Kierkegaard's Indirect Politics

KIERKEGAARD’S INDIRECT POLITICS
VIBS
Volume 269
Robert Ginsberg
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Adrianne McEvoy
Rem B. Edwards J.D. Mininger
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Philosophy, Literature, and Politics
PLP
Edited by Leonidas Donskis and J.D. Mininger
KIERKEGAARD’S INDIRECT POLITICS
Interludes with Lukács, Schmitt, Benjamin and Adorno
Bartholomew Ryan
Amsterdam - New York, NY 2014

Cover image: Feininger, Lyonel (1871-1956): El hombre blanco/The White
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Leonidas Donskis and J. D. Mininger

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VIBS 226
For my parents Conor and Eilis
It is not down on any map; true places never are.
Herman Melville, Moby Dick, 1851
Restlessness, in the sense of the hubbub of finitude, soon palls; but

restlessness in the pregnant sense, the restlessness of infinity, the joyous,
robust originality that, rejuvenating, invigorating, healing, stirs the water is a
great rarity, and it is in this sense that she is restlessness. Yet in turn this
restlessness signifies something, and something very great; it signifies the
first fieriness of an essential genius. And this restlessness does not signify
anything accidental; it does not mean that she cannot stand still; on the
contrary, it signifies that even when she is standing still one has an
intimation of this inner restlessness, but, note well, in repose. It does not
mean that she comes running onto the stage; on the contrary, it means that
when she is merely moving one has an intimation of the impetus of infinity.
It does not mean that she talks so fast that one cannot follow her; on the
contrary, it means that when she speaks very slowly one senses the
animation and inspiration. This restlessness does not mean that she must
very soon become tired; just the opposite, it discloses an elementary
indefatigableness, like that of the wind, of the sounds of nature; it discloses
that her roguishness is inexhaustibly rich, so that it continually only betrays
that she possesses ever so much more; it discloses that her coquetry (and a
character such as this utterly without coquetry is unthinkable) is nothing else
than a happy, innocent mind’s joyful, triumphant awareness of its
indescribable good fortune.
Inter et Inter, The Crisis and a Crisis in the Life of an Actress, 1848
CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS xiii
LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS xv
EDITORIAL FOREWORD xix
PREFACE BY GEORGE PATTISON xxiii
INTRODUCTION 1
1. Indirect Politics as Interlude (Mellemspil) 1

2. Reliving the Present Age 4
3. Images, Figures, and Drama Motifs 6
4. Interludes with Lukács, Schmitt, Benjamin and Adorno 8
ONE Crossroads of Revolution and Reaction 13
1. The Significance of 1848 13

2. The Skillevei 20
3. Ambiguities in the Individual and Society 27
4. Discourses for the ‘Present Age’ 36
TWO Inwardness as an Expression for Revolutionary Praxis 43

(Georg Lukács)
1. The Faustian Phase 44

2. Inwardness as an Expression for Revolutionary Praxis 52
3. The Reckoning 62
4. Dialectics of Totality and Disintegration 74
THREE Zones of Exception (Carl Schmitt) 89
1. The Exception 91
2. The Question of Political Romanticism 102
3. Political Despair 113
4. Kierkegaardian Praxis 123
xii KIERKEGAARD’S INDIRECT POLITICS
FOUR Loafers of History (Walter Benjamin) 135
1. Dagdrivers and Flâneurs 136

2. Tradition and Destruction 149
3. The Messianic, Awakening, and Politics as Nihilism 163
FIVE Out of the Petrified Primordial Landscape 177

(Theodor Adorno)
1. Inwardness as a Petrified Primordial Landscape 179

2. Dialectical Journeys 193
3. Melancholy and Myth 207
4. “Who’s There?” 220
CONCLUSION 233
1. Against the Tide 233

2. Incognito or Set of Masks 234
3. Keeping Open the Wound of Negativity 236
NOTES 239
BIBLIOGRAPHY 253
ABOUT THE AUTHOR 267
INDEX 269
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
For their advice, encouragement and stimulating conversation relating to

