Søren Kierkegaard Newsletter — Issue 38: July 1999

Søren Kierkegaard Newsletter — Issue 38: July 1999

REREADING ONESELF

by Joakim Garff

Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre

Late in October of 1851, Kierkegaard remarks: “Only now does my star arise in Denmark. A little folio book has just come out, a kind of review.” This remark sounds positive, but the magister is unfortunately being ironic, and he has good reasons for being so. The occasion for such feigned adulation is the recent arrival of a piece of work entitled On Magister Kierkegaard’s Activity as an Author: Observations of a Country Priest, by a certain Ludvig Gude, a close friend of royal court chaplain H.L. Martensen, something which is not a good sign. In his comments to Gude’s review (which were so detailed that they quickly grew into a fifty page manuscript!), Kierkegaard remonstrates Gude for not having attempted to differentiate between the pseudonymous and the signed production, and thus not only does Gude run afoul of the authorship’s sophisticated dialectic, but he also comes to employ a somewhat backwards method, whose comic character Kierkegaard is only too well aware of: “It is easy to see that anyone who has a desire for, shall we say, a little commerce in literature, he only needs to take a hodgepodge of citations, here from ‘the Seducer’, there from Johannes Climacus, and then from me, etc., stick them all together as if they were all my words, shows the contradictions therein, and then present such a confused mishmash of an impression as if the author were some kind of mad man. Bravo!”[1]

Yes, well, bravo and all that. Kierkegaard’s character-ization of this “hodgepodge” can, with just a tad of malicious good will, be read as a grimacing prophecy of that manoeuvre which is today practiced under the designation “deconstruction” and which in its lesser chaotic version has brought about a paradigm shift within various specialized studies, including Kierkegaard research. For this reason during the last decade, a whole new set of approaches to Kierkegaard, who has been set free of the “jargon of authenticity” and re-installed in his textual labyrinth with its vast repertoire of images, metaphors, allegories, and other visual material, have been observed. Viewed historically, the deconstruction of Kierkegaard was a reaction against a more traditional synthesizing interpretation, in which the “Kierkegaardian system” (the theory of stages, indirect communication, etc., etc.) was repeated so uncritically that everything was on the verge of coagulating into vicious cliché. Ostensibly, the thought that before Kierkegaard everybody was always wrong was somehow found to be edifying. And thereby seriously making him so right as to be seriously wrong. In other words, deconstruction was also an endeavor in freeing Kierkegaard from that apologetic reductionism which insisted on creating an artificial product, the real Søren Kierkegaard, who would vibrantly arise from the page in all his glory.

Furthermore, deconstruction is not a univocal discipline. From time to time there is some sleight of hand in the manoeuvre such that the reading can devolve into a non-committal text metaphysics which, almost in self-parody, runs the risk of becoming mere “jargon of inauthenticity”. Nevertheless, deconstruction has resulted in a formidable sharpening of the gaze upon the text as text and even upon the textuality of the text, whose inner contradictions, blind spots, rhetorical plays, and exchanges between concepts and images are inspected by the deconstructive reader with a kind of hermeneutics of suspicion which believes just as little in the text’s innocence as in the author’s reliability. At the same time, the premises for academic Auseinandersetzung have almost imperceptibly undergone a change which has resulted in a devaluation of the validity of hard core arguments, thus forcing significantly into the background the ideological interest in maintaining an “intact” Kierkegaard. Just as Kierkegaard interpretation has metamorphosed out of the discursive or epistemological realm and into the demonstratio ad oculus of interpretation through an interactive and exacting textual examination, so has the polemical attack against thinkers of other persuasions, who had previously been made game of in the secondary literature or forced to live a life of disrepute down in the pedestrian byways of the footnotes, correspondingly abated.

