derrida’s thinking has in the framework of the present book. I place Kierkegaard’s and Derrida’s texts within what I call the optics of a “parallelogram” (I return below to the meaning of this term). I conclude this last paragraph with a brief overview of current Kierkegaard research from a Scandinavian perspective. Derrida’s philosophy provides the point of view for the presentation of several of the most central topics in this book, topics that are also discussed by Kierkegaard. In this way, a mutual complementarity is established between Kierkegaard and Derrida. Despite the anachronistic or anachronous element in such a complementarity, the result is a shared philosophical discourse which brings Kierkegaard’s texts into a late-modern context in which they once again prove to be surprisingly relevant.

§ 2 Descartes on Method and Rationality Early in the seventeenth century, a work was published which marks the definitive breakthrough of modernity, the explicit desire for discontinuity with what went before: Descartes’ brief essay Discours de la méthode (1637), in which he criticizes the methodology – or rather, the lack of critical reflection on the question of method – which characterized philosophy throughout the entire middle ages.14 It took for granted one particular understanding of God, the world, and the hu14

Cf. René Descartes Discours de la méthode (1637) in Œuvres Philosophique, vol. 1, ed. by Ferdinand Alquié, Paris: Éditions Garnier Frères 1967, p. 584.

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man person, and organized all its thinking in the light of these presuppositions. This is most obvious in scholasticism, where the tiniest details in the old worldview are the object of academic disputations, but no question is raised about the actual foundations of the order of things. In his reading of scholastic texts, Descartes encounters this given order of things, and finds that it does not in the least correspond to the way in which he himself understands reality. He is driven out into uncertainty and into doubt about the most elementary things.15 The understanding of the “natural” order of things is about to enter a crisis which has significant epistemological, ontological, and methodological consequences for Descartes’ thinking and thus for philosophy and religion in the entire modern era. The crisis comes to the fore in the Cartesian doubt: Descartes attempts to doubt everything, even the most basic foundations of philosophy, the presuppositions of his own thinking – whether God exists, whether he himself exists, whether he is mad, etc. Descartes describes how he moved in his doubt towards the abyss, towards total chaos, i. e. the possibility that both his sense-perception and his thinking are an illusion, a fraud, that all his thoughts are accidental and fallible like a dream, and that there is thus no certain basis for knowledge, discourse, or method. But despite (or maybe rather because of) his doubt, he arrives at the famous insight which he believes cannot be doubted, viz. the fact that he thinks, that he is present and accountable in his own thinking: But immediately after this, I noticed that while I wanted thus to think that everything was false, it must necessarily be the case that I – who was thinking this – must be something; and, noticing that this truth: I think, therefore I am, was so solid and well assured that even the most extravagant suppositions of the skeptics were not able to shake it, I judged that I might accept it without any scruples as the first principle of that philosophy for which I was looking.16

Descartes holds that this moment of insight avoids the most fundamental doubt: it is so utterly obvious that it leads doubt into a selfcontradiction. Accordingly, no skeptic, no philosopher, no evil demon will be able to deprive him of this insight: cogito, ergo sum. This lays the foundations for a new method, one with doubt as its presupposition: de omnibus dubitandum est. In this method, philoso15

16

After establishing four maxims for a methodological doubt, Descartes relates: “And throughout the nine following years, I did nothing else than roll here and there in the world, trying to be a spectator rather than an actor in all these comedies which were being played out […]” (Descartes Discours de la méthode, p. 599). Descartes Discours de la méthode, p. 603.

§ 2 Descartes on Method and Rationality

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phy does indeed continually doubt its own ability to draw the right conclusions, but it nevertheless attempts to construct a system on the basis of simple and clear basic propositions. Thus, the method has two aspects for Descartes. One is the methodological doubt which is the expression of the crisis, the radical departure from what went before, the attempt to think in a way that is not conventional; the other is the deduction of a new system which keeps to the same basic rules as the doubt, viz. simplicity, clarity, and lucidity.17 If they take their starting point in the cogito, they will share in the same indubitable certainty that lay in the simple and obvious cogito-insight.18 In later works, above all Les principes de la philosophie (1644/47), he emphasizes that the subject’s presence to its own self is the guarantee that the insight is certain.19 The entire method is based on this self-presence, in the form of a continuous control and examination of the results acquired.20 Descartes deduces from this a new, consistent system which entails inter alia a fundamental distinction between res cogitans and res extensa, an antithesis between the knowing subject and the object that is known, and an ontological proof of the existence of God. 21 In Chapter Two, we shall discuss the Cartesian doubt in relation to a distinction between sanity and madness which Foucault believes was introduced to western history by means of Descartes’ cogito-insight. Hence, the question of madness suddenly becomes urgent: What does Descartes say about madness; resp. what is his judgment of mad people? Foucault claims that his rationality makes him afraid of madness to the extent that he excludes madness from philosophy, just like the insane in this period were expelled from civil society to be locked up in asylums. This historical claim has been disputed, though. But it is not without any support from the texts. In his Meditations, we may follow Descartes pondering the relationship between the clear and certain rationality which he seeks and the corresponding irrationality which he finds in insane and confused persons. The doubt concerns the extent to which we can trust what the senses tell us: And how am I to deny that these hands and this body belong to me, unless I wish to compare myself with these insane people whose brain is so disturbed and darkened by the black fumes of madness that they obstinately maintain that they are kings (while 17 18 19

20 21

Cf. Descartes Discours de la méthode, pp. 586 f. Cf. Descartes Discours de la méthode, pp. 632-650. Cf. René Descartes Les principes de la philosophie (1644/47) in Œuvres Philosophique, ed. by Ferdinand Alquié, vol. 3, Paris: Éditions Garnier Frères 1967, pp. 94 f. Cf. Descartes Les principes de la philosophie, pp. 139-145. Cf. Descartes Les principes de la philosophie, pp. 97-126.

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they live in the meanest of circumstances) and that they are clothed in purple (while they are completely naked), or who imagine that their head is made of clay, and that they themselves consist wholly of pumpkins or of glass? But this is insane, and I myself would seem no less crazy if I were to take them as my model. 22

Foucault holds that Descartes was the first in the history of philosophy to distance himself so clearly from madness. Foucault sees this as a fundamental distinction between logos and madness, a move which expels madness into silence in the same way as the insane were expelled from society in the 17th century by being locked away in asylums. 23 By Foucault this fits into a general thesis about how reason discovers its own power to control and discipline the people and the thoughts which do not fit in to its idea of the good. According to Foucault, such hubris is characteristic for modern rationality in general and the Enlightenment in particular; it tends to do violence against its adversaries and has a too simple view on the difference between right and wrong, light and darkness. 24 The problem is that such an attitude is intertwined with the method itself, with the rationality justifying the development of modern societies, with the fundamental distinction between true and false.25 Descartes does not write very much about madness, though, and one single quotation may be a slender basis for so radical an interpretation. It can indeed be read as an expression of the fundamental distinction between sanity and madness which Foucault believes occurred in the seventeenth century.26 But this is not the only reasonable interpretation. Perhaps, as Derrida claims, the opposite is true, and this passage is an expression of the entry madness makes into thinking? It took three hundred years for this passage to prompt a comprehensive discussion, early in the 1960’s, of madness and the borders of sanity, and this indicates at the very least that Descartes can still make an interesting contribution to new debates about methodology, new discours de la méthode.

22

23

24 25 26

René Descartes Les Méditations, (1641) in Œuvres Philosophique, ed. by Ferdinand Alquié, vol. 2, Paris: Éditions Garnier Frères 1967. p. 25. Cf. Michel Foucault Madness and Civilization (Orig. Folie et déraison. Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique (1961)), tr. by Richard Howard, London / New York: Routledge 2001, p. 102. Cf. Foucault Madness and Civilization, “Preface,” pp. vi-vii. Cf. Foucault Madness and Civilization, pp. 103 f. Cf. Foucault Madness and Civilization, pp. 35-60.

§ 3 The Hegelian Method of Conceptual Aufhebung

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§ 3 The Hegelian Method of Conceptual Aufhebung In Hegel, methodology has a very different position, but is perhaps even more central than in Descartes. Hegel affirms that methodology cannot be considered in abstraction from the problem which is to be analyzed; accordingly, his reflections on methodology have a different character in the Phänomenologie des Geistes (1807) and the Wissenschaft der Logik (1813/32), which are the two most important works in our present context.27 The Phänomenologie describes the path taken by the spirit or self from pure immediacy to the recognition of absolute knowledge. This entails a methodological unmasking of the Schein (“appearance”) in order that the true Sein (“Being”) of things, especially of the spirit, may become visible. The elements which must be unmasked as an appearance include the immediate knowledge of the senses, then the perception of outward things, and then the reason. The introduction to the Phänomenologie offers a description of the method which has some points of resemblance to the Cartesian doubt: It can therefore be seen as a path of doubt, or more precisely as the path of despair, since on this path there does not occur that which we usually understand as ‘doubting’ – first, this or that supposed truth is shaken, but then the doubt well and truly disappears, and one returns to that truth, so that at the end one accepts it as before. In this case, however, we have the conscious insight that the apparent knowledge is untrue. This ‘knowledge’ takes something to be utterly real; but the truth is that this is merely the unrealized concept. 28

Hegel criticizes a superficial doubt which doubts merely for a moment and then returns to the earlier conviction. He sees doubt as a conscious insight into the untrue aspect of the immediate appearance both of things and of knowledge. Hegel describes the transition first from the contemplative reason (an sich) to self-consciousness (für sich), and then to the individuality of the reason, which is true an und für sich. Der Geist (the “spirit”) develops in corresponding triads, as described 27

28

In the Enzyklopädie (1830) §§ 228-244, the methodology is elaborated in manner similar to Wissenschaft der Logik, but since it also contains elements from the Phänomenologie, it can be understood as a development from these two texts to a higher totality and unity; cf. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundrisse (1830) in Gesammelte Werke, ed. by Friedrich Hogemann and Walter Jaeschke, vol. 20, Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag 1992, pp. 224-231. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel Phänomenologie des Geistes (1807) in Gesammelte Werke, ed. by Friedrich Hogemann and Walter Jaeschke, vol. 9, Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag 1980, p. 56.

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in the last section of the book: first comes religion, and ultimately we have “the absolute knowledge” which implies the resolution of all internal contradictions when these are contemplated from the exalted perspective of the spirit. In this work, the methodology is dialectic in an organic sense, such that each new stadium is developed from the preceding stadium in a continuous process. With his dialectical method, Hegel has moved a good way off from the Cartesian doubt. Doubt is no longer the expression of a total lack of knowledge, since it is now included in the methodology as a negative element which is then to be resolved in the positive element, thus driving the dialectic forwards. Once the self is established as self-consciousness, this too is expressed in a dialectic between the self and the other: the self enters a relationship to the other, which makes it alien to its own self.29 This means that the self experiences a contradiction which it can resolve only with the help of the dialectic of recognition. 30 Basically, the entire dialectic in the Phänomenologie is concerned with the unmasking of inherent contradictions. As long as one’s selfconsciousness is based on a contradiction, it is imperfect, and the movement in the dialectic seeks to unmask the contradiction as apparent – as a doubt or a despair that conceals the self’s real being. The dialectical sublation and resolution of contradictions, Aufhebung, does not in fact mean that the contradiction disappears; on the contrary, it is preserved (in German wird aufgehoben), while at the same time it is raised up (in German wird aufgehoben) to a new level of self-consciousness. 31 The threefold meaning of the German noun Aufhebung – viz. that the contrary affirmation is resolved as a contradiction, although the difference (der Unterschied) is preserved by being raised up to a higher level – embraces this entire movement in one concept. Thus, the alienation possesses no reality per se. Rather; it can be seen to be an element of Schein which the knowing spirit must itself resolve by bringing it to a higher concept: it must discover the underlying unity between the self and the other, and posit the self as this higher unity. This is the secret of the dialectical method in the Phänomenologie des Geistes. Even though Hegel emphasizes the conceptual knowledge of the phenomena, it is not orientated to concepts in the same way as the dialectic in the Wissenschaft der Logik. It portrays the self as a dynamic 29 30 31

Cf. Hegel Phänomenologie des Geistes, pp. 103-109; cf. also pp. 264-266. See Hegel Phänomenologie des Geistes, pp. 109-116. Cf. Hegel Phänomenologie des Geistes, pp. 109 f.

§ 3 The Hegelian Method of Conceptual Aufhebung

21

movement and develops each new state organically from the previous state, as a continuous process; and it has a clear goal, a telos towards which it moves, viz. the absolute self-consciousness, the freedom of the self in “the complete and immediate unity with itself.”32 This unity is produced by the self in the dialectic epistemological process whereby the self gradually attains consciousness through methodical and teleological self-knowledge. It is the spirit of the human person which thereby knows itself and realizes its freedom in action. The dialectic in the Wissenschaft der Logik is more abstract, since its starting point is the conceptual antitheses or differences which are removed by means of the dialectical method. In this work, Hegel examines the problems posed by the conceptual contradiction between the finite and the infinite, and between existence and nothing, and points out that such antitheses are generated by a common basis. On this point, Hegel’s logic parts company with that of Aristotle. Whereas Aristotle understands the principle of contradiction as fundamental to every logical inference, Hegel holds that speculative philosophy can abolish the law of the excluded third by finding a concept which mediates between apparent contradictions and thereby resolves these. 33 In this way, existence is negated in its opposite, viz. nothing. But by a negation of this negation, these two can be reconciled to one another 32 33

Hegel Phänomenologie des Geistes, p. 432. “Aufheben and the Aufgehobene (that which is ideal) is one of the most important concepts of philosophy, a fundamental definition which recurs absolutely everywhere. One must grasp its meaning precisely, and it is especially important to distinguish this from nothing. – That which is resolved (sich aufhebt) does not thereby become nothing. Whereas nothing is that which is immediate, something that is aufgehoben is mediated, it is non-existent, but as a result which proceeded from a Being; and therefore it still possesses per se the specificity from which it takes its origin. In our language, aufheben has a double meaning: it denotes that something is preserved and maintained, and at the same time it denotes that something is made to cease, an end is made. The act of preservation itself already implies the negative element that something of its immediacy, and thereby of an existence open to influences from outside, is removed, in order that it may be preserved. – Thus, that which is aufgehoben is something that is preserved; it has lost only its immediacy, but it is not thereby destroyed. – These two definitions of aufheben can be presented lexically as two meanings of this word, but it must surely strike us as strange that a language employs one and the same word to mean two opposite things. For speculative thinking, it is delightful to find in a language words which bear a speculative meaning in themselves; the German language has several such words” (Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel Wissenschaft der Logik I.1 (Erster Band). Die objektive Logik. Erstes Buch. Die Lehre vom Sein (1832) in Gesammelte Werke, ed. by Friedrich Hogemann and Walter Jaeschke, vol. 21, Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag 1984, p. 94).

22

I. Prolegomena: Discourse on Method

in a third, namely becoming. 34 In other words, the differences go back to a basic unity, a common origin (Ursprung). The Wissenschaft der Logik contains both an objective part, concerning the mutual relationship of the concepts, and a subjective part, concerning the subject’s ability to make judgments and draw conclusions. The perfection of the dialectical method consists in its ability to unite these two sides of human knowing in the concept, which is on the one hand the expression of the absolute passivity of the spirit, and on the other hand can take the form of a general and absolute action, when the self is absorbed by knowledge into a self-defining and selfrealizing movement: From this, the method has been generated as the self-knowing concept which has as its object the absolute, both the subjective and the objective, i. e. as the pure correspondence between the concept and its reality, as an existence which this concept itself is. What must be regarded here as method is merely the movement of the concept itself, the nature of which has already been recognized; but the meaning is now for the first time that the concept is everything, and the movement of the concept is the general, absolute activity which is the self-defining and self-realizing movement. […] It is therefore the soul and substance, and something is understood and known in its truth only to the extent that it is completely subject to the method; it is the method proper to every matter itself, because its activity is the concept. 35

Hegel’s view of the Cartesian doubt is primarily negative: doubt makes it possible to uncover contradictions and unclarities in the concepts. It makes it possible to unmask that which is merely apparent and inauthentic – but only in order that the genuine existence can become visible. Doubt has therefore only a preliminary meaning: it is destined to be resolved in a new positivity. To put it briefly: the Phänomenologie is a description of the self’s path back to an original unity which underlies and is antecedent to doubt, while the Logik is a dialectical analysis of the concept, the “real” concept and the concept of “reality,” which preserves “reality” in the concept and establishes the absolute unity between reality and ideality.

34 35

Hegel Wissenschaft der Logik I.1, pp. 68-95. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel Wissenschaft der Logik II (Zweiter Band). Die subjektive Logik oder die Lehre vom Begriff (1816) in Gesammelte Werke, ed. by Friedrich Hogemann and Walter Jaeschke, vol. 12, Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag 1981, p. 238.

§ 4 Kierkegaard’s Doubt

23

§ 4 Kierkegaard’s Doubt In Denmark, the Hegelian philosophy provoked a vigorous debate in the 1830’s and 1840’s, among both philosophers and theologians. The central question in this debate was precisely Hegel’s method, above all the dialectical Aufhebung or “mediation” between antitheses. This was also discussed as the problem of transition. This discussion was not limited exclusively to philosophical questions and the Hegelian system, i. e. the principle of contradiction, the relationship between subject and object, and the question of the reality of the concept, etc. It was equally concerned with theological questions and with the relationship between theology and philosophy: Was the dialectical method valid for theology? Could the Hegelian mediation be employed to explain the Christian idea of atonement? Could theology adopt the description of the incarnation and of God’s self-revelation in the Phänomenologie des Geistes? Had the Hegelian philosophy abolished once and for all the antithetical relationship between theology and philosophy?36 All the leading theologians and philosophers in Copenhagen took part in this debate; these included Johan Ludvig Heiberg, Fredrik Christian Sibbern, Poul Martin Møller, Hans Lassen Martensen, and Jakob Peter Mynster. The last two of these five men were theologians, and so it was they who were the protagonists in the debate about the relationship between philosophy and theology. For a time, Martensen was strongly influenced by Hegel and wished to employ the Hegelian method as the starting point for speculative theology. Mynster criticized this, primarily for theological reasons. He maintained that one must hold fast to the principle of contradiction, i. e. the principle of the excluded third, and he discusses in an article on rationalism and supernaturalism the extent to which philosophy and Christianity are compatible. His conclusion is negative, since he emphasizes that Christianity has a supernatural origin and thus neither can nor should be understood. It is mediated by means of a revelation, and can be grasped only by faith. 37 At this period, Kierkegaard was a student at the University of Copenhagen, and he attended lectures by all these debaters. Naturally, 36

37

Cf. Viktor Kuhr Modsigelsens Grundsætning, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1915, pp. 7-17, and Jon Stewart Kierkegaard’s Relations to Hegel Reconsidered, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2003, pp. 45-82. Cf. Viktor Kuhr Modsigelsens Grundsætning, pp. 8 f., and Jon Stewart, Kierkegaard’s Relations to Hegel Reconsidered, pp. 77-80.

24

I. Prolegomena: Discourse on Method

he kept abreast of the debate and made his own notes, but it was only in the course of the 1840’s that he made any public comment on these questions. In The Concept of Irony (1841), his attitude to Hegel is predominantly positive; in later writings, however, his polemic takes an increasingly sharp tone against mediation, the system, and the Hegelian philosophers who, according to Kierkegaard’s polemic, begin by “doubting everything,” but very quickly acknowledge the entire history of the world and “go further” than Hegel – but thereby forget their own selves. 38 To put it briefly, he criticizes this philosophy for becoming abstract and remote from reality. The philosophers construct a system which may possibly be valid in an abstract world of ideas, but which has nothing to do with the concrete existence of human beings. Jon Stewart has pointed out that this criticism is directed first and foremost against Martensen, not against Hegel himself; on the question of the Hegelian Aufhebung, Kierkegaard agrees with Mynster. At the same time, Kierkegaard is clearly influenced by Hegel, and he employs a number of Hegelian models in his thinking, especially the Hegelian tripartite division of logic. This means that Kierkegaard has an ambiguous relationship to Hegel’s philosophy. Since this question plays a central role in the interpretation of The Sickness unto Death, I shall sketch Kierkegaard’s position as we find it in the unpublished manuscript from 1842-43, “Johannes Climacus, or: De omnibus dubitandum est.”39 The title refers to the Cartesian doubt and to the claim that philosophy should begin with a comprehensive act of doubting.40 The first part of the manuscript is narrative: Kierkegaard presents the story (partly autobiographical) of Johannes Climacus, “a dialectical head” who had learned that if he was to engage in philosophy, he must first be capable of doubting everything. This question leads to a number of reflections on the problem concerning the starting point, i. e. the very beginning 38 39

40

See e. g. SKS 7, 80-84 / CUP, 80-84. See Pap. IV B 1, pp. 101-150. Since this manuscript runs to fifty pages, I refer not only to the number of the note, but also to the page number in vol. IV of Søren Kierkegaards Papirer, ed. by P. A. Heiberg, V. Kuhr, E. Torsting, and N. Thulstrup, 2nd extended edition, vol. I-XVI (abbreviated Pap. I-XVI), København: Gyldendal 1968-74. With the exception of De omnibus (IV B 1), all other quotations from Papirer give references not to the page number, but to the numbering of the notes in the margin. Jon Stewart claims that the title is a direct allusion to Martensen’s lectures on the history of philosophy. He documents this claim by means of convincing references to notes Kierkegaard took during the lectures: cf. Jon Stewart Kierkegaard’s Relations to Hegel Reconsidered, pp. 244-246.

§ 4 Kierkegaard’s Doubt

25

of philosophical reflection. If doubt lies outside philosophy, how then is one to arrive at the beginning of philosophy as long as one does not believe oneself capable of doubting absolutely everything? If however doubt lies inside philosophy and the task is to doubt everything, how is the philosopher who takes his task seriously to do anything other than to doubt, and to doubt unendingly? Is it possible at all to arrive at an absolute beginning by means of doubt?41 It is certainly not by chance that the author compares the relationship to doubt in recent philosophy with Epicurus’ words about fearing death – viz., that it is absurd to fear death, “Since when I exist, death does not; and when death exists, I do not.”42 Epicurus does not allow himself to be disturbed by death, and the speculative philosophy does not allow itself to be disturbed by doubt. Johannes Climacus, however, indicates the possibility of a self-deception in both cases, by means of his almost naïve question about the attitude one should adopt to this proposition about doubt: in the last analysis, have these people who talk about doubt, about a comprehensive doubt, in fact allowed doubt to disturb their thinking at all? The second part of the manuscript is more fragmentary. This is a pity, because it is here that Kierkegaard takes up the more fundamental problems with regard to doubt, but at the same time it indicates that he has run into problems which he is unable to solve. He points out that all doubt begins with antitheses, e. g. the question whether truth arises by means of the distinction that we make between truth and untruth: “How does the question of the truth arise? By means of untruth; for as soon as I ask about the truth, I have already asked about untruth. In the question about the truth, the consciousness is set in relation to something else, and that which makes this relation possible is untruth.”43 Kierkegaard goes on to reflect on this state of affairs, which refers all the time to the relationship between consciousness and truth. This shows that the consciousness itself is put at risk – as untruth, as immediacy, etc. – by relating to its own self. He thus defines consciousness as a contradiction: “Immediacy is reality, language is ideality, the consciousness is contradiction. As soon as I utter the reality, the contradiction is present, since what I say is ideality. The possibility of doubt is present in the consciousness. The essence

41 42 43

Cf. Pap. IV B 1, p. 131. Pap. IV B 1, p. 129. Pap. IV B 1, p. 146.

26

I. Prolegomena: Discourse on Method

of the consciousness is a contradiction which is produced by a duplicity, and itself produces a duplicity.”44 We should note the source of the contradiction: it is produced by the utterance, by the act of speech. Since language wishes to express the reality, the reality is expressed as the ideal. This means that language is not capable of expressing reality; it expresses only this ideality, which the consciousness attempts to grasp. And this is the contradiction of the consciousness: a dislocation between that which is said and that about which something is said. This means in effect a dislocation between the signifier (signifiant) and the signified (signifié). This contradiction is not removed by our consciousness of it; on the contrary, Kierkegaard insists that it is only by means of the contradiction that the consciousness is posited. This form of self-consciousness is generated by reflection, but it takes the form of a contradiction: “Reflection makes the relationship possible, consciousness is the relationship which has contradiction as its first form.”45 In this way, he makes a distinction between the contents of the consciousness, which is dichotomous (divided into two), and the relationship between the consciousness and the contradictions, which is trichotomous (divided into three): “[…] which is also shown by language; for when I say, ‘I become conscious of this sense impression,’ I am expressing a triad.”46 Although “doubt” is etymologically linked to the number two “in most languages” (e. g. Zweifel and zwei in German), Kierkegaard holds that doubt presupposes consciousness and is therefore necessarily linked to a tertium which is related to the two: “If nothing other than the dichotomy existed, there would be no doubt; for the possibility of doubt lies precisely in the tertium which relates the two to each other.”47 Unlike all reflection, which is disinterested, and all knowledge, which is disinterested, Kierkegaard claims here that it is the interest (also as inter-esse, “being in-between”) that opens up the question of consciousness. This means that the only consistent move is to hold fast to doubt as the indeterminate, the unknown, if the question about consciousness is to be put in a more acute form: This procedure was consistent; but it was an inconsistency, which seems to be based in ignorance of what doubt is, that moved recent philosophy to seek systematically to enforce doubt. Even if the system was absolutely perfect, even if the reality surpassed all the promises, doubt was not overcome. On the contrary, this is where it begins, since 44 45 46 47

Pap. IV B 1, p. 146. Pap. IV B 1, p. 147. Pap. IV B 1, p. 148. Pap. IV B 1, p. 148.

§ 4 Kierkegaard’s Doubt

27

doubt lies in interest, and all systematic knowledge is disinterested. This shows that doubt is the beginning of the highest form of existence, since it can have everything else as its presupposition.48

Jon Stewart maintains that this text concerns Kierkegaard’s relationship to Martensen, since it was the latter who regarded doubt as the presupposition for modern philosophy, and who continually repeated the Cartesian principle. He sees that this can be relevant as a commentary on Descartes, but he does not see how it can concern Hegel’s thinking, since Hegel did not attach any particular importance to the philosophical doubt.49 Stewart is certainly correct about this last point, although Hegel, in the foreword to the Phänomenologie, calls doubt – or despair – the driving power in the dialectical method. But even if Kierkegaard’s criticism is directed primarily against his Danish opponent Martensen, I believe that one can discern a larger context in the history of philosophy here: is not Kierkegaard establishing a discourse in order to apply the Cartesian doubt against the Hegelian Aufhebung? When doubt, and thus interest, is given a place in the “trichotomous” situation, does it not crack open this situation from within? And would not this interest full of doubt – i. e. the interest in holding fast to the antithesis as an antithesis – entail a somewhat different phenomenology and a different dialectic than Hegel’s? We must probably leave these questions unanswered here, for the sketch stops round about this point. And although similar questions and problems occur in several variants in a number of writings in the following years – in Repetition (1843), Fear and Trembling (1843), Philosophical Fragments (1844), The Concept of Anxiety (1844), and the Postscript (1846) – he does not really get much further in the present text. He identifies the problem: it is the problem of repetition, where the consciousness is understood as a collision between ideality and reality. In this collision, he defines ‘consciousness’ as a contradiction – a contradiction which the single individual cannot resolve, as long as he continues to hold fast to doubt (i. e. as long as he philosophizes): When ideality and reality touch one another, repetition is produced. For example, when I see something at the moment, ideality comes on the scene and wishes to explain that this is a repetition. Here is the contradiction; since that, which is, also is in another manner. I see that it is external, but in the same moment I relate it to something which also exists, to something that is the same, and that also wishes to explain that the other is the same. Here there is a doubling, here a repetition is involved. Ideality and reality 48 49

Pap. IV B 1, p. 149. See Jon Stewart Kierkegaard’s Relations to Hegel Reconsidered, pp. 242-244.

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I. Prolegomena: Discourse on Method

collided, then – but in what medium? In time? That is impossible. In eternity? That is impossible. Where then? In the consciousness, which is the contradiction. 50

The fact that ideality and reality touch one another can mean two different things, and can lead to two forms of doubt. Kierkegaard develops this in more detail in one of the preparatory sketches for this text. 51 Doubt can arise either by bringing “reality” into relation with “ideality” – that is knowledge – or by bringing “ideality” into relation with “reality” – and that is the ethical dimension. With regard to this relationship, Kierkegaard notes: “Doubt in the strict sense is the beginning of ethics, since as soon as I must act; I am governed by interest, for I assume responsibility and thereby acquire significance.”52 Doubt in the general sense would conversely mean an epistemological or even metaphysical doubt, the doubt we know from Descartes. The manuscript closes with a double contradiction, which Kierkegaard claims is a contradiction in recollection – both in the Platonic and in the Hegelian sense: as anamnesis, i. e. the act of remembering, and as Er-innerung, i. e. the act of assimilation and interiorization. This is connected with a corresponding shift in the language game to which I have drawn attention above: viz., that ideality wishes to explain the other by removing the contradiction in the dialectic of recognition, leading the other back to the self or “the same” (“[…] and wishes to explain that the other is the same” (my emphasis)). Kierkegaard points to the paradox and quite simply maintains that this is a contradiction which cannot be resolved, neither abstractly nor by means of reflection. The only possible way of relating to the paradox, is to repeat it as a question and a problem – and not to continue philosophizing as if the problem were “already” solved. Thus, the consciousness is defined as a contradictory relationship between the other and the same, between reality and ideality, between the exterior and the interior, and between the signified and language as condition for any signification. Accordingly, Kierkegaard insists on philosophy as a critical task of doubt. It is in fact the Cartesian doubt which in two senses is repeated “within” the Hegelian Aufhebung. First, with regard to knowledge, where Kierkegaard points out that it is the contradiction, the chronic difference, that gives meaning to the consciousness, not the removal of con50 51 52

Pap. IV B 1, p. 150. See Pap. IV B 13; 18. Pap. IV B 13; 19.

§ 5 Unstable Signs

29

tradictions.53 Secondly, with reference to ethics, where the move from ideality to reality presupposes that it is the acting subject who assumes responsibility; this must take place differently in each new situation. The assumption of ethical responsibility never involves the removal of the contradiction between ideality and reality. On the contrary, this takes place by means of a repetition, which is expressed by the collision.

§ 5 Unstable Signs: Derrida Detects Traces of Death in Hegel’s Semiology In Derrida’s doctoral thesis, De la Grammatologie (1967), death plays a specific role, as the expression of a certain uncertainty, a certain absence, a certain indeterminacy. Here, he is concerned with writing as “spacing” (espacement) of the moment which is not filled with presence, where the subject becomes absent to its own self, or becomes unconscious of itself: Spacing, as writing, is the becoming-absent and the becoming-unconscious of the subject. By the movement of its drift/derivation, the emancipation of the sign constitutes in return the desire of the presence. This becoming – or this drift/derivation – does not occur to the subject who would choose it, or who would allow himself passively to be drawn along by it. As a relationship between the subject and his death, this becoming is the very constitution of subjectivity. On every level of the organization of life, i. e. of the economy of death. Every sign used in writing has an essentially testamentary character. And the original absence of the subject of writing is also the absence of the matter or of the referent. 54

The idea that the subject is constituted by its relation to its own death goes back to Socrates (in Phaedo), and is a basic notion in Derrida’s philosophy. Writing thus enters into an economy of death, but death is not a stable sign in philosophical language. Death is rather a concept and a reality that escapes an unequivocal definition. It remains altogether ambiguous, questioning the power of the subject to define the meaning of existence, to define the meaning of writing, and even to account for its own intention. Hence, death and the economy of death are closely connected to the space that opens up within the sign, a 53

54

This is why he specifies that doubt is more than reflection on contradictions. This means that it is “[…] a higher expression, antecedent rather than subsequent.” (Pap. IV B 1, p. 148.) Derrida De la Grammatologie, pp. 100 f.; cf. Of Grammatology, tr. by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Baltimore and London: The John Hopkins University Press 1976, p. 69 (translation modified).

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I. Prolegomena: Discourse on Method

space which may neither be subordinated to time, nor to presence, nor to the intention of the author, nor to the intention of the reader. Derrida sees the significance of the sign as drifting, due to an open lacuna, i. e. the spacing, between the signifier and the signified. In Chapter Three, I will return to the idea of the subject’s relationship to its own death as the origin of the “constitution” of subjectivity. In this paragraph, I shall follow the trace of death in writing, in the sign, and in the subject by means of a text in which this trace is given a particular bearing on the question of method and rationality: “The Pit and the Pyramid: Introduction to Hegel’s Semiology” from Margins of Philosophy (1972). 55 The subtitle of the essay indicates that Derrida is concerned with Hegel’s semiology: the theory of the sign is seen in connection with psychology, i. e. with the theory of consciousness as the “subjective spirit” – and is thus located in the heart of Hegelian logic. Derrida begins the essay by affirming that since metaphysics in general has identified existence as presence (either in the form of the presence of the object to the subject, or in the form of consciousness as presence to oneself), it could never treat the sign as anything other than a passage, i. e. a transition, something transitory (en passage). 56 This is why, in the Hegelian metaphysics, the sign (Zeichen) always remains standing as a transition or a bridge between two moments of complete presence, as a preliminary pointer between two presences. But the bridge can always be lifted, i. e. abolished. The history of the sign comprises only the time it takes to make the detour from an original presence to a recovered or assimilated presence. All this time, what is involved is a pointer. The sign always points out beyond itself to the ideality and to the true meaning. Derrida claims that the raison d’être of the sign in Hegel’s philosophy is therefore to give a meaning to self-presence, to let one presence point back to another presence. This establishes a close link between semiology and psychology. In the Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften, the sign is discussed under “III. Philosophie des Geistes / I. Subjektiver Geist” in section C: Psychology. 57 55

56 57

The essay “Le puits et la pyramide” was first delivered as a paper at a conference on Hegel in 1968 and then published in Marges de la philosophie, Paris: Éditions de minuit 1972, pp. 69-108, to which the first references are given. The second reference refers to the English translation in Margins of Philosophy, tr. by Alan Bass, Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1984, pp. 69-108. Cf. Derrida Marges de la philosophie, p. 82 / Margins of Philosophy, p. 74. See Hegel Enzyklopädie, pp. 445-458 (§§ 451-458). The formation of the concept and the sign are described in the two sections on “Die Erinnerung” and “Die Einbildungskraft.”

§ 5 Unstable Signs

31

In the Enzyklopädie, the sign functions as an external representation of mental states and ideas. Derrida points out that Hegel shares this presupposition not only with Aristotle, but also with Saussure and indeed with structuralism as a whole. In Hegel, the link between psychology and semiology is further developed by means of a distinction between the “reproductive” and the “productive” Einbildungskraft. 58 The reproductive imagination is related passively to external impressions, while the spirit itself, by means of the productive imagination, creates its ideas and notions, as “an imagination which makes signs.”59 It can look at itself and produce an image, a sign, without being dependent on anything else or anything external – on the contrary, it is the subjective spirit which utters (i. e. externalizes) itself thereby. This is why the productive imagination is the central point of the intelligence, which is capable of uniting all the antitheses in a unity: The imagination is the central point in which the Universal and Being, that which is one’s own and the condition of existing, the inner and the outer are made completely one. The preceding syntheses – of looking and remembering, etc. – are elements of this same unification, but they are syntheses: it is only in the imagination that the intelligence exists, not as the indeterminate pit and that which is universal, but as an individuality, i. e. as a concrete subjectivity in which the relationship to its own self is determined both with regard to Being and with regard to generality.60

It is by means of the productive imagination that the self participates in the synthesis, so that the understanding or the intelligence moves from the depths of the indeterminate pit up towards light and knowledge. Derrida notes that in this context, the sign remains in an intermediate position. It embraces both the inner and the outer, the spontaneous and the receptive, the intelligible and the sensuous, that which is one’s own (das Eigene) and that which is other (das Andere), although it “is” neither the one nor the other per se. As a central point, however, it makes possible a unification and mediation between all these antitheses in the subjective spirit. Derrida writes that this gives the sign a central position in the Hegelian methodology as a whole, since it opens a path (hodos in Greek) from the deep pit up to the light in the Egyptian desert, where the sign rises up like a pyramid over the abstract texture of the text.61 And 58 59 60

61

Cf. Hegel Enzyklopädie, pp. 450 f. Hegel Enzyklopädie, p. 451. Hegel Enzyklopädie, p. 451. Cf. Derrida Marges de la Philosophie, p. 92 / Margins of Philosophy, p. 80. Cf. Derrida Marges de la philosophie, p. 87 / Margins of Philosophy, p. 75. It is thus Hegel himself who describes the sign as a pyramid in this context: cf. Georg Wil-

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we may add that it is this hodos that opens the path to the Hegelian methodos, the dialectical method. Without the sign as a transition, as a negative movement, as “the work of death” in the text, it would not have been possible to unite the antitheses: “In [Hegel’s speculative semiology], the sign is understood according to the structure and the movement of the Aufhebung, by means of which the spirit, elevating itself above the nature in which it was submerged/buried, at once suppresses and retains nature, sublimating nature into itself, accomplishing itself as internal freedom, and thereby presenting itself to itself for itself, as such.”62 During the intervening time in which the sign functions as a pointer to the presence, Hegel sees it as an incarnation of the signifying body and the signified ideality. This means that an antithesis between body and soul is inherent in the sign; but this happens in such a way that the sign itself, “this proper and animated body,” is not only an expression of the life of the spirit, but also functions as a tomb (tombeau). Derrida points out that the sign thus accommodates an interplay between life and death: “The tomb is the life of the body as a sign of death, the body as the other of the soul, the other of the animated psyche, of the living breath. But the tomb is also that which shelters life, keeps it in reserve, and capitalizes on it, by signaling that life continues elsewhere.”63 The tomb/sign thus becomes both a warning about death (memento mori!) and a protection against death, since it points out beyond itself as a sign that life continues elsewhere. There are three steps in the process of assimilating its significance: first, the warning against a potential death; secondly, the warning against the death of the soul (i. e., the fact that death is concealed in the soul, just as death is concealed in the pyramid); and this leads lastly to a turning away from death towards life. In this way, death performs a necessary work, but only in order to protect and give meaning to life (cf. the meaning of “the immense power of the negative,” i. e. to endure death as “the most terrible thing of all” in the foreword to the Phänomenologie).64 The monument which unites this life-in-

62

63

64

helm Friedrich Hegel Enzyklopädie, p. 452. In what follows, I shall speak in greater detail of the pyramid as sign. Derrida Marges de la philosophie, p. 88 / Margins of Philosophy, p. 76. Translation modified. Derrida Marges de la philosophie, p. 95 / Margins of Philosophy, p. 82. Translation modified. See Hegel Phänomenologie des Geistes, p. 27.

§ 5 Unstable Signs

33

death and death-in-life in Hegel’s text is the pyramid, i. e. the sign is the pyramid.65 By letting the sign function as a pyramid, a tomb which en passant introduces a movement from death to life, from absence to presence, from antithesis to unity, Hegel can let the activity of death be productive for knowledge, above all for the self-consciousness of the subjective spirit. At the same time, however, this movement becomes somewhat mechanical. Hegel himself describes the Aufhebung of the imagination as follows: “[…] in the mechanical memory it accomplishes this form of Being in [the visible quality of the sign].”66 The deconstructive gesture in Derrida’s essay is therefore made possible due to the fact that the pyramid as image, as a metaphor for the sign, rebounds on Hegel himself: when the removal of the antitheses becomes mechanical, this is because the sign covers over the antitheses instead of permitting them to open up to knowledge, without the result being given in advance. This makes the pyramid a sign of contradiction within the texture of Hegel’s text, a sign that this text is attempting to cover over death’s trembling and death’s seriousness by immediately incorporating death into an economy of assimilation and understanding. A fear and shuddering lies trembling under this text. It does not come into sight in the sign, because the sign conceals more than it discloses. The sign has “a skeleton in the closet,” i. e. the skeleton of someone else, and the sign itself becomes a way of postponing reflection on death. Hegel too is clear that this is one of the meanings inherent in the palimpsest of the pyramid; but he surely did not guess that the introduction of such a polyvalent metaphor in the heart of the dialectic would open up a space for the deconstruction of his entire theory about signs – and thereby of his entire dialectical method. Derrida however cites various texts of Hegel to show that the mechanical understanding of the Aufhebung makes the system appear like a machine, a kind of auto-mat, i. e. an automatic machine for the production of the self, of the self which produces itself thanks to its productive imagination. This is the result of an Aufhebung of the difference between the self and the other, where the other ceases to exist as other and is reduced to the self. In the same way, the sign/pyramid 65

66

“The sign is an immediate act of seeing which presents a completely different content from what it has per se; the pyramid in which the soul of another is transposed and preserved” (Hegel Enzyklopädie, p. 452). Cf. Derrida Marges de la philosophie, p. 95 / Margins of Philosophy, p. 82. Hegel Enzykloplädie, p. 451.

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functions as a mechanical removal of antitheses which would remain incoherent without the mediation of the sign: the antithesis between inner and outer is covered over, when Hegel dissolves the outer in the inner by means of Er-innerung. The antithesis between speech and writing is removed by making the sign continuously point out beyond itself to the presence of speech. The antithesis between the body of the sign and the spirit of the meaning is removed by means of the inauthentic and provisional character of the sign. With the help of a threefold movement, Hegel converts the dead letter (the body) into a living spirit.67 Derrida’s point is that in all these cases, the removal of antitheses can be attributed to the arbitrary character of the sign: it is the spirit which has priority vis-à-vis writing in virtue of the voice, so that phonetic writing is preferable to other, more pictorial forms of writing (e. g. hieroglyphics) and indeed to symbols and mathematical signs. The authority of the voice is thus essentially linked to the entire Hegelian system, to its archeology, teleology, eschatology, and all its speculative dialectic – and above all to the “negative” and the dialectical Aufhebung of antitheses.68 Every trace, every image which opposes Er-innerung is negated and removed in the sign; while the sign is produced by the self and thus is generated spontaneously by the activity proper to the self. This entire movement of remembering, preserving, and removing is described in the foreword to the Phänomenologie des Geistes as a negation of negations. It is also called a doubt and a despair, and it presupposes that one sees face to face what Hegel later in this work calls “the terror of death.”69 When this unease, doubt, and despair are reduced to a mechanical movement, death has in reality caught up with the dialectic and has established its dwelling within it – as is also indicated by Hegel’s use of the pyramid as the sign for the sign.70 67 68 69 70

See Derrida Marges de la philosophie, p. 102 / Margins of Philosophy, p. 88. Cf. Derrida Marges de la philosophie, p. 102 / Margins of Philosophy, p. 88. Cf. Hegel Phänomenologie des Geistes, p. 321. In this context, the following quotation from The Sickness unto Death can function as a little observation: “So also with knowing, when it becomes fantastic. The law for the development of the self with respect to knowing, insofar as it is the case that the self becomes itself, is that the increase of knowledge corresponds to the increase of self-knowledge, that the more the self knows, the more it knows itself. If this does not happen, then the more knowledge increases, the more it becomes a kind of inhuman knowledge, and the self of the human person is destroyed in the process of acquiring such knowledge, somewhat as human beings are destroyed by building pyramids […]” (SKS 11, 147 / cf. SUD, 31). Translation modified. Whenever “cf.”

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The paradox, however, is that Hegel himself understands the machine and the calculable certainty as that which philosophy cannot conceive. A functional process of thought of this kind is impossible for the spirit, since it amounts to the total loss of spirit, i. e. to “damnation.” If thinking functioned like a machine, all that could survive would be an exterior aspect which could not be removed by any form of memory (as “internalization”). Derrida points out that the machine has neither memory nor a productive imagination: “It would be unthinkable, like a non-thought that no thought could ever sublate by positing it as its own opposite, as its own other. Philosophy would surely see there a non-functioning, a non-work; and thereby philosophy would miss that which, in such a machine, works. By itself. Outside.”71 The outside is one of the places where the deconstruction of this text begins. Derrida emphasizes that thought and philosophy also is this “outside” which does not correspond to the inside; i. e. writing which cannot be derived from the voice. Writing can always be read differently, can be read anew, and can be exposed to a repetition – exposed to a repetition, in which this “exposure” simply means that one delays the Aufhebung. This delay is a kind of passive opposition – not criticism nor rebellion, only a little pause at those antitheses in the text which perhaps cannot readily be reconciled, underlining the fact that the other has left traces in the text, that the machine is in the writing, that such a process of thought, detached from the one who thinks – and has anyone ever been capable of thinking everything, truly thinking the system without detaching himself from it? – can give the reader an impression that a kind of “auto-writing” is at work in the Aufhebung. And this outside, this inadequacy between the outside and the inside, opens up a space within thinking. Strictly speaking, it is nothing other than the writing itself, qua dead writing, that does this; but to insist on writing as writing, as an expression of the chronic difference between writing and speech, is sufficient to open up the text – before the book closes once more. How should we then analyze the relation between these two texts, Hegel’s text about the sign and Derrida’s text about Hegel’s text about the sign? There is a kind of parallelism here, a repetition. The first text closes in on itself, around the system, and derives the differences from

71

occurs before the English title, the translation of Kierkegaard has been modified; when not, the standard translation in Kierkegaard’s Writings has been used without modification. Derrida Marges de la philosophie, p. 126 / Margins of Philosophy, p. 107. Translation modified.

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the closing of the system; but it leaves traces of something else, something that the other text can take as its starting point (i. e. its “starting breach”) for opening up a space for meaning between inside and outside, between body and soul, between presence and absence – and between text and text. For Derrida’s text is not a text that is meaningful if detached from Hegel’s text; on the contrary, it is based on a detailed commentary on Hegel’s text. It is therefore as a supplement to Hegel that Derrida’s text becomes interesting, i. e. opens up for that which is interesting, the intermediary space. In this case, the supplement cannot be understood as a replacement, such that the new text in its perfection could take the place of the first text: the interesting point about the supplementary character is rather that the second text interacts with the first, disturbs the first text in its closed character, and lets it wrestle with the other – the other which is not only external to the first text, but has in fact also left traces in it. If we read the two texts in tandem, it is impossible to let them be united in a total Aufhebung. A space has arisen between them, a space in which the second text insists on an irreducible difference. The irony with Derrida’s text is however that it too, qua text, closes in on itself. It receives its own logic and its own rationality, which is indeed different from the rationality in Hegel’s text, but can nevertheless be understood as a new system meant to take the place of the old system, as in a “paradigm shift.” Derrida can counteract this impression only by insisting on the supplement, presenting the second text as a supplement to the first. The first text may fall back on a metaphysical closure in the system, and the second text may fall back on a deconstructive finitude; but Derrida insists on the space between them, a space which is indeterminate, which at any time is open to difference and deferral, which disturbs and postpones the closure. In principle, this is postponed until death, i. e. that which cannot be enclosed in a stable metaphysical meaning. When Derrida presents death as the other, as the alien, as that which no Aufhebung can remove without itself appearing auto-matic, this also gives the text an ironic undertone. His close reading of Hegel’s texts shows how the logic, syntax, affirmations, concepts, names, and language which Hegel employs are involved in the powerlessness of the system, i. e. in the subject’s powerlessness vis-à-vis the system, the structural powerlessness which makes it almost impossible to think without removing antitheses.72 Derrida’s own language is likewise 72

Cf. Derrida, Marges de la philosophie, p. 126 / Margins of Philosophy, p. 107.

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overtaken by the same structures and woven into such a way of thinking. But the mere fact that a text is repeated, sounding a little different, and is seen from a somewhat different perspective, sets in motion deconstruction’s resistance within the system, in the dialectic’s own dialect. In order to make oneself understood, Derrida suggests that it suffices to call a spade a spade: For example, calling a machine ‘machine,’ a functioning ‘functioning’, a work ‘work,’ etc., or else simply wondering why one has never been able to think this, looking for the reasons, origins, foundations, conditions of possibility, etc. Or else looking for other names. For example, another name for this ‘sign’ which does not dispense completely with the machine, any more than the pit or the pyramid.73

Finally, Derrida emphasizes that if one wishes to break out of the automatism, there is little point in reversing the hierarchy, “inverting” the movement, or ascribing an “essential” meaning to the machine. If one attempts this with such strategies, the only result is that one unwillingly confirms the system, adopting its method, its form of reflection, and its dialectic – and this is what Derrida believes Foucault does in his archeology (cf. Chapter Two, § 9) and Saussure in his semiology. In other words, one is swallowed up by the system and ends up as a cog in the machine. However, Derrida’s article also illustrates some other strategies which certainly do not permit one to evade the system, but do at least make it possible to let the system be disturbed by the other, e. g. by certain things that are inexplicable, certain things interior to the system which perhaps escape the Aufhebung. Death is already found in this text, it lies hidden in the sign itself, since the sign for the sign is a pyramid. The metaphor resists being reduced to an interior reality; it resists the subject’s control. Hegel’s text is disturbed and destabilized when Derrida points to other meanings which lie hidden in the pyramid as tomb in the desert, i. e. in the metaphor’s palimpsest. This leaves an irreducible antithesis between interior and exterior and in this space there opens up a plural logic which evades control by the presence and is not absorbed into the unity of the spirit. This makes the possible approaches to such a text “legion,” and it is precisely with the help of the “legionaries” of plurality and dislocation that deconstruction wages war on logocentricity – often by means of a trick such as we see in this text about Hegel, where the trick consists very simply in stopping short at death, at death as a question, as a kind of “echo” or acoustic deceit: machine – “machine”?; recollection – “recollec73

Derrida Marges de la philosophie, p. 126 / Margins of Philosophy, p. 107.

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tion”?; death – “death”? Death still lies there hidden and causes unease, like a foreigner inside the pyramid. But the inhabitants of Troy felt only peace and security when the wooden horse was drawn inside their walls.

§ 6 The Rigor of Deconstruction: Two Texts and the Space In-Between The essay “Le puits et le pyramide” will in this context serve as an example of how Derrida reflects upon method and rationality. Naturally, this is not a text about methodology in the traditional sense of an introduction to one particular procedure or one particular way of reading texts. It is not a normative text in the sense that it would prescribe particular methodological moves or perspectives on a text. Nevertheless, this essay can perhaps offer a perspective on some of the problems and aporias which we will encounter when we read Kierkegaard’s texts as well. The methodological problem itself remains ambiguous by Derrida. Like other methods, deconstruction can function “mechanically” as an instrument one uses in the study and analysis of texts. Unlike Gadamer’s hermeneutic, it attaches less importance to context, preconception, and consensus than to rifts, contradictions, and aporias within the text. The commentary on the texts is neither particularly original nor deep. Rather, it is detailed and keeps close to the texts; it is literally on the border to the “naïve.” And yet, it is this initial exegetical analysis of the text that opens up for the surprising turns which demonstrate or register a difference in the text which is being commented upon, and which breaks up this text from within. It is this difference which occurs in the room between the texts that makes deconstruction indeterminate and open, and entails an element of risk. This is why it is also this difference, dislocation, or différance that opens a rift in the texture of the text and accommodates alterity. It is this dislocation which makes deconstruction interesting and introduces the problem of repetition as the inter-esse of metaphysics and of the text.74 Instead of drawing up methodological rules for a deconstructive reading, I prefer to show how deconstruction “functions” in the relationship between texts, and how a detailed uncovering of structures 74

On the relationship between repetition, metaphysics, and interest (as well as interesse) in Kierkegaard, cf. SKS 4, 25 f. / R, 148 f.

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and connections, as well as of counter-structures, dislocations, and remarkable features, opens a crack, a “zero point,” and establishes a double structure which destabilizes the reading. “The Pit and the Pyramid” is only one example of what can be labeled a deconstruction of Hegel’s method, but I believe that a number of aspects of this procedure are relevant to our reading of Kierkegaard. Based on that analysis, I shall therefore outline some typical traits of deconstruction as an analytic approach to texts. The first aspect is the exegesis which we might call (with Schleiermacher) the “grammatical” aspect,75 i. e. the detailed commentary on the text which uncovers particular presuppositions, constructions, and structures which are required, if a text is to be meaningful. This is also necessary in order for the text to give room for differences and a variety of meanings. But this room, which we might call the room of interpretation or the room of writing, now opens up for the second aspect, a doubling of the text, pointing to a an apparent contradiction within the process of Hegelian dialectic, within the very body (i. e. the dead body) of the text. That contradiction gives Derrida an opportunity to question Hegel’s theory of the sign, as well as his concept of dialectics, of presence and absence, of body and spirit, whereas such a questioning breaks up the coherence of the text from within. That is the terrifying and dissolving “work of death” according to Jacques Derrida, a wound of negativity that thought will hardly be able to cover, and even less to resolve. Deconstruction appears then as a movement within the corpus of the text, and this movement cannot be controlled by any particular logic, structure, method, archaeology, or intellectual Aufhebung of contradictions. In the essay “The Pit and the Pyramid,” Derrida examines the relationship between the body of the sign and the spirit of the sign in Hegel’s semiology, where the body of the sign is defined as a transition, i. e. a temporal and spatial movement which is always vicarious, an absence which points out beyond itself towards the presence, whereas the spirit of the sign expresses the real, internal meaning of the sign, since the sign is constituted arbitrarily through construction by the subject. In the detailed, grammatical reading of Hegel’s texts, special attention is paid to the metaphors: the pit is a metaphor for the deep75

Cf. Helge Jordheim Lesningens kunst, Oslo: Universitetsforlaget 2001, p. 39. Whereas Schleiermacher employs grammar critically against “the romantic idea of the absolute genius,” Derrida employs the grammatical reading to detach the text from the perspective of the author’s intention and introduce a rift between the author and the text.

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est, unconscious absence, while the pyramid is a metaphor for the sign which rises up in the wilderness, the funeral monument which, by concealing death – and containing in itself the death of someone else – points out beyond itself towards the ideal meaning. Death is thus aufgehoben in a meaningful movement; through the negation of the negation, it helps to produce meaning. But it is precisely at this point that Derrida introduces a rift, a tear in the corpus of the Hegelian text, and asks whether Hegel is still relating to death, death as alienating otherness, “the terror of death” which tears meaning into pieces and abandons the human person (whether he is a philosopher or not) to something that he cannot comprehend. If death is inscribed in the sign as a trace, it follows that a self which relates to the sign will necessarily also relate to this trace of death, to something the self cannot explain, to the fact that the self, qua body, is linked to death and encounters its absolute boundary in death. In this case, however, the doubling of the text is more ironic than polemical. Towards the close of the essay, Derrida establishes a parallel between two “signs” which cannot enter an Aufhebung, but which the Aufhebung nevertheless has included, one sign in its constructive but exterior movement (the machine) and the other sign in its center, the mid-point of the sign (death) which in turn is at the heart of the dialectic. This establishes a parallel between two heterogeneous signs which cannot be reduced to a unity, since both will keep on breaking out of the unitive movement of the dialectic, or else they will slow this down or resist it in some other way. It is therefore not in the least necessary for Derrida to engage in polemic against Hegel’s Aufhebung. On the contrary, he can make concessions; this movement has “already” caught up with him too, and he too continues this movement, elaborating the movement and logic of metaphysics. Ironically enough, it is precisely these admissions that show that some dislocations have taken place already in Hegel’s thinking about the sign, that a room for ambiguity has been opened, so that the other text – taking its starting point in an absence which it is difficult to locate and define – opposes the speculative Aufhebung of the antitheses. In the room between the texts, a passivity is established which slows down and thus deconstructs the total architecture in Hegel’s system. Hegel thought of the sign as an accidental supplement to the intellect and the ideal meaning, but it is precisely the theory of the sign that has proved to contain a surplus of meaning which could not be reduced to its functional significance. It is this surplus that breaks out of the room between the two readings. The trace of that which is hidden (in

§ 6 The Rigor of Deconstruction

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the pyramid) disturbs the unity with the other; it gives the text a spatial dimension and breaks it up from within (from the bottom of the pit), splits it up and dislocates it, allowing it to collide with a difference which makes a difference – understood as the temporal and spatial opening. By holding onto the indeterminacy in the relationship between two texts, Derrida makes demands of the reader’s vigilance. Interpretation is not a disinterested task, or a task for the disinterested. It also has an ethical side; i. e. interpretation and cognition is always a response to the text which demands responsibility. But responsibility and indeterminacy are not contradictions; the latter could rather be seen as a presupposition for the former. By holding onto the indeterminacy in the relationship between two persons in his practical or ethical writings, like he does with two texts in his theoretical writings, Derrida appeals to an ethical vigilance, an indeterminacy in this relationship which calls the individual to assume respons-ibility. One of the most interesting aspects of deconstruction as a philosophical project is precisely this intersection of an epistemological interest and an ethical imperative, which entails a passionate interest for the other qua other, and an equally passionate obligation vis-à-vis the one who is other qua other.76 Simon Critchley has pointed out that this forms a kind of nerve in every form of deconstruction: My claim has been that it is precisely in the suspension of choice or decision between two alternatives, a suspension provoked in, as, and through a practice of clôtural reading, that the ethical dimension of deconstruction is opened and maintained. I have argued that an unconditional duty or affirmation is the source of the injunction that produces deconstruction and that the textual praxis of clôtural reading keeps open a dimension of alterity or transcendence that has ethical significance.77

What Critchley calls a clôtural reading entails a transposition or dislocation within the text, a deconstruction which divides the text in two by uncovering various aspects of the text’s Janus face. In one sense, deconstruction belongs to the logocentric metaphysics and it will never be able to “destroy” this or make itself independent of it; this metaphysics is embedded in the language, the structures, and the logical tradition into which one enters as soon as one begins to speak or write.78 In another sense, however, it is possible to signal a distance 76

77 78

Here, it is appropriate to recall the double contradiction we observed in Kierkegaard, which made the relationship between reality and ideality (a) a problem for metaphysics and (b) an ethical problem. Simon Critchley The Ethics of Deconstruction, Oxford: Blackwell 1992, p. 192. Cf. Michel Foucault L’ordre du discours, Paris: Éditions Galimard 1971, pp. 7-11.

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and to detach oneself, distancing oneself, getting a perspective on this metaphysics and underlining a deconstructive gesture within – and outside – the constructions, thereby establishing an irreducible difference within the logos of metaphysics. Critchley maintains that such a reading both transcends and re-establishes a closure, so that the book of metaphysics closes in upon itself.79 This results in a double structure of two closed constructions, but between these we can discern an element of alterity in which the repetition creates a room for the movements in the text in the form of an ellipse: First, the text is engaged in a repetition of its internal exigencies through an act of ‘commentary.’ Second, within and through this repetition, an ellipsis, or moment of alterity, opens up within the text which allows it to deliver itself up to a wholly other reading. It is of vital importance to emphasize that the moment of alterity, the ellipsis within the text, is glimpsed only by giving oneself up to textual repetition. The ellipsis is the space within repetition. 80

One final point in Critchley’s sketch of a clôtural reading is interesting: viz., that deconstruction implies that the author holds fast to the dualism and refrains from taking an unambiguous position: in this way, the text retains a variety of readings which supplement one another. This makes it possible to adopt a skeptical attitude, e. g. to Hegel, without taking up a directly antithetical position in regard to Hegel’s theses, but also without letting oneself be completely paralyzed by the epoché of the skeptics. Instead of polemical criticism, the polemic (a word which literally means the waging of war) takes the form of passive resistance, attacking from ambush and outsmarting what Hegel himself intended with his text. In this way, deconstruction makes it possible to be simultaneously a skeptic and an anti-skeptic or (as with Kierkegaard) an ironist and an ethicist, thus marking the transition to another philosophical dialect and another philosophical dialectic. This entails a chronic problematization both of the text one is criticizing and of one’s own self-understanding as critic. To be a Socratic in this sense is a deconstructive virtue – but also a rhetorical art, an art which from one point of view establishes a close link to Kierkegaard and his critical application of the Hegelian dialectic as a point of departure for his own thinking. 79 80

Cf. Simon Critchley The Ethics of Deconstruction, p. 88. Cf. Simon Critchley The Ethics of Deconstruction, p. 89; cf. also the brief text where Derrida describes precisely such an elliptical movement as the expression of repetition: Jacques Derrida “Ellipse” in L’écriture et la différence, Paris: Éditions du Seuil 1967, pp. 429-436.

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Interpreting philosophers with a method corresponding to their own philosophy is not always a virtue, though. The risk is that the interpreter becomes absorbed by the rationality he analyzes, and hence misses the critical distance which is necessary for any kind of scientific work. On the other hand, any method ought to adhere to the “matter” or the internal logic of the subject of study, in this case death, self, and God, according to texts on these matters by Kierkegaard and Derrida. In the plural specter of methods for reading, I can imagine three or four reasons why deconstruction in this very general sense81 may open up for new insights and new perspectives, as long as we stick rigorously to a literal study of the texts. Firstly, it is the exegetical occupation with the texts, reading and analyzing them according to their internal logic. Second, it is the distanciation to the same text introduced by a critical point of view; i. e. questioning some of the presuppositions and intentions of the author. This second moment comes close to what Ricoeur has called a hermeneutics of suspicion. Third, and this point is already deeply involved in the problems we are analyzing, is the insistence on a problem, even on an aporia for thought, which may not be dissolved unless there are good reasons for it. The double structure of a problem and an aporia comes close to a way of doing philosophy which we do in fact share with Kierkegaard and Derrida, a way of philosophizing where one concedes to plurality and accepts negativity as a wound of thought. It could simply be called a Socratic point of view: insisting on an existential involvement and responsibility, resisting the imperative to find solutions to every problem on the cost of contradictions and complexity, and subsisting on the love of wisdom by admitting that we know there are certain things which we do not know, but still want to reflect upon.

81

There are many senses of the word ‘deconstruction’ which have nothing whatsoever to do with philosophy. Since the word rose to great popularity in the two last decades of the 20 th century, there are probably few other concepts which have been so heatedly debated, so satirically mocked, and so often misunderstood. I do not even care to take up this discussion here, because I find it completely futile. Instead, I give one suggestion of what deconstruction may signify in a philosophical context, and if the reader could accept that, I would be more than grateful and could accept almost any name for it, e. g. grammar, hermeneutics, or parallelography.

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§ 7 Parallelogram: Kierkegaard # Derrida As I have already mentioned, deconstruction is not primarily a methodology in the classical sense. However, my analysis of Derrida’s texts has sought to sketch a way of doing philosophy, which is detailed, rigorous, and logical, but still open to a radical suspicion and doubt, questioning the very foundations of modern rationality. Like Derrida, I begin with the textual commentary, in order to detect a double structure in the texts, a repetition of the text within the new text, which in its doubling opens up for a discussion of the relationship between Derrida and Kierkegaard – but also for a discussion with other philosophers and the commentary literature. In order to illustrate the relationship between Derrida and Kierkegaard, I will insert their texts into a geometrical figure, the parallelogram. The parallelogram opens up a room between Kierkegaard’s “line” and Derrida’s “line” in the analysis. My intention has not been to analyze Derrida’s reading of Kierkegaard or to demonstrate a linear connection in terms of the Wirkungsgeschichte of Kierkegaard’s influence on other thinkers. Rather, I will allow Derrida’s texts to inform, stimulate, and disturb our reading of Kierkegaard in virtue of the room which comes into being between the texts. This requires us to maintain a textual distance between them. In this way, there arises a tension in the area between the texts, and it is here that my interesse lies,82 in a tension field in which writing opens up a space for interpretation and for repetition. The parallelogram is not only relevant in terms of the construction of a geometrical figure. If we look a little more closely at the written trope “parallelo-gram,” we see that it is also a rhetorical figure, a complex construction of parallelity and letter (Greek gramma), and the rhetorical figure “parallelogram” permits a more nuanced understand82

Cf. the way in which Kierkegaard in The Concept of Anxiety links the problem of repetition to ethics and metaphysics, and to a particular interesse (also qua interesse, i. e. a “being-between”): “‘Repetition is the interest (Interesse) of metaphysics, and also the interest upon which metaphysics breaks down (strander); repetition is the watchword (Løsnet) in every ethical view; repetition is the conditio sine qua non for every issue of dogmatics.’ The first sentence contains a reference to the sentence that metaphysics as such is disinterested, as Kant said about aesthetics. As soon as interest emerges, metaphysics moves aside. This is why the word ‘interest’ is spatialized. In actuality, the entire interest of subjectivity emerges, and now metaphysics breaks down” (SKS 4, 325n-326n / cf. CA 18n). It is particularly interesting to observe how the word “interest” is “spatialized,” thereby also letting the text spatialize metaphysics, giving space in-between for breaking up the relationship between metaphysics and ethics, etc., from within.

§ 7 Parallelogram: Kierkegaard # Derrida

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ing of the relationship between texts, thanks to the various meanings which are inherent in it. First of all, we have the grammatical meaning (in Schleiermacher’s sense): we continually return to the text, to Kierkegaard’s and Derrida’s texts, as the starting point for our analysis. Secondly, we have the parallelogrammatical meaning: we get a doubling of the text in the form of two readings with a mutual interference which creates a space for deconstruction between the lines. Thirdly, and finally, we have a grammatological crack in the texts which opens up the difference between writing and speech, between absence and presence, between logos and pathos or reason and madness, and which holds fast to this difference as a trace in the text, a trace in which the original arkhê is continuously broken by an equally original khôra (cf. Chapter Two, § 11 below). This means that our approach to the texts will be structured by a late modern version of the classical trivium, which consisted of the three philological liberal arts – grammar, rhetoric, and logic – among the seven liberal arts of mediaeval education. All these three are present in our understanding of a parallellogrammatology: (i) grammar as the literalistic study of a text, (ii) rhetoric as the uncovering of rhetorical plurality and polyvalence in the text, and finally (iii) logic as the expression of the logical construction, the structure, and the dialectic. I wish to insist on this tripartite division of the study of texts, although not as a tool to master the text, e. g. by subordinating grammar and rhetoric into the overarching logic of the text, qua structure and dialectic. On the contrary, it is the tripartite division that allows the text to resist a unitary and total reading; this division takes into account the plurality both in the structures and in the “double” dialectic of our thinking. In this way, the parallelogram as a rhetorical, grammatical, and logical figure makes possible a tripartite reading along the lines and between the lines. Let us however not forget that our original point was to apply the parallelogram as a geometrical figure. In our context, this geometrical meaning of the word functions as a supplement to the other three meanings; but qua supplement, it has its own justification, since it emphasizes the significance of the graphical and optical figure which can never be reduced completely to a logical, rhetorical, or grammatical analysis. This too is a difference to which we shall return several times: we shall see how writing (the graphical element) and the spacing (espacement) of written language constitute an irreducible difference in relation to the logical and dialectical universe of meaning of the text.83 83

When we include geometry in this analysis, we are even including one aspect of the classical quadrivium, which consisted of geometry, astronomy, music, and arithmetic.

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When we read Kierkegaard’s discourse “At a Graveside,” for instance, we discover that the ideas and images of death he presents, cannot be reduced to one specific concept or meaning (cf. Chapter Three below). Death “itself” remains indefinable and inexplicable. Hence, even by Kierkegaard we may observe how the difference between concept and idea remains the origin of meaning in general. The difficulties in classifying Kierkegaard’s texts under any one discipline have led international Kierkegaard scholarship to develop a number of different approaches to his texts. In addition to those studies with a philosophical, theological, psychological, biographical, and purely edifying orientation, the last few decades have seen the development of a whole range of rhetorical, literary-theoretical, aesthetic studies. This has been accompanied in English-language secondary literature by philosophical and theological studies which take account of the literary and rhetorical qualities of the texts and include this perspective in their philosophical and/or theological analysis.84 Frequently, this results in a markedly post-structuralist, deconstructive reading of the texts.85 This happens only by way of exception in German-speaking scholarship,86 while Danish scholarship is clearly divided on this question.87 It appears that some interpreters, in re84

85

86

87

One early example is Louis Mackey Kierkegaard: A Kind of Poet, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press 1971. A relatively new study is Jamie Lorentzen Kierkegaard’s Metaphors, Macon: Mercer University Press 2001. A fine illustration of the interaction between various literary, theological, and philosophical approaches to Kierkegaard can be found in three collections of essays: Harold Bloom (ed.) Søren Kierkegaard, New York / Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishers 1989; Martin J. Matuštík and Merold Westphal (eds.) Kierkegaard in Post/ Modernity, Bloomington / Indianapolis: Indiana University Press 1995; Jane Chamberlain and Jonathan Rée (eds.) Kierkegaard: A Critical Reader, Oxford: Blackwell 1998. An example of a more uncompromisingly deconstructivist study is the controversial book by Roger Poole: The Indirect Communication, Charlottesville / London: University Press of Virginia 1993. Cf. e. g. Pat Bigelow Kierkegaard and the Problem of Writing, Tallahassee: Florida State University Press 1987. The most exciting exception here is the study by Tilman Beyrich Ist Glauben wiederholbar? Derrida liest Kierkegaard (Kierkegaard Studies: Monograph Series vol. 6), Berlin / New York: Walter de Gruyter 2001. A purely rhetorical study is Tim Hagemann Reden und Existieren. Kierkegaards antipersuasive Rhetorik, Berlin: Philo 2001. For a typical deconstructive approach to Kierkegaard, cf. Hans Hauge Dekonstruktiv teologi. Tekster på kanten af det religiøse og det litterære, Århus: Anis 1985 and Joakim Garff “Den søvnløse.” Kierkegaard læst æstetisk/biografisk, København: C. A. Reitzels Forlag 1995. Two studies which include elements from late modern philosophy, but are also well informed about classical continental philosophy, are

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action to post-structuralist analyses, have returned to a markedly modern historical-analytical, 88 existentialist-philosophical, 89 classical theological90 or religious-philosophical91 approach to Kierkegaard’s writings. The question whether one includes the rhetorical and literary aspects in a philosophical, psychological, or theological discussion of the texts depends on how one perceives the relationship between these disciplines, as well as on how one more generally defines the relationship between language and reality. Naturally, one can discuss whether genre, metaphors, rhetorical figures, and linguistic effects such as irony and indirect communication are relevant to philosophical problems, but it is a pity if this discussion takes on the unduly ideological character of a debate

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Adam Diderichsen Den sårede Odysseus. Kierkegaard og subjektivitetens genese, København: Hans Reitzels forlag 1998 and Niels Nymann Eriksen Kierkegaard’s Category of Repetition (Kierkegaard Studies: Monograph Series vol. 5), Berlin / New York: Walter de Gruyter 2000. E. g. Jon Stewart’s comprehensive study of Kierkegaard’s relationship to Hegel, which basically consists of classical Quellenforschung: Jon Stewart Kierkegaard’s Relations to Hegel Reconsidered, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2003. This is particularly clear in Theunissen’s two studies: Michael Theunissen Das Selbst auf dem Grund der Verzweiflung, Frankfurt am Main: Hain Verlag 1991, and Der Begriff Verzweiflung. Korrekturen an Kierkegaard, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1993, but in my opinion it also applies for the study by Ulrich Knappe: Theory and Practice in Kant and Kierkegaard (Kierkegaard Studies: Monograph Series vol. 9), Berlin / New York: Walter de Gruyter 2004. Cf. Anders Kingo Analogiens teologi. En dogmatisk studie over dialektikken i Søren Kierkegaards opbyggelige og pseudonyme forfatterskab, København: Gad 1995, and Joachim Ringleben Die Krankheit zum Tode von Sören Kierkegaard, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 1995. This applies for example to two German studies: Dorothea Glöckner Kierkegaards Begriff der Wiederholung (Kierkegaard Studies: Monograph Series vol. 3), Berlin / New York: Walter de Gruyter 1998, and Ulrich Lincoln Äußerung (Kierkegaard Studies: Monograph Series vol. 4), Berlin / New York: Walter de Gruyter 2000, as well as to Arne Grøn’s articles and books from the 1990’s, which entail a cautious renewal of the Danish tradition from Johannes Sløk and Gregor Malantschuk. See Arne Grøn Begrebet angst hos Søren Kierkegaard, København: Gyldendal 1994, and Subjektivitet og negativitet: Kierkegaard, København: Gyldendal 1997. Above all, Grøn develops the constructive approach, inspired by continental philosophy, which finds expression in the two classic studies by Johannes Sløk: Die Anthropologie Kierkegaards, København: Rosenkilde & Bagger 1954 and Kierkegaard – humanismens tænker, København: Hans Reitzel 1978, rather than the apologetic defense of Kierkegaard as an apostle of the truth in an age of nihilism which we find in Malantschuk; cf. Gregor Malantschuk Frihedens Problem i Kierkegaards Begrebet Angest, København: Rosenkilde og Bagger 1971, Fra Individ til den Enkelte, København: C. A. Reitzel 1978, and Frihed og eksistens, København: C. A. Reitzel 1980.

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between modernists and post-modernists.92 I believe that scholarship would benefit if this debate were strengthened across the boundaries – i. e. if these boundaries too were integrated into the discussion and analysis. As I argued in the introduction, I find the sharp distinction between modern and post-modern thinking basically unfruitful. Nevertheless, it has clearly led to a new situation with regard to the problems that are discussed in the present work, as well as with regard to the relationship between theology and philosophy. Kierkegaard’s texts problematize many of the presuppositions of modern philosophy, but they are also deeply anchored in a modern way of looking at problems. This means that they anticipate a number of problems which have become central in late modern philosophy; at the same time, they can be seen as an uncompromising corrective to the American enthusiasm for deconstructionism or “theory” as a literary-theoretical method93 or an attempt to develop a “secular” theology in the form of a post-modern A/theology.94 My approach to Kierkegaard’s texts will allow me to present and actualize some problems which have received very little attention in Scandinavian theology and philosophy. This is, in fact, a paradoxical situation.95 In the course of the past two decades, questions linked to religion 92

93

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As happens for example in the article by John D. Caputo: “Looking the Impossible in the Eye: Kierkegaard, Derrida, and the Repetition of Religion” in Kierkegaard Studies: Yearbook 2002, pp. 1-25. Cf. e. g. Jonathan Culler On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism, Ithaca (N. Y.): Cornell University Press 1982. See especially Mark C. Taylor Erring. A postmodern A/theology, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press 1984. In this context, let me offer a few observations about the Norwegian reception of Kierkegaard, which appears to have been accompanied by similar paradoxes and profound contradictions from Fredrik Petersen onwards. At the same time as Petersen wrote his comprehensive and classic theological dissertation about Søren Kierkegaard at the Theological Faculty of the University of Oslo (Fredrik Petersen Dr. Søren Kierkegaards kristendomsforkyndelse, Oslo 1877), Georg Brandes wrote his subversive biography (Søren Kierkegaard: en kritisk Fremstilling, København 1877), in which he praises Kierkegaard as a rebel and an existentialist thinker, though at the same time claiming that Kierkegaard undermines both Christianity and the church through his fight against the church authorities during 1854-55. Petersen and his colleague Gisle Johnson established the premises for the edifying and partly pietistic reading of Kierkegaard in Norway, which was followed by Ole Hallesby and others (for more information, cf. my article “På de 70 000 Favne” in Kirke og Kultur 2002) and has left its mark on much of the Norwegian reception of Kierkegaard. The other important impulse comes from Brandes. In the same year as he published his biography of Kierkegaard, Brandes held a lecture in the Norwegian Student Society which has had an enormous influence in the form of a long tradition of a cultural-radical reading of Kierkegaard. This strongly influenced writers such as Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, Henrik Ibsen, Sigurd Hoel, Arnulf Øverland, and Dag Solstad.

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have taken on a contemporary relevance in a very novel manner in the political, cultural, and philosophical spheres. Although it is a Scandinavian philosopher who plays a key role in this discussion, one can have the impression that the theological and philosophical milieus are reThe deep trench separating cultural radicals and pietists runs through Norwegian cultural life from the 1870’s until well into the 1950’s. This means that diametrically opposite understandings of Kierkegaard made their contribution to the intellectual struggle between Hallesby and Øverland (which finally landed in court). The great tension in Kierkegaard’s writings thus came to define the starting point for many of the most basic tensions in Norwegian intellectual life in the twentieth century. Concerning the last 50 years of scholarly debate, however, the antithesis between “edifying” and “cultural-radical” has been replaced by the antithesis “theological” vs. “philosophical,” although the cultural-radical debate with pietism continues at full strength in cultural life. It was Per Lønning who brought Norwegian Kierkegaard research up to an international level with his dissertation: “Samtidighedens Situation,” Oslo: Land og Kirke 1954. Lønning’s relationship to the texts is somewhat distant, but here too we can see very clearly the traces of the profoundly serious and edifying tradition of interpretation, which is thus continued. We find a predominantly theological interest in Karstein Hopland Virkelighet og bevissthet, Bergen: University of Bergen 1981, and (from a more international perspective) in Jan-Olav Henriksen The Reconstruction of Religion, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans 2001. The two most important philosophical contributions in this period are KjellEyvind Johansen Begrepet Gjentagelse hos Søren Kierkegaard, Oslo: Solum 1988, and Alastair Hannay Kierkegaard, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul 1982. The latter book has not had any great influence in Norway, but it is considered a classic in the international context. On what has been called “the second front” (by Rune Slagstad), we also find studies which belong more to the history of ideas, by the German/Norwegian/ Danish scholar Johannes Hohlenberg (Søren Kierkegaard København: Hagerup 1940, and Den ensommes vej. En fremstilling af Søren Kierkegaards værk, København: Hagerup 1948), the psychologist Tollak B. Sirnes (Sann personlighet, personlig sannhet: kan Kierkegaard hjelpe oss?, Stavanger: Dreyer forlag 1979), and – with some reservations – even Finn Jor (Søren Kierkegaard. Den eksisterende tenker, Oslo: Land og kirke 1954, and “Til hiin Enkelte.” Søren Kierkegaards liv og verk, Oslo: Oktober 1995) and Grete Børsand Heyerdal (Forbilde og utfordring: en Kierkegaard-studie, Oslo: Tanum 1966). We should also mention here the more biographical studies from 1923-24 by Harald Beyer (Søren Kierkegaard og Norge, Kristiania: Aschehoug 1924) and Valborg Erichsen (Søren Kierkegaards betydning for norsk aandsliv, Kristiania 1923); the last of these is decidedly the best. For more information about the Norwegian reception of Kierkegaard, see Thor Arvid Dyrerud Tegn på liv: Søren Kierkegaard-biografiens historie, Oslo: University of Oslo 1999. Although it becomes less visible at certain periods, the line of conflict from Petersen and Brandes does not disappear, however, as we see from the fact that the influence from Brandes becomes exceedingly clear in Eivind Tjønneland Ironi som symptom. En kritisk studie av Søren Kierkegaards “Om Begrebet Ironi”, Bergen: University of Bergen 1999. Kierkegaard is thus a central figure in much of what has happened in Norwegian intellectual life in the last one hundred and fifty years.

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treating to old positions.96 This is one of the many paradoxes we see in today’s situation, and perhaps the best way to investigate this would be in the form of a new study of the concept of anxiety. Here, however, I do not take the detour via anxiety, but go directly to the concept of despair and to the questions about death, the self, and the other. I mentioned in the introduction that death is not a simple theme for an academic monograph; this also applies to genre and form. At times, my discussion of philosophical problems will begin by looking at literary and rhetorical aspects of the texts, since I find this necessary in the study of Derrida’s and Kierkegaard’s texts, which are so clearly marked by particular literary forms and genres. Naturally, this will influence the form of my investigation. Still, I believe that this is appropriate to a philosophical and philosophico-theological analysis of Kierkegaard and Derrida. Accordingly, the “clothing” of this treatise is the result of due consideration and rhetorical reflection with regard to the contents of the book. Let me thus finally quote a pseudonymous writer with whose works we will gradually become familiar: “But that the clothing of the dissertation is what it is has at least been considered carefully, and seems to be psychologically right as well. There is a more formal style that is so formal that it is not very significant and, once it is all too familiar, readily becomes meaningless.”97

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Paradoxically enough, this is expressed most clearly of all in some of those theologians who claim that we ought to take up the challenge posed by post-modern philosophy, etc., e. g. Jan-Olav Henriksen På grensen til Den andre. Om teologi og postmodernitet, Oslo: Gyldendal 1999, and most recently Trygve Wyller “Kallet til ikke å gjøre Den andre til Den samme” in Tidsskrift for Teologi og kirke (TTK) 2004, pp. 163-171, and Peter Widmann “Nye veie for nordisk teologi” in Tidsskrift for Teologi og kirke (TTK) 2004, pp. 224-231. One of those who contribute with genuinely constructive analyses of late modern theology and philosophy is Jayne Svenungsson in: Guds Återkomst. En studie av Gudsbegreppet innom postmodern filosofi, Göteborg: Glänta Produktion 2004. SKS 11, 118 / SUD, 6.

II. Secrets of the Self: Derrida on Madness, Death, and God

Les hommes sont si nécessairement fous, que ce serait être fou, par un autre tour de folie, de n’être pas fou. Blaise Pascal

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When Kierkegaard writes a book about the self, “a self relating to itself,” he analyzes a sick self, a self in despair, suffering from the sickness unto death. From this reversed perspective he analyzes the dark side of human reason and the basic inadequacies and misrelations of the self – in its relation to itself and to the other. He thus destabilizes the Hegelian synthesis of the self, by subverting the normal relationship between health and sickness, between time and eternity, and even between reason and madness. It is certainly a shattering analysis, to which I will return in detail in Chapter Four of the present study. When Derrida writes about the human self, he begins with an analysis of the relationship between reason and madness, in an essay first published as early as in 1963 under the title “Cogito et histoire de la folie.”1 The essay is an intensive discussion with Foucault inter alia on the interpretation of the Cartesian doubt and the cogito on the question of rationality vs. madness. Madness gives in this case the reversed perspective and represents a certain otherness in relation to the “selfcentered” rationality of the Cartesian cogito. What is at stake is a principal discussion about the origin and character of modern rationality; hence, the discussion is of great principal significance. In this chapter I will analyze the debate on rationality in some detail, because it has got a more general bearing on how we may reflect upon the human self without taking the modern conception of subjectivity for given. Thereafter I take one step further from this early period to his mature thinking, namely a discourse on death called Apories. Mourir – s’attendre aux ‘limites de la vérité’ (1995). This is an equally theoretical discourse, focusing on the problem of death, with particular reference to Heidegger’s Being unto death in Sein und Zeit. The title indicates a certain way of “thinking death,” which is also a way of thinking about the self, viz. by way of aporias. Our “way” of expressing ourselves already covers an implicit paradox: an aporia is not primarily a way of thinking, it is rather an impasse of thinking; it is thinking brought to its limits, just like death brings human existence to its limits, to its 1

This essay was first delivered as a lecture on March 4, 1963 in the Collège philosophique, then printed as an article in Revue de Metaphysique et de Morale. It was subsequently revised slightly before being printed in the 1967 collection of articles. I have used and give the first reference to the 1967 edition: Jacques Derrida “Cogito et histoire de la folie” in L’écriture et la différence, Paris: Éditions du Seuil 1967, pp. 51-97. The second reference refers to the English translation “Cogito and the History of Madness” in Writing and Difference, tr. by Alan Bass, London: Routledge 1972, pp. 31-63. When not otherwise indicated, the translations are taken from this English edition.

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very end (although it is an “end” which shatters its thinking about human existence, and thus about the self). The discourse on death thus implies a radicalization of the principal discourse of rationality, which we will pursuit throughout this inquiry. Every theoretical discourse by Derrida implies a discourse on language, i. e. on the problem of giving names and of designating something as x. This is already a complex problem concerning death: what do I refer to when I say “my death”? When I designate something as “God,” however, the problems are even amplified and multiplied. Referring to “God” as an x does namely involve a certain attempt to define totality and origin, even though such an attempt goes far beyond human capacity. In some of his latest essays, Derrida turns to negative theology in order to inquire what such a designation entails, what kind of possibility and impossibility which is involved. It is difficult to say whether he thereby enters a theological discourse or not. 2 I would say that it is primarily an inquiry into certain structures of language, thus they are linguistic, philosophical, and phenomenological, rather than theological. Because they are basic structures of language, however, they also concern the very possibility of religiosity, of religious language, of faith, of promise, of prayer, of referring to some x as “God.” And thus Derrida moves beyond a certain modern restriction on philosophy in general and phenomenology in particular, namely, that it should rather refrain from talking about God and about questions concerning religion – and if it deals with such questions anyhow, philosophy should restrict itself to a critique of religion and of any attempt to blur the border between philosophy and theology. Even though Derrida again and again returns to questions in the philosophy of language, he also does exactly what he ought not to do: he becomes involved in theological questions, and still he is not willing to give up his philosophical agenda. Thus, he blurs the border between philosophy and theology and includes theological questions in a philosophical inquiry. He understands philosophy as a discipline which is occupied with the other and never ceases to become disturbed by it – and that even includes the wholly other, le tout autre: God. After a brief passage through some texts where Derrida is occupied with religion, I will finally indicate what I find intriguing in Derrida’s discourse on language and rationality.

2

Cf. Dominique Janicaud Le tournant théologique de la phénoménologie française, Paris: Eclat 1991.

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§ 8 Foucault on Madness, Cogito, and the History of the Self The idea behind a book like the Histoire de la folie (English translation Madness and Civilization) is certainly original. Foucault describes here “the great confinement” of the insane in Europe in the seventeenth century. In many ways, this is a trans-boundary investigation, since it investigates records and cultural traces as diverse as public registers, eyewitness descriptions, historical books, literary works, legal texts, and painting – and analyzes these from a historical, philosophical, and sociological point of view. The aim is to write the “archaeology” of madness. 3 In our present context, the interesting point is that Foucault does not wish only to describe an event or a process (de facto and de jure) which occurs in society through the confinement of the insane in institutions. He also shows how this process penetrates literature and art, political/juridical ideology, and the rationality which leaves its imprint on both society and the academic world. This means that he also asks the philosophical questions about the foundations of rationality and about the basic distinctions which are introduced between reason and irrationality, between speech and silence, and between sanity and madness. In his foreword, he indicates that this is an underlying goal of the work as a whole, and it is here that we find the explicitly archaeological element in the description of madness: What is constitutive is the action which demarcates madness, not the [psychopathological] science elaborated once this demarcation is made and calm restored. What is originative is the caesura that establishes the distance between reason and non-reason; reason’s subjugation of non-reason, wresting from it its truth as madness, crime, or disease, derives explicitly from this point. Hence we must speak of that initial dispute without assuming victory, or the right to a victory; we must speak of those actions re-examined in history, leaving in abeyance all that may figure as a conclusion, as a refuge in truth; we shall speak of this act of scission, of this distance set, of this void between reason and what is not reason, without ever relying upon the fulfillment of what it claims to be.4 3

4

The word “archaeology” points in this context to the Greek words arkhê (beginning, origin) and logos (thought, speech, reason, order), not to the historical archaeology which seeks with the help of excavations to understand ancient cultures and extinct civilizations. A certain parallel between these two archaeologies does however arise through Foucault’s “excavations” in the forgotten – and therefore either hidden or suppressed – past of the European reason. Michel Foucault Madness and Civilization (Orig. Folie et déraison. Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique (1961)), tr. by Richard Howard, London / New York: Routledge 2001, p. xii. Translation modified.

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In other words, Foucault wishes to go back to what preceded this distinction, where “the man of madness” and “the man of reason” are still communicating in a dialogue that goes over the breach. Foucault holds that this dialogue must have been conducted “ […] in an incipient and very crude language, antedating that of science […].”5 In this epoch prior to the breach, he assumes that there was a near, but nevertheless unclear link between madness and reason: “Here madness and non-madness, reason and non-reason are inextricably involved: inseparable at the moment when they do not yet exist, and existing for each other, in relation to each other, in the exchange which separates them.”6 Foucault holds that this mutual exchange met an abrupt end with “the great confinement.” With a violent gesture, reason seized the sovereignty over irrationality. This gesture is both abstract in its language and its understanding of madness, and very concrete and physical in the boundary it draws between the sane and the mad. This breaks off the dialogue, and madness is brought to silence; “[…] all those stammered, imperfect words without fixed syntax in which the exchange between madness and reason was made. The language of psychiatry, which is a monologue of reason about madness, has been established on the basis of such a silence.”7 Foucault explicitly links this distinction between madness and reason to the name of Descartes and to the Cartesian doubt. He sees the connection in the fact that delirium and inner blindness are linked in classicism to the essence of madness, whereas the dawning rationalism of that epoch constitutes the reason by associating itself with truth and light – and thereby marking the boundary between itself and madness, which is exorcized and expelled: In this sense, the Cartesian formula of doubt is certainly the great exorcism of madness. Descartes closes his eyes and plugs up his ears the better to see the true brightness of essential daylight; thus he is secured against the dazzlement of the madman who, opening his eyes, sees only night, and not seeing at all, he believes he sees when he imagines. In the uniform lucidity of his closed senses, Descartes has broken with all possible fascination, and if he sees, he is certain of seeing that which he sees. While before the eyes of the madman, drunk on a light which is darkness, rise and multiply images incapable of criticizing themselves (since the madman sees them), but irreparably separated from being (since the madman sees nothing). 8

5 6 7 8

Foucault Madness and Civilization, p. xii. Foucault Madness and Civilization, p. xii. Foucault Madness and Civilization, p. xii. Foucault Madness and Civilization, p. 102.