Kierkegaard and other writers included in this book, I would like to thank
George Pattison, J.D. Mininger and Richard Purkarthofer. I would also like to
thank FCT and Universidade Nova de Lisboa for supporting me in the final
writing of this book, and those past and present at the Faculty of Theology at
the University of Aarhus, especially Per Bilde, Niels Grønkjær, Troels
Nørager, and Carsten Riis for supporting my three-year scholarship in the
initial preparation for this book. I spent two periods of six months at the Søren
Kierkegaard Research Centre in Copenhagen, and I am most grateful to the
director Niels Jørgen Cappelørn and secretary Bjarne Still Laurberg for their
hospitality and support. I would also like to thank Gordon Marino and
Cynthia Lund for giving me the opportunity to research and stay at the
Kierkegaard Library at St. Olaf College, Minnesota. My thanks also to Hugh
Pyper for his generous conversation and insights on Johanne Luise Heiberg, to
András Nagy for inspiring my reading on Lukács, and to Jon Stewart for
suggestions regarding Hegel, Heiberg and Martensen. And finally, I wish to
thank Arnoldas Stramskas for the proof-reading and formatting of the final
manuscript.
ABBREVIATIONS
Throughout the book I have abbreviated the works of Kierkegaard, Lukács,

Schmitt, Benjamin and Adorno, whenever they are referenced in the body of
the text. In regard to Kierkegaard, the Danish edition (SKS) is followed by the
English Princeton translation, except for the Journal references, where I refer
to the old Danish references of Pap. followed nearly always by the Alastair
Hannay Penguin translation. Below is the list of the abbreviations.
Søren Kierkegaard
BA The Book on Adler

CA The Concept of Anxiety
CD Christian Discourses / The Crisis and a Crisis in the Life of an
Actress
CI The Concept of Irony
COR The Corsair Affair
CUP Concluding Unscientific Postscript
EOI Either/Or Part I
EOII Either/Or Part II
EUD Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses
FSE For Self-Examination / Judge for Yourself
FT Fear and Trembling
LD Letters and Documents
M The Moment
P Prefaces
Pap. Journals and Papers
PC Practice in Christianity
PF Philosophical Fragments / Johannes Climacus
POSL From the Papers of One Still Living
PV The Point of View
xvi KIERKEGAARD’S INDIRECT POLITICS
R Repetition
SKS Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter
SLW Stages on Life’s Way
SUD The Sickness unto Death
TA Two Ages:A Literary Review
TD Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions
UDVS Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits
WA Without Authority
WL Works of Love
Theodor Adorno
AT Aesthetic Theory
B Beethoven: The Philosophy of Music
DE Dialectic of Enlightenment
K Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic
MM Minima Moralia
ND Negative Dialectics
NL1 Notes on Literature: Volume One
NL2 Notes of Literature: Volume Two
P Prisms
Walter Benjamin
A The Arcades Project (each quote is abbreviated to A followed by the

reference letter and number from the text)
I Illuminations
O The Origin of German Tragic Drama (Trauerspiel)
SW1 Selected Writings: Volume One
Abbreviations xvii
SW2 Selected Writings: Volume Two

SW3 Selected Writings: Volume Three
SW4 Selected Writings: Volume Four
Georg Lukács
DR The Destruction of Reason

GA Goethe and his Age
HCC History and Class Consciousness
SF Soul and Form
TN The Theory of the Novel
YH The Young Hegel
Carl Schmitt
CP The Concept of the Political