Deconstructing Kierkegaard (reading Kierkegaard with Kierkegaard against Kierkegaard) does not imply setting him up for one ambush after another Rather, it means to take him seriously, at his word, because his own texts as they stand are already potentially deconstructive. Kierkegaard’s work is polyphonic and full of textual actors and figures, all of whom are subordinate to a narrating fictional figure, who is capable of anything; for example, distancing him from a work in a postscript which at the same time reveals him as its actual author and as the character who prosaically comments upon the very crisis which the textual actors must suffer before the eyes of the reader; to this is added a publisher who, despite his most energetic efforts, can only relate the most arbitrary information pertaining to the work’s provenance. The texts themselves have the character of a picture puzzle or a cunning labyrinth, found as they are in secret, whether in the innermost parts of a chest-of-drawers under sudden attack or at the bottom of the Søborg Lake, where they have rested for a century before being dragged to the surface by the help of a sophisticated, underwater instrument. This confusing multiplicity of voices, pens, positions, and literary teases is not only found in the aesthetic writings but is also encountered in the more philosophical sections of the collected works (such as Philosophical Fragments and Concluding Unscientific Postscript), and thus requires an enormous vigilance on the part of the reader, a bifocal vision, which not only should take a hold of what Kierkegaard writes but also envelop the text and contemplate how he writes what he writes. This last point in no less important than the first; in fact, perhaps it is even more important, for it is precisely because the texts express their awareness of themselves as constructions so demonstratively that they invite their reader to undertake a deconstruction of them. Thus we see that interpreting Kierkegaard always means deconstructing him; and to deconstruct him is also to admit that one knows that it is precisely this that one is doing.

The Point of View for My Activity as an Author has become a veritable proving ground in the genre, wherein one and all can test their deconstructive mettle. The attractiveness of this text can be explained by the fact that, in terms of genre, The Point of View lies somewhere between biography and confession and thus extends out into the very terrain preferred by the deconstructionist. I myself have ventured into this territory in my article “The Eyes of Argus”, a venture which Sylvia Walsh, in her article “Reading Kierkegaard with Kierkegaard against Garff”, has deemed “highly provocative”, which is not meant as a compliment, since I have, in her eyes, actually revealed myself to be a bad reader who is not only a morally defective Freudian reductionist, but also someone who is seriously lacking that earnestness which is so necessary for understanding the Kierkegaardian enterprise correctly. For an amoral charlatan, it goes without saying that it would be tempting to declare myself in complete agreement, if only to defuse the situation, but the situation results from a difference that is fundamentally hermeneutical in nature, so I will instead attempt to reply.

The hermeneutical difference between us immediately makes itself apparent in Walsh’s first objection to my interpretation, which consists in my use of a rather longish citation from Johannes Climacus which I have ostensibly misunderstood because I have superimposed upon Climacus a postmodern reading strategy which in reality is merely my own. Climacus’ actual intention, I am told, is something quite different: his concern “is not with the interpretation of a text but rather with its appropriation in the life of the believer” (p. 2). There is nothing, absolutely nothing, I can object to here. Although the text in question is not an “edifying” or “Christian” discourse, Walsh is basically correct, which is fortunate, for were she not correct, then I would not have a point, either. Which is to say that if Climacus had actually put forth a postmodern reading strategy, not much would be gained by applying it to Kierkegaard. Indeed, it would be just as ridiculous as the man about whom we are told in Philosophical Fragments, who “in the afternoon displays a ram for a fee which can be seen for free in the morning, grazing in the open field”[2] And this is precisely my point. Climacus, with his seismographically sensitive consciousness of the discrepancy between the “what” and the “how”, here articulates a hermeneutical suspiciousness which comes strikingly close to being a deconstructive conscious-ness. Concerning the ironic observer, it is stated that he does not keep an eye on “what is written in large capital letters or what would show itself as being formulaic given the speaker’s diction (the polite “what” of honorable people); instead, he is careful of the little phrase in between, which evades the high-minded attention of honorable people, a little flag-flying predicate, and that sort of thing.” Even taking into consideration the difference in epochs, it is difficult for me to come up with a better description of the deconstructive reader’s tacking between epistemological and rhetorical discourse, between the concept and the image, and, not to mention, between the author’s declaration of his intentions for his text and what, at times, is the text’s own stubborn sidestepping of these very intentions. In my article, I do not attempt to hide the fact that I have transposed Climacus’ peculiarly situated observations into a particular hermeneutical key; rather, the hypothetical nature of my “caprice” is so obviously undisguised that the text, even if it were in Martian, would fairly bristle with subjunctivity.