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Foucault believes that Descartes, and indeed classicism as a whole, made reason and madness into mutually exclusive antitheses.9 The Cartesian nature is abstract, determined by a universal time, and divided into absolute antitheses between light and darkness – which means that the “universal law” about day and night in this period “excludes every dialectic and every reconciliation;” consequently, it lays the ground both for the unity of perfect knowledge and for the uncompromising partition of the tragic existence; “[…] everything must be either waking or dream, truth or darkness, the light of being or the nothingness of shadow. Such a law prescribes an inevitable order, a serene division which makes truth possible and confirms it forever.”10 It is also interesting to note that Foucault holds that he can demonstrate the same rationalistic tendency within the Church and theology, which led both Catholics and Protestants to contribute to the great confinement in the seventeenth century. They were guided by moral principles and acted in the name of God.11 He believes that the great idea of the madness of the cross, which left its mark on the middle ages and the Renaissance, disappeared in this period. He finds its last expressions in Jansenism, especially in Pascal: The scandal of Christian faith and Christian abasement, whose strength and value as revelation Pascal still preserved, would soon have no more meaning for Christian thought except perhaps to reveal in these scandalized consciences so many blind souls. […] Christian unreason was relegated by Christians themselves into the margins of a reason that had become identical with the wisdom of God incarnate. After PortRoyal, men would have to wait two centuries – until Dostoyevsky and Nietzsche – for

9

10 11

Cf. also the following claim about the significance of the cogito, when it becomes the model for the “authoritarian intervention” of medicine vis-à-vis madness: “Descartes sought this absolute awakening, which dismisses one by one all the forms of illusion, at the beginning of his Meditations, and found it, paradoxically in the very awareness of a dream, in the consciousness of deluded consciousness. […] What Descartes discovers at the end of his resolution and in the doubling of a consciousness that never separates from itself and does not split, medicine imposes from outside, and in the dissociation of doctor and patient. The physician, in relation to the madman, reproduces the moment of the Cogito in relation to the time of the dream, of illusion, and of madness. A completely exterior Cogito, alien to cogitation itself, and which can be imposed upon it only in the form of an invasion” (Foucault Madness and Civilization, p. 175). Foucault Madness and Civilization, p. 103. Cf. Foucault Madness and Civilization, pp. 74-79; in particular the following quotation from p. 77: “For classicism, the Incarnation is no longer madness; but what is madness is this incarnation of man in the beast, which is, as the ultimate point of his Fall, the most magnificent sign of his guilt.”

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Christ to regain the glory of his madness, for scandal to recover its power as revelation, for unreason to cease being merely the public shame of reason.12

We may of course ask what Foucault would think about Kierkegaard, e. g. a text like Fear and Trembling. Are not the absurd and the incommensurable in this text also expressions of the madness of the cross and of the revelatory power of the scandal? There is not such a great distance, admittedly, from Kierkegaard to precisely Nietzsche and Dostoevsky, nor indeed to Pascal, and this suggests that to place his texts in such a context would probably fit well into Foucault’s sketch. As we have seen in § 4, however, Kierkegaard’s understanding of the philosophical doubt is quite different from Foucault’s. He does not emphasize the lack of ambiguity and the purity of the reason, but makes doubt the starting point for thinking about the contradiction, about a consciousness based on contradiction. Foucault takes up a clear position in this conflict between reason and irrationality, between rationalism and madness, since he does not show any great interest in this language which takes control and holds the monologue – nor does he make any attempt to subject it to a more nuanced analysis. Instead, he tries to uncover the silence which lies under the language, the silence which is always spoken about but which itself has no right to speak, still less the possibility of discovering a language in which the dumb can give utterance to themselves. Psychiatry has the power of definition: it possesses language, and this is why Foucault believes that a study of madness itself must therefore turn to the dumb and to their silence: “I have not tried to write the history of that language, but rather the archaeology of that silence.”13

§ 9 Splitting Up the Cartesian Self From Within Derrida’s essay “Cogito et histoire de la folie” was published two years after Histoire de la folie. It is both critical and ironic – and given that the young Derrida was a former student of Foucault, this was a particularly explosive mixture.14 The criticism is aimed at the main intention in Foucault’s book, viz. the contents of “the archaeology of silence,” the possibility of writing about or describing this silence, and 12 13 14

Foucault Madness and Civilization, pp. 74 f. Foucault Madness and Civilization, p. xii. Cf. Derrida’s description of the difficult relationship between teacher and student: Derrida L’écriture et la différence, pp. 51-53 / Writing and Difference, pp. 31 f.

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the possibility of writing the history of madness without repeating rationalism’s “violent gesture” against the insane. Lengthy sections of the essay are devoted to the interpretation of the cogito and of its relation to madness; does Descartes’ insight imply only an exclusion of madness and irrationality, or also a permanent crisis for philosophy and for rational thinking as a whole? Let us first, however, pause a little at silence, the silence of the insane. Derrida’s most fundamental criticism of the entire historical and archeological project asserts that when Foucault wishes to put words to the experience of the insane, this entails merely a new form of violence on reason’s part, a new attempt to make silence speak – since the only available language in which we can describe madness is the language of reason. And even if Foucault does seek to avoid traditional psychological terminology, the term “archaeology” itself implies that he is looking for a rational explanation. In other words, the expression “an archaeology of silence” is not only self-contradictory; it is from the very outset also a repetition of the violent gesture of rationalism.15 Silence has no beginning, nor does it know any speech. The problem with writing a history of madness or an archaeology of silence is that “history” has always been a rational concept, and that ÉÚÁÍÐ has always been concerned with speech and utterance, based on the self-knowledge of reason, and frequently with reference to its beginning or origin (wÏÕ¼).16 Derrida claims that the project is built on a paradoxical formulation and is linked to the naïve desire to reach something “original,” something “pre-Socratic,” as by Nietzsche and Heidegger; but Foucault fails to see the problem posed by the fact that the logic in his own investigation is generated by language, by reason, and by the tradition which he intends to criticize.17 If one reads the Histoire de la folie from the perspective of the intentions which Foucault himself mentions in the preface, it does in fact appear that he is looking back in search of such an origin: he wants to isolate the “moment” when reason parts company with irrationality. He then wishes to understand how the historical and logical distinction – this fundamental difference which Derrida compares with Hegel’s A = A (“the Hegelian Entzweiung”) – develops and changes in the course of history,18 how it has institutional consequences and is slowly overtaken by deeper structural transformations and changes greatly 15 16 17 18

See Derrida L’écriture et la différence, p. 57 / Writing and Difference, p. 35. Cf. Derrida L’écriture et la différence, p. 59 / Writing and Difference, p. 37. Cf. Derrida L’écriture et la différence, p. 64 / Writing and Difference, p. 40. Cf. Derrida L’écriture et la différence, p. 62 / Writing and Difference, pp. 38 f.

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between the seventeenth and the nineteenth centuries. It is surely not too much to assume that it is here that Derrida believes he can see “a Hegelian dimension” in Foucault’s archaeology, although we do not find any direct reference to Hegel in the Histoire de la folie.19 According to Derrida, Foucault engages in a debate not only with Descartes but also with Hegel and the Hegelian reason. He does indeed employ a philosophical terminology, an understanding of history, and a dialectical movement which have clearly Hegelian traits. The “liberation” of the insane at which Foucault aims thereby takes on the character of a dialectical reaction to the Hegelian logos. In other words, it is a subtle repetition of the Hegelian dialectic, which confirms the metaphysics he is criticizing, even though it is apparently written “on behalf of” the insane.20 These observations suggest that the methodological approach on which the Histoire de la folie is based contain traces of the same dialectic that we find in Marx’s historical materialism.21 As Foucault describes it, the dialectic between reason and madness presupposes a form of suspicion vis-à-vis the reason itself, and implies an attempt to relate the development of history from the perspective of those who were oppressed or locked up, on behalf of these persons, on behalf of the dumb, the mumbling, and the voices that scream in despair. The question is whether such an enterprise is possible – and if so, whether it implies that the insane themselves can make themselves heard. We may also ask whether the archaeology can be expanded to include a description of reason’s structural oppression of madness, even in two works which have apparently so little to do with madness as Descartes’ Discours and Méditations. Do these two works permit us to trace the path back to a “violent gesture” which helped separate madness from thinking, i. e. the origin of a rationalistic reason which put the insane to silence once and for all? Derrida approaches this question by means of a new reading of the textual passages in Descartes to which Foucault refers, setting these in relation to their immediate context. The analysis is very detailed and intricate, but basically, it proceeds in three steps. First, he asks to 19 20

21

Cf. Derrida L’écriture et la différence, p. 68 / Writing and Difference, p. 43. “Will not the archaeology of silence be the most efficacious and subtle restoration, the repetition, in the most irreducibly ambiguous meaning of the word, of the act perpetrated against madness – and be so at the very moment when this act is denounced?” (Derrida L’écriture et la différence, p. 57 / Writing and Difference, p. 35). Foucault too makes a link between his archaeological project and Marx: cf. Michel Foucault The Archaeology of Knowledge, (Orig.: L’archéologie du savoir (1969)), London / New York: Routledge 2002, pp. 12 f.

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what extent one may assert that Descartes truly wishes to exclude the insane from the discourse, and a fortiori that Descartes views madness as an important stage on the way to the cogito.22 Here, Derrida holds that the text – understood in a naïve manner – merely mentions the insane as an exaggerate example, a “hyperbolic” example, of how each person can get his sense perceptions wrong. He then goes on to the more comprehensive hyperbole, the idea that all one’s thoughts might be a dream, or suggested by an “evil demon,” which would mean total madness: Now, the recourse to the hypothesis of the evil genius will make present and summon the possibility of a total madness, a total derangement which I would not be able to control, since it is inflicted on me – ex hypothesi – leaving me no responsibility for it. […] [It] is a madness that will introduce subversion into pure thought and to its purely intelligible objects, to the field of clear and distinct ideas, to the realm of the mathematical truths which escape natural doubt. 23

This is therefore a madness which encompasses every aspect of the earthly sphere, and indeed everything that exists, including that knowledge which is otherwise considered the most certain of all, those truths of mathematics which are unaffected by any doubts about our sense perceptions. Secondly, since doubt and uncertainty are intensified in the total madness, Derrida points out that even this idea is overcome by the moment of cogito, the sudden insight that whether I believe I am dreaming, or people think that I am insane, nevertheless no one can take away from me the fact that I am thinking, the fact that when I think I am thinking, I am thinking. And this means that I exist, as a thinking being, de facto and de jure. De facto, in that I point to something that already is thinking; and de jure, in that this insight posits thinking qua thinking: Whether I am mad or not, Cogito, sum. Madness is therefore, in every sense of the word, only one case of thought (within thought). It is therefore a question of drawing back toward a point where all determined contradictions, in the form of given, factual historical structures, can appear, and appear as relative to this zero point where the determined meaning and non-meaning come together in their common origin. 24

Derrida thus holds that Descartes is not attempting to exclude madness. On the contrary, by reflecting on the possibility that he himself 22 23

24

Cf. Derrida L’écriture et la différence, pp. 77-79 / Writing and Difference, pp. 50 f. Derrida L’écriture et la différence, p. 81 / Writing and Difference, pp. 52 f. Translation modified. Derrida L’écriture et la différence, p. 86 / Writing and Difference, p. 56. Translation modified.

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may be suffering from madness, he includes insanity in the logical discourse. Since it is difficult for reason itself to decide whether or not it is subject to a form of madness, thought turns in the cogito towards a zero point which is antecedent both to meaning and non-meaning, beyond both reason and insanity. Thereby he opens up the discourse for both of these and locates the origin of the discourse at a point antecedent to the distinction between madness and reason. This is then the third point in Derrida’s new reading of Descartes: viz., that this insight does not in the least exclude the insane or dreams from thought. On the contrary, Descartes makes such a fundamental move beyond the reflective and dialectical reason that it actually includes the contradictions of thought – madness, dreams, and errors. In the cogito, thought has made a hyperbolic move which surpasses the two preceding hyperboles, a move beyond its own presupposition, beyond all that exists, epekeina tes ousias (xλÈÃÇË¿Ò"hÐÍ}ѽ¿Ð cf. Plato, Republic 509b-c).25 This is the madness which is the presupposition of thought, and which itself is not based on anything else. This is the point where reason goes beyond itself in the direction of irrationality and includes this irrationality, this element of madness, in thought, in a manner that can never be overcome or excluded. Derrida claims that the hyperbole opens up a space antecedent to this either/or – either reason or irrationality – and since this space is filled neither with reason nor with irrationality, it leaves only a trace. The trace differentiates, but it is not itself differentiated. It is described as an “excess in the direction of the indeterminate,” towards Nothing (Rien) or the Infinite (l’Infini): The extent to which doubt and the Cartesian Cogito are punctuated by this project of a singular and unprecedented excess – an excess in the direction of the nondetermined, Nothing or the Infinite, an excess which overflows the totality of that which can be thought, the totality of beings and determined meanings, the totality of factual history – is also the extent to which any effort to reduce this project, to enclose it within a determined historical structure, however comprehensive, risks dulling the point itself. Such an effort risks doing violence to this project in turn […], and a violence of a totalitarian and historicist style which eludes meaning and the origin of meaning. 26

According to Derrida, it is the space opening up, the indeterminate space antecedent to reason and madness, that makes possible a deconstruction of reason, which therefore in turn risks “doing violence” to historicism’s construction of history. This shatters the predictability 25 26

Cf. Derrida, L’écriture et la différence, p. 87 / Writing and Difference, pp. 56 f. Derrida L’écriture et la différence, pp. 87 f. / Writing and Difference, p. 57. Translation modified.

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of thinking, the economy of thinking. It is shattered by the economy of writing, which is described as a regular link between a surplus and an excess, a totality which is surpassed: “The différance of the absolute excess.”27 If the difference is an excess of this absolute kind, the thinking subject will not even be able to retain control over his thinking; indeed, one will scarcely be able to decide the extent to which one is oneself mad or not. This leads Derrida to exclaim: “I philosophize only in terror, but in the confessed terror of being mad.”28 Derrida’s claim is thus that Descartes does not exclude madness (as Foucault maintains), but rather presupposes it both in his methodology and in the whole of his philosophy. He also claims that this is presumably the only way in which reason can express madness without seeking to speak “on behalf of” the insane and thereby repeating the “violent gesture” of reason. It must express the madness on which it itself is built, and from which it will never be able to detach itself. Finally, he indicates – not without a certain irony – that despite his own intention, Foucault does precisely this when he writes the Histoire de la folie. In some measure, therefore, Foucault has done the same as Descartes. He has repeated the Cartesian move in the mid-twentieth century by tracing thinking about madness back to an indeterminate space antecedent to the absolute distinction between reason and insanity. Ironically enough, it is this that Derrida finds highly laudable in Foucault’s project.29 Here it is not only Descartes who is deconstructed and read anew. It is just as much Foucault, Derrida’s own teacher, who has his thesis turned inside-out – or perhaps more accurately, outside-in. This led to a long and eloquent silence between the two philosophers. Foucault refused to answer the criticism, and when we read his texts, we do not find one single mention of the name Derrida in central works such as Les mots et les choses or L’archéologie du savoir. 30 During the next ten years, any conversation that may have continued had to take the 27 28

29 30

Derrida L’écriture et la différence, p. 96 / Writing and Difference, p. 62. Derrida L’écriture et la différence, p. 96 / Writing and Difference, p. 62. Translation modified. Cf. Derrida L’écriture et la différence, pp. 95 f. / Writing and Difference, pp. 61 f. It is only in an article published in 1972 that he takes up Derrida’s article and answers his criticism: cf. “Mon corps, ce papier, ce feu,” in Dits et écrits, vol. II, Paris: Gallimard 1994, pp. 245-268. In the revised edition of Histoire de la folie from 1972, however, Foucault has simply removed the preface to the first edition (which Derrida criticized sharply) and substituted it with a preface about what it means to be an author (!). Cf. Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique, revised version, Paris: Éditions Gallimard 1972, pp. 9-10.

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form of a conversation between texts where the other is silenced, between everything that is not said yet reveals a mutual influence, e. g. in Foucault’s further development of the archeological project. This makes their conversation a lengthy exercise in the French intellectual virtue of comment ne pas parler (“how to avoid speaking”). 31 The essay about cogito and the history of madness is primarily concerned to point out the problematic aspects of Foucault’s thesis about an “original” distinction between reason and madness. We find a completely different reading of Descartes, which shatters Foucault’s construction of the history of madness as an original distinction between reason and irrationality, a distinction drawn by the reason itself. The problem which Derrida sets out at the beginning, and which he discusses throughout the entire essay, is the extent to which the archaeology of madness, which intends to rebel against reason in general, is able to do so within the history of reason – since that limits its significance very considerably: “Since it can operate only within reason as soon as it speaks, the revolution against the reason always possesses the limited significance of what we call – using precisely the language of the Ministry of the Interior! – an ‘agitation’.”32 The significance of archaeology and of its agitation and war against the reason is very limited, since it is impossible to attack the reason from within. The very fact of its inclusion in an archaeology means that it has been captured by the closure of metaphysics (la clôture métaphysique), and hence the attempted war results in domestic terror. Under the war of reason against itself, however, Derrida detects the traces – often in the form of inherent contradictions in the text – of another, even more ambitious, project, viz. the attempt to identify the actual breaking point (le point de rupture) in the discontinued dialogue between one particular form of reason and one particular form of madness. 33 In discussing the possibility of writing the history of madness from a philosophical vantage point, discussing the character of language, rationality, and the discourse of the discourse, this would be the interesting problem. 34

31

32

33 34

This is more precisely the question of how to speak without speaking, i. e. speak by means of various kinds of circumscription, by negations, or by silence. Derrida employs this phrase as the title of an essay on negative theology (cf. Jacques Derrida Psyché: Inventions de l’autre, Paris: Éditions Galilée 1987, p. 535). Derrida L’écriture et la différence, p. 59 / Writing and Difference, p. 36. Translation modified. Cf. Derrida L’écriture et la différence, p. 61 / Writing and Difference, p. 38. Cf. Derrida L’écriture et la différence, p. 61 / Writing and Difference, p. 38.

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Since our investigation of madness, cogito, and doubt is guided precisely by a philosophical interest of this kind, we shall follow Derrida’s reflections one step further. Derrida takes up Foucault’s words about a decision between reason and madness. This is a striking way to speak of the distinction involved: it is an either/or which is employed to designate a caesura, but also to create a link between a certain reason and a certain madness: The Decision, through a single act, links and separates reason and madness, and it must be understood at once both as the original act of an order, a fiat, a decree, and as a schism, a caesura, a separation, a dissection. I would prefer to speak of a dissension, to underline that in question is a self-dividing action, a cleavage and torment interior to meaning [sens] in general, interior to logos in general, a division within the very act of sentire. As always, the dissension is internal. The outside (is) the inside, is the fission that produces and divides it along the lines of the Hegelian Entzweiung. 35

Derrida replaces décision with dissension in order to emphasize that this involves a turning point, a shift within the question about meaning in general, about logos in general. If one pursues the argument to its conclusion, however, it intends to show that the reason is not able to draw this distinction – and that accordingly, the decision itself is or takes place in a kind of madness, by means of a division into two, an Entzweiung, which points towards a zero point antecedent to the distinction between madness and reason and then lets this distinction pass like a fissure or a breach in the midst of one particular form of reason – thereby opening up a space which destabilizes the construction and questions the boundaries. All the author does is to repeat the text, to read it one more time. But the repetition (“in the most irreducibly ambiguous meaning of the word”) is a little different, and is constructed differently, and this means that the space between the texts (of Foucault, Descartes, and Derrida) becomes the space of writing. In this space, we find various movements – both the logical movement, which defines and constructs, and the insane movement, which is uncertain and indeterminate. But both are within the division into two and thus within the conflict of the logos with itself, where the ungovernable otherness of madness becomes a kind of Trojan horse within a Hegelian rationality. If madness is located within the cogito as a chronic uncertainty, a chronic absence of self-determination, then the Cartesian doubt (or at least, Derrida’s repetition of the Cartesian doubt) establishes de facto an indetermi35

Cf. Derrida L’écriture et la différence, p. 62 / Writing and Difference, pp. 38 f. Translation modified.

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nate contradiction and transposition in and of the Hegelian two-part division in Foucault’s text, breaking up this text from within. This also brings the problem of rationality right back to its origin, to the original decision which is put at the head of the essay in the form of a quotation detached from the Philosophical Fragments: “… L’Instant de la Décision est une Folie … (Kierkegaard).”36 This is a quotation from the “Appendix” between the fourth and fifth chapters, which discusses the offense of the paradox (“an acoustic deceit”). 37 This is the only direct reference to Kierkegaard in the essay. The quotation does indeed refer to the decision – a decision between reason and madness – but it is surrounded by an eloquent silence: Comment ne pas parler, “how to avoid speaking.” There is no real point in attempting to demonstrate any direct link between Kierkegaard and Derrida here; the interesting fact is the repetition of some problems which concern both philosophers. Derrida is perfectly aware that there is some link, and that a repetition of Kierkegaard’s decision runs through the entire text about madness; he has signaled this at the beginning of his essay. 38 The repetition is connected with the relationship between reason and madness, and with an objective uncertainty about the possibility of drawing an historical and logical boundary of this kind, since the one who must take the decision is himself put to the test. When the decision is taken, one’s madness and one’s reason are put to the test, and no one can determine the outcome in advance. 36

37

38

Derrida L’écriture et la différence, p. 51 / Writing and Difference, p. 31. On the translation of this text, see the following footnote. In the original, the quotation and the continuation run as follows: “The moment of decision is a foolishness (Daarskab), for if the decision is to be taken, then (see above) the learner becomes untruth, but precisely this makes a beginning in the moment necessary” (SKS 4, 255 / PF, 52). The French text translates Daarskab as folie, which can also mean “madness.” This ambiguity is not as obvious in Danish, but it is not an impossible translation, especially in view of the way in which Kierkegaard understands the “moment,” which becomes “folly to the Greek” (Socrates) – i. e., precisely that “folly of the cross” which Foucault asked for. In the next sentence, Kierkegaard/Climacus describes this “folly” as “the absurd.” A two-part division of the reason – within the logical discourse – is also a very interesting reading of the “offence,” and probably also of doubt and despair; we shall return to this point later. The title itself shows that a space in the discourse is opened up in Kierkegaard’s case too, for how else could an acoustic deceit arise? Cf. also Tilman Beyrich’s discussion of this quotation, which Derrida is clearly quoting from memory: Tilman Beyrich Ist Glauben wiederholbar?, pp. 204-208. According to Beyrich, the quotation is found in two other texts beside the essay on the cogito and the history of madness, viz. Force de loi and Donner la mort.

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Finally, if we draw a double line between Derrida’s reading of the cogito/the Cartesian doubt and Kierkegaard’s unfinished manuscript “De Omnibus” (cf. § 4 of the present inquiry) we discover in fact a parallelogram or a parallelography, i. e. a repetition of the Cartesian doubt, the Cartesian uncertainty, which introduces a breach, a shift, and a specific absence of unity between the contradictions which establish the Hegelian dialectic (l’Entzweiung hegelienne). In this breach, both adopt the Hegelian Aufhebung, but make it problematic from within. Thus they also break out of the necessity of the Hegelian dialectic. It is precisely with such a shift – both with regard to knowledge (qua doubt/uncertainty) and with regard to action (qua the aporia of responsibility) – that the problem of repetition is concerned.

§ 10 Aporias of Death Derrida’s book Apories is structured methodologically around the question how it is possible to write about death without removing death’s uncertainty and death’s offense: “How to justify the choice of the negative form (aporia) to designate yet another duty which, through the impossible or the impracticable, nevertheless makes itself known in an affirmative fashion? Because one must avoid a good conscience at all costs.”39 He claims here to have adopted unwillingly a worn-out term which has come to mean almost anything in modern philosophy and logic, viz. the Greek term ‘wÎÍϽ¿’, but then taken in plural.40 We should note the plural here: aporias, the experience of aporias. Derrida is not speaking of one aporia, such as death, but of various aporias which lead our thinking to take a certain step (pas in French), approach, or proceeding – and a certain denial (pas in French): Il y va d’un certain pas (“What is involved is a certain pas” – or: “He goes along at a certain pace”).41 Derrida defines “aporia” in relation to an39

40

41

Jacques Derrida Apories, Paris: Éditions Galilée 1996, p. 42. I refer first to the French edition and secondly to the English translation. When not indicated otherwise, the translation follows the English edition: Aporias, tr. by Thomas Dutoit, Stanford (Cal.): Stanford University Press 1993, p. 19. This translation is modified. “I gave in to this word aporias, in the plural, without really knowing where I was going and if something would come to pass, allowing me to pass with it, except that I recalled that, for many years now, the old, worn-out Greek term aporia, this tired word of philosophy and of logic, has often imposed itself upon me, and recently it has done so even more often” (Derrida Apories, pp. 31 f. / Aporias, pp. 12 f.). The ambiguity of this untranslatable sentence gives it a double sense and a paradoxical meaning: the experience of a certain denial or impossibility, which nevertheless

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other Greek philosophical term, viz. “problem.”42 He wishes to hold fast to these two, problem and aporia, with regard to death, lest the tension between them be dissolved into an identity. “Problem” is one way to identify a boundary or line, to mark off a particular area and to outline a certain direction. This involves a projection or draft of a project and a task that one will attempt to resolve. Thereby, however, the problem is also made into a substitute for something else: it conceals something and provides a rational protection against potential dangers. Derrida concludes that every boundary is problematic, in both these senses of the word.43 Derrida emphasizes the indeterminate plurality of thought which is generated by experiences of death. He describes three types of aporia, i. e. three partly contradictory expressions of aporetic logic. The first is one specific form of impermeability, a border which appears impassable, like the borders in a war. He also describes it as a “door that does not open,” an “unlocatable condition,” or an “inaccessible secret.”44 The second type of aporias occurs to be impasses which are caused by the fact that there is no border at all, no barrier into which one might bump. The limit becomes too porous, too permeable, and too undetermined. There is no longer any “at home” and “away,” neither war nor peace, and so the borders become peu de cas, “very little” or “insignificant.” However, Derrida holds that there are good reasons why we should attempt to formalize this peu de cas.45 The third type is the total dissolution of all borders and every idea, where the logic and the problem – even the logic of the aporia – collapse. This is a consequence of a negation of negations of negations, i. e. a kind of Aufhebung of the two previous aporias, where there are impenetrable borders and at the same time the borders dissolve. In other words, there are neither borders nor non-borders, and no distinction between problem and aporia, only the annihilation of every explanation and of all linguistic logic. Both of the mentioned meanings of the word “problem” (projection and protection) are related to these various forms of aporias in order to

42

43

44 45

makes the philosopher proceed in a certain direction; cf. Derrida Apories, p. 23 / Aporias, p. 6. Cf. Derrida Apories, pp. 31 f. / Aporias, pp. 12 f., for his description of the relationship between “aporia” and “problem.” “Every frontier is problematic in these two senses” (Derrida Apories, p. 30 / Aporias, p. 11). Cf. Derrida Apories, p. 44 / Aporias, p. 20. Derrida Apories, pp. 44 f. / Aporias, pp. 23 f.

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prevent the tension between them from being resolved. With regard to the first type of aporias, this entails a non-passage, i. e. an experience or an experiment with non-passages which occur where the problem becomes impossible. Then the one who formulates the problem (i. e. the dying subject) gradually becomes surrendered to that which is “absolutely unprotected,” with no weapons in the form of problems, substitutes, or boundaries. Ultimately, the definition and distinction of a problem dissolves, when the aporia implodes in its own impossibility: […] I knew what was going to be at stake in this word was the ‘not knowing where to go.’ It had to be a matter of [il devait y aller de] the non-passage or rather about the experience of the non-passage, of the trial of that which passes [se passe] and impassions [passionne] in this non-passage, paralyzing us in this separation in a way that is not necessarily negative: before a door, a threshold, a frontier, a line, or quite simply the edge or the approach of the other as such. It ought to be concerned about that which in general seems to block the road ahead of us, or to separate us in this place where it would no longer be possible even to constitute a problem, a project, or a protection, when the project itself or the problematical task becomes impossible and we are absolutely exposed without protection, without a problem and without prosthesis [prothèse], without any possible substitution, singularly exposed in our absolute and absolutely naked uniqueness, i. e. disarmed, handed over to the other, incapable of even sheltering behind anything that could still protect the inner reality of a secret. There, then, in this place of aporia, there is no longer any problem. Not because – fortunately or unfortunately – the solutions would be given, but because a problem would no longer be able to constitute itself as something that one would keep in front of oneself, an object or a project that could be presented, a protective representative or a substitute in the form of a prosthesis, a frontier that one would still have to cross or behind which one could protect oneself.46

In this context, an experience of aporias means not only stopping to consider the problem qua problem – as Aristotle does with regard to time as an “exoteric” aporia47 – but also the experience that the problem dissolves, that it surrenders one to something else, something one no longer grasps or comprehends: that which is impossible, where even the antinomy or the contradiction becomes a non-passage, since its “[…] elementary mid-point no longer gives space for anything that could be called a passage, path, dislocation, or substitution, i. e. a kinêsis in any sense. There is no longer any path (hodos, methodos, Weg or Holzweg). Even an impasse becomes impossible.”48 Such a description of the aporia has long ago crossed the boundary between rea46 47

48

Derrida Apories, p. 31 / Aporias, p. 12. Translation modified. Cf. the essay “Ousia et gramme” in Derrida Marges de la philosophie, pp. 31-78 / Margins of Philosophy, pp. 29-68. This is Derrida’s definition of a third type of aporia: cf. Apories, pp. 46 f. / Aporias, p. 21.

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son and madness. If we stick to Derrida’s analysis, this description no longer supplies any fixed points, since it moves beyond even the most fundamental forms of perception such as time and space, which are dissolved, every movement and every act of transcendence (as well as every other trans-) ceases, and there is no longer room for the aporia itself. It no longer has any topography or topology.49 We must speak here of extreme cases of aporia, a hyper-hyper-movement of a negative kind; but perhaps this is why such case nevertheless have some traits in common with other experiences of what is impossible, with other forms of negative theology. Is there not a paralyzing and totally destructive impulse of this kind which is also generated by death, or else perishes in death, making it difficult to relate to death, and impossible to experience or define it as a problem, as an aporia? The subject (le sujet) of Derrida’s little aporetic funeral sermon or oration (cette petite aporétique oraison)50 is “my death,” or the question whether “my death” is possible. He underlines the necessity of putting “my death” in quotation marks, because my death always means something different for myself than for everyone else, whereas “my death” is something to which everyone can – and probably sooner or later must – relate. “My death” is a hapax, according to Derrida, a hapax legomenon, since this expression refers to the life of the individual person and to the death of the individual person as something that no one else can take the place of: “The death of each one, of all those who can say ‘my death,’ is irreplaceable. The same applies to ‘my life.’ Every other is completely other. (Tout autre est tout autre.) This leads to a first exemplary complication of exemplarity: nothing is more replaceable, and nothing is less replaceable, than the syntagm ‘my death’.”51 It is impossible to define the meaning of the expression “my death” either formally or with reference to the singularity of the individual. On the one hand, “my death” is a completely general term, a common term to which everyone can relate; on the other hand, “my death” is a term which distinguishes each individual in his or her absolute singularity. In both senses, “my death” expresses a limit – “here and no further”; no one who attempts to think about death gets any further than this. At the same time, however, this is a limit which either could dissolve (as with the second type of aporias) or itself could dis49 50 51

Cf. Derrida Apories, p. 47 / Aporias, p. 21. Cf. Derrida Apories, p. 50 / Aporias, p. 23. Derrida Apories, p. 49 / Aporias, p. 22.

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solve and deconstruct whatever constructions and opinions one might have about how life makes sense and about what is significant and meaningful. 52 In this way, death takes on a structure which Derrida with reference to Plato calls a “khôra”- structure (cf. the Timaeus). It belongs to a third category (triton genos) which cannot be defined by the subject itself – and certainly not by anything that resembles the modern subject. 53 In the methodological definition of the aporia in relation to the problem – which ends with the impossibility of the method, the selfdestruction of the method, and a method without method – we find interesting descriptions of how one can gradually approach that which is aporetic, i. e. a form of aporetology. Derrida describes this as an experience of aporias, where “experience” corresponds precisely to a particular movement, a transition, while “aporia” is the contradiction, the antinomy, the impossible: “The affirmation that announced itself through a negative form was therefore the necessity of experience itself, the experience of the aporia (and these two words that tell of the passage and the non-passage are thereby coupled in an aporetic fashion) as endurance or as passion, as interminable resistance or remainder.”54 According to Derrida, therefore, the experience of aporias presupposes a certain passion (i. e. “suffering” and “passion”), a resistance and endurance – “steadfastness” may perhaps be the right word – if one does not wish to be driven further by new transitions where the aporia either is dissolved or is immediately transformed en passant into a transitory phenomenon. The experience of aporias is a type of experience which takes hold of one, and it is impossible to put up any resistance. But reflection on such experiences presupposes a steadfastness which turns back to the inexplicable element in this experience, to that which has inflicted suffering. If one seeks to draw closer to the borders of truth, or to the other side of truth (a point to which 52

53

54

Cf. Kierkegaard’s remark about the power of death in Works of Love: “Death is the briefest summary of life, or life traced back to its briefest form. This is also why it has always been very important for those who truly think about human life to test again and again, with the help of the brief summary, what they have understood about life. No thinker grasps life as death does, this masterful thinker who is able not only to think through any illusion, but to think it to pieces, think it to nothing” (SKS 9, 339 / cf. WL, 345). On what follows, cf. the essay “Khora” in Jacques Derrida On the Name, tr. by David Wood, John P. Leavey Jr., and Ian McLeod, Stanford (Cal.): Stanford University Press 1995, pp. 87-127. Derrida Apories, p. 42 / Aporias, p. 19.

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I shall return), through experiences of aporia, one is moving all the time along the borders of language. There is a rift in grammar which goes through language, through logic, and this means that the only way to formulate experiences of aporias is in the form of an experiment, trying out the possibilities that language has on the edge of the impossible. In this border sphere, a meaning is never something given, but rather something that is derived in various ways from certain traces, certain ideas, and certain differences. The book’s subtitle indicates that this meditation on death, which certainly does not lack Cartesian traits, is a reflection on the borders of truth: “Mourir – s’attendre aux ‘limites de la vérité’” (“Dying – awaiting (one another at) the ‘limits of truth’”). When he takes death as his point of departure and writes about truth, Derrida indicates that although the truth does have its limits, it is difficult to pin these down precisely. It is difficult to draw limits, especially if one brings in death as a “witness to the truth.” The simple act of thinking about the limit, about experiences with absolute limits, sometimes makes these limits impermeable; at other times, the limits dissolve. And such experiences can annihilate all one’s illusions about the “truth” by killing off all categories, problems, and boundaries. In several passages, Derrida compares this thinking about death to a via negativa, a specific form of negative theology. 55

§ 11 Khôra Derrida regards the khôra (Greek ÕÜÏ¿)56 which Plato describes in the dialogue Timaeus57 as the origin of a differentiating movement – a spacing (espacement) of the discourse – which cannot be defined definitively, whether logically, epistemologically, or ontologically. 58 Khôra itself does not belong to any order or class, nor is it a concept or a rhetorical figure (like a metaphor); it differentiates within the order of Being, within what we think we know as Plato’s philosophy, doctrine of ideas, etc. But according to Derrida, neither the doctrine of ideas, nor Plato’s philosophy, nor the order of being remains identi55 56 57 58

Derrida Apories, pp. 42; 49 / Aporias, pp. 19; 22. This Greek noun means “land,” “place,” or “room.” Derrida transcribes it as khora. Cf. Plato Timaeus 48e-52a. Cf. Derrida Apories, p. 29. On negative theology, cf. Joar Haga, Om det Andre: Dekonstruksjon og negativ teologi. Jacques Derrida og hans resepsjon av Dionysios Areopagita, Oslo: The Norwegian School of Theology 2000, pp. 18-22.

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cal to itself; it is rather changing, dissolving, and being deconstructed all the time. We may of course think of this as a historical process, but Derrida traces it back to the text itself, to a process going on in the writing we know as Plato’s Timaeus. Whereas the Greek arkhê, which in Plato’s terminology defines the origin of existence and establishes its meaning; establishes a unity antecedent to existence and time, khôra is the great rift in his account of the creation of the world – and in the text’s construction of a connection between mythos and logos, between idea and Being (to on) – a rift which Plato attempts to cover up by means of the conclusion of the Timaeus, but which khôra breaks open anew even before the unity is established. Khôra is for Derrida not only a Platonic concept, it is a name for the rift running through the entire history of western philosophy following after Plato. This is namely a history to which we have access only by way of written texts, i. e. through the changing structures of language and through the anachrony of writing, opening up a gap of différance in the text itself and deferring the meaning of concepts, constructions, and continuities. As such, khôra does not only occur in philosophical texts, but in other texts as well, it is e. g. apparent in texts about religion and theology. Theological and religious language may be analyzed in similar ways as philosophical language, and one may even maintain that the khôra-structure is more obvious in theology than in philosophy. This has to do with the basic concept of western theology, namely God. The monotheistic God of the “religions of the book” is on the one hand depicted as creator, foundation and origin of everything that exists, including language – and on the other hand, God is wholly other, indefinable, and inexplicable, surpassing any cognition and description through language. Even though the concept of God is closely connected to life and light, the cognition of God is deeply inflicted with darkness and the experience of death, in particular when seen from the mystical tradition, analyzed theoretically in so-called negative theology. But similar contradictions and aporias occur by the prophets, in the apocalypse, and in the Protestant “theology of the cross,” leaving deep traces e. g. in Kierkegaard’s thoughts about the paradox. Here we may find some of the madness Foucault misses in modernity. Derrida finds, in fact, that the logic or aporetology of these texts happen to have important traits in common with the analysis of madness in its relation to reason as well as with the aporias of death. During the last years of his work as an author, Derrida shows growing interest in these aspects of language, moving at the limit between philosophy and theology. He detects philosophical structures and

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strategies in theological texts and surprisingly theological traits in philosophical texts, even in those explicitly declared to be “secular.” In the rest of this chapter, I shall take three of these texts into consideration, with particular focus on the philosophical questions involved, concerning the linguistic structures, the paradoxes and the ambiguities: “Comment ne pas parler. Dénegations” – which is an essay on negative theology;59 “Of an Apocalyptic Tone Newly Adopted in Philosophy” – which is an essay on the apocalyptic character of modern (mostly atheistic) philosophical and political texts;60 and finally an essay about the proclaimed return of religions in the 1990’s, called “Faith and Knowledge: the Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the Limits of Reason Alone.”61 In “Comment ne pas parler,” Derrida claims that there are two competitive languages at work in those parts of the Timaeus where khôra is described. Unlike logos, which all the time is constructing new meaning and context based on the absolute origin in the arkhê – hence an archaeology – khôra is an expression of that place which evades time, of the process of making the world spatial (although it does not itself become visible), and of a passive receptivity.62 It is neither sensuous nor intelligible (in the “logical” sense), but it seems to partake in a mysterious way in that which is intelligible. And by being receptive to everything, it makes possible the creation of cosmos. The description of khôra in the Timaeus cannot be tied down to one specific logic, neither an either/or nor a both/and. On the contrary, it changes, or rather oscillates between a neither/nor and a both/and. This makes the rhetorical structures which surround khôra unforeseeable.63 Khôra is particularly important with regard to time, because, according to Derrida, it expresses the anachrony or atemporality of the 59

60

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62 63

Jacques Derrida “Comment ne pas parler” in Psyché. Inventions de l’autre, Paris: Éditions Galilée 1987, pp. 535-595 (all translations by Brian McNeil). For an English translation of the whole text, see: “How to avoid speaking: Denials,” tr. by Ken Freiden in Derrida and Negative Theology, ed. by Harold Coward and Toby Foshay, Albany: SUNY Press 1992, pp. 73-142. Jacques Derrida “Of an Apocalyptic Tone Newly Adopted in Philosophy,” tr. by John P. Leavey, Jr. in Derrida and Negative Theology, ed. by Harold Coward and Toby Foshay, Albany: SUNY Press 1992, pp. 25-71. Jacques Derrida “Faith and Knowledge: the Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the Limits of Reason Alone” in Religion, ed. by Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo, Cambridge: Polity Press 1998, pp. 1-78. This book is a collection of papers read at a conference on religion in Capri in 1994, but Derrida’s text subsequently underwent a comprehensive revision and was not published until it appeared in English in 1998. Cf. Derrida “Comment ne pas parler,” p. 566. Cf. Derrida “Comment ne pas parler,” p. 567.

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process of becoming spatial. This process is immune to every reduction, not only to presence and to a metaphysics of presence, but also to a linear development of time and a specific temporal space. This is why khôra has an anachronizing effect on the discourse: it opens up a pre-temporal “already” which gives room for writing, for inscription, and for an irreducible difference between time and space, between speaking and writing, and between synchronic and diachronic thinking. Derrida writes as follows about khôra: When khôra becomes spatial, this introduces a dissociation or a différance in the specific meaning which it makes possible, obliging us thereby to undertake tropical detours which are no longer the figures of rhetoric. The typography and the tropics to which khôra gives space, without giving anything, are explicitly noted in the Timaeus (50 BC). Plato thus makes the point in his own words: one must avoid speaking of khôra as one speaks of ‘something’ that exists or does not exist, that is present or absent, intelligible or sensuous (or both at once), active or passive, the good (epekeinea tês ousias) or the evil, God or human being, the living or the non-living.64

This opening in language, for language, which itself cannot be named by language, is therefore surrounded by silence, or rather, it is (insofar as it “is”) the silence which makes speech possible. How then is it possible to speak of this silence without breaking the silence? How is it possible to speak without speaking? Comment ne pas parler? Derrida believes that Dionysius, as well as later “masters” of negative theology such as Meister Eckhart, Nicholas of Cusa, and the German poet Angelus Silesius, are involved in a language game which continues to play upon the silence which surrounds khôra. Everyone who designates something as x is in fact involved in a corresponding language game, but the negative theologians in the radical sense of this term investigated the conditions which make it possible in the first place for speech to designate anything. In this sense, Derrida too must be counted as a “negative theologian,” and there is no doubt that he sees Heidegger as one of his great teachers in this respect.65 Within the negative theology of Dionysius the Areopagite, Derrida holds that we can discern khôra in prayer, as the open and unconditional turning to the other, i. e. to God as other.66 He claims that such a turning to God is different from the definition of God in a hymn, since the one who adores God thereby also applies a language that normally designates beings by addressing the triune, Christian God – and this makes it an address of one particular arkhê. It is therefore 64 65 66

Derrida “Comment ne pas parler,” p. 568. Cf. Derrida “Comment ne pas parler,” pp. 588-594. Derrida “Comment ne pas parler,” p. 572.

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interesting to see how Derrida attempts to distinguish between the hyperbolic logic which surrounds the Trinity in Dionysius (as “hyperexistence beyond existence”)67 from a silence antecedent to linguistic designation. Derrida believes that there is a fundamental difference between the linguistic designation in adoration (6ÊËÃÇË) and in silence (ÑÇÁ¼). He understands the former as the mystagogue’s “technique” for approaching that which is holy and unutterable; as such, however, it is also an attempt to define and localize God, thereby shutting God up in specific forms and linguistic designations. In Dionysius, however, even the hymnic designations collapse when they collide with silence, with the silent prayer. In this silence, the one who prays abandons his control of language, control of his own adoration, and surrenders his understanding and his intention to an uncertainty and a silence that is antecedent to the words. This is why Derrida insists that an original and indeterminate silence of this kind is embedded in the designation, as a precondition for every designation – and that is true par excellence of a designation of that or the one who eludes every designation, viz. God. Derrida identifies an original difference of this kind in a doubling of the text and of the name in Dionysius’ texts, which is described in On the Divine Names and put into practice in The Mystical Theology.68 This is a series of negations with regard to designation, name, existence, identity, etc. in the case of God, who is separated from language and is “secret” (Latin secretum). The question is: How is it possible to speak about a secret of this kind, to which Dionysius has access in prayer and which he knows in its unknowability and alterity? How can one communicate such a secret as a secret, without blurting it out? How can one get access to it and relate to it as a silence in speech, antecedent to speech – but also antecedent to all meaning? Derrida writes: There is a secret of the denial and a denial of the secret. The secret as such, as a secret, separates and already thereby institutes a negativity; this is a negativity which denies [nie] its own self. It de-nies [dé-nie] itself. This denial does not happen to it by accident: it is essential and original. And in the as such of the secret which denies itself because it appears to itself in order to be what it is, this de-nial does not leave any opportunity for dialectic. Dionysius would say: The enigma of which I am speaking here, no doubt too ‘elliptically’ and concisely, but also too volubly, is the sharing of the secret. 69 67

68

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Cf. Dionysius Areopagita On the Divine Names in Dionysius the Areopagite, ed. and tr. by C. E. Rolt, 4th ed., London / New York: Macmillian Company 1957, pp. 191-193. Cf. Dionysius Areopagita On the Divine Names, pp. 173-180, and The Mystical Theology in Dionysius the Areopagite, ed. and tr. by C. E. Rolt, 4th ed., London / New York: Macmillian Company 1957, pp. 194-201. Derrida “Comment ne pas parler,” p. 557.

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Derrida’s critique of hymnology, or even doxology, seems quite problematic when confronted with the liturgical experiences of believers in general, and even stronger when confronted with the experiences of the mystics. According to my understanding of hymnal language, the hymnal designation does not aim at defining or localizing God, hence the hymn is not simply a “technique” – neither by Dionysius nor by later hymnologists. I would rather say that it confronts certain aporetic experiences with the faith in someone who exceeds the realm of being. Hence the often paradoxical character of the hymnic language and the accumulation of names which also takes place in On the Divine Names. Prayer too is presumably dependent on the hymnic names, if the silent prayer, or even the “dark night of abandonment” which the mystics describe and which appears to be all the more common in modernity, should have any relation to the Divine – not to mention the capability of this silence to mediate a surplus. More appropriate is therefore Derrida’s analysis of question and promise inscribed in his understanding of (silent) prayer. The surplus of praying silence is according to Derrida introduced only when the prayer breaks out of the names and formulae of the hymn and suspends the explanations that the one who prays might give of what prayer is, breaks out of every attempt to establish control and a divine order. According to Derrida, prayer thus becomes the character (i) of a question and (ii) of a promise in Dionysius’ Mystical Theology and in similar negative theologies. The question has an apophatic character, it eludes definition and language; but precisely by eluding definition, it also opens up as a khôra for the rift in the designation of the hymn and allows God to appear or rather remain secret, as the other.70 In a temporal sense, the structure and grammar of the prayer corresponds to the structure and grammar of the promise: it is oriented to the future, but this is a future which also remains hidden and thus shares in the secret; it will not fulfill the promise as I myself imagine.

§ 12 Philosophical Apocalypse Heidegger said: Die Sprache spricht (“Language speaks”), and Paul de Man changed this to: Die Sprache (ver)spricht (sich) (“Language promises itself” or “Language makes a slip of the tongue”). For Derrida, the difference between these two claims illustrates how the gram70

Cf. Derrida “Comment ne pas parler,” pp. 572-574.

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mar of the promise is ambiguous, and remains ambiguous: normally, a promise could be fulfilled, but it will never be fulfilled in all the linguistic possibilities it contains.71 This is why the promise, even when it is fulfilled, remains an indication that language makes a slip of the tongue, that language both conceals and reveals, and that the future too conceals and reveals, but always contains something other than one had expected. This unforeseeability might appear frightening. But the chronically indeterminate structure of time also contains the possibility of a confirmation, an opening in the direction of a confirmation which surpasses all one’s expectations, goals, and calculations. This opening in the direction of a confirmation is expressed by the apocalyptic “Come!” – and it is in such an opening of the language game in the direction of that which comes that negative theology touches apocalyptic. In other words, we may say that this negative theology has all the time been borne up by an apocalyptic expectation. Derrida frequently returns to apocalyptic texts in general, and to the Revelation of John in particular.72 This often happens with reference to the possibility of a translation, and thus also with a continual reference to Babel, to the story of how the unity was broken because God withdrew, how the languages were broken up and differentiated, so that it was no longer possible for any one person to communicate with everyone, nor to control the meaning of the languages or of the words; from then on, all meaning and significance were left to a play between linguistic translations.73 What is language for one person seems mere babbling to another. Even when one has good linguistic abilities, there always remains an untranslatable “remainder.” This is why the tower – the construction of a unified meaning – collapses. This tower symbolizes both the hubris of human beings and their will to reach up to God, in the sense of knowing and understanding God on the basis of their own construction. In Babel, the construction collapses into a deconstructive movement, and it is precisely the razing of the tower and the dissemination of the meaning of language that represent the opposite of construction. This is why linguistic plurality and the untranslatable difference ensure that God remains something other vis-à-vis the discourse which seeks totality. God retains his irreducible alterity. 71 72

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Cf. Derrida “Comment ne pas parler,” p. 546. Cf. e. g. the essay “No apocalypse, not now” in Jacques Derrida Psyché. Inventions de l’autre, pp. 363-386. Cf. “Des tours de Babel” in Jacques Derrida Psyché. Inventions de l’autre pp. 203-235. See also his text “No apocalypse, not now” pp. 385 ff., and the essay “Of an Apocalyptic Tone,” pp. 53 f.

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Derrida is led to write about the apocalypse because of what he calls an apocalyptic tone in philosophy, which he sees as a dominant trait in western literature and philosophy in the twentieth century, above all in various forms of continental philosophy. He believes that he can detect an apocalyptic undertone in Kant’s whole project of Enlightenment, perhaps especially in the rhetoric which takes its starting point in the difference between light/enlightenment and darkness. It is therefore not without a certain ironic undertone that Derrida takes an article by Kant about a distinguished tone in philosophy as his point of departure when he wishes to describe what he calls an apocalyptic tone in the philosophy of more recent times.74 This is because he believes that the apocalyptic tone has only been strengthened within the projects of enlightenment in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which (strangely enough) all have an atheistic or secularist character: Marx’s historical materialism, Freud’s psychoanalysis, and Nietzsche’s eschatology, returning with a certain disquieting twist in Heidegger’s existential philosophy. The apocalyptic tone is different in the various texts and in the use to which these have been put in political and philosophical movements in the 1930’s, the 1960’s, and the 1970’s, but they share a particular vision of the last days, an apocalyptic self-understanding and understanding of time, where the present time is understood to be decisive and the end/goal seems to be very near at hand. When Derrida wishes to identify and deconstruct this apocalyptic tone in philosophy, he goes back to the text which is the mother of all apocalypses (and of all theologies), at least in the western philosophical, religious, and political tradition, the Apocalypse of John (Rev).75 In this text, he is looking for the apocalyptic element of apocalypticism. The Revelation is concerned with God’s name and God’s alterity, but here, the alterity of God has not only a spatial aspect. Above all, it has a temporal aspect, which is expressed in the unreserved “Come!” of the apocalypse (Rev 22:17.20). This is a “Come!” which is repeated many times and in many ways throughout the apocalyptic texts. Derrida sees in this “Come!” the apocalyptic primal difference, the original transposition or postponement of time which points forward to something uncertain, something that the text and the author will never be able to control – not even the author who claims a divine authority 74

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Cf. Derrida “Of an Apocalyptic Tone,” pp. 28-47. Kant’s article, written in 1796, is primarily a polemic against Jacobi. Its original title is: “Von einem neuerdings erhobenen vornehmen Ton in der Philosophie.” See Derrida “Of an Apocalyptic Tone,” pp. 53-55.

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(i. e. John). Because of this “Come!” which rises so uncompromisingly and radically out of the apocalyptic text, Derrida sees apocalyptic as an exemplary expression of the meaning of writing in general: This is one of the suggestions I wanted to submit for your discussion: wouldn’t the apocalyptic be a transcendental condition of all discourse, of all experience even, of every mark or every trace? And the genre of writings we call ‘apocalyptic’ in the strict sense, then, would be only an example, an exemplary revelation of this transcendental structure. In that case, if the apocalyptic reveals, it is first of all the revelation of the apocalypse, the self-revelation of the apocalyptic structure of language, of writing, of the experience of presence, in other words, of the text or of the mark in general: that is, of the divisible envoi for which there is neither self-presentation nor assured destination.76

Derrida points out how a multiplicity of voices and senders and receivers and secrets behind secrets leave their traces in the Apocalypse, so that paradoxically, the Apocalypse is a book which reveals at the same time as it conceals: in other words, it reveals precisely by underlining how concealed that which is to be revealed is.77 And this makes the Apocalypse one of the most polyvalent writings in the Bible, extraordinarily full of symbols, ideas, prophecies, and authors. It also has a differentiated time structure: it refers to one particular contemporary period and to various interpretations of tradition and of the past, but above all, it is oriented towards the future. It gives a promise about something that is coming. This promise is also Derrida’s starting point for a demystification, as well as a demythologization, of the Apocalypse of John, which has some deconstructive aspects. He views the apocalyptic “Come!” as an expression for the différance which makes the meaning of every text unforeseeable for the future. Accordingly, it is this “Come!” that breaks up the meaning of the apocalyptic images, of the judgment, of the Beast, breaking up the ideas from within, from the interior of the Apocalypse, and leaving it as an apocalypse without apocalypse (similarly, he writes in other contexts about religion without religion). This need not necessarily make it less “apocalyptic,” but it involves a new interpretation of what constitutes the apocalyptic element. Derrida asks if it is not precisely such a “Come!” that is the apocalyptic element in the Apocalypse: “And what if this outside of apocalypse were inside the apocalypse? What if it were the apocalyptic itself, that precisely breaks in in the ‘Come’? What is ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ a text, 76 77

Derrida “Of an Apocalyptic Tone,” p. 57. Derrida “Of an Apocalyptic Tone,” p. 60.

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of this text, both inside and outside these volumes of which we do not know whether they are open or closed?” 78 A future alterity of this kind, which breaks into the text from the future and breaks up in the text from the inside – or from the outside too; for what are the “outside” and the “inside” here? – is the absolute confirmation of the promise of a future meaning which lies in the différance and once again gives relevance to the question of the significance of religion. This is an example of how Derrida eloquently applies a hermeneutics of suspicion – even towards the “founders” of a hermeneutics of suspicion, namely Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud. The limit between religion and philosophy seems to have been drawn rather arbitrarily and with a certain naiveté. For ideological reasons, religion has been expelled from the philosophical discourse, but these critics themselves have based their criticism on a deeply religious element of their own philosophico-theological tradition. Thus, to draw a limit appears to be easier as drawing the consequences from the limit drawn. When we consider the late Derrida, it looks like it is impossible to understand the meaning of différance, unless one also reflects on the relationship between philosophy and religion. At any rate, the impulse from Derrida’s deconstruction means that we must return once more (as a repetition) to this boundary between religious and philosophical discourse, between theology and philosophy, since the boundary itself seems to have been problematized in a new manner in a so-called “post-secular” world.

§ 13 The Two Sources: Faith and Knowledge In his essay “Faith and Knowledge: the Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the Limits of Reason Alone” (1998), Derrida writes about the socalled “return of religions” in the last decade of the second millennium. Once again, he takes Kant as his point of departure (which is reasonable, because the Enlightenment critique of religion has Kant as its central figure), but this time the more famous Die Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der bloßen Vernunft. He attempts to analyze “religion” in general – in as abstract a manner as is possible – but he admits that he himself is obliged to begin with the religions he knows, viz. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. He underlines the contradictory element in these religions: the radically good and the radically bad, the 78

Derrida “Of an Apocalyptic Tone,” p. 67.

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element which is tied to tradition and the element which makes use of high technology, the sacred room and cyberspace, all deriving from a common task and basis. He views this origin per se – i. e., independently of these contradictions – as indefinable, and this is why he links religion to an aporia with a double origin: “Whence the aporia – a certain absence of way, path, issue, salvation – and the two sources.” 79 He also points to the fundamental function of light and darkness in every religion: this is not a question only of metaphors, but of a light that is clearer, more real and more original, and a darkness which is darker and more profound than the change of light between day and night.80 Every religion has its origin in a doubleness of this kind; once again, this is a contradiction which is derived from a common origin. The contrast between light and darkness is also expressed by means of concepts such as the Offenbarung (“revelation”) and Offenbarkeit (“revealability”) of a possibility which is more original (i. e., closer to the source) than any manifestation. Derrida points out that the same religious language and the same antitheses between light and darkness, between confusion and that which can be clearly seen, dominates Kant’s philosophy and indeed the entire age of the Enlightenment, perhaps more rigorously, but also more naïvely, than the religious traditions out of which it springs.81 The age of the Enlightenment takes for granted an idea of pure knowledge as the only source of light. The philosophers of that period base their knowledge on faith and trust (in a continuation of Descartes’ conversion from doubt to faith). Once again, we are left with the two sources, faith and knowledge, each of which problematizes the attempt to draw a clear border between religion within and religion outside pure reason. It is naïve of the thinking subject to draw such a border without at once problematizing it, because the subject derives the presuppositions which allow him or her to draw such a frontier line from both sources, from faith and from knowledge, from Offenbarung and from Offenbarkeit, while the basis of revelation and of that which is revealed is hidden from thought. This leads Derrida to supplement Kant’s “within” by an “on”: in other words, he attempts to think of religion on or on the basis of the limit between faith and knowledge. At the same time, however, he develops a Kantian and Heideggerian

79 80 81

Derrida “Faith and Knowledge,” p. 2. Cf. Derrida “Faith and Knowledge,” pp. 6-9. Cf. Derrida “Faith and Knowledge,” p. 28.

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concern by seeking to uncover an Offenbarkeit which is antecedent to every Offenbarung. In its most abstract form, then, that aporia within which we are struggling would perhaps be the following: is revealability (Offenbarkeit) more originary than revelation (Offenbarung), and hence independent of all religion? Independent in the structures of its experience and in the analytics relating to them? Is not this the place in which ‘reflecting faith’ at least originates, if not faith itself? Or rather, inversely, would the event of revelation have consisted in revealing revealability itself, and the origin of light, the originary light, the very invisibility of visibility?82

Derrida continues with a discussion about the relationship between the one and the other, linking the former to one particular structure of promise (messianism) and an historical expectation, and linking the latter to the indefinable place, khôra. Once again, therefore, it is this khôra, this indefinable place, which is established as the locus for thinking about religion and religious phenomena; the indefinable oscillation between faith and knowledge, between revelation and revealability which refrains from making a definitive judgment – and which demands to be respected as a tertium: “Respect for this singular indecision or for this hyperbolic outbidding between two originalities, the order of the ‘revealed’ and the order of the ‘revealable,’ is this not at once the chance of every responsible decision and of another ‘reflecting faith,’ of a new ‘tolerance’?”83 Derrida sees this new tolerance as a continuation of Kant’s religious tolerance and ethical imperative, but in a radicalized form: it presupposes a distance, and an infinitely singular alterity, but it also relates to the specific other person in the ethical sense in virtue of the singularity and otherness of this person. This introduces a social, political, and ethical dimension originating from a new religious tolerance. It entails accepting the indefinable as origin, without thereby reducing one’s responsibility for, and in relation to, the other person: on the contrary, every responsibility has its origin in an indefinable alterity of this kind, which forms a threshold for every repetition of religion.84 The problem at stake in responsibility, faith, and even in history, is how the human self may share in a secret, a secret of the self, and even share this secret with the other, though without betraying the secret as secret. Repetition, alterity, and responsibility are questions which Derrida also takes up in his essay Donner la mort, which involves a close reading of Fear and Trembling and definitively links his reflections in the field 82 83 84

Derrida “Faith and Knowledge,” p. 16. Derrida “Faith and Knowledge,” p. 21. Derrida “Faith and Knowledge,” pp. 26 f.

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of the philosophy of religion to the name of Kierkegaard. In this text, we find a profound discussion of the meaning of death as a gift for the relationship to the other person, where Kierkegaard and Levinas are united in a clôtural reading. I shall return to this text in Chapter Three, where it is included in a discussion of how Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Levinas understand death. Here too, the indefinable khôra comes into play in the border region between ethics and religion.

§ 14 Secrets of the Self and of the Other In the final analysis, one is compelled to ask what is going on in these texts by Derrida. They give a profoundly existential impression, to the limit of madness, of losing control, but still there is such a distanced style, that the author is continually hiding himself and his own intentions. It is certainly an indirect style, i. e. an indirect communication going along with his passion for the impossible. And exactly the styles of Derrida, combined with an experimental attitude to philosophy, has given him a reputation as anti-philosopher, as a thinker who dissolves the discipline of philosophy from within. It might all be true, but there is more at stake in these texts. There is a critical way of questioning the philosophical tradition, and the foundations of this tradition, which is typical for the epoch called modernity, an epoch which is more or less defined by such a crisis. Still, Derrida does not even delimit his questioning to the era of modernity. As most philosophers he goes back to the origin, to Plato and Aristotle, to Socrates as the model for critical questioning and doubt. Socrates, the one who did not write, has become the model for this philosophy of writing, with his continuous will to question accepted norms, ideas, and origins. As a writing disciple of Socrates, Derrida has become a Platonic philosopher. He explicitly denies that there is an origin which we may know and recognize, but nevertheless he is asking the question of origin again and again, and by way of this questioning he defines his own rationality, the logos of Jacques Derrida, who so fiercely fought the “logocentrism” of western philosophy. There is, in fact, no deep contradiction in this, or when there is a contradiction, it is such a contradiction which makes philosophy interesting at all, as a discipline asking questions of foundational and principal character, questions about what is good, of what there is and what “being” means, of God and religion, of justice and responsibility, about death, about the human self. All these questions belong to the

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philosophy of Derrida, and in that sense he is a classical philosopher. What makes his classical questions appear postmodern, is his way of asking these questions, his way of destabilizing the philosophical discourse, originating from a philosophy of language, from that linguistic différance which is impossible to pin down to a precise and specific meaning. The deferring difference as such is indefinable, though it has left traces in every text, in every literary and indeed linguistic expression. That the question after the “meaning” of différance in turn has many classical traits (as a question of origin, of identity and difference, of participation and limit, of the one and the other, etc.) does not make it more easily definable. Even though Derrida does not refer frequently to the dialogue Parmenides, I would suggest that this dialogue may be considered something like a paradigm for his thinking as a whole. In the entire Platonic corpus, there is no text as enigmatic and experimental in form as the Parmenides, but still there is no other text asking theoretical and principal questions in such a systematic and rigorous way. When Plato struggles to define the One in its relation to all the Other, he ends up in a series of contradictions and aporias, concerning time, age and movement (transition), concerning identity and difference, concerning the problem of thinking and of the relation between language (ideality) and the world (reality), of whether there is a logos structuring the world. Whereas Plato is quite convinced that there is such a logos which structures the world, however, Derrida is not, i. e. he gives preference to this uncertainty, to the indefinability of the questioning itself, which gives sufficient reasons for doubt. The problem of doubt once more poses the question of the self, the question of “who” is asking and doubting, of what this term “self” refers to, what it means being a self. It is in the first place a question of “reference,” i. e. of self-reference. As soon as the problem of reference is posed in connection with self-reference, there are good reasons to be suspicious of the answer. There is no context in which philosophers are so frequently lying, even when they are trying to be honest, as when they are posing the question of the self, of the true self and its justification. Hence, Derrida approaches this question by way of detours and circumscriptions. The question of the self is asked indirectly, by asking for the other, the otherness of the other which concerns the self. Asking for the other is already a strategy for de-centering the logocentrism and the selfcentrism of western philosophy. The otherness of the other, however, is not delimited to every other person (tout autre), it also concerns

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the otherness of death, of insanity, of the foreign language, of religion, of mystery, and hence of the absolute Other (tout autre). In this otherness lies the secrets of the self, of its instability, its finitude, its infinite and therefore impossible responsibility, its deeply hidden sources and its fragile (sur)face. How such an otherness affects the understanding and reflection of the self, to the limit of the inexplicable and beyond, as approach, response, and significance of the self, is a carrying thought in this inquiry, following some traces outlined by Derrida. The way of reflecting on topics like madness, death, and God are in fact more significant than the problems as such. Hence, I will conclude this chapter on Derrida’s rationality with a short review of how the essays (as traces of writing) contribute to a specific way of doing philosophy after Derrida, both as a deconstruction (of metaphysics and religion), as an aporetology (thinking through aporias), a thanatology (reflections on death), and a certain negative theology (a meditation on naming and the names of “God”), thus tracing philosophy back to its origins in antiquity and early modernity, though at the same time questioning these foundations in a radical doubt. The essay “Cogito et histoire de la folie” is an example of deconstructive polemic which is antecedent (both in the temporal and in the epistemological senses) to deconstruction as a theory; and this essay uncovers interesting aspects of deconstruction as an analytic approach to texts. The “grammatical” reading of Foucault as well as Descartes opens up a space for differences and a variety of meanings. But this space, which we might call the space of interpretation or the space of writing, now gives room for the second aspect, a doubling of the text, pointing to a problematic difference in Foucault’s text about the history of madness and the archaeology of silence – as well as the possibility of a madness within the method, within the logic of Descartes’ Méditations. Through this doubling, a deconstructive gesture is introduced into Foucault’s construction of history and into Descartes’ rational method, with the effect that the logic in the text is disseminated. We experience a displacement and a problematization of the supposed border between reason and madness, so that the reason presupposes the indefinable and uncontrollable madness, and madness belongs inherently to reason. When these two clash with one another, the result is the deconstruction of Foucault’s attempt to draw unambiguous historical lines between logos and dementia, and the destabilization of the supposed distinction between doubt and certainty in Descartes’ texts. Deconstruction appears here as a movement within the corpus of the text, its “body”: this movement cannot

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be controlled by any particular logic, structure, method, archaeology, or intellectual substance (res cogitans). In Apories, Derrida analyzes the methodological problems which confront us when we seek to think about death and relate to it as “my death.” He posits an antithesis between problem and aporia, where the problem already bears the following doubleness in itself: (a) it projects a task, a dilemma, which must be resolved, while at the same time (b) it protects the “problem-solver” against that which is unforeseeable and unprotected. The vehement challenge for philosophical deliberation is to hang onto the tension between death as a problem and death as an aporia, where the latter problematizes the problem itself in various ways: either by leading the problem to a boundary where the problem stops short, comes to a complete standstill, and does not take us any further; or else through the dissolution of the border, which becomes porous, indeterminate, and indefinable; or else when the problem-solver comes to a standstill while the borders disappear, so that the thought of death either dissolves or implodes in the impossible and the unthinkable. The expression “my death” is impossible and unthinkable in this way, since it is necessary, but not possible to define its meaning either formally or with regard to the singularity of the individual. On the one hand, “my death” is a wholly general designation, a common designation to which all human beings can relate. On the other hand, “my death” is a designation which distinguishes each individual in his or her absolute singularity. From both points of view, “my death” expresses a border: here and no further. No one who wishes to attempt to think of death can get beyond this border. At the same time, this is a border which may dissolve and thus itself dissolves and deconstructs the constructions and opinions one might have about how life makes sense and what gives life significance and meaning. This gives thinking about death a structure similar to the Platonic khôra, so that it eludes an unambiguous rhetoric and an ontological definition: it eludes control by the subject, although the subject will never be able completely to elude death. When death is introduced into the discourse, one includes a definitive border, a total yet indefinable category, a category which opens a rift in the text, opens the space for the other, a “difference which makes a difference,” and breaks up the connection between the signifier (signifiant) and the signified (signifié), between intention and meaning, etc. The consequence of Derrida’s reflections on death is this problematization of the text, which can be called a thanatology. It is impos-

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sible to elaborate a thanatology independently of phenomenology, to which it forms a supplement. Thanatology breaks up phenomenology from within, by transforming into problems or aporias several of the central premises for both Hegel’s and Husserl’s phenomenology. Derrida is not in fact writing about something other than phenomenology: he is rather reflecting on experiences with the other, leaving traces of otherness in thought, traces which enables us to inquire into the logic of the “other” which emerges within phenomenology (albeit not reducible to self-presence) and breaks it up from the inside. In this space which is opened up in the text by death, by the trace, by the khôra, by the différance, we also find that surplus of meaning which one cannot make one’s own simply through the grammatical reading. This surplus is the expression of a possibility despite the impossible (despite, but also in the thought of death), a gift which shatters the unambiguous economy of thought (by means of the promise which opens up in the heart of the text). In “Comment ne pas parler” and “D’un ton apocalyptique,” Derrida discusses how these thoughts about texts are also generated by a form of negative theology and by the apocalyptic opening of the text towards the future, towards the possible as such. In the first essay, he emphasizes the silence in the apophatic theology of Dionysius the Areopagite as a presupposition for every linguistic designation. This also breaks up every designation of God which seeks to localize and define “God” – whether this is done in a logically unambiguous manner or in an esoterically exclusive manner. “God” withdraws from all such attempts at a definition, and remains a secret that is inaccessible to linguistic designation and topographical localization. The silence of prayer is the presupposition for initiation into this secret and for participation in it: in this silence, the one who prays abandons control over language and acknowledges the instability which belongs to every linguistic designation of something as x, and which applies par excellence to every linguistic definition of “God.” In the essay on the apocalyptic character of the text, he posits a relationship between this irreducible difference and time, the character of language as “promise,” and the continuous reference of language to an unfulfilled meaning (Die Sprache (ver-)spricht sich). On the one hand, this temporal difference allows the Apocalypse to be broken up by various meanings and communicative strategies, so that it can refer to a variety of authors and authorities; hence, its message deconstructs itself. On the other hand, it is precisely this text that opens the way to the unreserved “Come!” and to a “yes” to the messianic

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fulfillment of meaning, although this meaning cannot be completely defined as fullness and presence. According to Derrida, it is not only the Apocalypse, not only Jewish or Christian messianism, but every text with a revelatory character that opens up precisely by means of this “Come!” which springs forth from the heart of the text, from the room between letter (gramma) and spirit, between author and reader, between present and future, as an indefinable surplus which gives meaning, a true excess of possibility. Finally, we find a philosophical analysis of “religion” in the essay “Faith and Knowledge” where Derrida emphasizes the connection in difference which characterizes the relationship between faith and knowledge, between revelation and revealability, and between theology and philosophy, in the western tradition. All three Abrahamitic religions are marked by contradictory and ambiguous elements, and this ambiguity in religions in general leads Derrida to trace them back to a khôra-structure: a reciprocal dependence, but also a chronic indefinability which characterizes every religious phenomenon. This indefinability is related to the absolute alterity in the concept of God, and makes a negative theology necessary; but it is also significant for ethics, in view of the chronically indefinable and unforeseeable element in one’s relationship to the other. This “double bind” of knowledge and action is the point of departure when we now move on from Derrida to the aporetic problem of thinking death in Kierkegaard’s discourse “At a Graveside” and to the disquieting terror of death and sacrifice in Fear and Trembling.

III. Seven Perspectives on Death

L’acte d’enterrer est une relation avec le mort et pas avec le cadavre. Emmanuel Levinas

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Of all the thoughts involved in Kierkegaard’s inquiries, the thought of death is one of the most influential, controversial, and most commonly misunderstood. His way of thinking about death is decisive for the interpretation of other key concepts, such as existence, truth, and repetition. Also his understanding of otherness is to a considerable extent influenced by his reflections on death. Whether Kierkegaard thinks it is possible, however, to “think death” properly or not, remains an open question, situated at the heart of the problem itself, disturbing any philosophical, theological or edifying discourse on death. To “think death” properly. That is the problem of the discourse “At a Graveside,” which is the last of the Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions (1845). To think death properly and to think one’s own or death proper are two sides of the same coin.1 As Kierkegaard writes in connection to death, the truth has always got another side, 2 and this other side of the coin, this reversed economy of death, is the topic for this chapter. Hence, I will set out from a problem of language, namely, how we give names, use images and apply concepts to “come to terms with” something we cannot know by experience, viz. “our own death.” This problem leads further to the question of appropriation, a question that is essential to all the three discourses on imagined occasions. I will, however, also take the discourse as an occasion to discuss critically Kierkegaard’s influence on twentieth century philosophy, above all on Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit (1927). This will be the topic for § 16. There are several aspects of Heidegger’s analysis of being unto death that might be traced back to Kierkegaard. Still, I suspect that Heidegger has overlooked an important point in Kierkegaard’s discourse by excluding the question of how one understands death. He does not take into account the ethical relevance of the thought of death, a point that is crucial to Kierkegaard. Thus, in the following paragraphs I will turn to the thought of Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida who present somewhat different points of view. They both find a relation between the problem of death and the foundation of ethics, though the former is criticizing Kierkegaard for introducing a violent and anti-ethical im1

2

The expression “to think death” is not a common use of English language, but is chosen by the translators for the Danish expression “at tænke Døden” (SKS 5, 446 / TDIO, 75). By the pun on thinking death proper I take into account the French use of the word “propre” (la propre mort) and the close connection in Danish between “sin egen” (one’s own) and “egentlig” (proper) (at tænke sin egen Død). “Yet this other side (of the truth) is just as important, because not only is that person mad who talks senselessly, but the person is fully as mad who states a correct opinion if it has absolutely no significance for him” (SKS 5, 467 / TDIO, 99-100).

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pulse to the history of philosophy. I will inquire into the basis for such a criticism in Kierkegaard’s texts to clarify to what extent the critique is justified and which consequences it will have for subsequent reflection on Kierkegaard. I will even take into consideration the relationship between terrorism and sacrifice, while asking if Kierkegaard refers to a dilemma which is similar to the dilemmas religious terrorists are facing in the name of Abraham, and moreover, whether his book Fear and Trembling advocates a logic similar to the one defending an act of terror in the name of a teleological suspension. After this detour through Fear and Trembling, we will however return to the discourse “At a Graveside” and to the relationship between Kierkegaard and Levinas. Although he criticizes him sharply, however, Levinas’ evaluation of Kierkegaard is not only repelling. We may in fact also detect a strong positive influence from Kierkegaard on his basic conviction: that Ethics is “First Philosophy,” prior to ontology or metaphysics. Levinas develops his thinking of ethics, of ontology, of the self and the other in a critical debate with Heidegger on the problem of death. Kierkegaard’s discourse may in fact add some new perspectives concerning the difference – but also the necessary interconnection – between the order of ethics and the order of onto-theology; both being equally disturbed by the earnest thought of death. In the last paragraph, I will thus conclude the argument with a deliberation on the ends of thinking death, i. e. the possibility of an autopsy for one still living.

§ 15 The Appropriation of Death as Problem and Aporia Kierkegaard’s discourse takes place at a graveside. Hence, the problem of death is introduced in a situation where death, the reality and loss of death, can hardly be ignored: Then all is over! – And when the person stepped up to the grave first because he was the next of kin, and when after the brief moment of the speech he was the last one at the grave, alas, because he was the next of kin – then all is over. If he remained out there, he still would not learn what the deceased is doing, because the deceased is a quiet man; if in his trouble he called out his name, if in his grief he sat listening, he still would learn nothing, because in the grave there is quiet, and the deceased is a silent man; and if recollecting he visited the grave every day, the one dead would not recollect him –. In the grave there is no recollection, not even of God. 3 3

SKS 5, 442 / TDIO, 71.

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This is how Kierkegaard describes the solitude of the bereaved out there at the graveyard: The link of communication between the dead and the one still living is broken once and for all. Thus at the graveside, the one still living arrives at a limit: the limit of human existence, which is also the limit of language. The possibility of verbal communication is ruined once and for all. In the absence of the other, the bereaved is forced to reflect further upon the problem of death as a problem of language. And hence, this limit of language is also a limit of community, of thought, and of recollection. Death occurs as a rupture of language and of thought, even in language and in thought, on this thought or imagined occasion.4 Death suddenly makes the familiar strange, thus a certain strangeness, a certain otherness is attached to the deceased person, who is now beyond communication, beyond language, and beyond community. His altered state makes it easier to forget him and to forget his death. Only the next of kin and a few close friends will retain his memory. Even they will slowly forget, though, because concerning the economy of life and of human community, he is non-existent. Only his name over the door remains in the flux of time, as an inscription for recollection. 5 This situation is typical of the forgetfulness of human beings; they recollect the name and they keep an image of the deceased in their mind, but they tend to forget the otherness of death, the tears and the rupture that the grave introduces in the life of a human being. 4

5

Mark the difference between the Danish and the English title, literally between a thought (tænkt) and an imagined occasion. Michael Theunissen underscores that the discourse is eminently a discourse on the thought of death, excluding any image as a jest, as not earnest; cf. “Das Erbauliche im Gedanken an den Tod“ in Kierkegaard Studies: Yearbook 2000, pp. 40-72. I can see Theunissen’s point, but as I argue in an article in KSYB 2003, the relationship between concept and image is probably more complex than this; neither thoughts nor images can be excluded from the considerations on death. The interplay between the two of them is rather rooted in the aporetic character of the whole discourse. Cf. Marius G. Mjaaland “Death and Aporia” in Kierkegaard Studies: Yearbook 2003, pp. 395-418. Parts of the present chapter is a modified and extended version of my article: “The Autopsy of One Still Living” in International Kierkegaard Commentary: Writing Sampler and Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions, ed. by Robert L. Perkins, Macon (Georgia): Mercer University Press 2006, pp. 358-380. “When no one asks about him any more, then the name over the door – when the house is no longer visibly a house of sorrow, when also the grief in the house has abated and the daily loss has with consolation practiced recollection – then the name over the door will signify to the two that they also have one additional work: to recollect the one who is dead” (SKS 5, 444 / TDIO, 72 f.).

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As readers of the discourse, of the deceased Søren Kierkegaard’s inscriptions, we do not get to know more than this about the deceased person. He remains a stranger to us. Only his death is of any interest, as a thought and imagined occasion for writing. His grave out there in the churchyard (Danish Kirkegaard) leaves nothing more than a trace of someone absent.6 This trace, however, of the unknown other becomes an occasion for thought, bringing about an intensified reflection on the meaning of death, prompting this otherness to be kept in mind. The contrasts between the familiar and the incomprehensible, the speech and the silence, the continuity of life and the rupture of death, and even between oneself and the other, occur frequently throughout the discourse and give it an unsettling and discordant nerve. A characteristic trait is thereby how the thought of death interrupts and disturbs the reflection on oneself, thus giving an impetus to a more profound understanding of the self. Therefore, Kierkegaard insists on a double scope in his defining of the problem of thinking death: “Earnestness is that you think death, and that you are thinking it as your lot, and that you are then doing what death is indeed unable to do – namely that you are and death also is.” 7 The problem is introduced at a graveside through the experience with death by one still living. It thus represents the point of departure, the point where the problem of death is posited, as a problem of language, of solitude, and of thought. In the rest of the discourse, the author makes an effort to transfer this problem into reflection on oneself. But the challenge is to transfer the problem without dissolving it. Dissolved as a problem, two results are possible: Either the explication of death becomes a main point, but then it has no decisive impact on self-reflection – or the self becomes so important that death is included into the finite economy of everyday life, making death appear more pleasant, more acceptable, than the chronic interruption of the inexplicable. Whoever reflects upon death, and reflects in earnestness, has to keep the experience of the open grave in mind. Hence the problem of the discourse remains at the graveside. The grave is there 6

7

To the understanding of the trace presupposed here, see Levinas Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, tr. by Alphonso Lingis, The Hague / Boston / London: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers 1981, pp. 148 f. and – concerning death – the chapter “Other and the Other” in Levinas Time and the Other, tr. by Richard A. Cohen, Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press 1987, pp. 77-79. “Alvoren er, at det er Døden Du tænker, og at Du saa tænker den som Dit Lod, og at Du saa gjør, hvad Døden jo ikke formaaer, at Du er og Døden ogsaa er” (SKS 5, 446 / TDIO, 75).

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at the centre of the text, as an empty tomb, insisting on a “memento mori!” (“remember, thou shall die!”) – as the slave is supposed to have whispered into the ear of the triumphant roman emperor. The discourse might appear unstructured and confusing at first glance. It is, however, possible to detect a logical and rhetorical agenda behind the many rich examples and changing perspectives. Following content as well as italics and other signals in the text, we may quite easily organize the discourse into six different parts:8 Meditation on the graveyard: SKS 5, 442-444 / TDIO, 71-73 Problem: To think death so that you are and death also is: SKS 5, 444-447 / TDIO, 73-76 (iii) Death’s decision is decisive: SKS 5, 447-454 / TDIO, 76-85 (iv) Death’s decision is indefinable: SKS 5, 454-464 / TDIO, 85-96 (v) Death’s decision is inexplicable: SKS 5, 464-468 / TDIO, 96-101 (vi) The end: Autopsy: SKS 5, 468-469 / TDIO, 101-102 (i) (ii)

The repeated expression “death’s decision” calls our attention to what Kierkegaard has emphasized as the central topic of the discourse.9 Now, what does this qualification of death by the decision signify for the interpretation of death? I would like to suggest two aspects: (i) it has to do with the transition, i. e. the transition of death into life by the thought of one’s own death. (ii) It is also connected to a certain aporia of death, i. e. an openness and non-closure in the understanding of death: The one still living is posed in a decisive position, although that person is not able to resolve the problem at stake. There will be more about this aporia in the following, but first, let us examine the art of communication in the discourse “At a Graveside.” The shortcoming of Kierkegaard’s discourse – and of writing in general – is, according to its author, that it is without any concrete occasion: “There is no death waiting for it so that all can be over.”10 This fact we might take as an expression of the general inappropriateness of texts on death. Still, the lack could be turned into an advantage, if the reader takes the discourse as an occasion to think about her own death. The speech (Danish Tale) on death is mediated through 8

9 10

A similar structure is found in Eva Birkenstock Heißt philosophieren sterben lernen?, Freiburg / München: Verlag Karl Alber 1997, p. 30. Birkenstock does not distinguish clearly between part four and five, though, and this lack anticipates a deficiency in her analysis of the discourse: She overlooks both the otherness of death and the relation to the other marked by death, thus she dissolves the thought of death in a way similar to Heidegger. Cf. § 16 below on Kierkegaard and Heidegger. See SKS 5, 447 / TDIO, 76. SKS 5, 444 / TDIO, 73.

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writing. Dead writing. The discourse (Danish Tale) shows that the author has been conscious of this difference.11 The relationship between speech and writing is reflected into the text and creates an ambiguity inside the thought of death. In the preface, the author describes how the book lies there, waiting for the reader to come and bring the occasion with him.12 The written text loosens the connection between voice and meaning, detaches the authority from the author. In this sense, the writing is dead – in opposition to the vivid voice. And in this sense death occurs as writing – in this text. Death is not given any definite meaning. Where death is concerned, one’s own death, there is no direct interconnection between the signifier and the signified. The meaning is rather displaced by a certain uncertainty, a certain inexplicability; the emphasis lies on the appropriation: “The meaning lies in the appropriation. Hence the book’s joyous giving of itself.”13 The meaning lies in the appropriation. The text opens up for different readings, but it refrains from giving a specific definition to “one’s own death.” Hence the very appropriation of the text, the way it is read and interpreted, reveals something important about the reader, about how he or she understands death and how they understand themselves. That is an example of indirect communication: The indefinable connected to death’s decision is inscribed into the reflection on the self. “One’s own death” will always come in between, that is, between the author and the reader, between the sign and the signified, between the meaning and the appropriation.14 It is as if the appropriation of the thought of death turns out to be a continuous de-propriation or expropriation of death. The point seems to be that death lies outside the control of any reader and any 11

12 13 14

By emphasizing the difference as such, Birkenstock is certainly right in calling Kierkegaard “a predecessor of a philosophy of difference” (Eva Birkenstock, Heißt philosophieren sterben lernen?, p. 46). Because it is of particular interest for our discourse, I will again call attention to Derrida’s definition of “trace” and “difference” in Of Grammatology, p. 65: “The trace is in fact the absolute origin of sense in general. Which amounts to saying once again that there is no origin of sense in general. The trace is the difference which opens appearance (l’apparaître) and signification.” Cf. SKS 5, 389 / TDIO, 5. SKS 5, 389 / TDIO, 5. Cf. the “spacing” (espacement) I discussed in Chapter One, as an expression for the subject’s relation to its own death: “As the subject’s relation to its own death, this becoming-absent is the constitution of subjectivity. On all levels of life’s organization, that is to say, of the economy of death. All graphemes are of testamentary essence. And the original absence of the subject of writing is also the absence of the thing or the referent” (Derrida Of Grammatology, p. 69).

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philosopher who reflects on oneself. Still, the only thought of death deserving this name, Kierkegaard writes, is one’s own death.15 That is the background for the interplay between a reflection on common images of death and a repulsion of these very images throughout the discourse, thereby puzzling the reader and questioning the way simplified images are used as an excuse to flee from the earnest thought of death – and from life as well. Let me give an example. People tend to talk about death as a rest: So by death’s decision all is over; there is rest. Nothing, nothing disturbs the dead. If that little word [that had been the meaning of one’s life] or that lacking moment made the death struggle agitated, now the dead one is not disturbed; if the suppression of that little word disturbed the lives of many of the living, if that enigmatic work engaged the researcher again and again, the dead one is not disturbed. Death’s decision is like a night, the night that comes when one cannot work; indeed death has been called a night, and the conception has been mitigated by calling it a sleep.16

Kierkegaard literally rests by this image of death as a sleep, as a rest. He describes it as a beautiful image, a conception of death that is comforting and mitigating. He goes even further, describing the deathbed as a cool and silent place. But then, suddenly, he turns the image around, and states: “But, my listener, this is mood, and to think about death in this way is not earnestness. To long for death in this way is depression’s escape from life, and in this way to be unwilling to fear death is rebellion. It is the treacherousness of melancholy to be unwilling to understand that there is something else to fear than life, and therefore a consoling wisdom other than the sleep of death must be found.”17 In this case, in Kierkegaard’s own description, the “mood” of depression has taken the image of death as a sleep as an excuse to escape from life. Death has thus been painted in romantic and beautiful colors, to make it less disturbing, less frightening. Kierkegaard does not say that the image as such is necessarily false,18 but the appropriation of the image, the way it is taken to represent one’s own death, 15

16 17 18

“To think of oneself as dead is earnestness; to be a witness to the death of another is mood” (SKS 5, 445 / TDIO, 75). SKS 5, 450 / TDIO, 80. SKS 5, 451 / cf. TDIO, 81. That is the opinion of Birkenstock and Theunissen, who both write about a “prohibition” of images and of an iconoclasm in Kierkegaard’s discourse. Cf. Michael Theunissen “Das Erbauliche,” pp. 41 f.; and Eva Birkenstock, Heißt philosophieren sterben lernen?, p. 39. In my opinion, though, there is a complex play between images and concepts in this text, where the concepts as a matter of fact take the images as occasions for thought. By this inscription of the thought in images, the concepts as well as the images are displaced.

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is definitely false. The otherness of death has disappeared. The difference between the dead and the living is gone. When Kierkegaard repudiates the image, however, it is in order to let the trace of death come in between the explainer and the explained, displacing the image of death as a sleep, or as a rest. The significance of death thus lies in the appropriation, i. e. the appropriation of a lacuna between signifier and signified. When the thought of death concerns the living, a question is raised by the repetition of the statement: Is death a sleep? Is death a rest? What would that mean for the living, for their appropriation of their own death? Hence, this is an example of the indirectness of the discourse. It places the focus on the one still living, i. e. the reader. Death comes in between the person and the image of death, rendering the “objective” truth or falsity of the image less interesting. The meaning lies in the appropriation of a certain difference; death makes a difference, and hence the earnest person sees the difference as a point of departure: Earnestness certainly understands the same about death but understands it differently. It understands that all is over. Whether this, mitigated in mood, can be expressed by saying that death is a night, a sleep, is of minor concern to it. […] If it is certain that death exists, which it is; if it is certain that with death’s decision all is over; if it is certain that death itself never becomes involved in giving any explanation – well, then it is a matter of understanding oneself, and the earnest understanding is that if death is night then life is day, that if no work can be done at night then work can be done during the day; and the terse but impelling cry of earnestness, like death’s terse cry, is: This very day.19

What one understands by death is of minor importance, but how one understands it is decisive. The image of death as a sleep must therefore be broken up from inside, by death itself, in order to introduce the decisive Socratic difference between understanding (“what”) and understanding (“how”):20 The certainty of death is that it exists. The uncertainty of death is due to the fact that “death itself never becomes involved in giving any explanation.” That is why it impels the one still living to seek to understand oneself. 19 20

SKS 5, 452 f. / TDIO, 82 f. “Does this mean, then that to understand and to understand are two different things? They certainly are, and the person who has understood this – but, please note, not in the sense of the first kind of understanding – is eo ipso initiated into all the secrets of irony. This is actually the contradiction that concerns irony” (SKS 11, 203 / cf. SUD, 90: The last sentence is simply missing (!) in the English translation). Such a contradiction and such a Socratic difference between understanding and understanding is, however, decisive for the following argument – i. e. for my understanding of “death’s decision.”