CPD The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy
HH Hamlet or Hecuba
L The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes
NE The Nomos of the Earth
PR Political Romanticism
PT Political Theology
RPC Roman Catholicism and Political Form
EDITORIAL FOREWORD
In Kierkegaard´s Indirect Politics: Interludes with Lukács, Schmitt, Benjamin
and Adorno, Bartholomew Ryan presents his readers with a difficult, slippery
object of study: a concept of indirect politics—easily named, but frustratingly
elusive by traditional propositional definition. To help his readers, Ryan
locates the concept’s genesis in the writings of Søren Kierkegaard, in
particular Kierkegaard’s efforts of 1848. In the book’s opening chapter on
Kierkegaard’s 1848 texts, Ryan connects Kierkegaard’s philosophical
concerns—such as preventing thought and existence from being mistaken for
one another—to the historical circumstances of the incendiary European
political context of 1848. Here the question of Kierkegaard’s politics is posed
clearly, in both biographical (existential) and philosophical (conceptual)
terms. Yet, in the wake of the opening chapter the book arcs out into a series
of “interludes” that chart Kierkegaard’s influence on the thought and writing
of four important intellectuals of the German-speaking interwar era: Lukács,
Schmitt, Benjamin and Adorno. What kind of scholarly object is this
Kierkegaardian indirect politics, such that it must be sought particularly in the
German afterlife of Kierkegaard’s writings?
In each subsequent chapter, or interlude, a Kierkegaardian indirect
politics is demonstrated—indirectly. Each of the four investigations into
Kierkegaard’s influence on these four thinkers speaks to the matter of indirect
politics; but perhaps some of the most profound insights into this concept
occur not within the sections themselves, but in the ways in which the
interludes relate to one another as stars of a greater constellation to which they
can only indicate together, fleetingly, as activated by the reader’s own insights
and interests. Politics here seems to refer less to a positive program or
platform, and less still to the friend/enemy distinction for which one of these
constellation points—Carl Schmitt—is intellectually renowned; instead,
Ryan’s understanding of politics seems to both borrow and break from
Schmitt and Kierkegaard. Indirect politics begins with the existential
circumstances of Kierkegaard’s single individual. But via Kierkegaard’s
attempts to unsettle the individual through (self-)reflection on the very
contradiction between thought and existence, the common—and therefore
political—plane of existence emerges as that which is always at stake in every
individual. Ryan’s concept of Kierkegaardian indirect politics seeks a way to
articulate the common via its seeming opposite—Kierkegaard’s single
individual—which the latter materializes precisely by foreclosing the
common. Ryan’s conception of indirect politics poses common existence, and
therefore common struggle, as a neutral matrix of the entire individual-
manifold structure: an absent cause, immanent in its own effect. This
somewhat parallax approach to conceiving politics is what Ryan, following
Kierkegaard’s own approach to communication, calls “indirect.”
xx KIERKEGAARD’S INDIRECT POLITICS
Whether the notion of an indirect politics borne of Kierkegaard’s

philosophy faithfully retains Kierkegaard’s original intentions or whether it
disrupts those intentions is not entirely clear, for Ryan addresses himself and
Kierkegaard’s philosophy both to Kierkegaard’s historical moment and our
own. Regardless if he strays from the letter, Ryan’s book certainly aspires to
maintain the Kierkegaardian spirit: the structure of the book is itself a kind of
performance of Kierkegaardian indirect politics.
What is the interaction between these texts and authors? Bundled
together the interludes do not lay out a map of where politics can be found—
there is no X to mark the spot here. Rather, these philosophical interludes
place Kierkegaard in conversation with these thinkers, and therefore into
conversation with one another, all without sublating these interludes into
some misleading systematic whole. No map in any traditional sense, Ryan’s
text is a political map of an entirely different sort—a scholarly negotiation of
the intellectual, textual, and conceptual scars that mark where each of these
thinkers confronted Kierkegaard, and thus where Kierkegaard himself
confronted the primacy and problem of political praxis otherwise practiced
only behind numerous and varied masks of philosophical concern.
And what is the specificity of these studies as “interludes”? To be sure,
this is no Platonic dialogue. If it were, the chapters would follow a decidedly
more teleological arc; as it is, they remain constellations capable of being read
in almost any order, with insights to be gained from each new arrangement. In
fact, were it a dialectical dialogue, we would be more correct to call it a
monologue, spoken through cheap philosophical masks by Ryan the puppet
master. But Ryan poses his studies of Kierkegaard’s influence on these
interwar thinkers as “interludes”—how delightfully Kierkegaardian!
Conceptual personae illuminate a philosophical landscape, all the while
bearing the description of interludes, ‘light entertainment’, something to fill
the space between the main acts. But this conversation is anything but folly.
While seeking an articulation of the common (plane of politics) indirectly
through the interaction of Kierkegaard’s philosophy in the work of Lukács,
Schmitt, Benjamin and Adorno, the gravity of Ryan’s study has direct and
clear manifestations. One point is perhaps more salient than any other factor
in explaining his studies as interludes, or conversations-that-are-not-
dialogues: Kierkegaard’s Indirect Politics refuses to sublate the tensions,
differences, and asymmetries found in the collision of these thinkers with
Kierkegaard’s work. For example, the co-mingling of Carl Schmitt’s Nazi
past with his notable intellectual debt to Kierkegaardian philosophy tellingly
demonstrates this irreducible tension. Thus, on the basis of the interlude
format, which rejects both systematization and the Platonic dialogue’s formal
task of sublating difference, the concept of Kierkegaardian indirect politics
remains tethered to its own emergence within this constellation of thinkers.
Like the Kierkegaardian single individual, it must be produced and activated
Editorial foreword xxi
anew, over and over again, for it is nothing ready-made or exchangeable.