From my perspective, a colossal hermeneutical challenge lies in the fact that Kierkegaard, as seen with Climacus, has at hand a presciently deconstructive conscious and that he, with this very consciousness, sits down and writes The Point of View, in which Kierkegaard, with almost all the weapons at his disposal, attempts to guard against a deconstructive reading, because he, at the very least, has a premonition that his reading is the most likely. This realization on Kierkegaard’s part creates the need for evenhanded-ness, connectedness, and systematization to be made possible throughout the entire authorship, which in itself is enough of a reason for writing The Point of View, which I call a meta-text, because it does not desire to be read along the same lines as his other texts, but rather as a text of texts. In my article, I claimed that the existence of earlier efforts at establishing points of view for the production, respectively signed by Climacus and Kierkegaard himself, not only undermined each other’s normative status but also compromised that very point of view which Kierkegaard puts forth in and with The Point of View. Walsh corrects me in regard to a few details (that Climacus does not remain unacknowledged by Kierkegaard and that it is exclusively Climacus who attributes the edifying discourses from 1843 to Kierkegaard). But this I merely acknowledge ad notam, since I see no reason to use time to clarify points that do not have decisive value for my own arguments.

When I undertake what Walsh in her article has much too generously called “a comparative analysis of the various accounts of the authorship” (p.3), it is only in order to identify a problem which is rather more seriously brought to the fore in and by The Point of View and which could perhaps be called the mobility of the hermeneutical focus. In order to emphasize this mobility, I have, in my article, pointed out the changeability of Kierkegaard’s various presentations of the authoriship’s intentionality, which actually has not, with The Point of View, achieved its definitive form. Indeed, as we all know, this declared intentionality undergoes a host of further changes throughout the Journals, in which Kierkegaard himself defines the intentionality of his complete literary enterprise so reductively that not even a naive reader would dream of accepting the proffered definition – even though it be signed by the Master himself! And even if one allows oneself the thought experiment that a Kierkgaard of sound mind wrote the very last word of the manuscript to The Point of View on the night of November 10-11, 1855, in his sickbed at Frederiks Hospital, one should not accept as given that this account of the authorship’s intentionality converges with the other 43 varying texts which also make up the authorship. Nor does it imply that the reader eo ipso is duty-bound to adopt Kierkegaard’s own communicative priorities, since it is precisely Kierkegaard the author, who (dressed as Climacus, certainly) takes the part of the reader against the author, who is not necessarily “his own words best interpreter”, by observing that it cannot “help a reader that the author ‘meant this and that’ when it has not been realized.”[3]

What is interesting about the delineating of the production as it takes place in The Point of View is Kierkegaard’s desire for numerical symmetry between the aesthetic and religious texts presented therein and how this deisre has compelled him to undertake a variety of not exactly transparent transactions. I draw attention to this fact in order to show how Kierkegaard’s textual delineation creates a somewhat untethered existence for a text such as A Literary Review which was delegated by Kierkegaard first to one and then to the other part of the production and finally booted out of his accounting of the totality of the authorship entirely. My point was and still is that it is only through such a reductive definition of the authorship that Kierkegaard himself can bring about a wholeness in which all of his collected writings can partake of a balanced symmetry such that a maieutic synchronicity between the aesthetic and the religious is set in place. Thus, when I write in this context that Kierkegaard, in the name of his survey’s evenhandedness, must leave out his “aesthetic juvenilia” from The Point of View, I am not not considering A Literary Review or The Crisis or The Crisis in the Life of an Actress, as Walsh seems to think, but rather such texts as From the Papers of One Still Living and The Concept of Irony as well as those articles for periodicals which Kierkegaard had owned to in “A First and Last Explanation” but had chosen to leave out of his scorekeeping survey.