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Kierkegaard’s use of the image of death as a sleep, as a rest, is typical for the rhetorical movement of the entire discourse. He takes a certain image or explanation of death as a starting point. He goes into the image, as if to make it rich and plausible. But then, suddenly, he reverses the image, showing that death is not caught by the explanation. Rather, death turns the explanation towards the explaining person, asking what this means if one tries to understand oneself. The meaning of death in the proper sense appears in the way it breaks up the text from inside, as a limit running through the whole text, situating the problem in the context of the reader reflecting on oneself. Trying to localize this limit, this border line of the discourse, is a major task of any interpreter: “Death is the schoolmaster of earnestness, but in turn its earnest instruction is recognized precisely by its leaving to the single individual the task of searching himself so it can then teach him earnestness as it can be learned only by the person himself.” 21 By this limit, or better at this limit, at the graveside of every single individual, is where the earnestness of death is to be found. Death itself turns the problem from a theoretical deliberation about how to describe death into an existential decision (“death’s decision”) introduced by the thought of death – a movement similar to that of a Socratic aporia.22 The position of the ignorant teacher, which Socrates takes in the dialogues, is here given over to death itself, as the “schoolmaster of earnestness.” The pupil is not an interlocutor appearing in the text, but the reader of the discourse, the one who Kierkegaard addresses as “my listener.”23 The problem of coming to terms with death is a typical “what” problem, just like Meno in the dialogue asks “what” virtue is. Socrates does not give any answer, just like death never becomes involved in giving any explanation.24 But the unresolved tension of the “what” problem returns to the reader, 21 22

23

24

SKS 5, 446 / TDIO, 75 f. Plato Meno 81a. Cf. also § 10 above and Philosophical Fragments, where Climacus refers to exactly this point in Meno to define the difficult task of searching the truth in a Socratic sense, being aware of one’s ignorance (see SKS 4, 218 / PF, 9). Cf. the interesting study on the Socratic dimension of Kierkegaard’s relation to death presented by Wilhelm Anz in his article: “Kierkegaard on Death and Dying,” tr. by Jonathan Rée in Kierkegaard: A Critical Reader, ed. by Jonathan Rée and Jane Chamberlain, Oxford: Blackwell 1998, pp. 39-52. “Thus Plato describes the situation where the ignorant becomes conscious of his ignorance and sets off to search for the truth […] To pose someone in the aporia is the goal of the Socratic art of questioning” (Bernhard Waldenfels, “Aporie” in Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, ed. by Joachim Ritter and Karlfried Gründer, vol. 1, Basel: Schwabe 1971, pp. 447 f.).

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it introduces a movement from the outside to the inside, whereupon a more profound awareness of oneself, and thus a deeper insight into the “how” problem, should express itself in a renewed praxis, enforced by the “retroactive power” of death.25

§ 16 Death and Ontology: Kierkegaard vs. Heidegger It is important to keep in mind how Kierkegaard reflects upon death when we now move to the content of his reflection. If we forget the how, or take it for a what, we will probably misunderstand the very point of his discourse.26 The hermeneutic circle of reflection upon death does not add any facts to the common understanding of death. It rather points at a fundamental ignorance concerning death’s reality. Even though we have to rely on concepts and images of death in order to get involved with the thought of death at all, death’s decision poses the problem in a radically different way. Thus we might say that the circle of understanding is broken by the silence of death. The aporia of death is “non-said,” as Levinas would express it; it is indefinable as such. Hence, the difference between common images of death and death itself refers to a fundamental difference, similar to the ontological difference between being (Sein) and the being of beings (Sein des Seienden) in Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit. Since Kierkegaard situates death in life and turns the question of death into a question of understanding oneself, it seems even more reasonable to turn to Heidegger for a comparison. Moreover, it seems plausible that Kierkegaard’s discourse on death is the most important source27 for 25

26

27

More about the aporetic structure of the discourse in my article “Death and Aporia,” pp. 405-409. Patricia J. Huntington accuses Heidegger of such a “category mistake” in his reading of Kierkegaard and sees this as a reason both for the lack of ethics and for a certain decisionism in Heidegger’s work as well as in his political support of National Socialism. See Patricia J. Huntington “Heidegger’s Reading of Kierkegaard Revisited: From Ontological Abstraction to Ethical Concretion” in Kierkegaard in Post/ Modernity, ed. by Martin J. Matuštík and Merold Westphal, Bloomington / Indianapolis: Indiana University Press 1995, pp. 56-59. Cf. Michael Theunissen “Das Erbauliche,” pp. 46 f. Professor Theunissen concludes that the famous footnote in Sein und Zeit, where Heidegger claims that one may learn more from Kierkegaard’s edifying works than from his philosophical writings, refers primarily to the edifying discourse “At a Graveside,” which is crucial for the understanding of Heidegger’s conception of death. It occurs directly before the discussion of death, and Theunissen refers to “secret sources” documenting that Heidegger particularly thinks of this discourse. Cf. also the following article

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Heidegger’s existential analysis of death as “being towards death” in Sein und Zeit.28 In his opus magnum, Heidegger criticizes Kierkegaard for being dependant on Hegel in his understanding of ontology. 29 He claims that Kierkegaard has thought through the problem of existence thoroughly as an ontic problem (an “existenziell” analysis), even though he is not aware of the ontological problem (an “existenzial” analysis) in Heidegger’s sense of that word. And given Heidegger’s understanding of ontology, his claim is notably correct where Kierkegaard’s analysis of death is concerned. His analysis is deliberately not an ontological one. To analyze death in an ontological way is namely a task that raises serious semantic and logical problems. Heidegger seems somehow to overlook these problems when he emphasizes that his ontological analysis of death is clear and unambiguous (German “eindeutig”). 30 The way Kierkegaard understands death, however, it is not unambiguous, and certainly not in relation to being. It is rather death that breaks up the unambiguous understanding of being, and continuously breaks up the images and notions one uses to describe it – which means that death can be said to break up and break out of the discourse it is a part of. 31 The difference between Kierkegaard and Heidegger with regard to being is that the latter analyzes death interior to the order of being, or rather as the temporal limit to the logos of being, while the former sees death as a paradoxical expression for the fact that human self-understanding is impossible to conform to a question of ontology. Thus, Heidegger is probably right in his characterization of Kierkegaard’s understanding of ontology, which is influenced by Hegel and antiquity, but Kierkegaard’s way of reflecting on death may nevertheless represent a serious objection to Heidegger’s understanding of ontology, in particular his attempt to include death in his existential (German existenzial) analysis of Dasein. The critical question I want to investigate is thus whether Heidegger’s “ontologization” of death might be more problematic than Kierkegaard’s insistence on the fact that death

28

29 30 31

by Richard Klein: “Antinomien der Sterblichkeit. Reflexionen zu Heidegger und Adorno” in Internationale Zeitschrift für Philosophie 1999, pp. 140-174. Cf. §§ 47-53 in Sein und Zeit. I have chosen to do my own translations, and thus I refer only to the German edition: Martin Heidegger Sein und Zeit, 17th ed., Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag 1993. However, the same page numbers do also occur in the margins of the English translation, Being and Time, tr. by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, Oxford: Basil Blackwell 1973. See Heidegger Sein und Zeit, p. 235n1. See Heidegger Sein und Zeit, p. 246. Cf. Derrida’s discussion of the inside and outside of the text in § 12 above.

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is indefinable and inexplicable. Let us consider some of the central points in Heidegger’s analysis: In Sein und Zeit, the concept of death ends up in a double position between the constant process of dying (Sterben) and the future “possibility of the total impossibility of being.”32 Dying is an open process of “not-yet,” though Dasein is constantly moving towards an end. This possibility is conceived of as a mode of Being “[…] in which the particular Dasein simply cannot be represented by someone else.”33 Facing death, every single individual is singularized, given a possibility which is, as far as it “is,” essentially one’s own. Furthermore, Heidegger points out that death is not an event; it is rather a phenomenon that has to be understood existentially. 34 All these points could be traced back to Kierkegaard’s discourse – in fact the general outline of the phenomenon of death reveals a heavy debt to Kierkegaard. Still, Heidegger himself underscores some points which differ. His very intention is to write en existential analysis that is prior to any other description of death, say, a biological, psychological, religious, theological, or philosophical one. That does not mean that the existential analysis is given as a complete theory of the phenomenon of death. 35 It is rather a formal analysis of its ontological structure in respect of its significance for the interpretation of the existence, facticity (Faktizität), and falling (Verfallen) of Dasein. 36 Heidegger distinguishes between two levels of the analysis: (i) the structure of death, i. e. the “essential” and “existential” concept of death, and (ii) the “authentic” being towards death. Concerning the first, Heidegger underscores the non-ambiguous and unequivocal character of his ontological interpretation: The complete, existential-ontological concept of death may now be delimited by the following definitions: Death as the end of Dasein is the most proper [eigenste], nonrelational [unbezüglich] possibility of Dasein, which is not to be overtaken [unüberholbar], though it is certain [gewiss] and, as such, indefinite [unbestimmt]. 37

32 33 34 35

36 37

Heidegger Sein und Zeit, p. 250. Heidegger Sein und Zeit, p. 242. Cf. Heidegger Sein und Zeit, p. 240. Cf. Derrida Aporias, pp. 21-36. The problem posed by Derrida, concerning the (im)possibility of experiencing an aporia, e. g. the aporia of death, and responding to it with ethical responsibility, is similar to the problem of radical ignorance of death, being indefinable and inexplicable, yet urging the responsibility of death’s decision, as it is posed by Kierkegaard in “At a Graveside.” Cf. Heidegger Sein und Zeit, p. 250. Heidegger Sein und Zeit, pp. 258 f.

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Starting out from this definition, the “authentic” being towards death is described as a mode of being where the self relates “most freely” to itself in its unique and individual possibility of being. 38 As such, it has anticipated death in Dasein as expression for its own most proper (“eigenste”) possibility. 39 A common charge against Heidegger is that he dissolves the problem of death in the conceptual economy of Dasein by re-interpreting it as an ontological possibility of authentic being.40 Thereby death becomes an abstract problem, detached from the concrete experience of aging and suffering. In some sense this is a justified charge, though Heidegger explicitly distinguishes between his conceptual definition of death and the indefinite and open character of being towards death, facing the facticity of death in a state of anxiety.41 Where the finite character of death is concerned, he argues that such a delimitation of the analysis is necessary to make it applicable for other sciences, relying on an ontological analysis. Still, it is necessary to ask if not Heidegger, by giving a positive, unequivocal definition of the significance (Bedeutung) of death includes death in an explication of the inexplicable? Admittedly, he emphasizes that death is indefinable in temporal respects, but still he insists on an unequivocal definition of what death means for the interpretation of human existence. Thus, death is de facto included by a conceptual analysis of Dasein – as Heidegger concludes: The existential concept of death was defined, and hence, what an authentic being might possibly relate to. Further, the inauthentic being unto death was defined, and thereby it was prohibitively shown how the authentic being unto death should not be. Through these positive and prohibitive instructions, it should be possible to make a draft of the existential construction of an authentic being unto death.42

From a Kierkegaardian point of view, which is also a view from inside existence, it seems that Heidegger says too much, and yet perhaps too little, about death. Kierkegaard’s text gives us the possibility to analyze the account from a different point of view, which is chronologically prior to, and therefore independent of the rich, but quite strict conceptual framework of Heidegger’s ontology. The reason why Heidegger says too much, is that he claims to be able to define 38 39 40

41 42

Cf. Heidegger Sein und Zeit, p. 264. Cf. Heidegger Sein und Zeit, p. 262. See e. g. Karl Löwith “Zu Heideggers Seinsfrage” in Aufsätze und Vorträge 1930-1970, Stuttgart: Kolhammer 1970, pp. 193-196. Cf. Heidegger Sein und Zeit, pp. 251; 254 f. Heidegger Sein und Zeit, p. 260.

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the “essential” concept of death unambiguously,43 even though death itself is said to be indefinite (unbestimmt) and not to be overtaken (unüberholbar). In this respect, Kierkegaard seems to be much more sensitive than Heidegger to the ambiguities of language. Since death is supposed to be indefinable, Kierkegaard does not claim to be able to give the definite and final definition of death. Instead of giving a final explanation, he introduces a certain difference into any definition of death, i. e. the difference between death “as such,” entailing that all is over, and death as it is interpreted by the one still living, whose possibility lies in the instant: “this very day.” Another difference that is kept open through his aporetical twist of language is the difference between image and concept. Kierkegaard’s discourse is definitely not as precise in its definitions as Heidegger’s ontological analysis, yet it is marked by a Socratic irony that breaks up the economy of language to the same extent that death breaks up the economy of conceptual thought. Hence, when I suggest that Heidegger says too much about death, it is exactly because he gives a conceptual definition of the structure of death that is supposed to be ontologically prior to any other description of this phenomenon. Death, however, might not be available for such a phenomenological definition. As Levinas points out, death hides itself by the very effort to describe it, thus introducing a deep rupture even in the ontological analysis of phenomenology.44 In that case, only the rupture itself is prior to any explanation. The existential analysis – insofar as it tries to go “further” than Kierkegaard’s reflections on death – has only managed to finitize the infinite negativity of death, which breaks up thought, language, and concepts from inside. Heidegger has thus included a concept of death in the finite economy of an existential ontology. But what about the radical ignorance of death, questioning even the ontological definition of the “most authentic” being? Is this the place where we have to look for the reason why Heidegger delimits the significance of death to the self, to the own, to en existential freedom unto death – and tears it away from the encounter with the other? Heidegger concludes his existential proposal to an authentic being unto death as follows:

43

44

Concerning the non-ambiguity of the concept of death, cf. also Heidegger Sein und Zeit, p. 246. Cf. Emmanuel Levinas Dieu, la mort et le temps, Paris: Éditions Grasset & Fasquelle 1993, pp. 60 f.

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The running-ahead (Vorlaufen) shows Dasein how it is lost in itself as “man” and puts it ahead of the possibility of being oneself, primarily not dependent on the providing care, released from the illusions of “man,” certain of itself, although being this self in the passionate, factual, anxious freedom unto death.45

The “freedom unto death” is defined as a liberation of the self from itself to itself, without any mentioning of the other. Even here, though, we discover some important similarities with Kierkegaard’s description of an earnestness facing death’s decision: In the distinction between the future “all is over” and the present “this very day” – and in the thought of death as singularizing fact, setting human beings apart from the “crowd” (Danish “Mængden”). Kierkegaard’s influence is also apparent in Heidegger’s passionate endeavor to release Dasein from the illusions of “man.” That corresponds to Kierkegaard’s criticism of the many pious or simplifying images of death, covered under the label “mood.” Despite these aspects, that seem to be more or less directly inferred from the discourse “At a Graveside,” some differences are just as striking, in certain notable absences. The three aspects that are more or less absent in Heidegger’s analysis of death, are (i) death’s inexplicability; (ii) the otherness of death; and (iii) the active impulse that, according to Kierkegaard, goes out from death’s decision this very day. These aspects are not so relevant for the “what” question (i. e. the attempt to describe what death “is”) as to the translation of any “what” into a “how”: How do you understand that which you understand by “death”? By virtue of this how, the Socratic-ironic distance to death is transformed into an ethical-existential movement, a decision. The direction and content of this decision, however, is not unimportant. On the contrary, by virtue of the “how,” the significance of the “what” becomes apparent, regarding one’s understanding of death as well as one’s actions. Heidegger does not follow Kierkegaard in his ethicalexistential dedication.46 Quite the reverse, his so-called decisionism seems to follow from the fact that the “how” of understanding is replaced by a “what.” This is probably one of the reasons why ethics by Heidegger loses its relevance for ontology. 45 46

Heidegger Sein und Zeit, p. 266. Hence, I agree with the critical remark from Huntington: “Following Martin Matuštik’s recent work on Kierkegaard, I suggest that Heidegger makes a ‘category mistake’ in which he slurs over the boundary between an existential mode of action (the how) and the substantive choice one makes in action (what one enacts)” (Patricia J. Huntington “Heidegger’s Reading of Kierkegaard Revisited,” p. 56).

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What disappears is what Levinas calls “the other”: That strange rupture which is experienced by the one still living “at the graveside,” in the disturbing otherness of death as a rupture with life as one knows it.47 The significance of death is not only connected to a possibility of understanding Dasein in its totality (Ganzheit), but also to death as a test of what you have understood about life. And further, not only examining what you understand, but even how you act, what you are, and what you believe about “life” and “death.” When the significance of death is delimited to Dasein’s being unto death, Heidegger renounces the possibility of radical self-evaluation, of understanding differently, i. e. of letting death disturb his own ontological project. Hence, he shuts himself off from the Socratic difference between understanding and understanding emphasized by Kierkegaard – a difference I will return to later.48 Now a true Heideggerian may object that I have overlooked the ontological difference, which according to Heidegger is prior to any other difference of language and thought. But my critical remark is more modest than that; it is simply to point out that Heidegger has, to a certain extent, ignored such an original difference – ontological or not – in his analysis of the concept of death.49 The result of such forgetfulness (not of being, but rather of non-being) can be observed on three different levels of the analysis: First, the existential-ontological concept of death is fixed and the being unto death is defined positively as well as prohibitively. Hence, the silence of death is overlooked, its non-outspoken negativity, which complicates logical explanation and evades a precise, conceptual definition. Later works of Heidegger are certainly more sensitive to this problem of language, for instance Zur Seinsfrage, but in the systematic framework of Sein und Zeit, the interpretation of death “surpasses” such objections. Second, death is included in the analysis of finite existence, instead of breaking up the reflection on the self from inside. Hence, the significance of death is dissolved in the possibility of one’s very own “authentic” (eigentlich) existence. But this interpretation of death does 47 48

49

Cf. Levinas Time and the Other, p. 77. Cf. again the Socratic difference between understanding and understanding in Sickness unto Death (SKS 11, 203 / cf. SUD, 90) and Chapter Six below. The most important sign that he is aware of the problem as an ontological one, although not giving it the necessary attention in the way he reflects upon death, is the inverted comma surrounding the repeated “is” in the sentence: “Death is, as far as it “is,” essentially always my own” (Heidegger Sein und Zeit, p. 240).

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not question the possibility for a human being to define and recognize this “authenticity” or “authentic being.” Neither does it take into consideration the eventual dependence on another to define “authentic” existence. At this point, Heidegger disagrees not only with Kierkegaard, but also with later thinkers like Levinas and Derrida: Levinas, who lets every reflection on the self be defined by the other, 50 while Derrida lets the analysis of the self spring out of an irresolvable problem and an irreducible secret. 51 My third objection is that the infinite character of death is overlooked. This is after all the most surprising – but also the most typically modern – aspect of Heidegger’s analysis. It is a clear contrast to the Socratic irony and aporia, which is marked by such an in-finite negativity, breaking up the philosophical reflection from within and thus resisting the closure (Abgeschlossenheit / clôture) of ontological reflection. Given that death introduces a limit between the finite and the infinite, between outside and inside, between the self and the other – without eliminating the external, the internal, the infinite, or the other – then the open rupture of death goes through the Dasein of human beings, but cannot be defined in terms of ontology. This openness of existence is what, according to Kierkegaard’s discourse, demands a response from every single individual, “authentic” or not, in the form of self-awareness, vigilance, and responsibility. Paradoxically, at this point Heidegger says too little about death, by defining it as finite, though as such indefinite. The problem of closure occurs since the concept of death is limited to and delimiting “existence” to one’s own and finite possibility. Hence the ambitious intention to disclose the “essential” and original character of being towards death is rendered questionable, and probably it should be questioned in many respects – as even Heidegger himself implicitly does in later texts. 52 Nevertheless, this is probably the most influential philosophical text on death in the twentieth century. It is a text that shows heavy debts to Kierkegaard’s “edifying” discourse, though it is quite different in its approach. The irony of texts is that even though the discourse “At a Graveside” (published 1845) is approximately twice as old as Sein 50 51

52

Cf. Levinas Otherwise than Being, pp. 15-19. See Derrida The Gift of Death, tr. by David Willis, Chicago: Chicago University Press 1995, p. 92. Cf. e. g. Martin Heidegger Unterwegs zur Sprache in Gesamtausgabe, vol. 12, Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann 1985, p. 203. See also Holzwege in Gesamtausgabe, vol. 5, Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann 1977, pp. 302 f.

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und Zeit (published 1927), it appears to be less dogmatic and even less “metaphysical” than its existential successor.

§ 17 Violence and the Death of the Other: Levinas, Kierkegaard, and Derrida Emmanuel Levinas accuses Heidegger not only of excluding ethics and the question of the other from ontology, but also of overlooking the death of the other in his existential interpretation of being unto death in Sein und Zeit. 53 I presume that a similar accusation could be turned against Kierkegaard, insofar as he dismisses witnessing the death of another as anything but “mood”: “Therefore if you, my listener, will fix your attention on this thought and concern yourself in no other way with the consideration than to think about yourself, then this unauthorized discourse will become an earnest matter also with you. To think of oneself as dead is earnestness; to be witness to the death of another is mood.”54 For Levinas, the relationship between the death of the other and my own death becomes important to understand the difference between myself and the other. On this difference, Levinas writes: “The difference between myself and the other is non-indifference, is the-onefor-the-other. But the-one-for-the-other, that is the very significance of the signification.”55 Levinas’ understanding of the relationship between oneself and the other represents a radical ethical impulse in philosophy, insofar as he sees the subject as a “hostage” of the other, and potentates the significance of death to dying for the other. 56 Thus, the death of the other might also give a radically new meaning to one’s own death – by connecting one’s own death to the question of the gift, of sacrifice, of how the thought of death opens up for the economy of the gift. 57 53 54 55

56 57

See Levinas Dieu, la mort et le temps, pp. 21-30. SKS 5, 445 / TDIO, 75. Levinas Autrement qu’être ou au-delà de l’essence, 2nd ed., The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff 1978, p. 273. Cf. also the translation in Otherwise than Being, p. 178. See Levinas Dieu, la mort et le temps, p. 21. “In this sense, the sacrifice for the other creates a different relationship to the death of the other: responsibility that might become the reason why “man” (l’on) may die. In the culpability of the surviving, the death of the other is my affair. My death is my part in the death of the other and in my death I die this death which is my fault” (Levinas Dieu, la mort et le temps, p. 49).

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In this connection, Levinas has marked a clear distance to Kierkegaard, above all to Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac, as it is presented in Fear and Trembling. On several occasions, Levinas has accused Kierkegaard of introducing a violent and irrational impulse into philosophy – he philosophizes “with a hammer”! – paving the way for Nietzsche and later for German National Socialism: It is Kierkegaard’s violence that shocks me. The manner of the strong and the violent, who fear neither scandal nor destruction, has become, since Kierkegaard and before Nietzsche, a manner of philosophy. One philosophizes with a hammer. In that permanent scandal, in that opposition to everything, I perceive by anticipation the echoes of certain cases of verbal violence that claimed to be schools of thought, and pure ones at that. I am thinking not only of National Socialism, but of all the sorts of thought it exalted. That harshness of Kierkegaard emerges at the exact moment when he “transcends ethics.”58

Intuitively, I have to admit that Levinas hits the nail right on the head. The situation described in Fear and Trembling is simply brutal, and the pseudonym Johannes de Silentio describes it in detail in order to confront the reader with the anxiety which Abraham experienced on his way up to Mount Moriah. He deals with a problem of murder and sacrifice, and follows the father right to the moment when he lifts the knife to kill his beloved son. Levinas criticizes Kierkegaard for transcending the limits of the ethical, accepting an authority which goes beyond every human authority, claiming to be absolute. Kierkegaard has introduced a sharp distinction between the ethical and the religious and claims that it is the absolute obligation in face of the Absolute which justifies the teleological suspension of the ethical. According to Levinas, however, there cannot be any absolute instance outside the human community that can legitimize a break with the ethical. It is rather the other way around, so that the absolute other – God – only becomes visible in the face of the other, not as immediately present, but hiding himself while leaving a trace in the face of the other. On the other hand, Levinas does also speak of a sacrifice, viz. a sacrifice which might become necessary when we see suffering and death in the other’s face. He refers to Abraham, but emphasizes some other aspects of the narrative: First of all, that Abraham listened to God when he called him back from the delusion of having to kill his son, thus called him back to the order of ethics; secondly, that Abra58

See Levinas Proper Names (Orig. Noms propres, Paris 1976), London: The Athlone Press 1996, p. 76.

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ham was willing to sacrifice himself when he made intercession for the righteous in Sodom and Gomorrah, before these cities were destroyed. Faced with the death of the other, everyone can find himself obliged to sacrifice himself or his own self. This is the ethical demand which is revealed in the face of the other. Levinas claims that it is precisely in such an understanding of ethics, where one does not spare oneself, but discovers the meaning of existence and finds one’s own identity in the encounter with the face of the other, that the religious dimension too becomes visible. Levinas’ critique must probably be read in the light of his own experiences during the Second World War, and of the very widespread view that Heidegger’s existentialism was a direct continuation of Kierkegaard’s philosophy of existence. 59 Although the criticism may seem exaggerated, and based on an anachronistic understanding of the subsequent impact made by the text,60 there can be no doubt that he has identified one of the most problematic aspects of Fear and Trembling. We experience similar dilemmas in our own days, when a religious justification is offered for human sacrifice in the form of suicide bombers and other forms of terrorist activity. Before I return to Levinas’ own exposition of the meaning of death, which in other respects turns out to share important common concerns with Kierkegaard, I will therefore focus more specifically on this problem of religious fundamentalism in the next paragraph, a problem which is closely connected to the question of sacrifice. In his essay Donner la mort (1992), Jacques Derrida refers to these two analyses of death and sacrifice, which appear to be diametrically opposite: Kierkegaard’s and Levinas’. They hold totally different views of the relationship between the ethical and the religious; of Abraham;

59

60

Arild Waaler claims that on this point, Levinas does not seem to have correctly grasped Kierkegaard’s point. He claims that the difference between the two authors lies primarily in a differing emphasis on the sequence ethical/religious (Levinas) and religious/ethical (Kierkegaard). See Arild Waaler “Levinas og Kierkegaard” in I sporet av det uendelige. En debattbok om Levinas, ed. by Hans Kolstad, Hall Bjørnstad, and Asbjørn Aarnes, Oslo: Aschehoug 1995, pp. 233-236. The Danish Jewish writer Klaus Wivel is extremely critical of Levinas’ interpretation of Fear and Trembling in a book where he proposes a thesis based on Levinas’ and Rosenzweig’s critique of Kierkegaard: “But Abraham allegorizes an inner sacrifice, a self-annihilation, and Levinas is therefore wrong when he lets Kierkegaard justify an external suspension of the ethical dimension. In this sense, there is no presage of National Socialism to be detected in the Danish thinker” (Klaus Wivel En jødisk kritik af Søren Kierkegaard, Copenhagen: C. A. Reitzel 1999, p. 116).

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and of the meaning of sacrifice. Derrida thinks, however, that he has found a vital insight in both Kierkegaard and Levinas, and thus he denies that one must choose between them; this is no “either/or.” On the contrary, he reads the two philosophers in parallel, taking a socalled shibboleth as his point of departure. The Jewish word shibboleth means an expression or a sentence which has a double meaning in one particular language – and where this doubleness is the interesting point in the expression itself. Derrida’s shibboleth here is the French expression Tout autre est tout autre: 61 “Every other (one) is every bit other”; or, “The absolutely Other is altogether different”; or, “Every single other is the absolutely Other,” etcetera, etcetera. Initially, the expression looks like a tautology, but it is in fact open to a variety of meanings and readings. Derrida undertakes the first reading in what we might call a classic reading of Fear and Trembling. For tout autre, he puts Dieu, “God,” and this gives the reading: “God is completely different.” There are thus good reasons to follow Kierkegaard/de Silentio in positing a clear separation between the ethical and the religious, since he understands God to be so completely different, and God’s paths to be so unfathomable, that they demand a breach with ethics and with the general conditions for human life (i. e. with the Hegelian foundation of ethics). Derrida then turns the expression in another direction, viz.: every other (one) is absolutely different – just as God is absolutely different.62 Every human being, indeed every animal, is according to Derrida so different from me that he/she/it deserves the same absolute respect and reverence as God. Everyone else is completely other – tout autre est tout autre – and the alterity which opens up a terrifying abyss between me and God, in a mysterium tremendum, opens up a corresponding abyss between me and every other other, whether human being or animal.63 When confronted with an alterity of this kind, I am called to respond; it is this other I am responsible for and this other whom I sacrifice every time I sacrifice one person to the advantage of another. Derrida takes the hungry and the homeless as his example, but this principle also applies to one’s closest relatives, to one’s own family, who are sacrificed in favor of other persons, things, causes, another telos. This is the almost intolerable responsibility which is the consequence of the absolute responsibility vis-à-vis everything and 61 62 63

Cf. Derrida The Gift of Death, pp. 82 f. Cf. Derrida The Gift of Death, p. 87. Cf. Derrida The Gift of Death, p. 84.

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everyone – or, as Father Zosima says in The Brothers Karamazov, we are all guilty of everything for everyone, and I am more guilty than anyone else. When Kierkegaard’s text is read in this other way, it actually expresses the same responsibility that Levinas proposes – and I believe that this is not an unreasonable or inadequate reading of Fear and Trembling, since it locates the religious responsibility within the ethical horizon. In later writings, Kierkegaard describes this as the ethical-religious and the other ethics. This entails a radicalization of the ethical responsibility, which becomes unconditionally valid for every other human being – and especially for the stranger (cf. the Good Samaritan). The consequence is that one may be called to sacrifice oneself and one’s love of oneself for love of another; in other words, love of the other provides the basis and the depth of the commandment to love oneself – as one loves one’s neighbor. God enters both these relationships as an intermediate definition (Mellembestemmelse) between the self and the other. In the same way, my neighbor enters as an intermediate definition between myself and God – as a protection against every abstract understanding of my relationship to God. My neighbor is always the litmus test of whether I am relating to God or to an abstract idea about the deity. This means that the abyss opens up – this fear and trembling – between the self and every other human being. Almost the only element which we will look for in vain in Kierkegaard is the touching concern for animals as “the other” which we find in Derrida. Derrida claims that both Levinas and Kierkegaard introduce the religious within the ethical sphere. It is indeed true that a boundary is drawn between the ethical and the religious, but only so that this boundary then posits a distinction within the ethical sphere, viz. between the various understandings of ethics which come into play each time one acts, or ought to have acted, and the action is ethically relevant. When it comes to sacrifice, death remains standing between myself and the other; life and death are at stake, my own death as well as the death of the other. Derrida thus agrees with both Kierkegaard’s and Levinas’ reflections on sacrifice, under the presupposition that both have their origin in the same shibboleth: Tout autre est tout autre. This is a proposition which both links and separates. It opens a space between the two readings of Fear and Trembling which is indefinable and allows the two readings to stand over against each other in such a way that the differences are not removed, and neither reading is permitted to replace the other.

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As we have seen, Derrida quite early gave this difference, this limit, the designation différance – a difference which is not removed and which cannot be explained, a difference which itself remains hidden, but nevertheless is the origin of every meaning, every interpretation of texts or of phenomena. That which comes to sight, that which is described by phenomenology, thus goes back to a difference which is concealed and shows itself, reveals itself, only in the trace of something else, in the trace of the other. Between the two readings, there occurs not only a transposition of meaning, but also a transposition of time, a chronic postponement (différance) of the definitive explanation. Derrida refuses at all costs to bring the interpretation to a resolution in a coherent and unified reading, an Aufhebung of contradictions, an absolute presence. The absence of a definitive explanation means that the solution is postponed to an open future, to the promise of the last things, to an apocalypse without apocalypse – in other words, in the final analysis, the explanation is postponed. There is thus no reason to dissolve the difference between Kierkegaard and Levinas; but Derrida points out that they both maintain a tension between the ethical and the religious. The ethical is already inscribed upon the religious, and cannot be detached from a religious understanding of otherness. At the same time, this entails a radicalization of ethics, which calls the individual to respond and establishes the necessity of a responsible self which in its relationship to itself relates in an absolute manner to the other as other. There is a reciprocal dependence here which means that the discourse cannot be concluded or broken off. Derrida emphasizes that the intention of such a reflection on sacrifice is at any cost to avoid having a good conscience – à tout prix d’éviter la bonne conscience. The radical otherness of God, which has left a trace in the face of every other other, is according to Derrida only accessible as a secret, i. e. the secret of the self and of the other. Abraham adumbrates this in a double sense; in the necessary silence underlying his words when he speaks to Sarah and to Isaac, and in the fear and anxiety which makes him tremble before God as a mysterium tremendum. Such a double secret will Derrida link to sacrifice, to death, and to the gift of death. There is however a dilemma linked to the theory about the mystery: moral responsibility is essentially linked to transparency, to the ability to give an account of the reasons for one’s conduct and to trace these back to ethical principles. But if responsibility is linked to the sacrifice, this means that one cannot give a full account of the reasons. Derrida sees this problem in connection with the dilemma

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which Abraham faces when Isaac asks him where the sacrificial lamb is: “And Isaac said to his father Abraham, ‘My father!’ And he said, ‘Here am I, my son.’ And he said, ‘Behold, the fire and the wood; but where is the lamb for a burnt offering?’ Abraham said, ‘God will provide himself the lamb for a burnt offering, my son.’ So they went both of them together.” (Gen 22:7-8)64 Abraham answers Isaac; he is not silent. But he answers without answering: “God will provide himself the lamb for a burnt offering, my son.” In this way, as Derrida puts it, he speaks without speaking, i. e. he preserves the secret. He preserves the secret which is the origin of the sacrifice, the secret which separates Abraham from the fellowship of humans, marking him out as an individual person over against all the others. Precisely this act of separation expresses the Latin aspect of the “secret” – secretum, secret, secretion – spittle or separation. The other meaning of the “secret” is linked to Abraham’s relation to God; Derrida derives this from the Greek mystêrion, the inexplicable, the hidden, a darkness antecedent to all light, the darkness where the source of light hides itself before it emerges, antecedent to every revelation or explanation.65 The reasons why Abraham is to sacrifice Isaac are concealed behind this secret, this holiness, this mysterium tremendum which makes the ground tremble under his feet and makes the silence which surrounds the words shudder. Such a silence surrounds all the problems that are drawn forth here and are drawn into a philosophical reflection by Derrida, the French, Arabic, and Jewish philosopher. Silence surrounds death and the attempt to think death, one’s own death and the death of the other. Silence surrounds God, the God who is hidden and sees what is hidden, antecedent to the human eye: this God cannot be seen by human eyes and eludes the grasp of every phenomenology, but he encounters the human being in such a trembling, in such an abyss. In face of the other as other, every single individual is called to assume responsibility, but the origin of this responsibility and the authority of this call remains secret, a secret of absolute responsibility and of goodness without condition. This absolute responsibility with regard to the Other cannot be justified by logic or by reference to a general condition, to humanity as a whole, etc. This is, according to Derrida, the terrifying aspect of this mysterium tremendum, the fact that every responsibility must be traced back to the relationship to the Other, but the response and the 64 65

Cf. Derrida The Gift of Death, pp. 73 f. Cf. Derrida The Gift of Death, pp. 6-8.

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responsibility demand a decision which cannot be generalized – and thus cannot be given a universal justification.66 The reasons for acting and the ethical principles can be discussed, and this should be done explicitly; but the foundation which is the origin of the decision cannot be expressed in general terms. The responsibility can only be presupposed; each time, it finds a new expression in the specific situation, in the encounter with the other person. Like Johannes de Silentio, Derrida sees Abraham’s responsibility as exemplary for every encounter with the other – both the absolutely Other and every other other. On the one hand, therefore, there are certain aspects in this encounter, in the responsibility for the other, that can and indeed should be explained. On the other hand, there are certain aspects in this encounter, in the responsibility for the other, before the other, and in relation to the other, that cannot be explained; on the contrary, they must be kept secret and shared as a secret, as a silent decision – as happens in relation to the sacrifice, as happens in relation to the gift. We can wonder whether it is not precisely this opaqueness, this mystery, which is employed today in defence of the most brutal actions everywhere in the world. Is there not a new fanaticism that is transformed into an ideology by a so-called teleological suspension of the ethical dimension and causes a new wave of violence everywhere, as well as sowing strife among Abraham’s children – among Muslims, Jews, and Christians? One man takes the lives of his sons by sending them into death in order to spread fear, but the end sanctifies the means. A woman builds fences to keep the others out, accepting daily sacrifices in order to take possession of the land of those others, but the end – the holy land – sanctifies the means. A third one wages war and sacrifices not only his own sons, but also the sons of the proclaimed enemies, and once again, the end sanctifies the means. Is not this the scourge of our age, its punishment and its poverty: the teleological suspension of ethics? This touches on the understanding of right and wrong, and disturbs every attempt to divide up the world into “the good” versus “the evil”; but are we not obliged to discern some kind of connection here? And does that mean that the absolute responsibility is generated by the same logic, the same interchange between death, mystery, and responsibility, as the most brutal acts of terrorism? And is it possible in any way to defend such a reflection on responsibility? In the present context, I can only hint at these questions, but they should 66

Cf. Derrida The Gift of Death, pp. 77 f.

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not be overlooked. Derrida himself, like Kierkegaard, warns against excessively simple readings of the story of Abraham, and especially against any reading where one allows oneself to “deal with death.”67 Ultimately, the only justification for a reading such as Derrida’s is the desire to avoid the simplistic answers to such questions, to problematize the simplistic explanations of the difference between moral good and moral evil, and finally, at all costs, to avoid a good or selfrighteous conscience.

§ 18 The Terror of Sacrifice: Abraham in Late Modernity Three phenomena intersect in Kierkegaard’s description of Abraham in Fear and Trembling: fundamentalism, sacrifice, and love. They intersect in the sacrifice of love, in the unconditional obedience of the act of sacrificing, and in the understanding of the origin or fundament of love. The attempt is often made to separate these, so that fundamentalism can be condemned as unambiguously as possible, while love is praised and sacrifice at best is forgotten or neglected. As soon as fundamentalism is introduced into this discourse, however, it begins to look somewhat anachronistic. The modern meaning of the word comes from the USA, in the period after the First World War, when fundamentalism was used to designate groups of Christians who wanted to take the words of the Bible literally in the sense of verbal inspiration; this position later became known as Biblicism. They held that the words of the Bible were valid not only in religious questions, but also as a political program. Fundamentalism is thus a modern phenomenon, a counter-reaction against a liberal and secularist society. This is why it is also a phenomenon that displays many characteristics of modernity, such as a positivistic rationality (in the realm of faith) and a tendency to seek total – or totalitarian – solutions to complex problems. After the Second World War, “fundamentalism” came to be used as a designation also for Hindu and Muslim political movements which turn back to the sacred scriptures and work politically and religiously to combat specific tendencies in a modern society. Some of them are reactionary, but they are often extremely modern in their form of action and their ideology – here it suffices to think of a group like the globalized and technically advanced network

67

Cf. Derrida The Gift of Death, p. 68.

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of Al-Qaeda, whose name refers to the fundament itself, the basis of Islamic faith. It is in the latter sense that I am here speaking of fundamentalism as a phenomenon: Muslim groups who are called fundamentalist are associated with the use of human sacrifices in a political and religious struggle, in the form of suicide bombers or other terrorist acts. This – to draw a parallel to Fear and Trembling – is not murder or a sacred action: it is murder and a sacred action, a sanctification of murder as a politically and religiously motivated action. The question is whether this is a misuse of the word “sacred,” or indeed a profanation of sacrifice. Irrespective of how one evaluates the phenomenon, the sheer fact that such a form of institutionalized suicide occurs in a religious context will influence our reading of the narrative in Gen 22 and of Fear and Trembling. This happens unavoidably, and makes an anachronous reading of the texts necessary,68 since these are not only texts that are read by posterity, but texts which to a very large extent help form their posterity. We are thus already within this text when we turn our attention to fundamentalism in the twenty-first century. What Johannes de Silentio has in common with (for example) Mohammed Atta is the repetition of an Abrahamic sacrifice in a modern period. Mohammed Atta himself drew a parallel to Abraham’s sacrifice of Ishmael in his farewell letter to posterity.69 They are also united by the necessity of being silent until they carry out the sacrifice, because they cannot speak. If they speak of what they plan to do, they destroy the possibility of a sacrifice. This is why both are obliged to speak without speaking, and to act in unconditional loyalty, without betraying their plan to any outsider. One difference – which in some respects is a decisive difference – is that Atta sacrifices himself, while de Silentio emphasizes the sacrifice of the son. The significance of the sacrifice in the latter case is intensified precisely by the fact that it takes place within a relationship of love, viz. the father’s love for his son, and, as in the autobiographical narrative of Søren Kierkegaard, the man’s (Søren Kierkegaard’s) love for the woman (Regine Olsen) 68

69

On many occasions, Derrida has pointed to the “anachronous” character of texts, which means that they elude characterization as either “synchronous” or “diachronic.” In Gift of Death, he presents a similar sequence of arguments with reference to the non-present character of decision: Derrida Gift of Death, pp. 65 f. Cf. Derrida Gift of Death, p. 40. Atta’s testament had been written as early as 1996, and was published after September 11, 2001, inter alia in the magazine Der Spiegel (October 1, 2001). For an English translation, cf. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/ frontline/shows/network/personal/attawill.html.

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whom he sacrifices for a higher goal (telos). At any rate, suicide as a sacrifice is committed for reasons that are different from a sacrifice of love, however brutal and absurd this love may appear. Atta will certainly not be inferior to de Silentio as far as passion is concerned, nor as far as devotion is concerned. And this is what we are compelled to acknowledge in Atta: the conflict between a lofty morality within a given moral system and the fatal consequences of his sacrificial act, his lethal gift to his own age when he takes over the controls of the plane and crashes it into one of the Twin Towers. This means that although the strong moral condemnation by western society, formulated in the words of the President, is completely understandable, it is insufficient for a deeper analysis. The result is a conflict between different moral systems, based on principles which are incommensurable and have their ultimate justification in religious absolutes. On both sides, there is a teleological suspension of (universal) ethics, allegedly because of the exceptional situation. Every suicide bomber and every victim of the bombs, just like every tortured prisoner and every “innocent” civil victim of the war against terror, is legitimated by appeal to the sacrifices which are demanded by one’s absolute relationship to the absolute. This situation inevitably puts both Kierkegaard and de Silentio in an unfortunate light, and I will not make any attempt to “rescue” them. On the contrary, this is clearly one of the weak sides in the ethic of Kierkegaard and Derrida, viz. that it is too subjective, and not sufficiently unambiguous to withstand the pressure from authoritarian (whether fundamentalist or totalitarian) religions and ideologies. Conflicts which are justified on the basis of absolute positions demand the massive counterweight of an intersubjective justification based on an accepted universal validity.70 On the other hand, more universal approaches in moral philosophy are likewise at permanent risk of being abused by a system. One example is Germany in the 1930’s, where the inheritance of the Kantian ethics of obligation and the Hegelian Sittlichkeit became part of 70

In such situations, Habermas’ communicative discourse ethics will be more significant, quite simply because of its emphasis on that which is shared by all human beings and on the interpersonal dimension. Hegel’s Sittlichkeit and Kant’s categorical imperative, with their rationalistic approaches, will have greater weight, for example in the argumentation on behalf of universal human rights. Kierkegaard and Derrida take up a problem that lies on a different level, viz. (1) the relationship between egoism and love (of neighbor), and (2) the fact that some persons and some concerns must sometimes be sacrificed in favor of others.

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a strategy to govern the German people on the basis of its obligation to fight for country and fatherland: it was precisely with the help of a thoroughly internalized ethic based on humanistic ideals that the German people became Hitler’s willing henchmen.71 An ethics which was regarded both before this period and afterwards as civilized and lofty was deliberately employed to increase the effectiveness of the struggle against “the others” (Jews, Bolsheviks, etc.). As a corrective to such a systematic exploitation of a moral obligation, it is perhaps only the absolute responsibility of the individual that will be able to put up a genuine resistance. Although the situation is not comparable in other respects, Kierkegaard too makes an accusation against the established Christendom of his age, viz. that it represents a complete and utter deceit – which makes it necessary to fight against the universal (“det Almene”). This means that de Silentio’s reflections are not located in the center of ethics, but in the analysis of the marginal zones of ethics, in the exceptional situation which, in virtue of being an exception or suspension, also puts the entire ethical system in a different perspective. The suspension will not be able to replace ethics or universal ethical reflection; rather, it functions in every sense as a supplement and a paradoxical surplus. Precisely for this reason, it also concerns some of the religious presuppositions of ethics – whether or not philosophy regards these as relevant. These presuppositions can be summarized under the catchword “love,” which some moral philosophers consider peripheral and irrelevant to ethics, but which is absolutely central in the present context. As soon as love is no longer abstract, but must be expressed in action, it encounters its own special dilemma, viz. sacrifice. One could say that the dilemma of love of neighbor is precisely that it inevitably entails a sacrifice. The sacrifice is not a goal per se, but a consequence. When the sacrifice no longer has its origin in love as the overarching goal, it becomes an advanced form of cynical idealism, or (in the apostle’s words) “a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.” 72 This was what Ibsen saw in one of his favorite characters, the great preacher and idealist Brand. For an outsider at a far distance, culturally as well as intellectually, something similar seems in fact to be the case with Mohammed Atta. It is his lack of love that means, not only that I cannot under71

72

Cf. e. g. Heinrich Böll’s satirical short story “Wanderer gehst du nach Spa …” (1950) in H. Böll Erzählungen, Cologne: Kiepenhauer & Witsch 2006. 1 Cor 13:1.

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stand him – just as I cannot understand Abraham – but that I cannot see anything great in his heroism. If his inner conflict, which he must have fought in secret, had revealed any sign of a hidden love, then even his fatal sacrifice would have possessed human traits, it could have had an element of greatness – just as an armed struggle for freedom against an apparently unassailable power often possesses strong and contradictory human traits. But from all that we know about Mohammed Atta, his sacrificial action was the fruit of a faith without love. In other words, the passion of love is found here only in a reversed form, as an intense hatred of “the others.” This means that his fundamentalism appears an easy prey to an “economic” exploitation of the sacrifice in a reciprocal exchange of anxiety (i. e. terror) between Muslims, Jews, and Christians. Perhaps this is what one might call “terrorism properly speaking,” which in reality is a child of the modern age just as much as of an “originally” religious impulse. There is surely nothing controversial in affirming that various ideas of God play an important role in suicide bombing and other forms of religiously motivated terrorism. Suicide is born of the economy of sacrifice, but the preachers and the military strategists misuse the traditionally sacred sacrificial act on the basis of calculated religious and political interests. In one sense, it may seem as if the sacrificial act too is profaned and secularized. Through his violent death, the suicide bomber expresses the fact that even fundamentalism must capitulate before the secular western society against which it is fighting – for he capitulates before the modern rationality which he so intensely hates. In this sense too, religious fundamentalism is a child of the modern age. In its fight against the modern age, it is deeply entangled in the modern age’s extremism and totalitarianism which found expression in the wish for a “final solution” (Endlösung) and in the dream of the ideal communist society, and is proclaimed today uninterruptedly in the sacred ubiquity of the market.

§ 19 Death, Love, and the Foundations of Ethics There is no unambiguous relationship between love and the question of the individual’s relationship to the universal, or the relationship between particularism and universalism in Fear and Trembling. The universal certainly does not exclude the particular, and it is precisely in relation to love that both tension and conflict arise here. Although the commandment to love one’s neighbor is a call to love each one

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(i. e., a commandment with universal validity), it is a commandment addressed to the individual – and the individual in his or her relationship to the other as foreign, unknown, or different. The special twist in the question Jesus puts to the lawyer shows clearly how love pins down the individual in every attempt to evade the call of love by appealing to universal ethics (“almen Ethik”).73 The concretization of the call presupposes precisely that the individual sees himself as a neighbor, as the other, and makes the one who needs love the center of his attention. This is also the secret in Jesus’ words about losing oneself in order to find oneself.74 There is a movement in this call which calls one out of egocentricity and logocentricity towards the other, towards the other person, and towards God’s definitive otherness. It is a call of this kind that shatters the economic reciprocity in the logic of the gift. The interpersonal reciprocity is broken up and deconstructed by the gift as overflowing goodness, without regard to the benefit which each one may receive from the other (qua eudaimonia or utilitas) as fundamental ethical principle and “regulative idea.” It is here that the conflicts arise: first, the conflict with self-love which, to be realistic, must be presupposed;75 and secondly, the conflict between love and sacrifice, viz. the fact that the one who loves is sometimes also the one who sacrifices. Even if one opposes the sacrifice and would much prefer to withdraw from the conflict it provokes, this conflict is almost inevitable.76 Many of these conflicts are focused in Abraham’s intention to sacrifice his son Isaac in obedience to a call he could not reject. There is the conflict between love for God and love for a son; there is the breach with the universal, which forces Abraham to be silent; and there is his willingness to sacrifice his son, which according to the tradition expresses not only his courage, but also his faithfulness and righteousness. De Silentio can follow Abraham as long as it is a question of relinquishing himself and resigning both himself and that which is his. But he cannot follow Abraham’s 73 74 75

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Lk 10:36-37. Lk 9:24. “In other words, this is implied in loving oneself; but if one is to love the neighbour as oneself, then the commandment, as with a pick, wrenches (vriste) open the lock of self-love and wrests (fravriste) it away from a person. If the commandment about loving the neighbour were expressed in any other way than with this little phrase, as yourself, which simultaneously is so easy to handle and yet has the elasticity of eternity, the commandment would be unable to cope with self-love in this way” (SKS 9, 25 f. / WL, 17 f.). Cf. Yvonne Sherwood and Kevin Hart (eds.) Derrida and Religion: Other Testaments, New York: Routledge 2005, p. 41.

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assumed faith – despite what human reason says – that he will get his son back in this life. He is not able to follow, to repeat after Abraham, the infinite double-movement which consists in trust in the impossible, trust that everything is possible for God, as unforeseen gift and overflowing goodness. And this is difficult for Kierkegaard too, in relation to his fiancée: he can resign all that is his, but he is not able to believe that he will get this whole reality back. This is the incommensurable in Abraham, the contradiction and the exception which de Silentio admires but can comprehend only “in virtue of the absurd.” The double-movement also plays a central role in Derrida’s reading of Fear and Trembling. The problem is one of repetition: how is it possible to repeat Abraham’s absolute decision without oneself picking up the knife and sacrificing one’s son, whether on Mount Moriah or on Montmartre?77 The entire problem seems to be based on a form of fundamentalism, but in this instance it is a fundamentalism that establishes an absolute obligation vis-à-vis the other. The striking element in this fundamentalism is that it can appeal to scripture only in an indirect sense. No one can repeat Abraham’s sacrifice without committing a tragic crime, yet everyone is called to repeat Abraham’s sacrifice in the call to absolute responsibility vis-à-vis the other. This means, paradoxically, that this form of fundamentalism presupposes a breach with fundamentalism in the sense of a blind obedience to scripture. We could put this in a typically Derridean phrase: fundamentalism without fundamentalism, indeed a fundamentalism without fundament.78 Fundamentalism in its modern form attempts to establish scripture, revelation, or tradition as the utterly solid fundament for the rationality of faith – and based on this fundament, to exclude every unwished-for aspect of modernity, whether it be liberal sexual morality, a woman’s unveiled head, women priests, homosexual marriage, or a democratic system of government. It is upon this unshakable fundament that fundamentalism bases its critique of modernity and its totalitarian struggle against modernity. But the God who calls Abraham is not available as a “fundament,” only as the other who makes us absolutely responsible. Beyond the abyss and the collapse of ethics, Abraham hopes and believes in a God who is good, who is the source 77 78

Cf. Derrida Gift of Death, p. 85. Cf. the expression “religion without religion,” which for Derrida means the repetition of the religious impulse without those religious dogmas and institutions which make religion problematical and perhaps impossible to accept for an honest latemodern believer; cf. Derrida The Gift of Death, p. 49.

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of all goodness and love. It is precisely this trust in God’s goodness that makes the sacrifice possible, indeed makes it necessary in the infinite double-movement of faith. The fundament has disappeared: it is shaken and deconstructed precisely by the infinity that the human reason cannot control. For Derrida, therefore, it is the relationship to the other as absolutely other that deconstructs scripture as an ethical system; in a similar way, Kierkegaard takes his starting point in an absolute relationship to the absolute when he seeks to deconstruct the Hegelian system of Sittlichkeit. In both cases, the reference to the conscience seems to be in agreement with Kant’s categorical imperative, but the absurdity in the moment of decision marks a breach with the attempt to rationalize and systematize the practical reason. In de Silentio, fear and doubt are the expression of reason’s chronic doubt in the truth in which it trusts: If worst comes to worst, a doubter – even though by speaking he brings every misfortune possible down upon the world – is still to be preferred to these wretched sweettooths who taste of everything and want to cure doubt without recognizing it and who then as a rule are themselves the chief reason why reason breaks out wildly and uncontrollably. […] But if the doubter can become the single individual who as the single individual stands in absolute relation to the absolute, then he can get authorization for his silence. In that case, he must make his doubt into guilt. In that case, he is within the paradox, but then his doubt is healed, even if he may have another doubt.79

The doubter who stands in an absolute relationship to the absolute is a repetition of the methodological doubt in Descartes (a recurrent theme in Fear and Trembling), but this time with regard to ethics instead of metaphysics. Descartes’ methodological doubt leads him into an epistemological fundamentalism or “foundationalism”: all knowledge is uncertain and must be rejected, with the exception of the knowledge that can be derived from the unconditional certainty of the cogito-insight.80 In the analysis of “Cogito et histoire de la folie,” I pointed out that Derrida sees cogito too as an insight that is open to attack, and will never be able to serve as a certain and indubitable fundament for metaphysics. It is attacked again and again by the possibility of madness, by the possibility that the world is governed by 79 80

SKS 4, 199 / FT, 111. Epistemological foundationalism is much older than the phenomenon of religious fundamentalism. It comes into play in the debate between rationalists and empiricists, and concerns the basis of (sense-) knowledge. This form of “fundamentalism” and fundamental doubt is probably just as well suited to an historical analysis of Fear and Trembling as the modern political-religious fundamentalism. My analysis here takes the opposite direction: I seek a better understanding of religious fundamentalism with my starting point in Kierkegaard.

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an evil genius. And doubt is overcome only by the trust that cogito does not exclude, but rather embraces even the mad person in his or her madness: “I philosophize only in terror, but in the acknowledged terror of being mad.”81 Philosophy is thus an act of thinking about the border between madness and reason – not a totalitarian drawing of boundaries – precisely because doubt makes the reason conscious of its limitation and its inadequacy. For de Silentio too, Descartes’ doubt is exemplary because it does not take knowledge for granted, any more than he himself takes the premises of ethics for granted. Abraham represents a counterexample: with him, the whole of ethics as a universal and transparent system is at stake. Although the sacrifice must be rejected by universal ethics, Abraham follows his call. He is completely responsible vis-à-vis God and cannot ease his conscience by discussing the call with his family or his friends. In the decision, therefore, the individual is responsible even if he acts in defiance of the norms of ethics. The fundamental doubt does not come to any definitive stop in the insight of cogito or of credo, such that one could infer logical consequences from a clear and obvious truth. Rather, with doubt as a presupposition, and in the doubter’s resignation, an unconditional trust provides the necessary impulse for action. Once again then, we meet “the infinite double-movement”: the infinite resignation, the total doubt, is repelled by an unconditional (and therefore infinite) trust which is the very presupposition for acting – in virtue of the absurd. Accordingly, the fundamental doubt in the necessity of sacrifice does not mean that de Silentio (and still less Derrida) opposes the encounter with the other as absolutely other. On the contrary, in this sense their search takes them right back to the origin, to the unfathomable authority which is antecedent to every action. But this is a hidden other, an other who evades my control, and who in the ethical sense meets me in the face, i. e. in the transcendence of the human face. Confronted with the other, who in his otherness opens the door both to recognition and to the absolutely other, every human being must shudder – in fear and trembling. If however one does not shudder, if one does not even doubt the legitimacy of action, this is scarcely a sign of courage or ethical judiciousness, but rather of superficiality. We can recognize this lack of unease in that fundamentalism which does not see obedience to God as an ethical suspension, but reads its Bible as an infallible verbal 81

Derrida L’écriture et la différence, p. 96.

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inspiration which suspends the doubt involved in a reference to the sacred writing. A self-certainty of this kind is generated by a concept of God which replaces the fear and trembling before the abyss with a specific, stable sign in the linguistic system, viz. the name “God.” There are no great difficulties in making such a linguistic sign operational and instrumental. It is more difficult to do the same with a mysterium tremendum. This is precisely why it is so important that Fear and Trembling should not be subjected to the judgment of an Idealistic or modernist rationality, as many modern interpreters have sought to do. It is against this type of rationality that the author fights with the strength of despair. It is here, in the fundament or fundamentalism which clings to the rationality of modernity and Idealism, that the shaking takes place. It is here that doubt must attack and open up a rift, in order to make the individual responsible – as an individual. As Kierkegaard sees things, it is precisely in the designation, in the reference, in the translation, and in the action that doubt automatically comes into play, the fundamental doubt about who it is one is dealing with – whether it is one specific other, whether the name of this other is to be translated as one believes, whether the action will remain standing before the judgment of righteousness, before the eyes of the one who sees without himself being seen.82 This is not only the first doubt, as we find it in Descartes; this is a second doubt, a doubt connected with a fundamental uncertainty. In every later repetition of Abraham’s faith, this doubt initiates an action in virtue of the paradox. In the heart of the faith as “tradition” which is handed on from generation to generation, there also lies a traduction or “translation,” an attempt to mediate an unfathomable secret, an attempt to speak of the ineffable.83 If Abraham’s sacrifice is to have any meaning in relation to faith in Abraham’s God, it is in virtue of such a repetition in every new generation, which can be appropriated only in fear and trembling at the unknown. Here, there is nothing to separate the modern person from Abraham in the encounter with the unfathomable, with a God who calls and who puts to the test, who makes one responsible – but who leaves the responsibility to the individual, to the individual as individual, in silence. This absolute responsibility vis-à-vis the other cannot be justified rationally, and Derrida claims that this is the terrifying aspect of such a mysterium tremendum which belongs inher82 83

Cf. Derrida The Gift of Death, pp. 91 f. Cf. SKS 4, 201 / FT, 113; see also Derrida The Gift of Death, pp. 79 f.

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ently to human reality: viz., the fact that every responsibility is derived from the relationship to another, but demands a decision from each individual which cannot be taken in general terms – and thus cannot be completely put into words and explained rationally with “three reasons.” The origin of love remains hidden, even when it is recognized – despite or because of the sacrifice – as love. Let me underline that Derrida, like Kierkegaard, presupposes that valid ethical justifications and general ethical principles both can and should be articulated, and thus be made explicit as far as possible. But the basis which generates the decision cannot be expressed in general terms; the responsibility must be presupposed as something given, something that each time finds a new expression in a new situation, in the encounter with the other. Derrida and Kierkegaard thus agree in seeing Abraham’s responsibility as exemplary for every encounter with the other – the absolutely other as well as every other other. On the one hand, therefore, there are certain aspects of this encounter, of the responsibility for the other, that can be explained, defined, and ethically justified. But on the other hand, there are certain aspects of this encounter, of the responsibility for the other, that cannot be explained, but belong to silence and are communicated as a secret, as a silent decision – as happens in relation to the sacrifice, as happens in relation to the gift of love.

§ 20 Disturbing Enigma: Levinas and Kierkegaard on the Other Side of Truth The discussion about sacrifice and religious fundamentalism shows how difficult it is to give answers independent of the actual circumstances. Every discourse concerned with sacrifice these days is overshadowed by the self-sacrifice of suicide bombers, and every discourse in the decades after the war was overshadowed by the terror of holocaust, as the most horrible repetition of the burned sacrifice, beyond words and imagination. Levinas’ harsh criticism of Kierkegaard is therefore not only understandable, it is highly justified. And nevertheless does Kierkegaard’s “dialectical-lyrical” meditation on Abraham continue to provoke thoughts and reactions beyond the horizon of Levinas’ criticism. It is in fact the violent gesture, the absurd, and the dark abyss of the discourse which continue to draw our attention to it. These are suddenly taken into consideration in a philosophical context, and that is certainly a reason for continued deliberation on the

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topic and the text. This is exactly what Levinas also does in some later texts, focusing on the relationship between the enigmatic, that which eludes the light of reason, and the phenomenon. We will therefore return to these other aspects of Levinas’ thought, which seem to be more in line with Kierkegaard; to some extent they are even directly influenced by his ideas. Thereby, we are also taking the step back from Fear and Trembling to Kierkegaard’s discourse “At a Graveside.” Levinas’ debate with Heidegger and existentialism has in fact many striking similarities to Kierkegaard’s critique of Hegel and Hegelianism. However, Levinas does not simply repeat Kierkegaard’s arguments; he develops the ideas, and thus his thinking also sheds a new light on Kierkegaard’s texts. For example, Levinas’ reflection on the enigma and on interiority (what Kierkegaard calls “Inderlighed”), which eludes the order of Being, opens up interesting perspectives on Kierkegaard’s text about death. Kierkegaard repeatedly emphasizes that the inexplicability of death and death’s decision – in a way similar to the enigmatic by Levinas – disturbs one’s life by giving the enigma of death retroactive power: As the inexplicable, death can indeed seem to be everything and nothing at all, and the explanation seems to be to pronounce this all at once. Such an explanation indicates a life that, satisfied with the present, defends itself against the influence of death by a mood that holds death in the equilibrium of indecisiveness. Death does not acquire power to disturb such a life; it does acquire influence, however, but not the retroactive power to transform such a life. 84

Kierkegaard describes two different attitudes to the inexplicability of death: The Epicurean, keeping death at a distance, and the “earnest,” which introduces a decisive change in the life of an individual by the retroactive power of death. In both cases, the problem of death evades thought, evades the effort of a phenomenological description, by way of images or concepts. But in the first case, the person reflecting on death remains utterly indifferent, i. e. evades death as well. In the second case, death becomes a disturbing riddle, a decisive question for any reflection on life. Kierkegaard’s description of the enigma of death has many features in common with Levinas’ description of the enigma in “Phenomenon and Enigma.”85 The enigma is to Levinas that which breaks up the 84 85

SKS 5, 465 / TDIO, 97. Levinas “Énigme et phénomène” (1965) in En découvrant l’éxistence avec Husserl et Heidegger (Paris: J.Vrin, 3rd ed., 1974), pp. 203-216. I refer to the English translation: “Phenomenon and Enigma” in Collected Philosophical Papers, tr. by Alfonso Lingis, Dordrecht / Boston / London: Kluwer Academic Press 1993, pp. 61-74. In

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clarity of the “coherent” speech (French le Dit).86 The semantics of the enigma breaks out of the order of autonomous thought, whereby the enigmatic as such becomes visible only as a trace – which means that it cannot be expressed by a direct representation of language (i. e. the sign or the signifier). The enigma is, according to Levinas, always “older” than, it is presupposed by, the intellectual cognition; but it cannot be reduced to a coherent system.87 Through the semantics of the enigma, as elaborated in this essay and later applied on death in Dieu, la mort et le temps, Levinas’ reflections on death come close to the dramatic presentation of death at the end of Kierkegaard’s discourse. Kierkegaard has presented the breakdown of coherent semantics in the form of an encounter between the disciple and death as the “teacher of earnestness”: Now the concerned person turns to the teacher of earnestness, and thus death is indeed not a monster except for the imagination. The learner now wants this or that, he wants to do it thus and so and under these assumptions – “And it is bound to succeed, is it not so?” But the earnest person answers nothing at all, and finally he says, yet without mockery but with the calmness of earnestness, “Yes, it is possible!” The learner now becomes a little impatient; he suggests a new plan, changes the assumptions, and concludes his speech in a still more urgent way. But the earnest person is silent, looks calmly at him, and finally says, “Yes, it is possible!” Now the learner becomes passionate; he resorts to pleas or, if he is so equipped, to clever locutions – indeed, he perhaps even insults the earnest person and becomes totally confused himself and everything around him seems to be confusion. But when with these weapons and in this condition he charges at the earnest person, he has to endure his unaltered calm gaze and put up with his silence, because the earnest person merely looks at him and finally says, “Yes, it is possible.”88

In this encounter, death itself is presented as the other. Death is so to speak the metaphor for otherness (French autrui), standing there in silence, waiting and listening – until the disciple breaks down in despair. In the moment when death appears as an enigmatic character in “At a Graveside,” the entire discourse reaches its dramatic peak. This enigmatic point cannot be enlightened by any “speech” or any light of logos.89

86 87 88 89

a thought-provoking article, Merold Westphal has shown how this essay communicates with Kierkegaard’s thought: “The Transparent Shadow. Kierkegaard and Levinas in Dialogue” in Kierkegaard in Post/ Modernity, ed. by Martin J. Matuštík and Merold Westphal, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press 1995, pp. 265-281. Levinas “Phenomenon and Enigma,” p. 69. Levinas “Phenomenon and Enigma,” pp. 67 f. SKS 5, 462 f. / TDIO, 94 f. Cf. Levinas’ criticism of a “phenomenology” of death (i. e. death as “enlightening” logos): “I even wonder how the principal trait of our relationship with death could

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This point, which is hardly a point at all, because the definition of the “point” dissolves in the chronic indefinableness of death, is the turning point of the discourse.90 It is therefore interesting to see that Levinas is referring explicitly to Kierkegaard in the essay on the enigma, emphasizing that they both base their view on subjectivity on the enigma and the infinite – in as far as the responsible individual evades the system and the order of being: The infinite is an inassimilable alterity, a difference and ab-solute past with respect to everything that is showed, signaled, symbolized, announced, remembered, and thereby “contemporized” with him who understands. […] The infinite is a withdrawal like an adieu which is signified not by opening oneself to the gaze to inundate it with light, but in being extinguished in the incognito in the face that faces. For this, as we have said, there must be someone who is no longer agglutinated in being, who, at his own risk, responds to the enigma and grasps the allusion. Such is the subjectivity, alone, unique, secret, which Kierkegaard caught sight of.91

As I read the discourse “At a Graveside,” death’s decision is represented as a chronic interruption between the self and the other. Death’s decision singularizes the individual person (hiin Enkelte), but in the same moment, death is established as an “intermediate designation” (Mellembestemmelse) – between oneself and the other. Thereby, the earnest thought of death renders it necessary to relate to any other as other – a thought Derrida has summarized in the ambiguous dictum: “Tout autre est tout autre.” 92 Following Derrida, I see the significance of death by Kierkegaard in its ability to disturb the strict separation between the order of being and the order of acting – thus emphasizing that ontology becomes meaningless without ethics and vice versa.93

90 91

92 93

have escaped philosophers’ attention. It is not with the nothingness of death, of which we precisely know nothing, that the analysis must begin, but with the situation where something absolutely unknowable appears. Absolutely unknowable means foreign to all light, rendering every assumption of possibility impossible, but where we ourselves are seized” (Levinas Time and the Other, p. 71). Cf. also Levinas “Phenomenon and Enigma,” p. 69. Levinas “Phenomenon and Enigma,” pp. 71 f. The translation is modified and emphasis added. See Derrida The Gift of Death, pp. 77-79; pp. 82-85. Thus Derrida thinks that Levinas comes closer to Kierkegaard than he is aware of in his description of a relationship between the self and the other – including God as the absolute other: “[S]ince Levinas also wants to distinguish between the infinite alterity of God and the “same” infinite alterity of every human, or of the other in general, then he cannot simply be said to be saying something different from Kierkegaard. Neither one nor the other can assure himself of a concept of the ethical and the religious that is of consequence; and consequently they are especially

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Hence, the decisive significance of death in “At a Graveside” lies in the interruption. The interruption occurs when death – and death’s decision – is neither delimited by “one’s own” (images, notions, expectations, views on life and death, etc.), nor excluded from thought as “something else,” something irrelevant for the self. Death becomes disturbing when it occurs as the other in a Levinasian sense. As such it is one’s own death that is inevitable – but when it appears as death’s decision, in earnestness, it even becomes decisive for the relationship to the other: “Yes, death certainly is a singular enigma, but only earnestness can define it.”94 As opposed to Heidegger, who describes death as non-relational (“unbezüglich”), Kierkegaard lets the thought of death become relevant for the relationship between human beings – as an interruption of this relationship. Kierkegaard views death as indefinable in two respects: by equality and by inequality. The equality is a purely negative phenomenon; it becomes visible by a negation of the inequalities of life, i. e. by the nothingness of annihilation: “Concerning death’s decision, the next thing that must be said is that it is indefinable. By this nothing is said, but this is the way it must be when the question is about an enigma. Death does indeed make all equal, but if this equality is in nothing, in annihilation, then the equality is itself indefinable.”95 By defining every person as equal before death – as each is before God – the earnest thought of death tends to interrupt and break down any human hierarchy and system of social power. Death stands beyond these ways of organizing and oppressing human beings: Behold, death has been able to overthrow thrones and principalities, but the earnest thought of death has done something just as great; it has helped the earnest person to subordinate the most advantageous dissimilarity [Forskjellighed] to the humble equality before God and has helped him to raise himself above the most oppressive into the humble equality before God.96

Kierkegaard applies in fact a master/slave dynamics here, where the advantaged person is the master and the oppressed is the slave. In this dynamics, the interruption may have a subversive effect; the earnest thought of death may overthrow the most advantageous difference (Forskjellighed) by introducing the “humble equality before God” between the privileged self and the other. On the other hand, the

94 95 96

unable to determine the limit between the two orders” (Derrida The Gift of Death, p. 84). SKS 5, 461 / TDIO, 93. SKS 5, 454 / TDIO, 85. SKS 5, 458 / TDIO, 89 f.

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heaviest difference, for instance the difference of oppression, might be undermined and overthrown when the oppressed person discovers his or her equality – before death and before God. That is so to speak the communism97 – or even the an-archism98 – of the single individual, which does not need the crowd to justify itself. As far as I can see, both the order of ethics and the order of being mutually interfere in the earnest thought of death. Death comes in between these two orders and makes them mutually relevant to each other: The order of being is brought to its limit by the annihilation of every single individual in death, of every opinion and every concept of life. The order of ethics is on the other hand introduced by the decisiveness of death’s decision. Kierkegaard insists on death’s reality, its destructive and enigmatic character, but also on the appropriation of the difference between death and life so as to give the thought of death retroactive power in an ethical sense. Death remains on the limit between the two orders, as a limit between understanding and understanding. Hence, the truth of this thought has always another side: See, one can have an opinion about remote events, about a natural object, about nature, about scholarly works, about another human being, and so on about much else, and when one expresses this opinion the wise person can decide whether it is correct or incorrect. No one, however, troubles the opinion-holder with a consideration of the other side of truth, whether one actually does have the opinion, whether it is just something one is reciting. Yet this other side is just as important, because not only is that person mad who talks senselessly, but the person is fully mad who states a correct opinion if it has absolutely no significance for him. […] Alas, yet it is so easy, so very easy, to acquire a true opinion, and yet it is so difficult, so very difficult, to have an opinion and to have it in truth.99

Kierkegaard’s point seems to be that any reflection on – or explanation of – death already is inscribed into a praxis, and thus either can find its meaning through praxis or appear as hollow truths by way of their meaninglessness. In this tension, Kierkegaard refers to a double 97

98

99

Cf. Kierkegaard’s note in the Journal NB4 from 1848, the year of revolutions: “The communists here at home and in other countries are fighting for human rights. Good, that’s what I do as well. That’s why I am fighting fiercely against the tyranny of fear of other human beings. […] What the communists are making such a number of, follows, according to Christianity, by itself; that all human beings are equal before God, i. e. that they are essentially equal. But Christianity fears this horrible thought, that will take God away and replace him with fear of the human crowd, of the majority, of the public” (SKS 20, 338 f.). Cf. the meaning of “an-archy” in the chapter “Principle and Anarchy” in Levinas Otherwise than Being, pp. 99-102. SKS 5, 466 f. / TDIO, 99 f.

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notion of truth, where the latter becomes a criterion to the former; the decisive criterion to prove whether one has a so-called true opinion about death is whether one has this opinion in truth.

§ 21 Autopsy Compared to Heidegger, and even Derrida or Levinas, Kierkegaard’s discourse “At a Graveside” appears to be quite modest, an occasional discourse that does not make any claim to have understood death, the ontological essence of death, and the like. But this ignorance nevertheless reappears as a Socratic question, whether the reader has understood the full implication of one’s own opinion on the thought of death. The radical inexplicableness of death returns as a repetition, as an echo returning from the limit of death. An echo sometimes has such a hollow sound that makes you wonder whether your words make any sense at all. Accordingly, the tone of the discourse is often wondering, wondering about the sense and nonsense of different images and descriptions. The discourse does not totally refrain from any name or description of death; instead, Kierkegaard uses several different names, such as “[…] a transition, a transformation, a suffering, the last struggle, a punishment, the wages of sin.”100 And he continues: Each one of these explanations contains a whole life-view. What an earnest challenge to the explainer! It is easy to recite them all by rote, easy to explain death when it costs no effort to refuse to understand that the discourse is about acquiring retroactive power in life through the explanation. Why does anyone want to transform death into a mockery of himself? Death has no need of an explanation and certainly has never requested any thinker to be of assistance. But the living need the explanation – and why? In order to live accordingly.101

Death does not need the explanation, Kierkegaard concludes, because death remains inexplicable. But the living, they need it, in order to live accordingly. Death might as a matter of fact be incomprehensible because it represents a certain otherness, a certain unknowing to any discourse or text on death, hence also when inscribed into the self-understanding of any person still living. Thus any explanation of death is necessarily indirect in the sense that it returns to the reader as a question, as a challenge, as a fundamental otherness questioning 100 101

SKS 5, 466 / TDIO, 99. SKS 5, 466 / TDIO, 99.

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the being and acting of the explainer; that is, “[…] the earnestness lies in just this, that the explanation does not explain death but discloses the state of the explainer’s own innermost being.”102 This is what I refer to as an autopsy of one still living. Kierkegaard uses the concept of autopsy in Philosophical Fragments in order to describe the “self-view” of the believer who has become contemporaneous with Christ.103 In this case, the metaphor seems even more apt, insofar as the single individual is put before the impossible task of becoming contemporaneous with death, i. e. to do “[…] what death is indeed unable to do – namely that you are and death also is.”104 Facing death’s decision, every single individual is given the urgent task to understand oneself – and to act according to that understanding. An autopsy in the technical sense of the term, i. e. the physician’s own (aut-) inspection (-opsia) and dissection of the dead body, can hardly be an autopsy (literally self-view) in the reflexive sense, insofar as the ability to see by the one being inspected is normally quite delimited. When the pathologists cut the skin and open up, they will of course get a view of your innermost being, but that is something different from your own view. Earnestness, of course, understands this word differently. The rupture, or rather caesura, of death will suffice to tear up the skin. But the disclosure of the innermost being follows by the questioning of the other side of the explanation, the inside, the reverse, the how. It is an autopsy in the proper sense, that is, a diagnostic introspection based on radical ignorance. The earnestness of this and similar images is dramatic, to some people it might even seem terrifying. At the end of the discourse, though, Kierkegaard admits that his non-explanation is not the only legitimate explanation of death. He even deliberates about some other possibilities, that death has also “a gentler, a more friendly side for consideration,” that it might be just for the laborer to long for rest, for those in pain or suffering to long for sleep – and he concludes: “Undeniably!”105 Maybe we should even add that the thought of death 102 103

104 105

SKS 5, 464 / TDIO, 97. Notice, however, that to be contemporary with Christ is quite different from being contemporary with someone in the ordinary sense (and it could even be argued that it is the death of Christ which separates the one from the other): “Yet a contemporary such as this is not an eyewitness (in the sense of immediacy), but as a believer he is a contemporary in the autopsy of faith. But in this autopsy every noncontemporary (in the sense of immediacy) is in turn a contemporary” (SKS 4, 270 f. / PF, 70). SKS 5, 446 / TDIO, 75. SKS 5, 467 f. / TDIO, 101.

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could be a reason for relief, and even for joy, still without losing its earnestness, because earnestness is not a certain mood but a way of listening to the memento mori as a continual reminder to the otherness, brevity, and fragility of one’s own existence: Therefore, the discourse will refrain from any explanation. Just as death is the last of all, so this will be the last thing said about it: It is inexplicable. The inexplicability is the boundary, and the importance of the statement is simply to give the thought of death retroactive power and make it impelling in life, because with the decision of death all is over, and because the uncertainty of death inspects every moment. Therefore, the inexplicability is not a request to solve enigmas, an invitation to be ingenious, but is death’s earnest warning to the living: I need no explanation; but bear in mind, you yourself, that with this decision all is over and that this decision can at any moment be at hand; see, it is very advisable for you to bear this in mind.106

This other, viz. death himself, in personae dramatis, might very well return at an unexpected (and certainly imagined) occasion, in the shape of an inspector and oral examiner; earnest, but nevertheless ironical in a Socratic sense. Whenever we think that we have given the right explanation to the enigma of death, he simply answers: “it is possible.”107 And as a pathologist for the living, he will certainly give reason to a moment of autopsy, just to check if one is still living, or if this living has slowly turned into a dying death.

106 107

SKS 5, 467 / TDIO, 100 f. Cf. SKS 5, 462 f. / TDIO, 94 f.

IV. Alterity and Autopsia

Inversement, supposez que X ne veuille pas de votre nom ou de votre titre; supposez que, pour une raison ou une autre, X s’affranchisse et se choisisse un autre nom, opérant une sorte de sevrage réitéré du sevrage originaire … Jacques Derrida

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A human being is spirit. But what is spirit? Spirit is the self. But what is the self? The self is a relation that relates itself to itself or is the relation’s relating itself to itself in the relation; the self is not the relation, but is the relation’s relating itself to itself.1

This is how the principal philosophical section in The Sickness unto Death begins; it is one of the most celebrated and most frequently quoted passages in all of Kierkegaard’s writings. In the space of a few briefly formulated sections, we find a presentation of what has often been called Kierkegaard’s basic anthropological and philosophical structure.2 This entire chapter (ch. A.A) runs only to two pages, but these two pages play a decisive role in my whole exposition of The Sickness unto Death. It is here too that the divergences from some other contributions to Kierkegaard research in recent years become clearest, and this is why I shall devote most of this Chapter Four to a critical and detailed analysis of chapter A.A, section by section (cf. §§ 24-28). I begin with some introductory reflections, though, on the genre conflict, the art of communication, and the textual understanding of the preface and introduction to the book. The Sickness unto Death was published in 1849, and is regarded as one of Søren Kierkegaard’s most important works. Many threads from his other writings come together here in a work about the self. The circumstances surrounding the publication were extremely difficult, as we see from Kierkegaard’s journals; at the last moment, he decided to publish the book under the pseudonym Anti-Climacus. 3 This pseudonym does not mean that the work is an “anticlimax”; rather, the name is a counterpart to Johannes Climacus, the pseudonymous author of the philosophical reflections in Philosophical Fragments (1844) and Concluding Unscientific Postscript to the Philosophical Fragments (1846). In this context, the pseudonymity has little to do with anonymity; Kierkegaard justifies it by the assertion that the work

1 2

3

SKS 11, 129 / SUD, 13. Kierkegaard himself calls this his “scheme” in the papers, and he seems to be satisfied with it: “Perhaps [the book] may not be of any value, but at any rate, it has made the contribution of an excellent scheme (Schema) which can always be used in a more concealed way in the discourses” (Pap. VIII 1 A 651). “So ‘Sygdommen til Døden’ is now coming out under a pseudonym, with myself as the editor. […] The pseudonym is: Johannes Anticlimacus (as opposed to Climacus). Climacus said that he was not a Christian, but Anticlimacus is the opposite extreme, a Christian to a supereminent degree – only I myself take care to be a very simple Christian” (NB11:204 in SKS 22, 127 f.). In the manuscript which was delivered to the printer, we can see how Kierkegaard at the last moment crossed out his own name with a pencil and wrote “Anti-Climacus,” adding himself as editor.

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does not “correspond to” his own personality.4 The writings of Climacus are philosophical reflections on Christianity, but Anti-Climacus is described as a “supereminent” Christian. 5 Like the seventh-century theologian Johannes Klimakos, this Climacus is one who moves upwards on the heavenly ladder towards God by means of philosophical reflection; but Anti-Climacus is the one who climbs down into the darkness, down into the depths of the human mind, and formulates a diagnosis of the age in which he lives.6 This indicates a general direction, but it should not be taken to mean that Anti-Climacus is less interested in philosophical problems. On the contrary, The Sickness unto Death is a work which reflects on the presuppositions of philosophy and on the connection between theology and philosophy – but these reflections take place in the context of a psychological study of the phenomenon of despair. The psychology in this work develops and deepens the study of anxiety in The Concept of Anxiety. The Sickness unto Death also develops problems from Either-Or, Fear and Trembling, and Repetition.7 The most characteristic point, however, is the intersection in Anti-Climacus between the trajectory from the pseudonymous works and a trajectory of development in the edifying writings from 1842 to 1849. This does not mean that the two trajectories merge in this work; rather, the intersection should be regarded as a problem, a problem which Kierkegaard sets out in the preface to The Sickness unto Death. 4

5

6

7

The writing “is designated ‘for edification,’ and that is more than my category, the category of poet: edifying. Just as the River Guadalquivir […] rushes underground at one point: so, there is a section: the edifying, which has my name. There is something that is lower (the aesthetic), which is pseudonymous; and there is something which is higher, and is also pseudonymous, because my personality does not correspond to it” (NB11:204 in SKS 22, 127 f.). “He merely describes the sickness, when he continually defines what ‘faith’ is, and he appears to believe that he himself possesses this faith to a supereminent degree. This is the source of his name, ‘Anti-Climacus’” (Pap. X 5 B 19). Kierkegaard writes in his journals about the relationship between the two pseudonyms, in a reflection placed on the lips of Anti-Climacus: “For we are related to each other, but we are not twins. We are counterparts. […] It is as if from the peaks of the mountains two eagles swooped in flight upon a single point, or an eagle swooped down from the heights of the rock, and a predatory fish rose up to the surface at the same speed: thus, we both are seeking the same point; we make contact, and in the same instant we part company, each going to his own extreme” (Pap. X 6 B 48). Examples of developments: from Either-Or, the first reflections on despair and the self; from Fear and Trembling, the question about the relationship to God and the infinite double-movement; and from Repetition, the question of the possibility of a repetition of the relationship to oneself with the starting point in the other.

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§ 22 The Genre Conflict Between Psychology and Edification The forewords are in Kierkegaard’s works differing from all other words and literary expressions: “[…] the preface is an altogether unique kind of literary production, and since it is pushed out [of the system], it is high time for it to emancipate itself – just like everything else.”8 Not only did Kierkegaard publish a book with the title Forord (“Prefaces”), which consists simply of seven different prefaces to unpublished books (with a foreword to the forewords, from which the last quotation is taken); all the forewords, introductory pages, evocations, introductions, beginnings, and preliminary expropriations “emancipate” themselves in one way or other from the text that follows them. They shift the perspective and give space for the “[…] incommensurable, which in an earlier period was placed in the preface to a book.”9 Naturally, a foreword with a book is something very different from a foreword without a book, but even when the foreword deals with a serious topic – original sin, murder, or despair – the foreword expresses a consciousness of the literary character of the work, an awareness that even the most systematic scholarly dissertation is also a literary product which finds expression by means of a choice of style, genre, plot, and metaphors. In short, the foreword as a conventional genre, “in a purely ceremonial manner,” compels the author to engage in a brief meta-reflection on form and content: “Even an author who in his work defies the times may nevertheless in the preface accommodate himself to custom in trivial matters and is thereby put to the test in many a collision – very droll for the observer – with regard to how far and how.”10 A collision between whether and how: based on the title page,11 “Preface,”12 and “Introduction” to The Sickness unto Death,13 I shall investigate the questions related to “trivial matters,” viz. what kind of text this is, and to what genre it belongs. With regard to the genre of the work, its subtitle already makes an ambiguous impression: “A Christian psychological consideration for

8

9 10 11 12 13

SKS 4, 468 / cf. P, 4 (as noted previously, the “cf.” indicates that the translation has been modified). SKS 4, 468 / P, 4. SKS 4, 467 f. / P, 3. SKS 11, 115 / SUD, 3. SKS 11, 117 f. / SUD, 5 f. SKS 11, 123-125 / SUD, 7-9.

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upbuilding and awakening.”14 This inserts a conflict or collision between genres into the very opening of the text – a pattern that we find in a number of other works by Kierkegaard.15 Naturally, psychology and Christianity are not in conflict, in the sense that all psychology would necessarily exclude Christian presuppositions. I would rather tend to affirm that the opposite is true: at least from an historical perspective, psychology such as we know it today is unthinkable without Jewish-Christian anthropology, philosophy, and pastoral care. But if psychology is to be scientific,16 then it was in conflict even in Kierkegaard’s days – and is even more clearly in conflict today – with what we usually associate with the genre of “edifying literature.” The discussion of genres is itself a difficult genre, since there are scarcely any hard and fast rules for the definition of a “genre”; still less do we possess criteria for drawing boundary lines between the various genres.17 This problem is equally acute with regard both to historical classifications and to contemporary classifications.18 But as soon as anyone attempts to break the genres or the boundaries between academic disciplines – for example, by analyzing philosophical texts as literature – the boundaries become clearer, thanks to what many will regard as a category mistake.19 This shows that the genres, and 14 15

16 17

18

19

SKS 11, 115 / SUD, 1. Cf. the title page to Fear and Trembling: “Dialectical Lyric” (SKS 4, 99 / FT, 1); The Concept of Anxiety: “A simple psychologically orienting deliberation on the dogmatic problem of original sin” (SKS 4, 309 / cf. CA, 1); Concluding Unscientific Postscript: “A mimical-pathetical-dialectical compilation, an existential contribution” (SKS 7, 7 / CUP, 1); etc. Cf. SKS 11, 117 / SUD, 5. Howard and Edna Hong translate “scholarly.” “If we fail to see genres – the classical ones and subclasses, or different registers and modes – we make the serious mistake of overlooking the coercive and persuasive power of literary models, of writers’ and readers’ expectations, of our apparent anthropological need to naturalize difficult and groundbreaking literary works in accordance with some pre-established understanding of genre” (Hans H. Skei “On Literary Genres” in Genrer och genreproblem: teoretiska och historiska problem, ed. by Beata Agrell and Ingela Nilsson, Göteborg: Daidalos 2003, p. 27). Cf. also Eva Haettner Aurelius, “Att förstå och definiera genrer: ett semantiskt perspektiv på genreteori” in Genrer och genreproblem: teoretiska och historiska problem, ed. by Beata Agrell and Ingela Nilsson, Göteborg: Daidalos 2003, pp. 45-57. Cf. Anders Pettersson “Traditional Genres, Communicational Genres, Classificatory Genres” in Genrer och genreproblem: teoretiska och historiska problem, ed. by Beata Agrell and Ingela Nilsson, Göteborg: Daidalos 2003, pp. 33-43. I believe that the second form, the communicational genres, which Pettersson links to Bakhtin’s theory of literature, is especially relevant in the present context. This is Ricoeur’s criticism of Derrida: Paul Ricoeur The Rule of Metaphor (Orig. La métaphore vive, Paris 1975), tr. by Robert Czerny, London: Routledge 1978, pp. 293 f.