Kierkegaardian indirect politics has no autonomous material existence outside
of the context and problems that produced it; it is simply the effect of its own
effects.
At once a Kierkegaardian book on Kierkegaard and an intellectual
history of four eminent philosophical minds of the German-speaking
twentieth century, Bartholomew Ryan’s Kierkegaard’s Indirect Politics offers
insight and challenges to seasoned scholars of Kierkegaard and his intellectual
legacy; at the same time, it provides uninitiated readers with a primer on the
power of political critique of and by key figures from continental philosophy
of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Though the thought in his book
bespeaks of indirectness of truth and address, Bartholomew Ryan very
directly communicates his passion here—his passion for exploring these
authors and concepts, and their histories and future. This book is
Kierkegaardian indeed.
J.D. Mininger
Philosophy, Literature, and Politics,
Series Co-Editor
PREFACE
Bartholomew Ryan’s study of Kierkegaard’s ‘indirect politics’ takes up a task

that has long lain dormant in Kierkegaard studies. It is not that no one before
him has attempted to bring Kierkegaard into dialogue with issues of society
and politics. Ryan is aware of other forays into this territory and both cites and
respects them. What he does that is truly original is to combine two different
but related sets of questions. The first concerns whether and how we might
productively apply Kierkegaard’s writings to our own contemporary political
situation. The second relates to Kierkegaard’s actual impact on some of the
key figures of twentieth century political thought. The importance of bringing
these together is that addressing the first without attending to the second will
remain abstract and up in the air. No more than any of the other great moderns
is Kierkegaard a timeless figure who can be detached from his own time and
from the ‘effective history’ of his work. And, even where Kierkegaard is not
named and even where the struggle to redefine the heritage of Marxism is not
explicit, that effective history is one that unites us with Kierkegaard.
Kierkegaard’s interpreters have, in significant ways, been our predecessors.
A Kierkegaardian politics will therefore need to engage with this history,
which, as Ryan points out in the Introduction, has often been a hidden history.
However, it is becoming increasingly clear that, for the generation of German-
speaking thinkers who came to intellectual maturity in the first quarter of the
twentieth century, Kierkegaard was a pivotal thinker, often set alongside two
of the other major cultural influences of the time, Nietzsche and
Dostoevsky—both of whom also played not a little part in shaping the
political landscape of the time. But why should this be so? One reason is that
this was a time in which the cement binding individual, social, religious, and
political identities was ceasing to hold. Already before the war, the peculiar
tensions of the multi-religious, multi-ethnic Austro-Hungarian Empire were
generating radical crises of identity and it is perhaps no wonder that this
provided the context in which some of the earliest significant responses
outside Denmark to Kierkegaard’s thought took shape. Amongst those finding
inspiration or provocation in his thought in this context were Buber, Kraus,
Kassner, Rilke, Dallago, Haecker, Wittgenstein—and one of Ryan’s key
figures, the young George Lukács. And if Lukács was not yet a political
thinker at the time of his first encounters with Kierkegaard, he was soon to be
applying Kierkegaard’s model of Abraham’s teleological suspension of the
ethical to his own career as a Bolshevik commissar. With the defeat of
Germany and the end of Empire, the former Reich was itself soon gripped by
an all-encompassing crisis of identity. This was the time in which Spengler
wrote The Downfall of the West and von Balthasar produced his Apocalypse of
the German Soul. And if this critical condition was prevalent throughout
xxiv KIERKEGAARD’S INDIRECT POLITICS
society and in all aspects of culture, this was perhaps most intensely true for
left-wing Jewish intellectuals who were both distanced from Jewish religious
beliefs and practices but also keenly aware—how could they not be?—of their