That the overly aesthetic writing of The Crisis or The Crisis in the Life of an Actress causes Kierkegaard problems is a fact that becomes excessively evident from his reflections in the Journals where this particular text has given occasion to what might be called a religious crisis in the life of its author. “Nothing exhausts me so terribly as negative decisions”, he laments in the early summer of 1848, when he is just about to publish The Crisis, but, please note, just about to. Once again he has experienced that sudden “flying together of a host of reflections amidst which [he] almost succumbs”. To publish or not to publish – that is the real question. First, the many “pros” are laid out: He would like to please Fru Heiberg while at the same time “poking a little fun” at her husband, J.L. Heiberg, to whom he would also like to address a couple of home truths; thereafter came the consideration that Editor Giødwad had entreated so pleasantly for just such an article for his newspaper; and finally, Kierkegaard can, by making The Crisis public, counteract the notion that he, whose production for the longest time had been exclusively religious, had become “holy”[4] and “serious”.[5] And it is precisely this latter attribute, this “seriousness” which takes the shape of a mere external gesture, that Kierkegaard views as being an utter misunderstanding of the nature of true seriousness. “This is a very important reason pro. But the contra speaks. I have now become so decisively involved in the Christian, have presented so much of that so strongly and seriously, that there will certainly be those who will now be affected. For such as these, it could now almost become an offense to hear that I have written about an actress in a feuilleton. And, truly, one does have a responsibility toward such people. (…) Besides, I do not have at this precise moment any religious writing ready for the printer which could come out on the same day. Therefore, it will not be published.”[6] Yet a few entries later, Kierkegaard has apparently reversed his decision: “No, no, the little article will be published.” And so it was. Thus, Kierkegaard could breathe a wee bit easier, resting now in the assurance that had he, in fact, died without having published “that particular little article”, then there would certainly have been “slander, given the dreadfully thoughtless confusion of concepts indicative of our age, especially about my being an apostle. Great God! Instead of being a help in honoring the Christian, I would have merely succeeded in ruining it.”[7] But, as is often the case, Kierkegaard’s greatly overestimates his contemporaries’ interest in his literary economy. So, shortly thereafter when Rasmus Nielsen takes one on the chin because he did not grasp that The Crisis was intended as an indirect and inverted communication, it is simply another case of needless violence directed against the innocent.

The reason I present this example is, in part, to show the fluctuation in Kierkegaard’s own motivations for publishing (and, concomitantly, for not publishing) and, in part, in order to draw attention to the problematical nature of his own genre categorizations when they become polarized between the so-called aesthetic and religious productivity. As justified as Walsh is, however, in touting “the fact that Kierkegaard places a dash between the pseudonymous writings and the eighteen edifying discourses in the list of works comprising the first group and distinguishes them with the word samt (‘plus’ or ‘along with’)” (p. 5), this fact does not alter my argument and, actually, substantiates my view that Kierkegaard’s schematization of his production is and remains a rather doubtful construction which is, at bottom, based upon something so unkierkegaardian as pure quantitative size. Yet I find much more important than this apologetic concern for balance in Kierkegaard’s production the aforementioned “genre problem”, around which Walsh moves, unaffected and untroubled. What does it mean, and to what extent can one accept, that Kierkegaard, for example, relegates The Concept of Anxiety to his aesthetic production; and what con-sequences result for the interpretation of the second half of Either/Or, given the startling fact that the author in propia persona also sets this work under the rubric of the aesthetic? When considered rhetorically, Kierkegaard’s writings are complex in the extreme, and thus even an appropriation of his own genre definitions will necessarily also lead to a reductive reading.

Kierkegaard’s contemporaries did not understand him, of this he was convinced, but perhaps posterity would. Such a fear of being misunderstood might seem exaggerated in an author who at almost every opportunity, whether personal or pseudonymous, had attempted to disavow the greater part of his authorship and with a gesture of giddy generosity foist it upon his reader. The Point of View is particularly peculiar, given the fact that in a certain sense it defies some of the more basic communicative mechanisms found in Kierkegaard’s authorship, since it addresses its reader via a kind of demythologization in order to orient him or her about a series of relationships which do not lend themselves to direct communication or which can only flourish in silence; for eample, the fact that an author deceives his reader, even deceives his reader into truth, does not change the fact that it is still deception.