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the boundaries between them, are constitutive of the way in which the academic disciplines understand themselves, and of their descriptions of reality. When Derrida deconstructs the concepts of metaphysics by analyzing them as dead metaphors, even fundamental metaphysical concepts such as “ground,” “concept,” and “clarity” are fragmented and displaced.20 The concepts take their place not only in a metaphysical dialectic, but also in a metaphorical language game. Derrida discovers the same dead metaphors in Plato’s metaphysics as in Hegel’s system, and this lends support to the claim that what Hegel sees as the expression of absolute science is also constituted by something as unstable as a literary genre – and circles around relatively simple literary plots.21 A metaphorization of language, which emerges from the clash between a philosophical and a literary genre, is often associated with Nietzsche’s texts, 22 but Kierkegaard had already applied similar strategies, thereby introducing a deconstructive movement into the literary history of philosophy.23 Criteria of genre often lie hidden in a set of expectations with regard to the text, which are laid down in the unwritten rules of the discourse.24 However, the text usually signals by means of a number of identifying signs (style, concepts, references, etc.) how its genre is to be understood. This in turn is important for the understanding of its categories and the classification of its concepts; it also tells us some20 21

22

23

24

Cf. Jacques Derrida Marges de la philosophie, pp. 265-269 and pp. 322-324. Kierkegaard too presents similar reflections on the same texts by Hegel, more than a hundred years earlier: cf. his ironic comments on the “recent scholarship” which has made the preface superfluous, since science is no longer literary, but relates directly to reality, “[…] because when one begins the book with the subject and the system with nothing there apparently is nothing left over to say in a prologue” (SKS 4, 468 / P, 4). “What then is truth? A moving sea of metaphors, metonyms, anthropomorphisms, in short, a sum of human relations which were intensified poetically and rhetorically, transposed, and decorated. After long usage, they appear to a people to be firm, canonical, and obligatory: the truths are illusions (but people have forgotten that they are illusions), metaphors that are worn-down and have lost their sensuous power, coins that have lost their image and can now be considered as metal, no longer as coins” (Friedrich Nietzsche Über Wahrheit und Lüge im außermoralischen Sinn in Werke, ed. by Karl Schlechta, vol. 3, Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft 1997, p. 314). Nietzsche’s rhetorical dissolution of philosophy’s pretensions to truth forms the starting point for Jacques Derrida; cf. Marges de la philosophie, pp. 257 f., and for Paul de Man: “The Epistemology of Metaphor” in On Metaphor, ed. by Sheldon Sacks, Chicago: Chicago University Press 1979, pp. 20 f. Cf. also the following passages in an essay by Jacques Derrida: “La littérature au secret” in Donner la mort, pp. 163-173 and pp. 202-209. Cf. Michel Foucault L’ordre du discours, pp. 23-38.

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thing about how the text qua text distinguishes between fiction and reality. The introduction of a genre conflict into the work itself can therefore be an effective instrument, since this opens the text up to various meanings, breaks down the classic categories, and introduces a meta-reflection into the text about distinctions between facts and fiction which are “taken for granted,” or have simply been adopted from elsewhere – and about the meaning of the concepts involved. The text becomes less foreseeable. Under every assertion lies a doubt about the order of things, of the discourse, and of the text. Anti-Climacus thus introduces a genre conflict of this kind as early as the subtitle, and he goes on to reflect upon this in the foreword: Many may find the form of this “exposition” strange; it may seem to them too rigorous to be upbuilding and too upbuilding to be rigorously scholarly. As far as the latter is concerned, I have no opinion. As to the former, I beg to differ; if it were true that it is too rigorous to be upbuilding, I would consider it a fault. 25

I shall shortly return to the question whether the book is too strict to be edifying. In the present context, what interests me is the little reflection on the relationship between two genres which are usually regarded as incompatible: an academic text and edifying Christian literature. The edifying literature seems to be given a certain priority, since the author is immediately willing to backtrack on the academic character of the text, but clearly insists upon, and argues for, its edifying character. However, the very next section shows that this is only a strategic retreat, for Anti-Climacus at once directs a counter-assault by accusing all science that is not edifying of being “unchristian” (!). He calls its ideal of objectivity “inhuman curiosity”26 and says that the “exaltation of indifferent knowledge” is “jest and vanity.”27 In other words, what we witness here is a little skirmish against the contemporary criteria of good, objective academic discourse and the demarcation line drawn between science and all religion; there is also an attack on the Hegelian philosophy’s attempt to “integrate” religion into an Idealistic understanding of reality, where the speculative method abolishes every absolute difference.28 In 1849, Anti-Climacus believes that the speculative philosophy still calls the tune on questions of objective science; at any rate, he bases the “academic character” of his own text on such an understanding of 25 26 27 28

SKS 11, 117 / SUD, 5. SKS 11, 117 / SUD, 5. SKS 11, 118 / cf. SUD, 6. Cf. Hegel Phänomenologie des Geistes, pp. 400-421.

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science.29 Hegel locates psychology within the theory of the “subjective spirit,” and as we have seen, he links it to the theory of signs. Ultimately, the goal of the speculative philosophy is to abolish the antithesis between subjective and objective knowledge, so that all knowledge can be objectively secured in the concept and the dialectic method; but this whole system is dead if it does not spring out of the human spirit and is not brought back to the human spirit, which is constitutive of the recognition and of the dialectical Aufhebung of antitheses. In the 1830’s, the right-wing Hegelian Karl Rosenkranz wrote a book about psychology which was based on Hegel’s theory about the subjective spirit, 30 a psychology which Kierkegaard read and which supplied him with important insights. He quotes from it in terms of high praise in The Concept of Anxiety. 31 This treatise is divided into three main parts: anthropology, phenomenology, and pneumatology. The development is clear: from the immediate spirit, “the spirit in immediate unity with its natural character,” to a systematic description of the natural spirit, including such matters as the “solar” life and the perfection of the white race in comparison to the black and yellow races. 32 29

30

31

32

Jon Stewart does indeed claim that “they heyday of Hegelianism” in Denmark was over by the close of the 1840’s, but he also points out it that it is Hegelian psychology and philosophy that constitute the background to Kierkegaard’s reference to the “academic” quality. Cf. Jon Stewart Kierkegaard’s Relations to Hegel Reconsidered, pp. 592 f. Cf. Karl Rosenkranz Psychologie oder die Wissenschaft vom subjectiven Geist (Orig. 1837), 2nd ed. (“Zweite sehr verbesserte Auflage”), Königsberg: Verlag der Gebrüder Bornträger 1843. “Although I am not yet inclined to give a definition or to speak in abstraction’s joke about serious matters, let me present a few remarks by way of orientation. In Rosenkranz’s psychology, we find a definition of temperament. He says on p. 322 that temperament is the union of feeling and self-consciousness. In the earlier passage, he explains admirably that the feeling opens up to self-consciousness, and conversely, that the content of self-consciousness is felt by the subject as his own. It is only this unity that can be called temperament. For if the clarity of knowledge and the knowledge of feeling are missing, all that exists is the striving of the natural spirit, the pressure of immediacy. But if the feeling is missing, all that exists is an abstract concept, which has not attained the ultimate intimacy of intellectual existence, and has not become one with the self of the spirit (cf. pp. 320 and 321). When one goes in the reverse direction and follows his definition of feeling as the immediate unity of the spirit between its character as ‘soul’ and its consciousness (p. 242), and recalls that the definition of the ‘soul’ includes the unity with the immediate natural definition, this all adds up to an idea of a concrete personality” (SKS 4, 447 f. / cf. CA, 147 f.). “The perfection of this race consists in the fact that in it, the one-sidednesses of the other races are overcome“ (!) Karl Rosenkranz Psychologie oder die Wissenschaft vom subjectiven Geist, p. 34. Today, it is surprising and – bearing in mind the course

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With a clear reference to Hegel, phenomenology is then elaborated as the theory about the consciousness of the human person, including a dialectic of acknowledgement between master and servant. Pneumatology, the theory about the spirit of the human person, is likewise elaborated by means of a systematic description in which the tripartite scheme corresponds to that of Hegel, but where it is more difficult to discern the inherent development of the dialectic from one concept and state to the next. From a modern, post-Freudian perspective, the most surprising point is how little space is given to psychological illness. The entire passage amounts to between ten and fifteen pages: a description of craziness, melancholy, and mania 33 is followed by an exposition of “the process of the sick feeling about oneself” and the restoration of this sickness to health.34 This too is presented as a dialectical process in which health is normal and sickness is the negative element which must be overcome. There is little to suggest that Kierkegaard returned to Rosenkranz’ psychology for help in the further elaboration of his psychological scheme in The Sickness unto Death, but his view of the academic character of psychology refers to a Hegelian ideal of objectivity and science, and to a dialectical understanding of the human spirit. In comparison to Rosenkranz, Kierkegaard’s psychology of the self seems much more modern. Anti-Climacus chooses a completely different approach to anthropology and psychology, viz. the assertion that everyone is, or has been, in despair. His psychology, with its pathological orientation, begins by positing a problem, which it then pursues throughout the entire dialectic of the dissertation about despair. When Anti-Climacus’ foreword engages in polemic against the Hegelians’ understanding of science, the primary intention is to set out his own psychological project in contrast to, and in continuity with, the psychology inspired by Hegel. He believes that the prevalent view in science places the focus wrongly. He wishes to draw attention to the task “[…] to venture wholly to become oneself, an individual human being, this specific individual human being, alone before God, alone in this prodigious strenuousness and the prodigious responsibility.”35

33

34

35

of subsequent history – frightening to see what was regarded as the most enlightened and civilized science only one hundred and sixty years ago. Obviously, the idea of a general development towards perfection has more than one disadvantage. Cf. Karl Rosenkranz Psychologie oder die Wissenschaft vom subjectiven Geist, pp. 158-169. Cf. Karl Rosenkranz Psychologie oder die Wissenschaft vom subjectiven Geist, pp. 169-174. SKS 11, 117 / SUD, 5.

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He emphasizes the individual as against the universal, against the system, against the Hegelian dialectic and speculative Idealism. 36 AntiClimacus has an objection to the description of reality which the Hegelians represent: he believes that he has discovered an earnestness and responsibility which fall completely outside the focus of science, as long as psychology relates to categories such as “idea,” “system,” and “world history.” The dilemma is that his own anthropology is based on the same concepts; it is elaborated and written in the dialectic’s own dialect. Nevertheless, he insists that his anthropology is different. This sets the scene for a controversy about the concept of “spirit” – and the foreword strongly indicates that this controversy takes place in the conflict between genres. On the basis of the contemporary structure of the academic disciplines, spirit can either be analyzed psychologically – entailing an objective academic investigation of the subjective spirit – or else be described in an edifying manner – based on Christian dogmatics and addressed to the individual reader. Anti-Climacus wishes to do both of these, thereby infringing the conventions governing both genres. I therefore wish to approach The Sickness unto Death as a composite text, a texture woven together from psychological and edifying threads. This would not be particularly difficult, if the author were capable of creating a productive interplay between psychological science and Christian anthropology which could thus be combined in a higher synthesis; but each of these genres seems to be based on presuppositions which tear up the texture and destabilize the presentation. The academic text seeks to be dependent on a relatively stable conceptual apparatus, which makes it possible to describe and analyze a psychological state (viz., despair) with some measure of precision. But the very concept of “sickness unto death,” which can scarcely be called peripheral in this work, is developed as a metaphor and is continually applied metaphorically, and the author makes the following observation fairly early on in the treatise: “This concept, 36

Cf. also the following note appended to The Point of View in the Journals for 1848: “ ‘The individual’ is a category which can be employed in two ways. In times when all is security, and existence is like a languid enchantment, ‘the individual’ is the category to rouse people. In stirring times, when everything is shaken, ‘the individual’ is the category to soothe people. The one (…) who knows how to use this category will present a very different appearance in times of peace than in times of unrest; the difference is like that between employing a sharp and pointed instrument (this word is corrected from “weapon”) like a goad in order to wound, and employing the very same instrument to cleanse a wound” (Pap. IX B 63).

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the sickness unto death, must, however, be understood in a particular way.”37 We need not read metaphors such as “sickness unto death” with exclusive reference to the edifying character of the text. As a linguistic form of expression, the metaphor is invaluable in helping to develop an academic terminology for phenomena which have not yet been described in psychological terms. 38 In The Sickness unto Death, the psychological theory has a systematic point of departure in the scheme for analysis of the self which is presented in chapter A.A. Psychologically speaking, however, the transpositions of the scheme which follow in the next sections, as well as those aspects of the theory which do not fit into the scheme, are just as interesting. 39 I therefore see no fundamental objections to Anti-Climacus’ claim that the text not only lays claim to academic validity, but is also an example of how good science ought to be done – if science were conscious of a deeper seriousness. In principle, I do not rule out the possibility that the psychological theory could stand on its own feet, independently of whether or not the individual reader can make the text his own “to be edified and awakened to life” by it.40 But when one attempts to read this as a psychological theory, without wishing to go into Anti-Climacus’ edifying intentions, there is a grave danger that one will misunderstand a number of the problems which are also discussed in the text, because the “Christian” starting point that Anti-Climacus has chosen inevitably means that his analysis of the human person will lead to a fundamental discussion 37 38

39

40

SKS 11, 133 / SUD, 17. Ricoeur points out that metaphorical expressions are particularly well suited to develop a terminology for the description of an “inner” reality, or for aspects of existence which are not immediately accessible to observation: Paul Ricoeur The Rule of Metaphor, pp. 254-256. For further detail on the metaphor as expression of a new description of reality, cf. also Paul Ricoeur “The Metaphorical Process as Cognition, Imagination, and Feeling” in On Metaphor, ed. by Sheldon Sacks, Chicago: Chicago University Press 1979, pp. 141-157. Ricoeur goes a long way in making metaphorical thinking applicable to various forms of analogous reflection (cf. p. 144). The analytical philosopher Patti Nogales has likewise elaborated a pragmatic theory of metaphor. She claims that the most important function of the metaphor lies in a reconceptualization of terms: Patti D. Nogales Metaphorically Speaking, Stanford (Cal): CSLI Publications 1999, pp. 189-208. Cf. Kresten Nordentoft Kierkegaards psykologi (1972), 2nd ed., København: Hans Reitzel 1995, pp. 31 f. Kresten Nordentoft Kierkegaards psykologi, pp. 21 f. Cf. William Kerrigan „Superego in Kierkegaard, Existence in Freud“ in Kierkegaard’s Truth: The Disclosure of the Self, ed. by Joseph H. Smith, New Haven / London: Yale University Press 1981, pp. 143-162.

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of the premises of psychology: in the present case, this takes the form of a philosophical conceptual clarification of the relationship between dogmatic and Idealistic Geistesphilosophie. I shall therefore comment on this genre conflict from two sides, first from the psychological, then from the edifying perspective. As a psychologist, Anti-Climacus appears to be far beyond his Hegelian contemporaries. In the introduction to The Concept of Anxiety, under the pseudonym Vigilius Haufniensis, Kierkegaard made an attempt to clarify the relationship between psychology and dogmatics as follows: psychology describes states, and is therefore unable to explain qualitative transitions, as dogmatics does.41 This does not prevent psychology from being systematic in its analysis of human states of mind. Its starting point is the individual case, from which it generalizes and forms generally valid categories (unum noris, omnes).42 In The Sickness unto Death, the opposite appears to be true. The author has his scheme clear from the outset and presents it in the opening chapter A.A. Based on these categories, he then develops a psychological taxonomy in which the various forms of despair are continuously analyzed and displayed to the reader by means of a number of typical examples. At the same time, the psychology points out beyond itself at every point: it is relevant to philosophical and theological problems.43 I believe therefore that we are justified in highlighting two characteristic aspects of the understanding of psychology on which AntiClimacus bases his analysis of the human person in The Sickness unto Death. First, psychology, qua theoretical and analytical science, remains located as a discipline in the intersection between theology and philosophy; and secondly, psychology also has a practical dimension which means that it can be applied to self-reflection. This practical 41

42

43

SKS 4, 329-331 / CA, 21-24. The whole of The Concept of Anxiety is in fact a psychological account of the doctrine of original sin, which makes it possible to explain the meaning of the dogma without explaining that which is inexplicable, viz. why a human being begins to sin. Here too, a parallel application of various academic disciplines makes such an explanation possible, but as far as I can see, the genre conflict is not so prominent as in The Sickness unto Death. The disciplines complement one another, rather than conflicting with one another. In The Concept of Anxiety, Vigilius Haufniensis links this expression to the Greek and Socratic exhortation ÁË×éÇ Ñ¿ÓÒÍË and comments: “The Latin expression unum noris omnes expresses the same idea in a frivolous manner, and really expresses the same, when one understands unum as a reference to the observer himself, and does not look for the omnes, but earnestly holds fast to the one who actually is all” (SKS 4, 382n / CA, 79n). Cf. also Kresten Nordentoft Kierkegaards psykologi, pp. 22-28. Cf. Kresten Nordentoft Kierkegaards psykologi, pp. 459-461.

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dimension becomes particularly important where the psychological investigation uncovers contradictions and discrepancies which cannot be explained on the basis of an Idealistic anthropology such as is formulated in the first part of chapter A.A. These contradictions are called “despair,” and it is precisely in these breaches that the reader is invited into the text (as a literary theorist would put it). But perhaps the relationship between invitation and guest is the opposite of this – perhaps this text comes as an unbidden guest and invites itself into the reader? I see The Sickness unto Death as a text with a center outside itself: it points out beyond itself and inscribes itself upon the reader’s relation to himself. The following passage indicates that a strategy of this kind has guided the author in his work: Despite its illusory security and tranquillity, all immediacy is anxiety and thus, quite consistently, is most anxious about nothing. The most gruesome description of something most terrible does not make immediacy so anxious as a subtle, almost carelessly, and yet deliberately and calculatingly dropped allusion to some indefinite something – in fact, immediacy is made most anxious by a subtle implication that it knows very well what is being talked about. Immediacy probably does not know it, but reflection never snares so unfailingly as when it fashions its snare out of nothing, and reflection is never so much itself as when it is – nothing.44

It is a crafty, almost nonchalant understanding of a communication which indirectly mediates reflection’s difference – “half a word […] about something undefined” – and thereby entices the immediate and unreflecting person out of the camouflage of “happiness,” merely by hinting at the same time that “it itself knows what one is speaking about.” Writing, as an indirect communication, has a similar function: the reader may otherwise be indifferent to his relation to himself, but he is enticed out into the difference, into the writing’s reflections about the self, about despair, as if he himself “knows what one is speaking about.” The psychology in The Sickness unto Death is dialectical, but the dialectic continuously points out beyond itself, thanks to the diagnoses which the author formulates. Although the diagnosis and the reflection captivate the reader, the dialectic does not in fact proceed to resolve the problem. It begins with despair and sticks consistently to this subject, viz. to a diagnosis of the illness: “Just one more comment, no doubt unnecessary, but nevertheless I will make it: once and for all may I point out that in the whole book, as the title indeed declares, despair is interpreted as a sickness, not as a cure. Despair is indeed that dialectical.”45 44 45

SKS 11, 141 f. / SUD, 25 f. SKS 11, 118 / SUD, 6.

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As an edifying author, Anti-Climacus develops his Socratic theory of maieutics by way of indirect communication. As Kresten Nordentoft underlines in Kierkegaards psykologi, psychology has a maieutic function both in The Concept of Anxiety and in The Sickness unto Death.46 In this foreword, there is one image which provides an outstanding illustration of the text that lies before us: Everything especially Christian must have in its presentation a resemblance to the way a physiscian speaks at the sickbed; even if only medical experts understand it, it must never be forgotten that the situation is the bedside of a sick person. It is precisely Christianity’s relation to life (in contrast to a scholarly distance from life) or the ethical aspect of Christianity that is upbuilding (…)47

The doctor’s lecture is applied science: he is formulating a diagnosis. This is an address in the form of a description. It is however not obvious why this address is ethical or edifying; for in many respects, this book is different from the edifying discourses published under the name “S. Kierkegaard.” The demand for scientific rigor means that the focus is directed onto a psychological description, not onto a reader who seeks edification. Besides this, the book is published pseudonymously and only rarely addresses a “you” (or “my listener”) in the direct manner that we find in many of the edifying discourses. In this context, Søren Kierkegaard sees himself as one reader among others, as we see in a note where he comments on the pseudonymity: “This book is written as if by a doctor, that is true. But he who is the doctor is one who is no one; he does not say to one single person: ‘You’ are sick – nor does he say this to me; he only describes the illness […] and it is therefore up to the individual, to the reader, whether he feels that this concerns him.”48 The form of the work is not a speech-act, and its rhetorical ideal is not that of persuasion.49 The doctor does not say that “You” are in despair, nor does he attempt to persuade you of this; in one sense, he does exactly the opposite, because the theoretical description draws the attention away from the individual and towards the general symptoms of the sickness. At the same time, the academic form makes this text less accessible. A marked distance is introduced between the text and the reader, and this may make the text most inclined to repel the reader.50 Is then this act of 46 47 48 49

50

Kresten Nordentoft Kierkegaards psykologi, pp. 459-464. SKS 11, 117 / SUD, 5. Pap. X 5 B 23. Cf. Tim Hagemann Reden und Existieren. Kierkegaards antipersuasive Rhetorik, pp. 75-80. For a more comprehensive discussion of Kierkegaard’s theory of communication, cf. Kresten Nordentoft Kierkegaards psykologi, pp. 439-442. For the specifically psychological element in this theory, cf. pp. 459-461.

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repelling the author’s way of approaching “the edifying” – as an indirect strategy? Considered as a textual theory, it is in any case a very interesting construction: the one who publishes the text conceals himself (at least as an authority) behind his pseudonym, thereby vanishing as author, and returns as the first reader of the work, which “emancipates” itself from the author’s intention and leaves the task of edification to the reader.51 This is one variant of a form of communication which is otherwise known as indirect communication, and which is found in various genres and signatures in Kierkegaard’s writings. 52 The indirect communication is written with the intention of establishing a relationship – not between the author and the reader, but between the reader and his or her own self. This however does not mean that the communication allows the reader to be at peace with himself and with what is his. The text is hammered in like a wedge, a rift, in the reader’s relation to himself and reflection on himself. Indirect communication is seldom written with the intention of confirming the reader’s view of himself, irrespective of whether it addresses an unreflective or a thoroughly reflective relationship to himself. These texts do not confirm: they confuse and destabilize by pointing to contradictions and paradoxes, with the aim of uncovering self-deceptions and giving the reader the task of reflection on how he reads his own self. 53 Such a concept of communication would be declared bankrupt, if the reading of the text were to conclude with a question about what the 51

52

53

“If one accepts what is affirmed in the foreword to The Sickness unto Death, it is not the text itself that is scientific or edifying. It is the reader who decides this question, so to speak” (Eberhard Harbsmeier “Die erbauliche Rede als Kunst des Gesprächs” in Kierkegaard Studies: Yearbook 1996, p. 308). This is a more refined description of the phenomenon also known as the death of the author – which hands over the reader to the text, not to a question about the intention and identity of the author. Cf. also Eberhard Harbsmeier “Die erbauliche Rede als Kunst des Gesprächs,” pp. 304-313. A different view is taken by Hannay, who does not see any form of indirect communication or “existence communication” in The Concept of Anxiety and The Sickness unto Death, but only direct communication: “In fact, these are not ‘existence communications’ at all. They are direct communications offering general descriptions of conscious states” (Alistair Hannay Kierkegaard, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul 1982, p. 157). This view is somewhat surprising, when we consider the foreword. “This is Christian heroism – a rarity, to be sure – to venture wholly to become oneself, an individual human being, this specific individual human being, alone before God, alone in this prodigious strenuousness and the prodigious responsibility; but it is not Christian heroism to be taken in by the idea of man in the abstract or to play the wonder game with world history” (SKS 11, 118 / SUD, 6).

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author meant. The author is thus compelled to develop various strategies in order to withdraw from the text, at least as a direct authority. Whereas the Romantic ideal envisaged the text as the expression of the meaning and feelings of the author, 54 so that the text ideally communicates the author’s presence and intention, indirect communication is based on literary irony: the author distances himself from the text and makes his absence a precondition of its appropriation. 55 The edifying element in this text is therefore strictly speaking something that happens through the text, which initiates a movement, a reaction. Despair. Offense. These are negative reactions which break down – apparently the opposite of an edification (Da. Opbyggelse, which literally means “building up”). This is a little paradox of communication which is inscribed upon this text; there may be good reasons for pointing it out, but there is no reason to attempt to resolve it. Let me only note that we have observed a similar contradiction between aporia and self-knowledge in the discourse “At a Graveside.” Let us therefore suppose that there are at least two different ways to read this text. It can be analyzed as a psychological theory about the self, and in view of such a reading, the author appears to have insisted on the psychological correctness and relevance of the scheme. 56 It can however also be read “to edify and build up,” and the foreword in particular prepares the reader for this: “Earnestness, on the other hand, is the upbuilding.”57 The text becomes edifying once it is read seriously – and this entails that the text immediately turns in a new direction; its compass point shifts. It is no longer primarily about “spirit,” understood abstractly or schematically, but about the reader as a (sick) spirit, as one who despairs, etc. The author cannot shrug off all his responsibility for the text, but he does so to the extent that the text, the writing, is something that takes place in the process of reading – of reading the text, and of reading the self. The responsibility is now the

54 55

56 57

Cf. Helge Jordheim Lesningens kunst, 39. Cf. the introduction to Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions: “[This little book] seeks that single individual whom I with joy and gratitude call my reader, or it does not even seek him. Unaware of the time and the hour, it quietly waits for that right reader to come like the bridegroom and to bring the occasion along with him. Let each do a share – the reader therefore more. The meaning lies in the appropriation. Hence the book’s joyous giving of itself. Here there are no worldly ‘mine’ and ‘thine’ that separate and prohibit appropriating what is the neighbor’s” (SKS 5, 389 / TDIO, 5). Cf. Pap. VIII 1 A 651. SKS 11, 117 / SUD, 6.

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given responsibility of the reader for himself, the responsibility which each human person has for being a human person.58 However, what it means to be a human person is not simply a given, since reading is a process in which something is at stake: What is the human person? What is spirit? What is the self? Earnestness enters in as soon as these are no mere academic problems in an abstract sense, and the reader sees the connection between the text and his own self. This obviously recalls the definition of earnestness which we encountered in the discourse “At a Graveside”: “Earnestness is that you think death, and that you are thinking it as your lot, and that you are then doing what death is indeed unable to do – namely, that you are and death also is.”59 If the “academic” element in The Sickness unto Death is to be appropriated seriously, the reader is obliged to think of himself in connection with the sickness, so that the sickness unto death is – and he himself also is. It is not enough to be able to read a diagnosis: one must also be able to apply it.60 The psychological analysis of despair can therefore be understood and discussed as a theory, but it cannot be appropriated as a theory. It can be assimilated only as a problem – as the reader’s problem.61

§ 23 Lazarus and the Platonic Cave The foreword asks questions about “why and how” psychology can be edifying; in the following “Introduction” (“Indgang”),62 the question is whether this little biblical meditation can be relevant in any way to psychology. For this is the chapter in The Sickness unto Death which most directly springs out of the genre of edifying literature, and even drifts over into something that recalls a pietistic tractate urging conversion. The title of the work is derived from the affirmation in Jn 11:4, “This 58

59 60

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“And because the relation is spirit, is the self, upon it rests the responsibility for all despair at every moment of its existence […]” (SKS 11, 132 / SUD, 15). SKS 5, 446 / TDIO, 75. “On the one hand, then, the true conception of dispair is indispensable for conscious despair. On the other hand, it is imperative to have clarity about oneself – that is, insofar as simultaneous clarity and despair are conceivable” (SKS 5, 162 / SUD, 47). “But that the clothing of the dissertation is what it is has at least been considered carefully, and seems to be psychologically right as well. There is a more formal style that is so formal that it is not very significant and, once it is all too familiar, readily becomes meaningless” (SKS 11, 118 / SUD 6). SKS 11, 123-125 / SUD, 7-9.

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sickness is not unto death”63 – Jesus’ reply when he is told that Lazarus is seriously ill and will probably die. When Lazarus nevertheless dies and this news reaches Jesus and his disciples, these words are confounded; but for the reader who knows the continuation of the Gospel narrative (something Anti-Climacus presupposes),64 this only discloses a deeper stratum of meaning, viz. that Jesus’ affirmation did not refer to sickness and death in a purely bodily sense. For although Lazarus is indeed raised from the dead, this is only a postponement of the bodily death which will certainly come sooner or later. “No,” writes Anti-Climacus, “it is not because Lazarus was raised from the dead that one can say that this sickness is not unto death; but because He exists – that is why this sickness is not unto death.”65 It is the protagonist of the narrative, Jesus Christ, who gives the words “life, sickness, and death” a different meaning, making a distinction between a “human” and a “Christian” meaning. Humanly speaking, death is the last thing of all; but for the Christian, it is only “one little event” within eternal life.66 Here, we meet Anti-Climacus’ most foreseeable rhetorical qualities, when he derives dogmatic differentiations from biblical texts. He thus distinguishes between temporal and eternal life, and between temporal and eternal death. But is not this just what we would expect from an edifying author? Is it not such a reversed significance of all concepts that characterizes a good, classic revivalist sermon – to edify and awaken? Is not this the well known distinction between inside and outside, between the Christians and the pagans? Anti-Climacus sounds almost like a revivalist preacher when he makes the following claim: Only the Christian knows what is meant by the sickness unto death. As a Christian, he gained a courage that the natural man does not know, and he gained this courage by learning to fear something even more horrifying. […] But the most appalling danger that the Christian has learned to know is “the sickness unto death.”67

One who writes in such terms is certainly not afraid of giving offense. When he speaks of Christianity, it is not in order to highlight reconciliation and hope, but rather fear, punishment, and eternal death. De63 64

65 66 67

SKS 11, 123 / SUD, 7. “We know that Christ had in mind the miracle that would permit his contemporaries, ‘if they would believe, to see the glory of God’ (11:40), the miracle by which He raised Lazarus from the dead; therefore ‘this sickness’ was not only not unto death, but, as Christ predicted, was ‘for the glory of God, so that the Son of God may be glorified by means of it (11:4)” (SKS 11, 123 / SUD 7). SKS 11, 123 / SUD, 7. Cf. SKS 11, 124 / SUD, 7. SKS 11, 125 / SUD, 8 f.

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pending on the category under which the reader defines himself – “the natural human being” or “the Christian” – we may expect that the author’s affirmation causes a certain unease, a “fear and trembling.” And I am convinced that this is the reaction the author wishes to provoke; it rings out like a solemn warning before we have even begun to read his treatise on the self and despair. This too entails a shift of focus, towards death and the life beyond the grave or the death beyond the grave.68 But even the death beyond the grave, eternal death, is drawn back into life; the expected punishment is anticipated as a description of life here on earth – to the extent that the human person suffers from the sickness unto death. The result is a kind of apocalyptic vision with a sharp distinction between the Christian hope, which is linked to the last things (ÒÍFÑÕ¿ÒÍË) and can only just be glimpsed behind the fear of that which is terrible, and the terrible thing itself, which is experienced here and now but can become even worse. And this terrible thing is the sickness unto death.69 Anti-Climacus’ exposition forms however a stark contrast to the text to which he refers, viz. the story of Lazarus in Jn 11. These conversations about life and death take place while Lazarus lies decaying in the grave: as the evangelist has Martha say, with a certain disgust, “He stinks already” (Jn 11:39). The man is dead, he reeks of a corpse, and it is this dead man that Jesus summons forth from the grave. John relates: “The dead man came out, his hands and feet bound with bandages, and his face wrapped with a cloth. Jesus said to them, ‘Unbind him, and let him go’.” 70 The Johannine text reaches an overwhelming climax when Lazarus steps out of the grave after having lain there for two days – and in comparison to this climax, the allegorical reading in The Sickness unto Death is a disappointing anticlimax. Whereas Lazarus goes out of the grave, Anti-Climacus goes into the grave, down into the semi-darkness of the funeral cave. In the one text, eternal 68

69

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“Humanly speaking, death is the last of all, and, humanly speaking, there is hope only as long as there is life. Christianly understood, however, death is by no means the last of all; in fact, it is only a minor event within that which is all, an eternal life […]” (SKS 11, 124 / SUD, 7). “Christianly understood, therefore, not even death is ‘the sickness unto death,’ still less is it everything that can be called earthly and temporal suffering, distress, sickness, destitution, tribulation, adversities, tortures, mental sufferings, grief, or bitterness. Such things may indeed be so heavy and painful that we human beings – or at least, the one who suffers them – say: ‘This is worse than death.’ But all this, since it is not sickness, can indeed be compared to a sickness, and yet, Christianly understood, it is not the sickness unto death” (SKS 11, 124 / cf. SUD, 8). Jn 11:44.

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and earthly life are woven together in the Johannine manner, and redeemed by the word of Christ; in the other text, Anti-Climacus still dwells by death, the eternal death and the sickness unto death which are “more terrible” than death itself. If this was meant as an introductory biblical exegesis, it would be an unusually poor piece of exegesis, since the author completely reverses the meaning of the text in his “Indgang”: where the Johannine narrative turns death to life and sickness to healing, and the miracle reverses the premises so that the impossible suddenly becomes possible, the “Indgang” speaks only of death and despair, of the painful sickness unto death, and how every hope of redemption ends in desperatio. Perhaps, then, this is not exegesis in the classic sense, but a countertext to scripture which remains in an unresolved relationship to John’s miracle narrative. Such a reading opens up a number of new perspectives, also with regard to the work The Sickness unto Death. Where the Lazarus story confirms the claim that this sickness is not unto death, the counter-text by Anti-Climacus claims that the other sickness (viz. despair) is the sickness unto death. The other aspects of the narrative are interpreted into a corresponding scheme where life is death, and death is life. The counter-text deals with all these categories by means of the antithesis between the “human” and the “Christian.” This may offer an interesting perspective on the “edifying” aspect of the work. If someone were to claim that The Sickness unto Death is really a theological or edifying work and that its real understanding of reality and the problem it studies are based on the Bible and on biblical problems, such a reading would be at least as mistaken as the claim that the text is pure psychology. Just as Anti-Climacus shifts psychology in the direction of edifying literature, so too his little revivalist sermon twists the meaning of the biblical text around. A miracle story is put onto the stage of the Grand Guignol, where “that which is most terrible” and “awful” is vividly portrayed for the reader. This corresponds in one sense to the demands of the genre, but if this were to be understood as “biblical” fundamentalism, it would be a dramatic distortion of “The New Testament’s Christianity.” 71 But if we regard this as a dramatic exaggeration, which turns light into darkness and darkness into light with the intention of driving the reader back to scripture, the text takes on a new interest, both for our reading of The Sickness unto Death and for the incongruity between John’s 71

Cf. The Moment, no. 2 in SV3 19, 119 f. / M, 115 f., and The Moment no. 5 in SV3 19, 178 f. / M, 185 f.

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climax and Anti-Climacus’ anticlimax. The confusion seems to have a very specific aim, namely to question the reader’s notions. Like a Socrates of modern Christianity, Anti-Climacus goes deep into the cave of death in order to point out the simulacrum and self-deception infecting the self-knowledge of his contemporaries. The brief “Indgang” tries out the reader’s categories and challenges these by saying something about the character of fear, about what “the natural human being” fears and what “the Christian” ought to fear. The severe tone provokes irritation and gives offense, and in this sense, this introductory text is in fact much too strict to be strictly academic. But I do not exclude the possibility that this too is the expression of an indirect communication, since offense too is a form of interest – it is perfectly true to call this an offended interest which rejects what the author has to say – but this makes it a resistance to the text. In such a resistance, which causes unease, the questions are confusing. This is why there is a profound contradiction in this text between the academic and the edifying understanding of the human spirit, a contradiction which will haunt us throughout our study. This contradiction also contains a tension between subjective and objective approaches, and a potential conflict between the logos of faith and the logos of thought. This means that The Sickness unto Death contains great tensions. The author attempts to combine two genres which are strictly speaking incompatible, and the result is a text full of contradictions, where both genres are inverted and twisted around, each in its own way. One who looks here for an academic dissertation in keeping with strict criteria for scientific texts will be disappointed, for good reasons; but the same applies to a reader who had expected an edifying discourse offering consolation and suggesting points for further reflection. This little discourse or introduction, this slender and narrow gate, is ill suited to build anyone up in that sense, since it seeks almost exclusively to generate fear and to tear down. This – and only this – is the upbuilding element.

§ 24 A.A: The Synthesis of the Self What is a human being? This is the question that lies and resonates beneath the surface of the whole of chapter A.A, and indeed under the entire treatise The Sickness unto Death. Since this is the primal question of anthropology, it has been the object of much dispute, inter alia with reference to whether it is possible for human beings to attain true knowledge of what a human being is. Despite all these debates,

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Anti-Climacus offers a brief and programmatic answer to this question as early as the opening chapter, to which we shall return here: A human being is spirit. But what is spirit? Spirit is the self. But what is the self? The self is a relation that relates itself to itself or is the relation’s relating itself to itself in the relation; the self is not the relation, but is the relation’s relating itself to itself.72

In chapter A.A, the three questions – what is the human being, what is spirit, and what is the self – are woven into each other like threads in a fabric; and like threads in a fabric, in the tight but broken structure of this passage, these three questions will guide our steps in the following analysis.73 In this texture, the passage just quoted plays a key role. It is like a weaver setting up his loom: each question opens a new field, a new perspective, and a new basic structure.74 After each question comes an answer which helps step by step in the construction of a more precise definition of the human person, and thus we get a sketch of a fundamental understanding of what a human being is. The series of questions ends with a definition of the human person as a reflexive self-relation. Thus, the self is not defined only as a relation, but as a relation in which the self relates itself to itself. However, the answers leave the reader somewhat uneasy. And this unease has two reasons. The first is despair, which – according to the extended title – occurs as a sickness in the self and in the spirit: Despair is a sickness in the spirit, in the self, and can thus be threefold: in despair not to be conscious of having a self (inauthentic despair); in despair not to will to be oneself; in despair to will to be oneself.75

The title makes clearer the position from which the question about the human person is posed: it is posed from the position of despair, in order to understand what despair is. Such a localization of the question is not unimportant, since it gives the question a context and a place. How72 73

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SKS 11, 129 / SUD, 13. The following analysis largely corresponds to the argument I presented in my Xarticle: Marius G. Mjaaland “X. Alterität und Textur in Kierkegaards Krankheit zum Tode” in Neue Zeitschrift für systematische Theologie und Religionsphilosophie 2005, pp. 58-80. It is therefore not by chance that I make the questions the starting point of my reading. The logic of the question is understood here as the opening, the beginning, and the possibility of thinking, much in the way of Gadamer in “Die Logik von Frage und Antwort”: cf. Hans-Georg Gadamer Wahrheit und Methode (1960), 6th ed., Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck) 1990, pp. 375-386. We find a more passionate, but not completely dissimilar discussion of the same theme in Jacques Derrida L’écriture et la difference, pp. 118 f. SKS 11, 129 / cf. SUD, 13.

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ever, the despair lies on the reverse side of the self, that side which is not immediately accessible to philosophical reflection. On the reverse side, new problems arise which are linked to the question itself: viz., the fact that the question of what a human being is, is continually covered over by despair, is confused, is misunderstood, is postponed, and (for many people) almost dissolves.76 The despair makes it necessary to pose the questions differently – with the starting point in a sickness and a rift in the relation to the self and with a view to finding an opening and an abyss in the self which is despairingly willing, or not willing, to be itself. And this brings us to the second reason for the unease: the reason in the ground (Danish Grunden i Grunden). The claim which assumes the decisive role in Anti-Climacus’ approach to the problem is that the question about the self cannot be resolved if the starting point lies in oneself. On the contrary, it must be posed with the starting point in the other.77 The other is posited as a presupposition of the self, but at the same time, the dependence of the self on the other will be a decisive reason why the human person’s self is unable “to arrive at or to be in equilibrium and rest by itself,” 78 – and accordingly despairs. In other words, Anti-Climacus attempts to elaborate the dialectic of the self with his starting point in one specific kind of otherness (French altrui) or alterity. This makes the logic of the text more complex and contradictory, but at the same time it makes it possible to formulate the question about the human person in another way. The discussion of these problems is decisive for my understanding of the epistemology and the dialectic of the self in The Sickness unto Death. In the rest of this chapter, I will therefore study in detail all the six sections in chapter A.A, a passage which runs to all of two pages. With regard to the first two paragraphs, I emphasize especially the philosophical theory about the human person which Anti-Climacus analyzes by way of two different dialectical models, a “negative” (Socratic) and a “positive” (Hegelian). The understanding of the human 76

77

78

For this reason, the understanding of the question changes even within chapter A.A. in the direction of a breach and a rift, and despair – as a perspective on the self – also entails that this rift is transposed, disseminated, rewritten, and covered over. Cf. Jacques Derrida Vom Geist. Heidegger und die Frage (Orig. De l’ésprit. Heidegger et la question (1987)), tr. by Alexander García Düttmann, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1992, pp. 109-113, esp. n. 105. “The human self is such a derived, posited relation, a relation that relates itself to itself and in relating itself to itself relates itself to the other” (SKS 11, 130 / cf. SUD, 13 f.). SKS 11, 130 / cf. SUD, 14.

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person which is constructed here becomes programmatic, in the sense that it holds good for the rest of the treatise. In the third section, however, the problem of alterity is introduced, and this means that the entire construction is torn apart in the two following sections: for it is only here that we find a discussion of the meaning of despair for the understanding of the self. Philosophically speaking, this is expressed in a chronic contradiction and a rift in the very basis of the self. Therefore, in § 26, I will enter a debate with Michael Theunissen’s “Korrekturen an Kierkegaard.” 79 Against Theunissen I argue for the necessity of a logic of contradiction in thinking about the self – if the self is to be recognized with the starting point in the other. In § 27, I focus on the epistemological problem which is inscribed upon the relation to the self. And in the paragraph concluding this chapter, called “X,” I will draw some lines in the textual passage which I believe can be discerned in the texture, and which have consequences for our understanding of the relation between philosophy and theology, between construction and deconstruction – and between Socrates and Christ. We find the basis for this entire discussion in the first two sections, in which the definition of the human person as a relation to himself is expressed by means of two different dialectical models. The continuation of the first section already makes it clear what Anti-Climacus means when he affirms that the self is a “relation”: A human being is a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity, in short, a synthesis. A synthesis is a relation between two. Considered in this way, a human being is still not a self.80

The definition of the category “human being” is thus based on classic metaphysical antitheses such as infinity and finitude, temporality and eternity, freedom and necessity.81 It is only somewhat later that the content of these concepts is described more fully,82 and we see there that the content of these concepts is not as classically metaphysical as this definition of the human person might suggest. Without a repetition in which their meaning is made concrete in the form of a series of examples, they remain unusable for Anti-Climacus’ psycho79

80 81

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Cf. Michael Theunissen Der Begriff Verzweiflung. Korrekturen an Kierkegaard, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1993, pp. 16-21. SKS 11, 129 / SUD, 13. Cf. the metaphysical basis given to anthropology in the Renaissance, e. g. in Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, De hominis dignitate (Meiner Philosophische Biliothek vol. 427), Hamburg: Meiner 1990. Interestingly, a special interest in the synthesis as an intermediary definition is typical both of Pico and of Kierkegaard. Cf. especially chapter C. A. (SKS 11, 145-157 / SUD, 29-42).

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logical taxonomy.83 Here, at the beginning of the work, however, the primary concern is not the meaning of the individual concepts, but the understanding of the human person as “synthesis.” The author operates with a quite broad definition of “synthesis” as “a relation between two.” This understanding of synthesis is even more general than what we find for example in The Concept of Anxiety.84 It seems that Anti-Climacus wishes to keep open his definition of the human person as an undefined reality between infinity and finitude, etc. In an intermediary position of this kind, there arises the inter-est with regard to the question of the conditions which underlie and form the existence of the human person.85 This first definition of the human person may be fundamental, but it remains an abstract definition of the conditions which make possible a relation to the self, and it does not provide a fully satisfactory explanation of what a self is. It gives us the bricks, but the work of building remains to be done. The construction of the self in the form of an account of the building up (or the “up-building”) of the self is described only in the next section, where a dialectical connection is established between the contradictions. It is only thanks to the consciousness of itself as a relationship that the self is inscribed upon the metaphysical oppositions. The conscious selfrelation is introduced here as the self-reflective tertium, that which unites the oppositions and is therefore itself composite – constructing to the same extent as it is constructed – and is defined here as a negative or a positive unity of opposites: In the relation between two, the relation is the third as a negative unity, and the two relate to the relation and in the relation to the relation; thus, under the designation soul, 83

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Ricoeur has an interesting description of how this taxonomy switches between unorthodox dialectic and pointed examples: “The reader’s astonishment, unease, admiration, and irritation depend on this incessant oscillation between the most pointed imagery experimentation and the most artificial conceptual dialectic” (Paul Ricoeur “Two encounters with Kierkegaard” in Kierkegaard’s Truth: The Disclosure of the Self, ed. by Joseph H. Smith, New Haven / London: Yale University Press 1981, p. 322). “Man is a synthesis of the mental and the physical; however, a synthesis is unthinkable if the two are not united in a third. This third is the spirit” (SKS 4, 349 / cf. CA, 43). It is the human person’s existence as an intermediary-existence (inter-esse) which makes anxiety possible (cf. SKS 4, 454 / CA, 155); and at the same time, it is the openness in this structure which makes repetition possible: “Repetition is the interest (Interesse) of metaphysics; and also the interesse on which metaphysics gets stranded (strander); repetition is the watchword (Løsnet) in every ethical contemplation; repetition is conditio sine qua non for every issue of dogmatics” (SKS 4, 25 f. / cf. R, 149); cf. The Concept of Anxiety (SKS 4, 325n-326n / CA, 18n). The same is also true of that repetition which has its starting point in despair.

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the relation between soul and body is a relation. But if the relation relates to itself, this relation is the positive third, and this is the self. 86

On the basis of the two possibilities – a negative and a positive unity – I should like to point out two different understandings of dialectic which operate in Kierkegaard’s oeuvre as a whole, and which are played off against each other here; we may call these a negative and a positive dialectic. The negative dialectic goes back to Plato, but Kierkegaard tends to link it more to the “Socratic” than to the “Idealistic” side of Plato’s writings.87 I shall therefore follow Kierkegaard’s terminology and call this a Socratic dialectic. This dialectic is binary, i. e. it presupposes antitheses which are not resolved in a third, unifying authority.88 As early as On the Concept of Irony, his 1841 dissertation for the Master’s degree, however, Kierkegaard criticizes this dialectic as inadequate, since it lacks the unifying tertium,89 or the “dialectical trilogy” which characterizes the Hegelian dialectic. In the same passage, he gives preference to the Hegelian dialectic of Aufhebung because it can lay claim to greater completeness and to a higher unity in thinking.90 In the dialectical construction of the self which forms the 86 87

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SKS 11, 129 / SUD, 13. Cf. the extensive discussion of this in On the Concept of Irony: SKS 1, 90-102 / CI, 28-41. In the Platonic dialectic, “the One” (to ôn) stands outside the dialectical movement and therefore makes it impossible to abolish the antitheses completely; cf. the transition from the first to the second hypothesis in Plato’s Parmenides 141d-142b. Cf. also the analysis of Plato’s aporetic dialectic in Egil A. Wyller Platons Parmenides in seinem Zusammenhang mit Symposion und Politeia, Oslo: Aschehoug 1960, pp. 98-108. Cf. Hegel Wissenschaft der Logik I.1, p. 248: “But the third is closer to the immediate through abolition of the mediation, the simple through abolition of the difference, the positive through abolition of the negative, the concept which realizes itself through alterity, and has coalesced with itself through the abolition of this reality, and has established its absolute reality, its simple relationship to itself.” Hegel then elaborates the idea of the “triple character” of the simple and the concrete, which qua abstract, untrue elements unite in the concrete subject, and he concludes: “The third is the concluding proposition through which [the concept] mediates with itself through its negativity, and thus is posited for itself as that which is universal and identical in its elements” (ibid.). A long list of books come between On the Concept of Irony and The Sickness unto Death, in which Kierkegaard develops his sharp polemic against the Hegelian method, system, and “mediations,” and perhaps especially against the way in which these concepts are applied by the Danish Hegelians in theology and philosophy. Nevertheless, the Hegelian dialectic remains a basic paradigm for Kierkegaard’s thinking, and he continually returns to this; cf. Jon Stewart Kierkegaard’s Relations to Hegel Reconsidered, pp. 368-377. The same is also true of the Socratic dialectic,

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starting point for The Sickness unto Death, this antithesis returns, but now as two different levels in one and the same construction. In both cases, the human person appears as a relation between antitheses; but the Socratic dialectic is not tied to a self-reflective unity, and it can therefore either be developed as a “negative” dialectic of antitheses91 or lead into a “positive” dialectic of consciousness in which the antitheses are mediated in something “higher,” viz. self-consciousness.92 It is only when the dialectic becomes conscious and self-reflexive that Anti-Climacus is willing to speak of a self in the “true” sense. The three questions about the human person, the self, and the spirit take on various functions, depending on their relationship to the dialectical construction of the human person. The basic category human person designates quite simply a “relation” which exists between antitheses such as infinity/finitude, freedom/necessity, etc. Under these conditions, each one must live out his existence as a human person, nolens volens. The reflexive category of the self has its origin in this first category, but at the same time presupposes a construction of the human person who, by means of consciousness of himself, establishes a conscious connection between the various antitheses in the relation to the self. The third category, spirit, is unfortunately not given an explicit description in relation to the dialectical definition of the human person. But this is the category with which the next section is concerned, when it discusses the relation between the self and the other. We shall therefore now discuss the human person as spirit, the self as spirit, and the self in its relation to the other – in short, the question: What is spirit?

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which is not abandoned after On the Concept of Irony, but makes its presence felt continually in both the pseudonymous and the edifying writings. One can however critically object that Stewart is too eager to demonstrate the traces of Hegel’s thinking in Kierkegaard and that he does not pay sufficient attention to how Kierkegaard also reformulates this thinking critically. More on this question in Chapter Six below. The Socratic dialectic becomes paradigmatic for the taxonomy of the various forms of despair in chapter C.A.: “Despair considered without regard to its being conscious or not, consequently only with regard to the constituents of the synthesis” (SKS 11, 145-157 / SUD, 29-42). This is because the problem of despair is connected to a fundamental lack of unity, which means that the dialectic opens out onto an aporetic. The Hegelian understanding of synthesis defines the point of departure in the analysis of self-consciousness in chapter C.B.: “Despair as defined by consciousness” (SKS 11, 157-187 / SUD, 42-74). Unlike Hegel, however, Kierkegaard claims that the misrelation in the self is not removed as long as it despairs – on the contrary, the self suffers chronically from an infinite negativity, an aporia, and a sickness, as long as it is not “grounding” transparently in the other as its presupposition.

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§ 25 The Rupture in the Spirit In the third section, the dialectical understanding of the self is confronted with the concept of the other, and this takes the form of a disjunction, an either/or: Such a relation that relates itself to itself, a self, must either have posited itself or have been posited by another.93

With the other, Anti-Climacus looks for a new beginning of thinking about the self, another origin for the dialectic.94 This puts the entire construction of the self to the test. The dialectical equilibrium is disturbed and shifted in the direction of this unknown “other.” The two previous models appeared to be supplementary, since the Hegelian dialectic could complement and supplement the Socratic dialectic. In this case, however, it is different because the disjunction between these two alternatives demands a basic decision between different forms of dialectical thinking. Accordingly, this either/or marks the first clear breach in the chapter, between a thinking which takes its starting point in the self and returns to the self, and a thinking which attempts to interpret the self with its starting point in the other. And it is this either/or which is decisive for the question about spirit: if the spirit is to be defined on the basis of the other, on the basis of an alterity which is at the root of one’s relation to oneself qua spirit, we must rethink the entire dialectic of the self and the understanding of the human person, but this time with the starting point in an alterity which allows the dialectic to reflect at every step the relation to the other. This second alternative, where the dialectic of the self takes its starting point in the other, is set out in greater detail in the next section, the fourth section in chapter A.A: If the relation that relates itself to itself has been posited by another, then the relation is indeed the third, but this relation, the third, is yet again a relation and relates itself to that which has posited the entire relation.95

There is a clear division in the text between before and after the decisive either/or. This disjunction therefore makes a sharp cut, a caesura, 93 94

95

SKS 11, 129 / cf. SUD, 13; emphasis added. Wouter Göris has seen a similar problem in The Concept of Anxiety. He believes that this is the search for another beginning, where reflection finds a new starting point, a new ground for thinking through “another immediacy” – and therefore takes a different direction from that previously taken: Wouter Göris, “Unterwegs zum anderen Anfang. Der Fall Kierkegaard” in Allgemeine Zeitschrift für Philosophie (27), 2002, pp. 177-198. SKS 11, 129 f. / cf. SUD, 13.

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through the text – but also through the self, that self which is woven into the texture here. Before the disjunction, the self is constructed out of antitheses which are fundamental to the existence of every human person. This dialectic is then developed and defined on the basis of the self’s consciousness of itself as a relation to itself. But the introduction of the disjunction into the text means that the self must also relate to something other, which constitutes a condition for – and in that sense is also antecedent to – this entire dialectic. Consequently, the entire dialectical structure must be repeated within another context: if the self is posited by means of something other, it follows that its relation to itself (whether conscious or unconscious, whether positive or negative), when it relates to itself, will also necessarily be relating to the other. This fourth section stands in the text directly over against the second section, on either side of the disjunction in the third section. Here, therefore, we find yet another dialectical definition of the human person, but this definition is formulated in such a way that the original dialectic is put into another perspective. If this new definition, “posited by another,” is to be understood as a supplement to the first construction of the self, this must be a supplement which transposes the fundamental definition of the human person. Dialectically speaking, the first definition of the human person is complete and sufficient on the basis of the conditions which have been laid down up to this point, viz. that the self is a relation which relates itself to itself. It is precisely this demand for completeness, as a “higher” and closed unity, that characterizes the Abgeschlossenheit of the Hegelian dialectic. Kierkegaard, however, introduces a distinction between the concepts of “self” and “spirit” which entails that if the human person is also to be understood as spirit, we are obliged to presuppose a difference which is posited antecedently to the dialectic of the self: and this is the difference between the self and the other. This means that the question about the human person as spirit raises new questions about the understanding of the self-relation; at the same time, this question goes like a rift through the entire self-relation, a rift between self and self, and this in turn goes back to the original difference between the self and the other. The difference between the self and the other is thus posited antecedently to all other differences. In order to be a self, a human person must therefore still relate to himself, but in the relationship to the self, he must also relate to something that is other. Every other difference in the self thus also involves the relationship to the other. Correspond-

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ingly, the relationship to the other involves all those other differences which initially formed the basis of the self as a self-relation. If we compare the self in the fourth section with the self which was presented in the second section, the decisive decision is expressed by means of a repetition of the self-relation, but this time with the starting point in the other. The construction of the human person in the first and second sections is sufficient per se and logically consistent, as long as it is presupposed that the self has “posited” itself. But when it is presupposed that the self is posited by another, the dialectic in the self-relation must also reflect the relationship to the other. The transition from section two to section four is thus indirect: it depends on an either/or which means that if the individual is to understand the difference between the two models of the self-relation, he must always take the detour via the other. In the fifth section, the author confirms that he wishes to investigate the importance of precisely this second possibility, its importance for a given self-relation: The human self is such a derived, posited relation, a relation that relates itself to itself and in relating itself to itself relates itself to another. This is why there can be two forms of genuine despair. If a human self had posited itself, then we could speak only of one form: not to will to be oneself, to will to do away with oneself, but there could not be the form: in despair to will to be oneself. This second formula is namely the expression for the complete dependence of the entire relation (of the self), the expression for the inability of the self by itself to arrive at or to be in equilibrium and rest by itself, but only, in relating itself to itself, by relating itself to that which has posited the entire relation.96

It is only here, in the fifth section, that despair is introduced as a relevant problem for the understanding of the self, so that the exposé becomes explicitly psychological. The reflection moves thereby from the front of the self to its rear, so to speak, from abstract dialectic to the experience of an unease, the experience of a discomfort in one’s relation to oneself. Anti-Climacus refers once more to the two alternative understandings of the self-relation. When one takes one’s starting point in the first understanding (“If a human self had posited itself […]”), it is obvious that despair can be subjected to a psychological analysis which does not raise fundamental questions about the systematic-dialectical construction of the human person in the first two sections. This is precisely why it is only with the repetition of the selfrelation, when the self is interpreted with constant reference to the other, that Anti-Climacus finds despair philosophically interesting. 96

SKS 11, 130 / cf. SUD, 13 f.

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Despair thus becomes a psychological phenomenon with philosophical consequences, a phenomenon which prompts a fundamental doubt about the conditions for the construction of the self. This experience of a despair which cannot be explained if one takes one’s starting point in the dialectic of the self nourishes a suspicion that the construction of the self as sufficient unto itself is not really correct, and that it is inadequate for an understanding of the psychology of the self.97 When despair comes into the picture, the question about the human person is now posed very differently than we saw initially. The first two sections concerned the way in which the dialectic of the self is constructed; here, the aim is to describe the synthesis as seen from the rear, i. e. to investigate the texture of the self as it appears on the reverse side. According to Anti-Climacus, there is a double reason why the synthesis does not succeed and the antitheses are not resolved in a dialectical unity. The first reason can be traced back to the self, in the sense that the synthesis does not succeed because the person in question does not want to be himself. The other reason must be traced back to the difference between the self and the other, and is connected to the claim that the self cannot come to itself of itself, but only through the relation to the other. Despair can thus be traced back to a double origin, viz. the self-relation as the self’s relation to itself, and the self-relation as the self’s relation to the other.98 The double origin of despair also has a double consequence, which finds expression in the description of the self by means of a doubling of the self-relation. Structurally speaking, this gives rise to a parallelity between two structures which are inscribed upon one and the same texture (viz., the self). However, these do not simply coincide. Indeed, they are not even compatible: a certain friction, a “misrelation,” arises also between these two structures. Every misrelation in the first structure (the self-self-relation) points to a misrelation between this structure and the other structure (the self-other-self-relation).99 This 97

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In this sense, Kierkegaard must be counted among the great hermeneuticists of suspicion in the nineteenth century, alongside Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud. Hermann Deuser emphasizes the difference between these two definitions of the self by designating them as C and C'. See Hermann Deuser “Grundsätzliches zur Interpretation der Krankheit zum Tode” in Kierkegaard Studies: Yearbook 1996, pp. 117-128, esp. pp. 118 f. Of all the numerous contributions to the discussion of The Sickness unto Death in the Kierkegaard Studies: Yearbook 1996, this is the only one that preserves the distinction between these fundamental perspectives. Cf. also the following discussion with Michael Theunissen. “The misrelation (Misforhold) of despair is not a simple misrelation, but a misrelation in a relation (Misforhold i et Forhold) that relates itself to itself, and has been

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introduces a serious rift into the “synthetic” structure. The doubling and the rift are thus the first signs of a deconstruction of the self as early as chapter A.A. This is roughly how the problem looks as long as one contemplates it ab extra, i. e. as long as one aims at a certain measure of objectivity in the understanding of the self. When it is contemplated ab intra, i. e. for the individual who relates to his own self, the double origin of despair and the rift in the self first become visible in the form of an aporia in one’s own self-relation. As Anti-Climacus describes despair, this takes the form of a despairing contradiction between willing and not willing to be oneself. Accordingly, the specific epistemological challenge entailed by the phenomenon of despair consists in the fact that the self-relation in this (double) sense is accessible to the despairing person exclusively through the aporia of the will and corresponding aporias, misrelations, and contradictions. And this is in fact the only direct expression of the alterity of the other, if this alterity is to be consistently thought through: it can be known only indirectly, through a misrelation in the self. This leads to an interesting connection in Anti-Climacus’ logic between despair and the relation to the other: when the other is to be thought of in its otherness, this otherness finds expression through contradictions and misrelations – and this is the hiding place which protects its alterity against anyone who might attempt to “explain” it and thus make it compatible with “the same,” viz. with the self’s construction of itself. This, however, also makes self-knowledge more difficult. The one who seeks to know himself must take the path via the rear side of the self, where the self hides itself in despair. If we accept that despair has a double foundation, both in the self and in the other, we are obliged to reflect about the self by means of misrelations, contradictions, and ambiguous symptoms of the “sickness unto death.” The contradiction between despairingly willing to be oneself and despairingly not willing to be oneself does not concern an ethical conflict between velle and nolle, nor is this an ordinary contradiction between velle and indifferentia, or between a first-order and a second-order expression of the will.100 Rather, this is an aporia in a qualified sense, i. e.

100

posited by another, so that the misrelation in that relation which is for itself (for sig) also reflects itself infinitely in the relation to the power that posited it” (SKS 11, 130 / cf. SUD, 14). I shall return to this affirmation and discuss it in greater detail in the next paragraph. This is a differentiation of the will and of the concept of person with which Harry Frankfurt operates, in defense of a free will which would be compatible with

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a contradiction which at the same time expresses the fact that one does not know and stops short, that one cannot get any further. The contradiction between despairingly willing to be oneself and despairingly willing not to be oneself is closely connected to an unease about one’s inability to know oneself, to explain oneself or become transparent to oneself. This lack of self-knowledge (or failed attempt at self-knowledge) displays itself as a contradiction in the will, since both willing and not willing are integral aspects of the problem of self-knowledge. In this aporia, therefore, self-reflection and will intersect. In this context, “aporia” can quite simply be translated as “despair,” on the presupposition that both forms of “genuine” despair collide with one another in the despair, i. e. the despairingly willing to be oneself and despairingly not willing to be oneself. In that case, the despairing element is not only something that is almost a matter of course (viz., the fact that the one who does not want to be himself, does not become himself), but also something more surprising, viz. that the one who does in fact want to be himself cannot achieve this wish, because he encounters a difficulty that he cannot overcome in his relation to himself. In the latter case, it may even be the will that excludes all possibility of becoming oneself, when the will to become oneself is so strong that it shuts out the other from the self-relation. When Anti-Climacus writes that the dialectic of the self always remains dependent (“derived”) on the other, this means that the aporia too is an integral element of the relationship to the other. The other is still that which is unknown, the decisive X in the intricate lignelse of the self.101 As long as the other remains unknown, the aporia of the will remains insoluble – and the human person remains a riddle to himself. The dependence of the self and of the dialectic on the other creates an ambiguous starting point for the economy of despair. On the one hand, this dependence entails that the synthesis which is uniform

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moral responsibility and deterministic causality. See his essay “Freedom of Will and the Concept of a Person” in The Importance of What We Care About, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1988, pp. 11-25. Cf. also my own discussion of this viewpoint in Marius G. Mjaaland Om fri vilje, Oslo: University of Oslo 1999, pp. 34-38 and (with reference to Kierkegaard) pp. 137-139. The Norwegian and Danish noun Lignelse has the double meaning here of a mathematical equation and of a parable. Cf. the corresponding parable of the human person in Philosophical Fragments (SKS 4, 238 / PF, 31 f.), and the parable of inclosed reserve and the good in The Concept of Anxiety (SKS 4, 427 f. / CA, 126 f.). We find a similar manner of designating the good and God as the unknown x in Jacques Derrida On the Name, tr. by David Wood, John P. Leavey Jr., and Ian McLeod, Stanford (Cal.): Stanford University Press 1995, p. 64 and p. 76.

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(but therefore also closed) is broken up and opened in the direction of the other. At the same time, however, the aporia means that the synthesis becomes chronically unattainable; indeed, the dependence on the other actually covers over the synthesis and makes it difficult, viz. self-knowledge as a conscious synthesis of antitheses. This is why the economy of despair takes the form of a continuous interchange between an unveiling of (in-) closure and renewed veiling of the disclosed structure of the self.

§ 26 Self-Contradictions In the continuation of the fifth section, Anti-Climacus emphasizes how fundamental the contradiction of the will, as well as the “double” origin of the self-relation, is for his understanding of the self: Yes, this second form of despair (in despair to will to be oneself) is so far from designating merely a distinctive kind of despair that, on the contrary, all despair ultimately can be traced back and resolved in it.102

From this perspective, despairingly wanting to be oneself is the fundamental form of despair.103 Thus, the first form (despairingly not wanting to be oneself) can not only be derived logically from this, but also be resolved in it. Somewhat later in The Sickness unto Death, however, the second form is once again traced back to the first.104 Anti-Climacus himself thus holds that both forms of despair can be traced back to one another and dissolved into one another. This depends primarily on the perspective one chooses, i. e. whether the self-relation is considered with the starting point in the self or with the starting point in the other. In his book Der Begriff Verzweiflung, Michael Theunissen employs the argument that the two forms of despair are logically dependent on each other, to propose a logical solution to the contradiction between a despairing will and a despairing non-will. He then traces despair back to one simple reason, viz. that the one who despairs does not want to be himself. He arrives at this conclusion first by “translating” the two 102 103

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SKS 11, 130 / SUD, 14. Cf. Alastair Hannay “Basic Despair in The Sickness unto Death” in Kierkegaard Studies: Yearbook 1996, pp. 15-17. “To despair over oneself, in despair to will to be rid of oneself – this is the formula for all despair. Therefore the other form of despair, in despair to will to be oneself, can be traced back to the first, in despair not to will to be oneself, just as we previously resolved the form, not to will to be oneself, into the form, in despair to will to be oneself (cf. A)” (SKS 11, 136 / SUD, 20).

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basic forms of despair into (i) despairingly not wanting (or willing) to be one’s concrete, authentic self, and (ii) despairingly wanting (or willing) to be an abstract, inauthentic self.105 The last proposition is however logically compatible with the first, since one who wants to be an inauthentic self, or to construct his self detached from his concrete context as a human person, will eo ipso not be himself, i. e. his concrete, authentic self. Theunissen argues that this is why the two claims can be traced back to the self’s wish not to be itself, or the self’s lack of a will to be itself; in other words, they can be traced back to the claim that the human person despairs because he does not will to be himself. Theunissen believes that this is the “existential-dialectical basic principle” which posits the premises for Kierkegaard’s entire analysis of despair: “Der existenzdialektische Grundsatz der Verzweiflungsanalyse Kierkegaards lautet: Wir wollen nicht unmittelbar sein, was wir sind.”106 We can therefore have the impression that he has untied the Gordian knot, i. e. that he has resolved the contradiction – at least, as a fundamental contradiction in the self’s relation to itself. With his two books and a number of articles about The Sickness unto Death in the 1990’s, Theunissen initiated the widest philosophical debate about Kierkegaard for many years – and certainly the most comprehensive debate about this work since it was published in 1849.107 Alistair Hannay and Arne Grøn replied with a series of critical objections, and made several attempts to refute Theunissen’s principal thesis. The debate culminated in 1995 with new contributions and counter-contributions at a conference in Copenhagen, to which Hermann Deuser and Niels Jørgen Cappelørn also contributed.108 At 105

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Cf. Michael Theunissen Der Begriff Verzweiflung, pp. 19-30. With regard to the criticism of Kierkegaard’s use of the concepts “abstract” and “concrete,” cf. esp. pp. 20 f. For a summary of the entire argument, cf. pp. 56 f. “The existential-dialectical basic principle of Kierkegaard’s analysis of despair is: Immediately, we do not will to be what we are” (Michael Theunissen Der Begriff Verzweiflung, p. 18). Two years before the publication of Der Begriff Verzweiflung, Michael Theunissen published Das Selbst auf dem Grund der Verzweiflung, which is primarily concerned with the structure and articulation of the work. The following articles by Theunissen are relevant to the subsequent debate: “Das Menschenbild in der Krankeit zum Tode” in Materialien zur Philosophie Søren Kierkegaards, ed. by Wilfrid Greve and Michael Theunissen, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1979, pp. 496-509 and “Für einen rationaleren Kierkegaard” in Kierkegaard Studies: Yearbook 1996, pp. 61-90. Alistair Hannay “Basic Despair in The Sickness unto Death” in Kierkegaard Studies: Yearbook 1996, pp. 15-32, first delivered as a response to a lecture by Theunissen in The Norwegian Acadamy of Letters and Science in Oslo in 1992

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that time, the debate was described as paradigmatic for the discussion of Kierkegaard’s thinking.109 It continued in the following year with contributions which concentrated especially on the structure of the work and the relationship between First and Second Part of The Sickness unto Death.110 Some aspects of what Theunissen proposes have become clearer, but I believe that up to now, no one has succeeded in identifying the blind spot in Theunissen’s analysis. This problem is fundamental, not only for an understanding of Kierkegaard’s work, but also for further reflection on what a self is, on despair, on the relationship between philosophy, psychology, and theology – and on various forms of rationality. I shall now concentrate on Theunissen’s principal thesis, which he develops and attempts to substantiate in Der Begriff Verzweiflung. Although the argument is carried through with acute intelligence, from a dialectical perspective, the author permits himself to be exceedingly generous with his compliments. He believes that he can demonstrate a “self-misunderstanding of the theory,” i. e. of the conditions for the analysis of despair and of the consequences of this analysis, and he points to a number of logical errors in Kierkegaard’s argumentation which he feels obliged to correct. He also holds that Kierkegaard commits “errors” on several oc-

109

110

and published in Kierkegaardiana 17, 1994, pp. 6-24. Similarly, Arne Grøn “Der Begriff Verzweiflung” in Kierkegaard Studies: Yearbook 1996, pp. 33-60, was first published in Kierkegaardiana 17, 1994, pp. 25-51. The other essays in Kierkegaard Studies: Yearbook 1996 were delivered as lectures at a conference in Copenhagen in August, 1995, and then published in the Yearbook: Hermann Deuser “Grundsätzliches zur Interpretation der Krankheit zum Tode” in Kierkegaard Studies: Yearbook 1996, pp. 117-128; Arne Grøn “Kierkegaards Phänomenologie?” in Kierkegaard Studies: Yearbook 1996, pp. 91-116; Niels Jørgen Cappelørn “Am Anfang steht die Verzweiflung des Spießbürgers” in Kierkegaard Studies: Yearbook 1996, pp. 129-148; Alistair Hannay, “Paradigmatic Despair and the Quest for a Kierkegaardian Anthropology” in Kierkegaard Studies: Yearbook 1996, pp. 149-163. Cf. Hermann Deuser “Grundsätzliches zur Interpretation der Krankheit zum Tode,” p. 117. With reference to the structure of the work, cf. Arne Grøn “The Relation between Part One and Part Two of The Sickness unto Death” in Kierkegaard Studies: Yearbook 1997, pp. 35-50; Joachim Ringleben “Zur Aufbaulogik der Krankheit zum Tode” in Kierkegaard Studies: Yearbook 1997, pp. 100-116; Jon Stewart “Kierkegaard’s phenomenology of Despair in The Sickness unto Death” in Kierkegaard Studies: Yearbook 1997, pp. 117-143. – On the question of the Other and despair, cf. C. Stephen Evans “Who is the Other in Sickness unto Death?” in Kierkegaard Studies: Yearbook 1997, pp. 1-15; M. Jamie Ferreira “Imagination and the Despair of Sin” in Kierkegaard Studies: Yearbook 1997, pp. 16-34; Alistair Hannay “Kierkegaardian Despair and the Irascible Soul” in Kierkegaard Studies: Yearbook 1997, pp. 51-69; George Pattison “‘Before God’ as a Regulative Concept” in Kierkegaard Studies: Yearbook 1997, pp. 70-84.

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casions, and that Kierkegaard confuses the abstract concept of the self (as this is found in the “sketch of a system”) with the concrete self.111 Criticism as sharp as this is certainly a sign of a marked divergence between differing positions. Since Theunissen insists that he has demonstrated such grave “errors,” we must at least investigate whether his claims are “correct.” The German philosopher does not conceal the fact that he has an agenda of his own, which partly conflicts with that of Kierkegaard: he seeks to offer a “philosophical reconstruction” of the theory of despair, which means “bringing to light Kierkegaard’s hidden intentions, and making a rational debate easier by means of a cautious correction of his conceptuality.”112 The idea of bringing to light Kierkegaard’s “hidden” intentions is certainly an ambitious project in itself, and one that says a lot about the understanding of text, author, and intentionality on which Theunissen bases his critical interpretation; but his attempt to “correct” the use of concepts in The Sickness unto Death, in order to initiate a “rational” discussion with the corrected version, is even more problematical. What kind of rationality is Theunissen looking for? In the present case, is he not writing about a text which poses doubts about the foundations of an excessively rational rationality (in the sense of a rationality centered on the reason or on the self)? The justification which Theunissen offers for his combination of interpretation and criticism is itself so controversial that it raises a number of questions. First, is his argument that the analysis must be corrected genuinely convincing? Secondly, does his “correction” take into account the philosophical problems which are at stake in Anti-Climacus’ text? Thirdly, the starting point of his reconstruction is the alleged “existential-dialectical basic principle” of the text: to what understanding of philosophy (and of psychology and theology, for that matter) does this reconstruction lead?113 I shall now investigate these questions more closely, in order to see what is “really” happening in Theunissen’s hair-splitting argumentation: for I suspect that he himself commits some errors when he attempts to present a philosophical “reconstruction” of the analysis of despair. I see (a) a danger that he 111

112 113

“The self which we immediately do not will to be is the abstract or negative self, whose negativity is based on its indeterminacy. Kierkegaard makes the mistake of extending this concept of the self in the direction of a concrete self which in reality means only the unlocated Dasein in the sketch of a system. We must correct his mistake, because it is only the indeterminacy of the self that explains the desire not to be, which is genuinely constructed upon this indeterminacy” (Michael Theunissen Der Begriff Verzweiflung, pp. 20 f.). Michael Theunissen Der Begriff Verzweiflung, p. 14. Michael Theunissen Der Begriff Verzweiflung, p. 16.

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commits a category mistake when he eliminates (or at least brackets off) the entire problem of alterity,114 and I believe (b) that he simply commits a logical error when he attempts to dissolve the contradiction of the will by tracing it back to one simple reason, viz. that the despairing person does not will to be himself (das Nichtselbstseinwollen). The danger of a category mistake is the result of his desire to replace the dialect between the self and the other by a supposed dialectic between “that which we are” and “that which we are not.”115 This is because he confuses two problems which are categorically different and belong to differing categories of problems. I do not in fact disagree that the relationship between the concrete self (which Theunissen links to “what we are”) and a negative, abstract concept of the self (correspondingly linked to “what we are not”) does play a certain role in the dialectic in The Sickness unto Death. These perspectives come into play with regard both to the despairing will and the despairing non-will. But in this case, the debate about “abstract” or “concrete,” about “what we are” and “what we are not,” and even about weakness versus defiance, is a sidetrack which merely diverts attention from the fundamental problem.116 However, Theunissen quite simply skips over this other problem, the problem of alterity, without problematizing it or signaling in any way that he understands the philosophical significance and the extent of the problem. Theunissen overlooks the radi114

115

116

“The methodological abstraction from Kierkegaard’s antecedent theological decisions requires us to suspend judgment about the precise definition of what it means to speak of being posited by God” (Michael Theunissen Der Begriff Verzweiflung, p. 19). Obviously, therefore, Theunissen is aware that the relationship to God is a presupposition, and it is not here that the problem with Theunissen’s analysis lies. But his “suspension of judgment” (epoché) not only postpones this definition: at the same time, he levels down its alterity. Consequently, he overlooks the problem of knowing the other, when this is to be thought of as the presupposition of the self. “We want to be what we are not, because we do not want to be what we are. […] In a certain sense, of course, the opposite too is true: we do not want to be what we are, because we want to be what we are not” (Michael Theunissen Der Begriff Verzweiflung, p. 29). Theunissen however insists on an asymmetry between these “translations”: the first reason is always true, independently of the other, wherever a human being despairs. But Theunissen holds that the second reason is true only on occasion, and is always dependent on the first. This is why he views the first reason (das Nichtselbstseinwollen) as the basic form, and the second reason (das Selbstseinwollen) as derivative. Much of the discussion before, during, and after the 1995 conference in Copenhagen concerned precisely this question: cf. Alastair Hannay “Basic Despair in The Sickness unto Death,” pp. 24-26; Arne Grøn “Der Begriff Verzweiflung,” pp. 37-44, Arne Grøn “Kierkegaards Phänomenologie?,” pp. 103-114; Michael Theunissen “Für einen rationaleren Kierkegaard,” pp. 78 f. and 86 f.

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cality and profundity of the aporia of the will, and instead of studying this aporia in greater depth, he merely replaces the aporetic dilemma with another, more “rational” problem. As soon as one prescinds from alterity as a problem, however, one will not be dependent on an aporetic presuppositional logic in order to clarify the relation between concrete and abstract – but that is precisely the issue in chapter A.A: has the self posited itself, or must it also relate in despair to an aporetic relation of this kind between the self and the other? In AntiClimacus’ text, the other must be understood as a presupposition. It is posited antecedently to – or exists antecedently to – all other dialectical contradictions in the self. And this means that if one wishes to define the problem of alterity more precisely, one is obliged to accept the terms of a presuppositional logic which begins with the aporia and does not dissolve it, but goes down into its depths. The text is organized around a presuppositional logic of this kind in view of the other as the presupposition of the self, a presupposition which cannot be included in the self, where this is understood as a dialectical synthesis. And the presuppositional logic is not dissolved. On the contrary, the aporetic character of the problem is intensified when – with reference to the other – the contradiction of the will becomes an integral part of the non-knowledge of the one who knows. The contradiction between despairingly willing and despairingly not willing to be oneself is not primarily a matter of a sketch of a consistent explanation of despair as an existential-philosophical basic presupposition. Rather, this is an aporia which the self encounters, but is itself unable to resolve – and indeed, an aporia which the self is not at all meant to resolve rationally. The aporia makes the problem ambiguous in the following way: it clarifies what one does not understand, without however explaining it, and without incorporating it into a logical theory. On the contrary, it exposes a dialectic between the self and the other which is antecedent to the self’s relation to itself – that is to say, it simultaneously exposes this and conceals it. When we have established where the category mistake in Theunissen’s argumentation lies, it becomes easier to identify the logical flaw in his interpretation of The Sickness unto Death. The problem arises when he attempts to translate the two basic forms of despair into (i) despairingly not wanting to be one’s concrete, authentic self, and (ii) despairingly wanting to be an abstract, inauthentic self. In order to make these correspond better to what he calls the existential-dialectical basic principle of the analysis of despair, he also formulates these two propositions somewhat differently: (A) “We do not want

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(or will) to be what we are,” and (B) “We want (or will) to be what we are not.”117 Under certain conditions, therefore (which Theunissen sets out in his introduction), all that is required is a little shift in Anti-Climacus’ two basic forms of despair, in order to dissolve the contradiction. The two propositions would then no longer be contradictions: they would make the same affirmation. For the sake of correctness, I prefer to reproduce his argument with the help of formal logic, since this clearly displays the lines of his argumentation and therefore also the logical aspect of his “correction.” If we designate the fundamental form of despair as D and the adjective “despairing” or the one who despairs as d, and give the expression “wanting to be oneself” the logical indicator p, the affirmation that “The basic form of despair is despairingly not to will to be oneself” will look like this: “D is d(~p).” Correspondingly, the affirmation that “The basic form of despair is despairingly willing to be oneself” will be formalized as follows: “D is d(p).” Theunissen also claims that Kierkegaard’s use of the concept Selv (“the self,” the substantivized form of the pronoun selv, “self”) is too imprecise.118 He therefore wishes to make a further differentiation between the “authentic” self, which points to the facticity of the self, and which is given the indicator “pa” here, and the “infinite, negative” self, which is written here as “pi.” With the help of the following deductive inference, his argument can thus be reproduced without the need of any further reconstruction: Kierkegaard: (1) (D is d(~p) & (D is d(p)) Theunissen: (2) (D is d(~pa)) & (D is d(pi)) (3) d(pi) 2 ~d(pa) (4) ~d(pa) 2 d(~pa) (5) (D is d(~pa)) 2 ~(D is d(pi))

Theunissen translates this into: but p refers to a construction of the self, ergo and once again, the consequent can be translated as follows: this makes one of the “basic forms” superfluous:119 and we are left with only one basic form of despair:

(6) D is d(~p)

117

118 119

In the original: (1) Wir wollen nicht sein, was wir sind, and (2) Wir wollen sein, was wir nicht sind. Cf. Michael Theunissen Der Begriff Verzweiflung, pp. 28-30. Michael Theunissen Der Begriff Verzweiflung, p. 23. Theunissen does not regard this as completely superfluous, but as less fundamental than not wanting to be oneself. He sees the relationship between these two forms as asymmetrical, in such a way that not wanting always plays a role in despair, whereas the will plays a part only in some cases. Ergo it is only the first form that can be regarded as a basic form of despair (D).

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Since the conclusion follows from the premises, the logical problem is solved as with a magic wand – and the “error” in Kierkegaard’s analysis is corrected. However, the weakness in Theunissen’s argument does not lie in the transition from premises to conclusion. It enters at an earlier point, in the definition of the premises and in the “translation” of the basic forms of despair. The question therefore is what happens in this first transition, viz. from Kierkegaard’s premises to Theunissen’s. Does not this transition entail the loss of an essential point? There is a substantial question here: does the little reformulation hold water? I believe that both the “translations” of the basic forms of despair into German are based on a logical fallacy which means that the substantial dilemma is pushed to one side. One could take all four propositions and show how the category mistake is “translated” into a logical-semantical error. I begin with the last of the four propositions, claim (B), and then come back to the other three. Theunissen claims that the problem with the despairing will is that we do not want to be what we are. But the problem which Anti-Climacus finds expressed in the second basic form of despair is not that we want to be what we are not, but the very opposite, viz. that we want to be precisely what we are, and nothing else. We want to be “ourselves,” and in this instance, this can scarcely be regarded as a solution – it is a problem! Let us note this point, and look at claim (A). Here, we can at least formulate a problem which resembles the question that AntiClimacus discusses: in our despair, we do not want to be what we are, and in our despair we want to be what we are. This avoids the logical fallacy and ensures, from the substantial point of view, that the two forms of despair remain equally basic (gleichursprünglich). The contradiction is not dissolved. The propositions can be given a different formulation without losing one’s grip on the problem (i. e., the human person), but one must be on one’s guard lest “not” simultaneously disappears in one place and turns up in a completely different place.120 Let me however return to the issue: we want to be precisely what we are. Let us for the moment assume that this is the problem. We can derive two propositions from this formulation, each of which can be compared to Theunissen’s first two claims: the reason for despair is (i) that one despairingly wants to be one’s concrete, authentic self, and (ii) that one despairingly wants to be an abstract, inauthentic self. The problem lies in this despairing authenticity and the despairing inauthenticity. 120

If one studies Theunissen’s argument in detail, one will see that this is precisely what happens; cf. especially Michael Theunissen Der Begriff Verzweiflung, p. 28.

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For what is the authentic meaning of the word “authentic”? Repetition makes this clearer, and it becomes clearest of all when the proposition is read aloud. The English adjective “authentic” is derived from Greek and refers (exactly like the German adjective eigentlich and the Norwegian and Danish adjective egentlig) to that which is one’s own, i. e. one’s own self, that which we perceive to be specific to “ourselves” and our authentic existence.121 Much of the problem, both logically and substantially, lies in this “us,” in this “existence,” in this “one’s own.” It is no longer possible to presuppose as a matter of course what “the concrete self” is, or what “we” are. On the contrary, this is a consequence of something other, and this means that the question must be put otherwise. We must approach the question of the self in a different manner. The self can always be understood otherwise – and the aporia of the self concerns this otherwise and this other. My question to Theunissen is therefore: “What or who are ‘we’?” And this leads to all the other questions: What is a human being? What is the self? What are “concrete” and “abstract” in this instance? Through the aporia of despair, these problems recur again and again in The Sickness unto Death, and they are posed somewhat differently each time: from the outside with regard to the inside, and from the inside in such a way that they are reflected on the outside. Theunissen’s logical error finds expression in a variety of ways. In terms of propositional logic, I believe that his logical conclusions are simply invalid. The fatal character of errors in propositional logic comes to light only when the semantic conclusions from the logical fallacy are included in the evaluation. And I believe that it is precisely on the logical-semantical level that Theunissen’s “translation” of the basic forms of despair and his reduction of the contradiction to one single basic form become really problematic. Besides this, the result of this reformulation is that an analysis of the human being which penetrates deeply into philosophical, psychological, and theological aporias is reduced to a rather flat (though more consistent) philosophical theory about despair. If we want to explain why Theunissen commits this error, however, we must look at it once again in the light of the category mistake, and thus locate the logical problem on another level. This makes it somewhat clearer why he thinks as he does, and what understanding of reality underlies his critical “corrections.” 121

Arne Grøn is on the right track here, but he links this point exclusively to the ethical demand in Works of Love. Cf. Arne Grøn “Der Begriff Verzweiflung,” p. 60. However, he does not see this in the light of a more profound dialectic between the self and the other in chapter A.A.

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Despite his severe criticism, Theunissen did not dispute the affirmation that a human being is despairing as long as he does not want to be himself. The discussion was about whether a human being is despairing even when he does want to be himself – and whether this is an original (German ursprünglich) problem with regard to despair, i. e. whether it has a fundamental or merely an accidental link to despair. In relation to this problem, however, I would wish to underline that the problem of the will cannot be separated from the epistemological problem. As I pointed out above, despair always involves a reciprocal intersection of the will and of knowledge in the aporia of the self; this becomes particularly clear in the way in which despair is analyzed in the present chapter. The epistemological problem, the problem of knowledge, is connected in turn with the other. It cannot be resolved if our only starting point is in the self and the self’s conscious reflection on itself. Dialectically speaking, the relationship to the other poses fundamental questions about the construction of a human being who, in his attempt to know himself, always starts from himself and returns to himself – i. e., only circles around himself and his own. This locates the self-relation in a presuppositional logic which leads in practice to an ever deeper understanding of the paradoxical relationship between the self and the other. Anti-Climacus also presupposes the existence of an anthropological connection between knowledge and will, and not even Theunissen objects to this.122 Accordingly, when a human being begins with himself and insists on wanting to be himself, he excludes through his own will this other perspective, irrespective of whether or not he relates consciously to this other. To the extent that the other is covered over, or indeed consciously excluded from the self-relation, the misrelation between the self and the other will be reflected in the self-self-relation exclusively as a contradiction in the will. This contradiction is indeed repeated and transposed in a number of various aporias: in the relations between finitude and infinity, between possibility and necessity, between visible and invisible, and between inner and 122

He does however attribute the following insight to Heidegger: “It is only in Sein und Zeit that the following insight emerges: even when we do not want to be ourselves, we want – in the sense that this is a question of our Being (Sein)” (Michael Theunissen Der Begriff Verzweiflung, p. 47). If this claim is not limited to Being (“what we are” and “what we are not”), but is extended to include the self, it would however also apply to The Sickness unto Death – as a contradiction in the will. Besides this, Theunissen complains in a footnote on the same page that Kierkegaard never succeeds in getting the will to agree with reflection. But the conditio sine qua non for an analysis of despair is to hold fast to the disagreement between the will and reflection, and to analyze the reasons for this.

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outer. These contradictions establish the premises for the somewhat peculiar dialectical development of the text, and this means that if one fails to grasp the significance of precisely these contradictions and aporias, the dialectic and the logic in The Sickness unto Death will remain completely unclear and inaccessible. If we prescind entirely from the other, and refuse a priori to be concerned about the other as a problem, there will be some plausibility in Theunissen’s strategy – viz., to trace despair back to one single reason, the unwillingness of the self to be itself – but this does not entitle him to claim that it was this that Anti-Climacus “really” intended to say, if only Kierkegaard had understood his own theory. To begin from an alternative theory like this, and then point out logical errors in the analysis of despair, is an odd way to propose an interpretation. From Theunissen’s perspective, the problem of the will is only a subordinate question, relevant to some special instances of despair; it is no longer an “original” problem, as it appears in Anti-Climacus. And this is precisely why the difference between Theunissen and Anti-Climacus indicates why the contradiction plays such a basic role in Anti-Climacus’ “elaboration” of the problem of despair. He sees the two forms of despair as equally original (German gleichursprünglich) in the human psyche. This means that non-willing is deeply enmeshed in the despairing will; and correspondingly, the will to be oneself is enmeshed in the despairing non-will. An elaboration and a description of this complicated enmeshing is what we might call the scientific project in the book.123 The description is never wholly neutral or detached, for that would be far from the author’s ideal of science. It describes not only a state, but also human beings in this state. The monograph is written as a diagnosis which can also be applied to individuals. This gives the contradiction between the basic forms of despair an epistemological character which corresponds to one particular understanding of indirect communication. If the contradiction is dissolved, one not only destroys the problem around which The Sickness unto Death incessantly circles: one also destroys an interplay between the substantial problem and the mediation which is deeply anchored in Kierkegaard’s entire psychological and edificatory project. Theunissen’s interpretation of Kierkegaard is dialectically hairsplitting, especially in the final chapter (to which I shall return a little later), but still, there are logical and more general philosophical reasons 123

Cf. the subtitle: “A Christian psychological exposition for upbuilding and awakening” (SKS 11, 115 / SUD, 1).