Jewish identity. For these thinkers of the left, the kind of return to roots found
in Buber, Rosenzweig, and Scholem could not answer their need for a new
politics. But, to the extent that they were also inheritors of the traditions of
German culture, the brutal discipline of Soviet Communism could only be a
source of further anguish (even if, as in the case of Lukács, the result was
submission to the party line). And, of course, as the Weimar Republic
foundered and was replaced by Hitler’s new Reich, all of this became literally
a matter of life and death.
Kierkegaard’s crises were, on the whole—or at first glance—of a more
personal nature. The struggles with a melancholy super-ego and the broken
engagement featured prominently in the secondary literature of the time. But,
as Ryan also points out, Denmark’s velvet revolution of 1848 also played a
crucial part in shaping the last period of his authorship and it became ever
clearer that his quarrel was not just with a certain kind of aestheticism but
with the very attempt to mould Christianity, democracy, and culture into a
unified whole. His objections were framed humorously, ironically, and
satirically—but also, increasingly, with anger and a pathos that went to the
edge of inviting martyrdom (it certainly brought mockery and ostracism on
him). His voice, then, was well-tuned to speak to those who saw the various
elements of the social whole falling apart before their eyes. This didn’t mean
that they saw his solution (if he offered a ‘solution’ at all) as their solution. On
the contrary, it was especially painful for those on the left to see that
Kierkegaard could so easily be used as an exemplary figure by the decisionists
of the right. Ryan shows how this happened in the case of Schmitt, but he was
by no means the only one to read Kierkegaard in this way (Bauemler and
Heidegger might also be cited here, or the theologian and Kierkegaard scholar
Emmanuel Hirsch). This could lead—as it did for Adorno—to a rejection of
Kierkegaard, even despite an all-too apparent (if unacknowledged)
Kierkegaardian element in a thinker’s own development.
The stakes, then, were high, perhaps as high as they could be in the
reception of a thinker from another time and place. One consequence of this
was that if Kierkegaard was being read—as he was—with passion, positively
or negatively, the outcome was not always the kind of reading that
contemporary academic scholarship might approve. Tendencies and positions
were ascribed to the Dane that seem to force his thought into a pre-existing
mould and that with greater or lesser deliberation ignore his own cautions on
one-sided readings of particular texts. Few of these readings would survive
the scrutiny of a more rigorous research-oriented culture. But perhaps that is
connected with the reasons why they could also become primary texts in their
Preface xxv
own right and, as I have suggested, become an ‘effective history’ that still has
resonance for us today.
Ryan’s book too is an engaged and passionate study. He has done his
research—but the outcome is not a dry, neutral textbook: it is itself testimony
to the importance and the possibility of an ‘indirect politics’. Today’s
atmosphere is different from that of the 1920s and 1930s and, if our
challenges are no less serious, our politics are not primarily shaped by
clashing totalitarianisms. In this connection, Ryan’s ‘discovery’ of the
Kierkegaardian ‘loafer’ is an important contribution to the debate
(remembering perhaps Ellul’s hint that idleness might be one of the last
surviving means of resistance to the encroachments of the technological
system).
In any case, this is a book that will speak well beyond the community of
Kierkegaard scholars, provoking debate and stimulating further study of this
pivotal moment in modern intellectual life.
George Pattison
Oxford
INTRODUCTION
1. Indirect Politics as Interlude (Mellemspil)
No, politics is not for me. To follow politics, even if only domestic politics,
is nowadays an impossibility, for me, at any rate […] Politics is too much for
me. I love to focus my attention on lesser things, in which one may
sometimes encounter exactly the same.
Kierkegaard [LD 253, 1848]
Does it make sense to write a book on ‘Søren Kierkegaard’ and ‘politics’?