But there is also another way in which The Point of View seems strikingly subversive, for on a starkly simplified plane, one could claim that if what The Point of View is trying to communicate to its reader were actually as evident as Kierkegaard would like us to think it is, then he really did not need to have written The Point of View at all. That Kierkegaard nonetheless proceeded to write The Point of View points, as suggested, to his fear of being misunderstood, perhaps even deconstructed. And when he thus explicitly and emphatically opposes an aesthetic reading, it is precisely because, logically viewed, he himself had already undertaken such a reading and therefore knew that it was not only a possible reading; he knew it was perhaps the most likely. Thus, for long stretches in The Point of View Kierkegaard seems to be parodying the very difficulty he finds himself in; he anticipates the possible objections of the critical or distrusting reader, he pretends value neutrality in his judgements, he frequently assures us of his impartiality, he stresses his distance from his material, but he is nonetheless or, perhaps, especially forced by this performance into the very apologia which he had earlier promised his reader that The Point of View in point of fact would never become. And thus as the text goes on, Kierkegaard must be forever grasping at even more sophisticated smoke and subterfuge and mirrors in order to outdo himself in procurring that necessary trustworthiness for which his creation has relentlessly generated a greater and greater need. It is through this process that the originally somewhat soberly reporting Kierkegaard receives the assistance of that experienced author of the same name whose familiarity with a host of fictional forms turns The Point of View into that particular mixtum compositum which I, with an unbeautiful but effective neologism, have called documenta(fic)tion.

Walsh concludes her critique convinced that I am “convinced that Kierkegaard is a deceiver”, a conviction which I allegedly base on four “rather flimsy pieces of post facto evidence” (p. 9). This claim astonishes me somewhat, especially given that I do not need to go to any great lengths in my article to reveal Kierkegaard as a deceiver, since it is Kierkegaard himself who refers expressis verbis in The Point of View to the cunning deceptions by which he has deceived his readers into the truth. Thus, one can hardly blame me for Kierkegaard’s admitting to this manipulative praxis directly. My own point presupposes that Kierkegaard admits to his own deception, since it is my goal to expose the performatively problematical figure that Kierkegaard presupposes his reader will accept, namely the figure that says: “I deceive, believe me!” And the probem which I would concomitantly like to highlight is that deception and self-deception have an unhappy tendency to go hand in hand.

Here my concern is closely connected to the criteria necessary for establishing a text’s reliability which conceivably cannot be separated completely from the concrete reader. But neither can it just be reduced to a question of the presence of the requisite seriousness or the absence thereof in a particular concrete reader. “If one lacks seriousness,” claims Walsh, “or at least the capacity for it, no amount of evidence will convince the sophistical reader of the truth of any explanation” (p. 8). And, yes, I did catch the mild moral reprimand, but I regard it a dubious operation to substitute hermeneutical terms for moral ones, not only because such an substitution smacks of incipient interpretive hegemony but because it also implies that the reader’s “seriousness” may evolve into being nothing more than a tacit sanctioning of fiction. Kierkegaard’s “lover,” his implicit reader who first comes and then sees how everything in Kierkegaard’s life and production “comes together, right down to the last jot and tittle,”[8] is precisely that reader who lets himself be seduced by Kierkegaard into reading fiction as non-fiction (and vice-versa); indeed – I have plainly claimed – that unreflective innocence, such as that which the Seducer presupposed in Cordelia, closely resembles that uncritical seriousness which Kierkegaard occasionally presupposes for his reader. By the same token, the reader should especially keep a watchful eye on Kierkegaard’s rhetoric which is not harmless but seductive. Because, as Rainer Nägele so succinctly observed in Echoes of Translation, it is “the task of rhetorical analysis to direct the attention to that which produces certain effects instead of being seduced by the effects.”[9]