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which make it difficult for me to accept it. As an alternative theory, it is a challenging approach, but I find the way in which he uses Kierkegaard’s text as a springboard for his own theory highly problematical. In his attempt to “cut out” that which is philosophically relevant in the analysis of despair, he ends up by cutting away those problems which are the most interesting from a philosophical point of view. Or are we permitted to apply the term “philosophy” only to that which can be presented in a consistent manner, free of contradictions? It is only when we take due account of the intersection between philosophy, psychology, and theology in Kierkegaard’s texts – although one need not refrain from pointing out the problems which such an intersection involves – that one can see the original and interesting aspects of these texts. This is true of his works as a whole, but applies perhaps in particular to The Sickness unto Death. In the contradiction and the paradox, some questions emerge even more clearly. It is therefore not without reason that despair is defined as a “tormenting contradiction,”124 and that Anti-Climacus repeatedly emphasizes the ambiguity of the phenomenon and writes about the “double dialectic” which characterizes all the symptoms of the sickness.125 One who speaks meaningfully about despair – not merely as a theory about what despair is, but also giving the impression of knowing from personal experience what it means to despair – will find it important to return to such a contradiction, a contradiction in the self.

§ 27 In the Name The relationship between the self and despair appears extremely ambiguous in chapter A.A. It is indeed true that despair can make one more deeply attentive to the self – but this does not mean that the discovery of despair gives a direct access to a deeper understanding of oneself. Despair is described as a hidden state, not only in the sense that it is difficult to detect, but also because its effect is to displace and confuse one’s self-understanding. The dialectic of the self is woven into this play, and this is why the dialectic is subject to the same interchange between clarification (or “revelation”) and a new concealment. According to Anti-Climacus, however, if we are to reach an “authentic” concept of despair, our attention must first be drawn to its hidden 124 125

Cf. SKS 11, 134 / SUD, 18. Cf. SKS 11, 131; 140 f. / SUD, 15; 24 f.

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dialectic – either by chance (when something “bumps into” one) or by reflection on the self.126 But since the dialectic is ambiguous, it is very probable that one will get it wrong, misunderstanding the relationship between the self and despair. As an epistemological problem, despair is a question about optical illusions, more or less as in Plato’s parable of the cave. How is one who himself leads a shadowy existence, and believes that the thinking and the language of the shadows is true, to recognize that appearances are deceptive? How does he discover that the shadows within him – or in the external environment – which he believes lead him to despair, are only the feeble beginning of a dialectic in which self-knowledge takes its starting point in the other? In Anti-Climacus, knowledge is further obscured by the one who knows, because he assumes that the human person willingly lets himself be confused and even holds fast to the optical illusion by his own will. Knowledge is made difficult by an aporia in the foundations of the self, and at the same time, the will encounters the same contradictory phenomenon. Nonetheless, despair also provides an occasion and a starting point for thinking about oneself as despairing (just as the grave offered an occasion for thinking about oneself and about one’s relation to death). In this context, the relations between the hidden and the visible, and between inner and outer, are particularly interesting; but in order to make a diagnosis of these relations, a certain sensitivity to the significance of external symptoms and of their ambiguity is required. I return to the text, and quote the continuation of the fifth section: If the despairing person is aware of his despair, as he thinks he is, and does not speak meaninglessly of it as of something that is happening to him (somewhat as one suffering from dizziness [Svimmel] speaks in nervous delusion of a weight on his head or of something that has fallen down on him, etc., a weight and a pressure that nevertheless are not something external but a reverse reflection of the internal) and now with all his power seeks to break the despair by himself and by himself alone – he is still in despair and with all his presumed effort only works himself all the deeper into deeper despair.127

Dizziness is an interesting example, both simple and illuminating. This is a dialectic between inner and outer, but the dialectic is presented through a picture: not as “a pure thought, but as a thought in the image.”128 The later diagnosis of the sickness unto death also usually takes its starting point in the exterior, but the author then attempts to show how the exterior symptoms are connected with the interior situ126 127 128

Cf. SKS 11, 166 / SUD, 51. SKS 11, 130 / SUD, 14. Isak Winkel Holm Tanken i billedet, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1998, p. 13.

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ation of the one who despairs. The quotation above shows, however, that the relation between inner and outer is not so simple as is sometimes claimed (viz., that the despair comes only from within, and displays itself in the exterior).129 This can be seen in the example of dizziness, a phenomenon which arises in a disproportion between inner and outer. The only question is whether the cause lies in the exterior, and creates a dizzy impression in the head, or lies in the interior and presses outwards, i. e. expresses itself as dizziness. In the first case, the dizziness is inexplicable, something that simply happens to one, and it is indeed often difficult to explain why one has become dizzy. According to the logic of the example, however, the inexplicability must be generated by an interior cause. Medically speaking, this Copernican revolution gives a somewhat more plausible explanation of the phenomenon of dizziness, when it is described as “a reversed reflection of what is inside him,” but the explanation does little to change the disproportion itself, since all that is involved here is the perspective on the disproportion. Open questions remain: What is the source of the dizziness? Is it due to one particular action, or to an optical illusion? Is it the result of a “contradiction” between outer and inner? Anti-Climacus abandons this example before arriving at a definitive definition of the causes. The example can be applied to despair, but then the transposition becomes the starting point for a new problem, which is formulated as follows. If the one who despairs believes that he knows what despair is and how it affects him – and if he wishes to try to remove the disproportion, and get rid of the despair, with his starting point in his own self, “[…] he is still in despair and with all his presumed effort only works himself all the deeper into deeper despair.” Accordingly, the will is a part of the problem, not of the solution. The disproportion between inner and outer remains unresolved, but forms part of the aporetic relation between willing and not willing to be oneself. Once again, this is an aporia which remains unresolved, because the self-relation forms part of a difference, the “primal dif129

Cf. e. g. Michael Theunissen Der Begriff Verzweiflung, pp. 95 f. It is true that some remarks by Anti-Climacus point in this direction (e. g. SKS 11, 132; 168 f. / SUD, 16; 53 f.), but these are always polemic against the view that despair affects a person by chance, and that the presence or absence of despair is a question of unhappiness or happiness. Anti-Climacus himself takes a far different view. He can indeed speak of despair as an illness, as something that causes suffering to the one who despairs; but even in such passages, there is an interplay between action and suffering. This in turn can be seen in the misrelation, especially in the misrelation between inner and outer, which I will discuss in greater detail below.

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ference,” between the self and the other. This is why despair does not help resolve these misrelations and aporias, but instead helps hold them fast. The fact that the contradictions are held fast means that the question about the human person is likewise kept open. This question breaks up the first construction of the human person, and this means that the questions about the self, about the other, and about the spirit, are repeated and posed in continually changing ways: The misrelation [Misforhold] of despair is not a simple misrelation, but a misrelation in a relation [Misforhold i et Forhold] that relates itself to itself, and has been posited by another, so that the misrelation in that relation which is for itself [for sig] also reflects itself infinitely in the relation to the power that posited it.130

As I understand it, the goal of this introductory chapter is not to present a fully fledged theory of the self, which could then be defended; nor is it the proleptic result of a comprehensive “negativistic” investigation.131 Rather, the point is to formulate a problem. The elaboration of this problem will then reveal how complicated the self is in itself. However, one point in this elaboration is kept open – or better, there is an opening, a rift which points towards a zero point antecedent to thinking: this is the foundation and origin of the self, the relation to “the power that posited it.” It is obvious from the context – both the foreword and the following chapter A.B – that this refers to a relation to God; but Anti-Climacus takes great care to avoid the name of God in this context, and I do not believe that this is by chance. The author does not give any explicit reason why he avoids the name “God” in chapter A.A, speaking instead of “the other” and “the power that posited it.” Let me therefore make a qualified guess, based on 130 131

SKS 11, 130 / cf. SUD, 14. Cf. Michael Theunissen Das Selbst auf dem Grund der Verzweiflung, pp. 24 f. The main thesis in this study is precisely that Kierkegaard’s dialectical method is “negativistic” – both in the sense that his starting point when he writes about the self is the “negative” phenomenon of despair, and also with the consequence that the theory of the self is not presented directly, but always via various twists and distortions of the self-relationship. Theunissen holds that the result which we do look for in vain at the end of the book is anticipated or prefixed at the beginning: it is presented in chapter A.A and is gradually explicated as the treatise unfolds. Arne Grøn too accepts the negativism thesis in his dissertation Subjektivitet og negativitet: Kierkegaard. The negativism thesis is undeniably interesting, although it tends towards a speculation about what happened “in the author’s head.” However, I question the concept of negativity which is linked to “negative phenomena,” especially in the form in which this is presented by Grøn, pp. 49 f. At any rate, it seems to me insufficiently radical – especially with regard to negativity in language and to one particular form of negative theology. Cf. § 36 for further discussion.

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the logic and structure of this chapter. The designation “the other” is connected to the aporetic theory of the self. This means that when the name “God” is strikingly absent, the name of God, or the human person’s attempts to define God – and thereby the entire linguistic economy which goes back to God and refers to him – itself becomes problematic.132 I believe that this absence more strongly emphasizes the significance of God’s alterity. As the origin of language, as the basis for dialectics, as the starting point of the relation between “inner” and “outer,” God’s unfathomable otherness must be underlined – or perhaps we should say “overlined” by means of a “doubled cruciform crossing out” (doppelt kreuzweise Durchstreichung),133 since the theological and philosophical understanding of this name has been overtaken by a linguistic counterfeiting. This is one of the aspects of the “optical illusion” which must be questioned here. This indicates something of the depth of the problem, perhaps especially the epistemological problem; from the perspective of the one 132

133

Cf. Derrida’s problematization of a name, a title, and a designation that one does not want, for reasons of freedom, gift, and authority: “Conversely, suppose that X does not want your name or your title; suppose that, for one reason or another, X emancipates itself and chooses another name, carrying out a kind of reiterated weaning of the original weaning; although your narcissism, doubly wounded, will find itself enriched thereby to the same extent. That which bears, has borne, shall have borne your name appears sufficiently free, powerful, creative, and autonomous to live alone and to dispense radically with you and with your name. It is the task of your name, of the secret of your name, to be able to disappear in your name. And hence not to return to itself, which is the condition of the gift (for example, of the name) but also of every expansion of oneself, of every auctoritas” (Jacques Derrida Passions, Paris: Éditions Galilée 1993, pp. 32 f.). As a doubled cruciform crossing out, the problem of nihilism is also an integral dimension of the question about the self, as a “line” of despair, death, and sickness unto death. In this instance, Michael Theunissen is completely correct to identify the dawning nihilism as a presupposition for The Sickness unto Death, and this is one of the genuinely acute observations in Der Begriff Verzweiflung. The account he gives of Sartre’s dependence on Kierkegaard is convincing, and I accept this; but in the case of Heidegger, I do not agree with Theunissen’s identification of the problem as the relationship between Sein and das Seiende in Sein und Zeit. I believe that the problem concerns the topology of the “line” in Martin Heidegger Zur Seinsfrage (1956), 4th ed., Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann 1977. The problem is posed differently in Kierkegaard because it is not a question of beings, Being, and nothing, but rather of the self, the other, and the sickness unto death. Jean-Luc Marion and Jacques Derrida transpose the problem to a “negative theology,” and probably bring the whole problem somewhat closer to Kierkegaard, through the mediation of a problem posed in Dionysius the Areopagite. Cf. Jean-Luc Marion God Without Being, tr. by Thomas A. Carlson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1991), pp. 61-83, and Jacques Derrida Psyché: Inventions de l’autre, pp. 588-592.

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who despairs, however, this throws light especially on the problem of the will.134 This involves a rewriting of the language we employ in everyday speech and thought. The beginning of the self, its origin, is the problem that must be tackled. And for thought, for the despairing person who reflects on himself as a self-relation, this other becomes visible only in an aporia – and then in other traces on the rear side of the self, as the “infinite reflection” of a misrelation. If I am correct, this means that a fundamental not-knowing or ignorance in relation to God is made the starting point for all self-knowledge. The deconstruction of the self begins in an Urdifferenz (“original difference”) between the self and the other. And on the basis of this unknown origin, with this “X” as the point of refraction, AntiClimacus problematizes his contemporaries’ dominant theory of the self, by maintaining the Socratic not-knowing even in the case of all self-knowledge. This not-knowing is the starting point which enables him to identify the optical illusion, the starting point for the double ambiguity. Anti-Climacus repeatedly attempts to show why the human person is a riddle to his own self, even when one formulates a profound, academic, and consistent philosophical theory about what a human being is, and even when the human being is regarded from the highest perspective, as spirit. Anti-Climacus claims that the spirit is sick. It suffers from a contradiction in the will, which in turn causes the many misrelations in the human person’s relation to himself. And even when the many confusing optical illusions and self-deceptions are cleared up, we are still left with the aporia of the self and the ambiguity of the theory, because ultimately, the foundations themselves remain hidden – and all the contradictions and misrelations point to this, as an excluded foundation in the self-relation. In this “paradox,” in the aporia of the self, “an end is made fast” in the thread.135 In other words, the “X” indicated above stands for “paradox.” It is from this 134

135

Thus, the epistemological problem also finds expression through the will to power, the will to be oneself, against everything else – including “the power that posited (the self).” Cf. Martin Heidegger Zur Seinsfrage, pp. 32 f.: “The movement to an ever decreasing fullness and originality within the realm of Beings (Seiender) as a whole is not only accompanied, but also determined by a growth of the will to power. The will to power is the will that wills itself.” “[F]or speculation’s secret in comprehending is simply to sew without fastening the end and without knotting the thread, and this is why, wonder of wonders, it can go on sewing and sewing, that is, pulling the thread through. Christianity, on the other hand, fastens the end by means of the paradox” (SKS 11, 206 / SUD, 93). We should note how Anti-Climacus uses the metaphor of sewing a textile for reflective thinking.

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point that the questions are posed. Our three leitmotifs start from this “X”: What is the self? What is the spirit? What is the human person? This means, of course, that we are still entitled to wonder why AntiClimacus so passionately holds fast to the paradox. One factor is the possibility of discovering another way to relate to the self, to the self and to the other: a different kind of understanding, not only of the other, but also of the self – a self which has its foundations in the other. In the sixth and last section of A.A, Anti-Climacus writes about the possibility for a self without despair: For this is the formula that describes the state of the self, when despair is completely eradicated: in relating itself to itself, and in willing to be itself, the self grounds (grunder) transparently in the power that posited it.136

This formula is surprisingly short and simple, if we compare it to the complicated theory about the self which was discussed in the first five sections of A.A. A possibility of relating differently to oneself is formulated in one simple sentence. This formula has however no direct relationship to the misrelations and contradictions which have been described in the text; accordingly, I interpret its primary significance as the expression of the author’s intention to hold fast to the possibility, the definitively different possibility of being a self, i. e. of being oneself. In the chapter as a whole, this sixth section is the counterpart to the extended title in which Anti-Climacus has introduced despair as a sickness in the spirit. The problem is not resolved; it is merely confronted with another possibility. And precisely this other possibility does not dissolve the paradox: rather, a solid “knot is tied in the thread,” so that this possibility too “fastens the end” in the paradox.137 As soon as the definitive difference between the self and the other is removed and reduced to the self, there no longer exists any definitively different possibility of being oneself. In order to indicate this possibility as a qualitatively different possibility, and to get some idea of a way of thinking and understanding that poses fundamental questions vis-à-vis the presuppositions of the speculative philosophy, the one who knows must at least come so far, in his attempt to know himself, that he encounters the question about the other. When Anti-Climacus insists on the significance of the other, this helps to make the wellknown foreign, suspending one’s immediate understanding of what it is to be a human being. The concept “human being” is replaced by the unknown: x. We find a similar x-emplification of the human being in 136 137

SKS 11, 130 / cf. SUD, 14. Cf. SKS 11, 206 / SUD, 93.

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other passages in Kierkegaard’s writings, both in Philosophical Fragments138 and in The Concept of Anxiety.139 The logic in the examples is that everyone knows what it is to be a human being – but then encounters the possibility of another way of reflecting on the question, which makes everything that one knows uncertain. We find a similar logic in chapter A.A, and this logic is paradigmatic for the whole epistemology that underlies The Sickness unto Death. According to Anti-Climacus, the phenomenon of despair is constituted in such a way that if one wishes to include it as a fundamental phenomenon in the understanding of the self, one is obliged to pose a whole number of questions with regard to one’s immediate relation to one’s own self; one is compelled to consider the possibility of an optical illusion and a self-deception. One can then begin to reflect dialectically on a misrelation in the self, despair at this, reflect on the reciprocal intersection of knowledge and will – and thus be obliged to return again and again to the “double crossing-out” of the self, to the unknown X in the foundation.

§ 28 X It is precisely an X of this kind that underlies my understanding of the dialectic in chapter A.A. Anti-Climacus has borrowed from Idealistic philosophy the dialectical starting point for his reflection on the self. This means that the Idealistic understanding of synthesis underlies the way in which the self is structured, and the logic of this thinking is mirrored in the first two sections. In the remaining sections, however, this structure is interrupted, and this logic is broken up, by the unknown other and by an aporia in the self which cannot be resolved in a Hegelian synthesis. This also problematizes the transition from a Socratic to a Hegelian dialectic. As long as the “positive” unity is missing, the result is a discrepancy between these two models of dialectical reflection. The unity remains “negative.” It remains a problem to which the author continually returns in what follows. With regard to the will, this finds expression as a chronic contradiction between 138

139

“Let the learner be X, and this X must also include the lowliest […]. In order for unity to be effected, the god must become like this one” (SKS 4, 238 / PF, 31). “The demonic is inclosing reserve, the demonic is anxiety about the good. Let the inclosing reserve be x, and its content x, denoting the most terrible, the most insignificant, the horrible, whose preference in life few even dream about, but also the trifles to which noone pays attention. What then is the significance of the good as x? It signifies disclosure” (SKS 4, 427 f. / CA, 126 f.).

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wanting and not wanting to be oneself – but in neither case does one actually become oneself. With regard to the other, it finds expression as a sickness and a rift in the spirit, which is the starting point for this Phänomenologie des Geistestodes. If we see the fifth section as a counterpart to the first, and compare them, we can observe how the construction of the self is completely shattered. The aporia of the will and the dependence on the other become a double starting point for a deconstruction of the self which finds expression in the fourth and fifth sections of A.A. This deconstruction is certainly not a play with words, unless one sees it as a game where life itself is at stake, where it can be lost or won – as always, this is an either/or.140 Nor does the deconstruction mean that the self can be dissolved or constructed arbitrarily; and it certainly does not mean that the other can be suspended as absurd. It is “absurd” only in the sense that it is incommensurable with one particular form of dialectical thinking, since it constitutes a type of presupposition which breaks down the logic in the dialectical system. At the same time, however, this other rationality of the self lives from, and must therefore be seen as a supplement to, the Idealistic dialectic. It accompanies the building-up of the self, in the construction both of the self and of rationality – up to a certain point. But it is on this point that everything depends, a point that is scarcely a “point” but is rather a caesura, a rift, a breach. Departing from this rift, the dialectic is problematized by an aporia; it is broken up by the definitive alterity of the other. This is what deconstruction means here: a contrary logic, a different way of thinking, which is put forward as a counterpart to the first way of thinking. Construction and deconstruction thus interact in a type of rationality where they remain reciprocally dependent, and neither of them is dissolved. This structure is marked very clearly in the text, by means of the division into various sections. Since the fifth section is much longer than the others, one may perhaps not notice this structure on the first reading. But as soon as one examines more closely the structure of the contents of the text – or the texture, which is woven into the text as a guide, with the questions about the human person, the self, and the spirit – a pattern becomes clearly visible. This pattern can be illustrated as follows, through the division into a superscript, five sections, and a “subscript” (is this also a signature in the self?): 140

Cf. the remarks on deconstruction, the impossible, and risk in “Sauf le nom”: Jacques Derrida On the Name, p. 43.

188

IV. Alterity and Autopsia (0) Title: A.A. Despair is a sickness in the spirit, in the self (1) The human person is a synthesis of contradictions (2) The self as the “positive” third (3) The other (4) The doubling of the self-relation (5) Through despair, the synthesis becomes a misrelation (6) The formula for the self which grounds transparently in the other

In an article about the structure in the first part of The Sickness unto Death, Nils Jørgen Cappelørn has written about a chiasmus between the superscript to the entire section A and the superscript to chapter A.A.141 The superscript to section A reads: “The sickness unto death is despair,” while that to chapter A.A reads: “That despair is the sickness unto death.” Between these two stands only an A (for “Aanden” (the Spirit), or “et Andet” (another)), which is crossed out by the chiasmus. Our analysis shows that this chiasmus in the superscription seems to repeat itself on the structural level in chapter A.A, where it is “another” (et Andet) that is crossed out by the structural chiasmus. The author returns in the “subscript” to the problem which is formulated in the superscript – although I do not believe that the problem is really solved. He returns in the fifth section to the formulation of the synthesis in the first section, when he describes how the misrelation in the self’s relation to itself leads to a misrelation in which “[…] the misrelation in that relation which is for itself (for sig) also reflects itself infinitely in the relation to the power that posited it.”142 Between the various parts of the synthesis, we now find something infinite that breaks up the synthesis into a misrelation. When we look at the second and fourth sections, we see that the former introduces a distinction between the self as a negative and as a positive unity; in the fourth section, this distinction is problematized and doubled by the two basic forms of despair. And between all these sections, which are organized in pairs, we find Anti-Climacus’ either/or: either the self has posited itself, or it is posited by another. This could of course have been constructed as a dialectical or literary highpoint in this textual passage, but I have deliberately included a letter in the schematic reproduction, a letter which I believe has left its mark on the structure of the chapter as a whole. This is the Greek letter chi (µ), which organizes this entire text as a chiasmus – not on the level of propositions, but on the structural level, so that the division or disjunction or dissection between the self and the other takes place in the very heart of 141

142

Cf. Niels Jørgen Cappelørn “Am Anfang steht die Verzweiflung des Spießbürgers,” p. 136. SKS 11, 130 / cf. SUD, 14.

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the intersection.143 Strangely enough, I have never seen this structuring of the text in the secondary literature, not even as a transition from the construction of the self to a problematization of the self.144 It has gradually become a matter of common knowledge that Kierkegaard likes to use the chiasmus as a rhetorical figure,145 and I shall return to the significance of such chiasmuses later in the present book. This analysis shows that it is also possible to trace an X that has made its mark on the basic structure of the text and thus gives space for an aporetic discourse about the self, i. e. spaces the discourse about the self by opening a room for the relation to the other in the self’s relation to itself. It is precisely here that we find the special element in Anti-Climacus’ approach to the question whether it is possible to establish a theory about the self when this theory is to take its starting point in the other: for it is by means of such a crossing of the structure that the question about the human person and the question about the self are posed in a new way. Through this question, the question about the other, as the presupposition and foundation of the self, is also posed – and this last question entails a repetition and a doubling of the first question, so that it is also problematized in the following way: How is the question about the human person, about the self, about the spirit, posed when 143

144

145

A chiasmus is first of all a rhetorical figure which occurs when a sentence is organized according to the pattern a-b-b-a. Many examples can be found in the Book of Psalms and in Hebrew poetry in general. Gradually, the term has come to be applied in the literary criticism of the Bible also to the patterns in larger textual units, such as the Psalms or passages in the Letters of Paul. In the superscript, therefore, we find a rhetorical chiasmus, and I am convinced that the existence of a structural chiasmus in chapter A.A can be demonstrated. Cf. e. g. Theunissen’s first book about The Sickness unto Death, where he divides the beginning into three parts: the first section on its own, then a passage which goes as far as the description of the two basic forms of despair, and finally the rest of the text (with the exception of the formula for the eradication of despair): Michael Theunissen Das Selbst auf dem Grund der Verzweiflung, pp. 22 f. Ringleben attaches greater weight to the relationship to the other, but he does not draw attention to the relationship between construction and deconstruction: Joachim Ringleben Die Krankheit zum Tode von Sören Kierkegaard, pp. 41-95. Similarly, Glenn and Hannay overlook this doubling of the self-relationship which leaves its mark on the structure; this leads Glenn to read the introduction in the light of the theory of stages, while Hannay problematizes the reflexive self-relationship in the definition of the self as spirit: cf. John D. Glenn “The Definition of the Self and the Structure of Kierkegaard’s Work” in International Kierkegaard Commentary: The Sickness unto Death, ed. by Robert L. Perkins, Macon, Georgia: Mercer University Press 1987, pp. 5-22; Alastair Hannay “Spirit and the Idea of the Self as a Reflexive Relation,” pp. 31-37. Cf. Jacob Bøggild “Chiasmens kors: korsets chiasmer” in K&K 83 (1997), pp. 29-45.

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it is to be posed with its starting point in the other, which is the doubly crossed-out foundation of the self? In this case, the repeated question is posed through the aporia of the self, which in turn is closely connected to despair, to the sickness unto death. As I emphasized in Chapter Three, death is already an ambiguous phenomenon for Kierkegaard, but through despair, this aporia is integrated in a contradictory manner into the self’s relation to itself. This means that the question what a human being is, is left as an unsolved problem, a double question about the self and about the other. But the aporia also means that the relationship between construction and deconstruction remains open. This relation goes back to an unknown X, to the difference between the self and the other, and is at the same time reflected in the texture as a Greek chi. The texture itself thus voices a question, and voices it in a very specific manner: What is a human being? It is here that the reader enters the text (or vice versa) and must pose the question with regard to his or her own self-understanding. But it is never a matter of indifference how a question is put. The texture gives a little hint about the context that underlies Anti-Climacus’ formulation of the question. The trace in the texture points in the direction of a translation, from the Latin X to the Greek µ. Along with the question about the self, the problem of truth is also problematized – a problem which Kierkegaard always locates in the point of intersection between philosophy and theology. As early as his Master’s dissertation On the Concept of Irony (1841), this is formulated as a discussion of the relationship between Socrates and Christ, where the principle thesis is: “The similarity between Christ and Socrates consists primarily in the dissimilarity.”146 In Philosophical Fragments and the Postscript, Socrates and Christ represent fundamentally different ways of knowing the truth, and the problem returns once again here in the opening chapter of The Sickness unto Death. In Greek, and with a starting point in ancient Greek philosophy, this question represents a challenge to break out of the systematic understanding of what a human being is, conscious of one’s own deficient understanding: I know that I know nothing. In an aporetic non-knowing of this kind, we find the most important similarity (similitudo) between a thinking based on ±ÜÈÏ¿ÒÃÐ and one which takes µÏ½ÑÒÍÐ as its starting point. The decisive dissimilarity (dissimilitudo) lies hidden in a X. 146

“Similitudo Christum inter et Socratem in dissimilitudine præcipue est posita” (SKS 1, 65 / cf. CI, 5 f.).

V. Dialectics of Darkness

– Bøygen, Peer Gynt! En eneste én. Det er Bøygen som er sårløs, og Bøygen som fikk mén. Det er Bøygen som er død, og Bøygen som lever. Henrik Ibsen

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In the analysis of the introductory chapter A.A, I drew attention to the two dialectical models which play an important role in The Sickness unto Death, the Socratic and the Hegelian. In the rest of section A and throughout section B, however, Kierkegaard means something else when he writes about dialectics and “the dialectical.” Dialectic here explicitly denotes a linguistic turn (more than a century before the linguistic turn) or a linguistic twist, as an attempt to uncover a language behind language. It can seem as if the self is meant to “come into existence” by discovering a new language behind the “vulgar” or common language. Hence, the emphasis lies just as much on the grammar and rhetoric of the self as on its logic, which is traditionally connected more closely to dialectic. The dialectical development in the chapters A.B, A.C, and B resembles the epistemological metabolê (literally, “turning around”) of the human person which Socrates describes in the parable of the cave: the one who sits in the cave and looks at shadowy images believes that he sees the whole of reality, but that which he takes to be real turns out to be a pale reflection of the light that exists outside.1 Nevertheless, it is precisely there, in the cave, that the dialectic must begin; it is there that child of knowledge must be delivered. In the present chapter, I shall concentrate on the understanding of dialectics which Anti-Climacus elaborates in the first half of Part One, from chapter A.B through C.A. Thereby I will seek to identify the origin of the dialectics of despair. In that context, I shall emphasize especially the expression “sickness unto death” and analyse the text carefully in order to identify the hypothesis underlying the scientific investigation in Kierkegaard’s late opus magnum. Then I will return to the Cartesian doubt in order to study the relationship between doubt and despair in chapter C.A. Kierkegaard raises the question of rationality in a radical sense, thus the peculiar interconnection between reason and madness once more comes into consideration, putting the entire rationality of the self at risk.

§ 29 Double Dialectics of Despair The physician who occasionally turns up in The Sickness unto Death functions as a midwife to the self. Like Socrates, he is acquainted with the inner life of human beings, and knows how to get the despair into the open: “The physician knows that just as there is a sickness that is 1

Cf. Plato, Republic 514a-517a, and the interpretation, ibid. 517a-519b.

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mere imagination, so too there is good health which is mere imagination; accordingly, in the latter case he begins by applying remedies that will make the sickness visible.”2 The physician knows a different reality from the shadow-theater that goes on inside the cave: in other words, he is able to see a connection between the exterior and the interior world. He knows, however, that the language which describes existence in another way, taking the knowledge of the Good as its point of departure, is not immediately comprehensible to those who are down in the cave. This means that the physician’s task is to give a diagnosis of the sickness, but preferably in such a way that the diagnosis also functions as a dialogue. The disease called “sickness unto death” eludes an unambiguous definition; it confuses language, rather than clarifying it. This is why the physician must apply remedies in order that the sickness may become visible. He must attempt to find a language that communicates, even among the shadows. And it is here that the dialectic begins, with a diagnosis of the blindness of the one who despairs and the linguistic confusion about what is health and what is sickness. 3 The words “dialectics” and “dialectical” occur in four different contexts in the two first main chapters, A and B:4 possibility/actuality of despair – as condition for the coming-into-existence of the self;5 (ii) sickness/normality – the diagnosis of language and self-deception;6 (iii) visible/concealed – the hidden and broken character of despair in the Platonic cave;7 (iv) spirit/mind-body – the spirit remains hidden and ambiguous in relation to body and mind.8 (i)

We could also have made a dialectical analysis of the relationship between the temporal and the eternal,9 between inner and outer,10 between the self and the other, etc., but here we shall keep focus on these 2 3

4 5

6

7 8 9 10

SKS 11, 139 / cf. SUD, 23. Cf. the motto for the work as a whole, which is borrowed from Zinzendorf: “Lord, give us weak eyes / for things of little worth / and eyes clear-sighted /in all of your truth” (SKS 11, 116 / SUD, 3). SKS 11, 129-144 / SUD, 13-28. “Is despair an advantage or a deficiency? Purely dialectically, it is both” (SKS 11, 130 / cf. SUD, 14). “The vulgar view also overlooks the fact that despair is dialectical in another way than what we otherwise call ‘sickness,’ because it is a sickness of the spirit” (SKS 11, 140 / cf. SUD, 24). Cf. SKS 11, 140 f. / SUD, 24 f. Cf. SKS 11, 141 / SUD, 25. Cf. SKS 11, 140 / SUD, 24. Cf. SKS 11, 130 / SUD, 14.

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four topics, which are explicitly described as dialectical. In the course of main chapters A and B, these different dialectics are woven into one another, but the text itself does not make it clear whether there is one of these dialectics which is primary, and therefore organizes the others. There is certainly a connection, but the author does not give us a clear account of what this connection is. Nor is it obvious what the specifically dialectical element is, apart from the fact that all these structures I have mentioned are double structures. In all four examples, however, it seems that the dialectical element breaks up a supposed immediacy by introducing an element of reflection – “reflection” not only in the general sense of thinking about something, but more specifically as a mirroring of a concept in relation to its antithesis. This puts the concept in a different perspective, and the tension between the two opens up a difference which is reflected in several strata of meanings. Thus, the dialectic does not introduce a necessary development from one concept to another; on the contrary, the dialectical element opens up the possibility of a certain trembling (“dizziness”) and ambiguity in the concepts and the language applied. The dialectic questions the immediacy of the immediate, the grantedness of that which is taken for granted, and the normality of the normal. Let us therefore begin with the second point, the dialectic between sickness and normality. Anti-Climacus understands what is normally considered normal as sick; and what is otherwise regarded as sickness may very well turn out to be a sign of health. At any rate, the sickness consists in something very different from what the sick person himself believes. In other words, the author is launching a subversive understanding of the relationship between sickness and normality, where the “sickness unto death” is normal, while that which is supposed to be normality must be diagnosed on the basis of the supposition that the sickness is concealed. It is this subversive understanding of sickness and health that he calls dialectical. In this dialectic, words take on a different meaning than they usually possess, while still retaining their customary meaning. An ambiguity, a difference, is inserted into every concept, with the result that a transferred meaning can be sensed behind its usual meaning. However, this state of affairs remains hidden. It differentiates and doubles language without itself becoming visible. That which is hidden comes into sight in the linguistic rifts, but it cannot be held fast by means of a precise definition. The dialectic reflects the inadequacy of language to give a precise definition, i. e. to make a certain diagnosis, of the sickness. If one at-

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tempts to elaborate a pathology on the basis of a direct connection between symptoms and sickness, one may perhaps describe a psychological or physical suffering, but one will not be describing the “sickness unto death.” Despair is described as “doubly” dialectic: in other words, there is a second dialectic which eludes the grasp of the first: “Despair is not only dialectically different from a sickness, but in relation to despair, all the symptoms are dialectical, and therefore the superficial observation so easily disappoints in its endeavor to determine whether or not despair is present.”11 Once again, we find a double structure: the double dialectic opens up a space for analysis between soul and body, a space for “spirit,” which cannot be identified either with the sickness of the soul or with the sickness of the body. Accordingly, the dialectic of despair is not only psychological – it is pneumatological. However, the spirit is precisely that which the self cannot posit on its own. The diagnosis of the sickness of the spirit and the account given of the dialectic of the spirit (iv) occur in the field of tension between the self’s relationship to itself and the self’s relationship to the other. The attempt at a diagnosis thus opens up a dialectic between that which is immediately visible, i. e. the “superficial” way of looking at things, and that which is immediately hidden, i. e. the subversive understanding of the relationship between sickness and health. Within this dialectic, security and reliability can be symptoms of very divergent states. Most commonly, security is the expression of a “happy” ignorance – one thinks one is healthy, although there is a hidden despair under the surface. But security can also be a sign that despair has been overcome. The problem consists in making a diagnosis, in acquiring insight into how the sickness affects the person and how it develops. Sickness and indisposition are, however, not much simpler than health, since: “Here again the indisposition is likewise dialectical.”12 According to Anti-Climacus, the dialectic of feeling unwell reveals that the state of the human person, considered as spirit, is always critical, both with regard to sickness and with regard to health. Under the calm of normality, there yawns a krisis, an unstable and at the same time decisive state where life and death are at stake. It is precisely this decisive crisis which once again draws a caesura through the self – in the case of the “sickness unto death,” we could indeed speak of a dissection. The significance of this dissection corresponds to the dissension that Derrida believed he could demonstrate in the “original” separation between reason and madness: 11 12

SKS 11, 140 / cf. SUD, 24. SKS 11, 141 / cf. SUD, 25.

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The Decision, through a single act, links and separates reason and madness, and it must be understood at once both as the original act of an order, a fiat, a decree, and as a schism, a caesura, a separation, a dissection. I would prefer to speak of a dissension, to underline that in question is a self-dividing action, a cleavage and torment interior to meaning [sens] in general, interior to logos in general, a division within the very act of sentire. As always, the dissension is internal. The outside (is) the inside, is the fission that produces and divides it along the lines of the Hegelian Entzweiung.13

The crisis draws a border, a line, a caesura through the self. As I have pointed out, it opens an interior room for reflection on the self. This is the expression of a self-division of the self (Entzweiung) in the Hegelian sense: the “outside” (is) the “inside.” The division of the self is thus the same as in a Hegelian dialectic. But like the limit between reason and madness, the limit between health and sickness is a limit that the self is unable to draw. This limit concerns the self’s possibility of reflection upon itself – and the sickness sits in the eye that sees. The dialectic points out beyond the normal distinction between normality and sickness. It twists language around and compels the reader to appropriate a different and subversive understanding of rather ordinary linguistic connections. This is one way of creating space in language, by breaking up the clearly defined meaning of concepts. Every linguistic designation receives a false bottom, so to speak, and this is why the meaning of words will depend on the situation and the appropriation. The author does indeed retain responsibility for the meaning contained in the text and for the elaboration of a description of sickness, but at the same time he waives responsibility for the meaning of the text. In a certain sense, the text becomes autonomous. It follows its own law, its own syntax and syn-tactics. The text opens up an ambiguous space where the meaning interacts with the reader’s self-understanding. If the reader is sure that he is healthy in the normal sense, the text makes the claim that there are other forms of sickness than those that are displayed in immediate physical or psychological symptoms. The “sickness unto death” remains chronically hidden from the eyes of the vulgar explanation of when a human being is sick and when he is well – but the krisis of sickness nevertheless opens up a rift for experiences of sickness, i. e. experiences of aporias. Thus, it is not the self that defines the beginning of the dialectic, nor is it the human person who posits the separation or establishes a synthesis among contradictions. The dialectic begins as a reflection on the experiences one has had, on the aporias which have already found a space in the self’s experiences of itself. 13

Jacques Derrida L’écriture et la différence, p. 62 / Writing and Difference, pp. 38 f. Translation modified.

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The dialectic between hidden and visible (iii) is thus played out by means of the dialectical description of sickness and normality (ii). We can however also observe a corresponding problematization of the dialectic between the possibility and the actuality of despair (i). Here, the terminology is somewhat closer to that of classical philosophy, but Kierkegaard takes care to mark the differences: confirmation becomes denial, progress is a step backwards, a rise becomes a fall, etc. The main point, however, is not that he thinks in the opposite way to other dialecticians (since for example the original division into two corresponds to the Hegelian Entzweiung), but that the dialectic does not follow the same methodological development (not even in a purely negative sense). This means that the philosophical system too must be broken up through a subversive dialectic. When Kierkegaard writes in sections A and B about a dialectical understanding of the spirit (iv), the primary implication is that he employs a subversive rift in language to point to a different origin for the self and for knowledge. But when he calls this the dialectic of the spirit, he thereby indicates that this introductory shift of language will have wideranging consequences for the entire economy of language. It will also have consequences with regard to how one approaches the beginning of thought, its “Ur-Sprung,” since the spirit is the organizing principle within the humanities (Geisteswissenschaften, literally, the “sciences of the spirit”), where philosophy and theology are considered to be the most important disciplines, as well as within the scientific psychology which was emerging at that period. But it is here, in a subversive understanding of language, that the collapse begins. And if it does not begin here, it will remain without consequences in any other sense. I believe that the subversive understanding of language and the double dialectic not only allow us to see a transposition of the Hegelian dialectic, but also a fundamental doubt about the ability of dialectics to give an account of the human person’s relationship to himself. This doubt lies on a deeper level than a mere criticism of individual aspects. As I understand this dialectic, Anti-Climacus is looking for a path back to a different origin, or at least to a very different understanding (or non-understanding) of this origin – and this entails a different beginning for philosophy, for language, and for the self. Nevertheless, this movement towards a different beginning takes place within the Hegelian dialectic, through the experience of a contradiction, through various experiences of despair. So far, it is difficult to perceive any systematic organization of the four forms of dialectic which Anti-Climacus takes up in sections A

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and B. The claim that he maintains the perspective of the spirit as his basic approach suggests that the dialectic of the spirit (iv) is the most fundamental. The difference between sickness and normality (ii), between visible and hidden (iii), and the transition from possibility to actuality (i) cannot however be assigned places in a dialectical hierarchy. Rather, we must say that the other three differences disturb and decentralize the thinking. These are not differences which find resolution in a higher unity, but rather contradictions which elude a logical definition within the dialectic of the self. Before we analyze these dialectics further systematically, however, I will focus on the rhetorical aspects of what has been elaborated up to now, of what Kierkegaard elsewhere calls the dialectic of communication. The subversive dialectic of language, and writing as a differentiating aspect of language, can lay the foundations for another perspective, a doubled perspective on knowledge. At the same time, however, this lays down some very clear limitations on what it is possible to communicate in this way, and to what authority the author can appeal. One who wishes to unmask what he believes to be an illusion must expect to encounter some resistance on the part of those who believe it to be true. Similarly, Anti-Climacus must assume a measure of resistance against the subversive understanding of words such as “sickness” and “normality,” and the same applies to what he writes about the broken dialectic of the spirit. The dialectical point would disappear if he merely criticized the Hegelian dialectic or the “vulgar” understandings of the relationship between normality and sickness, between the visible and the hidden. His presentation always relates to – and reflects – the illusion (German Schein) it is intended to unmask. As an expression of the dialectic of communication, this is one way of opening up language, undermining the reader’s immediate confidence in linguistic contexts by means of the subversive element, and using the writing to draw the attention to a difference which comes on the reader from behind.14 This is the great advantage of writing, as an indirect communication which leaves it up to the reader himself to be drawn between the perspectives. Here, we can once again glimpse Anti-Climacus’ Socratic ideal. If he is right to understand himself as a midwife, he must entrust the reader with responsibility. He can indeed analyze despair, point out 14

Cf. the original title of the first section of the book: “Thoughts that wound from behind – for edification” (NB4:76 in SKS 20, 324).

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the contradictions, and make some diagnoses, but he is neither able nor willing to write out prescriptions: for it is at this point that the book meets its boundary. The subversive dialectic can uncover a disproportion, and indicate that the problem is due to an absence – an absence of spirit. In this way, the diagnosis can uncover and problematize the despair; and to the extent that the reader understands what is at stake here – not merely as a theoretical reflection on reason and madness, sickness and normality, but as an analysis of experiences that most human beings would recognize – the book has already opened up a space for self-reflection. But the diagnosis, qua diagnosis, cannot make the sickness stop; the book cannot resolve the contradiction or replace the absence with a presence. It stops short at a certain aporia, a certain impossibility. It stops short at despair, i. e. at superficial or more decisive experiences of aporias.

§ 30 The Rhetorical Abyss of a “Sickness unto Death” Although the category of “despair” breaks up the stability of the relationship between classical metaphysical categories such as possibility and actuality, being and existence, freedom and necessity, and although despair remains indefinable in relation to these antitheses, it can still count as a diagnosis and as a psychological category. It becomes the starting point for one particular form of dialectical reflection – or perhaps better, for an aporetology. Things become even more complicated, however, when Anti-Climacus sets out to define this category in relation to another expression, viz. “the sickness unto death.” This is not just any expression: it is the title of the whole book and plays a central role in the definition of a problem. This expression was elaborated in the Introduction and we are told in the superscription to A.A: “Despair is the sickness unto death.” This affirmation is repeated in A.C, but the expression is given prominence by means of quotation marks: “Despair is: ‘the sickness unto death’.” The quotation marks draw the reader’s attention to the rhetorical device, indicating how the expression itself is to be understood. The author himself underlines this in the first sentence: “This concept, the sickness unto death, must, however, be understood in a particular way.”15 The question, therefore, is how this concept must be understood. In what sense is it a concept at all? Is it also a metaphor? Does it 15

SKS 11, 133 / SUD, 17.

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refer to a particular state or experience? Does it transpose experience? Is it possible to make any certain diagnosis about this sickness? The description of the sickness unto death has some traits in common with Kierkegaard’s description of death in the discourse “At a Graveside.” In the discourse, it is the experience at the graveside which is inscribed upon the thought of death and death’s decision. In The Sickness unto Death, it is the idea of an abyss which is inscribed upon one’s relationship to one’s own self. The sickness unto death is portrayed as decisive, indefinable, and inexplicable. It soon becomes clear, however, that there are also important differences between death and the sickness unto death. In ordinary Danish, a “sickness unto death” means quite simply a mortal illness, but AntiClimacus rejects such a reading here, just as he had done in the Introduction. In contrast to this, he formulates the relationship between death and the sickness unto death as follows: “If we are to speak in the strictest sense of a sickness unto death, this must be a sickness where the last is death, and where death is the last. And this is precisely what despair is.”16 Anti-Climacus gives precision to the description of the “sickness unto death” by playing further on the two concepts of “sickness” and “death” – but he ensures that it will not be possible to identify the “sickness unto death” with either of these. There is always a decisive, but indefinable, difference between them: between “sickness” and sickness, between signifiant and signifié. However, provided that we take note of this difference, “sickness unto death” can be described both as a form of death and as a form of sickness. This is why Anti-Climacus compares this state to one who is mortally ill and is already covered by death, so to speak, yet cannot die: Literally speaking, there is not the slightest possibility that anyone will die from this sickness or that it will end in physical death. On the contrary, the torment of despair is precisely the inability to die. Thus it has more in common with the situation of a mortally ill person when he lies struggling with death and yet cannot die. Thus to be sick unto death is to be unable to die, yet not as if there were hope of life; no the hopelessness is that there is not even the ultimate hope, death. When death is the greatest danger, we hope for life; but when we learn to know the even greater danger, we hope for death. When the danger is so great that death becomes the hope, then despair is the hopelessness of not even being able to die.17

Here, we may observe how the meaning of the “sickness unto death” in the “literal” sense is developed further by the metaphor of sickness 16

17

SKS 11, 133 / cf. SUD, 17. We should note the chiasmus in this formulation; it is not the last chiasmus in the present chapter. SKS 11, 133 / SUD, 17 f.

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unto death.18 The two concepts of sickness and death are integral to despair, but at the same time, they are rewritten: sickness supplies a description of the tormenting agony of despair. Death, as the designation of a boundary, is inscribed upon the eternal, qua “eternal death.” This last expression, however, contains a problematic contradiction: death is precisely that process whereby all transient life will perish, whereas “eternal” is a designation of that which does not perish. And yet, this contradiction is not weakened by the expression “sickness unto death.” Rather, the contrary is the case: “If a person were to die of despair as one dies of a sickness, then the eternal in him, the self, must be able to die in the same sense as the body dies of sickness. But this is impossible; the dying of despair continually converts itself into a living.”19 This is a genuine impossibility. The experience of such a sickness, such a death – which is worse than the worst sickness, worse than the most agonizing death – is described as a “tormenting contradiction” which offers no hope of any resolution, shattering every idea and every concept. It shatters the boundaries of that which can be expressed in words, and this is what Anti-Climacus is attempting to describe: a state which shatters human ideas and concepts, which eludes experience and eludes description, but which can be described and paraphrased through a hyperbolic comparison with experiences and descriptions that we recognize (or can imagine) as terrifying. This makes it difficult for me to envisage any constructive application of the expression “sickness unto death,” which dethrones every constructive explanation of how the human person relates to himself, can become himself, or can be healed of the sickness. Experiences of “the sickness unto death” – to the extent that such experiences are possible – are experiences of the impossible. Like “sickness unto death,” “damnation” is not a concept in the usual sense; rather, it presents the appearance of an abyss, and it is difficult to include abysses in a rational discourse, and a fortiori in a rationalistic discourse. But this is precisely what Anti-Climacus 18

19

It is precisely this kind of use of metaphors of sickness that Susan Sontag sharply criticizes in her two famous essays: Susan Sontag Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and its Metaphors, London: Penguin Books 1991. Her attempt to demythologize the metaphors of sickness has a most laudable moral intention, viz. to make it easier to live with a concrete illness such as cancer (cf. pp. 84-87), but as a semantic theory about linguistic expressions and their supposed lack of ambiguity, it verges on the naïve. I set little store by such a demythologization of language by way of restrictions, and I believe that her intention can be served by a somewhat more conscious use of metaphors and of their connotations. SKS 11, 134 / SUD, 18.

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does: he includes the abyss in an academic rational discourse. He also refuses to transpose the possibility of losing oneself in damnation (Fortabelse) out towards a life that may exist after death: the possibility of losing oneself is real and present at every single moment. Thus it is here that the apocalyptic perspective enters the picture. Anti-Climacus, as apocalypticist, employs the possibility of damnation as the other extreme limit of the discourse. The constructive definition of the human person is that he is considered as spirit, while the destructive, or rather the de-constructive, definition is that he suffers from the sickness unto death. In despair, the self is stretched out between these two possibilities. With regard to the line of thought in The Sickness unto Death, including the philosophical and psychological reflections, the possibility of losing oneself in “damnation” (Fortabelse) must be counted a fundamental premise. The ideas which Anti-Climacus employs in order to sound out the meaning of the metaphor “sickness unto death” are not limited to conceptual contradictions either: he draws on a whole arsenal of apocalyptic ideas which have been linked to “the eternal death” in the course of history. I quote in extenso: It is in this last sense that despair is the sickness unto death, this tormenting contradiction, this sickness of the self, perpetually to be dying, to die and yet not die, to die death. For to die signifies that it is all over, but to die death means to experience dying, and if this is experienced for one single moment one thereby experiences it forever. If a person were to die of despair as one dies of a sickness, then the eternal in him, the self, must be able to die in the same sense as the body dies of sickness. But this is impossible; the dying of despair continually converts itself into a living. The person in despair cannot die; “no more than the dagger can slaughter thoughts” can despair consume the eternal, the self at the root of despair, whose worm does not die and whose fire is not quenched. Nevertheless, despair is veritably a self-consuming, but an impotent self-consuming that cannot do what it wants to do. What it wants to do is to consume itself, something it cannot do, and this impotence is a new form of self-consuming, in which despair is once again unable to do what it wants to do, to consume itself; this is a potentation, or the law of potentation. This is the provocativeness or the cold fire in despair, this gnawing that burrows deeper and deeper in impotent self-consuming. The inability of despair to consume him is so remote from being any kind of comfort to the person in despair that it is the very opposite. This comfort is precisely the torment, is precisely what keeps the gnawing alive and keeps life in the gnawing, for it is precisely over this that he despairs (not as having despaired): that he cannot consume himself, cannot get rid of himself, cannot reduce himself to nothing. This is the formula for despair raised to a higher power, the rising fever in the sickness of the self. 20

Anti-Climacus does not attempt to dissemble when he gives a detailed description of the apocalyptic character of the sickness, and there is 20

SKS 11, 134 / SUD, 18 f.

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no reason to doubt that he believes the possibility of damnation to be perfectly real – in other words, he accepts the possibility that despair is not only a psychological state, but also an eschatological state which anticipates the suffering that awaits the one who despairs after death.21 The opposite is also true, viz. that it is this suffering that finds expression in despair and that already seizes hold of a human being in despair. Thus, losing oneself in damnation is, according to the author, not only a future possibility, but an actuality which is present at every moment. For an apocalyptic line of thought, this ambiguity and tension must be considered an existential premise. Although the possibility is presented as real, there is at the same time something definitely literary about the way in which these ideas are presented. There is a mystical-literary dynamic in the way in which the metaphors are introduced and overlap with one another. The author does not try to argue that damnation leads a human being to one particular place (i. e., the inferno, hell or Gehenna) where he suffers the verdict on his actions. This worldview has long been left behind – and in this regard, Anti-Climacus is a very modern author. His modernity does not however prevent him from seeing the apocalyptic ideas as extremely relevant to a description of the human person’s selfrelationship, where a person is despairing. “Damnation” or “the sickness unto death” is the indefinable place which opens the door to reflection on the self – opens up the self as a place – but at the same time ensures that this place is not eliminated or “removed” by thought. The “sickness unto death” is the ÕÜÏ¿ of this text, which opens up a place for the self and gives a spatial dimension to the discourse about the self, while itself eluding every precise definition. Accordingly, in this text the “sickness unto death” becomes what “original sin” is in The Concept of Anxiety: “something that moves, something that no science can take hold of.”22 Like the author of The Concept of Anxiety, Anti-Climacus exploits the explanatory potential which lies hidden 21

22

Cf. the eschatological revivalist discourse at the close of section B: SKS 11, 142-144 / SUD, 26-28. Even though the English editors refer to Democritus, I find it more plausible that the reference concerns precisely the Platonic ÕÜÏ¿ (cf. Plato’s Timaeus), which Vigilius describes as a “vortex” that moves and gives space for creation (i. e. receives the creative wÏÕh), something that no science, rhetoric, or dialectic can explain: “Therefore dogmatics must not explain hereditary sin but rather explain it by presupposing it, like that vortex about which Greek speculation concerning nature had so much to say – a moving something that no science can grasp” (SKS 4, 327 / CA, 20). The reference is so general, though, that it is difficult to give the definitive answer concerning Kierkegaard’s sources. Concerning his use of the concept, it is at

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in the language of myth and which loses nothing of its power despite all that rationalism and the age of the Enlightenment have done to demythologize ideas. 23 It is precisely as a counterfoil to some intellectual myths that AntiClimacus introduces the world of biblical ideas. And when we bear in mind how quickly intellectual myths tend to be replaced by new intellectual myths, it is no bad argument that the logos which underlies the narratives from primal history and the apocalyptic visions – both of which have left their mark on the history, theology, philosophy, and anthropology of western culture – offers a richer and more interesting potential for philosophical and psychological reflection than many of the ideas and systems which claim to be based on reason alone. Quite simply, the biblical ideas represent a different approach to those problems which are otherwise discussed on the basis of empiricism and rational categories. I hope that no one will misunderstand my argument here and see it as a belated contribution to the debate about the eternal character of the punishments in Gehenna. All I wish to do is to point out that the book The Sickness unto Death will certainly not be interpreted in an appropriate manner if these ideas are avoided and the scholars who interpret and apply Kierkegaard philosophically, theologically or psychologically “cut” a piece of philosophy or psychology out of the text, or if the modern reader (for other and more praiseworthy reasons) simply jumps over the abyss of damnation – as is the case with the great majority of those who have written about Kierkegaard in recent years. It may be true that the ideas Anti-Climacus brings forth from the deep reservoir of tradition are given a metaphorical, literary character, but it is also true hat the philosophical reflection on the self has its starting point in the abyss that the possibility of damnation opens up in the human person’s self-relationship. This is the great darkness right in the center of the human person, a profound contradiction which is inscribed upon the phenomenon of despair. There might be

23

least structurally similar to Plato’s use of ÕÜÏ¿, and in Chapter Seven I will discuss the problem further. Let me recall here Vigilius Haufniensis’ argument for taking one’s starting point in the rationality of the myth and then reflecting further on this when one seeks to understand the basic conditions of the human person in the world (the argument is part of an analysis of the story of how the serpent tempted the woman in the garden of Eden, and was therefore cursed by God): “Even though one may call this a myth, it neither disturbs thought nor confuses the concept, as does a myth of the understanding. The myth allows something that is inward to take place outwardly” (SKS 4, 352 / CA, 46 f.).

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good reasons for simplifying Kierkegaard’s thought, but the reasons should be very good if one intends to eliminate the basic difficulty the texts are struggling with. Abstracting from the impossible in The Sickness unto Death is, in the final analysis, more or less impossible.

§ 31 Despair, Causality, Responsibility, and Origin We can now compare the double dialectic in these introductory chapters of the work (A.B through B) with the texture in the self that we discovered in A.A, where we also found a double structure of a self that (i) relates itself to itself and (ii) in its self-relation relates to the other. A number of disagreements arose between these two structures, in the form of contradictions and discrepancies in the self’s relationship to itself. Two principal causes generated these discrepancies: first, despair as a sickness in the self; and secondly, the cause (Grund) in the ground (Grund), i. e. that the self in its relationship to itself is dependent on the other. To what extent do these apply with regard to the specific dialectic of despair? Is it possible, on the basis of these two, to point to an absolute origin of despair? And if so, does this absolute origin have any connection to the hypothesis that the author has proposed to verify or falsify with the help of the analysis of despair? Moreover: How should we formulate the basic hypothesis of this work? The problem that we take up here is indissolubly linked to the relationship between theory and experience, between an abstract theory about despair and the experience of being in despair. Chapter A.B functions as a transition between these two, from a theoretic definition of the sickness (A.A) to an attempt to describe experiences of the sickness (A.C). But it also explicitly deals with a transition from the possibility of despair to the actuality of despair.24 Anti-Climacus’ account of this transition is again ambiguous: he discusses whether despair is an advantage or a deficiency. His conclusion is that it is both. Not only is it both: it is an enormous advantage which points to “the infinite elevation or sublimity, that he is spirit,”25 as long as we are speaking of the possibility of despairing. To be despairing, on the other hand, is not only the greatest misfortune and distress: “no, it is damnation.”26 24 25 26

Cf. the superscription to Chapter A.B: “The possibility and the actuality of despair.” SKS 11, 131 / SUD, 15. SKS 11, 131 / SUD, 15.

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The description of despair is a “not only …” description which transcends every general goal and every probable criterion both positively and negatively, an infinite movement in the direction of “better than the best” and “worse than the worst.” And the sickness unto death is in a certain sense both of these at once, since it is both possible and actual. This makes the definition oscillate between the immense advantage and the most terrible distress. This is why the author encounters similar problems when he wishes to describe the transition from possibility to actuality – for the relationship between possibility and actuality is not the same as in normal causal connections: what is an ascent elsewhere is a “fall” here, and that actuality which otherwise is a destroyed possibility is described here as a realized possibility, etc.27 In short, this is a sickness and a phenomenon which does not fit into usual modal categories and apparently confuses the relationship between them: “[…]actuality in relation to possibility is usually an affirmation, but here it is a negation.”28 The same applies to the description of despair as a sickness. It is not a sickness in the usual sense of the word; it is not just something that happens to a human being (i. e. contingent), nor is it something that belongs to human nature (i. e. necessary); nor is it a combination of the contingent and the necessary, i. e. death, “which is everyone’s fate.”29 In relation to these categories, despair seems to resist definition. It is neither the one nor the other, but it is traced back to the self-relationship as synthesis, and in the self’s relationship to itself as a relation to the other. It is this double relationship that disturbs and breaks up the usual definitions of a transition from possibility to actuality, since these definitions follow a natural causality. The disturbing element in this case is the definition of the human person as spirit. This is why the responsibility for despair and for the discrepancy in the self is attributed as follows: “And because the relation is spirit, is the self, upon it rests the responsibility for all despair at every moment of its existence, however much the despairing person speaks of his despair as a misfortune […].”30 This is an important point for Anti-Climacus: the human person, considered as spirit, is at every moment responsible both for the selfrelationship and for the despair. It would be “both cruel and inhuman” if one were to claim this about a normal sickness. Generally 27 28 29 30

Cf. SKS 11, 131 f. / SUD, 15 f. SKS 11, 131 / SUD, 15. SKS 11, 132 / SUD, 16. SKS 11, 132 / SUD, 16.

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speaking, a normal sickness afflicts one by chance, and one catches it only once; its further development is then traced back to this catching of the sickness, which is the cause of its development. However, the attempt to describe “despair” in causal terms means that the continuity of time is broken up when responsibility is traced back at every moment to the self, since it is the despairing person himself who catches this sickness: To despair, however, is a different matter. Every actual moment of despair is traceable to possibility; every moment he is in despair he is bringing it upon himself. It is always the present tense; in relation to the actuality there is no pastness of the past: in every actual moment of despair the person in despair bears all the past as a present in possibility. 31

The construction which Anti-Climacus employs here seems strange; it is reflexive and at the same time active and passive: he speaks of catching a sickness in the sense that I myself am made responsible for it, not only with regard to the future and the present, but even with regard to the past. All the past, everything that has happened, is jeopardized in the present moment and is therefore made the starting point for the problem of repetition: the one who despairs bears with him “all that has happened in the past” in posse, viz. as the possibility of a repetition of the self-relationship. Since however his formulation is not entirely clear, let me specify that this is the possibility of a different repetition, a repetition with its starting point in the other. A different repetition of this kind seems inaccessible to the one who is despairing himself, for two main reasons: the indefinability of despair, and the chronic hiddenness of the self. The state which Anti-Climacus describes is not only hidden in the sense of unconscious or suppressed (à la Freud); it remains hidden because its origin eludes every unambiguous definition and every logical explanation of its cause. In all these chapters, the dialectical indefinability of despair is expressed through a doubling of the dialectic. The double dialectic is not identical with the distinction between self-self relation and the self-other-self relation; but without this distinction, the dialectic would not be able to uncover such situations which in most cases remain hidden, i. e. situations which are not straightforwardly open to a phenomenological analysis. Phenomenology (and most explicitly of all, the Hegelian phenomenology) is based on the possibility of absorbing the phenomenon into the concept. But as we have seen, the “sickness unto death” eludes a conceptual definition of this kind. It 31

SKS 11, 132 f. / SUD, 17.

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remains metaphorical and indefinable; it constitutes a rhetorical and dialectical element of disturbance in the discourse. All the same, it is despair qua “sickness unto death” that is to be analyzed here: in other words, the author intends to clarify how this sickness infects, influences, and breaks up the self-relationship. But the sickness itself remains hidden. Like death and death’s decision, it is inexplicable and indefinable – and yet it is decisive for one’s selfunderstanding, i. e. for the development of a self in the sense of spirit. In this way, the entire dialectic seeks to uncover a state which in its “essence” remains hidden, and this means that we can give only an indirect answer to the question of an “absolute” origin of despair. The sickness unto death is per se the absolute origin of despair, but the sickness unto death is not itself something absolute; it is a trace which remains ambiguous in every symptom with regard to the origin. It is not only dialectical: it is doubly dialectical, and can point equally well to nothing and to the absolute. The “sickness unto death” has no Being in itself, but becomes visible through a rupture in the explanation of what spirit is, an inexplicable discrepancy in the self’s relation to itself. Accordingly, the sickness unto death is – to the extent that it “is” – both a trace which points towards annihilation and a trace of an absolute origin (what Anti-Climacus calls “the Eternal”). If there is an absolute origin of despair, it is precisely because of despair that this absolute origin – i. e. the hidden foundations of the dialectic of despair – remains hidden. In other words, the “absolute” origin cannot be identified as absolute. It can be identified only as a trace or a “différance” in the relationship between the self and the other. The hiddenness of the origin is decisively important for what I shall call the hypothesis of the analysis of despair, and my hypothesis is that this hypothesis concerns the identification of “God” with the other.

§ 32 The Hypothesis “God” Although Anti-Climacus begins the book with one specific definition of what the human person is, and of why he is such as he is, I do not regard the book as a whole as a logical development from the premises which are established at the beginning. On the contrary, I have demonstrated a fundamental contradiction in the beginning, and I believe that this constitutes the problem posed in The Sickness unto Death, a problem which concerns the understanding of the self and of the basis of the self: Has the self posited itself, or has it been posited by

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another? This means that the inherent logic of the investigation does not move from premises to consequences: rather, it goes from consequences to premises. This means that it is the premises – whether the self is a relationship, whether it is despairing, and above all whether despair is connected with the relationship to the other – which are tested in both Parts of the book, although in different respects. In Part One as well as Part Two, the self is investigated from a very specific perspective, viz. that it is spirit. This is the basic view, consistently put into practice, to which Anti-Climacus refers. The phenomenon which makes it interesting to approach the concept of spirit with psychology as a point of departure is despair, since the phenomenon of despair problematizes and differentiates the understanding of the human person as spirit. It detaches this idea from an Idealistic construction and gives the problem a location in the individual’s self-relationship. Among those premises which are both differentiated and problematized, however, there is not only one particular understanding of the self, but also one particular understanding of the other. Just like the hypothesis about the self, the hypothesis “God” is not based on some Vorentscheidung (“antecedent decision”), as Theunissen will have it;32 on the contrary, in Part One it is primarily this hypothesis which is at stake and is to be tested on the basis of psychological observations of what it is to be a human person, and of how the human person relates to the other. Although many interpreters claim that it is Part Two of the book that is theological, while Part One is philosophical, my hypothesis is that it is primarily in Part One that the hypothesis God (“X”) is to be tested against various understandings of the human person as spirit (which may, of course, nevertheless be counted as a task for philosophical investigation). It is not, however, Anti-Climacus’ intention to present a philosophical proof of God’s existence. In many different contexts, Kierkegaard pokes fun at the so-called classical proofs of God, or arguments for the existence of God, where these offer a defense of God’s existence or suggest rational reasons for his existence, his goodness, etc. They can neither prove nor disprove the hypothesis. Here, the hypothesis God is to be tested on the basis of its significance for anthropology and psychology, on the basis of the claim that the human person is spirit, and on the basis of the observation that many persons despair. Anti-Climacus approaches this problem by means of a detailed account of the symptoms of the sickness and of what these symptoms 32

Cf. Michael Theunissen Der Begriff Verzweiflung, p. 16.

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mean both for the understanding of God and for the understanding of the human person as spirit. I believe that the question of how the hypothesis can be tested is just as interesting as the question of which hypothesis is involved here. If my supposition is correct – i. e., if it is the hypothesis God that is at stake in Part One – how then can we test this hypothesis? It cannot be done by the presentation of proofs, by logical arguments, or by a speculative dialectic, because explanations of what or who God is face exactly the same dilemma as explanations of death: any assertion that someone makes about the existence or non-existence of God says more about this person than about God. If God exists, then God is older and more fundamental than every explanation of God. Nevertheless, this fact does not deprive the problem of its interest. When the hypothesis God is tested, one’s entire understanding of reality is put to the test, including one’s understanding of one’s own self. Accordingly, it is impossible to test the hypothesis God without at the same time testing one’s understanding of what it is to be a human being – and what it is to be a self (or rather oneself, with the reflexivity of the Danish expression “at være sig selv”). We observed an interesting dialectic in the discourse “At a Graveside”: how the ideas about death can help cover over death, neutralizing it, making it beautiful, melancholic or dreaming – in short, evaporating death into a “mood.” The same dynamic is at work with regard to God, and with even greater intensity. There is no idea that is more continuously the object of human wishes and projections than the idea (or rather, the ideas) of God. On the other hand, there is no idea more influenced by human hubris and self-contempt than the idea of God. When I say that Anti-Climacus wishes to test the “hypothesis” God, this is not because he presents yet one more idea, or yet one more explanation, of what or who God is – the opposite is true. In this context, to relate to God as a hypothesis entails a suspension of the many ideas about “God” and explanations of “God.” Naturally, this includes both the philosophical and the theological explanations of God which are prevalent among Anti-Climacus’ contemporaries, as well as the many other ideas about God which he claims are current in “Christendom.” Here, it is psychology that is interesting, because it analyzes precisely the “place” where the idea of God is tested: the reverse side of the self, where it gets entangled in the contradictions of despair. Every idea about a what is tested at the same time against a how. This means that every explanation of the Other receives a “retroactive effect” in the self, since the idea about God is tested against how one understands one’s own self.

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This means that the corresponding hypothesis about the human person is just as important as the hypothesis “God”: every person’s self-understanding says something about how he or she de facto relates to God. If a hypothesis about God is at stake, it follows eo ipso that a hypothesis about the human being is at stake. It is here that every consequence of the hypothesis will be seen. The hypothesis is thus open in both directions, but the author insists on a connection. In the Postscript, Johannes Climacus formulates a dialectic which comes into play between the opposing claims that subjectivity is the truth and that subjectivity is the untruth. 33 This is a dialectic which takes the route inwards, but stops short at the paradox: one cannot know oneself in truth as long as one does not get beyond oneself. In such a case, one comes no further than the true untruth about oneself: the subject’s own (authentic) untruth. It is a dialectic of this kind between the truth and the untruth of the subject that Anti-Climacus inscribes as an inherent contradiction, a discrepancy, upon the self-relationship at the very beginning of The Sickness unto Death: despairingly willing and not willing to be oneself. The contradiction is formulated in such a way that it cannot be resolved theoretically. Nor can it be explained. Nor can it be evaded, without at the same time evading the self. But this contradiction is formulated as writing, as the “original writing” (Urschrift) which is inscribed upon the self.34 The writing is the explanation which makes obscure, and the ambiguity which reveals. It is on the basis of such a division into two (Entzweiung) of the self – and we should note that this division is held fast in the contradiction – that the dialectic of the self is developed as the dialectic of despair. Climacus writes about the dialectical difficulty entailed in the attempt to know God objectively, and about the ensuing pain caused by the fact that the one who attempts to know has an immediate need of God, and does not have the time to postpone the relationship to God. In a footnote, he explains what dialectical contradiction lies at the basis of the problem, a contradiction which in fact lies at the basis of the entire line of thought and development of concepts in The Sickness unto Death: In this way, God does indeed become a postulate, but not in the loose sense in which it is ordinarily taken; rather, it becomes clear that this is the only way in which an 33 34

Cf. SKS 7, 182-190 / CUP, 199-207. For more on this topic of writing and self, cf. Marius G. Mjaaland “Die Schrift im Selbst: Das Äußere im Inneren – oder umgekehrt” in Schleiermacher und Kierkegaard, ed. by N. J. Cappelørn, R. Crouter, Th. Jørgensen, and C. Osthövener (Kierkegaard Studies: Monograph Series, vol. 11), Berlin / New York: Walter de Gruyter 2006, pp. 457-464.

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existent enters into a relationship with God: when the dialectical contradiction brings passion to despair and assists him grasping God with “the category of despair” (faith), so that the postulate, far from being the arbitrary, is in fact necessary self-defense [Nødværge]; in this way God is not a postulate, but the existing person postulating God – a necessity [Nødvendighed]. 35

I believe that Anti-Climacus is testing such a postulate and such a hypothesis, with the help of two forms of dialectical reflection, in main chapter C: In C.A with regard to the different forms of despair (cf. §§ 33-35 below), and in C.B with regard to the consciousness of despair (cf. Chapter Six).

§ 33 Doubt and Despair In chapter C.A, Anti-Climacus gives a more detailed account of four of the “constituents of the synthesis” which were presented already in the introductory chapter A.A. This applies to the relationship between infinitude and finitude, and between possibility (freedom) and necessity, in the self’s relationship to itself. The chapter is divided into two parts on the basis of these pairs of antitheses, and each of these parts is in turn divided into two sub-chapters, so that the four elements in the synthesis are analyzed successively as four forms of despair: C.A. Despair considered without regard to its being conscious or not, consequently only with regard to the constituents of the synthesis a) Despair as defined by finitude/infinitude ¿) Infinitude’s despair is to lack finitude À) Finitude’s despair is to lack infinitude b) Despair as defined by possibility/necessity ¿) Possibility’s despair is to lack necessity À) Necessity’s despair is to lack possibility

If we take a careful look at the subdivision, it is striking that the parallel forms of despair are organized like chiasms. Anti-Climacus comments on the significance of the chiasms for the dialectic immediately after the superscription to the first section: “That this is so is due to the dialectic inherent in the self as a synthesis, and therefore each constituent is its opposite. No form of despair can be defined directly (that is, undialectically), but only by reflecting upon its opposite.”36 The formulation that “each constituent is its opposite” might sound a bit strange, at least as a definition of dialectics and could be taken 35 36

SKS 7, 183n / cf. CUP, 200n. SKS 11, 146 / SUD, 30.

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for a parody of speculative Idealism. The point is, however, that no form of despair can be defined directly. It ought to be done by means of a reflection on the opposite, on that which is lacking. Each category is thus defined by being mirrored in its antithesis, and since Anti-Climacus is describing a lack, the category is analyzed in virtue of its absence. In the tension between antitheses, therefore, he can elaborate a more precise description of despair – and of the hidden dialectic of despair. Given the combination of the rhetorical point – viz. that the antitheses are in a chiastic relationship to each other37 – and then the dialectical point, viz. that every definition of despair includes a reflection of its antithesis, we may conclude that the metaphysical dialectic in C.A is elaborated in an interplay between rhetoric and dialectic. Hence, the “double dialectics” of hiddenness and visibility, of surface and depth, of sickness and normality, continues with the description of the different forms of despair. Thus I can only affiliate myself to the estimation of Paul Ricoeur concerning the dialectic in The Sickness unto Death: “The reader’s astonishment, unease, admiration, and irritation depend on this incessant oscillation between the most pointed imagery experimentation and the most artificial conceptual dialectic.”38 Still, our evaluation of the rationality in the book as a whole demands a more detailed analysis of the significance of these concepts: infinitude, finitude, possibility, and necessity. Should they be considered as metaphysical concepts, as (modal) logic, or rather as constituents of the new “grammar” of the self? This question is in my opinion not sufficiently clarified by the author himself, which might be a sign that the question is not settled, it remains open throughout the discourse. Søren Kierkegaard has commented on this question himself, however, in an entry in his journal about a “note” he received from Professor Rasmus Nielsen in the Year of the Lord 1849, exactly eleven days after the publication of The Sickness unto Death: 37

38

According to the “Report about The Sickness unto Death,” which we find in the Journal NB4 (1848), it is clear that the rhetorical aspect of the analysis of despair caused Kierkegaard great difficulties. He notes in the margin: “But the fact [is] that for a rhetorical exposition, the task is too great, since it would require every single figure to be sketched poetically. It makes a better job of the algebra of dialectics” (SKS 20, 365). The solution to this dilemma which he proposes in chapter C.A was to make a sketch, a rapid outline of the various forms of despair, with the starting point in dialectics. In this context, the close reading of the text (“the grammatical dimension”) seeks to uncover the relationship between the two other aspects of the trivium – rhetoric and logic – in the text. Paul Ricoeur “Two encounters with Kierkegaard,” p. 322.

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R. Nielsen has now discovered in a note of August 10 that the point where Climacus and Anti-Climacus coincide is despair, and in this context, he quotes the closing words of Climacus that he does not himself say that he is a Christian, “and Anti-Climacus must declare this to be despair.” In an earlier note, R. Nielsen maintained that the point where they coincide is offense. This was much more correct, and his new discovery is quite simply an AntiClimax. For this is the scale: that which is doubt in metaphysical terms, is despair in ethical terms, and offense in Christian terms. To this extent, therefore, there is truth in his discovery that the antithesis lies quite correctly on the point of declaring oneself not to be a Christian – but this discovery by R. Nielsen is questionable, because it was mentioned in my note to him, which accompanied the book, and which he received. 39

Apart from Professor Nielsen’s questionable discovery of this point where Climacus and Anti-Climacus meet – a question to which we shall return later – I would like to draw the reader’s attention to the precise definition of the relationship between doubt, despair, and offense. The metaphysical doubt corresponds in ethical terms to despair, and in Christian terms to offense. I believe that we can categorize the three forms of dialectic that we find in The Sickness unto Death in keeping with this scale, irrespective of whether one perceives it to be a rising or a falling scale.40 The metaphysical doubt finds expression through the abstract definition of the various forms of the self in chapter C.A. The ethical despair finds expression when despair is considered from the perspective of “consciousness” in chapter C.B. The Christian offense is analyzed in the whole of Part Two, but above all in section B of that part. We thus have a successive division of the analysis in keeping with the scale doubt – despair – offense. The confusing element is that Anti-Climacus mostly writes about “despair” in all three parts. Two reasons can explain this: first, that the subject of the book, the sickness unto death, is defined as despair (which means that despair is already present in a hidden manner both in doubt and in offense); and secondly, that despair therefore remains situated between doubt and offense, and is consequently relevant to both. Since it is possible to see a connection of this kind between doubt, 39 40

NB12:93 in SKS 22, 193. The Latin word scala, which is used in the Danish original (and is translated here as “scale”), corresponds to the Greek klimax. Both nouns mean a “ladder.” Throughout this quotation, therefore, Kierkegaard is playing on various meanings of rising and falling movements – in the names Climacus and Anti-Climacus, in the categorization of doubt, despair, and offense on a scale, and in his evaluation of Nielsen’s observation as a simple “anticlimax.” The question of the point of coincidence is therefore also a question about where the different movements and the different pseudonyms meet or cross.

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despair, and offense, there is nothing to prevent us from establishing a variety of perspectives on despair – and I believe that this is what AntiClimacus does. First, he establishes a metaphysical perspective, then an ethical-existential perspective, and finally a religious perspective, in keeping with the “scale” he formulates in the letter to Rasmus Nielsen: “For this is the scale: that which is doubt in metaphysical terms, is despair in ethical terms, and offense in Christian terms.” What the metaphysics in C.A concerns, the self is analyzed with the aid of metaphysical antitheses (finitude/infinitude), but at the same time, the self seems to break out of these antitheses as something other. The question is whether this breach with metaphysics, in the metaphysics of the self, is also the expression of a metaphysical “longing for the other.” According to Emmanuel Levinas, this has always been the goal of metaphysics and the driving force in the metaphysical movement. In Totality and Infinity, he describes the metaphysical striving as follows: “ ‘The true life is absent.’ But we are in the world. Metaphysics arises and is maintained in this alibi. Its face is turned toward the ‘elsewhere’ and the ‘otherwise’ and the ‘other.’ […] The metaphysical desire tends toward something else entirely, toward the absolutely other.”41 We find a corresponding tension in the metaphysics that AntiClimacus formulates, a metaphysics which always has its face turned towards the Other, which points out of the synthesis towards another presupposition. The movement in this dialectic breaks out of the Same and makes towards the Other as infinite presupposition – but not in such a way that the Other is abolished in the dialectic of the self. This means that Anti-Climacus is repeating what we might call (with Levinas) a Cartesian movement towards the infinite: This relation of the same with the other, where the transcendence of the relation does not cut the bonds a relation implies, yet where these bonds do not unite the same and the other into a Whole, is in fact fixed in the situation described by Descartes in which the “I think” maintains with the Infinite it can nowise contain and from which it is separated [through] a relation called “idea of infinity.”42

Levinas explicitly links this Infinite with the madness in Plato’s Phaedrus, which comes from God as a “winged thought.”43 We shall, how41

42 43

Emmanuel Levinas Totality and Infinity (Orig. Totalité et infini (1961)), tr. by Alphonso Lingis, The Hague / Boston / London: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers 1969, p. 33. Translation modified. Emmanuel Levinas Totality and Infinity, p. 48. “Against a thought that proceeds from him who ‘has his head to himself,’ [Plato] affirms the value of the delirium that comes from God, ‘winged thought.’ Delirium does not have an irrationalist significance; it is only a ‘divine release of the soul

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ever, follow this idea a bit further into the distinction between finitude and infinitude and between possibility and necessity in chapter C.A, with continuous reference to Descartes. The self which suffers under the despair of infinitude is analyzed by Anti-Climacus as a fantastic self, while the self which suffers under the despair of finitude is “narrow,” because it has abandoned its original naivety and simplicity – that which makes this self unique in relation to all others. Such a self has lost that in-finity in the self which breaks out of the economy of comparison and the bourgeois manner of looking at the world. The dialectic points, not in the direction of a synthesis, but of a lack – a negativity between the antitheses which cannot be resolved in a tertium. This means that the entire dialectics takes on the character of a dialectics of deficiency or maybe even a dialectics of absence (i. e. the absence of the other which metaphysics is longing for). In the two last sub-chapters, we can find the same dynamic – as a repetition of the former two – but now within the antithesis between possibility and necessity. The superscriptions are arranged chiastically: “Possibility’s despair is to lack necessity” / “Necessity’s despair is to lack possibility.” We may therefore reasonably assume that we shall find here too a dialectic that is not aimed at resolving the problem, but on the contrary at fixating the problem in a negative dialectic. At the beginning of C.A.b.¿, Anti-Climacus does in fact deliberate a bit further about the reciprocal relationship between the two chiasms: Just as finitude is the limiting aspect in relation to infinitude, so also necessity is the constraint in relation to possibility. Inasmuch as the self as a synthesis of finitude and infinitude is established, is È¿Ò¿ ÂÛË¿ÊÇË, in order to become itself it reflects itself in the medium of imagination, and thereby the infinite possibility becomes manifest. The self is È¿Ò¿ÂÛË¿ÊÇË just as possible as it is necessary, for it is indeed itself, but it has the task of becoming itself. Insofar as it is itself, it is necessary, and insofar as it has the task of becoming itself, it is a possibility.44

A parallelity is established between the two pairs of antitheses, but the first antithesis is inscribed at the same time upon the second, so that the antithesis between possibility and necessity outstrips the first antithesis in radicality.45 The author thus assumes that the self is pos-

44 45

from the yoke of custom and convention’ ” (Emmanuel Levinas Totality and Infinity, 49). SKS 11, 151 / SUD, 35. “Possibility and necessity belong to the self just as do infinitude and finitude (wÎÃÇ ÏÍË ÎÃÏ¿Ð). A self that has no possibility is in despair, and likewise a self that has no necessity” (SKS 11, 151 / SUD, 35).

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ited, È¿Ò¿ÂÛË¿ÊÇË (in terms of its potential) as a synthesis of finitude and infinitude, but in relation to the categories of possibility and necessity, despair is repeated – on a higher level, so to speak. Here, the self is problematized in relation to place and time – and in relation to its (deficient) freedom. I believe that the link between this dialectics and metaphysics becomes clearer precisely in the transition from one antithesis to the next. We also see how, in relation to metaphysics, there is a fundamental doubt about whether Reason can establish certainty and a secure basis for self-knowledge (de omnibus dubitandum est). Let me therefore, in order to clarify the relationship between doubt and despair, recapitulate what Kierkegaard had written five or six years earlier in the fragment De omnibus dubitandum est. He begins by making a distinction between the contents of consciousness, which he describes as dichotomous (divided into two), and the relationship between the consciousness and the antitheses, which is “trichotomous” (divided into three); “[…] as language too proves: for when I say, ‘I become conscious of this sense impression,’ I am uttering a triad.”46 He then claims that although the word tvivl (“doubt”) is linked etymologically to the number “two” (Latin duo, German zwei), the philosophical doubt presupposes consciousness and hence is necessarily linked to a third element which is related to the two: “If nothing other than the dichotomy existed, there would not exist any doubt; since the possibility of doubt lies precisely in the third, which puts the two in relation to each other.”47 In opposition to the self-knowledge of speculative philosophy and to the “objective” knowledge of the surrounding world, each of which he views (in its own way) as disinterested, Kierkegaard maintains that in relation to doubt, it is the interest (also qua inter-esse) which opens the path to the question about consciousness. This means that, if the question about consciousness is to be made more acute, the only logical action is to hold fast to doubt, i. e. to that which is indeterminate, uncertain: This way of proceeding was logical, whereas it was an inconsistency, which seemed to be based in ignorance of what doubt is, that led modern philosophy to wish systematically to bestow wings on doubt. Although the system was absolutely perfect, although the reality surpassed all predictions, doubt was nevertheless not overcome. Indeed, this is where it really begins, for doubt lies in the interest, and all systematic knowledge 46

47

Pap. IV B 1, p. 148. Danish “Jeg bliver mig dette Sandseindtryk bevidst,” literally: “I become aware to myself [of] this sense impression.” Pap. IV B 1, p. 148.

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is without interest. This shows that doubt is the beginning of the highest form of existence, because it can have everything else as its presupposition.48

I believe that this last affirmation may be of crucial importance to our reading of The Sickness unto Death. Kierkegaard does namely affirm that doubt is the beginning of the highest form of existence, for the simple reason that it can have “everything else” as its presupposition. Thus, with the aid of doubt, one can ask what the “self” is, also with regard to the question of the presupposition of the self, viz. whether in the last analysis the self posits itself or is posited by another. The movement towards such a presupposition begins in specific antitheses: infinity/finitude and possibility/necessity. Despair expresses itself here as doubt with regard to the presuppositions of the self, viz. (a) about whether the self is able to define itself reflexively, and (b) whether it is possible to understand oneself by comparing oneself with other people. Doubt problematizes both the formation of the categories and the categories themselves, as well as the possibility of drawing a boundary between them. However, doubt does not stop once it is accepted that this difference has been established; on the contrary, it is intensified by means of an even more fundamental doubt, which concerns the relationship between possibility and necessity. This doubt questions (c) whether the individual is capable of recognizing the category of possibility, without losing himself in an abstraction, and (d) whether the individual is capable of recognizing what “necessity” is in his own existence, without ending up in determinism or triviality. Doubt thus concerns the possibility of knowing oneself, and the presuppositions for one’s own knowledge, as well as the possibility of drawing a boundary for the self which makes it concrete and realizes the possibilities of the self in an ethical sense. The development from the first antithesis to the second can thus be seen as an intensification of doubt in a hyperbolic sense, a continuously deeper and more radical doubt. If we apply our parallelogram to draw a parallel line to Derrida’s reading of Descartes’ cogito, we see that he specifically emphasizes such a hyperbolic twisting of the line of thought in Descartes’ Discours and Méditations. In both these texts, doubt is intensified by means of a hyperbolic dynamic, first as a doubt about the subject’s ability to know truth; then doubt about whether one is mad or not; and finally doubt about whether there exists an evil genius who confuses all one’s thinking. I believe that a corresponding dynamic can be seen 48

Pap. IV B 1, p. 149.

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in the metaphysical doubt in chapter C.A. The development is hyperbolic in two different meanings of the word: first, as an ever stronger intensification of the doubt, and then also as a movement in the direction of the infinite, in a graphic hyperbole: the closer the hyperbole comes to a specific boundary-value, and the closer doubt draws to the presupposition of the self, the more strongly does the dialectic turn in the direction of a zero point, a limit, which can represent either the infinite or nothing. This figure corresponds to what Climacus in the Postscript calls an “approximation.”49

§ 34 An Excess of Possibility In C.A.b.¿, we can observe such a hyperbolic turning of the dialectic. It is the section about the despair of possibility and the problem is a lack of space and a lack of time. Most people would think that it is impossible to escape such basic conditions for existence, but AntiClimacus shows how we lose our time in the moment we have lost ourselves. And the same applies to place: without a self as a limited place for becoming, we develop into abstract phantoms of possibility, and the development is hyperbolic: more and more abstract, without a body, without a soul, without material weight and without mutual relations, the self can always change, always slip into “someone else.” But according to Anti-Climacus is a self that simply can slip into someone else not a self at all. Hence, he can affirm that a certain symptom of the despair of possibility is the disappearance of the self as a place, as a topos for self-reflection. The diagnosis of this form of despair runs as follows: This self becomes an abstract possibility; it flounders in possibility until exhausted but neither moves from the place where it is nor arrives anywhere, for necessity is literally that place; to become oneself is literally a movement in that place. To become is a movement away from that place, but to become oneself is a movement in that place. 50

The point is that the self needs a limit, a boundary, in order to become a concrete self. The person would have to define his own limits and 49

50

The word “approximation” is often used in relation to historical knowledge, but also as a doubt concerning objective knowledge in the speculative sense: “Perhaps this is so because objectively there is no truth for existing beings, but only approximations, whereas subjectively truth for them is in inwardness, because the decision of truth is in subjectivity” (SKS 7, 199 / CUP, 218). SKS 11, 151 / SUD, 36.

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limitation, or even more important, the limits he has been given. Before he encounters a boundary, the dialectic of his self will never become a qualitative dialectic – and the necessity in the self is precisely such a boundary, a boundary in the self. 51 If the boundary is lacking, the dialectic too will lack a concrete point of departure against which the various ideas about the self can be tried out. In relation to time, the hyperbolic development becomes even clearer, since the dynamic of experienced time shows that the more possibility increases (without any of this possibility being translated into actuality), the more frequently does one idea succeed the other, until the ideas are integrated in a series of ever more frequent “phantasmagoria”: “Thus possibility seems greater and greater to the self; more and more becomes possible because nothing becomes actual. Eventually everything seems possible, but this is exactly the point at which the abyss swallows up the self.”52 The abyss swallowing up the self, that is an example of an aporetical development where every limit, every concrete limitation, dissolves. Anti-Climacus describes how the dialectic of possibility and necessity moves in the direction of absurdity, where the realization of the self seems more and more remote, since the possibility can be compared to a mirror for the self, a mirror in which everything seems possible but nothing becomes actual, due to lack of necessity. Anti-Climacus points out that the whole of reality is at stake in the dialectic between possibility and necessity, since the symptom of the despair of possibility is that nothing becomes actual (Danish virkelig), and thus nothing becomes real (Danish virkelig). For if the self becomes unreal, then the whole of that actuality to which the self relates also becomes unreal: all of reality is lost. This too is an insight that Anti-Climacus shares with Descartes, and it is a consequence of the uncertainty of doubt. The Cartesian doubt is a doubt about whether the reality to which we have access via the senses and the reason is the genuine reality, or merely an illusion. This means that reality in its totality is held in suspension – as also happens in this section of The Sickness unto Death. Through the contrast between the Cartesian suspension of reality and the Hegelian Aufhebung of the antithesis between possibility and actuality, however, doubt is placed within the Hegelian dialectic, as a doubt about whether it is at all possible for the 51

52

“What is missing is essentially the power to obey, to submit to the necessity in one’s life, to what may be called one’s limitations” (SKS 11, 152 / SUD, 36). SKS 11, 151 f. / SUD, 36.