Might it not be the height of contradiction to juxtapose the two? Kierkegaard
already appears to have stated his opinion on the matter: “No, politics is not
for me”. But by focusing on “lesser things” Kierkegaard says that he may
encounter exactly the same thing. And what is meant by the term ‘indirect
politics’? ‘Indirect Politics’ explains the interstitial space between several
disciplines such as politics, theology, law, literature and philosophy. The
concept emerges in this book through an exploration of key areas of
Kierkegaard’s thought, and how and why Kierkegaard’s work has such crucial
influence on four radical critical thinkers of the twentieth century (Georg
Lukács, Carl Schmitt, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor Adorno) whose work
continues to be central to the intellectual and political landscape we find
ourselves living in today. The concept indirect politics is not multi- or trans-
disciplinary because it is a negative space within each discipline; it is inter-
disciplinary because it nevertheless demands attention from those disciplines
by asking them to rethink themselves. Indirect politics is a set of masks that
continually displaces disciplinary identity from one field to the next just at the
moment it seems clear: theology masks politics; law masks theology; political
theory masks philosophy; and psychology masks literary critical approaches.
Its thematic deferral of overarching traditional disciplinary codes is precisely
its inter-disciplinarity: only and always between and among, and never a
passive or facile accumulation of several topics. Kierkegaard’s own work is a
prime example of inter-disciplinarity as the refusal of fixed disciplinary
boundaries, and the whole point of borrowing from various disciplines is not
to maintain the integrity of each, but precisely to dissolve the boundaries, and
to develop an entirely new framework within which to rethink the act of
political praxis.
Indirect politics is the gap or interlude (Mellemspil in Danish) that makes
room for the dialectical leap, the exception, the exile and loafer, and the
negative foil to all totality. Each of these areas is explicitly revealed in the
writings and lives of the four thinkers in the wake of Kierkegaard through
chapters two to five. Kierkegaard is not a political thinker and yet he turns out
2 KIERKEGAARD’S INDIRECT POLITICS
to be a major influence in certain radical political thinking of the twentieth

century, a fact that has remained the best kept secret in the twentieth century
history of ideas. This book aims to bring to life Kierkegaard’s remarkable
oeuvre, to demonstrate how a new interdisciplinary landscape is created by
juxtaposing his thought with Lukács (dialectical leap), Schmitt (state of
exception), Benjamin (loafers of history) and Adorno (negative dialectics and
the unfinished journey), and how they are in passionate conversation with one
another. In turn, I show the persistence of Kierkegaard’s thought in the highly
creative and troubled interwar years of the twentieth century, and how these
issues of the interwar years have still not been resolved today.
One must continually be aware of two aspects of Kierkegaard before
attempting to imagine indirect politics. First, as a thinker Kierkegaard is
always polemical (“Every religious author is eo ipso polemical,” he writes,
“because the world is not so good that the religious can be assumed to have
triumphed or to be in the majority” (SKS16, 45 / PV, 67)); and second, his
thought always focuses on concrete, human existence—in particular, the fate
of the single individual [den Enkelte]—before his or her God and in the world.
And yet the importance of the single individual is that s/he is “the category of
spirit, of spiritual awakening, as diametrically opposite to politics as possible”
(SKS16, 101 / PV, 121). Kierkegaard prioritizes both the single individual in
the world, and the eternal and/or God over and above any duties or
responsibilities to government, state, country and world. In Kierkegaard’s
writings, what is presented as the greatest task for humankind is to attain
one’s individuality before “God” and at the same time, to live in the world,
which means to challenge and engage in the world. As Kierkegaard writes:
“Of all anguish, the greatest is this—to have the task of being spirit and then
have to live among men” (Pap. IX A 38, 1848), and yet the overwhelming
inclusiveness of Kierkegaard’s thought is that “In the world of the spirit, all
are invited, […] if it pertains to one single person it pertains to all” (SKS5,
324 / EUD, 335).
In a simple sense, we cannot speak of Kierkegaard and politics together.
But Kierkegaard’s indirect politics exists on a general level in two ways. First,
because Kierkegaard does not write political theses and despises traditional
politics, his politics can only be indirect. If the whole of Kierkegaard’s
authorship exists to unsettle human beings, then the idea is that if people
become more self-aware of themselves as individuals formed by their own
decisions, this may lead them to also more radically question the structures of
authority which often seek to mask human autonomy, namely the state and
certain kinds of dogmatic political forms. Second, ‘indirect politics’ is
revealed by showing that Kierkegaard’s influence is quietly present in
influential political intellectuals of the twentieth century whose work in many
ways defines the history of Europe’s century of extremes. Kierkegaard’s
politics are ‘indirect’ because he is anti-, de- and un-political in one sense, and
Introduction 3
his engagement is not directly political. Kierkegaard’s ‘politics’ is such that