Speaking of seduction, it rather puzzled me that Walsh called my way of reading Kierkegaard “psychoanalytic reductionism” of the Freudian variety (p. 10), because I am not a Freudian of any stripe. Instead, I, for my part, have written several small parodies of what might be called the vulgar Freudian treatments of Kierkegaard which have become as common as they are unendurable, always ending as they do in complete kitsch. Although it seems to me that my ironic distance is embarrassingly evident (“gefundenes Fressen for enhver freudianisk Feinschmecker”—“lad nu Freud få fred”),[10] it nevertheless seems apparent that the parody should have been made even more apparent, so that in this way it becomes an indirect reminder of how difficult it is to account for such textual devices and how easily they, in reality, can backfire. A kierkegaardian notabene. And a notabene to Kierkegaard (and Kierkegaardians).

Walsh devotes the last part of her critique to a rather truncated analysis of that section of my own article in which I attempt to follow Kierkegaard in a complicated dialectic between the autonomy of the producer of a text and the heteronomy of the text so produced. What occasions this discussion is the notion of “the part of Governance” in Kierkegaard’s activity as an author. At this point, Walsh objects that “Kierkegaard attributes the inexplicable element in his discourses to God, that is, to a transcendent source, not to one inherent in the system of signs itself” (p. 10). This objection, however, is not a real objection, for I am completely aware of the fact that Kierkegaard is not a semiotician, but if Climacus can amuse himself with a little “metaphysical caprice”, then–mutatis mutandis–I, too, can engage in a little anti-metaphysical capriciousness. When I substitute the concept “Divine Guidance” with an a-religious concept such as “how the text has guided its writer”,[11] I do so in complete awareness of the fact that this is just an at-tempt to grasp the nature of the experiences which Kierkegaard the writer has had with his text. In this way, I take his assertions concerning the non-autonomous activity within text production quite literally, but as I would also like to understand them, I refuse to wrap them up in metaphysical window dressing —although this would be the easiest thing to do. Walsh quotes me as having described Kierkegaard’s description of “the part of Divine Guidance” in his activity as an author as evidence of his “rampant megalomania” (p. 10), but this is only half the truth or, rather, even less, since I wrote the exact opposite. Namely, that the concept could (note: the subjunctive once again!) at first glance seem to be such a megalomania but that in reality it was actually closer to an admission of his limited autonomy.

It is this dialectical interchange between the writer and his writing which intriques me, because it also intrigued Kierkegaard, who turns and returns to the topic in journal entry after journal entry, and who is thrown into an unmistakable amazement over the fact that he “has been used, without [himself] even rightly knowing it” and therefore he cannot say, in the solid sense of autonomy, “I”.[12] In my article, I attempt to follow Kierkegaard and let my reflections take shape as a kind of critical co-amazement. Something which Walsh, who calls my efforts “fictive interpretation” (p. 11), obviously does not find attractive, deeming unworthy of a dime Kierkegaard’s journal entries on his experience of reduced autonomy. As she wishes. Yet I wish she would invest a little time in these journal entries, as it would interest me to see what position she takes on the journal entries in question.

When one takes into consideration Kierkegaard’s reduced autonomy, I see only a blithe paradox in the fact that Kierkegaard contemplated publishing The Point of View–which was the closest he had come to an autobiography–in the name of pseudonym Johannes de silentio! Ever since I discovered this extraordinary fact, whose extraordinary nature is not at all diminished by the reality that Kierkegaard–as Walsh rightly points out–“rejects this possibility” (p. 11), this mere circumstance, that such a possibility was even entertained as a possibility, has been for me symptomatic of the crisis in Kierkegaard’s understanding of himself and his authority as a writer which the writing of The Point of View was intended to overcome and which it only succeeded in intensifying.

That Walsh and I cannot be expected to come to an immediate agreement about such matters is obvious. And despite the fact that it is her urgent desire to divest me of all seriousness in her critique by confronting me with the same ironizing Climacus with whom I confronted Kierkegaard in my own article, I actually view such an interpretive manoeuvre as a promising sign of Walsh’s having appropriated some of those aspects of deconstruction which have always been considered slightly impertinent.

Yes, well, that was almost a joke. And were I just a little more serious, I would take advantage of this opportunity to cease speaking.

NOTES