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speculative philosophy to arrive at a definition of “actuality” (Virkelighed) which also refers to “reality” (Virkelighed): “The philosophers are mistaken when they explain necessity as a unity of possibility and actuality – no, actuality is the unity of possibility and necessity.”53 When the speculative philosophy can define necessity as the unity of possibility and actuality, this is done by means of an Aufhebung of the modal categories – where the antithesis is preserved, is negated, and is abolished – according to the logical necessity of the system. Anti-Climacus’ contrary strategy, viz. the doubt which expresses itself through despair, is to introduce a doubt about whether this Aufhebung gives space for “actuality.” Does it not rather elude actuality, when its thinking abolishes the antithesis between possibility and actuality? This is why he organizes the three categories in a different way. He establishes possibility and necessity as antitheses, and it is in the space between these – as a synthesis, as an intermediary definition, as interest, i. e. the interest of metaphysics – that actuality moves. This allows doubt to inscribe anew time and space as a problem within the synthesis of the self. In despair, these are experienced as contradictory, on the border of absurdity. But the contradiction is not resolved: it is held fast. This leaves the self hanging in a rupture between possibility and necessity, between finitude and infinity; and the self comes into existence in this tension between antitheses which do not merge into one another. It may be interesting to look more closely at how “time” and “place” are inscribed upon the synthesis of the self: as an abstract problem or as a Socratic aporia. The definition of the self as a “place” is the starting point for the formulation of a problem: viz., that the self does not bring itself into existence, or exist in virtue of its own power. The lack of place turns out however to be an aporia, and an aporia of the second type according to Derrida’s distinctions, i. e. that type which makes the boundary disappear, become unclear, dissolve. 54 “Time” too appears at the outset to indicate a problem, even a problem concerning modal categories as possibility and actuality in a particular way. But the intensification of time, where the ideas about the self become more and more fluid, more and more momentary, hands over the self to an aporia, that is, an aporia of the third type, which makes it impossible further to define or specify any problem or relate to any boundary at all, since time enters an avalanche of time, and the ideas 53 54

SKS 11, 152 / SUD, 36. Cf. Jacques Derrida Apories, pp. 44 f. / Aporias, pp. 20-24 and § 10 above.

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about the self disappear in a series of “phantasmagoria” – until the abyss swallows up the self. This is why, in the psychopathological description of the despair of possibility, Anti-Climacus emphasizes that what the self utterly lacks is a boundary, necessity as a boundary. Lacking such a clear boundary, to which the self can relate and “bow down,” it simply loses itself: the one who despairs has run astray in possibility and thus “lost himself, because this self fantastically reflected itself in possibility.”55 The possibility is thus compared to a mirror in which the despairing person seeks to understand himself by reflecting himself in various ideas about himself, various drafts of a self-understanding. But the problem with the mirror of possibility is that it lies, and that it displays at most only half the truth: for when the individual contemplates himself in the mirror of possibility, everything seems possible. He is not able to see his own boundary at the same time, i. e. the boundary for reflection on the self. This is why the mirror of possibility can never give any certain definition of the self or of the presupposition of the self. Our analysis of C.A indicates that it is in doubt that the self looks back for its own presupposition, either qua “positive” unity between antitheses or qua “negative” unity and differentiating rupture between antitheses. But even in the despairing person’s increasingly general questions about what is “real” in actuality – hence, the possibility of a certainty about, and a knowledge of, reality as a whole – doubt only becomes more and more comprehensive and more and more fundamental. Not only does the one who despairs doubt the possibility of understanding his own self; even those categories on the basis of which the self is defined seem to lead into an impasse, and the logos of the self threatens to disintegrate. Even the reflecting reason is overtaken by despair – not by an objective authority that is capable of detaching itself from despair’s look at the “self,” at “God,” or at “truth.” Doubt becomes total at the close of chapter C.A.b.¿ in an all-embracing possibility which, precisely because it is so all-embracing, makes impossible every certain criterion for the definition of the self and makes the despairing person run astray: “In possibility everything is possible. For this reason, it is possible to become lost in possibility in all sorts of ways, but primarily in two. The one takes the form of desiring, craving; the other takes the form of the melancholy-imaginary (hope/ fear or anxiety).”56 The description of how the despairing person runs 55 56

SKS 11, 152 / SUD, 36 f. SKS 11, 153 / SUD, 37.

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astray and cannot find the path back – or dies in fear of that of which he is afraid – can in fact be read as a poetic reproduction of the Greek term ‘wÎÍϽ¿’. 57 Just as doubt becomes total in the despair of possibility, as an aporia in which every boundary dissolves, doubt also becomes total in the despair of necessity; but in this instance, it takes the form of an impenetrable boundary, an impasse where one cannot get any further. In a description of the dialectical “algebra” in the dialectic of despair, these two impossible alternatives are sketched in the introduction to C.A.b.À: If losing oneself in possibility may be compared with a child’s utterance of vowel sounds, then lacking possibility would be the same as being dumb. The necessary is like pure consonants, but to express them there must be possibility. If this is lacking, if a human existence is brought to the point where it lacks possibility, then it is in despair and is in despair every moment it lacks possibility. 58

We shall now proceed to the analysis of a specific turning point in chapter C.A.a.À, which (with some reservations) can be described as the cogito-insight in The Sickness unto Death. Naturally, this is not the same cogito as in Descartes;59 but it is a corresponding turning point within the metaphysical doubt about the possibility of knowing the presuppositions of the self, since it is in this chapter that we find an interlude roughly two pages in length, which completely breaks with the description of despair in the three preceding sub-chapters. More precisely, the turning point occurs at the beginning of the third section, when the author suddenly diverts the entire dialectic from the self towards God: What is decisive is that with God everything is possible. This is eternally true and consequently true at every moment. This is indeed a generally recognized truth, which is 57

58 59

“Legends and fairy tales tell of the knight who suddenly sees a rare bird and chases after it, because it seems at first to be very close; but it flies again, and when night comes, he finds himself separated from his companions and lost in the wilderness where he now is. So it is also with desire’s possibility. Instead of taking the possibility back into necessity, he chases after possibility – and at last cannot find his way back to himself. – In melancholy the opposite takes place in much the same way. Melancholically enamored, the individual pursues one of anxiety’s possibilities, which finally leads him away from himself so that he is a victim of anxiety or a victim of that about which he was anxious lest he be overcome” (SKS 11, 153 / SUD, 37). SKS 11, 153 / SUD, 37. Strictly speaking, what we find is a credo ergo sum, i. e. a certainty based on faith rather than on thinking itself. In the light of the role played by insanity in the two alternatives, however, this credo is neither more nor less rational than the Cartesian cogito. I shall expand on this in what follows.

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commonly expressed in this way, but the critical decision does not come until a person is brought to his extremity, when, humanly speaking, there is no possibility. Then the question is whether he will believe that for God everything is possible, that is, whether he will believe.60

Although the idea of God and the name of God have been mentioned earlier in The Sickness unto Death, it is only here that the hypothesis “God” is to be tested in earnest – not the question of the existence of God, but the problem: if God exists, what meaning does this have for the individual who relates to himself and attempts to know himself? What is involved is thus not a theological definition of the concept of God, but a definition which takes psychology as its point of departure, but considers the consequences for the philosophical structuring of anthropology, i. e. the direct consequences for the construction of the self and the dialectic of the self. The assertion “With God everything is possible” can be understood in radically different ways. It may be read as it is “generally” or “commonly” understood (these two adverbs translate til daglig Brug, literally: “for daily use”; this phrase is employed twice in the Danish original, in a chiastic structure which further underlines the static element in the “everyday” – and thus domesticated – view of God’s possibility). Or else it may be read in the situation which arises when the self is taken to its uttermost limits. Then the meaning of this assertion becomes completely decisive. In the confrontation with this radical possibility, all the preceding dialectic between possibility and necessity collapses, since the category of “possibility” takes on a radically different meaning if the possibility is not limited to the self’s reflections on itself in the mirror of possibility, but takes the other as the origin to a possibility surpassing its own imagination. Such a possibility shatters the categories in which the reason can understand itself, as these have been outlined hitherto. And this is why trusting such an assertion makes saying Adieu to one particular type of rationality. Anti-Climacus then refers to such a breach in rationality: “But this is the very formula for losing the understanding: to believe is indeed to lose the understanding in order to gain God.”61 Clearly, Anti-Climacus perceives this as a caesura, a definitive decision, an either/or. But this does not mean that we are obliged to let go of the reason so quickly; rather, the opposite is the case, for as we shall shortly see, Anti-Climacus attempts to draw the boundary line 60 61

SKS 11, 153 / SUD, 38. SKS 11, 154 / SUD, 38.

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between a self-knowledge based on reason alone and a self-knowledge based on the counter-rationality, the other rationality, which sees its origin in a possibility that bears the name of “God.” This is a division and a line drawn inside thinking, as a presupposition for reflection on the self. It is thus not to be understood only as a demarcation vis-àvis something “outside” (a metaphysical transcendence), or something irrational that has nothing to do with the thinker himself. It is a selfdivision of human rationality, an Entzweiung, so to speak, divided by the “limit” of “reason alone.” In this decisive moment, the understanding not only draws near to a primal difference which represents the distinction between the self and the definitively other. At the same time, reason draws near to its own presupposition. If “God” denotes an all-embracing possibility of this kind, it is precisely as the possibility of the self that it becomes important for self-knowledge. We should however also keep in mind that this is a possibility that the self itself is not capable of comprehending. According to Anti-Climacus, the first reaction of the despairing person to this possibility is not at all the end of despair: on the contrary, he claims that the confrontation with such a possibility leads to an intensification of the despair. At this point, his diagnosis of despair abruptly shifts from analysis to a narrative description of a human being’s fateful struggle with despair: Take this analogy. Imagine that someone with a capacity to imagine terrifying nightmares has pictured to himself some horror or other that is absolutely unbearable. Then it happens to him, this very horror happens to him. Humanly speaking, his collapse is altogether certain – and in despair his soul’s despair fights to be permitted to despair, to attain, if you please, the composure to despair, to obtain the total personality’s consent to despair and be in despair; consequently, there is nothing or no one he would curse more than an attempt or the person making an attempt to hinder him from despairing, as the poet’s poet so splendidly and incomparably expresses it [Shakespeare, Richard III, 3.3]: “Beshrew thee, cousin, which didst lead me forth Of that sweet way I was in to despair!” At this point, then, salvation is, humanly speaking, utterly impossible; but for God everything is possible! This is the battle of faith, battling, madly, if you will, for possibility.62

By repeating the word despair in different variations no less than seven times, Anti-Climacus emphasizes how important it is that one truly despairs, that one is given the calm needed to despair, that one enters more deeply into oneself through despair. And if one collapses, breaks down, in despair, then, psychologically and humanly speaking, salva62

SKS 11, 153 / SUD, 37.

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tion is utterly impossible. But exactly in this situation, when the individual’s category of possibility is shattered, this other affirmation takes on a decisive role: “For God everything is possible!” That is the possibility which shakes every other possibility, unto the limit of insanity. We have seen that various designations of insanity are found in this section: “This is the very formula for losing the understanding”; “This is the battle of faith, battling, madly, if you will, for possibility.”63 And I believe that madness is a key word in the description of the self, once it reaches the borders of despair and thus the limits of reason alone. Kierkegaard often employs madness to denote escaping from control by the reason, e. g. when he has Climacus describe the moment of decision as “foolishness (Daarskab).”64 Insanity does not however enjoy an exclusively positive value in Kierkegaard’s texts. It can denote a medical diagnosis, viz. that one has taken leave of one’s senses, and this is certainly not something Kierkegaard holds up as an ideal. On the contrary, he often makes fun of the insane. This humor has a polemical character when it is directed against the Hegelian system and the Danish Hegelians’ “babbling” repetition of high-flown claims which have no consequences for their own lives – in short, they lack the interior dimension, because their insanity is “that they are without sense.”65 One can always excuse the madman, since he does not know any better, but the philosophers’ madness is comic, since they believe that they are the wisest of all. There is however also another form of madness, viz. madness as a suspension and a destabilization of reason – as in the moment of decision. This other madness is linked to the absurd in Fear and Trembling, and to the madness of the paradox in Philosophical Fragments and the Postscript. This madness is antecedent to the division between faith and knowledge, and the division between reason and insanity, and opens up here a space for that which is indefinable by the subject itself, that which cannot be definitively explained – but which precisely for this reason summons the subject to make a decision. It is certainly a madness of this kind that makes its appearance in this passage in The Sickness unto Death, although the author seems not to have been fully conscious of his choice of words. It is the madness which was known in the middle ages and the Renaissance as the “altere folie.” This kind of madness makes possible a rupture in the 63 64 65

SKS 11, 153 / SUD, 37. SKS 4, 255 / cf. PF, 52. For the comparison between the madman in the asylum and the philosopher, cf. SKS 7, 178-180 / CUP, 194-196.

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category of possibility, dissolving the speculative unity of possibility and actuality in necessity. The madness in fact plays a decisive role for the turning point in the dialectic of despair in no less than three respects: First, because the radical possibility appears insane to a rationality that is based either on reason alone, on probability, or on rational calculations about how to achieve success in life. Secondly, because to follow the “formula” for losing the understanding means acknowledging that one is not oneself capable of drawing the boundary between reason and madness, and that madness can thus turn out at any moment to be superior to reason. Thirdly, this means that madness will always remain a possibility alongside the understanding’s reasoning about the self, and this possibility will continue to be a chronic source of uncertainty in the knowledge of oneself.66 Let us once again inscribe this relationship between reason and madness in the parallelogram. Here, Derrida’s analysis of the general relationship between doubt and madness, the reason, uncertainty, and philosophy will cast an oblique but nevertheless clarifying light on our text.67 Derrida describes the hyperbolic movement in Descartes’ cogito-insight as audace (“daring”), since it cannot be made secure in any fixed point: The hyperbolical audacity of the Cartesian Cogito, its mad audacity, which we perhaps no longer perceive as such because, unlike Descartes’ contemporary, we are too well assured of ourselves and too well accustomed to the framework of the Cogito, rather than to the critical experience of it – its mad audacity would consist in the return to an original point which no longer belongs to either a determined reason or a determined unreason, no longer belongs to them as opposition or alternative. Whether I am mad or not, Cogito, sum. Madness is therefore, in every sense of the word, only one case of thought (within thought). It is therefore a question of drawing back toward a point where all determined contradictions, in the form of given, factual historical structures, can appear, and appear as relative to this zero point where the determined meaning and non-meaning come together in their common origin.68

66

67

68

Cf. Derrida’s claim: “I philosophize only in terror, but in the confessed terror of being mad,” Jacques Derrida L’écriture et la différence, p. 96 / cf. Writing and Difference, p. 62. Tilman Beyrich too sees the significance of madness as a link between Kierkegaard and Derrida. Naturally, he refers primarily to the two texts Fear and Trembling and The Gift of Death. Cf. Tilman Beyrich Ist Glauben wiederholbar?, pp. 206 f. The reference to madness in The Sickness unto Death seems more fortuitous, but substantially speaking, the decisive point is surely that it occurs here, in that dissertation in which Kierkegaard outlines his definitive anthropology. Jacques Derrida L’écriture et la différence, p. 86 / Writing and Difference, p. 56. Translation modified.

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Likewise, in Anti-Climacus’ text, a decisive problem is at stake, which demands audacity, even a mad audacity: the collapse of the human person in despair, or a saving possibility. This makes it easier to perceive the trembling under the text in its movement towards a point that is antecedent to the various forms of despair, antecedent to the antitheses between finitude and infinity, certainty and uncertainty, determined sense and non-sense, reason and madness. This point is not the protection of the reason or of thought against madness: on the contrary, it is an opening towards madness, towards a madness within the thinking about the self, a madness that cannot have a rational basis, that cannot have a basis in the self in any way, but which is traced back to the other qua other: whether or not I am mad, whether or not I am despairing, for God everything is possible.69 This is not an insight or a decision that can be defended by means of three arguments. It is a movement in which Anti-Climacus exposes himself to the miraculous, the impossible, attempting to look at reality as a totality, despite the fact that reality is never accessible otherwise than in small pieces and fragments. In this moment, it is not decisive whether or not he actually sees reality as such a totality, nor whether or not he is right as a matter of sheer fact in his supposition. The decisive point is only his trust that this is the case, that this is possible, and that this possibility, this other possibility, is able to resolve contradictions. Derrida describes this kind of infinite movement out beyond the totality of all that exists as an excess of possibility, in which the subject discovers and acknowledges the freedom of madness as his own possibility: Even if I do not in fact grasp the totality, even if I neither understand nor embrace it, I still formulate the project of doing so, and this project is meaningful in such a way that it can be defined only in relation to a precomprehension of the infinite and undetermined totality. This is why, in this excess of possibility [en cet excès du possible], of right, and of meaning over and above the real, the fact, and the existent, this project is mad [fou] and acknowledges madness as its freedom and its own possibility.70

69

70

Cf. also Derrida’s analysis of Descartes’ confession, saving him from the radical possibility of madness and deception: Jacques Derrida L’écriture et la différence, pp. 88 f. / Writing and Difference, pp. 58 f. Jacques Derrida L’écriture et la différence, p. 87 / cf. Writing and Difference, p. 56. Translation modified. Alan Bass translates “which exceeds all that is real” for “en cet excès du possible,” a translation that almost misses the whole point of the Derridean excess of possibility.

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I believe that an excess of possibility is an appropriate description of the breach with despair and the breaking out of despair which AntiClimacus describes. It is an excess over and above all goals and criteria, and this is why it is fou in relation to every rational calculation – fou in the double sense of simple-minded and mad. The decisive point in the moment of decision is not in fact whether such a possibility is real or comprehensible, whether it exists or is rational. On the contrary, it receives its rationality, its intuitive comprehensibility, and its reality thanks to its being possible: this project is madness, but this is why it also acknowledges madness as its own freedom and possibility. It is precisely in such an excess of possibility that I sense in Anti-Climacus the outlines of another freedom, freedom as a form of madness whereby the self puts the reason at risk through a crazy struggle for the possible, but discovers in the mad possibility that the word “freedom” acquires a meaning quite different from such terms as “self-determination” or “freedom of action.”71 If we try to define where the limit between reason and madness is drawn in this decisive moment, the only possible answer is that the limit runs right through the decision, which confirms the limit – in the sense that such a limit exists, and also that this limit is suspended in the recognition of a possibility antecedent to those inferences which are otherwise acknowledged as rational or mad. In this moment, there is a possibility which must be categorized as belonging to irrationality and madness – but it is this possibility that expresses the highest reason. At the same time, we are justified in assuming that one who acknowledges such a mad possibility, such a radical freedom, in the depths of his rationality, cannot simply shut away this possibility’s alterity in a rational totality – for in such a case, the other would lose its alterity, its madness, its excessiveness. This is why the limit of madness is inscribed upon the reason, as the other origin of thinking. And even if the madness remains silent, it is inscribed as silence upon speech. This also expresses the relationship between the self and the other, as this is defined in the moment of decision. The fundamentally new and decisive element which we meet in the text is a new definition of possibility. When someone is in despair, he either runs astray in possibility (the despair of possibility) or else sees no way out and suffers under the lack of possibility (the despair of necessity). But in the 71

Cf. Arne Grøn’s two concepts of freedom, which as far as I can see risk forcing freedom back to “probability’s trap or box of tricks” (Arne Grøn Subjektivitet og negativitet: Kierkegaard, pp. 177-181).

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moment of decision, the possibility is led to another origin, and it is precisely the origin that makes this possibility different: “At times the ingeniousness of the human imagination can extend to the point of creating possibility, but at last – that is, when it depends upon faith – then only this helps: that for God everything is possible.” 72 For the despairing person who grasps that he is in despair, the hypothesis “God” once again becomes relevant, though only if the meaning of the hypothesis is expounded as an excess of possibility.

§ 35 The Closure and Repetition of Metaphysics Considering this turning point in the dialectic in The Sickness unto Death, I will conclude by returning to the question of metaphysics and metaphysical categories, which by Kierkegaard is ultimately a question of repetition. The very general problems occupying Kierkegaard are (i) to what extent the metaphysical assumption of totality can be given a rational foundation, (ii) whether the general assumption of a metaphysical totality entails a closure of philosophical rationality, and ultimately (iii) whether or not the hypothesis “God” may be maintained in a reality and a language defined by metaphysics. The modal categories possibility, actuality, and necessity receive particular importance in this discussion of metaphysics as a whole, because they are directly connected with the questions (a) which possibilities do we have for organizing and explaining the world as a whole; (b) what criteria do we have for judging between fiction and facts (and for the transition of something to “come into existence”); and (c) what counts as a logical necessity and limitation, what will we have to take for “given,” and what is open for human definitions and interpretations. When the problems and questions at stake are formulated in such general terms, it is not hard to understand why Anti-Climacus attaches such a great importance to exactly these categories: possibility, actuality, and necessity. The problems are very general, they are fundamental, and the whole rationality of his own project is at risk. Anti-Climacus’ approach to metaphysics is however neither propositional nor synthetical, it rather seems to be analytical and aporetical. He is not out for giving solutions; he is rather looking for trouble, i. e. for aporias inherent in metaphysical explanations, which may have caused the aporetic impasse of despair. What makes doubt so interest72

SKS 11, 154 / SUD, 39.

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ing and essential to this discourse, is its position between psychology and philosophy, between psychology and religion, and between religious notions and the philosophical reflection about their significance. If a person suffers from despair, and this despair is directly connected to his fundamental categories for organizing reality (i. e. what is possible vs. what is necessary), the doubt on these categories may introduce the shattering of his rationality and world-view (including the shattering and collapse of his self). This discussion becomes a particular case of the problem of repetition, but also the case where repetition becomes a particular philosophical interest. Let me thus once again return to the problem of repetition that we find described both in the book Repetition and in The Concept of Anxiety. The following quotation is from Repetition: Repetition is the new category that will be discovered. If one knows anything of modern philosophy and is not entirely ignorant of Greek philosophy, one will readily see that this category precisely explains the relation between the Eleatics and Heraclitus, and that repetition proper is what has mistakenly been called mediation. […] “Mediation” is a foreign word; “repetition” is a good Danish word, and I congratulate the Danish language on a philosophical term. There is no explanation in our age as to how mediation takes place, whether it results from the motion of the two factors and in what sense it is already contained in them, or whether it is something new that is added, and, if so, how. In this connection, the Greek view of the concept of ȽËÅÑÇÐ corresponds to the modern category “transition” and should be given close attention. The dialectic of repetition is easy, for that which is repeated has been – otherwise it could not be repeated – but the very fact that it has been makes the repetition into something new. When the Greeks said that all knowing is recollecting, they said that all existence, which is, has been; when one says that life is a repetition, one says: actuality, which has been, now comes into existence. If one does not have the category of recollection or of repetition, all life dissolves into an empty, meaningless noise. Recollection is the ethnical view of life, repetition the modern; repetition is the interest of metaphysics, and also the interest upon which metaphysics is stranding; repetition is the watchword in every ethical view; repetition is conditio sine qua non for every issue of dogmatics.73

The distinction between recollection and repetition is clarifying: Recollection is “ethnical,” it organizes the world according to a particular culture and values, and refers to a world and a reality which is perceived to be “given.” Repetition, on the other hand, is modern in the sense that nothing is given, every truth and every reality may be questioned, may be understood otherwise. Hence, what characterizes modernity is a certain distance to the problems, notions and categories applied. It might even refer to metaphysics as a whole, as a totality 73

SKS 4, 25 f. / R, 148 f.

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of everything that is, and question this totality. Thus there emerges an open, undefined gap of doubt between the person doubting and the doubted reality, taken as a whole. Situated in this open gap between “ideality” and “reality,” between the appearing and the appearance, between language and givenness, Kierkegaard locates “consciousness” in “De omnibus dubitandum est.” That consciousness is in The Sickness unto Death seeking its definition as a “self.” The author of Repetition claims that the dialectics of repetition is easy, because “that which is repeated, has been – otherwise it could not be repeated – but the very fact that it has been makes the repetition into something new.” This is exactly what happens in the chapter C.A in The Sickness unto Death. Anti-Climacus refers to common notions of possibility and necessity, based on Idealistic metaphysics, but also common in everyday perception of modern reality. In order to think them anew, he reflects upon their basis in the modern self, but exactly this reflection upon the self entails taking the self for something given, something that has been. But becoming a self is according to the author not limited to something which has been, it is on the contrary something which is coming, i. e. it is coming into existence. That is the repetition of the self, which can never be the result of any necessary or logical development; it is always a transition from possibility to actuality. That means, however, a radically new evaluation of the categories “possibility” and “necessity” involved in an open repetition of these categories. What “has been” defined respectively as possible and necessary may in this re-evaluation of the categories appear to be something other, or even if they still are nominally the “same” (i. e. necessity and possibility), they actually signify something else, something different, or even a difference inscribed into the concepts through a re-doubling of “possibility,” and a re-doubling of “necessity.” This is apparently what happens when the understanding breaks down: when the one who despairs greets madness, all the categories that one has applied in order to reflect on the self undergo a pronounced shaking: “[…] because the being of God means that everything is possible, or that everything is possible means the being of God; only he whose being has been so shaken that he has become spirit by understanding that everything is possible, only he has anything to do with God.”74 This shaking is in fact a continuation of the tremendum which is expressed both in the “earthquake” in Repetition and in the trembling in Fear and Trembling. The shaking occurs when 74

SKS 11, 156 / SUD, 39.

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one encounters an alterity that one cannot comprehend, but which – in its alien, and therefore frightening otherness – introduces another movement. The beginning of the other movement is that shaking. What is so special about this shaking? In what sense is such a shaking a different movement than Aufhebung, which is also a transition of categories? First of all, the shaking is not something that a human being can control. It is snatched out of the grasp of the one who despairs, out of his concepts and the resolution of antitheses. In madness, one does not encounter self-determination and the appropriation of the other: one encounters the Abyss, that other which no one can appropriate as “his own,” but which nevertheless sets this motion in train: a trembling, a radical transformation. With the shaking begins a new movement. This is, as foreshown already in the quotation from Repetition, connected to the ethical, to the possibility of dogmatics and indeed of religious categories in general. According to Anti-Climacus, all religious categories begin with such a trembling. And in the trembling, The Sickness unto Death establishes a new presupposition for the understanding of the self, of the possibility and the necessity of the self – and hence also for the actuality of the self. The transition can probably best be described as hyperbolic, a total turning which culminates in a possibility xλÈÃÇË¿ Ò"hÐÍ}ѽ¿Ð, a possibility antecedent to the question of Being, of possibility, and of necessity in the metaphysical sense – but at the same time, a possibility which becomes the origin of another way of speaking about possibility, necessity, and responsibility. There is clearly a link here between (i) the coming into existence of the self in the transition from possibility to actuality, (ii) a madness of divine origin, and (iii) a new definition of the categories of possibility and necessity. The definition of God as excessive possibility is in fact formulated as a chiasmus, the rhetorical figure which Arne Melberg defines as an anti-metabolê: “God is this, that everything is possible, or that everything is possible, is God.”75 This chiasmus is, rhetorically seen, a 75

In a comprehensive discussion of the concept of repetition in Kierkegaard, the literary scholar Arne Melberg touches inter alia on the significance of chiasmus for the formulation of the philosophical problem that is posed in the book (cf. Arne Melberg Theories of Mimesis, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1995, pp. 135-141). Melberg points out that the pseudonymous author of Repetition, Constantin Constantius, locates the problem of repetition in the point of intersection between the Eleatic philosophy, which denied motion, and the Heraclitic philosophy, which claimed that everything was in motion. This means that he is doing the same as Plato in the dialogue Parmenides. Plato engages in a discussion of principles with the Eleatic philosophy – as a counterfoil to the Heraclitic idea of mo-

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way of expressing God’s immutability in the middle of a reality where everything is changing; at the same time, this excessive possibility imtion. The Parmenides has rightly been called the most fundamental of Plato’s dialogues; by means of nine hypotheses, it discusses the questions of the One and the Other, similarity and difference, Being and non-Being, totality and part. But what interests Constantin is the question of the significance of time and the problem of motion, understood as metaballon (transition) and kinêsis (movement) (cf. Plato Parmenides, 156c-157a). In Constantin, the Greek understanding of transition and movement becomes a contrast to the Hegelian dialectic. As we have seen in the fragment “De omnibus dubitandum est,” which was written in the same year as Repetition, the dialectic of repetition is linked deliberately to another philosophical dialect than the Hegelian. The Greek transition is not identical to the Hegelian Aufhebung, although both involve a dialectical movement. Melberg’s interest is primarily in rhetoric and the theory of literature, and this leads him at once to note a remarkable aspect of Constantin’s definition of repetition. He points out that this is formulated as a chiasmus: “The dialectic of repetition is easy, for that which is repeated has been – otherwise it could not be repeated – but the very fact that it has been makes the repetition into something new” (SKS 4, 25 / R, 149). Melberg comments on this as follows: “A chiasmus is the very opposite of a transitory metaballon (and another name for the chiasmus is also antimetabole), but according to my quotation it is the chiastic definition and not the transition that is the renovating repetition. What appears to be a closed and empty formula is – ironically? – said to result in the new” (Arne Melberg Theories of Mimesis, p. 137). The movement (metaballon) of repetition is thus defined with the help of what Melberg calls the rhetorical antithesis of movement, viz. chiasmus, which also goes by the name of anti-metabolê. But is Melberg right in defining “anti-metabolê” as the opposite of metabolê? Could it not be a different kind of movement, namely a movement which returns or proceeds with an unexpected twist? Moreover, Melberg sees this as an ironic disproportion between contents and form, but is irony really involved here? Is it not rather a question of movement? Is the formulation itself empty, or is it only a way of expressing a termination of the old, so that the expression can be appropriated anew by means of a repetition of the expression – but with an indefinable difference between the old and the new? Is the closing of the chiasmus perhaps an expression for the closing of metaphysics, while the chiasmus’ twisting of the meaning sketches a new ellipse (cf. Jacques Derrida “Ellipse” in L’écriture et la difference, pp. 429-436)? Jacob Bøggild takes his starting point in Melberg, but develops his reflections on the chiasmus as a rhetorical figure. He concludes that the chiasmus has a double function of inversion and of halt (Standsning). He points out that the halt can be seen in despair and offense, and on the basis of Anti-Climacus’ second text, Practice in Christianity, he shows how the chiasmus is particularly significant for the reading of the paradox, since it helps to crucify the understanding – and then hands over the understanding to the grace of the paradox: “In short, there is no certain point that could stabilize the texts of Climacus and Anti-Climacus. Instead, these texts are handed over to the grace of the paradox. Accordingly, they cannot describe the fundamental ambiguity which is a characteristic of the paradox without themselves practicing this ambiguity, with the chiasmus as their preferred figure” (Jacob Bøggild Ironiens tænker: tænkningens ironi, p. 191).

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mediately points back to existence, to the self, to coming into existence, and to action. This means that reflection on the human person as self and as spirit receives a new starting point in this chiasmus. It is indeed true that the definition raises as many questions as it answers, and in this respect it is highly puzzling. It is not an exact definition of possibility; it is rather a definition showing beyond any definition: that everything is possible. And this is the significance of the name “God.” Albeit the definition is not really exact, it has something of the “opening” character of revelation or apocalypse: a revelation which is not explanatory, but which makes a “transfiguration” possible, i. e. a transformation in the one who looks for an explanation.76 The concept of God is kept radically open: “God is this, that everything is possible, or that everything is possible, is God.” Anti-Climacus’ point seems quite simply to be that such a concept of God breaks with the understanding, as long as “understanding” is defined on the basis of a closed rationality (whether bourgeois, religious, or philosophical). The concept of God remains an aporia, in the Socratic sense. It is indefinable and inexplicable, just like death’s decision: “Yes, it is possible.” 77 For the one who despairs, however, and whose philosophical doubt is driven by passionate interest, this possibility entails a radical difference. It is decisively important whether or not God represents an excess of possibility of this kind, and if it was the case, then it would give God’s inexplicable possibility retroactive power in human life. It

76

77

Bøggild’s demonstration of a connection between the chiasmus as rhetorical figure and the ambiguity of the paradox is certainly interesting, but it does not exhaust the significance of the chiasmus in Kierkegaard’s texts. Naturally, a rhetorical figure such as the chiasmus does not have any meaning as such; hence, the possibilities that it opens in the text are legion. In chapter C.A of The Sickness unto Death, it is the dialectical significance of the chiasmus that is particularly interesting, and we will therefore retain Bøggild’s halt and Melberg’s description of a movement, viz. transition. I believe that the interesting point, in terms of the dialectic, consists in defining the relationship between movement and halt – not the halt alone, nor the movement for the sake of reflection, but a halt in the movement and a movement towards the halt and again proceeding from the halt. It is perfectly correct to point out that the halt is not a “certain point,” but it is equally important to localize the halt itself, if the movement towards the halt is to be developed dialectically. Just as in Plato’s Parmenides, the decisive point in this text is the discussion of the relationship between a certain limitation leading to standstill, viz., necessity’s despair (the aporia), and the possibility of a radical movement (the metaballon), which takes place in the relationship between finitude and infinitude, between necessity and possibility – and therefore also between the self and the other. Cf. M. Jaime Ferreira Transforming Vision. Imagination and Will in Kierkegaardian Faith, Oxford: Clarendon Press 1991, p. 66. See SKS 5, 462 f. / TDIO, 94 f.

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may not make God accessible to human reason, but as the other on which the self depends, it gives a totally new perspective on “his or her innermost being.” Such knowledge, however, is always accompanied by a shaking of our being – in our innermost dimension. This definition of metaphysics is connected to large-scale trajectories in the history of ideas in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in politics, society, religion, and philosophy. For example, The Sickness unto Death was written in the year in which Karl Marx published his Communist Manifesto together with Friedrich Engels; but the fragmentary element in the revolutions of the period and the dissolution of thinking has a more urgent character in Kierkegaard than in Marx and Engels. Through the concept of “repetition,” Kierkegaard expresses the end of metaphysics, both in the sense of its conclusion/ collapse and of its Ò»ÉÍÐ, so that thinking is obliged to take new paths, attempting to give an account of how metaphysics’ discourse about the human person can be meaningful without the stability that metaphysics had ensured in earlier times. The metaphysical picture of reality has entered a definitive crisis which modern people seem unable to resolve. This is why doubt, both in the Socratic and in the Cartesian sense, has become normal. This crisis affects not only philosophy, but also ethics and religion, which have employed a metaphysical vocabulary to express their thinking and their world view. The stability of metaphysics crumbles to nothing: but does thereby the language become meaningless? Or can this language regain a meaning which is not shut in in a metaphysical totality of existence, substance, and meaning? Is it possible to reconquer reality on the brink of despair? Throughout Part One of The Sickness unto Death, the knowledge of God and the knowledge of oneself are closely connected in their relation to the despair of necessity: “[…] for he who does not have a God does not have a self, either. But the fatalist has no God, or, what amounts to the same thing, his God is necessity; since everything is possible for God, then God is this – that everything is possible.” 78 This could in fact be read as a confirmation of our hypothesis that AntiClimacus is testing the hypothesis “God”; but the quotation can also be considered an expression of exactly the opposite, viz. that AntiClimacus never genuinely doubts that the self of the human person is connected to his or her relation to God. This affirmation can therefore be said to disprove our hypothesis, even though it has been confirmed. 78

SKS 11, 155 / SUD, 40.

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The point of our hypothesis, however, is not to make the self a function of the concept of God, nor to make God a theological Vorentscheidung which is at the basis of the book as a whole. The point of the hypothesis “God” is first to underline the difference between the many ideas and concepts one may have about God – and the alterity which we can call the origin and basis of the self. This is true, irrespective of whether our ideas about God lead us to reject or to accept one particular philosophical, psychological, religious, or non-religious belief in God. Secondly, I should like to point out that with the hypothesis “God,” the concept of God is at stake: one’s ideas about God are put to the test, and this means that with despair, the self too is put to the test. This is because the hypothesis “God” is so comprehensive that it tests whatever one might believe about one’s existence, one’s understanding, one’s reason, all one’s views about true and false. And this is perhaps the aspect that emerges most clearly in this section: “Only he whose being has been so shaken that he has become spirit by understanding that everything is possible, only he has anything to do with God.” 79 When one’s being is shaken, this involves all one’s views, ideas, and categories that are linked to the hypothesis “God.” They are not falsified or rejected altogether, but they are suspended by the experience that God is different from one’s expectation. Relating to God as God, as alterity beyond comprehension, in fact presupposes the experience of such a difference, as an experience with aporias. Thirdly, we see that there is a connection between the self and God, both in the sense that it is meaningless to speak of an appropriate knowledge of God without self-knowledge, and in the sense that one’s self-knowledge is always implicitly also a knowledge of God. The knowledge of the self always involves a knowledge of the other (though most commonly only through the trace of despair, of a lack, of a rupture, of an aporia in the self, in the very construction of a self relating to itself); in this case, however it involves knowledge of “God” as the one who is absolutely Other. This knowledge of God cannot however be made a function of the dialectic of the self. On the contrary, it is the dialectic of the self which on the reverse side, through the aporetic possibility, discovers a trace of God as infinite presupposition, as an inexplicable and therefore indefinable possibility antecedent to the self – a trace that despair covers over all the time. In anxiety and in despair, however, we can see how this trace has left behind an unease, 79

SKS 11, 156 / SUD, 40.

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a difference, a hint of something alien, even if this is covered over by a philosophical system, by the economy of reciprocity, by a bourgeois lifestyle, etc. – indeed, even if all that remains is “a trace of a trace.” When Anti-Climacus makes his treatise about despair into a psychological study of how modern persons relate to the hypothesis “God,” despair takes on a dialectical appearance, in an ambiguous and indefinable sense. Not only is it “doubly dialectic”; moreover “all its expressions are dialectical.” Despair can never be defined unambiguously, whether as a necessity or as a possibility, or as a synthesis of necessity and possibility. Through despair, however, it is possible in self-reflection to discover a trace of an infinite possibility, a trace of the insight that for God everything is possible; not only as a selfevident proposition (“til daglig Brug”), but as a recognition opening a space for the other in the self-relationship (between the construction of the self and the self experiencing contradictions, conflicts of will, and despair). This is a possibility antecedent to the philosophical distinction between finite and infinite, between possibility and necessity, and this is why it can be said to belong essentially to silence. But like Dionysius the Areopagite, Anti-Climacus has opened up this space of silence for breathing, for respiration, for the prayer which is led to a certainty antecedent to the description of reality in existential dialectic: Personhood is a synthesis of possibility and necessity. Its continued existence is like breathing (re-spiration), which is an inhaling and exhaling. The self of the determinist cannot breathe, for it is impossible to breathe necessity exclusively, because that would utterly suffocate a person’s self. 80

There is a continuous shift in the image between “to breathe” (ånde), which is necessary for life, and the coming into existence of the self through its becoming “spirit” (ånd). As a contrast to the purely “necessary” view of the world, which “suffocates” the self, re-spiration, the continuous re-petition of breathing, allows the self to be moved by possibility – although according to a deterministic, fatalistic or simply a closed view of existence, such a possibility does not exist at all. The recognition of an infinite possibility, an excess of possibility, is intuitive and apophatic, but Kierkegaard does not in The Sickness unto Death make it clear whether this is a presupposition upon which the self can build a new and stable self-understanding, or whether the breathing is a possibility which receives the distinctions as distinctions and resolves them, while at the same time leaving the rift between 80

SKS 11, 155 / SUD, 40.

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finite and infinite. Here, there seem to be some shifts within the text itself.81 The dynamic is as follows: first a negative, Socratic dialectic until the point of stopping, the aporia. The definition is closed, it appears to be opaque and absurd for someone who reflects on himself and finds only aporias and contradictions. Either it seems irrelevant (because of the alienating alterity) or it seems unbelievable, because it is all too simple, too good to be true, so to speak. The chiastic definition of God holds fast to God as immutable alterity, as the boundary for the understanding, as “the Absurd” which cannot be explained. But from the inside of this construction, it is God who breaks out, as possibility, an impossible possibility, a possibility for life and for the one who suffers from the sickness unto death. This is an excess of possibility: “that everything is possible” – after all. The idea that the spirit is based in an infinite and indefinable possibility offers resistance to a finite dialectic, i. e. a dialectic which removes absolute distinctions, and to the idea of the world as a metaphysical totality. If the possibility is infinite, it cannot be included in a closed system. But on the other hand, possibility and necessity are re-introduced as basic categories of the self, although in a sense different from the assumed normality of foreseeable possibilities. This is the repetition of metaphysics: Between possibility and possibility, between necessity and necessity, there is opened up an undefined space of alterity. Hence, it is this primal distinction between self and other which opens the space between finite and infinite, between necessary and possible, where the self can exist, and exactly because it exists in a relationship to the other as other. 81

First, it is affirmed that the decisive point is that “for God everything is possible,” i. e. that God is the active subject in this possibility, the one who makes possible the resolution of despair. Later, however, we have the more closed definition of God (though perhaps this definition opens up, as a rift in the text): “the being of God means that everything is possible, or that everything is possible means the being of God.” We should note that this chiastic definition has an apocalyptic structure of possibility: it is the “Come!” of prayer that opens the self to the future, a completely open future in which God is possibility, i. e. “that everything is possible means the being of God.” The possibility of prayer includes the silence that surrounds the concept of God – even the God who acts. This is the khôra inscribed upon the arkhê, in the human person’s relationship to God as arkhê, which can never be thought of without a deconstructive distinction of this kind, the distinction in the text which opens up, which gives space for the self, which gives time for the self, but does not itself determine time and space. The chiastic construction, which is defined rhetorically and dialectically as an anti-metabolê, is broken up from within and makes possible the metabolê of the one who despairs, i. e. movement, turning back, transition.

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If not, if the despairing person does not accept such an excess of possibility and give space for its transition into actuality, he will soon return to the trap of controlled possibility, which is an everyday version of metaphysical closure corresponding to the motto “enough is enough”: The philistine-bourgeois mentality thinks that it controls possibility, that it has tricked this prodigious elasticity into the trap or madhouse of probability, thinks that it holds it prisoner; it leads possibility around imprisoned in the cage of probability; exhibits it, imagines itself to be the master, does not perceive that precisely thereby it has imprisoned itself in the thralldom of spiritlessness and is the most wretched of all. The person who gets lost in possibility soars high with the boldness of despair; he for whom everything became necessity overstrains himself in life and is crushed in despair; but the philistine-bourgeois mentality spiritlessly triumphs. 82

Accordingly, if this possibility is not to be denied in adiecto, or in actam, it presupposes in the self-relationship, in the dialectical movements of thought, and in language a sensitivity to the incommensurable breach of infinity, to silence, and to the alterity of God.

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VI. The Thanatology of the Spirit

Wir sind uns unbekannt, wir Erkennenden, wir selbst uns selbst das hat seinen guten Grund. Friedrich Nietzsche

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Kierkegaard’s relationship to Hegel is one of the great, classic themes in Kierkegaard research. It has always been marked by great ideological differences, and the need to emphasize these. One tendency has been to affirm a pronounced difference in every respect (e. g. Malantschuk, Thulstrup, Kingo).1 The consequence was mostly a continuation of Kierkegaard’s own polemic, without any critical examination of the validity of his arguments, or of the extent to which Kierkegaard too could be thought of as a Hegelian, or at least a thinker who employed some Hegelian structures of thought. This strand of Kierkegaard scholars appears to think of Kierkegaard not only as a genius, but also as a truth witness. Malantschuk sees him as the conqueror of nihilism even before nihilism was considered a philosophical position. Thulstrup, Malantschuk, and Kingo are sometimes very detailed in their text analysis of Kierkegaard, but they appear to be rather apologetic on his behalf and are not at all interested in discussing his position or his categories critically. Another tendency has been to read Kierkegaard in the light of Hegel in order to uncover agreements (e. g. Ringleben, Dunning),2 and these scholars have convincingly argued that Kierkegaard despite all differences and polemics against Hegel must be considered a Hegelian philosopher. Ringleben and Dunning are both analyzing Kierkegaard based on the Hegelian method of appropriation (Aneignung) and sublation (Aufhebung) and they discover dialectical structures in Kierkegaard which either are based on or at least compatible with Hegel. What they both lack, however, is a critical deliberation about the specific character of Kierkegaard’s philosophical methodology and his use of different dialectical models. Their Hegelian presuppositions seem to have made them insensitive to a more radical understanding of otherness in Kierkegaard, thus, breaking out of the totality of the system, but often re-introduced in a subversive or hidden manner. A more differentiated analysis of the relationship is offered by Mark C. Taylor and Arne Grøn, 3 both of whom 1

2

3

Cf. Gregor Malantschuk Frihedens Problem i Kierkegaards Begrebet Angest, Copenhagen: Rosenkilde og Bagger 1971; Fra Individ til den Enkelte, Copenhagen: C. A. Reitzel 1978; Frihed og eksistens, Copenhagen: C. A. Reitzel 1980, and Niels Thulstrup Kierkegaards forhold til Hegel, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1967, and Anders Kingo Analogiens teologi. En dogmatisk studie over dialektikken i Søren Kierkegaards opbyggelige og pseudonyme forfatterskab, Copenhagen: Gad 1995. Joachim Ringleben Aneignung. Die spekulative Theologie Søren Kierkegaards, Berlin / New York: Walter de Gruyter 1983, and Stephen N. Dunning Kierkegaard’s Dialectic of Inwardness, Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press 1985. Mark C. Taylor Journeys to Selfhood: Hegel and Kierkegaard, Berkeley: The University of California Press 1980, and Arne Grøn Subjektivitet og negativitet: Kierkegaard, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1997.

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point out similarities and shared concerns, but without leveling important differences, or even incommensurable aspects dissociating the two thinkers from each other. Two emphatic positions that have been put forward in the last fifteen years lay particular emphasis on The Sickness unto Death when they seek to explain this relationship: The first is Michael Theunissen’s negativism thesis (1991), which was published prior to the book on the concept of despair which I discussed thoroughly in Chapter Four.4 Despite my criticism of his reading of chapter A.A, I have to admit that Theunissen has argued convincingly for other parts of his negativism thesis and succeeds in giving a balanced analysis of the relationship between Kierkegaard and Hegel. Arne Grøn has also affiliated himself to this position, albeit with some critical reservations. The second position is presented in Jon Stewart’s Kierkegaard’s Relations to Hegel Reconsidered (2003). Stewart’s book is a continuous debate with Niels Thulstrup’s classic work Kierkegaards forhold til Hegel (1967), an apologetic defense of Kierkegaard which for a long time was considered the standard work on the topic. Thus a re-consideration was certainly overdue, and he has done an impressive work of Quellenforschung in order to support his main theses, i. e. that Kierkegaard criticized Hegel because he disagreed with the Danish Hegelians. Hence, Kierkegaard’s polemic is directed against the (often deficient) use of Hegel in Danish philosophy and theology, whereas it does not question the basic principles of Hegel’s own thinking. Stewart even suggests that Kierkegaard secretly admired Hegel, whom he saw as a teacher and a thinker he could discuss with, whereas he disdained the Danish Hegelians for their lack of originality and existential credibility. In the following I will base my analysis primarily on a discussion with Stewart and Theunissen, but also refer occasionally to Grøn, who has presented thorough studies on The Sickness unto Death. I will concentrate the analysis on chapter C.B in Part One and the entire Part Two of Anti-Climacus’ work. My focus is not to what extent Kierkegaard criticized Hegel or not, but to what extent and in which way he applies a Hegelian way of thinking throughout the “phenomenology of despair” in the first part and the discussion of despair as sin in the second part. Hence, this is not a study of Hegel, but of Kierkegaard, with continual references to some of Hegel’s works, above all the Phänomenologie des Geistes (1807). One of the most complicated 4

Cf. Michael Theunissen Das Selbst auf dem Grund der Verzweiflung, Frankfurt am Main: Hain Verlag 1991.

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problems concerns the role of Aufhebung in Kierkegaard’s analysis of despair.

§ 36 For or Against Hegel In his comprehensive work on Kierkegaard’s relationship to Hegel, Jon Stewart claims that we find two forms of Hegelian dialectic in Part One of The Sickness unto Death. 5 He identifies in chapter C.A. a dialectic which has aspects in common with the dialectic that Hegel develops in Wissenschaft der Logik, where the concepts are elaborated in their reciprocal relationship.6 The justification for drawing this analogy is that the analysis is conceptually orientated, not phenomenological. Stewart does indeed concede that there is also a clear “disanalogy” between this dialectic and Anti-Climacus’ dialectic between the elements of the synthesis. The disanalogy consists both in a failure to resolve the antitheses, and in a lack of connection between one antithesis and the next: “The one category determines the other (i. e., finitude and infinitude mutually determine each other as do possibility and necessity), but there is no attempt to establish a logical connection or transition between these pairs.”7 Given such concessions, one might feel tempted to ask: What remains, then, of the Hegelian dialectic from Wissenschaft der Logik? I mean, some other philosophers too have formulated a thinking which takes its starting point in conceptual antitheses. It is true that use of terms such as synthesis, positing, the negative and the positive Third, Spirit, Self, consciousness, etc. indicates a certain influence, but it is not enough to decide whether Kierkegaard thinks in a Hegelian way or in a way differing from Hegel in substantial matters. With regard to chapter C.B, Stewart claims that the dialectic is phenomenological in the sense that it continues an understanding of dialectic that we find in Phänomenologie des Geistes. This view is also held by Arne Grøn, who develops this idea both in his article “Kierkegaards Phänomenologie?” (1996) and in the dissertation Subjektivitet og negativitet.8 Stewart points out that in this chapter, Anti-Climacus’ starting point is a figure which is immediate, and thus corresponds 5 6 7 8

Jon Stewart Kierkegaard’s Relations to Hegel Reconsidered, pp. 580 f. Jon Stewart Kierkegaard’s Relations to Hegel Reconsidered, pp. 579 f. Jon Stewart Kierkegaard’s Relations to Hegel Reconsidered, p. 580. Cf. Arne Grøn “Kierkegaards Phänomenologie?” pp. 109-113, and Subjektivitet og negativitet: Kierkegaard, pp. 137-142.

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to Hegel’s natürliches Bewusstsein.9 We can also trace a development toward an ever higher consciousness of the self, since the consciousness progresses through various stages, each of which determines the next. In Hegel, it is true, the concept becomes ever more sophisticated, whereas Anti-Climacus describes how the increasing consciousness leads to a continuous intensification of despair;10 but Stewart argues that in both cases, the dialectic leads to a clearly defined ÒéÉÍÐ. In the case of Hegel, the goal consists in attaining a higher understanding of the science of the spirit; Anti-Climacus’ goal consists in attaining a consciousness of the despair of the self. It is thus possible to speak of a phenomenological process in chapter C.B, although Stewart himself admits that the process is “inverted.”11 Nevertheless, he sees so many agreements that this can scarcely be a matter of chance: “Key words that Anti-Climacus employs here, such as ‘spirit,’ ‘dialectic,’ ‘immediacy’ and ‘the natural man,’ all self-consciously recall terms from Hegel’s philosophical terminology. These words in a sense announce to the reader the affinities with Hegel’s philosophy. Thus, Kierkegaard has Anti-Climacus use Hegel’s methodology here openly and unapologetically.”12 I find the inference here from terminology to methodology somewhat hasty: does Stewart really believe that the terminology and a certain dialectical teleology can be taken as a guarantee that Kierkegaard/Anti-Climacus is not speaking “apologetically” or even polemically? It is true that Stewart is not alone in pointing to a close connection between Hegel’s dialectic and The Sickness unto Death, in particular what chapter C.B concerns. As mentioned does Arne Grøn find similarities with Hegel’s phenomenology, as does Theunissen, but both scholars maintain that there are some important differences here as well. Michael Theunissen describes the dialectical development in Anti-Climacus as negativistic.13 Arne Grøn accepts this thesis, but claims that the difference between Hegel’s positive dialectic (where the driving force is the negation of negation) and Anti9 10 11

12 13

Jon Stewart Kierkegaards Relations to Hegel Reconsidered, p. 583. Cf. Jon Stewart Kierkegaards Relations to Hegel Reconsidered, p. 582. “The absolute defiance of the devil is the end-point of the dialectic and thus the inverted analogue to Hegel’s notion of absolute knowing” (Jon Stewart Kierkegaards Relations to Hegel Reconsidered, p. 583). Jon Stewart Kierkegaards Relations to Hegel Reconsidered, p. 584. Cf. Michael Theunissen Das Selbst auf dem Grund der Verzweiflung. Kierkegaards negativistische Methode (1991). The entire book, sixty pages in length, is devoted to this thesis.

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Climacus’ negativism is due primarily to the negative phenomenon that Anti-Climacus is describing, viz. despair.14 There are various views about how the substance, i. e. the analysis of despair, has influenced the form, the methodology, and the dialectic. Mark C. Taylor claims that Hegel anticipated The Sickness unto Death in his analysis of the unhappy consciousness, whereas Kierkegaard views Hegel’s thinking as an expression of the most despairing self-consciousness: “Ending where one ought to begin, Hegel becomes Kierkegaard’s unhappiest man, Kierkegaard remains Hegel’s unhappy consciousness.”15 Taylor sees the criticism as justified from both sides, and if he is right in his observation, it may well be that Anti-Climacus views Hegel’s analysis of the unhappy consciousness as an ironic remark inside the system. In some sense, Kierkegaard seems to accept Hegel as premise, but he does not accept his conclusions. This is a problem that becomes urgent for any thinker who relates to Hegel: His methodology and his systematic approach seems to swallow up the sharpest opposition by integrating it in his own system as a negation one ought to mediate with the position and thus sublate it through higher insight. Thus opposition to the system inside the system must look for alternative strategies. In Chapter One, I gave an example of how Derrida discusses death, psychology, and the sign: He sees death as a collapse in the Aufhebung of the sign – a collapse which is connected with the unconscious pit in the consciousness.16 Derrida’s solution to the problem is neither to oppose openly to Hegel nor to follow him all the way through. He is not either for or against Hegel – he is both at the same time. He admits that he thinks in a Hegelian manner, but he questions some of the essential premises in such a way of thinking. Hence, if Kierkegaard fits into Hegel’s description of an unhappy consciousness, it would not prove that he is wrong or outstripped by Hegel. It rather appears to be an obvious topic for Kierkegaardian irony. If it is a serious irony, however, an irony based on deep misfortune, anxiety, and despair, it would also establish an important point: despair concerns the other side of the truth, the reverse side of the self, a side which eludes Hegel’s analysis as long as the goal of his thinking is to succeed in establishing a systematic totality. The counterquestion would then be how the understanding of spirit and of the self corresponds to the 14 15 16

Cf. Arne Grøn Subjektivitet og negativitet: Kierkegaard, p. 142. Mark C. Taylor Journeys to Selfhood: Hegel and Kierkegaard, p. 265. Cf. Jacques Derrida “The Pit and the Pyramid” and my analysis of the text and its methodology in §§ 5-6.

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how of action, knowledge, and self-knowledge. The analysis of despair concerns the sickness unto death, and this is why it is also an analysis of death’s self-consuming circles in the interior of the spirit. May not such an analysis in the work itself be directed polemically against the very conception of a phenomenology of the spirit? In order to answer these questions properly, let us turn to the chapter about despair viewed under the category of “consciousness” (C.B) and see how the chapter is organized on the basis of increasing degrees of consciousness about (i) what despair is, and (ii) in what sense the self is despairing: a) The despair that is ignorant of being despair, or the despairing ignorance of having a self and an eternal self. b) The despair that is conscious of being despair and therefore is conscious of having a self in which there is something eternal and then either in despair does not will to be itself or in despair wills to be itself. ¿) In despair not to will to be oneself: despair in weakness (1) Despair over the earthly or over something earthly (2) Despair of the eternal or over oneself À) In despair to will to be oneself: defiance Acting Suffering

This structure shows a somewhat different construction than we found in C.A. Strictly speaking there are only two forms of despair, which are varied in different constellations: despairingly willing to be oneself, and despairingly not willing to be oneself. Antecedently to this division into two, however, there is a distinction between (a) ignorant and (b) conscious despair (cf. the superscription to A.A, where the former is described as inauthentic despair). Under point a, Anti-Climacus outlines two alternatives as a contrast to his own project, namely “the average person,” who does not consider himself especially happy or especially unhappy, but is more or less content with the life he already has, and the philosopher, who is building huge systems of philosophy, but himself getting lost in the building.17 They both fail to recognize the basic presuppositions of Anti-Climacus’ concern, namely that to analyze the human person as spirit, one need to know what despair 17

“A thinker erects a huge building, a system, a system embracing the whole of existence, world history, etc., and if his personal life is considered, to our amazement the appalling and ludicrous discovery is made that he himself does not personally live in this huge, domed palace but in a shed alongside it, or in a doghouse, or at best in the janitor’s quarters. Were he to be reminded of this contradiction by a single word, he would be insulted. For he does not fear to be in error if he can only complete the system – with the help of being in error” (SKS 11, 159 / SUD, 43 f.).

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is and to what extent oneself is in despair. Hence, one cannot exclusively look at the others, measure oneself on the others, or construct an objective theory of the self; one must primarily be able critically to observe and analyze oneself (i. e. as an autopsia). The very brief section (a) clarifies this distinction ab externa, and the whole section (b) is concerned with the internal perspective, i. e. how despair gradually develops as an illness through a higher consciousness of what despair is and to what extent oneself is in despair. Hence, under point (b), about the conscious despair, the author starts all over again, with the figure of “the immediate” person. The beginning is here made within the consciousness of despair, with a description of the self-understanding of the immediate person. More specifically, Anti-Climacus begins with a linguistic expression, viz. what the despairing person says about himself, and holds this up to the mirror offered by a qualified understanding of what despair is. This means that the perspective continually shifts between the description of the figure of “the despairing person” and the author’s analysis of the self-understanding of the one who despairs within the dialectic of despair. Stewart, Grøn, Theunissen, and other scholars are of course justified in calling this dialectic phenomenological – with particular reference to the phenomenology which Hegel elaborates in Phänomenologie des Geistes. There is a clear development in chapter C.B with regard to knowledge both of the nature of despair and of how the one who despairs gets entangled in despair through his will and his reluctance. The author does not however offer any description of how despair is resolved. On the contrary, the high point is the maximum intensity and hopelessness of despair. This has obviously something to do with the contradiction in the will, which seems to fit badly into the Hegelian model and which is surprisingly often ignored in these comparisons. When Theunissen calls the dialectic “negativistic,” he mentions two reasons for doing so: (i) despair is a “negative” phenomenon, which the author also (ii) analyzes negatively, by first presenting an exposition in the introduction (i. e., in A.A) and then taking up the individual points of this exposition successively in the course of the book.18 This is why he believes that the analysis in the book points out beyond despair to a dialectical definition of the self and of faith – which is the goal (Zweck) and the “positive” intention of the investigation.19 Theu18 19

Cf. Michael Theunissen Das Selbst auf dem Grund der Verzweiflung, pp. 16-18. Cf. Michael Theunissen Das Selbst auf dem Grund der Verzweiflung, pp. 26-31.

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nissen finds this positive definition of the self in chapter A.A. Arne Grøn follows him on this point, but differentiates the thesis by emphasizing more strongly that the dialectic is broken, and that the one stage does not automatically turn into its opposite: on the contrary, every transition is problematized by the problem of the will, viz. by the fact that the one who despairs wills, or does not will, to be himself. 20 He also emphasizes human freedom more strongly than Theunissen: this is linked to a possibility at every stage of despair to “turn aside” in the direction of faith.21 Theunissen’s negativism thesis offers a good suggestion of how the argument may be reconstructed, but it is not entirely unproblematic. But there are several problems involved in the application of a Hegelian dialectic, either one takes the Wissenschaft der Logik or the Phänomenologie des Geistes to be the dialectical paradigm.22 What I miss in Stewart, Grøn, and Theunissen is a clearer definition of where the breach with a Hegelian thinking can be localized, and consequently of the significance that the dialectical designations “negative” and “positive” have in Anti-Climacus’ dialectic. The Hegelian use of these terms is not applicable to Kierkegaard without further ado. In Anti-Climacus’ diagnosis, the very concepts are part of the big deceit, and the language the Hegelians use draws the simulacrum of self-deception that affects philosophers as well as ordinary people. At the same time, however, the language they use gives the author (or the analyzing doctor) the key to unveil the deception. Such a negativity in the concept itself, opening up for the double dialectics of despair, has not seriously been considered by Theunissen or Stewart, and only rudimentarily by Grøn. A Hegelian understanding of dialectic prescribes certain premises for the exposition of the text. One fundamental premise in Phänomenologie des Geistes is that the self is understood as a process of consciousness that is perfected only in absolute knowledge. The self is described as process of consciousness in The Sickness unto Death too, but the “absolute” self-consciousness is also employed at the close of C.B as an expression for the profoundest contradiction in the self’s 20

21 22

Cf. Arne Grøn “Kierkegaards Phänomenologie?” in Kierkegaard Studies. Yearbook 1996, pp. 111 f. Cf. Arne Grøn Subjektivitet og negativitet: Kierkegaard, pp. 163 f. In Das Selbst auf dem Grund der Verzweiflung, where the negativism thesis is formulated, Theunissen refers only to Hegel’s Wissenschaft der Logik, not to Phänomenologie des Geistes. He differentiates between C.A and C.B in this way only in his book from 1992.

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relationship both to itself and to the other. How then is this dialectic related to Hegel’s phenomenology? Is this an “open and unapologetic” relationship, as Stewart claims? Is it “negativistic” in the sense proposed by Theunissen, with reference to a methodological procedure he finds in Marx, where the result is stated at the head of the essay, and is justified in the course of the essay?23 Is it “negativistic” in the somewhat looser sense proposed by Grøn, and justified on various levels, viz. because (a) despair is a “negative” phenomenon; (b) the structure of the self is open and undefined, and therefore negative; and (c) the dialectic has a “doubly” negative structure, since the negative phenomenology leads to a negative result?24 By Anti-Climacus, one might in fact say that the negative (is) the positive. The point with such a definition is to underscore an important difference between Kierkegaard and Hegel: Negativity, death, otherness, alienation, despair, are not “phenomena” that ought to be overcome dialectically, they are rather the subject of the phenomenological investigation. But as I have already indicated in Chapter Two, Three, and Five, these so-called “phenomena” resist an unequivocal linguistic and thus also a phenomenological definition. In one sense, they are situated outside the system, as indefinable and inexplicable, but insofar as they are subject of a phenomenological investigation, they break up the phenomenology from within. The whole distinction between negative and positive becomes distorted when even the positive is caught up by negativity. The stability of the method is distorted; the common understanding of language and concepts is questioned and reversed. Hence, the suggestion of a “negativism” and a “phenomenology” of despair ought to be discussed not only as true or false, but to what extent they are able to discover such double strategies and analyze their consequences. This is the point where all the three philosophers seem to lack subtlety in their definitions; they analyze the texts as if they conformed to a Hegelian concept of negativity. I think the twist of language and methodology lies exactly there, in the concept of negativity, which is not unambiguous. Hence “negativism” or not, the problem of negativity ought to be followed closely. Nevertheless, the divisions in chapter C.B may suggest that AntiClimacus is employing a dialectical structure which shares some traits with the dialectic in Phänomenologie des Geistes; not however with the “negative,” but with the “positive” in the work from 1807. He23 24

Cf. Michael Theunissen Das Selbst auf dem Grund der Verzweiflung, p. 16. Cf. Arne Grøn Subjektivitet og negativitet: Kierkegaard, pp. 137-142.

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gel’s positive dialectic, which attains a positive definition of the self by overcoming ignorance and Schein, is in some sense the basis of the dialectic in this part of The Sickness unto Death. But then again, Anti-Climacus defines the positive by a contradiction, an “eternal” contradiction in the self. And here is the abyss; the abyssal trait in the very concept “sickess unto death.” An abyss is not simply negativistic, it is also aporetic in a radical sense. Hence, it is probably the aporetic character of Anti-Climacus’ text which expresses the Anti-Hegelian, Anti-Phenomenological, and Anti-Climactic structure of the treatise. Following this abyssal trait, the negativity is described in the light of a fairy-tale of the broken spell: Compared with the person who is conscious of his despair, the despairing individual who is ignorant of his despair is simply a negativity further away from the truth and deliverance. Despair itself is a negativity; ignorance of it, a new negativity. However, to reach the truth, one must go through every negativity, for the old legend about breaking a certain spell is true: the piece has to be played through backwards or the spell is not broken. 25

If Anti-Climacus in fact attempts to play the whole piece through backwards, it could indicate that he begins with the end and ends with the beginning. But the section A.A is not the expression of a result; it is rather the formulation of a problem, the anticipation of a problem, not of the solution. The use of negativity here is threefold:26 (i) it concerns a limit for the self, a definitive limit towards the other. This is a limit for knowledge and for will; the self is not able to sublate this division in terms of Speculative knowledge, nor to control the will or intention of the other. The consequence is that the self is not able to define or delimit itself; it is continuously dependent on the other and must develop its thinking in accordance with this; (ii) it also defines the dissolution of the limit, in the infinite reflection of the different forms of despair. Hence, the self struggles with the definition of something which eludes its mental capabilities, a state of mind which conceals the problem in order to escape it. Reason is thus not only a part of the solution; it is just as much a part of the problem and must be treated with suspicion as a source of deception; (iii) finally there is an ultimate negativity which lets the problem and the self break down; in one sense or another it seems like such an ultimate break-down is the ÒéÉÍÐ of The Sickness unto Death in the final analysis. However that 25 26

SKS 11, 159 / SUD, 44. Cf. to this threefold division § 10 Aporias of Death and Jacques Derrida Apories, pp. 44 f. / Aporias, pp. 20-24.

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may be is it an urgent matter to hold fast to the plural logic of negativity in Kierkegaard’s text, in order to avoid the good and undisturbed conscience. A conscience in despair is namely in more than one respect a disturbed conscience. Given these critical remarks to the general “negativism thesis,” I prefer to stick to the term negativity and indicate in every case what kind of negativity, aporia or “negative theology” we are dealing with. Another concept which Kierkegaard uses in a “negative” sense is the concept of eternity. He describes the self as eternal, and the spirit as eternal, but it is not at all clear what the word actually signifies. More than any other concept he applies, “the eternal” is loaded with metaphysical connotations. Thus, in order to specify his relation to Platonic, Christian, and Hegelian metaphysics, we ought to undertake a detailed analysis of the concept of eternity.

§ 37 The Eternal Self and the Difference of Despair Point (b) has the comprehensive superscription: “The despair that is conscious of being despair and therefore is conscious of having a self in which there is something eternal and then either in despair does not will to be itself or in despair wills to be itself.”27 Anti-Climacus presupposes here that even the slightest consciousness of despair (even if the one who despairs can otherwise be called “the immediate” person) entails a consciousness of possessing a self – a self that includes the eternal (cf. the Danish preposition hvori, “in which”). What counts is not a specific theory about the self (e. g. Hegel’s), but the consciousness of despair, for it is here that the interplay between construction and deconstruction of the self begins, in the rift of despair. It is here that possibility wrestles with necessity, time with eternity: in that self which “includes” the eternal. The analysis takes its point of departure in what “the man of immediacy”28 despairingly says about himself and his own despair, 27 28

SKS 11, 162 / SUD, 47 I use the masculine forms fairly consistently when I refer to the figure of “the despairing person” in Anti-Climacus’ dialectic of consciousness. This is not because I disdain gender-inclusive language, but because the author himself is describing a male figure, irrespective of whether he is writing about a “female” form of despair (that of weakness) or a “masculine” form of despair (that of defiance). This is of course not unproblematic, but for practical reasons I follow Anti-Climacus’ own terminology on this point. I believe that the gender difference can influence the way

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how he acts and otherwise relates to himself and to his despair.29 The first forms are defined as variants of the despair of weakness, where the despairing person has a predominantly passive, suffering relationship to his despair. The despair of weakness is divided into three forms, in keeping with the progression “weak, weaker, weakest”: despairingly not willing to be oneself, despairingly not willing to have a self, and despairingly willing to be someone else. 30 Anti-Climacus allows himself to poke fun at this lowest form of despair. It is indeed a favorite topic for the infinite comedy, when someone wishes to be another person than he in fact is, and this alteration is to be accomplished by “changing one’s clothes.” Infinite comedy has always a double meaning. The starting point for the comical disproportion is the infinite distinction between the clothes and the self (“for a self is indeed infinitely distinct from an externality”). When these are confused, things can quickly go wrong, as in the following little story about a peasant: Imagine a self (and next to God there is nothing as eternal as a self), and then imagine that it suddenly occurs to a self that it might become something other – than itself. And yet one in despair in this way, whose sole desire is this most lunatic of lunatic metamorphoses, is infatuated with the illusion that this change can be accomplished as easily as one changes clothes. The man of immediacy does not know himself, he quite literally identifies himself only by the clothes he wears, he identifies having a self by externalities (here again the infinitely comical). There is hardly a more ludicrous mistake, for a self is indeed infinitely distinct from an externality. So when the externals have completely changed for the person of immediacy and he has despaired, he goes one step further; he thinks something like this, it becomes his wish: What if I became someone else, got myself a new self. Well, what if he did become someone else? I wonder whether he would recognize himself. There is a story about a peasant who went barefooted to town with enough money to buy himself a pair of stockings and shoes and to get drunk, and in trying to find his way home in his drunken state, he fell asleep in the middle of the road. A carriage came along, and the driver shouted to him to move or he would drive over his legs. The drunken peasant woke up, looked

29

30

in which despair is expressed, and I believe that this is therefore a better alternative than making a superficial attempt to write in a gender-inclusive manner. – This problem can profitably be discussed on its own, and this has in fact been done on several occasions: cf. Sylvia I. Walsh “On ‘Feminine’ and ‘Masculine’ Forms of Despair” in International Kierkegaard Commentary: The Sickness unto Death, ed. by Robert L. Perkins, Macon (Georgia): Mercer University Press 1987, pp. 121-134, and Leslie A. Howe “Kierkegaard and the Feminine Self” in Feminist Interpretations of Søren Kierkegaard, ed. by Céline Léon and Sylvia Walsh, University Park (Pennsylvania): Pennsylvania State University Press 1997, pp. 217-247. On this point, Grøn has offered an important corrective to Theunissen’s undifferentiated claims that Kierkegaard sees despair as “only action”: cf. Arne Grøn Subjektivitet og negativitet: Kierkegaard, pp. 147-150. Cf. SKS 11, 168 / SUD, 52 f.

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at his legs and, not recognizing them because of the shoes and stockings, said: “Go ahead, they are not my legs.”31

Anti-Climacus believes that it is simply impossible to depict the “man of immediacy” in despair without a touch of comedy. At the same time, the infinite comedy is a strategy to entice out of its concealment that which is invisible or “obscure” for the person involved. The humor brings out the ambiguity, and as soon as the ambiguity is established, it is also possible to look at the self in a more differentiated manner, perhaps especially with regard to the distinction between inner and outer. When this distinction is established, Anti-Climacus describes how the immediate person, through reflection on despair, gradually discovers that he possesses a self. This, however, is a risky undertaking, since it only leads out into a deeper despair. Anti-Climacus therefore assumes that most people quickly turn back. They leave the question untouched, so that it becomes a “false door” (Danish en Slags blind Dør; literally a kind of “blind” door) at the very back of his soul. 32 Instead, they appropriate what they call “in their language” their self, i. e. their abilities and talents – “in an outward-bound direction,” towards the world, towards the temporal and active life. The question about the spirit is simply not posed. It disappears among all the other questions in life which are outward-bound and are therefore more immediately accessible to language. This means that the most important linguistic challenge is to establish a perspective on the human person which is simply absent from daily speech, from philosophy, and from general religiosity – though not “simply” absent, since there are innumerable traces of this perspective in the web of language, but always on the rear side of the self, hidden. The clearest traces can be found in what the individual says about himself, since everyone betrays something about his selfrelationship in the way in which he speaks about himself. In a passage extending to twenty pages in the editio princeps (pp. 38-57), AntiClimacus describes the chronic unease about a despair which is weak, which is oriented to matters of chance, and which does not break 31 32

SKS 11, 168 f. / SUD, 53. “In a deeper sense, the whole question of the self becomes a kind of false door with nothing behind it in the background of his soul. He appropriates what he in his language calls his self, that is, whatever capacities, talents, etc. he may have; all these he appropriates but in an outward-bound direction, toward life, as they say, toward the real, the active life. He behaves very discreetly with the little bit of reflection he has within himself, fearing that what he has in the background might emerge again” (SKS 11, 170 / SUD, 56).

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through to any deeper despair. This means that more than half of C.B is over before there is any significant progression in the dialectic. Like those who despair, the text glides past in horis successivis, but nothing happens. 33 This postpones every decisive change, every deeper “interference” – i. e. the disturbance. In this way, the author shows how even “the man of immediacy,” without necessarily being aware of what he is doing, continues to work on the construction of his life project and thus builds his little tower of Babel. If despair were to acquire decisive importance, it would be precisely as confusion, a confusion of languages and a construction that collapses in a heap; a confusion that runs so deeply that it compels a “metamorphosis in which consciousness of the eternal in the self breaks through.”34 I shall not discuss in detail here all the gradations of self-consciousness which Anti-Climacus describes within the despair of weakness qua despair over something earthly, but I will keep focus on one aspect of the development of the consciousness which was already mentioned in chapter A.A and occasionally referred to in chapter A.C and B, but then it was hardly mentioned in chapter C.A. Here, in chapter C.B, it suddenly emerges as central for the dialectical development, viz. the relationship between time and eternity. The decisive point is thus a consciousness of the eternal. The question, however, is what “eternity” means here. Is it, as indicated in the superscription, something eternal in the self – or rather something eternal outside the self? Is the eternal something that brings redemption, or an eternal death, or even the eternal sickness unto death? “The eternal” is one of the most problematic expressions in the entire book; that which is most clearly linked to a classical metaphysics and metaphysical religious categories. At the same time, it is the concept which is least unambiguously defined, and which accordingly changes its meaning continually. Maybe we should thus stop writing about the eternal, and rather distinguish between different eternals. The author himself seems not to have been quite aware of all the nuances of meaning in this expression, but he has needed it in order to nail the self to something that it itself cannot get behind, viz. the fact that every person “already” relates to himself and comes too late to posit the conditions for the self-relationship. The self-relationship is 33

34

“The self-inclosing despairing person goes on living horis successivis; even if not lived for eternity, his hours have something to do with the eternal and are concerned with the relation of his self to itself – but he never really gets beyond that” (SKS 11, 179 / SUD, 64). SKS 11, 174 / SUD, 60.

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established and has a history before there is anyone who relates. This time lag must be borne in mind; whoever begins to reflect on despair must be conscious of this. If someone tries to abstract from the time lag, all he does is to make the self-relationship even more abstract, removing it even further from a concrete starting point. Let us therefore begin with the inscription of “the eternal” upon time, upon the individual’s relationship to himself qua future or past, i. e. respectively in anxiety/hope and remorse/recollection. For the young person, the eternal can find expression as anxiety for something in his future (“as the present in futuro”), something that he is not able to “take upon himself.” In this anxiety, there lies a trace of despair; if this trace were truly to become decisive, it could lead to a self-relationship in the deeper sense. At the same time, however, the anxiety is a postponement of the eternal, of the relationship to something decisive in the eternal sense. In anxiety, therefore, the eternal is absent, postponed to an uncertain future. For the older person, the eternal can find expression as despair over something that happened in the past (“as a present in praeterito”), which he is not able to forget, but cannot “take upon himself” as his own. Repentance is one example of a disturbance which in this case would breach the chronic postponement, creating a new turn of events and opening the door to a genuine praesens: “This past may even be something that repentance really should have in custody. But if repentance is to arise, there must first be effective despair, radical despair, so that the life of the spirit can break through from the ground upward. But in despair as he is, he does not dare to let it come to such a decision.”35 All talk of despair and of the spirit is in one sense meaningless, 36 indeed sheer “babbling,” if it does not lead to such a reversal of things, such an interruption, such an avalanche of meaning. All other reflection on the self and the human person and the spirit is based on the aim of constructing meaning, constructing an “image,” constructing an idea of the self which functions externally. Seen in this light, this is all a question of the tower of Babel, i. e. of one’s own constructions of

35 36

SKS 11, 174 / SUD, 59 f. “[…] to will to be spirit seems to be a waste of time in the world, indeed, an indefensible waste of time that ought to be punished by civil law if possible, one that is punished in any case with scorn and contempt as a kind of treason against the human race, as a defiant madness that insanely fills out time with nothing” (SD, 172 / SUD, 57).

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the self. 37 For Anti-Climacus, however, the most interesting reflection on the self begins at the point where a construction collapses, where language is confused and breaks down. As at Babel, there is one particular language that is confused, that is broken up in confusion, and at once creates a problem of translation: the immediate language, the language of speculation, the general language. How are these languages to be read? How are they to be interpreted? The problem is left up to the individual reader – since the author’s “public” is split up into individual readers – how is one to create meaning out of this foreign element which eludes the explanations and the ideas that the reader has about the “self”? How can one appropriate concepts such as spirit, despair, the eternal? Writing opens a space in the self; despair fills the space. And in despair, there are always traces of the eternal. But what is the eternal? What is the eternal in the self? Is there a border, a movement, or a halt (Danish Standsning)? Is there a presence (present tense) or an absence? Or absence in presence and presence in absence? This is the riddle which is continually rewritten and destabilized and redefined. The despairing person who gradually becomes more conscious of his despair is an interesting figure precisely because he sees through the emptiness in all the finite and temporal projects. He sees through them, one by one. But he becomes really interesting only when he totalizes all these finite projects to form a mighty tower of Babel, but remains standing between two untenable alternatives: the total construction of meaning and the total collapse of meaning. Let us see how Anti-Climacus describes this dialectical turning point: Is there, then, no essential difference between the two expressions used identically up to now: to despair over the earthly (the category of totality) and to despair over something earthly (the particular)? Indeed there is. When the self in imagination despairs with infinite passion over something of this world, its infinite passion changes this particular thing, this something, into the world in toto; that is, the category of totality inheres in and belongs to the despairing person. The earthly and the temporal as such are precisely that which falls apart or disintegrates into particulars, into some particular thing. The loss or deprivation of every earthly thing is actually impossible, for the category of totality is a thought category. Consequently, the self infinitely magnifies the actual loss and then despairs over the earthly in toto. However, as soon as this distinction (between despairing over the earthly and over something earthly) must be maintained essentially, there is also an essential advance in consciousness of the self. 38 37

38

Cf. the two houses: the philosophical system where no one lives, and the bourgeois house where one lives in the cellar: SKS 11, 157-159 / SUD, 42-44. SKS 11, 174 f. / SUD, 60.

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It is thus the loss, above all the loss of meaning, that is total, and so this is what we can call a nihilistic experience. At the same time, it is a decisive turning point, and this turning point too is aporetic in the Socratic sense: if it is certain that one is despairing over the earthly, and it is not possible to understand the despair in the light of this earthly reality, one is obliged to attempt to understand oneself. This is why we find this shift in the text to a new knowledge and a new exploration in depth of the aporia: the consciousness of oneself as despairing. On this level of despair – despair about the eternal over oneself – the total construction and the total collapse are indissolubly linked. Anti-Climacus describes this as a chronic state of deficiency: a person suffers under the absence of the eternal (here, “the eternal” is understood in the sense of several expressions of presence: stability, continuity, and meaningfulness). At the same time, this person despairs of himself, since the self cannot function as the starting point for a meaningful context of this kind. This is described as a profound conflict in the self, similar to the situation of a father who disinherits his son: “the external circumstance is of little help; he does not thereby rid himself of his son, at least not in his thought. It is often the case when a lover curses the one he detests (his beloved) that it does not help very much; it captivates him almost more – and so it goes with the despairing self in regard to itself.”39 Anti-Climacus employs this exemplum rhetorically to describe how the self is lacerated from within, resists being itself, throws the self away, hates it, yet loves it too. That which is described is the split itself, lacerated by the conflict with its own self, torn between different understandings of the self: something eternal, which is said to exist, but which does not create any meaningful context to which it can relate. This means that the eternal, as a possibility of continuity and selfidentity at every time (past, future, present), is absent. The self is also understood as something temporal, and this is indeed true, but it is not meaningful; at the turning point, it is totalized to become the loss of meaning. What we have here are, respectively, a decisive absence, a kairos-absence, and an undefined absence, a khronos-absence.40 Both these absences are connected in some way to the eternal, with an aporetic and indefinable relationship to the eternal in time. This is 39 40

SKS 11, 177 / SUD, 62 f. On the antithesis between kairos and khronos, cf. M. Kerkhoff “Kairos” in Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, ed. by Joachim Ritter and Karlfried Gründer, vol. 4, Basel/Stuttgart: Schwabe Verlag 1976, pp. 667 f., and E. Amelung “Kairos” in Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, pp. 668 f.

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the starting point for the entire continuation of the argument. A self which is lacerated internally, which lacks unity, which lacks context and continuity, and which at the same shuts itself in with its own self, shuts out the world. From now on, despair will be a matter of Indesluttedhed, “inclosing reserve.”41

§ 38 Eternity Revisited Despair about the eternal (a.2) is described as acting and suffering; “indirectly-directly,” it comes from the self, as a reaction. Anti-Climacus sees it initially as suffering (weak). It finds expression when the person in despair does not want to be himself. Despair about the earthly sphere in toto is still directed outwards, towards the totality of meaning in the external dimension, but when one despairs over one’s despair, one abstracts from the external causes and despairs over oneself. One is suffering, but one is also active in the despair. Here, the author detects a hidden will to be oneself. At the next turning point, the transition to À, the eternal is involved. As Theunissen points out, Anti-Climacus has made himself dependent on this concept of the eternal, but he has not completely clarified what meaning he attaches to it.42 It is simply widersprüchlich, “contradictory.”43 But perhaps this may turn out to be an interesting contradiction. Let us study the following passage: First comes despair over the earthly or over something earthly, then despair of the eternal, over oneself. Then comes defiance, which is really despair through the aid of the eternal, the despairing misuse of the eternal within the self to will in despair to be oneself. But just because it is despair through the aid of the eternal, in a certain sense it is very close to the truth; and just because it lies very close to the truth, it is infinitely far away. The despair that is the thoroughfare to faith comes also through the aid of the eternal; through the aid of the eternal the self has the courage to lose itself in order to win itself. Here, however, it is unwilling to begin with losing itself but wills to be itself.44 41

42 43

44

“And from now on we shall discuss inclosing reserve, which is the very opposite of immediacy and in terms of thought, among other things, has a great contempt for it” (SKS 11, 177 / SUD, 63). Cf. Michael Theunissen Der Begriff Verzweiflung, pp. 106 f. “The antithesis between earthly and eternal collides with the interpretative patterns of these two. Not only is the concept of eternity which forms part of this antithesis completely unexplained; it is incompatible with what is called ‘eternal’ elsewhere in The Sickness unto Death” (Michael Theunissen Der Begriff Verzweiflung, p. 107). SKS 11, 177 / SUD, 62 f.

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The stronger the despair, the more clearly does Anti-Climacus emphasize the connection to the eternal which is in the self. This expresses the fact that one in despair wills to be oneself. The corollaries of distance between this despair and the truth are defined chiastically: since it is despair with the aid of the eternal, it is very close to the truth; and because it is very close to the truth, it is infinitely far away. There follows the alternative: losing oneself with the aid of the eternal in order to win oneself. On the one hand, therefore, we have a despair which is chiastically defined in relation to the truth. Despair with the aid of the eternal is very close to the truth, writes Anti-Climacus. Here, I understand det Sande (“the true”) to mean a true understanding of the self, of what the self is and how it relates to itself. But precisely because it is very close to the truth, it is nevertheless infinitely far away, since it is this infinite element that is still missing: viz., disturbance, interruption, reversal (metabolê). This makes the potentially redeeming possibility a self-consuming powerlessness. In one sense, the first and the second understandings of the eternal are very close to each other, but they part company with reference to the other aspect of the truth, the ethical-religious dimension – and in relation to despair, this is the decisive dimension. As I have mentioned earlier, the chiasmus has also been called an anti-metabolê, which underlines rhetorically the static element in the self’s relationship to the eternal, or rather the “eternal” in the way in which the despairing person relates to his own self. The eternal is described in relation to despair as a quality of the self, as something that the self is: eternal. But this eternal element is also relevant in relation to something that the self does with itself: “the despairing misuse of the eternal within the self to will in despair to be oneself.”45 We have already seen an overlapping between what the self is and what the self does – the self is eternal because it relates to itself, it relates to itself and wills to be itself, both of which express the same fact, that the self-relationship is eternal. This is the vicious circle of despair, an “eternal” vicious circle in which the self circles around its own self; and it intensifies the despair by continuing to circle around itself. On this point, Theunissen’s analysis has brought an important clarification. He holds that through the antithesis between the earthly and eternal, a Platonizing metaphysics sneaks into The Sickness unto

45

SKS 11, 181 / SUD, 67.

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Death.46 In addition to this, he notes two other concepts of the eternal: first, as part of a synthesis with the temporal, and secondly as an expression of the perennial quality of the self-relationship.47 As Theunissen subsequently affirms, the two last concepts can also be read in the light of a Platonic metaphysics, but not necessarily as the expression of “two worlds.”48 As long as Anti-Climacus is describing the antithesis between earthly and eternal, the eternal is the antithesis of everything earthly, and it remains standing when the earthly in toto perishes. But as soon as the reader has seen through the earthly perspective, the eternal returns as a problem. More specifically, it is within the despairing will that the eternal truly holds a person fast in despair. In the two meanings of the eternal which Theunissen mentions, the synthesis and the perennial, the despairing person uses a metaphysical understanding of the eternal as a strategy which allows him to hold fast to the self in despair, holding it fast in an eternal immutability and resisting the radical change which takes its starting point in the other. On the other hand, in the passage we have quoted, Anti-Climacus also writes about despair as a “thoroughfare” to faith, which also takes place “through the aid of the eternal.” The difference is a loss. The eternal gives the courage to lose oneself. Is this the same “eternal,” which in one instance holds the circle closed, and in another instance allows the self to collapse? What then is the difference, this “infinite” difference that separates the one from the other? As far as I can see, Anti-Climacus is describing a collapse within the logic of the eternal. The eternal as static and immutable breaks down, i. e. collapses, through a movement initiated by the eternal. It is here that the self as eternal (in the sense of “immutable”) is lost, and Theunissen writes in this context of a “destruction of metaphysics in the thought of an eternal.”49 The self collapses. It is however only a possibility at which Anti-Climacus is hinting, and he does not develop this idea to its conclusion. He mentions, almost en passant, that this possibility too exists. As far as I can see, this is a possibility where metaphysics is neither destructed nor abandoned; rather, it is deconstructed with the other as an altogether different point of departure. The other cannot be bound by one specific metaphysics. Thus it becomes clear where metaphysics sets boundaries, where metaphysics draws a defini46 47 48 49

Cf. Michael Theunissen Der Begriff Verzweiflung, p. 106. Cf. Michael Theunissen Der Begriff Verzweiflung, pp. 107 f. Cf. Michael Theunissen Der Begriff Verzweiflung, p. 113. Michael Theunissen Der Begriff Verzweiflung, p. 112.