he is writing as a citizen (politikos) of the city (polis), writing within the
world and attempting to engage with human beings in the world. By bringing
Kierkegaard’s thought together with the four other thinkers, Kierkegaard’s
indirect politics is brought to fruition in twentieth century thought both
positively and negatively. What manifested as full-blown political
theorisations in those thinkers he influenced was already latent in
Kierkegaard’s thought, and would not have manifested in quite the way it did
had those thinkers who propounded their critiques not been exposed to his
thought. Although these thinkers’ ideas chiefly take root in the inter-war
period, their conversation with Kierkegaard resonates just as strongly today
and what has already come to pass in the twenty-first century.
This study continues a debate for Kierkegaard’s inclusion as a relevant
thinker in the socio-political realm of discourse. Scholars and thinkers such as
Alain Badiou, Jørgen Bukdahl, J. D. Caputo, Stephen Crites, Mark Dooley, C.
Stephen Evans, Bruce Kirmmse, John Elrod, Robert Perkins, Edward
Mooney, Martin Matustík, Kresten Nordentoft, George Pattison, Gillian Rose,
Merold Westphal, and Slavoj Žižek have already contributed to our growing
understanding and appreciation of Kierkegaard as a socio-political thinker.
My project attempts to deepen this project by showing Kierkegaard’s ‘indirect
politics’ both in Kierkegaard’s own works, most specifically through the
prism of the works written in the symbolic and revolutionary year of 1848;
and by turning to four twentieth-century thinkers in conversation with one
another and either openly or secretly with Kierkegaard’s work, bringing out
their own political thought and, at the same time, shedding light on
Kierkegaard’s political impact. My reading is within a political context once
we admit that Kierkegaard is at loggerheads with society and when both
Kierkegaard and the reader confront and challenge the world—at that point a
political gesture must be made. In the canon of political philosophy,
Kierkegaard is no Aristotle, Machiavelli, or Hobbes; but his importance to
both the legacy and future of political philosophy may be precisely that the
relevance and influence of his thought is subtle, surreptitious, in short—
indirect. When Kierkegaard writes in his journal that “Christianity is political
indifference” (Pap. X 3 A 746, 1851), one must be very careful in
understanding what Kierkegaard means by ‘political’ here. For Kierkegaard,
‘political’ represents various things. ‘Political’ depicts the image of the
hysteria of mass movements, Kierkegaard’s idea of “the crowd is untruth”,
divinising political structures, and enforcing the priority of all things worldly
over all things eternal. Hence, this is what leads Kierkegaard to declare: “Of
all tyrannies a people’s government is the most excruciating, the most
spiritless, unconditionally the downfall of everything great and sublime […]
A people’s government is the true picture of hell [En Folk-Regjering er det
sande Billede paa Helvede]” (Pap.VIII I A 667, 1848). Kierkegaard’s indirect
politics combats all the above descriptions of ‘political’.
2. Reliving the Present Age
Kierkegaard’s diagnosis of the ‘the present age’ in his Two Ages:A Literary
Review (the original title is En literair Anmeldelse) serves as an essential
backdrop to this book, both as the prelude to 1848 and to contemporaneity. In
that essay, Kierkegaard defines both the present age and the revolutionary age.
Contrary to what some readers of Kierkegaard might presume, Kierkegaard is
positive towards the revolutionary age, stating clearly:
The age of revolution is essentially passionate, and therefore it