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tive boundary between the possible and the impossible. It is there, at the boundary, that God appears as a possibility in the impossible. 50 A loss was also described earlier: the loss of meaning, which was totalized. But this did not lead any further than to a new despair. What is the difference between the one loss and the other? What is the difference between one end and the other? The first loss was a loss of the earthly – the end of the world – but this meant in fact a strengthening of the self, a greater awareness of the self, seeking refuge in the self as the eternal. The other loss is a loss of the self, an abandonment of the self, the end of the self. It is in an end of this kind that the possibility, the radical possibility, lies hidden. An alternative reading has thus repeatedly been hinted at, but Anti-Climacus does not switch over to an open polemic against the speculative philosophy, against Platonism, against metaphysics. He could have done so, and Theunissen clearly holds that he ought to have done so (and this leads him once more to lament the ambiguity and to insist that Kierkegaard is committing new errors here). 51 But as far as I can see, Anti-Climacus’ strategy is somewhat different – and for warfare (polemos) against an overwhelmingly strong tradition of Platonic metaphysics and speculative philosophy, it is surely more subtle than an attempt at total destruction. The cunning strategy consists in following the speculative construction of the self through to the end, until its innermost aporias are laid bare and can be analyzed as what he believes they are: expressions of despair. Let us investigate how this strategy is continued into the inner dimension of the self. The possibility which Anti-Climacus suggests is redemptive – where the metaphysical concept of the eternal results in self-contradictions – presupposes an unconditional confirmation, or even confession, that the self is lost. But despair expresses itself as a denial that the self is lost. The person holds fast to the self despite the despair, and this means that one holds fast to the eternal – the selfrelationship – and against the eternal – the self-relationship. This undeniably sounds self-contradictory, and it is self-contradictory. It is selfcontradictory in the explicit or implicit no to the self, no to despair. It is self-contradictory in the use of the eternal in the self against the self. It is on the rocks of this self-contradiction that the self is stranding – in despair. Anti-Climacus links this directly to a continuous building of towers and similar constructions: 50 51

Cf. Michael Theunissen Der Begriff Verzweiflung, p. 112. Cf. especially Michael Theunissen Der Begriff Verzweiflung, pp. 110 f.

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In order in despair to will to be oneself, there must be consciousness of an infinite self. This infinite self, however, is really only the most abstract form, the most abstract possibility of the self. And this is the self that a person in despair wills to be, severing the self from any relation to a power that has established it, or severing it from the idea that there is such a power. With the help of this infinite form, the self in despair wants to be master of itself or to create itself, to make his self into the self he wants to be, to determine what he will have or not have in his concrete self. His concrete self or his concretion certainly has necessity and limitations, is this very specific being with these natural capacities, predispositions, etc. in this specific concretion of relations etc. But with the help of the infinite form, the negative self, he wants first of all to take upon himself the transformation of all this in order to fashion out of it a self such as he wants, produced with the help of the infinite form of the negative self – and in this way he wills to be himself. In other words, he wants to begin a little earlier than do other men, not at and with the beginning, but “in the beginning”; he does not want to put on his own self, does not want to see his given self as his task – he himself wants to compose his self by means of being the infinite form. 52

The one who despairs has discovered an idea about the self in its most abstract form. He wants to construct it, to “design” his life so that he can then exist with the aid of this construction. It is this that is the tower of Babel: “Come, let us build …” This is a tower and a self with no place for one very specific Other, who is said to have created in the beginning. The one who constructs wishes himself to define the beginning, thereby detaching the self from every power that has posited it. This makes the strategy more recognizable. Anti-Climacus holds that despair dwells in the very heart of the speculative philosophy, in the very idea that it is the self that posits the self, that it is the human person himself who forms the concepts, constructs the system, and establishes the beginning of philosophy. He is thus fighting a war below the surface against the philosophy which constructs the self and the other on the basis of metaphysical antitheses and lets these antitheses find resolution in a Verflüssigung (literally, a “liquefaction”) which then makes possible an Aufhebung of all the antitheses in the self – considered from the absolute perspective of the spirit. Since this synthesis is constructed by the self, Anti-Climacus regards it as an abstraction that has little to do with the concrete self, unless one also accepts that the synthesis encounters a boundary; unless one accepts antitheses that remain antitheses; unless one investigates where the weakness and disproportion lie; unless one accepts the possibility that the synthesis collapses. It is only when the synthesis collapses that one will at once be on the tracks of a real contradiction and a real self – but 52

SKS 11, 182 / SUD, 67 f.

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also a despairing self, a self that sees and recognizes the despair in the self-relationship. It is however this disturbing other, which cannot be defined within metaphysics and cannot be resolved by the dialectical method, that eludes the Idealistic philosophy. In one sense, this “other” remains outside the method, since it is not possible to subordinate under the concept. 53 The other as such cannot be thought (like death, like the machine). 54 As “other,” however, it continues to disturb every attempt at an Aufhebung, not only as something outside the system, but primarily as something inside: inside the self. As the eternal. And the disturbance becomes the starting point for the chronic suspicion in this text: does not the construction abstract from some contradictions which the self is not able to resolve? Unlike the Cartesian self, the Hegelian self is sure of itself; it has become mature and has liberated itself from every dependence. Would not the logical consequence of such a detachment sooner or later be to dismiss this “other” as non-existent? What would then take the place of the “other” – the self, society, or nothing? Anti-Climacus describes characteristic traits in this basic philosophical attitude when he describes the acting despairing self. The problem with this action is that it remains within a hypothesis: “The self is so far from successfully becoming more and more itself that the fact merely becomes increasingly obvious that it is a hypothetical self. The self is its own master, absolutely its own master, so-called; and precisely this is the despair, but also what it regards as its pleasure and delight.”55 The self in its entirety exists only within the hypothesis “self.” But a hypothesis can be suspended at any moment. This means that we are left without any breach, something with which the self can wrestle, something that does not fit one’s own understanding. Interestingly enough (the book was written in 1848), Anti-Climacus describes a dialectic between a master and a servant, but in this dialectic each one is his own master. In that case, however, who is his “servant”? The conclusion is more than obvious: naturally, he is his own servant and slave. He is a servant to his own expectations, his own constructions, his own creativity – and this is the “visitation” upon this person: this 53

54 55

Cf. the following claim in Part Two: “The secret of all comprehending is that this comprehending is itself higher than any position it posits; the concept establishes a position, but the comprehension of this is its very negation” (SKS 11, 209 / SUD, 97). Cf. §§ 5-6 above. SKS 11, 183 / SUD, 69.

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dialectic makes rebellion (against his own self) necessary, so that he may gain the legitimation that allows him to be master once more. 56 Anti-Climacus both identifies with and distances himself from this acting and constructing human being – irrespective of whether he is an Idealistic philosopher, an “eschatological” communist, or a theologian of the Enlightenment. I emphasize that he does both: not only distance, not only identification, but an identification whereby he opens up, by means of the distance, a space between two hypotheses: the hypothesis that the self posits itself, and the hypothesis that the self is posited by another. For in a certain sense, both are true: it is impossible to abstract from the constructions of the self, from its imagination, its own identity. But what are the constructions of the self worth, if they do not also wrestle with otherness, with that which is definitively other? We find a corresponding doubling in the understanding of the eternal. Anti-Climacus identifies with both a Platonic and a Hegelian metaphysics, by placing his own theory about the self within various metaphysical/Idealistic concepts of the eternal. But he distances himself by identifying precisely this eternal as despairing. This understanding of the eternal is very close to what he himself will call truth, but at the same time infinitely far away. With the aid of this difference, which it is impossible to identify in the concepts and cannot be localized in any special construction of the truth, but which is nevertheless maintained as an infinite difference, Anti-Climacus deconstructs the concept of the eternal in the self. This is localized in the self, and it cannot be detached from a particular action and a particular passivity – but in virtue of a differentiating difference of this kind, the difference itself opens up a space between totally different meanings, where the one meaning (the eternity of the self in the self) becomes the distorted image (the inversion) of the other, viz. the eternity of the Other in – and outside – the self (and here we are indeed entitled to ask: In this case, what is “inside” and “outside”?). Taking this same small, but infinite difference as his rupture of departure, he deconstructs the entire understanding of the self which was presented at the start, by illustrating how the despairing person suffers under his own self without the other – or suffers under his contradictory relationship to the other. 56

“On closer examination, however, it is easy to see that this absolute ruler is a king without a country, actually ruling over nothing; his position, his sovereignty, is subordinate to the dialectic that rebellion is legitimate at any moment. Ultimately, this is arbitrarily based upon the self itself” (SKS 11, 183 / SUD, 69).

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The concept of the self is the same, and yet there is a small but decisive difference.

§ 39 Hypotheses Anti-Climacus regards the constructivist as a worthy opponent – unlike the bourgeois Philistine – and this is why he shows a certain amount of sympathy for this position. If he were to give this philosophical position a general designation, he writes, he would call it Stoicism – “but understood as not referring only to that sect.”57 For this is not a question of a philosophical school in classical antiquity, nor of a philosophical-religious group, but of a basic philosophical position with regard to philosophical and religious questions. The point about the Stoic thinking is that each philosophical position must be held to be potentially true until the opposite is demonstrated. The result is a refusal to bind oneself to any fundamental point of view; instead, one prefers to formulate a variety of points of view and to maintain an epoché as a basic attitude, rather than giving one’s adherence to any of these positions. One adopts a waiting attitude and insists that this is the only intellectually honest standpoint. From antiquity onwards, this position has had its philosophical adherents, and it is surely not controversial to claim that this is a very widespread fundamental attitude in both modern and late-modern thinking, in philosophical and in religious matters. In terms of the history of ideas, Anti-Climacus is no slow-coach, since he writes as early as 1849 that this development is typical of modernity. To some extent, he too relates to, and argues on the basis of, a philosophical position of this kind with reference to what I have called the hypothesis “God.” If he is to communicate with the intellectuals of his age in a way that corresponds to Schleiermacher’s Reden über die Religion (published exactly fifty years before), he is obliged to formulate a Stoic starting position. The modern Stoic will not necessarily reject the existence of God on a basis of principle;58 the question of God’s existence is so fundamental that one cannot find any adequate argument against such a philosophical possibility. But the modern Stoic will not go so far as to profess his definitive adherence to such a position; philosophically 57 58

SKS 11, 182 / SUD, 68. In other words, Schopenhauer and Feuerbach are not good Stoics. Nietzsche, on the other hand, is much more Stoic in his polemic against Christianity.

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speaking, the arguments against it are too weighty. Consequently, the question is postponed to a chronic epoché – a chronic undecidability. Anti-Climacus too postpones this decision. He begins by presenting it as an either/or: either the self has posited itself, or else it is posited by another. But throughout Part One, the question of the other is left in abeyance. Instead, he presents a psychological analysis of the self which takes its starting point in itself and returns to itself. He does however argue for the necessity of a deeper self-reflection, if the self is not to lose all interest in meaning and context and deeper existential questions which are linked to the task of understanding oneself as a human being. At decisive points in this analysis, therefore, the question of the other is posed – but always as a possibility, as a hypothesis, although it is true that this hypothesis represents the only real alternative to the bourgeois mentality, naivety, determinism, and Stoicism. The other represents the definitively other starting point, a self-relationship which relates to another beginning. If however this “other” is to be a real alternative, it cannot remain a hypothesis, and this is paradoxical. As long as the other is a hypothesis, it is worthless. If the other is to represent another beginning, this presupposes that the self lets go of control, abandons its intellectual privilege (which is to ponder every possibility and seek to maintain an intellectual equilibrium), and stakes everything on this other possibility, viz. that the self is based in the other, and can understand itself only in the light of the other, which is the presupposition of the self. In reality, this is the end of the self, the end of the Stoic self, the bourgeois self, the religious self (in general or in Christian terms), the Idealistic self, the ethical self, the absolute self. Considered in this way, this is a climax in the anticlimax: when the positions are driven to their uttermost limits, an either/or arises, and the hypotheses are worthless – including the hypothesis “God” – qua problem and qua hypothesis. As Anti-Climacus observes, the problem with the Stoic self is that it always remains within a hypothesis. It remains a “hypothetical self.” And it relates to a hypothetical God – “even if this self does not go so far into despair that it becomes an imaginatively constructed god.”59 If Anti-Climacus had written his books a hundred and fifty years later, he could have filled a whole series of books simply by writing about “imaginatively constructed gods.” Ultimately, therefore, the hypothesis is invalidated, our main hypothesis, the hypothesis “God,” because it is quite simply worthless 59

SKS 11, 182 f. / SUD, 69.

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as a hypothesis. Who needs the hypothesis “God”? Either one relates to God as “the principle that everything is possible,” which bursts the boundaries of a purely human rationality and a purely human economy, or else one relates in reality to a construction. And who needs such a construction? There are many who can use it and can gain advantages by means of it – in the form of money, influence, religious authority, etc. But does it give them any joy, in the sense of “eternity”? Will it ever be able to bring them anything other than despair upon despair? As I read this climax in the anticlimax, Anti-Climacus invalidates the hypothesis “God” and rejects it as worthless. Does this mean that our hypothesis-hypothesis is likewise invalidated? No, on the contrary: this hypothesis, viz. that the underlying hypothesis which was at stake all the time, was the hypothesis “God,” is confirmed. Anti-Climacus invalidates the hypothesis as hypothesis and points out that if “the hypothesis God”/“the problem of the other” is to be meaningful, it can be so only as an alternative to the basic Stoic position, in which every construction ends up as a hypothesis. In this case, the hypothesis will be suspended, and the self is handed over – or hands itself over – to a possibility that is not under its own control. Anti-Climacus does not however dwell on the alternatives to a modern Stoicism. He limits himself to describing what he sees as the defiance of despair, viz. that the despairing person wants to be himself, insists on himself defining his self-relationship, and rejects every other authority when it is a question of understanding this self. In his view, such a self lacks resistance, a boundary with which all the constructions of the infinite, negative self in its abstract form can collide. In this case, such a resistance would represent a disturbance, an interruption, i. e. a rupture, a breach in the construction. In the interruption lies the concrete stimulus to another dialectic – if “dialectic” is in fact the right word here – a reflection on the self which, with its starting point in the breach, gradually breaks down and justifies (in the typographical sense of this word) – i. e. deconstructs – the dialectical construction which the Stoic continually establishes.60 The constructivist position corresponds rather precisely to what was described in C.A as the despair of possibility, i. e. to lack necessity. The only difference is that the despair of possibility is described 60

“And yet, in the final analysis, what it understands by itself is a riddle; in the very moment when it seems that the self is closest to having the building completed, it can arbitrarily dissolve the whole thing into nothing” (SKS 11, 183 / SUD, 69 f.).

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here on the basis of a clear consciousness of the Stoic independence of the self. In other words, this is a despair of possibility which has been completely thought through. The next position, which is described as a suffering defiance, corresponds to the despair of necessity: the one who suffers will despairingly want to be himself and will insist on being himself, but he lacks possibility in the radical sense – and suffers because of this. Anti-Climacus describes him as follows: Perhaps such an imaginatively constructing self, which in despair wills to be itself, encounters some difficulty or other while provisionally orienting itself to its concrete self, something the Christian would call a cross, a basic defect, whatever it may be. The negative self, the infinite form of the self, will perhaps reject this completely, pretend that it does not exist, will have nothing to do with it. But it does not succeed; its proficiency in imaginary constructing does not stretch that far, and not even its proficiency in abstracting does. In a Promethean way, the infinite, negative self feels itself nailed to this servitude. Consequently, it is a self acted upon.61

This concrete “basic defect” now becomes the starting point for the self-understanding of the one who despairs, and for his understanding of the rest of the world. However, since he is not immediately able to integrate the basic defect into his self-understanding, he is offended by it, “[…] or, more correctly, he takes it as an occasion to be offended at all existence; he defiantly wills to be himself, to be himself not in spite of it or without it (that would indeed be to abstract himself from it, and that he cannot do, or that would be movement in the direction of resignation) – no, in spite of or in defiance of all existence, he wills to be himself with it, takes it along, almost flouting his agony.”62 As a despair of this kind becomes more and more conscious, the offense and the agony are further intensified, and this potentiated suffering despair is what Anti-Climacus calls demonic. It is the last form of despair within the dialectic of despair, despair at its most intense and at its most lost. This is why despair can most clearly be seen here, both with regard to its psychological implications and with regard to its philosophical and theological meaning. It is here that despair “explains itself.” The diagnosis is a desperate “inclosing reserve”; the despairing person insists on his agony, holds fast to it, and would not let it go for anything in the world. This is why he also shuts himself in against existence, and above all against every help that existence might be able to give him – and especially against the absurd possibility that God represents: “Hope in the possibility of help, especially by virtue of the absurd, that for God everything is possible – no, that he 61 62

SKS 11, 183 f. / SUD, 70. SKS 11, 184 f. / SUD, 71.

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does not want. And to seek help from someone else – no, not for all the world does he want that. Rather than to seek help, he prefers, if necessary, to be himself with all the agonies of hell.”63 In the form of a negation, Anti-Climacus inserts the opening for a breach in the “eternally” rotating circle of despair: a possibility “by virtue of the absurd” – “that for God everything is possible.” In this humiliation, in this gift of self, in this passivity called an absurdity, lies the annihilation of the self with its rationality based on itself. Accordingly, the economy of help or of the gift would enter into this passivity; and this economy would be different, for here the self could for the first time discover its beginning and its origin in the Other. Where there ought to be a climax, however, Anti-Climacus already presupposes the anticlimax, viz. in the form of negation: all this is what the despairing person certainly will refuse to accept. Nevertheless, AntiClimacus has expressed the alternative for which he wished to open a door precisely here, but without prescribing it as a “remedy” for the sickness, without issuing any kind of direct summons. In the form of negation, he speaks of God as the other and follows a long tradition of negative theology (cf. Derrida’s analysis of the linguistic theory in “negative theology”: “Comment ne pas parler”).64 Anti-Climacus emphasizes two other aspects of this form of despair, both of which are connected with an inn-vending (“objection”) and det inn-vendige (“the interior”): (i) the hiddenness of despair, i. e. the attempt by the one who is shut in to conceal his despair by turning inwards to his own self (i. e. inclosing reserve); and (ii) the understanding of the self as an innvending (objection) to the whole of existence. The demonic despair is hidden to such an extent that it is not even possible to localize the closed-in despair by means of any specific external characteristic sign – for in this instance there is no correspondence between the inner reality and the outer sign. The external dimension is in fact wholly indifferent in relation to the inner act of holding fast to the self, since the “inclosing reserve, or what could be called an inwardness with a jammed lock, must be the particular object of attention.”65 In his attempt to hide his despair from those around him, the despairing person localizes the visible trace of despair in an externality which draws as little attention as possible. This is the only crevice that opens the path into the troll’s world of despair: 63 64 65

SKS 11, 185 / SUD, 71. See above, § 11. SKS 11, 186 / SUD, 72.

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Just as the troll in the fairy story disappears through a crevice that no one can see, so it is with despair: the more spiritual it is, the more urgent it is to dwell in an externality behind which no one would ordinarily think of looking for it. This secrecy is something spiritual and is one of the safeguards to ensure having, as it were, an in-closure [Indelukke] behind actuality, a world ex-clusively [udelukkende] for itself, a world where the self in despair is restlessly and tormentedly engaged in willing to be itself.66

There is thus no external sign which corresponds to and could “represent” the despair in the internal sphere. The crevice which AntiClimacus mentions is the only trace of despair that is left after the despairing person has sublimated his despair to something so spiritual. This fairy story is a counterfoil to the first fairy story, where the melody had to be played backwards in order to lift the magic spell. Here, the spell is not lifted, since when the troll flees from the light, he flees into the rock through a crevice and barricades himself in the cave of the self. As a modern, reversed “parable of the cave,” this is the story of how a human person goes down into the darkness, cuts himself off from every other possibility, steels himself against any other self-understanding, and insists on clutching his doubt to himself, and constructing his own ideas or shadow-images of the self. This can also be read as an alternative interpretation of the entire story of the age of the Enlightenment, with its “happy ending”: by detaching oneself from every other authority, from every other author, modern persons have shut themselves in in their lonely, godless existence, an existence with no real hope of change, with no real trust in an inexplicable possibility. It is only a parable, it is only a play of metaphors – but is not this the core of the great discussions about truth?67 The final malapropos, the definitive anticlimax in this account of the path taken by the despairing person towards inclosing reserve, is the claim that the demonic person has made himself dependent on the other, since he is no longer attempting to detach himself from it. In a strange way, therefore, he confirms Anti-Climacus’ understanding of the self as derived from the other, but this can be seen only back-tofront, inscribed upon the self-understanding of the despairing person as an objection to the whole of existence, and thereby also to God, who is the author of creation: “Not even in defiance does it want to tear itself loose from the power that established it, but for spite wants to adhere to it out of malice – and, of course, a spiteful denunciation must above all take care to adhere to what it denounces. Rebelling 66 67

SKS 11, 186 f. / SUD, 73. “Philosophical discourse, as such, describes a metaphor which is displaced and reabsorbed between two suns” (Jacques Derrida Marges de la philosophie, p. 321).

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against all existence, it feels that it has obtained evidence against it, against its goodness.”68 Anti-Climacus takes this figure – the one who wants to use the problem of theodicy to justify himself vis-à-vis God – and characterizes it by means of a typographical image, that of the slip of the pen (skrivefeilen) which finds its identity in its specific difference, in the fact that it is a mistake in the writing, and insists on continuing to exist as a mistake. Such a person thus excludes other possible interpretations, other readings, other attempts to rewrite (omskrive), to inscribe himelf (skrive seg inn), or to confess (skrifte).69 His courage, his tragic courage, consists in an unbreakable will to continue to exist as he does now, rather than be changed or erased: Figuratively speaking, it is as if an error slipped into an author’s writing and the error became conscious of itself as an error – perhaps it actually was not a mistake but in a much higher sense an essential part of the whole production – and now this error wants to mutiny against the author, out of hatred toward him, forbidding him to correct it and in maniacal defiance saying to him: No, I refuse to be erased; I will stand as a witness against you, a witness that you are a second-rate author.70

§ 40 Phänomenologie des Geistestodes (Demonic Double Game) An interesting light is shed on the dialectic in the whole of section C (Part One) of The Sickness unto Death if we see it in connection with the name of the pseudonymous author: Anti-Climacus. On August 1, 1849, exactly two days after the publication, Kierkegaard wrote an “Efterskrift” (postscript) to a “[…] book which I by a fiction am thought to have written.”71 The title to this postscript is to be: “Climacus and Anticlimacus / a dialectical invention / by / Anticlimacus.” 72 In this pseudonymous postscript, Anti-Climacus reflects on his relationship to Climacus, on the relationship between fiction, writing, and reality – and on dialectic: “I, Anticlimacus, […] was born in Copen68 69

70

71 72

SKS 11, 187 / SUD, 73. Cf. Marius G. Mjaaland “Die Schrift im Selbst: Das Äußere im Inneren – oder umgekehrt,” pp. 457-464. SKS 11, 187 / SUD, 73. An orthographical observation: in the Danish text, the word translated here as “error” is written first as Skrivfejl and then as Skrivfeil. At least one of these must be a slipp of the pen. Is this purely a matter of chance? Pap. X 6, B 47. Pap. X 6 B 46 (cf. also entry 48, 49, and 50).

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hagen, almost exactly at the same time as Johannes Climacus, with whom I have in one sense much, indeed everything in common, but from whom in another sense I am infinitely different.”73 In terms of their birthplace and external facts, they are completely alike yet also infinitely different, and it is this similarity and this infinite difference that interest me. Anti-Climacus writes that the main difference is that Climacus claims not to be a Christian, and this makes him furious. Consequently, he claims to be a “supereminent” Christian “such as never yet has existed, but please note that I am thus in a hidden interior disposition.” 74 Anti-Climacus himself makes the difference between the two pseudonyms almost a matter of chance, when he claims that his own position is what it is only because it is the opposite of what he finds in Climacus. At the same time, this polemical position uncovers the malice in Anti-Climacus. He himself believes that this exists despite his supereminent Christianity; I myself believe that it is because of his “supereminent” Christianity that his malice becomes visible: The reader, who is not only my friend, but equally a friend of understanding, will easily see that despite my supereminent Christianity there is something malicious in me – for it is clear enough that it is only out of chicanery against Johannes that I have taken the position I have taken. If I had been the first on the scene, I would have said about myself what he now says about himself, and he would have been compelled to say about himself what I say about myself.75

This passage is a splendid example of the chiastic expression, as the rhetorician Jacob Bøggild notes with pleasure.76 I do not wish to exclude completely the possibility that Anti-Climacus thereby does away with the alleged difference in level between the two authors, as Bøggild claims in his book;77 but I myself believe that there is a difference. If it is not a difference in level, it is at any rate another difference, and I regard this difference as decisive. I see it as a difference of dialectics. Each one represents his own form of dialectical thinking – an ascending, humoristic path towards the inexplicable, and a descending path of offence (for Anti-Climacus is certainly offended!) which localizes the inexplicable in the depths of human despair. In my view, both positions and both forms of dialectic are represented in section 73 74 75 76 77

Pap. X 6 B 48. Pap. X 6 B 48. Pap. X 6 B 48. Cf. Jacob Bøggild Ironiens tænker: tænkningens ironi, p. 186. Cf. Jacob Bøggild Ironiens tænker: tænkningens ironi, p. 187.

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C in Part One of The Sickness unto Death, in keeping with the claim in Kierkegaard’s note to Rasmus Nielsen that doubt is for knowledge what despair is for ethics. In C.A, Anti-Climacus takes the path of doubt towards a presupposition for thinking about the self, thereby undertaking a repetition of Climacus’ dialectical movement towards the border of the understanding. This is what I called (in Chapter Four) a Socratic, negative dialectic. It is a rhetorical dialectic and a dialectic of difference, but the differences are organized chiastically and encounter an aporia in the self’s relationship to itself. With the starting point in this halt and this aporia, he describes the collapse of the understanding and the existential turning towards a presupposition antecedent to the understanding, xλÈÃÇË¿Ò"hÐÍ}ѽ¿Ð, which is also described as an excess of possibility, “that for God everything is possible.” A comparison between the dialectical movement in C.A and texts of Climacus – either Philosophical Fragments or the Postscript – would reveal a significant agreement in the line of thought at the decisive points. The second movement, the anticlimax of despair, is organized somewhat differently. The starting point is “the immediate man,” who either does not see himself as despairing or has a very immediate understanding of what despair entails. The dialectic in this part has some traits in common with Hegel’s Phänomenologie des Geistes. Anti-Climacus describes a dialectical development of the consciousness qua self-consciousness, but this development takes another direction than in Hegel. It does not ascend to the unity of the self and to absolute knowledge, but descends into the depths of despair, where the self is lacerated, in conflict with itself, and hides in its own interior, while it suffers under a contradiction in the will and is consumed by the agony of the contradiction. When the sickness unto death is placed within the self-relationship, in the speculative methodology and knowledge, a dialectic which has obvious traits in common with Hegel’s Phänomenologie des Geistes is construed as a Phänomenologie des Geistestodes. The presentation is directed especially against the Danish Hegelians, who still practice a dialectical thinking of this kind in philosophy and theology, but confuse the Socratic imperative, “Know yourself!,” with an abstract construction of the self. In principle, however, Anti-Climacus’ presentation also affects Hegel’s own texts, as a deconstruction from within. The background to this is on the one hand a radical negativity which has its origin in the relationship to the other. If the radical other is a possibility which can be grasped only as a possibility, as the affir-

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mation “that everything is possible” – in other words, if it cannot be grasped conceptually, but can only be assumed to be the presupposition of one’s understanding, where the boundary runs between the understanding and madness – then the self-relationship is not per se subordinate to the methodology of the speculative knowledge. The phenomenological dialectic can nevertheless still be employed to uncover the conditions for the self-relationship, and this is precisely what Anti-Climacus does in C.B; but the totality which the self constructs is presented per se as a despairing totality – and a despairing eternity – no matter how perfect this totality might be from a philosophical and systematic point of view. The meta-reflection on the methodological self-knowledge within speculative Idealism establishes a splitting tension within this construction, and this problematizes both alternatives; either one, in the act of knowing, does not want to be oneself and therefore does not understand the self as a totality; or else one wants to know oneself and understands the self as a totality of this kind, but also as a totality which it is up to the individual himself to define. On the other hand, therefore, it is such a “double” construction of the self-relationship, which positively holds fast to the tension between willing and not willing, that finds expression ethically speaking (with reference to despair) as a contradiction, and epistemologically or metaphysically speaking (with reference to doubt) as an aporia in the self’s relationship to itself. The trace of death in this self-relationship can be read both in the light of the self as a temporal self and in the light of the self as an eternal self. If we look for example at the modern Stoic, who constructs his own identity and accordingly his own reality, his freedom consists in the ability to construct an infinite series of selves, and to create new constructions at any time, if the construction should encounter something he cannot explain. But if we look more closely at what it is he understands about himself, the drafts have their ultimate basis in a riddle – or in nothing. Does not the riddle, which at any moment can “arbitrarily dissolve everything into nothing,” bear witness to a trace of death, of the inexplicability of death? Or is this a trace of the hidden God? What if the constructivist himself were unable to make this distinction? Does he in any way need the hypothesis “God” – to say nothing of the hypothesis “death”? If he does not need them as decisive authorities, he may perhaps need them as hypotheses, because it is difficult to find other designations for certain things that cannot be explained. For the constructivist, however, as Anti-Climacus depicts

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him, the trace of death would not interrupt his thinking; it has no retroactive power in life. Things are a bit different with the one who suffers, who encounters a “basic defect” which he cannot remove merely by the power of thought. Then the self is nailed to a “servitude” of this kind, in a simplicity which is per se a matter of chance, but to which an eternal significance is ascribed. The self is viewed as immutable, as eternally suffering from its weakness. Here, despair is expressed as an eternal circling around a tension, a contradiction, which causes suffering and cannot be sublated or “resolved,” and therefore causes one to perish as a human being. Anti-Climacus has earlier described such a powerless self-consumption as an “eternal death.” In this case, “God” is understood as an eternally immutable power, but since all that the eternal power does is to confirm one’s suffering self-understanding, not even a hypothesis of this kind will be disturbing. On the contrary, this hypothesis is held fast as an objection to every change. Where the first despair was Heraclitic in its continual dissolution of reality into possibility, this despair is Eleatic in its eternal immutability. Anti-Climacus’ reflection on the self can therefore scarcely be said to represent an autonomous phenomenology or a methodological dialectic which develops an understanding of the self from immediacy to a clearly defined ÒéÉÍÐ.78 The clearest ÒéÉÍÐ of the dialectic is to demonstrate how a teleological dialectic collapses under its own presuppositions – either by causing the dissolution of all boundaries when the question is posed about the origin of the self or of thinking, or else when the boundary appears as an absolute and impenetrable impasse where the self is held fast in a contradiction which it itself is unable to resolve. There are two different kinds of aporia which can be said to mark the boundaries of the dialectic.79 The dialectic which AntiClimacus elaborates thus becomes supplementary, in the sense that it takes its starting point in the speculative philosophy and shows how this, with reference to self-knowledge, is stranding on its own presuppositions, by shutting the self up in a totality which proceeds from the self and returns to the self, and which is not interrupted by any other. This supplementary logic in chapter C.B thus expresses the thanatology of the Spirit, as a counterfoil and anticlimax to the phenomenology of the Spirit. The great anticlimax in this movement is that it takes place within phenomenology, with its starting point in the 78 79

This, as I have mentioned above, is claimed both by Arne Grøn and by Jon Stewart. Cf. my analysis of negativity as aporetic negativity in § 36 above.

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phenomenological terminology, dialectic, and methodology – but with the most decisively positive result that phenomenology strands on its own presuppositions. In the next paragraph, I will look more closely at how such a thanatology is related to, or inscribed upon, a phenomenology, but to conclude a discussion which was opened at the beginning of this chapter let me point out that it cannot simply be claimed that Anti-Climacus goes along with Hegel; one must also consider in what sense he goes against Hegel. He takes his starting point in a Hegelian dialectic and employs a Hegelian terminology, as Stewart quite correctly notes. But he never does so with complete openness and without any trace of an apologetic or at least a polemical “dispute” or twist: on the contrary, he is all the time playing a double game, a movement “with” and a movement “against.” And it is only such a dialectical double game that allows the double structure in the despairing self to become visible, through nailing it fast to the contradiction and the aporia.

§ 41 A Cross for the Speculation Jon Stewart finds a dialectic development on the Hegelian pattern in section B of Part Two too: “The form of this dialectical triad has striking similarities with the analysis of ‘Despair as Defined by Consciousness’ […].”80 He does indeed emphasize that the context is different, since it is a question of the religious concept of sin and the human person’s relationship to God, but he is fully convinced that we find here a dialectic of acknowledgment modeled on the dialectic between lord and servant in Phänomenologie des Geistes.81 He finds a further agreement with Hegel’s work in the development from a lower stage to a higher, in the form of a continuous intensification of despair. He also sees the section about the internal consistency of evil as a direct reference to the introduction to the Phänomenologie, where Hegel calls the path of dialectic “the path of despair,” and he points out that there is an etymological link between the Danish words tvivl and fortvivlelse which corresponds to the German Zweifel and Verzweiflung.82 He admits that one can object to his analysis that there is no dialectic 80 81 82

Jon Stewart Kierkegaard’s Relations to Hegel Reconsidered, p. 584. Jon Stewart Kierkegaard’s Relations to Hegel Reconsidered, pp. 584 f. I. e. “doubt” and “despair.” Cf. Jon Stewart Kierkegaard’s Relations to Hegel Reconsidered, p. 586. Cf. also Hegel Phänomenologie des Geistes, p. 56.

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between pairs of antitheses in Part Two, but he concludes that this only makes the dialectic in this part of the work agree even better with the dialectic in the Phänomenologie: Moreover, it is dialectical in the same way Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit is dialectical since it displays the same linear progression. The dialectic here operates explicitly with the criterion of internal consistency. In addition, it shows accumulation or accretion and has a definite teleology. Unlike the two dialectical movements in Part One, this analysis does not work with complementary pairs of opposites as is characteristic of the Science of Logic; instead, one notion or conception of sin seems to lead to the next organically in the way Hegel’s dialectical movement in the Phenomenology proceeds. Thus, of the three discussions that have been examined, this one follows Hegel’s dialectical and phenomenological methodology most closely. 83

Stewart’s claims are not completely new, 84 but they are nevertheless astounding, since they come towards the end of a major study in which he examines virtually all the pseudonymous texts in order to reassess Kierkegaard’s relationship to Hegel. His primary intention is to protest against Thulstrup’s classic presentation of the relationship between the two philosophers,85 since he believes that this is based on a superficial reading of Kierkegaard and does not take sufficient account of the continuous polemic which he directs against the intellectual milieu in Denmark, which was influenced by Hegel. He is however also critical of theories that Kierkegaard has an ironic relationship to Hegel; he believes that the irony has to do with completely different persons, above all the theologian Martensen, the author and philosopher Heiberg, and the parson Adler, each of whom in his own way was strongly influenced by Hegel (although Stewart holds that they partly misunderstood Hegel). Stewart sees Kierkegaard’s relationship to Hegel as one of respect for a great thinker from whom he has taken over a great deal. Nevertheless, Kierkegaard has a certain critical distance vis-à-vis Hegel, especially with regard to Christianity. Hegel is not a theologian, but a philosopher who discusses Christianity from the standpoint of a philosopher of religion, whereas Kierkegaard 83 84

85

Jon Stewart Kierkegaard’s Relations to Hegel Reconsidered, pp. 586 f. Stephen Dunning has made a thorough analysis of Kierkegaard’s entire oeuvre based on his understanding of a Hegelian dialectic, and points to a number of similar triadic structures in The Sickness unto Death. Indeed, he sees more triads in “Part Two,” section B. Cf. Stephen N. Dunning Kierkegaard’s Dialectic of Inwardness, pp. 226-233. Thulstrup sees Kierkegaard’s presuppositions, goals, and methodology not only as different from, but as “fundamentally incompatible” with, those of Hegel, although he sees a clear influence from Hegel in terminology and the use of concepts. Cf. Niels Thulstrup Kierkegaards forhold til Hegel, pp. 328-334.

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insists on understanding Christianity on the basis of the individual’s relationship to God.86 According to Stewart, therefore, Kierkegaard’s criticism concerns not so much Hegel himself, as the Danish theologians who adopted Hegel’s system without understanding the fundamental difference between philosophy and theology. Stewart’s work is impressive in its exact investigation of the sources and its historical reconstruction of the discussions to which Kierkegaard referred, but I find somewhat problematical his attempt to introduce a fundamental distinction between philosophy and “personal” faith and between historical and systematic problems in the thinking of Kierkegaard and Hegel.87 In his discussion of Kierkegaard’s relationship to Hegel (which according to the title is the subject of the book) he seems to prefer a strategy of avoidance: Kierkegaard’s whole critical and ironic debate with Idealism concerns his contemporary Danish Hegelians, not Hegel himself. A large part of the criticism is that they are poor Hegelians, because they “go further than” Hegel without reflecting on the fundamental distinctions (e. g. between philosophy and theology) which we find in Hegel’s own writings.88 Stew86

87

88

The following commentary is a typical example of Stewart’s view of the relationship between Hegel and Climacus: “The problem is once again the attempt to base one’s personal faith on a philosophical or conceptual understanding of Christianity. There is nothing in Hegel’s position that would prevent him from accepting Climacus’ doctrine of the paradox, given that it is to be understood in the context of personal belief. Thus, the criticism here ultimately reduces to a point about one’s relation to faith and not about Hegel’s philosophy” (Jon Stewart Kierkegaard’s Relations to Hegel Reconsidered, pp. 471 f.). Stewart may be right when he says that Hegel could have accepted Climacus’ position; I have no particular opinion on this question. But it is unacceptable to reduce his understanding of the paradox to a question about personal faith. For Climacus, the question of personal faith has fundamental philosophical and theological aspects, aspects which are incompatible with Hegel’s philosophy of religion; more on this below. Nor am I sympathetic to his claim that discussions about the relationship between the two philosophers are “ahistorical” for the simple reason that Kierkegaard seldom refers explicitly to problems in Hegel’s own texts. This claim is put forward in the discussion of the relationship between Climacus’ position in Philosophical Fragments and Hegel’s philosophy, where he points out that the two projects are completely different and that the understandings of the modal categories are incompatible. He writes that although many scholars have compared the two, such a comparison is completely ahistorical: “One is free to make such comparisons, but to do so would be ahistorical since it is clear that Kierkegaard’s intent is to carry out a polemic against Martensen” (Jon Stewart Kierkegaard’s Relations to Hegel Reconsidered, p. 377). Cf. e. g. Jon Stewart Kierkegaard’s Relations to Hegel Reconsidered, pp. 560-564; 568-570.

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art sees Kierkegaard’s relationship to Hegel himself as two-sided: he is clearly influenced by Hegel, but is afraid of being lumped along with the Danish Hegelians, and this is why, for a period, he feels a great need to distance himself from Idealism, with the aid of both polemic and irony. On the other side, Stewart himself writes that he is not attempting to turn Kierkegaard into a Hegelian; but he sees clear traces of Hegelian thinking both in the early and in the late writings. He attaches particular weight to Either-Or and The Sickness unto Death.89 It is nevertheless a little surprising that Stewart sees so many parallels between Phänomenologie des Geistes and the dialectic in precisely the last part of The Sickness unto Death, since in this text Anti-Climacus writes with great polemic vigor against philosophers in general, and speculative philosophy in particular. Naturally, Stewart too has observed this, and he examines many of Kierkegaard’s critical objections to “speculation”: a misunderstood moral philosophy, the attempt to understand sin although sin is a paradox which presupposes a revelation, the critique of a rationalistic theology and the “rational” justification by faith which is preached in the parishes – and lastly, the doctrine of atonement expressed as the doctrine of the “God-man.”90 Stewart claims however that all these objections are a criticism of Danish theologians, especially of Martensen and Adler, whereas Hegel’s thinking is entirely irrelevant to this critique: “Martensen characterizes theology as continuous with philosophy. Following Hegel, he sees the two as having a common object of investigation, which they approach in slightly different ways. […] Whereas Kierkegaard seems generally willing to accept a philosophical analysis of religion from a philosopher (i. e., Hegel), he objects when it comes from a priest, such as Martensen. The plea of Anti-Climacus is to separate Christianity from science.”91 In a somewhat different context, he adds: “I wish to argue that although this discussion might have something to do with speculative theology or specific theologians, there is no evidence that it has anything to do with Hegel.”92 The claim about Christianity and science, however, is positively wrong, since Anti-Climacus in the Preface explicitly describes his project as a scientific one, and the other 89 90

91

92

Cf. Jon Stewart Kierkegaard’s Relations to Hegel Reconsidered, pp. 590 f. These four problems are discussed one after the other in: Jon Stewart Kierkegaard’s Relations to Hegel Reconsidered, pp. 553-572. Jon Stewart Kierkegaard’s Relations to Hegel Reconsidered, p. 564. Cf. also corresponding “salvaging” strategies on pp. 560, 565, and 572. Jon Stewart Kierkegaard’s Relations to Hegel Reconsidered, p. 565.

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claims appear to be poorly accounted for. Hence, Stewart’s strategy apparently comes down to a “salvaging” critique of earlier accounts of the relationship between Kierkegaard and Hegel: he attempts first to show that the criticism is directed against other thinkers and that it does not affect Hegel, and then he points to aspects of The Sickness unto Death which appear to be influenced by Hegel. He infers from this that the agreement between the two is more important than the differences between them. Nevertheless, I would gladly defend Stewart’s right to adopt such a strategy for the sake of Quellenforschung; but when he finishes by adducing so many Hegelian traits in The Sickness unto Death, with regard to methodology, dialectic, and contents, he lays himself open to the same criticism that he addresses to others, only in reverse. He is not willing to be content with the differences and the polemic against the Danish Hegelians; Stewart wants to go one step further and make a comparison with Hegel, since he believes that Anti-Climacus has taken over important elements from Hegel. The agreements Stewart finds in “Part Two,” section B, and in “Part One,” section C, lead him to argue that we find a methodology, a dialectic, and a line of thought which are influenced by Hegel. Indeed, he even ponders the possibility that Kierkegaard may have changed his position with regard to the discussion of the Hegelian Aufhebung.93 He holds that whereas hiin Enkelte (“that single individual”) in earlier writings was an absolute category which eluded mediation, the subject in Sygdommen can in fact be reduced to its individual parts,94 and that mediation in a Hegelian sense is supposed to be possible with regard to the self.95 I agree with many of Stewart’s observations about Anti-Climacus’ discussion-partners, but I maintain that he is wrong to claim that AntiClimacus/Kierkegaard has no fundamental objections to Hegel’s way of incorporating Christianity into philosophy. I also believe that his claim that Anti-Climacus has taken over the dialectical method from the Phänomenologie is really weakened when he refrains from problematizing the way he does this, or what use he makes of this method. It is at least necessary to nuance Stewart’s claims to some degree. The 93 94

95

Cf. Jon Stewart Kierkegaard’s Relations to Hegel Reconsidered, p. 587. This claim is made with reference to Part One: “Here, by contrast, the subject is conceived as a complex aggregate of mutually contradicting categories, which can be analyzed apart from the whole person. This seems to imply that the individual subject can indeed be reduced to its component parts as is done in these analyses” (Jon Stewart Kierkegaard’s Relations to Hegel Reconsidered, p. 588). Cf. Jon Stewart Kierkegaard’s Relations to Hegel Reconsidered, pp. 588 f.

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influence as such is not so interesting, if it is impossible to say anything about the differences. Let us therefore look first at the claim that Anti-Climacus develops in section B a dialectic of acknowledgment on the model of the lord/ servant dialectic in the Phänomenologie. The three chapters in section B not only constitute a dialectical triad in the Hegelian sense; they also reflect a classic tripartite division within theology, viz. the Trinity. In B.A, a self is described vis-à-vis God; in B.B, a self is described vis-à-vis Christ; and in B.C, a self is described which rebels against both Father and Son and therefore commits the sin against the Holy Spirit. The despair is intensified as the self becomes gradually conscious of itself as a self vis-à-vis the three Persons of the Trinity. This could indeed help support Stewart’s claim about a dialectic of acknowledgment, but if we look more closely at the development, we see that it scarcely merits the name of a dialectic of acknowledgment, since the author is describing an ever stronger and more explicit rejection of God. Above all, this is a rejection of God’s demand that he be the starting point for the human person’s self-understanding. The acknowledgment is problematized; indeed, it is made impossible by what Anti-Climacus calls God’s urgent maintenance of an absolute distinction between God and human beings. The result is that the apparent acknowledgment is unmasked as Schein (mere outward appearance). The human person is offended by the distinction, and ultimately the supposed acknowledgment emerges as a total rejection. We may further take a look at Stewart’s claim that Anti-Climacus takes a completely different view of the Hegelian Aufhebung than earlier pseudonyms: Anti-Climacus’ use of Hegel’s dialectical method here seems to indicate a change in Kierkegaard’s position on the ongoing issue of the Aufhebung of the law of excluded middle in Hegel’s speculative logic. […] there seems to [be] a change in position and an admission of the validity of Hegel’s sublation of the law of excluded middle even in the sphere of actuality, which is the sphere of despair.96

This claim applies first and foremost to the development in Part One, chapter C.A, but the point is relevant to the work as a whole. The question is whether the self is able de facto to resolve the antithesis between infinity and finitude, etc. in a higher unity. As I have mentioned earlier, there is no reason to doubt that Anti-Climacus’ starting point is an understanding of the self as a potential synthesis of antitheses, but the analysis of the phenomenon of despair points in a 96

Jon Stewart Kierkegaard’s Relations to Hegel Reconsidered, p. 587.

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different direction: the self is not able to arrive at such an Aufhebung with the help of a Hegelian dialectic. What appears to be a Hegelian dialectic of Aufhebung is therefore the opposite, viz. the uncovering of an ever deeper contradiction in the self’s relationship to itself. As Stewart notes, the starting point is a Hegelian logic, but this is turned against the Hegelian position, which is shared by both Hegel and Martensen, that the self, following the speculative method, would be able to resolve all contradictions. The phenomenon of despair uncovers precisely such a self-centeredness in the speculative philosophy. The same point is reinforced in Part Two, where the argument is directed against a dialectic of Aufhebung in philosophy and theology, both among the common people and in the pulpit. The speculative philosophy is accused of having introduced modern paganism, because, in Anti-Climacus’ eyes, the absolute distinction between God and the human person has been abolished by bringing together the divine and the human in the speculative category of the God-man. Stewart is probably correct to say that the intention of the polemic envisages the Danish Hegelians (especially Martensen and Adler, Kierkegaard’s main theological enemies at this period) more strongly than Hegel himself. But not even Hegel is wholly averse to an understanding of the incarnation as a dialectical Aufhebung of the antithetical relationship between God and the human person, or to the idea of an Aufhebung of the antithesis between the divine and the human Geist in the synthesis of the self.97 It is therefore useful to discuss the fundamental question of Anti-Climacus’ relationship to the Hegelian Aufhebung in the light of Phänomenologie des Geistes, especially since Stewart himself identifies such a clear influence of the dialectic of this work on the part of The Sickness unto Death that we are discussing here. 97

As is well known, Hegel too discusses the relationship between the three Persons in the Trinity in the religious-philosophical parts of the Phänomenologie des Geistes. He understands God “the Father” as God an sich, who is worshiped by the people of Israel, but is completely inaccessible to human knowledge and is therefore worshiped through ideas and allegories. He understands the Son of God as God für sich, who makes God accessible to knowledge by coming to earth – and thus is also Seyn für anderes. But it is only through Christ’s death that he becomes God an und für sich in that, as the Spirit of God, he is united with the community in its religious consciousness and makes possible the definitive Aufhebung of the antithetical relationship between God and human beings: “God is thus here plainly visible, as he is; he is there, as he is an sich; he is there as Spirit. It is only in the pure speculative knowledge that God can be attained. It is only in this knowledge that he is, and is himself, for he is the Spirit; and this speculative knowledge is the knowledge of the public religion.” Cf. Hegel Phänomenologie des Geistes, pp. 420 f. and 406 f.

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Let me summarize my argument up to this point. I find Stewart’s observations of some methodological agreements between the dialectic of Anti-Climacus and that of Hegel interesting, and certainly relevant to a new assessment of the relationship between the late Kierkegaard and Hegel. But if this is to be a critical assessment, it must at least take into consideration some substantial aspects which separate the two. One central aspect of Hegel’s understanding of the dialectical method is that the form and the line of thought can never be detached from the specific contents which are being discussed.98 It is therefore not enough to point out that Kierkegaard in his late writings feels free to pick out “eclectically” those aspects of Hegel’s thinking which serve his own purpose. We must also evaluate the way in which he takes this over, on the basis of substantial criteria which play a decisive role in the elaboration of the dialectic. Let me mention three factors which problematize the dialectical development in Part Two, chapter B: (i) that “despair” is a concept which does not describe a movement towards ever greater unity, but rather a movement towards ever greater inner division; (ii) that the continuity and inner consistency which Anti-Climacus describes (and which Stewart sees as an argument for the teleological character of the dialectic) is a continuity or internal consistency in evil, in the demonic, in the inclosing reserve; and (iii) that in Part Two, Anti-Climacus makes highly critical remarks about speculation, system, and mediation – while he himself insists on the paradox as expressing the possibility of offense. I do not believe that these three factors are relevant only to Anti-Climacus’ polemic against his Danish opponents, and irrelevant to a holistic evaluation of the dialectic in section B. As far as I can see, it is the following commentary by Anti-Climacus in the core chapter B.B of Part Two that best illustrates the problem that Stewart must tackle, if he wishes to make the dialectic of the Phänomenologie the starting point for his investigation of the development in The Sickness unto Death: Speculation does not take into consideration that with respect to sin the ethical is involved, always pointing in the direction opposite to that of speculation and taking the very opposite steps, for the ethical does not abstract from actuality but immerses 98

This point is expressed with particular pregnancy towards the end of “Die Lehre vom Begriff” in the Encyclopedia: “In this way, the method is not an external form, but the soul and the concept of the contents, from which it is distinguished only to the extent that the elements of the concept in their specificity also come in their own selves to appear as the totality of the concept” (Hegel Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundrisse, p. 231).

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itself in actuality and operates mainly with the help of that speculatively disregarded and scorned category: individuality. Sin is a qualification of the single individual; it is irresponsibility and new sin to pretend as if it were nothing to be an individual sinner – when one himself is this individual sinner. Here Christianity steps in, makes the sign of the cross before speculation; it is just as impossible for speculation to get around this issue as for a sailing vessel to sail directly against a contrary wind. The earnestness of sin is its actuality in the single individual, be it you or I. Speculatively, we are supposed to look away from the single individual; therefore, speculatively, we can speak only superficially about sin. The dialectic of sin is diametrically contrary to that of speculation.99

Accordingly, the interesting question is what happens when AntiClimacus, with the help of Christianity, “makes the sign of the cross before speculation.” He does not abandon the methodology of speculative philosophy; on the contrary, he has made this his own and he employs it in his analysis of Christianity. At the same time, however, he gives the dialectic a new twist, radically turning the line of thought around and leading the dialectic back to the individual. The direction is thereby reversed. We see this in the polemic against the cogito of modern philosophy, which Anti-Climacus accuses of making the “transition” a necessity:100 And the secret of modern philosophy is essentially the very same, for it is this: cogito ergo sum, to think is to be (Christianly, however, it reads: be it unto you according to your faith, or, as you believe, so you are, to believe is to be). Thus it is evident that modern philosophy is neither more nor less than paganism. But this is not the worst possible situation – to be in kinship with Socrates is not too bad. But the totally unSocratic aspect of modern philosophy is that it wants to delude us into believing that this is Christianity.101

The movement in the speculative philosophy is progressive: it draws inferences from thinking to Being, from the concept to the self. But that investigation of the human person’s self which takes its starting point in the paradox makes a sign of the cross before this movement with the help of a chiastic contrary movement: “be it unto you according to your faith, or, as you believe, so you are.” Here too, the chiasm can be linked to a standstill in the middle of the cogito’s movement of thought, and this has two consequences for the argumentation. With regard to philosophy, it entails that it is confronted with its own conditions, viz. the supposition that it is possible by means of philosophical reflection to know the conditions for hu99 100 101

SKS 11, 231 / SUD, 120. Cf. e. g. Hegel Phänomenologie des Geistes, pp. 40 f. SKS 11, 206 / cf. SUD, 93 (the chiasmus disappears in Hong’s translation; thus the translation is modified).

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man existence. With regard to the individual despairing person – who is the starting point for the dialectic of despair – it leads to a halt at the aporia and an aporetic turning point: if sin is defined as ignorance, this means that every single one is ignorant of what sin is, and must relate to sin under the presupposition that no one can grasp what sin is. The focus is shifted from the theoretical “what” to the practical question of “how.” The question about sin is posed ethically and existentially, as a decision. If Christianity eludes a conceptual definition in this way, it simultaneously eludes the speculative philosophy’s abstraction from the despair of the individual sinner and replaces this with a Socratic aporia to which each one must relate on the basis of his consciousness of himself and his relationship to God. The same applies to the category of the “forgiveness of sins,” which is illustrated on the basis of the relation to the paradox. The dialectic of the forgiveness of sins does not entail any Aufhebung in the speculative sense; rather, when theoretically considered, it entails a confirmation of the contradiction. My point is quite simple: the paradox is significant for the dialectic, for the development of the dialectic of despair and of sin. In this regard, there is no difference between AntiClimacus’ paradox and Climacus’ description of this; the only difference is that the significance of the paradox is described here as an outbreak within a dialectical Aufhebung, which ultimately leads to the collapse of the dialectic, since the contradiction is held fast in despair as a contradiction, both ethically and existentially.102 This means that the secret of the use Anti-Climacus makes of the speculative method is this: every dialectical sublation is based on an even deeper contradiction, a paradox which cannot be resolved by the understanding, not even with the help of a dialectical logic of transition. In this way, AntiClimacus makes a sign of the cross before speculation: the speculative movement which he employs in order to analyze despair is based on despair’s contradiction and the halt of offense. Anti-Climacus’ polemic against the speculative philosophy can scarcely be dismissed by saying that it is a modern paganism and a confusion of categories as soon as a parson and a theologian present the incarnation as an Aufhebung, whereas the argument is perfectly 102

Nor would the forgiveness of sins in this case entail any theoretical resolution of the contradiction. The contradiction is held fast as a paradox, but through the forgiveness of sins the contradiction is inscribed upon another dialectical movement, which has its origin in the dialectic of gift or of forgiveness. This can however never be traced back to the self as sufficient unto itself. Cf. Marius G. Mjaaland “Die Schrift im Selbst: Das Äußere im Inneren – oder umgekehrt,“ pp. 457-464.

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in order as long as it is the philosopher Hegel who argues in the same way. On the contrary, Anti-Climacus’ double strategy, divided into two parts, shows that he sees despair as a problem that concerns all human beings – whether they consider themselves primarily on the basis of their own construction of the self, or also read the grammar of the self with the starting point in a relationship to, and a dependence on, the other. The argument against the constructivism of the “secular” philosophy is expressed clearly in the section on the acting defiance in Part One, C.B, while the argument against the speculative Christian dogmatics is intensified in Part Two, B.B, since the structure in the dialectic of despair is the same, and it is precisely the concept of “despair” that holds the two parts together in a continuous analysis of the crisis in the modern project of Enlightenment. This is a crisis which cuts across the disciplines of philosophy and theology, and these two disciplines are criticized with equal severity. Anti-Climacus’ criticism is however neither a typical criticism “from the outside” nor a typical criticism “from the inside.” It is a criticism which largely draws in its reflection on concepts and methods borrowed from German Idealism – here, I agree with Stewart – but which problematizes and questions these from within to such an extent that it shatters the dialectic as a speculative method, the system as a totality, and the transition as Aufhebung. It is scarcely controversial to point out that Hegel’s phenomenology has a holistic tendency. With the help of the dialectic of despair, Anti-Climacus demonstrates the autocentrism of this holistic thinking – not by arguing against Hegel or other philosophers, but by analyzing the contradiction of despair with regard to the self’s relationship to the other. When this dialectic is translated into a language game which relates to theological concepts such as sin and forgiveness, the problem turns out to be the same, even if the grammar is different. Despair now goes under the name of “sin” and takes the form of an ever more conscious rebellion against God. This is why I view the argument in the book as a whole as concerning both Martensen’s dogmatics and Hegel’s philosophy of religion. Anti-Climacus does not only argue as a dogmatic theologian or a “personal” believer. Rather, the argument is philosophical, and for this reason also has a polemical thrust against philosophy’s attempt to “consume” religion by incorporating it into an Idealistic sublation of the deeper contradiction between God and the human being. Drawing the boundary between philosophy and religion is not such a simple task that philosophy can look at religion “from the outside” and thereby “grasp” it, while theology must relate to the problematic of sin and

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is therefore obliged to problematize the incarnation. Sin and despair represent epistemological boundaries which break up philosophy and theology respectively – from within. The paradoxical consequence of this is that Jon Stewart is probably correct in his observation that Anti-Climacus employs a dialectical method which has traits in common with the dialectic in Phänomenologie des Geistes. But the paradox turns the dialectic itself in a direction “diametrically contrary to that of speculation.”103 Moreover, I believe that Stewart’s claim that Anti-Climacus understands the development of the self as a development within logical categories, and that he thus “reintroduces” the movement into logic, is based on a misunderstanding.104 There is a difference between introducing a movement into logic and drawing on logical categories to describe the transition from possibility to actuality, i. e. to describe the development of the self with the help of the categories of modal logic. Besides this, where the self is analyzed with the help of metaphysical antitheses, the logic is quite different from that in Hegel’s Wissenschaft der Logik. It would be more correct to say that Anti-Climacus develops and makes more precise some essential distinctions found in earlier works by Kierkegaard. The transition which is ethically and existentially interesting takes place in the sphere of actuality, i. e. for every individual human being, for every individual self, and is a transition from possibility to actuality.105 It is precisely because he distances himself from the idea of a “necessary” logical development from one stage to the next that the category of transition is presented a number of times. For example, the distinction between Aufhebung and the “transition” of repetition permits him to affirm that there is no Stilstand (“standstill”) in the world of the spirit, nor indeed any Tilstand (“state”), but only movement.106 At the same time, he adds that everything is actuality, in actu. According to the grammar of the spirit, this addition certainly does not mean that the transition takes place speculatively, i. e. as a necessary transition from one form to the next. Rather, at every transition it encounters a cross, a contradiction, a halt, an either/or, a paradox.

103 104 105

106

SKS 11, 231 / SUD, 120. Cf. Jon Stewart Kierkegaard’s Relations to Hegel Reconsidered, pp. 589 f. Cf. Repetition: SKS 4, 25 f. / R, 149 and The Concept of Anxiety: SKS 4, 325n / CA, 18n. “In the life of the spirit there is no standing still (really no state, either; everything is actuation)” (SKS 11, 206 / SUD, 94).

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I perfectly agree with Stewart’s view that this dialectic is thought through more systematically than in earlier texts by Kierkegaard,107 but it is also systematic in the sense that it continuously holds fast a transition which eludes the logical necessity of the dialectic – and of despair.108 This is the decisive distinction between the surface and the depths, between open and hidden, in Anti-Climacus’ dialectic: the dialectical development towards something “higher” is always based on a contradiction which goes deeper down into the self and into the self’s despair (irrespective of whether the development has its starting point in dialectical antitheses or in a higher consciousness of the self). In every case, a higher self-consciousness seems to correspond to higher insight into the dialectic of the self and a stronger will to be oneself. But this increased self-consciousness is always based on a profound contradiction in the will, a contradiction between willing and not willing to be oneself, which remains chronically hidden from a speculative philosophy and a speculative theology which do not problematize the will. Finally, the increased self-consciousness is measured in Part Two primarily against that to which the self relates (its vis-à-vis) as its “other.” The increasing consciousness of the self as a self vis-à-vis God, and then vis-à-vis Christ, corresponds to a continuously increasing self-consciousness. But this self-consciousness too is based on a contradictory relationship, i. e. a contradiction between the self and the other in the self-relationship – as a contradiction between the self and God in the continuation of sin, a contradiction between the self and Christ in the refusal to accept the forgiveness of sins, and finally as an outspoken contradiction in the form of a “no” in the self’s relationship to the Holy Spirit, i. e. in the relationship between the human person’s spirit and the Spirit of God. Anti-Climacus takes care to make it clear at every point in his elaboration that this contradictory relationship expresses the possibility of offense on all the levels of the dialectic of despair. 107

108

“Kierkegaard has no objection to understanding a concept, in this case despair, in terms of its systematic relations” (Jon Stewart Kierkegaard’s Relations to Hegel Reconsidered, p. 591). Despite this, Theunissen is in fact correct to say that the whole dialectic remains within a Hegelian “automatism”: “A remnant of automatism remains in his theory, since it does not dispense the consciousness, which wishes to avoid a relapse, from carrying out the full program” (Michael Theunissen Der Begriff Verzweiflung, pp. 154 f.). The autonomous production of the self goes further – and this is why it is a decisively important question where death is localized in the auto-matic “machine” of philosophy.

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It is thus the possibility of offense that distinguishes the individual as individual and uncovers a contradiction in the will and a paradox for the understanding at every transition from possibility to actuality. As far as I can see, such a fundamental difference, which is carried through systematically in this case, remains within the dialectic. This difference cannot be resolved by terminological and methodological agreements with Hegel.109 It is not decisive, strictly speaking, whether or not Kierkegaard or Anti-Climacus had any special interest in criticizing Hegel. The question is whether there are substantial differences in their understanding of the self and the spirit – and whether these differences are expressed in a different dialectic and a different methodological approach. In relation to a Hegelian dialectic, the strategy is a doubling of the structure of the self, which runs like a rift through the entire work. This also occurs in Part Two, where it is in fact more explicit than in the first part. A corresponding line or limit can be drawn between the first and the second parts of the book: the first concerns the “human” self and the second the “theological” self. But just as the second part concerns the human person, the hidden self, which eludes the attempts of philosophy (i. e. primarily of phenomenology) to define the secret of his singular existence (intrinsically connected with the aporia of sin), so too the first part is concerned about God, about the hidden God. This means that the line runs not primarily between, but rather through the two parts of the book, and through a construction of the self beginning with the self – i. e. which also defines the other beginning with the self – and an understanding of the self which continuously takes the other as its point of departure.110 The doubling of the self-relationship inscribes an in-finite difference as a differentiating distinction between the two structures. And precisely this distinction is a distinction that conceals itself, that a human being cannot grasp with the mind, because it is antecedent to the subject as a willing, acting, and understanding subject. The self is subject (Latin sub-iectum) to this distinction through a spatialization (espacement) of the self and a temporal shift in the understanding of itself which it itself can neither determine nor control. In this sense, thanatology and the secrets of the self lie deeper in the self-relationship than phenomenology and 109

110

This means that Stewart is correct to affirm: “In many ways Kierkegaard is engaged in a much more serious discussion with Hegel here than when he mentions him by name elsewhere” (Jon Stewart Kierkegaard’s Relations to Hegel Reconsidered, p. 591). Cf. once more our analysis of chapter A.A in Chapter Four.

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those aspects of the human person which are openly accessible to the reason’s self-reflection. Hence the discourse about the self which relates to itself and in this relation sees itself dependent on God and delimited by death, is evidently a topic for autopsia.

§ 42 Alteropsia Anti-Climacus’ approach to this problem is the human will, which the human person himself cannot define autonomously. In this regard, his anthropology is genuinely Lutheran and corresponds to Luther’s definition of the will as enslaved.111 Anti-Climacus uses the problem of the will to hold the subject fast in a problem which it cannot resolve on its own. He then points out that this makes its situation a paradox which it cannot grasp “from within,” but to which it must relate in its relationship to its own self, to other persons (the ethical dimension), and to God. This holds true, whether or not one has a clear concept of “God.” Despair leaves traces in knowledge as an aporia, in the will as a contradiction, and in the self-understanding as an abyss, an experience of losing oneself. There is a good example in Phänomenologie des Geistes of Idealism’s reflection on the logos which, according to the Gospel of John, became a human being in Jesus Christ. Hegel looks phenomenologically at the transition from God as absolute Seyn to a knowable human being, with the telos of showing that God’s incarnation is that which makes it possible in a religious way to anticipate the absolute Geist which resolves all the antitheses in the self and allows the self to appear as the underlying and constructing unity in existence. It is with the self as origin and goal that Hegel’s strict demands with regard to internal consistency and continuity in the dialectic can be satisfied. In one particular sense, Anti-Climacus’ understanding of Christ’s log111

Cf. Martin Luther De servo arbitrio. In his discussion with Erasmus, Luther too adopts an interpretative strategy which takes the form of a doubling deconstruction of Erasmus’ diatribe about the free will: “Indeed, the whole Diatribe is itself nothing else but an egregious performance of free choice, condemning by defending and defending by condemning, and so being doubly stupid while wishing to be thought wise. The first opinion, then, when compared with itself, is such as to deny that man can will anything good, and yet to maintain that a desire is left to him which nevertheless is not his own” (Martin Luther The Bondage of the Will, tr. by Philip S. Watson, in Luther’s Works, ed. by Helmut T. Lehmann, volume 33, Philadelphia: Fortress Press 1972, p. 115 (WA 18, 670)).

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os is anti-phenomenological: Christ’s divinity and God’s humanness (Kierkegaard: Menneske-Lighed) cannot be defined unambiguously, and they remain a problem for thinking and an offense for the will. A telos of Anti-Climacus’ dialectic is therefore to demonstrate that God’s incarnation eludes any dialectical explanation and resists sublation, even in the Christian sense of reconciliation, if this is presented as compatible with the rationality of the mind. Ultimately, the breach is based on human sinfulness, which opens up an abyss between human beings and God: As sinner, man is separated from God by the most chasmic qualitative abyss. In turn, of course, God is separated from man by the same chasmic qualitative abyss when he forgives sins. If by some kind of reverse adjustment the divine could be shifted over to the human, there is one way in which man could never in all eternity come to be like God: by forgiving sins. At this point lies the most extreme concentration of offense, and this has been found necessary by the very doctrine that has taught the likeness between God and man.112

This abyss, “the most chasmic qualitative abyss,” is the premise for relating to a hidden humanness, the secrets of the self, by philosophical or theological reflection. This abyss is the expression of the human person’s total abandonment by God in his reflection on the self and in the self-relationship, and paradoxically enough even in his reflections on the hypothesis “God.” It is perfectly possible to relate to oneself on the basis of such a total abandonment by God, but Anti-Climacus’ assumption is that it is impossible to do so without the self falling into despair. He develops this hypothesis dialectically, first with regard to speculative philosophy, then with regard to rationalistic and speculative theology. The dialectic of despair uncovers the apparent absence as a hidden presence. It is God’s hidden presence, in the world and in the self, that disturbs and breaks up thinking from within. The result of such a double strategy is that he makes the Christian logos a problem both for philosophical and for theological reflection on the self. In contrast to what Stewart claims, I believe therefore that Anti-Climacus insists that the Christian logos is a relevant problem for philosophy, but that it takes its place in philosophy in a different manner than in Hegel’s Phänomenologie and in the speculative philosophy as a whole. It is anti-phenomenological, in the sense that it organizes this discourse from the rear side and becomes visible in the inexplicable, in discrepancy and in the contradiction of the will. If one takes account of despair and begins – as Anti-Climacus maintains 112

SKS 11, 233 / SUD, 122.

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Christianity always does – to reflect on the human person beginning with the fact that he is a sinner, this automatically means that one does not begin with the beginning, but arrives backwards (in every sense) at the beginning, along the path of reflection.113 And this beginning, viz. the beginning of the human person’s self-understanding, is made in a distinction between self and self which it is not up to the human person himself to define. Why does Anti-Climacus take this long detour around the human person’s hiddenness and despair? The answer is very simple: because he wants to open up a space antecedent to self-definition, a space where God can reveal himself as God – in the self’s despair. The idea of revelation is a paradox for thought (which “makes a sign of the cross” before speculation) and the “folly” of Christ, viz. that God through death communicates life, through condemnation communicates grace, through the deepest despair communicates happiness and bliss.114 The formula for faith keeps such a possibility open throughout the entire text, a possibility that that self which comes to know itself and its despair can rest transparently at any time in the power that posited it: This contrast [sin/faith], however, has been advanced throughout this entire book, which at the outset introduced in Part One, A, A, the formula for the state in which there is no despair at all: in relating itself to itself and in willing to be itself, the self rests transparently in the power that established it. This formula in turn, as has been frequently pointed out, is the definition of faith.115

To rest in the power that posited the self is somewhat different from an autopsia that only takes its starting point in death, or does not get any further than the sickness unto death. It is an autopsia which finds a new starting point and a new beginning in the Other, and thus corresponds to the “autopsia of faith” about which Climacus writes in Philosophical Fragments – which also has the possibility of offence as its presupposition.116 But in this context, it is in fact just as appropriate to write of an alteropsia, a repetition of the self which begins 113

114 115 116

“The beginning is not that with which one begins but that to which one comes, and one comes to it backward. The beginning is this art of becoming silent […]” (SKS 11, 17 / WA, 11). Cf. Martin Luther On the Bondage of the Will, p. 62 (WA 18, 633). SKS 11, 242 / SUD, 131. “Yet a contemporary such as this is not an eyewitness (in the sense of immediacy), but as a believer he is a contemporary in the autopsy of faith. But in this autopsy every noncontemporary (in the sense of immediacy) is in turn a contemporary” (SKS 4, 270 f. / PF, 70).

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with the other who sees in hiding, with the earnest thought that God looks upon you: “Thy Father which seeth in secret …”117 This opens the self to a new perspective and a new grounding, but also for an excess of possibility in the center of the self, viz. in the relationship to the other.118

117 118

Cf. SKS 11, 182 / SUD, 69. Cf. SKS 11, 242 / SUD, 131.

VII. Hidden Ground: Holy Ground

Verbracht ins Gelände mit der untrüglichen Spur: Gras, auseinandergeschrieben. Die Steine, weiß, mit den Schatten der Halme: Lies nicht mehr – schau! Schau nicht mehr – geh! Paul Celan

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It is a singular form of philosophy we find by Kierkegaard and by Derrida. They both analyze philosophical problems through language and question the rational basis or ground for the predominant system of thought. Hence, they introduce a certain repetition of the Cartesian doubt, but this time as a repetition inside the modern tradition which sees Descartes as a model of critical philosophy and methodology. Instead of giving rationality a safe and solid ground, they underscore the hiddenness of this ground, and hence also of the ultimate ground for rational discourse. When Derrida again includes the question of religion into philosophy, as a profoundly and genuinely philosophical question, he refers to a tradition which historically is very strong in the western world, not only in its Christian form, but also in Jewish and Islamic versions. Even the wake of the modern doubt and critique is based on an act of faith: Descartes’ cogito, which is intimately connected with his credo. Epistemologically, cogito itself is already based on faith in a very general sense, covering faith in one’s senses, in the credibility of a logical deduction, and ultimately in God as unconceivable Ground beyond rational foundation (although here both Kierkegaard and Derrida part company with Descartes, who tries to secure this faith in an ontological argument for God’s existence). For Derrida, it does not seem to be an important point to defend religion or religious rationality against the modern criticism; on the contrary, he simply turns the same kind of questions and arguments back against the critique of religion and the all too naïve acceptance of a non-religious basis for modern rationality. There are several traits of religious rationality among the critics, affecting notions, grounds, and inferences, of which they are often unconscious. Moreover, when traditional metaphysics breaks up from within, the religious traditions are also changing their views and notions. Hence, the attempt to deny the validity of religious experience has become more questionable. And typically enough, what we find by Kierkegaard as well as by Derrida is an appeal to experience, even an experience which is ambiguous, which refers to a hidden source, but nevertheless concerns the very foundations of language, of self, of experience, and hence of modern rationality. Even as anti-foundational thinking it is concerned with the foundations, with the hidden ground where the self is grounding. The hidden ground has been rediscovered as holy ground; and hence it is trembling. In this last chapter, I will follow a double trace, considering alternately Kierkegaard and Derrida in order to clarify the differences between two thinkers who have many concerns in common. I will keep

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a special focus on the questions of the ground, the hidden ground in which the self according to Kierkegaard is grounding – whereas Derrida occasionally has taken the ground for an abyss. The transition from hidden ground to holy ground marks the religious qualification of the problem discussed, but it does not in fact make the problem less philosophically relevant; only less accessible, as a secret of the self. It is clearly based on a certain faith, a faith of a profoundly religious origin and with radical philosophical consequences. When every defense of God’s existence has become difficult for metaphysical reasons, how will it still be possible to talk about God, to save Gods name, and refer to God as unconditional gift, as goodness beyond being? Is it still possible after Kierkegaard and Derrida? In a certain sense, it has become impossible. Hence, however, precisely the impossibility of the impossible has become a topic for the discourse, a topic beyond precise topology. The impossibility of an aporia, of an abyss, of despair, of death, has occupied us all the way through this inquiry, but now we have arrived at the impossible as such, which both Derrida and Kierkegaard define as a condition for the unconditional, for what Derrida calls the impossible gift, and Kierkegaard, in his grammar, calls grace. The relation between Part One and Part Two of the Sickness unto Death is of particular interest here. Both parts analyze the impossibility of a reconciled self, because of despair which consumes the self in a more and more intensified self-consummation. The analysis follows the despaired deeper and deeper into the cave of simulacra and inclosing reserve, or when they move along the edge of the abyss as the limit of this discourse. But then there are also some hints towards another possibility, a possibility beyond the impossible, breaking out of the closure of an inclosing reserve. I shall keep focus on both traits in Kierkegaard’s thinking, with particular emphasis on the way he discusses the name of “God” and the possibility of a self grounding in the other. Derrida is no theologian at all, and it was only some years after he had published his most influential texts on grammatology and textual theory that he recognized that the unknowable trace of an Ur-Sprung in human rationality applies also to the knowledge of God.1 He is cautiously warning, however, against the fallacy to identify différance with God, with negative theology, etc. He is not willing to affirm the 1

This discovery of Derrida came in a long process of development, and entailed in fact a “reversal of direction” in the course of his own literary production: cf. Yvonne Sherwood and Kevin Hart (eds.) Derrida and Religion: Other Testaments, pp. 36 f.

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existence of God – but, on the other hand, he is not willing to deny such an existence either. He consistently argues that deconstruction is always ambiguous concerning the existence of things, ideas, and beings – and God may at any rate not be confused with such a thing which is available for phenomenological description. There is a continuous reflection, though, on how this other, who as God must be absolute other, affects human self-understanding, affects acting, conscience, and the secrets of the self. On the one hand, he insists on the impossibility of grasping God, as a protection of God from the rationality of humans who want to domesticate the name. But on the other hand, he may quite unprotectedly speak of God as a projection of my own self-knowledge, of calling “myself” God, just like my self comes into being when God calls “me.” Hence, we will conclude the argument on autopsia by indicating how these orthodox and rather heretical definitions reflect the distinction between self and other, between abyss and ground, between the sovereign power and the unconditional gift, between the impossible and a possibility beyond possibility.

§ 43 Kierkegaard: The Hidden God God is hidden and sees in hiding. Jacques Derrida’s reading of Fear and Trembling ends with this mysterium tremendum.2 This is also the “secret note” which is inscribed upon Part One of The Sickness unto Death: every human being relates to such a mystery, either consciously or unconsciously (and more often the latter than the former). 3 More or less thoughtfully, more or less consciously, each one is in a relationship to his own self, to death, and to God as absolute other. Despair is the aporia of this self-relationship, in the form of what seems to be an indissoluble antithesis between self and self; either because the individual does not want to be himself – i. e., is himself against himself – or else because he wants to be himself – i. e., is himself against the other. “God” is established as the hidden presupposition and origin of the self’s relation to itself, even if the despairing person has only an unclear notion of such a possibility behind a “false door” in the self. In Part One, Anti-Climacus analyzes a psychological and dialectical development in the human person’s despair from this point of departure: (i) on the basis of how he relates to himself as despairing; and (ii) 2 3

Cf. Jacques Derrida Donner la mort, p. 103. Cf. Joachim Ringleben “Zur Aufbaulogik der Krankheit zum Tode,” pp. 106-109.

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how he in despair relates to his hidden origin. The author first uncovers traces of a despair in the human person’s need of, and striving for, happiness, meaning, fellowship, and power, and then in various ideas about, and constructions of, a self. More directly, despair is expressed on the occasion of grief and unhappiness. But whether despair is hidden or visible, it is seen as the topos of a hidden relationship to God, the wound of negativity in the self.4 If it is true that all human beings are or have been in despair, this is because all human beings relate to God in a hidden manner, and in their relationship to their own selves implicitly relate to the hidden God – whether they want to or not. When we bear in mind that in the first part of the work, the one who despairs lacks a clearly formulated notion of God, it is all the more interesting that Anti-Climacus in Part Two takes his starting point in one particular conception of God, but still analyzes a despairing self: “The emphasis is on before God, or with a conception of God; it is the conception of God that makes sin dialectically, ethically, and religiously what lawyers call ‘qualified’ despair.”5 This is not primarily a discussion of who or what God de facto is. Anti-Climacus limits himself to a juridical characterization of the idea of God, de jure. The distinction is not unimportant, because the question of proofs of the existence of God is moved thereby onto the sideline; it is almost taken for granted that God is hidden from human eyes. But if God also hides himself from the human understanding, as both Kierkegaard and Derrida presuppose, the attempt of philosophers and theologians to explain and defend God’s existence can almost be viewed as an attempt to betray God. This is why Anti-Climacus writes: What a priceless anticlimax – that something that passes all understanding – is proved by three reasons, which, if they do anything at all, presumably do not pass all understanding and, quite the contrary, inevitably make it obvious to the understanding that this bliss by no means passes all understanding, for “reasons,” after all, lie in the realm of the understanding. No, for that which passes all understanding – and for him who believes in it – three reasons mean no more than three bottles or three deer!6

For Anti-Climacus, the alternative to such a “proof” is to take his starting point in God as an absolute presupposition. If God is the one who sees in hiding,7 then the consciousness of God will de jure characterize 4 5 6 7

Cf. Marius G. Mjaaland “Et åpent sår i selvet” in Kirke og Kultur 2001, pp. 85-96. SKS 11, 191 / cf. SUD, 77. SKS 11, 215 / SUD, 103. Towards the end of the first part of the book, Anti-Climacus writes about steeling from God the thought “[…] which is earnestness – that God pays attention to one; instead, the self in despair is satisfied with paying attention to itself, which is supposed

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despair as sin in three regards: dialectically, ethically, and religiously. The dialectic concerns the individual’s self-knowledge, as this appears in the light of the knowledge of God (de jure); ethics concerns behavior and the will, as this relates to the self-consciousness; and the religious dimension concerns the experience of sin in relation to the Christian doctrine of the atonement. The first two are presented already in the first part, but return here in the second part too, while the third does not enter with full weight until Part Two. It is anticipated in the section on the excess of possibility, but without explicit reference to Christian dogmatics. The wish to explain the concept of God is called (not without a certain irony) “a priceless anticlimax” – since it subordinates the concept of God to the domain of the intellect. In relation to such an intellectual anticlimax, the definition of despair as sin will appear as a clarifying element, something that almost amounts to a climax. And this is in fact the basic perspective which runs throughout The Sickness unto Death: sin is the goal and measure for human self-knowledge.8 Or, seen in relation to the concept of God: it is the definition of the relationship between knowledge of God and self-knowledge. We are told as early as The Concept of Anxiety why this is so: the knowledge of sin entails a qualitative leap in relation to all other knowledge of the conditio humana. More specifically, this “leap” designates a transition from an autonomous rationality to a rationality where the human person is defined on the basis of his relationship to the other. It is precisely here that the decisive caesura ran in the introductory chapter to the book (A.A), and we find it again in Part Two as the fundamental distinction in all human knowledge. It has become clear in the course of Part One that Anti-Climacus does not reject the human person’s autonomy per se. Rather, his analysis of despair takes its starting point in the autonomous human person; but this autonomy is contrasted with another definition of the humanum, the synthesis of the self as “posited” or established by the other, and this in turn establishes a double structure in the anthropology, viz. between the human person’s self, as this constructs itself in the speculative sense, and the human person’s self as this is defined on the basis of a theological rationality where God is given as the primary origin of thought and every construction of the self thus necessarily becomes de-centered. The double structure outlined here corresponds in many respects to what we find later in the dialectical theology of the 1920’s, perhaps most

8

to bestow infinite interest and significance upon his enterprises, but it is precisely this that makes them imaginary constructions” (SKS 11, 182 / SUD, 68 f.). Cf. Kresten Nordentoft Kierkegaards psykologi, p. 171.

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clearly pronounced in the theology of Karl Barth, who explicitly refers to Kierkegaard. While Barth, however, always holds open the possibility of salvaging himself and his theology into the revelation of the New Testament as the normative text, and allowing the world to get by on its own, Anti-Climacus has in reality abandoned every possibility of retreat. The genuine and hopeless despair which finds expression in The Sickness unto Death is due to the fact that neither of these alternatives can make the other superfluous. The philosophical and psychological self-knowledge is necessary as a critical corrective to theology, since the church and the theologians have neutralized its message; on the other hand, theological dogmatics is necessary as a critical corrective to philosophy, where philosophy consumes the absolute otherness of God and integrates it into the philosophical system. In this context, a dialectical sublation of the antithesis between the self and the other is blasphemy, since it entails reducing the name of “God” to the human ideas that define this concept – thereby making God both de facto and de jure a function of the human person’s imagination and his philosophical logic. Here, Anti-Climacus feels obliged to draw an absolute boundary: The Socratic admission which is entailed by a fundamental ignorance with reference to what and who the god is would at least be intellectually honest, but the speculative Idealism which includes the Spirit of God in the philosophical system is definitively a result of human hubris (i. e. the mother of sins, when sin is considered from a Jewish or Christian perspective). Where Barth finds a solution in revelation, Anti-Climacus thus prefers to renounce the solution, in order thereby to present the problem more tightly. Even revelation itself only brings new problems with regard to self-knowledge. It is here that the concept of offense comes in as a further intensification of the problem. The critical problem with the concept of God, as Anti-Climacus is painfully aware, is that even dogmatics can function as a human construction or (as Feuerbach claims) a projection of human wishes and deficiencies. Anti-Climacus discusses this problem in “Part Two,” in the introduction to section A: “[…] a poet-existence verging on the religious, an existence that has something in common with the despair of resignation, except that the concept of God is present.”9 This is one of the passages in the oeuvre which has rightly been interpreted biographically, with reference to the editor (S. K.).10 Anti9 10

SKS 11, 191 / SUD, 77. Cf. e. g. Joakim Garff SAK, pp. 469-472. – Adorno makes the somewhat weird claim (possibly inspired by a famous caricature of Kierkegaard) that in this section, Kierkegaard is creating a new type of existential mythology with the help of

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Climacus points out here that the religious poet’s problem is that he poetizes instead of existing, which means “[…] relating to the good and the true through the imagination instead of being that – that is, existentially striving to be that.”11 Nevertheless, he relates to God all the time and will not let go of his idea of God; “[…] and yet he actually allows himself – perhaps unconsciously – to poetize God as somewhat different from what God is, a bit more like the fond father who indulges his child’s every wish far too much.”12 In short, the religious poet’s dilemma is due to the fact that he writes about God on the basis of his own idea, “somewhat differently,” instead of relating to God as the radical possibility that transcends the boundaries of the intellect and all conceptions, i. e. the possibility that snatches him out of despair. But the poet’s idea of God is not too severe; rather, it is too mild. Or more correctly, he understands God as far too weak, as if God were not able to establish a different kind of self-relationship. In this way, he keeps God at arm’s length from his own self-understanding. The idea of God remains within the circle of despair: it takes its starting point in despair and stops short at despair. God is not given any space and time to interrupt the self-relationship, to break the circle as the One who is absolutely, and therefore also decisively, other (cf. death’s decision). Anti-Climacus sees interruption as the most important criterion of the relationship between one’s idea of God and one’s idea of the self. Here, the interruption goes under the name of Forargelse, “offense.” If the definition does not contain “the possibility of offense,” it is eo ipso no Christian idea of God: The antithesis sin/faith is the Christian one that Christianly reshapes all ethical concepts and gives them one additional range. At the root of the antithesis lies the crucial Christian qualification: before God, a qualification that in turn has Christianity’s crucial criterion: the absurd, the paradox, the possibility of offense. That this is demonstrated by every definition of what is Christian is extremely important, because offense is Christianity’s weapon against all speculation.13

The possibility of offense is thus connected with the absurd and the paradox. It is the combination of these three that ensures that the concept of God is rescued from Idealism’s methodological attempt to re-

11 12 13

astrological constellations, a mythology centered on his own person: Theodor W. Adorno Kierkegaard: Konstruktion des Äthetischen in Gesammelte Schriften, Lizenzausgabe, vol. 2, Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft 1998, p. 13. SKS 11, 191 / SUD, 77. SKS 11, 192 / SUD, 78. SKS 11, 196 / SUD, 83.

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solve contradictions in a higher unity. Anti-Climacus also points out that the possibility of offense lies in the reality which such a definition of sin bestows on a human person: viz. that each human being is so important that his sin concerns God.14 This is precisely why Anti-Climacus has insisted on the little addition “before God” as a necessary condition for the concept of sin. The reference to the paradox certainly makes his line of thought clearer, but still we may ask what leads Anti-Climacus to believe that the paradox could not be a human construction? Could it not simply be called a somewhat more complicated construction of the human person’s self-relationship, which takes account of the self-contradictions? With such questions, we return to uncertainty – which, for obvious reasons, must be left to the uncertain. If we attempt to argue logically in favor of the paradox, we end up in a performative self-contradiction which is comical, in fact, a topic for infinite comedy. As Climacus claims in the Postscript, the subjective truth (and therefore also the self) appears as a problem only when one maintains that the objective uncertainty is the uncertainty that exists at the edge or literally on “the uttermost point” of existence.15 Anti-Climacus’ double strategy cannot be based either on logical reflection or on the rational proof of Gods existence. It takes its stand upon the juridical judgment, the decision, which makes the self a derived function of the concept and the name of God – indeed, this can be put more strongly: it entails that the reality of the human person is derived from the reality of God. It is precisely in the aporetical experience of despair that each one “concerns” God, i. e. becomes the object of God’s action, or rather: the subject of God’s action. It is God who nails the individual human being fast to his or her concrete self, with all its self-contradictions and deficiencies. It is God who nails reflection to the body, to desire and to weakness, but also to the will, to the soul and to the intellect.16 Anti-Climacus writes polemically against those who, in their desire to defend Christianity, have wanted to remove the absurd – and thereby 14

15 16

“In what, then, lies the possibility of offense here? It lies in this, that a human being should have this reality: that as an individual human being a person is directly before God and consequently, as a corollary, that a person’s sin should be of concern to God. The idea of the individual human being – before God – never enters speculation’s mind. It only universalizes individual human beings fantastically into the race” (SKS 11, 197 / SUD, 83). Cf. SKS 7, 520 / CUP, 572. See above, Chapter Six.

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have removed the possibility of offense.17 It is in the possibility of offense that God hides himself from the understanding, and theology and philosophy must respect this hiding place, if they are not to hand over the concept of God and the self to stupidity: “Therefore, it is certain and true that the first one to come up with the idea of defending Christianity in Christendom is de facto a Judas No. 2; he, too, betrays with a kiss, except that his treason is the treason of stupidity.”18 One need neither defend nor explain God’s hiddenness. On the contrary, to understand what one cannot understand, and that one cannot understand it, is the first step in the direction of an appropriate knowledge of God. This is why it is so important for Anti-Climacus, as an up-building author, to tear down: to tear down every attempt at offering a logical defense of God or a speculative explanation of the relationship between God and the human person, as if the goal was to remove the total difference between them.

§ 44 Derrida: I Call Myself God Derrida has discussed this problem in a somewhat different context, viz. the question of the gift: how far is it possible to give one’s gift without expecting to receive something in return, certain only that the Father who sees in secret will reward one (Matt 6:1-4)? Derrida points out that the logic in Matthew is problematic. He agrees that the giver should keep the gift hidden, in order to avoid being repaid in kind, but he claims that the promise of the Father’s reward introduces a barter economy. Derrida wants to avoid the idolatry that makes God a function of human beings’ need of reward: In order to eschew idolatrous or iconoclastic simplisms, that is, visible images and ready-made representations, it might be necessary to understand this sentence (“and thy Father which seeth in secret … shall reward thee”) as something other than a proposition concerning God, this subject entity, or X who on the one hand would already exist, and who, on the other hand, what is more, would be endowed with attributes such as paternity and the power to penetrate secrets, to see the invisible, to see in me better than I, to be more powerful and intimate with me than myself.19 17

18 19

Cf. the following example: “To defend something is always to disparage it. Suppose that someone has a warehouse full of gold, and suppose he is willing to give every ducat to the poor – but in addition, suppose he is stupid enough to begin this charitable enterprise of his with a defense in which he justifies it on three grounds: people will almost come to doubt that he is doing any good. As for Christianity! Well, he who defends it has never believed it” (SKS 11, 200 / SUD, 87). SKS 11, 200 / SUD, 87. Derrida Gift of Death, p. 108.

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It may seem as if Derrida regards every representation linked to God and God’s name as idolatrous – in keeping with a strong Jewish tradition – and that he suggests an alternative definition of God in order to save God’s name against the idolaters: “God is the name of the possibility I have of keeping a secret (la possibilité pour moi de garder un secret) that is visible from the interior but not from the exterior.”20 This definition is not wholly unlike the definition we find in the first part of The Sickness unto Death, where we read that God is “that everything is possible,” or “that everything is possible, is God” – although AntiClimacus sees the latter affirmation as based on “[…] the thought – which is earnestness – that God pays attention to one; instead, the self in despair is satisfied with paying attention to itself […].” 21 What Derrida dissociates, is by Kierkegaard closely connected. Nevertheless, the focus lies on God as possibility, a possibility that shatters one’s ideas about the self, ideas which link the self to the limitations of the intellect, to the necessity of thought and of expectations. In both Kierkegaard and Derrida, the sign “God” refers to a condition of possibility that opens the space, opens the self as the space of possibility, as a self that is called by God. But does not the openness in such a definition empty it of all substance, of all resistance to the arbitrary imagination which projects the concept of God on the basis of one’s own wishes and needs? This is precisely the possibility that Kierkegaard sketches at the beginning of the second part, and his conclusion is that such a God is a weak God, without the power to bind the individual fast to his or her given self or to break the circle of despair and open the individual for a radically different possibility. If the other is defined by the human person himself and in reality is made a function of self-reflection, this abolishes that alterity which was meant to make possible a different kind of self-understanding – and we are back in the self as the expression of the circular definition of self-reference. If we follow Derrida one step further, however, it becomes clearer that this even applies to his concept of God, which he first introduces, and then insists upon: Once such a structure of conscience exists, of being-with-oneself, of speaking, that is, of producing invisible sense, once I have within me, thanks to the invisible word as such, a witness that others cannot see, and who is therefore at the same time other than me and more intimate with me than myself, once I can have a secret relationship with myself and not tell everything, once there is secrecy and secret witnessing within me, then what I call God exists, (there is) what I call God in me, (it happens that) I call my20 21

Derrida Gift of Death, p. 108. SKS 11, 182 / SUD, 68 f.

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self God [(il y a que) je m’appelle Dieu] – a phrase that is difficult to distinguish from “God calls me” [“Dieu m’appelle”], for it is on that condition that I can call myself or that I am called in secret. God is in me, he is the absolute “me” or “self,” he is that structure of invisible interiority that is called, in Kierkegaard’s sense, subjectivity. 22

Before I return to this last claim about subjectivity in Kierkegaard’s sense, let us be clear about what Derrida wants to express by means of this definition of God which he himself calls heretical (though “both evangelical and heretical”) but which is introduced with the best intentions, since it helps to rescue the name of God from false images and a rationalistic or nihilistic critique.23 The description of the conscience (con-scientia, “knowing with”) as a place where I experience an otherness which is different from myself, from my immediate self-identity, and at the same time experience that this other knows me more deeply than I myself do, corresponds to an original, intuitive experience of God, whether this is defined within the Jewish, the Christian, or the Islamic tradition. As such it can even count as a condition of possibility for experiencing God. A subjective certainty of this kind can also be read in direct continuity with the description in the Postscript of the subjective truth, which precisely presupposes an objective uncertainty. Language, “the invisible word,” thus becomes decisive for establishing an experience of this other – as other, as something other than the self. But is it possible to define the concept of God on the exclusive basis of the experience of that which is secret as secret, as mysterium tremendum? Is it possible, on the basis of this experience, to localize what one “calls” God within one’s own self and have the nerve to call oneself God? And what about the claims that God is “in me,” that he is the absolute “me” or “self”? Language speaks for itself. On the one hand, it quite simply expresses a reduction of the concept of God to self-consciousness, i. e. to the hidden and secret “surplus” in the self’s relationship to itself, which it can neither define nor determine. Such a definition is useless, not because it is necessarily erroneous in the light of subjective experience, but because it is undifferentiated and virtually devoid of significance. If one is unable to differentiate between oneself and God – and 22 23

Derrida Gift of Death, pp. 108 f. This definition is strikingly similar to Schleiermacher’s discourses Über die Religion (1799), in which he writes polemically against Kant’s project of Enlightenment and defines the essence of religion, not as thinking and acting, but as Anschauung und Gefühl: Friedrich Schleiermacher Über die Religion, ed. by Günther Meckenstock, Berlin / New York: Walter de Gruyter 2001, p. 79. He also defines religion as “an absolute feeling of dependency” and “perception and taste for the infinite.”

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not even tries to look for criteria for making such a distinction (which one might of course look for in scripture or other exterior sources concerned with these matters) – it is no longer “God” to whom one refers, or anything which might deserve this designation. It is simply an expression out of good old hubris in a more sublime manner. The affirmation abolishes every essential distinction between God and the human self. It is a self which relates to itself, posits itself and has included the other in the definition of the self as self-consciousness. Paradoxically, the lack of difference and distinction becomes a problem that ultimately catches up with Derrida himself. On the other hand, this affirmation also concerns language itself, for Derrida’s definition also contains a theological justification of the philosophy of language. In the light of Matthew’s text about God who sees in secret, it becomes possible to maintain God’s otherness as the condition for every designation, including the designation of “me” as “me,” of the self as self, viz. “[…] it is on that condition that I can call myself or that I am called in secret.” This makes the relationship to God an integral presupposition, not only of the relationship to the other, but also of the relationship to oneself, through the designation of the other as other and of oneself as oneself. This prevents a purely instrumental understanding of language, and gives it an original ethical and religious meaning which is determined by the relationship to the other. Seen from this other perspective, Derrida expresses exactly the same insight as Anti-Climacus in chapter A.A, though, of course, differently. In the case of Derrida’s definition, we must probably distinguish between those types of definition of God which he criticizes and the definition of which he makes himself the spokesman. The definitions which he rejects include both the onto-theology which wishes to define God’s attributes metaphysically and the Enlightenment philosophy which has a more mechanical view of God as the transcendent first cause. But we also find a clear polemic against Nietzsche’s nihilism and his attack on Christianity.24 Of these three, the polemic against Nietzsche is the most surprising, since Nietzsche played a central role in Derrida’s own philosophical project. It is not hard to agree with these three critical observations. The distance vis-à-vis onto-theology follows in the footsteps of Heidegger and concerns the primary aims of deconstruction. In a subtle manner, Derrida even turns Heidegger against Heidegger and reintroduces theology within philosophy, as a destabilization of the new philosoph24

Cf. Derrida Gift of Death, pp. 114 f.

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ical ontology which Heidegger establishes in Sein und Zeit; but the localization of God’s existence in the individual’s self-consciousness is equally problematic, for theological and philosophical reflection – and for the distinction between these two. What concept of God does Derrida seek to define in this context? Is it the God of the philosophers, the God of the Jews, or more generally the God of scripture or writing (écriture)? Is it the Christian God? It appears in fact to be a certain late modern repetition of the Christian concept of God, since he refers primarily to Christian philosophy (Kierkegaard) and a Christian critique of religion (Nietzsche), and even claims that there is an immanent Christianity in Heidegger and a Jewish-Christian discourse being continued in the works of Levinas and Pato¿ka. It is precisely a Christian understanding of God, however, even a late modern Christian understanding of God, that makes it impossible to localize God’s transcendence exclusively in the interior dimension, as an abstract possibility. Even though I do agree that it has become more difficult in a late modern situation to repeat or defend an argument for God’s existence, I cannot understand why the alternative should be exclusively reserved to the interior, to the “secrets of the self.” I find such a circumscription of philosophical and religious piety far too pietistic, in fact, far too traditional, and it suits all too well the modern view on religion as a strictly private matter. These days, however, after the turn of the millennium, it rather becomes obvious that religion is inscribed onto the exterior, concerns political and ethical issues, concerns the body of a single individual and the body of a community, concerns even the birds, the lilies, the trees, and the air we are breathing, the water we are drinking. The entire exteriority is affected by the question of God, politically, ethically, aesthetically, and philosophically. Therefore, when faced with the question of God as restricted to the interior, to the secrets of the self, a repetition in the exterior has become overdue. And such a repetition ought to consider the authority for drawing such a limit between the exterior and the interior, since the limit as such affects the question of transcendence.25 The strength of Derrida’s philosophy lies in the detailed exposition of religious texts, often in the form of a “deconstruction.” Here, ignorance in the Socratic sense is emphasized – both within the text and in the self-relationship – as the condition of all knowledge. But when he 25

Cf. Derrida’s deconstruction of Kant’s border between religion inside and outside the limits of reason alone: Derrida “Faith and Knowledge,” pp. 27-29.

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attempts to make an autonomous definition of what “God” is, the result is a weak, subjective, and abstract notion of God – indeed, so weak that it almost becomes philosophically and theologically irrelevant. Let us therefore return to the question of how Derrida’s concept of God relates to Kierkegaard, to whom Derrida explicitly refers as the guarantor of his own localization of “God” in the self: “God is in me, he is the absolute ‘me’ or ‘self,’ he is that structure of invisible interiority that is called, in Kierkegaard’s sense, subjectivity.”26 There are two problems connected with this affirmation, one which associates Derrida with Kierkegaard and another which dissociates the two philosophers. The former concerns the lack of exteriority, which also becomes more and more problematic throughout Kierkegaard’s authorship. During his last year, it even becomes disastrous, when he takes up the big fight against the church in the Moment (Øieblikket). At the moment when he confronts the exterior world on a political level, it becomes obvious that Kierkegaard himself lacks a differentiated reflection on how God affects the relationship between the interior and the exterior. Some of his observations and arguments are certainly striking, but the whole attack ends up in a destructive collision. Let us therefore rather consider the latter problem, which dissociates Kierkegaard from Derrida: Kierkegaard’s sense is in the description of God as the absolute “me” or “self” almost distorted into non-sense.27 It is true that Kierkegaard makes one of the most famous claims about subjectivity in the history of philosophy, viz. that subjectivity is the truth. He does, however, also write in a number of books against God as the absolute “me,” perhaps most clearly of all in The Sickness unto Death. The problem lies in the supposed identity (“God is”), in the leveling of the distinction between the subjectivity and God. Derrida himself appears to regard this as provocative or heretical, but I regard it as virtually meaningless, as non-sense. Still, I do find the supposition that God is a “structure of invisible interiority” called subjectivity rather more interesting. Obviously, Derrida makes a deliberate link here to Climacus’ discussion in the 26 27

Derrida Gift of Death, pp. 108 f. Climacus’ argument in the Postscript against nonsense – and therefore for the distinction between the absurd in which he can believe and the nonsense in which he cannot believe – runs as follows: “Therefore he cannot believe nonsense against the understanding, which one might fear, because the understanding will penetratingly perceive that it is nonsense and hinder him in believing it, but he uses understanding so much that through it he becomes aware of the incomprehensible, and now, believing, he relates himself to it against the understanding,” (SKS 7, 516 / CUP, 568).

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Postscript of whether subjectivity is the truth.28 Like Derrida, Climacus writes polemically against an objectification of the concept of God, but he also problematizes his own affirmation by claiming that subjectivity is untruth – and that it is with untruth that the dialectic of subjectivity begins.29 The Sickness unto Death continues along this track and problematizes every affirmation which suggests that the subject or the self “is” or could be identified with the divine, that the spirit of human self merges with the Holy Spirit, etc. Even if the Apostle defines the Holy Spirit as such a breath of prayer in the human spirit or self, the distinction ought to be emphasized in order to avoid the complete confusion. Anti-Climacus does in fact accept that there is no alternative to a subjective search for truth, a search which is subjective in the sense that the self is at stake; but nevertheless, he claims both in Part One and in Part Two that such a self-knowledge (“self” in its weak or suffering form) will never come further than despair. With God as a “structure of invisible interiority,” the concept of God may be reduced to a function of the self. This makes Derrida’s concept of God too weak to be able to open up the self to the other qua other – in the philosophical, religious, and ethical sense. His concept of God exhausts its meaning in the interpretation of writing as writing, 30 as a secret inscribed upon writing and the self-relationship (il y a là du secret). If the concept of God is simply defined as such a secret or “that structure of invisible interiority that is called, in Kierkegaard’s sense, subjectivity,” the interruption of the discourse by the concept of God most probably will get lost, or else is absorbed by the individual’s tendency to trace every 28 29

30

Cf. SKS 7, 182-188 / CUP, 199-206. “So, then, subjectivity, inwardness, is truth. Is there a more inward expression for it? Yes, if the discussion about ‘Subjectivity, inwardness is truth’ begins in this way: ‘Subjectivity is untruth.’ […] Viewed Socratically, subjectivity is untruth if it refuses to comprehend that subjectivity is truth but wants, for example, to be objective. Here, on the other hand, in wanting to begin to become truth by becoming subjective, subjectivity is in the predicament of being untruth. Thus the work goes backward, that is, backward in inwardness. The way is so far from being in the direction of the objective that the beginning only lies even deeper in subjectivity” (SKS 7, 189 f. / CUP, 207). Cf. the following claim: “Kenosis of discourse. If a phenomenological type of rule is followed for distinguishing between a full intuition and an empty or symbolic intending (visée) forgetful of the originary perception supporting it, then the apophatic statements are, must be on the side of the empty and the mechanical, indeed purely verbal, repetition of phrases, without actual or full intentional meaning” (Jacques Derrida On the Name, p. 50). Understood in this way, the affirmation that God is a structure of invisible interiority remains meaningless and mechanical.

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explanation back to the self. The concept of sin therefore becomes the discrimen which Derrida would need (but completely lacks, despite his continuous dialogue with Augustine) in order to avoid domesticating the concept of God within the phenomenological discourse. Hence, we return to The Sickness unto Death and to Anti-Climacus’ nailing of the self to the will, to soul and body, to self-reflection, and to God as the qualitatively different origin of self-reflection. In Part Two, he discusses the criteria of self-knowledge anew, this time with two clear alternatives: the Socratic definition of sin as ignorance versus the Christian definition of sin as despair, and in its most explicit form, as offense. The point, however, is not to emphasize the one at the expense of the other, but to see them in a critical reciprocal relationship.

§ 45 Sin, Aporia, and Revelation in The Sickness unto Death Anti-Climacus elaborates in The Sickness unto Death some criteria for a Christian epistemology in the sense of self-knowledge and knowledge of God – woven together in the aporetic X in the foundations of the self. It is precisely in order to clarify these criteria that he refers to the Socratic definition of sin: “Sin is ignorance.”31 Socratic ignorance can however be understood in a variety of ways, as the author points out. Intellectually speaking, ignorance is an aporetic test of all one thinks one knows – with reference to the question whether one also knows oneself in the light of what one knows. Ethically speaking, the aporia is the same, but it takes a different twist:32 The test of whether one has come to know the good is whether one also does it. 33 In other words, the good is not known as the good before it is translated into action. It follows that sin in the ethical sense means that one fails to do the good – a form of practical ignorance. 31

32 33

“Sin is ignorance. This, as is well known, is the Socratic definition, which, like everything Socratic, is an authority meriting attention. But with regard to this point, as with so much that is Socratic, men have come to feel an urge to go further” (SKS 11, 201 / SUD 87 f.). Cf. SKS 11, 202 / SUD 89. “The intellectuality of the Greeks was too happy, too naïve, too aesthetic, too ironic, too witty – too sinful – to grasp that anyone could knowingly not do the good, or knowingly, knowing what is right, do wrong. The Greek mind posits an intellectual categorical imperative” (SKS 11, 203 / SUD 90).

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Socrates has a double function in Anti-Climacus’ definition of the Christian concept of sin. First, his understanding of ignorance emphasizes a distinction between understanding and understanding, which I have discussed above with reference to the other side of truth:34 “Does this mean, then, that to understand and to understand are two different things? They certainly are, and the person who has understood this – but, please note, not in the sense of the first kind of understanding – is eo ipso initiated into all the secrets of irony. This is the contradiction with which irony is concerned.”35 The point is that one does not necessarily know what the good is, and still less what sin or God is, even if one has arrived at an intellectual knowledge of a concept of the good, of sin, or of God. If this concept has no ethical and existential significance, it is vacuous, a misunderstanding. Socrates, not least thanks to his skill in putting questions and to his ironic distance, represents an “ironical-ethical correction” which Anti-Climacus believes his own age needs – indeed, “[…] this may actually be the only thing it needs – for obviously it is the last thing it thinks of.”36 As a corrective, the Socratic ignorance thus takes its place in Anti-Climacus’ own critical account of the concept of sin. Socrates’ second function in this text is as a counterfoil to the Christian understanding of sin. In the author’s view, the will is lacking in the definition of sin as ignorance. He claims that the will constitutes the “qualitative difference” between the Socratic and the Christian definition of sin. 37 As Paul affirms in Romans 7, it is perfectly possible to will the good, without doing it.38 This is the presupposition for the Jewish-Christian understanding of guilt and hence of subjectivity, guilt towards other persons and guilt before God. Anti-Climacus has insisted all along on a qualitative difference, from the opening chapter’s definition of despair and onwards through the dialectical development which followed it. This is why it is important for him to demonstrate that the understanding of the human person in the Idealistic philosophy and theology is Socratic in its definition of sin 34 35 36 37

38

Cf. Chapter Three, § 20. SKS 11, 203 / cf. SUD 90. SKS 11, 205 / SUD 92. “The qualitative distinction between paganism and Christianity is not, as a superficial consideration assumes, the doctrine of the Atonement. No, the beginning must start far deeper, with sin, with the doctrine of sin – as Christianity in fact does. What a dangerous objection it would be against Christianity if paganism had a definition of sin that Christianity would have to acknowledge as correct” (SKS 11, 202 f. / SUD 89 f.). Cf. Rom 7:14-25.

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as ignorance – although it does not itself pay heed to the Socratic distinction between understanding and understanding: “In pure ideality, where the actual individual person is not involved, the transition is necessary (after all, in the system everything takes the place of necessity), or there is no difficulty at all connected with the transition from understanding to doing.”39 The central term is here: transition. It is the transition from knowing to acting, which is problematized on the basis of the Christian understanding of sin since Augustine, but before that all the way back to its Jewish origin. It depends on this very early distinction between self and other, which defines the self as dependent on the other through guilt. According to Anti-Climacus, the transition from understanding to doing is always dependent on the individual’s will – i. e., not on a so-called free will (liberum arbitrium), a free choice, or the like, but on the will.40 The will thus occupies a position between knowing and acting. The consent of the will becomes the precondition for the transition from possibility to actuality – since this does not happen by a logical necessity. Anti-Climacus refuses to deal with the problem of sin as a purely epistemological problem, as a question about understanding. As Hans Jonas points out, this is not simply a theological point which is dependent on a Christian understanding of God.41 Paul’s argument has also a more general philosophical validity and defines a new turning point in the history of responsibility, where the will becomes more decisive for the understanding of the self than vice versa. Jonas puts this as follows: The “will” is a priori always there, underlying all single acts of the soul, making it possible for things like “willing” as well as its opposite – lack or renunciation of will – to occur as special mental phenomena. It precedes any explicit resolve, any particular de-

39 40

41

SKS 11, 206 / SUD, 93. “When sin is posited in the particular individual by the qualitative leap, the difference between good and evil is also posited. We have nowhere been guilty of the foolishness that holds that man must sin; on the contrary, we have always protested against every merely experimental knowledge, and we have said – and now repeat – that sin presupposes itself, just as freedom presupposes itself, and sin cannot be explained by anything antecedent to it, anymore than can freedom. To maintain that freedom begin as liberum arbitrium (which is found nowhere, cf. Leibniz) that can choose good just as well as evil inevitably makes every explanation impossible” (SKS 4, 414 / cf. CA, 112). For a more detailed discussion of this problem, cf. Marius G. Mjaaland Om fri vilje, Oslo: University of Oslo 1999, pp. 84-114. Hans Jonas “The Abyss of the Will: Philosophical Meditation on the Seventh Chapter of Paul’s Epistle to the Romans” in Philosophical Essays. From Ancient Creed to Technological Man, Chicago: Chicago University Press 1974, pp. 335-348.

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cision, although it is in itself, in its essential nature, nothing but continuously decision about itself – that permanent self-determination from which the subject cannot withdraw into the alibi of any neutral, indifferent, “will-free” state: for the primal decision of will is itself the condition of any such state, be it indifference or its opposite.42

Anti-Climacus too argues that the will marks the very distinction between will and knowledge just as fundamentally and just as originally as knowledge does. Just as the will is always dependent on knowledge, so knowledge too is always dependent on the will. In other words, the will is decisive not only for a decision, but also for what Derrida will call a dissension between true knowledge and good will.43 The distinction between Anti-Climacus’ anthropology and both the Greek and the Idealistic anthropologies is that the will constitutes the decisive problem – and that the problem (viz. doubt, despair, and offense) thus becomes visible in the decision or hides itself when no decision is taken. Nevertheless, the will can never be detached from the epistemological problem; the problem of the will and of knowledge is always entangled in an interplay which the despairing self cannot completely grasp.44 According to Anti-Climacus, a living human being has no possibility of relating to himself and understanding himself independently of this dialectic of obscured knowledge and of a will that lets one down, or is defiant, or keeps on postponing a decision. This is why anyone who seeks to know himself is obliged to assume that knowledge is obscured, that the will lets one down or is defiant, with every attempt one makes to escape from this entanglement: No man of himself and by himself can declare what sin is, precisely because he is in sin; all his talk about sin is basically a glossing over of sin, an excuse, a sinful watering down. That is why Christianity begins in another way: man has to learn what sin is by 42 43 44

Hans Jonas “The Abyss of the Will,” p. 339. Cf. Chapter Two, § 9 above, and Jacques Derrida L’écriture et la différence, p. 62. In this context, the author describes a conflict (“a very long-winded story”) between the will and knowledge, where the good is in fact known, but “the lower nature” in the human person is not particularly interested in this knowledge. This leads to a conflict of the will. But instead of choosing between alternatives, the will “[…] allows some time to elapse, an interim called: ‘We shall look at it tomorrow.’ During all this, knowing becomes more and more obscure, and the lower nature gains the upper hand more and more; […] Gradually, willing’s objection to this development lessens; it almost appears to be in collusion. And when knowing has become duly obscured, knowing and willing can better understand each other; eventually they agree completely, for now knowing has come over to the side of willing and admits that what it wants is absolutely right” (SKS 11, 206 f. / SUD, 94). This description is not without humor, but nevertheless illustrates the earnestness in the despairing self-knowledge which Paul formulates as follows: “I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do” (Rom 7:19).

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a revelation from God; sin is not a matter of a person’s not having understood what is right but of his being unwilling to understand it, of his not willing what is right.45

The fundamental discussion about why the human person is entangled in such a self-understanding leads back to the Augustinian understanding of original sin. Anti-Climacus does not take up this discussion here, but he presupposes it – in the sense that sin presupposes itself “[…] and which is explained in Christianity in the dogma of hereditary sin, the border of which this discussion will merely approach.”46 The dogma of original sin is discussed in detail in The Concept of Anxiety, and Anti-Climacus appears to presuppose this discussion here.47 If one attempts to explain original sin genealogically, by explaining why Adam sins, one ultimately encounters a boundary where original sin presupposes itself: “Therefore dogmatics must not explain hereditary sin but rather explain it by presupposing it, like that vortex about which Greek speculation concerning nature had so much to say – a moving something that no science can grasp.”48 As I mentioned above, Vigilius seems to be referring here to the Platonic ÕÜÏ¿ (cf. Plato’s Timaeus), which is described as a moving “vortex” which spatializes, and which no science – neither rhetoric nor dialectic nor ontology – can conceptualize or describe clearly.49 Vigilius locates the origin of original sin in a ÕÜÏ¿ of this kind, which in turn is the moving force in human sin. Is then the dialectic of sin woven into the original differentiation of the human person, in a spacing (espacement) which the human person himself cannot comprehend, but is obliged to presuppose, if he is to relate to it? Both The Concept of Anxiety and The Sickness unto Death seem quite simply to presuppose such a “vortex” when the human person begins to reflect on himself and on his history, his historicity. Sin is presupposed as something inexplicable, and this means that a person who wishes to take his place in the history of responsibility must begin with a recognition of the distinction as inexplicable, the original distinction between self and other, between good and evil, a distinction which through the myth is transferred from generation to generation, and precisely in its inexplicability makes visible the ambiguous beginning of responsibility in guilt. Therefore, concerning 45 46 47 48 49

SKS 11, 208 / SUD, 95. SKS 11, 202 / SUD, 89 Cf. SKS 4, 332-341 / CA, 25-35. SKS 4, 327 / CA, 20. Cf. Plato Timaeus, 48e-52a.

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the origin of thinking, Vigilius holds that it is good for the human person to reflect on the myth of the origin rather than to create his own myth by imagining that he can explain his own beginning. 50 He believes that the inner dialectic of the myth between ignorance, breach, and knowledge is the reflection over sin and evil which opens the door to the most appropriate understanding of the genealogy of the self. 51 Knowledge stops short at the distinction, at an original heterogeneity, a primal distinction. According to the dogmatic exposition of the fall (peccatum originale), this is inscribed upon the human person’s selfunderstanding as an original presupposition, a heterogeneous origin also of reflection on the human person, an original writing (scriptum originale) in the self. Anti-Climacus holds fast to a doubleness of this kind in relation to the sickness unto death, where the origin of the sickness is traced back to the human person’s will, but that which prevents a possible healing is the fact that the sickness also sits in the person’s knowing (i. e., his “eye”). And as we read in the Sermon on the Mount, if the eye is sick, the whole body becomes dark.52 Hence, the human person needs another light, another perspective on himself, in order to discover and know what sin is: But can any human being comprehend this Christian teaching? By no means, for it is indeed Christianity and therefore involves offense. It must be believed. To comprehend is the range of man’s relation to the human, but to believe is man’s relation to the divine. How then does Christianity explain this incomprehensibility? Very consistently, in a way just as incomprehensible; by revealing it. 53

The description of the relationship between Socrates and Christ, between aporia and revelation, which I have sketched here points in the direction of a supplementary logic. The logic of revelation presupposes the aporia and the Socratic ignorance, but takes care at the same time 50 51

52

53

Cf. SKS 4, 338 f. / CA, 33 f. Cf. in this regard Derrida’s reflection on the origin of responsibility and of history, further developing a theory of Jan Pato¿ka: “The genesis of responsibility that Pato¿ka proposes will not simply describe a history of religion or religiousness. It will be combined with a genealogy of the subject who says ‘myself,’ the subject’s relation to itself as an instance of liberty, singularity, and responsibility, the relation to self as being before the other: the other in its relation to infinite alterity, one who regards without being seen but also whose infinite goodness gives in an experience that amounts to a gift of death (donner la mort)” (Derrida The Gift of Death, p. 3). “The eye is the lamp of the body. So, if your eye is sound, your whole body will be full of light; but if your eye is not sound, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light in you is darkness, how great is the darkness!” (Matt 6:22-23). SKS 11, 207 / SUD, 95.

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to mark a boundary between philosophical reflection on the human person and the Christian ÉÚÁÍÐ. The paradox authoritatively imposes a distinction connected to the will and throws the explanation of the self-relationship back upon the explainer. The self is continuously in a dialectical movement, making new drafts of self-knowledge, and discovering more “secrets of the self.” The paradox, however, is located outside the self and gives access to a different understanding of the self. This otherness makes a caesura in the construction of God which is based on the self and constructed as a secret of the self. The knowledge of sin, the insight into the evidence of guilt and dependence, comes about when the inner movement is compelled to stop short, where it collides with an interrupting halt (Standsning). On the one hand, then, we have here an intensification of God’s alterity: God eludes every attempt at explanation. But on the other hand, a secret about what it means to be a human being is revealed. It is however necessary to underline that the problem of despair is not simply resolved through such an insight, as Anti-Climacus comments on in his own age: one is in such a hurry to find a solution that one leaps over the entire problem. One goes directly to reconciliation, understood as Aufhebung, but all one does is to push the problem aside. Sin becomes an intellectual problem which can be quickly solved, with the result that no one reflects further on the existential depth of the problem. Hence, the Christian logos is emptied of meaning. The fundamental connection between folly (i. e. “insanity”) and wisdom about which Paul writes in 1 Corinthians54 is simplified in a banal manner: The trouble is not that Christianity is not voiced […] but that it is voiced in such a way that the majority eventually think it utterly inconsequential […]. Thus the highest and the holiest things make no impact whatsoever, but they are given sound and are listened to as something that now, God knows why, has become routine and habit like so much else. So what wonder is that they, instead of finding their own personal conduct indefensible, find it necessary to defend Christianity. 55

Instead of relating to the inexplicable as inexplicable, as a “mad” possibility precisely where everything seems impossible, people have be54

55

“Where is the wise man? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe. For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ is the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men” (1 Cor 1:20-25). SKS 11, 214 / SUD, 102 f.

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gun to explain it and to offer “three reasons.” And where the speculative theology has set the trend, people have gone so far as to seek to comprehend the inexplicable: “This is precisely why Christendom (this is the proof of it) is so far from being what it calls itself that the lives of most men, Christianly understood, are far too spiritless to be called sin in the strictly Christian sense.”56 Where offense and skandalon are confused with explanation and self-evidence, where the paradox is confused with concept and Aufhebung, Anti-Climacus’ notion of the hidden God takes a new and disturbing twist: he claims that when the paradox is expounded as the self-evident, the possibility of offense disappears. And this means that there is no occasion for any interruption of the self-relationship any longer. This makes it necessary to defend Christianity – and this in turn is a parody. Hence, the self-sufficient relation to oneself is not broken up from within, and despair holds the human person fast in his or her own rationality. There is no longer any space for a relationship to the other qua other. Neither absolute power nor an unconditional powerlessness, as forgiveness or as gift, is ascribed to God. God is subordinated to a human measurement and a rational, i. e. foreseeable economy of self and other. This however is fateful for the one who despairs: if revelation becomes explanation and paradox becomes parody, God remains hidden behind the contradiction and the aporia – and all talk of God becomes both de facto and de jure cut off from that excess of possibility which goes under the name of “grace.”

§ 46 Derrida vs. Kierkegaard on Sovereignty and Unconditional Gift In a book called Derrida and Religion, which was published the year after his death, Yvonne Sherwood, John Caputo, and Kevin Hart are discussing the concept of God with Derrida. One of the problems under discussion is the relationship between power, sovereignty, and powerlessness in God. 57 Derrida sees a deconstruction of the concept of God as entailing the dissociation of powerlessness from omnipotence, and of the unconditional from God’s sovereignty. Omnipotence and sovereignty are linked to the classical concept of God, but it is precisely such an unmovable and (in the classical sense) metaphysical 56 57

SKS 11, 216 / SUD, 104. Cf. Yvonne Sherwood and Kevin Hart (eds.) Derrida and Religion, p. 41.

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(or “onto-theological”) concept of God that Derrida wants to leave behind: If I think of God on the side of grace, forgiveness, hospitality, unconditional law, then in order not to have to agree with what I call the onto-theological tradition of sovereignty, one has to dissociate God’s sovereignty from God, from the very idea of God. We would have God without sovereignty, God without omnipotence. If one thinks of this possibility of the name of God being dissociated from absolute power, then this would be a strategic and political lever to think of unconditionality without sovereignty, and to deconstruct the political concept of sovereignty today, which I would argue is a heritage of onto-theology. 58

As both Hart and Caputo point out, this is however not a new thought in western philosophy and theology. It is in fact a problem that has followed Christianity from the very beginning. Reflection on God’s incarnation, on Jesus as God’s Son, indeed as God himself, entails a breach with God’s absolute power and immobility, since God becomes vulnerable and suffering. God suffers death in powerlessness and degradation. In the paradox of the incarnation, God’s love appears as an unconditional gift without power, as subjection and degradation without sovereignty. Hence, the difference between the Christian logos and Derrida’s political theology is not that God is omnipotent and sovereign in the one case, grace and forgiveness in the other. In the Christian notion of God there is a tension between absolute power and suffering, between sovereignty and hospitality, between unconditional law and unconditional gift, but these are held together as an antithesis in God, in a Trinitarian concept of God, or more precisely in a triune mystery of God. Derrida responds that neither does he think of powerlessness independently of power, since that would once again make the concept of God rather impotent, maybe even irrelevant for the economy of politics (which in fact is also the problem with his definition of God as the absolute “me” or “self,” according to my critique). Faced with Kevin Hart’s objection, he claims that the point is to inscribe this powerlessness upon a tradition in which omnipotence is the most prominent characteristic of God, not least in the philosophical tradition which Derrida calls “onto-theological.” He does so (as is his wont) by emphasizing the distinction and then destabilizing the relationship between absolute power and powerlessness. The idea of God as absolute power would then correlate with the notions of a creator (ex nihilo) and a sovereign king and ruler, the Lord of the living and the dead. This is, 58

Cf. Yvonne Sherwood and Kevin Hart (eds.) Derrida and Religion, p. 42.

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so to speak, the arkhê in the Christian tradition and the character (or caricature) of a theistic, onto-theological conception of God. The alternative, which Derrida establishes as a supplementary conception of God, is defined as a total powerlessness in God, a passivity and receptivity which are absolutely heterogeneous in relation to God’s power and sovereignty. He sees a passivity and powerlessness of this kind as the necessary presuppositions, if God shall have the receptivity to be affected by an event. And precisely such an event, where the unconditional appears as an unconditional gift detached from sovereignty, forms the other starting point for thinking God. Derrida holds the one-sidedness in the deconstructive strategy to be necessary, so that by virtue of the distinction one will be able to deconstruct the opposite one-sidedness, where unconditional power is always presupposed antecedent to powerlessness. In this way, the passivity is thought of as the very origin of power and powerlessness, and the unconditional gift is thought of as the origin of the heterogeneity between sovereignty and the unconditional goodness in God. Thereupon, the unconditional (and therefore impossible) gift becomes the initial point, i. e. the initial rupture, for thinking that possibility which goes by the name of “God” and interrupts the human economy of reciprocity and retaliation. The gift is in Derrida connected to death as the gift of death, the unconditional goodness which makes it impossible to give in return; “[…]the gift of death that puts me into relation with the transcendence of the other, with God as selfless goodness, and that gives me what it gives me through a new experience of death.”59 This qualification of the gift as a gift of death implies that the notion of God is connected primarily to a khôra-structure, destabilizing the arkhê of absolute power and this rupture in the discourse corresponds with an ethics of forgiveness and a politics of hospitality. It is this kind of one-sidedness that establishes deconstruction as economy of writing, as a supplement to theology, enabling a change in the very practice of theological discourse, but without qualifying deconstruction as a theological discipline. It is precisely thanks to such a double structure that his philosophy puts religion and theology in a new perspective, facilitating a renewed discussion of the relationship between power and powerlessness in a theological, religious, and political sense. The question is, however, if Derrida is not oversimplifying the problem. His idea of God’s power seems to be depicted in a 59

Derrida Gift of Death, p. 6.

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rather uniform manner, as reflected in the absolute authority of the sovereign (cf. Carl Schmitt).60 The so-called onto-theological tradition he refers to is not that simple, though, especially not when it comes to the reflection on God. In Kierkegaard, who in this case resembles Luther, the hidden God is explicitly a powerful God, but still not corresponding to the theistic idea of the sovereign. Neither is the notion of God identical with the unconditional goodness of the gift. At the transition from Part One to Part Two we might follow Anti-Climacus when he describes the single individual who suffers under his relationship to God, the hidden God whom he relates to without recognizing it. His despairing relation to God holds him fast in an abyss of sickness unto death (i. e. the eternal in his relationship to himself), where he cannot see any hope or possibility of relief and therefore remains in the closed circle of necessity. Kierkegaard’s main concern is not to deconstruct theology, but to deconstruct the Idealistic philosophy, focusing on the self’s dependence, unease, and despair. Despair is the “wound” in the self where the human person relates to God, even if he does not know God and the relationship therefore is unconscious; it is the place where the human person suffers his relationship to God. Still, God’s power becomes evident in his sovereignty, as the one who posits the self’s relationship to itself – de jure. The human person’s self must collide with this claim: that is the interruption which may tear it apart and let it break down from within. Without the possibility of such an interruption, such a break-down, the suffering and willing “self-consumption” of despair is an experience which borders on total absence; it finds expression in the modern experience of being abandoned by God. This is because God’s power remains inexplicable and unacceptable to the despaired, and every attempt to explain the meaning of omnipotence does in fact confuse the construction of meaning and leads straight down into the abyss of despair. There is thus a close connection between the power of God and the aporia of the self: The khôra of the discourse is not connected to God’s weakness and the unconditional gift, but to the original “vortex” of sin, qualifying the single individual as sinner. By Anti-Climacus, the knowledge of sin can almost be seen as a deconstruction within the Christian tradition – within, but also outside this tradition, in a polemic against every attempt to offer a philosophical explanation of Christianity. On the one hand, the knowledge of sin 60

Cf. Carl Schmitt Politische Theologie: Vier Kapitel zur Lehre von der Souveränität, Berlin: Duncker und Humblot 1934.

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involves knowledge of one’s own self, but on the other hand, it also involves the knowledge of God – a knowledge in which both the concept of the self and the concept of God are at stake. The gift of grace would in this case represent the other possibility, of grounding transparently in God. In the abyss, however, there is no forgiveness, no hospitality, no unconditional gift.

§ 47 Derrida on Religion Without Religion In the following two paragraphs, we will follow the distinction between the abyss and the ground a bit further. The possibility of thinking God after Kierkegaard and Derrida, continuing the religious tradition without basing the notions primarily on the foundationalism of classical theology, depends on a clarification of the internal relationship between these two. Our inquiry so far has discovered some decisive differences, however, and thus we will focus on Derrida in this paragraph and Kierkegaard in the next. Common for both of them is the reflection on the limit between the possible and the impossible, where the impossible marks the border to a radical possibility beyond the impossible. Hence, Derrida seeks to translate religion by a “passion for the impossible.” We find this phrase in many of his texts, first in some of the essays in Psyché: Inventions de l’autre, then in the three texts which are collected in an English edition with the title On the Name. In the essay “Sauf le nom,” the impossible is defined on the analogy of the paradoxical claim made by Angelus Silesius in one of his many aphorisms: “To become nothing is to become God.” Derrida writes about this impossibility, this unheard-of affirmation, viz. to become God: The becoming-nothing, as becoming-self or as becoming-God, the becoming (Werden) as the engendering of the other, ever since the other, that is what, according to Angelus Silesius, is possible, but as more impossible still than the impossible. This “more,” this beyond, this hyper (über) obviously introduces an absolute heterogeneity in the order and in the modality of the possible. The possibility of the impossible, of the “more impossible” that as such is also possible (“more impossible than the impossible”), marks an absolute interruption in the regime of the possible that nonetheless remains, if this can be said, in place.61

The impossible has no strictly modal-logical function in this claim. Rather, the distinction between possible and impossible refers to that 61

Derrida On the Name, p. 43.

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which can be formulated within a rational discourse and that which shatters a rational discourse. For example, the affirmation: “To become nothing is to become God” is a paradoxical formulation of this kind. It is impossible to become nothing, unless one dies. It is also impossible for a human person to become God. But precisely where one impossible claim of this kind encounters another claim about the impossible, language opens the door to an impossible possibility, for an economy which empties language of rationality, while at the same time exploiting the possibility of language in order to establish an alternative logos. And this logic is established as a hyperlogic, over or beyond the logical order of Being. The new logos will not in any way be able to replace the possible, as this is formulated within a rational discourse, but it establishes an absolute heterogeneity which breaks in and interrupts the normal order. This is the source of this “more” which allows the possible to remain in existence and to retain its place, but does not permit it for one single moment to remain untouched by the impossible (and hence, because the distinction between the possible and the impossible is so rigorously carried out, this reflection on the relationship between “me” and God is quite different from the one we discussed in § 44). It is only when this absolute heterogeneity between the impossibility of the impossible and the possibility beyond the impossible is established that Derrida follows Silesius one step further in the direction of the possibility of the impossible: “Go where you cannot go; see where you do not see / hear where there is no sound at all, then you are where God speaks.” This lays down a direction, a path, but an impossible path, and an imperative to see where sight is impossible. And finally a silence, a deafening silence where God speaks. John D. Caputo refers to this order, “Go where you cannot go,” and claims that this is the only movement that is truly a movement, a transition, a transcendence.62 All other movement is a standstill, where one continually returns to the same point. And Derrida’s passion for the impossible concerns precisely the act of going – although one cannot go. As Caputo puts it: In order to be really and truly on the move, we must pass through a prior state of paralysis and immobilization. One must first be ground to a halt, brought to a standstill; to be on the go one must experience the no-way-to-go, which is what an aporia is. Only then, precisely when it is impossible, is it possible to move, eminentiori sensu.63 62

63

Cf. John Caputo “Looking the Impossible in the Eye” in Kierkegaard Studies: Yearbook 2002, pp. 6-9. Caputo “Looking the Impossible in the Eye,” p. 7.

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Caputo’s interpretation of Derrida, which in this case seems plausible, would be a rather precise description of the double or negative movement that takes place in The Sickness unto Death.64 We could simply replace the words “standstill” or “aporia” with “despair,” and the analysis would apply to this contradictory text too.65 The goal of the analysis of despair is to get the human person to stand still, to doubt, to remain standing in a situation where there is no exit, and to grasp precisely the fact that there is no exit. This is the absolute zero point of the text, its dead point – and at the same time, the uttermost abyss of the self; “[…] this agonizing contradiction, this sickness in the self, to die eternally, to die and yet not to die, to die death.”66 Derrida’s text “Sauf le nom” can seem rather confusing, because it is built up around an imaginary conversation between voices which do not completely correspond to one another. The idea is that different signatures refer to each other, but also that they refer to an event, a decisive event, although they always arrive too late to describe this event. The description, the address, the name is always expressed as a postscript (Efterskrift), after the fact.67 Here, Derrida repeats a central idea from the early texts about writing as différance. He repeats this in relation to the religious dimension, and suggests that deconstruction is a form of negative theology – not negative theology in the classical sense, but a negative-theological voice in the sometimes confusing conversation in and about language which goes by the name of “negative theology,” but probably finds expression just as often without this name (sauf le nom). But for Derrida, this act of reflecting on the name is one way of saving the name (sauf le nom!), including the name of God. It is one way of allowing this name to find its place 68 – a place to which you cannot go, a silence in which God’s voice resounds: Go where you cannot go, see, where you do not see: hear where there is no sound at all, then you are where God speaks.

According to Derrida, religious discourse (exemplified here in the aphorisms of Angelus Silesius) always speaks with two voices. This 64

65 66 67 68

Caputo’s article is an attempt to establish parallels between Derrida and Kierkegaard, but with primary reference to Fear and Trembling. Since it is precisely in Fear and Trembling that the double movement is launched for the first time, it is not really surprising that it is possible to draw the parallel further to the double movement in The Sickness unto Death. Cf. Chapter Four above. SKS 11, 134 / SUD, 18. Cf. Derrida On the Name, pp. 60 f. Cf. Derrida On the Name, pp. 62-65.

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becomes particularly clear in the doubled movement (or doublemovement) which goes under the name of negative theology: I am always sensitive to this unusual alliance of two powers and of two voices in these poetic aphorisms or in these declarations without appeal […] These two powers are, on the one hand, that of a radical critique, of a hyper-critique after which nothing more seems assured, neither philosophy nor theology, nor science, nor good sense, nor the least doxa, and, on the other hand, conversely, as we are settled beyond all discussion, the authority of that sententious voice that produces or reproduces mechanically its verdicts with the tone of the most dogmatic assurance: nothing or no one can oppose this, since we are in passion: the assumed contradiction and the claimed paradox.69

Entering into this aphoristic text, Derrida discovers some traits which are typical of negative theology, of paradoxical texts, and of a certain kind of postscripts (written after the fact). On the one hand, these texts express a radical critique, a hyper-critique, which cannot be defined in purely theological or purely philosophical terms, still less in scientific or political terms; on the contrary, these texts express the destabilization of the entire linguistic and cognitive system. This can be compared to the Cartesian doubt, which affects every known idea and enters both into the knowing subject and into the basis of his or her knowledge. But the hyper-critique is probably even more radical, since it affects language itself and the ability of language to express the “matter” under discussion. This is what happens in an apophatic discourse, but also in a deconstruction of texts which leads them back to a trace antecedent to language, to a distinction between the world and the phenomena which itself eludes all description and definitive definition. Such a hyper-critique then leads, at least in the aphorisms of Silesius, to a dogmatic assurance which is proclaimed with a voice that claims absolute authority, beyond all discussion. This voice cannot be gainsaid, since its basis is only in passion. This allows it to hold fast dogmatically both to the contradiction and to the paradox as the presupposition of the impossible possibility which is established as an interrupting supplement to the normal order of discourse. This formal observation is connected precisely to the definition of the contents of the texts: this is a revolution which makes the discourse transcend itself, transcend its own conditions of possibility. Derrida compares it with a transcendence of the language of metaphysics, which still belongs to the language of metaphysics but leads metaphysics out beyond its own boundary line. He insists that this is at one and the same time an interior and exterior upheaval or revolution, 69

Derrida On the Name, pp. 66 f.

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because of an absolute transcendence (viz., the absolute exteriority) which makes itself heard from the inside.70 If Derrida is right, a tradition which emphasizes this doubleness will necessarily have to change in order to be like itself. It will in fact remain foreign to itself at every time – in the translation from one language to another, from one generation to the next – and it will undergo a profound transformation which leads it back to the origin. Religion has one aspect which is positively historical. It is linked to the handing on of dogmas and to continuity in traditions; in the Christian context, explicit reference is made to a revelation. But Derrida claims that negative theology is also able to express the self-difference of the religious tradition in an ahistorical manner.71 Negative theology takes care to make itself independent of every Christian revelation, of a literal exposition of the New Testament, of the coming of Christ, of the story of his passion, of the Trinitarian dogma, etc. He describes this ahistorical tendency as a mysticism without intuition: An immediate but intuitionless mysticism, a sort of abstract kenosis, frees this language from all authority, all narrative, all dogma, all belief – and at the limit from all faith. At the limit this mysticism remains, after the fact [après coup], independent of all history of Christianity, absolutely independent, detached even, perhaps absolved, from the idea of sin, freed even, perhaps redeemed, from the idea of redemption. Whence the courage and the dissidence, potential or actual, of these masters (think of Eckhart), whence the persecution they suffered at times, whence their passion, whence this scent of heresy, these trials, this subversive marginality of the apophatic current in the history of theology and of the Church.72

This marginal phenomenon corresponds to what Jacques Derrida elsewhere calls “religion without religion.” 73 His interest in negative theology has its origin in negative theology’s ahistorical transcendence of the tradition – though in the tradition – which continuously deconstructs the tradition within which it stands, precisely because it relates to a heterogeneous origin outside the historical continuity of the tradition. This is the absolute origin which could any time suspend not only the ethical (as in Johannes de Silentio), but also the religious – and which does in fact do so. If such a suspension and transcendence is not possible at every moment, as the possibility of the impossible, God (or the other who goes under the name of “God”) is already “dead” (as Nietzsche will put it) or else quite simply no longer another. 70 71 72 73

Cf. Derrida On the Name, p. 70. Derrida On the Name, p. 71. Derrida On the Name, p. 71. Cf. e. g. Derrida Gift of Death, p. 53.

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For in such a case, “God” would be reduced to a system of given designations laid down within the historical and cultural entity which goes under the name of “religion” – or else left up to the individual’s wellnigh arbitrary construction of “God.” Such a collision from the inside between the tradition and that which lies absolutely outside tradition characterizes Derrida’s repetition of religion, as religion without religion. This is admittedly not an attempt to create a universal common religion built upon the ruins of the traditional religions. Rather, it is an attempt to broaden the understanding of religion so that this is a phenomenon in which most people share, or which catches up with them sooner or later; not least, a phenomenon in which the cultures share and which they hand on, with significance for politics and philosophy, as a form of “enlightenment” or “revelation” in a late-modern, global society which is in the process of dissolution and speedy reshaping.74 Within such a discourse and such a society, the deconstructive approach opens the door to otherness, but also to self-difference, in the encounter with other religions and religious expressions. When “God” is at stake in this conversation, as a presupposition to which neither side has a privileged access, the conversation demands humility on one’s own part, which is also humility on the part of the other. It is in such a context that Derrida takes refuge in the German noun Gelassenheit (“sobriety”), which occurs in a tradition of negative theologians that stretches from Eckhart to Heidegger: “It is necessary to leave all, to leave every ‘something’ through love of God, and no doubt to leave God himself, to abandon him, that is, at once to leave him and (but) let him (be beyond-something). Save his name (sauf son nom) – which must be kept silent there where it itself goes to arrive there, that is, to arrive at its own effacement.”75 With a religious Gelassenheit of this kind, one will be able to devote oneself to mystical knowledge or to prayer, but also to act towards the other – without defining the other person in one’s own image. One can even let God be God without comprehending or imagining God according to human intuition or a human mode. This is not a religion with many concrete fixed points; rather, the Cherubinic Wanderer is situated between two abysses – and cannot do otherwise: 74

75

Cf. Jürgen Habermas Zwischen Naturalismus und Religion, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag 2005, p. 151: “Religiöse Überlieferungen scheinen, auch wenn sie sich einstweilen als das intransparente Andere der Vernunft präsentieren, sogar auf eine intensivere Weise gegenwärtig geblieben zu sein als die Metaphysik.“ Derrida On the Name, pp. 78 f.

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“One abyss calls to the other.” The abyss of my spirit calls always with a cry to the abyss of God: tell me, which is the deeper?76

The depth of this double abyss – the abyss of the spirit or self, and the abyss of God – can be measured only by means of the question, and the form of the question is the vessel that contains it. The double abyss manifests religion as a passion for the impossible. And precisely this double abyss brings us back to the second line of the parallelogram, to the understanding of religion, of spirit, of the self, and of God in Part Two of The Sickness unto Death.

§ 48 Kierkegaard on the Abyss and the Source The Sickness unto Death too begins with a radical critique, but is it a hyper-critique of the kind Derrida sketches, a critique which means that nothing is stable any longer – neither philosophy nor theology nor common sense? Some traits suggest this, but at the same time there are other traits in the text which do not fit this double scheme of hyper-critique and dogmatic authority. Part One can be read as such a hyper-critique, where the self is thrown out into the abyss of despair, where nothing is stable any longer either in the finite or in the infinite sense, neither as temporal nor as eternal, neither philosophically nor theologically. Both the philosophical system and the theological system are destabilized by the sickness unto death. In the second part, the author then takes the opposite path. He insists that the primary concern of Christianity finds expression only when the dogma of original sin, of Christ, of revelation is understood in the strictest sense. This makes him the spokesman of an unconditional authority which “mechanically” reproduces the claims of orthodoxy in a tone that leaves no room for doubt.77 If however we take a closer look at the relationship between hyper-critique and dogma, we discover that there is a deeper connection between these, a connection that is anything but arbitrary. The recognition of sin as sin presupposes an acknowledgment of God as the unconditional authority (de jure), but not necessarily of God’s sovereignty. Still, God’s sovereignty is the hidden power which even in the first part lies concealed behind the self’s deficient self-knowledge. Anti-Climacus holds 76 77

Derrida On the Name, p. 67, quoting Angelus Silesius. Cf. Derrida On the Name, p. 67.

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that the human person cannot evade this “eternal” power, no matter how hard he tries: he will only entangle himself more and more deeply in the aporias of despair. In the second part, the self is opened up first to the revelation of sin as sin, and then to the gift of forgiveness, which comes from the unconditional in God, not primarily as sovereign, but still as authoritative, and as unconditional giver of the gift. Anti-Climacus holds fast to both of these in an asymmetrical link, as two ellipses each in its closed unity: the ellipse of despair and the ellipse of trust. In the former, the human person discovers the abyss in experience, which Anti-Climacus traces back, with complete consistency, to an abyss in God. This is the indefinable abyss of omnipotence, which is the cause of the contradictions and misunderstandings in Reason’s attempts to comprehend existence. As Luther too points out, it is impossible to comprehend God’s omnipotence and sovereignty.78 It is absolutely hidden from the intellect, but shows itself precisely in the contradictions and the despair that all human persons will discover if they seriously attempt to become conscious of themselves. Like a “vortex,” despair gives the self a spatial dimension, but it also holds it infinitely fast in such a vortex, unless the human person finds another origin in something else, a distinctively different way of reading the grammar of the self. This is what Anti-Climacus calls stopping short at the paradox. The paradox establishes a transition to another order, the order of the impossible, which is absolutely heterogeneous in relation to the possibility of self-reflection and the category of probable possibility that belongs to the bourgeois-philistine life. The paradox opens up an economy of unconditional grace and thus becomes the source of a different understanding of the self. It is not a coincidence that I speak here of a “source,” while I described God’s omnipotence and the self’s despair as a double “abyss.” In Works of Love, Kierkegaard describes precisely love as a source of this kind: the human being does not know its origin, nor the point at which it springs out, its Ur-Sprung. This can be known only by a movement which is the movement of love, and to follow this movement is the same thing as grounding in God, without precluding the possibility that the abyss remains an abyss (Afgrund), in the self and in God.79 78

79

“Quae uoluntas non requirenda, sed cum reuerentia adoranda est, ut secretum longe reuerendissimum maiestatis diuinae, soli sibi reseruatum, ac nobis prohibitum, multo religiosius, quam infinitae multidinis specus Coricij” (Martin Luther On the Bondage of the Will, p. 139 (WA 18, 684)). “Love’s hidden life is in the innermost dimension, unfathomable, and then in turn is an unfathomable connectedness with all existence. Just as the quiet lake originates

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This is the language and the metaphysics of mystical theology, which keeps up the double relationship to God, on the one hand as sovereign power, leaving no other option than resignation or despair, on the other hand as gift and unconditional goodness. And we find back to precisely such a double definition in Anti-Climacus’ definition of faith, which he views as an infinite double-movement, the only alternative to a life in despair or offense. Hence, the double definition of the human person, in the revolving circle of sin and in the unconditional trust of faith in an impossible gift which shatters the circle, is held fast at every moment: This contrast [sin/faith], however, has been advanced throughout this entire book, which at the outset introduced in Part One, A,A, the formula for the state in which there is no despair at all: in relating to itself and in willing to be itself, the self rests transparently in the power that established it. This formula in turn, as has been frequently pointed out, is the definition of faith. 80

As we see, this formula expresses the meaning of faith in the language of mystical theology and with the mystic’s confidence, which remains incorruptible, even (if necessary) against the understanding. This creates room for the Gelassenheit which characterizes the history of negative theology, from Meister Eckhart to Jacques Derrida, which means in fact that not even the concept of God, of the historical Jesus, etc., has the same meaning. If God is an unconditional origin and source of this kind, this can find expression in every situation even without God’s name being mentioned, even where trust does not know whether or not “God” exists, and still less what “existence” would mean when this term is applied to God.81 For is it not precisely the faith in such an unconditional goodness that attributes the source of the good to an origin xλÈÃÇË¿Ò"hÐÍ}ѽ¿Ð, to a light that no human being has ever seen or can see?82

80 81

82

deep down in hidden springs no eye has seen, so also does a person’s love originate even more deeply in God’s love. If there were no gushing spring at the bottom, if God were not love, then there would be neither the little lake nor a human being’s love. Just as the quiet lake originates darkly in the deep spring, so a human being’s love originates mysteriously in God’s love” (SKS 9, 18 / WL, 9 f.). SKS 11, 242 / SUD, 131. Cf. once again Derrida’s words: “It is necessary to leave all, to leave every ‘something’ through love of God, and no doubt to leave God himself, to abandon him, that is, at once to leave him and (but) let him (be beyond being-something). Save his name (sauf le nom) – which must be kept silent there where it itself goes to arrive there, that is, to arrive at its own effacement” (Derrida On the Name, pp. 78 f.). Cf. 1 Tim 6:16.

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§ 49 Metaphysics Revisited Abyss and source, trace and enigma, are terms often applied by both Kierkegaard and Derrida when it comes to ultimate questions, such as death or God. Thus, they avoid the most obvious references to a metaphysical language about certain things that cannot be explained: they do not include death and God in an ontology of beings and a metaphysics of essences. The question is, however, whether or not this strategy of avoidance ends up replacing the old metaphysics with a new metaphysics, i. e. a metaphysics which is weaker, which is less static, but nevertheless establishes an ultimate frame of reference for philosophical and religious language. To a certain extent it does, simply because they are both dealing with questions concerning the way things are, even how they ultimately are, viz. questions concerning the first and last things. I would in fact affirm that Kierkegaard and Derrida are still occupied with metaphysics, simply because they keep on asking questions with metaphysical implications, and because they are involved in the problem of repetition. Hence, there is good reason to ask if this is a strategy for the future, for thinking about self, death, and God after Kierkegaard and Derrida. Isn’t it rather a strategy of the past? Has not the problem of metaphysics been overcome, once and for all? Given all the polemics against metaphysics and onto-theology throughout the 20th century, such problems concerning the first and last things, concerning what is and what is not, concerning the essence, the real, concerning how and why, seem more problematic than ever. There is still a general doubt in the possibility of answering such questions adequately. The most common strategy in relation to metaphysics in the 20th century was to avoid the question all together, i. e. to turn to language, to logic, to experience, to phenomena, and to the structures of texts in order to escape the most problematic aspects of the philosophical legacy. Derrida has pointed out that such a strategy of avoidance in many cases leads to an even less critical acceptance of some metaphysical presuppositions concerning the relation between language and reality, etc. By some postmodern philosophers and theologians following in the trace of Derrida, such as Gianni Vattimo, Richard Rorty, and John D. Caputo, however, the basic questions of language, truth, and reality more or less disappear with reference to the historical “fact” that we live in a “post-metaphysical” era. Instead of asking the same questions differently, they tend to leave the basic questions behind, entering a web of equally valid “interpretations.” That is a rather naïve position, given the problems involved in philo-

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sophical inquiry and the continuous actuality of the history of ideas for understanding the present. I would suggest a quite different option, taking the questions further into a problematic field – even when it implies an acceptance of its aporetic impasses. The question of metaphysics receives in Kierkegaard a particular fashion and a significant twist due to his double relationship to Hegel. In Hegel’s philosophy there is e. g. a basic connection and correspondence between the external and the internal. Kierkegaard’s conception of the internal and the interior truth is still dependent on Hegel in order to give sense, even though he denies that there is a straightforward correspondence. His negativity, even his negative theology, is bound to this framework, albeit he refutes the possibility of finding truth by way of Hegelian dialectics. When the Hegelian framework disappears in his latest texts from the 1850’s, Kierkegaard tends to lose this perspective all together. His thinking becomes split up in an interiorized self, reflecting on questions of truth, deception, and despair, and an external activism, fighting any institution which is not giving witness to the truth in the profound sense he has found to be valid. The Sickness unto Death is in fact the last book in which he keeps both perspectives closely related, without giving up his own agenda: The synthesis of the self is impossible, and it is by way of reflecting on such an impossibility that reality opens up, in the rupture between the infinite and the finite, between the possible and the necessary, between the eternal and the temporal. Kierkegaard’s inquiry is temporal, finite, and bound to necessity – but its critical claim for truth is given by deliberation on the eternal, the infinite, and the possible, breaking up the given categories (i. e. the categories of the given, “es gibt”) from within. Human self is, according to Kierkegaard, distinguished by its ability to relate otherwise to itself and to the other, and this otherwise even has metaphysical consequences. Kierkegaard includes two rather extensive metaphysical positions in The Sickness unto Death: the Hegelian dialectic and the Christian dogmatic. These two positions are exposed in their mutual opposition and the principal differences are underscored, not sublated. Kierkegaard thereby keeps their claim to represent ultimate truth and reality in suspenso, as long as such truth may always be misrepresented by the act of final definition. In both cases, he sees the contemporary discourse as representing a deception rather than a love for wisdom or truth (philo-sophia). That Kierkegaardian suspension and interruption of conceptual thought – in conceptual thought – is the critical meta-reflection which

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distinguishes and justifies metaphysics in late modernity. The process of repetition is a critical appropriation of metaphysics which includes the possibility of unresolved tensions or aporias and of infinite ruptures in metaphysical reflection. A certain priority is thereby given to the question. But the question is not coincidental, it becomes decisive; it amounts to a question about reality, about recapturing the significance of human self, by reflecting upon the self, and by relating to the other, to death, and to God. It is in fact these others, as necessary and significant others transcending the self, its capacities and its control, which preclude a self-sufficient metaphysics of the self to simply replace the metaphysics of essences. As I showed in Chapter Four, Kierkegaard discusses such a crossing of conflicting interpretations of the self in the passage A.A, a passage connecting all the different aspects of our investigation. The main point of that passage is neither to reject the Hegelian framework for reflection on the self nor to replace it with a philosophy of alterity. These two positions are rather shown to be interdependent, in the sense that any philosophy of alterity refers to a particular theory and grammar of the self, of being, and of truth, but is not included by this theory. There is a difference which is insisted upon to the degree that inclusion and Aufhebung becomes impossible, and the irreducible difference is exactly the question worthy of further deliberation. Any other question in philosophy and theology is affected by that difference, even the definition and significance of notions like “self,” “death,” and “God.” It is necessary for the sake of clarity and rigor to define the terms as precisely as possible, but there is always a negativity and a Cartesian doubt involved, threatening to let the definition and the entire horizon of thought break down. Even though the metaphysics of late modernity has changed a lot since Hegel, the process of double-reflection remains an option for religious discourse which keeps the possibility of God open, as an absolute and thus unconditional presupposition marking the discrimen between philosophy and theology. I see here a mutual interference however, so that the unconditional absoluteness of God also implies the possibility of a sovereign power, i. e. that the significance of such a possibility is not restricted to possible worlds, but primarily concerns reflection on the present world. This is the point where absence and writing interferes with responsibility, action, politics, and the definition of the actual world, i. e. where the apophatic thinking is inscribed upon and deeply involved in the kataphatic discourse. Such a return of the concrete is necessarily going to follow after theory, and I do in

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fact expect it to raise a new discussion of metaphysics throughout the 21st century. Here we touch upon a basic problem in Derrida’s philosophy. In his best analyses from different periods of his authorship, he remains close to the text, and thus close to a particular ontology, be it the one of Husserl, Hegel, or Plato. Remaining within the text, he breaks out of the text, questioning some of the distinctions and lines drawn through the text (between immanent and transcendent, interior and exterior, presence and absence, etc.). The space thereby opened within the text establishes a certain distance to the metaphysical tradition, questioning some of its basic concepts, but gives also a new opportunity to ask principal questions of metaphysical significance, including the concept of time, of space, of distinctions, of origin, of self and other. The question he does not pose is the question of being, except by way of an aporia, a “non-saying,” the how to avoid speaking. He refers to being in future and past tense, as a “trace” and as a deferral, sometimes even the “Versprechen” of a “coming”. The priority given to absence, however, lets the question after being and “existence” return, over and over again, and sometimes as a visitation (Heimsuchung), revisiting us unexpectedly. That is the case with metaphysics, even in the crisis of metaphysics, with death (as annihilation of and question for existence), and with religion. And one of Derrida’s most significant contributions to philosophy in the late 20th century was to continue asking these questions unceasingly. In some of his latest texts, this perspective gets lost, e. g. in his essay on the “return” of religions, entitled Foi et savoir. The rather abstract reflections on the “possibility” of religion, of revelation, etc. are more or less detached from any text and thus no longer embedded in a particular discourse and context. These deliberations are clearly intended to be “actual,” responding to a new political and cultural situation, but they seem completely outdated less than ten years after their publication. Something similar happens to an affirmation like “I call myself God.” The author might once have intended to be provocative or heretical, but after the death of the author, it rather indicates a certain amount of hubris on his behalf. Derrida is an original, rigorous, and even groundbreaking philosopher only as long as he remains within the text, within the tradition of metaphysical and phenomenological discourse, and breaks it up from within. His lasting contribution to philosophy remains true to the Kantian heritage, as a critique of pure reason, of practical reason, and of the power of judgment; metaphysics, ethics, and aesthetics.

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We have not yet arrived at the proclaimed end of the history of metaphysics, and we never will, since that history takes a new beginning at every end, every Ò»ÉÍÐ of metaphysical discourse. The problem of metaphysics will never be overcome, since there will always be a need to construct new theories (or towers) explaining certain things that can or cannot be explained. And since history tends to repeat itself, many of these theories will, consciously or not, have a theological background or justification. Hence, it is exactly as problem that metaphysics remains an urgent topic for philosophical investigation. The question after God, then, as a question of philosophical significance in late modernity, after Kierkegaard, and after Derrida, remains a question which is not only to be raised in one particular field of discourse called “philosophy of religion,” or theology, or religious studies, nor is it a problem concerning only a particular aspect of society called “religion.” It is rather a question which affects aesthetics, ethics, and metaphysics, and these days most clearly global and regional politics. A critical discourse including the notion of “God” will first and foremost have to analyze the notion itself, however, and discuss whether this notion has become functionalized for a certain purpose, e. g. for political reasons, as it seems to be the case on different sides of the war on terror. In such cases, an analysis which deconstructs a particular image and a particular metaphysics of God seems necessary and probably one of the most effective approaches in order to de-mask the intentions behind such a domestication of the notion. After all, that might be one of the most effective ways of doing philosophy in our time, in order to avoid, à tout prix, a good conscience.

In the Final Analysis In the final analysis, there is good reason to ask once more what autopsia is all about; what the problem is, after all. It might be argued that this is all too simple: to recognize who oneself is, to acknowledge that one is going to die, and that both dying and being oneself is closely connected to a responsibility towards the other as other, before God as absolute other.1 If autopsia is that simple, why make it so difficult? Is there any reason whatsoever why the very simple should appear that difficult? The most obvious answer to such a question is that the most simple ought to be the most difficult, exactly because it concerns one of the basic questions of philosophy: What it is to be a human being, to become wholly oneself, with its prodigious strenuousness and its prodigious responsibility. Such a task takes philosophy back to its Socratic origin, to the questioning of the given, of the most basic aspects of life. And it remains faithful to the two Socratic devices for exercising philosophy, i. e. know thyself and learn to know what you do not know. That is the very point about certain things which cannot be explained: They are so simple, so basically related to what it means to be a human being that they often become silenced by all the other questions, which appear to be so much more advanced and so much more important to answer. What happens when the thought of death occurs, this very simple and basic thought about death, that I will most certainly die, and that you will most certainly die, is that all these other questions are stripped down to basic, that the very basis for knowledge and existence is shivering, whether one is trembling in tears for another or oneself shivering in anxiety and awe. Hence, at the end we return to the place where we began, at the graveside. Death is, as Kierkegaard once pointed out, “the briefest summary of life, or life traced back to its briefest form.” And he continues: “This is also why it has always been very important for those who truly think about human life to test again and again, 1

Cf. Derrida Gift of Death, p. 3.

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with the help of the brief summary, what they have understood about life. No thinker grasps life as death does, this masterful thinker who is able not only to think through any illusion, but to think it to pieces, think it to nothing.”2 This is the interruption of thought, when it falls apart, into pieces, into very little, almost nothing. And that interruption is worth a detailed study, because it is the expression of the crisis of modernity, going back to the wake of modernity itself, in the moment of questioning and doubt. The rupture that opens up in the interruption is an opening up of the closed universe from within, from within life, from within culture, from within politics, from within language, from within philosophy and from within religion. It is a doubt once more about the foundations of human existence, and it appears above all as a rupture in language, the language which is the medium for any knowledge, of oneself, of death, of the other, and of the “real world,” of reality in general. The doubt concerns the possibility of a repetition: If that which has been can again come into existence, if the language which has described the world can still apply to the world we are experiencing, or if language itself ought to be circumscribed, if the very syntax of existence is interrupted and ought to be suspended. It is in the process of such a questioning of the foundations for human knowledge that the question of God reappears. Thanks to a radical questioning of the foundations on the one hand, and to a rationalistic definition of reality on the other, the question of God has since long before Nietzsche and even before Kant been a question of crisis and of philosophical doubt. It seems like the grammar of faith, of different faiths, has fallen apart to the same extent as the grammar of philosophical reasoning. The question of repetition has become imperative; is a repetition possible? Is it possible to share religious faith with earlier generations? Is it possible to translate, to transfigure, to pass on, and to share this faith with the others, as a community of believers, or even in a more general sense, as humankind, as a general condition for humanity? In the final analysis, it is indeed possible, but only as the sharing of a secret, of a certain secret which eludes objective justification. In a certain sense, it is most uncertain, but at the same time it concerns certainty itself, the possibility of Gelassenheit, of a general trust in the future, of Care for the other and of belief in Goodness beyond being. Hence, the possibility of religion, of relating to God as absolute 2

SKS 9, 339 / WL, 345.

In the Final Analysis

339

other, verges on the limit of the impossible. Measured on a measured notion of possibility, in fact, “God” is the impossible, expresses a possibility far beyond the limits of the possible. In this name, the name of God, reality as we know it, as human language normally defines it, breaks down, breaks into pieces, breaks into very little, almost nothing. Hence, autopsia as a critical reflection on the self, on death, and on God after Kierkegaard and Derrida comes down to a continuous reflection about the limit between the possible and the impossible. In the final analysis, after all, these are questions concerning every single person without exception, but because of their very general character they are sometimes taken to be general questions as well. They are indeed general questions, but in a singular way, concerning the understanding of oneself, though always in relation to the other, to the other as other, who never stops interrupting my own understanding. It is, however, when one is brought to the limits, the limits of the possible, that these categories are put to the test, in anxiety, in grief, in despair, in going where you cannot go. The impossibility of the impossible is a necessary, but sometimes even vicious circle, which circumscribes every human being without exception. And this circumscription is the autopsy of one still living, the discovery of death, of the uncertain, of the decisive, as a condition for life. When the interruption once has occurred, though, it may reoccur, as a repetition, in the most normal situations, as an echo of oneself, as a questioning of language in language, or even in the continuous repetition of a silent breath, taking existence back to its origin before returning to speech: Who is this other, to whom I am speaking, who is this other who calls me by name, what is the secret of consciousness, of being conscious of oneself? And what is, after all, this otherness and unease which encounters me in death, in the death of another, and, in the final analysis, in my own death?

Abbreviations SKS

SV3

Pap.

KW

CA CD CI CUP EO1 EO2 EUD FT P PC PF PV R

Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter, ed. by Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, Joakim Garff, Anne Mette Hansen and Johnny Kondrup, 28 vols. (abbreviation: SKS 1-28) and 28 vols. of commentary (abbreviation: SKS K1-K28), Copenhagen: Gads forlag, 1997Samlede værker, ed. by A. B. Drachmann, J. L. Heiberg, H. O. Lange and Peter P. Rohde, 3rd edition, 20 vols., Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1962-64 Søren Kierkegaards Papirer, ed. by P. A. Heiberg, V. Kuhr, E. Torsting and N. Thulstrup, 2nd expanded edition, vols. I-XVI (with supplementary vol.), Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1968-74 Kierkegaard’s Writings, trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, vol. I-XXVI, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1978-98 The Concept of Anxiety, trans. by Reidar Thomte in collaboration with Albert B. Anderson, KW VIII. Christian Discourses, KW XVII. The Concept of Irony, KW II. Concluding Unscientific Postscript, KW XII,1. Either/Or, Part I, KW III. Either/Or, Part II, KW IV. Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses, KW V. Fear and Trembling, KW VI. Prefaces / Writing Sampler, trans. by Todd W. Nichol, KW IX. Practice in Christianity, KW XX. Philosophical Fragments, KW VII. The Point of View including On My Work as an Author and The Point of View for My Work as an Author, KW XXII. Repetition, KW VI.

342 SL SUD TDIO UD WA

WL

Abbreviations

Stages on Life’s Way, KW XI. The Sickness unto Death, KW XIX. Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions, KW X. Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits, KW XV. Without Authority including The Lily in the Field and the Bird of the Air, Two Ethical-Religious Essays, Three Discourses at the Communion on Fridays, An Upbuilding Discourse, Two Discourses at the Communion on Fridays, KW XVIII. Works of Love, KW XVI.

Bibliography

A. Works by Søren Kierkegaard First editions Tre Taler ved tænkte Leiligheder, Copenhagen: C. A. Reitzel 1845 Sygdommen til Døden, Copenhagen: C. A. Reitzel 1849

Editions of Søren Kierkegaard’s Writings Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter, ed. by Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, Joakim Garff, Anne Mette Hansen and Johnny Kondrup, 28 vols. (SKS 1-28) and 28 vols. of commentary (SKS K1-K28), Copenhagen: Gads forlag 1997-

Collected Works, 3rd edn. Samlede værker, ed. by A. B. Drachmann, J. L. Heiberg, H. O. Lange and Peter P. Rohde, 3rd edition, 20 vols., Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1962-64

Papers, 2nd edn. Søren Kierkegaards Papirer, ed. by P. A. Heiberg, V. Kuhr, E. Torsting and N. Thulstrup, 2nd expanded edition, vols. I-XVI (with supplementary vol.), Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1968-74

All English translations Kierkegaard’s Writings, trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, vol. I-XXVI, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1978-98 Cf. also the list of abbreviations.

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B. Works by Jacques Derrida French editions De la grammatologie, Paris: Éditions de minuit 1967 L’écriture et la différence, Paris: Éditions du Seuil 1967 Marges de la philosophie, Paris: Éditions de minuit 1972 Psyché: Inventions de l’autre, Paris: Éditions Galilée 1987 Passions, Paris: Éditions Galilée 1993 Apories, Paris: Éditions Galilée 1996 Adieu, Paris: Éditions Galilée 1997 Donner la mort, Paris: Éditions Galilée 1999 Foi et savoir, Paris: Éditions du Seuil 2001

Translations Of Grammatology, tr. by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Baltimore and London: The John Hopkins University Press 1976 Writing and Difference, tr. by Alan Bass, Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1978 Margins of Philosophy, tr. by Alan Bass, Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1984 Vom Geist. Heidegger und die Frage (Orig. De l’ésprit. Heidegger et la question (1987)), tr. by Alexander García Düttmann, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1992 “Of an Apocalyptic Tone” (Orig. “D’un Ton apocalyptique adopté naguère en philosophie” (1982)), tr. by John P. Leavy Jr. in Derrida and Negative Theology, ed. by Harold Coward and Toby Foshay, Albany: SUNY Press 1992, pp. 25-71 Aporias, tr. by Thomas Dutoit, Stanford (Cal.): Stanford University Press 1993 On the Name, tr. by David Wood, John P. Leavey Jr., and Ian McLeod, Stanford (Cal.): Stanford University Press 1995 The Gift of Death, tr. by David Willis, Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1995 “Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the Limits of Reason Alone” in Religion, ed. by Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo, Cambridge: Polity Press 1998, pp. 1-78.

C. Other Works Adorno, Theodor W. Kierkegaard. Konstruktion des Ästhetischen in Gesammelte Schriften, Lizenzausgabe, vol. 2, Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft 1998 Agacinski, Sylviane Aparté: Conceptions and Deaths of Søren Kierkegaard, Tallahassee: Florida State University Press 1988

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Index of Names and Subjects

Abraham 2, 88, 91, 108-125 alterity 2-4, 38, 41 f., 75-88, 110, 128, 157, 160, 162-168, 172 f., 183, 187, 229, 233, 237-240, 305, 316 f., 333 anxiety 50, 102, 108, 112, 119, 137, 147, 159, 186, 222 f., 237, 246, 256, 337, 339 aporia 1-5, 10, 38, 43, 52, 66-72, 81-87, 91-99, 101, 106, 150, 161, 166-168, 173, 176-190, 196, 199, 221, 223, 230, 235239, 252, 258, 262, 274-277, 286, 290 f., 297 f., 311, 316-318, 321-324, 329, 333 f. appropriation 3, 90 f., 95-97, 130, 150, 196, 233, 242, 333 Aristotle 21, 31, 68, 83 Aufhebung 11, 15, 19-28, 32-40, 66 f., 112, 142, 160, 220 f., 233 f., 242-244, 246, 263 f., 281-283, 286-288, 317 f., 333 author/pseudonymous a. 2, 11-14, 25, 30, 34, 39, 42 f., 62, 64, 72, 78 f., 83, 87 f., 93-95, 136, 138, 148-155, 171, 182, 185, 188, 196-199, 203, 233, 255-257, 271-273, 334 authority 34, 78, 95, 108, 113, 123, 149 f., 160, 183, 198, 222, 268, 271, 308, 311, 317, 321, 325-329 autopsy/autopsia ix, 1-4, 91, 131-133, 248, 291-293, 298, 337-339 Being 19, 21, 31, 33, 52, 55 f., 61, 71 f., 76, 83, 90 f., 99-107, 126, 128, 130, 132, 177, 183 f., 199, 208, 232-239, 285, 323, 331, 333 f. Beyrich, T. 1, 46, 65, 227 Birkenstock, E. 94-96 Bøggild, J. 189, 234 f., 273 Cappelørn, N. J. viii, 169 f., 188, 211 Caputo, J. D. 10, 48, 318 f., 323 f., 331

closure/clôture 12, 36, 42, 63, 94, 106, 168, 230, 240, 297 cogito 3, 14-17, 52, 56-66, 122 f., 218, 223, 227, 285, 296 collision 27, 29, 138 f., 309, 327 Critchley, S. 41 f. death vii, ix, 1-5, 9 f., 14 f., 25, 29-40, 43, 46, 50, 52 f., 66-72, 83-88, 90-115, 119, 126-133, 151-155, 195, 200-203, 206-210, 235, 246 f., 250, 264, 275 f., 283, 289-293, 297 f., 302, 319 f., 331-334, 337-339 deconstruction 3, 8, 10-14, 33, 35, 37-45, 48, 61, 80, 85, 158, 166, 184, 187-190, 274, 291, 298, 307 f., 318, 320 f., 324 f. Descartes 8 f., 13, 15-18, 27 f., 55-64, 81, 85, 122-124, 215-220, 223, 227 f., 296 despair 1-4, 19 f., 27, 34, 50, 59, 65, 124 Deuser, H. viii, 165, 169 f. dialectic 3, 9, 11, 15, 20-23, 27 f. 32-34, 37, 39 f., 42, 45, 56, 59, 61, 66, 75, 140, 142-144, 147, 157-165, 167, 172 f. 176, 178-180, 182 f., 186-188, 191-199, 203, 205, 207 f., 210-217, 219 f., 223 f., 227, 230 f., 232, 235-240, 242, 244-246, 248-252, 255, 264 f., 268 f., 272-278, 280-292, 298-301, 310, 314-317, 332 différance 8, 11-13, 38, 62, 72, 74, 79 f. 84, 87, 112, 208, 297, 324 Dionysius Areopagita 74-76, 87, 183, 238 doubt 9, 13, 15-17, 19 f., 22-29, 34, 44, 52, 55, 57, 60 f., 64-66, 74 f., 81, 83-85, 109, 122-124, 141, 147, 165, 171, 182, 197, 203, 212, 214 f., 217-223, 227, 230-232, 235 f., 271, 274 f., 277, 282, 296, 304, 314, 324 f., 327 f., 330 f., 333, 338

356

Index of Names and Subjects

Dunning, S. N. 242, 278 Dyrerud, T. A. viii, 49

Huntington, P. J. 99, 104 Husserl, E. 87, 334

edifying: see upbuilding eternal, the 152-154, 158, 193, 201 f. 204, 208, 223, 247, 251-253, 255-262, 264, 265, 270, 275 f., 321, 324, 328 f., 332 ethics 28 f., 44, 83, 88, 91, 99, 104, 107112, 114, 117-123, 128, 130, 236, 274, 300, 320, 334 f.

indirect communication 47, 83, 95, 97, 121, 131, 147-150, 155, 178, 198 interruption/disturbance 2, 93, 128 f., 208, 255 f., 260, 264, 268, 302, 310, 318, 321 f., 332, 338 f.

faith 1, 23, 53, 56, 73, 76, 80-82, 88, 115 f., 119, 121 f., 124, 132, 137, 155, 212, 223, 225 f., 230, 248 f., 259, 261, 279 f., 285, 293, 296 f., 302, 326, 330, 337 f. Ferreira, M. J. 170, 235 Foucault, M. 17 f., 37, 41, 52, 54-59, 6265, 72, 85, 140 freedom 21, 32, 103 f., 119, 158, 161, 183, 199, 212, 217, 228 f., 249, 275, 313 Gadamer, H.-G. 10, 14, 38, 156 Garff, J. 46, 301 God ix, 1, 3-5, 15-17, 23, 43, 53, 56, 72, 74-78, 83, 85, 87 f., 91, 108, 110-113, 119-124, 128-130, 137, 143, 149, 152, 167, 172, 182-184, 186, 204, 208-212, 215, 222-226, 228, 230, 232-240, 253, 262, 266-272, 274-277, 279 f., 282 f., 286 f., 289-294, 296-313, 315, 317 f., 320-328, 330 f., 333-335, 337-339 genre vii, 47, 50, 79, 136, 138-141, 144, 149, 151, 154 f. Grøn, A. 47, 169 f., 172, 176, 182, 229, 242-250, 253, 276 Habermas, J. 8, 10 f., 117, 327 Hagemann, T. 46, 148 Hannay, A. viii, 49, 149, 168, 169 f., 172, 189 Hegel, Hegelian 3, 9, 11, 15, 19-24, 27-40, 42, 52, 58 f., 64-66, 87, 100, 110, 117, 122, 126, 140-146, 157, 160-163, 180, 192, 196-198, 207, 220, 226, 234, 242-252, 264 f., 274, 277-292, 332-334 Heidegger, M. 2 f., 11, 52, 58, 74, 76-78, 81, 83, 90 f., 94, 99-107, 109, 126, 129, 131, 157, 177, 183 f., 307 f., 327 Henriksen, J.-O. 8, 49 f.

Jonas, H. 313 f. Jordheim, H. 39, 150 Kant, Kantian 44, 78, 80-82, 117, 122, 306, 308, 334, 338 Kuhr, V. 23 f. language/l. game 5, 8-11, 13, 21, 25 f., 28 f. 36, 41, 45, 47, 53, 55, 57 f., 63, 71-77, 79, 81, 84 f. 87, 90, 92 f., 103, 105, 110, 127, 140, 180, 182-184, 192-194, 196-198, 201, 204, 217, 230-232, 236, 240, 249 f., 252, 254 f., 257, 287, 296, 306 f. 323-326, 330 f., 338 f. Levinas, E. 2 f., 83, 89-91, 93, 99, 103, 105-112, 125-131, 215 f., 308 love 43, 111, 115-120, 122, 125, 258, 319, 327, 329 f., 332 Luther, M. 291, 293, 321, 329 Lønning, P. viii, 49 machine 15, 33, 35, 37, 40, 264, 289 madness 3, 5, 17 f, 45, 52, 54 f., 60-65, 69, 72, 83, 85, 122 f., 192, 195 f., 199, 215, 226-229, 232 f., 256, 275 Melberg, A. 233-235 metaphor 12, 33, 37, 39f., 46f., 71, 81, 127, 132, 138, 140, 144 f., 184, 199-204, 271 modernity/late or post-modernity 8, 14 f., 72, 76, 83, 85, 115, 121, 124, 203, 231, 266, 333, 335, 338 Mynster, J. P. 23 f. Nietzsche, F. 56-58, 78, 80, 108, 140, 165, 241, 266, 307 f., 326, 338 Nordentoft, Kresten 145 f., 148, 300 nothing/nothingness 21, 24, 55 f., 61, 70, 86, 126, 128 f., 147, 183, 202, 208, 219 f., 231, 236, 254, 256, 264 f., 268, 275, 322 f., 338

Index of Names and Subjects

357

ontology 3, 91, 99 f., 102-104, 106 f., 128, 308, 315, 331, 334 other/otherness viii, ix, 1 f., 4 f., 14, 17, 20, 27 f., 31-33, 35-37, 40 f., 50, 52 f., 63 f., 68 f., 72, 74, 76 f., 82-88, 90-94, 97, 103-114, 118-125, 127-129, 131, 133, 137, 157 f., 161-168, 172 f., 176-178, 180, 182-190, 193-195, 205-210, 215 f., 220, 222, 224 f., 228 f., 232-239, 242, 244, 248, 250 f., 261-265, 267 f., 270 f., 274, 280, 287, 289 f., 293 f., 297, 300-302, 305-307, 310 f., 313, 315-320, 322, 326-328, 332-334, 337-339

silence 18, 54 f., 57-59, 62 f., 65, 74-76, 85, 87, 93, 99, 105, 112 f., 122, 124 f., 127, 229, 238-240, 323 f. space/espacement 10, 29 f., 33, 35-38, 42, 44 f., 61 f., 64 f., 68 f., 71, 74, 81, 85-87, 95, 111, 189, 195 f., 199, 203, 219, 221, 226, 238-240, 257, 265, 290, 293, 302, 305, 315, 318, 334 Stewart, J. viii, 23 f., 27, 47, 142, 160, 170, 243-250, 276-292 subjectivity/subj. truth 13, 22, 29-31, 33, 44, 52, 95, 117, 128, 142, 144, 155, 211, 219, 303, 306, 309 f., 312

Plato, Platonic 28, 61, 70-74, 83 f., 86, 98, 140, 151, 160, 180, 192 f., 203, 215, 233-235, 252, 260-262, 265, 315, 334 pseudonyms: see author

Taylor, M. C. 48, 242, 246 temporal, the 39, 41, 73 f., 76, 78, 85, 87, 100, 102, 152 f., 158, 193, 254, 257 f., 261, 275, 290, 328, 332 Theunissen, M. 47, 92, 96, 99, 158, 165, 168-179, 181-183, 189, 209, 243, 245, 248-250, 253, 259-262, 289 Thulstrup, N. 242 f., 278 time 28, 30, 32, 36, 52, 56, 68 f., 72-74, 77-79, 84, 87, 92, 112, 150, 207, 211, 217, 219-221, 234, 239, 252, 255 f., 258, 302, 334 Tjønneland, E. 11, 49 trace vii, viii, 1, 13, 29 f., 34-36, 40, 45, 49, 54, 59-63, 71 f., 79, 84, 87 f., 93, 95, 97, 108, 112, 127, 161, 184, 190, 208, 237 f., 254, 256 f., 270 f., 275-277, 291, 296 f., 299, 325, 331, 334 truth 3, 9, 11 f., 14, 16, 19, 22, 25, 47, 54, 56, 60, 65, 70 f., 90, 97 f., 122 f., 130 f., 140, 190, 193, 211, 214, 218 f., 222 f., 231, 242, 246, 251, 259 f., 265, 271, 303, 306, 309 f., 312, 331-333

repetition 12, 14, 27, 29, 35, 38, 42, 44, 58 f., 64-66, 80, 82, 90, 97, 116, 121-125, 131, 137, 158 f., 164, 176, 189, 207, 216, 226, 230-239, 274, 288, 293, 296, 308, 310, 327, 331, 333, 338 f. responsibility 10, 28 f. 41, 43, 60, 66, 82 f., 85, 101, 106 f., 110-114, 118, 121, 124 f., 143 f., 149-151, 167, 196, 198, 205-207, 233, 285, 313, 315 f., 333, 337 Ricoeur, P. 43, 139, 145, 159, 213 Ringleben, J. 47, 170, 189, 242, 298 Rosenkranz, K. 142 f. rupture 63, 92 f., 103, 105 f., 132, 162, 208, 221 f., 226, 237, 265, 268, 320, 332 f., 338 sacrifice 2, 88, 91, 107-125 Schleiermacher, F. 39, 45, 266, 306 self ix, 1-4, 10, 13 f., 17, 19-22, 25, 28-31, 33 f., 40, 43, 50, 52 f., 75, 82-85, 91, 93, 95, 102-106, 109, 111 f., 128 f., 136 f., 142 f., 145, 147, 149-151, 153, 155-190, 192 f., 195-198, 200-229, 231-233, 235-240, 244-271, 274-277, 281-283, 285-294, 296-311, 313-319, 321 f., 324, 328-334, 339 signifier/signified 9, 12, 26, 28, 30, 32, 86, 95, 97, 127 f., 200

upbuilding/edifying 46, 48 f., 90, 99, 106, 137-139, 141, 144-146, 148-155, 161, 178, 198 vortex 203, 315, 321, 329 Westphal, M. 46, 99, 127 will 164-168, 172-181, 184-187, 248-251, 274, 289-293, 300, 303, 311-314, 317 Wyller, E. A. viii, 160