essentially has form […] The age of revolution is essentially passionate,
and therefore essentially has culture. In other words, the tension and
resilience of inner being are the measure of essential culture
[Inderlighedens Spændkraft er nemlig den væsentlige Dannelses Grad]
[…] The age of revolution is essentially passionate, therefore it must be
able to be violent, riotous, wild, ruthless towards everything but its idea
[…] (SKS8, 59-60 / TA, 61-62).
But too much of either ‘the present age’ (which for Kierkegaard
represents comfort, conceit, forgetfulness, superficiality, and mediocrity) or
‘the revolutionary age’ (passionate, revealing, unfolding, immature,
subversive, and the resilience of inwardness) leads to disaster. Thus, despite
his constant allusions to Revelations 3:15-16 (of only liking hot or cold, rather
than anything lukewarm) that closes the New Testament, the trick is to not let
one overwhelm the other. The times are “confused”, especially in light of the
outbreak of revolution across Europe in 1848, because, on one level, the
revolutionary age has supposedly erupted once again—and yet this is
grounded by the present age in the latter’s affiliation with the public, mass,
number, and hatred even for the single individual. The age is confused in its
disintegration of philosophical systems, religion, the authority of the state, the
search for pleasure over responsibility and the rise of mass groups of people
without a coherent voice. Additionally, everyone seems to have attained
higher or greater amounts of knowledge in all spheres of life. When
Kierkegaard writes: “But it is the misfortune of our age that it has come to
know too much” (SKS7, 201 / CUP, 269), he could easily have been writing
about the twenty-first century.
By 1848, politics is everywhere, or as Kierkegaard begins his
supplement to The Point of View: “In these times everything is politics”
(SKS16, 87 / PV, 103). The confusion reaches such heights that much to
Kierkegaard’s annoyance, his servant, Anders, is “taken” from him and
drafted into the army (Pap. IX A 375, 1848). The year 1848 is significant on
many levels: historically, it is the occasion of ferment and rising democracies;
symbolically, it is the prelude to twentieth century catastrophes; for
Introduction 5
Kierkegaard, it is his most prolific writing year next to 1844; and personally,
he even has a revelation that “he must speak” (Pap. VIII A 640, 1848). The
texts written in 1848 provide the prism through which Kierkegaard’s other
works weave in and out of this book. And added to the incendiary political
conditions of that year, Kierkegaard’s political sensitivity reaches new heights
after his difficult experiences in his confrontation with the newly emerging
media that was the satirical publication “The Corsair,” which ultimately
pushed Kierkegaard to take his walks on the outskirts of the city to escape
jeers and mockery in the central streets of Copenhagen.
In order to activate the political impact of Kierkegaard’s writing for
today, he must be read in the context of our present age. Kierkegaard attempts
the enormously difficult task of exploring the gap between God and human
beings, the eternal and the world, Christianity and politics. For Kierkegaard
the essence of the human being is spirit. The spirit of the eternal resides in the
human being, as described by Kierkegaard’s pseudonym, Johannes Climacus,
with the metaphor of a magic lamp:
In fables and fairytales there is a lamp called the wonderful lamp; when
it is rubbed, the spirit appears. Jest! But freedom, that is the wonderful
lamp. When a person rubs it with ethical passion, God comes into
existence for him. And look, the spirit of the lamp is a servant (so wish
for it, you whose spirit is a wish), but the person who rubs the wonderful
lamp of freedom becomes a servant—the spirit of the Lord. (SKS7, 129 /
CUP, 138-139)
The magic lamp represents a freedom which follows a trajectory from

John Locke to Charles-Louis de Montesquieu to Karl Popper that prioritises
the human being over and above political states and systems. Added to that
position, it does not herald in an extreme form of individualism when, unlike
Max Stirner or Friedrich Nietzsche, Kierkegaard states clearly in The Point of
View: “The neighbour is the absolutely true expression for human equality
[Menneske-Lighed]” (SKS16, 91 / PV, 111). Finally, the impact and actuality
of Kierkegaard’s indirect politics is manifested through the conversation—at
points directly and indirectly—with the four key thinkers represented in this
book, two of whom arguably represent the clearest and most influential theses
for the political Left and Right of the twentieth century: Georg Lukács and
History and Class Consciousness, and Carl Schmitt and Political Theology.
Both cite Kierkegaard as their primary, albeit indirect, teacher.
3. Images, Figures, and Drama Motifs
This book relies on images, figures and motifs from drama as often as
philosophical terms to tease out the political gesture. It is through these
figures and images that Kierkegaard’s indirect politics is also to be found.
Kierkegaard consistently uses images and figures in his writings and they
therefore need to be taken seriously. He continually employs various guises
and tools to carve out a new space for writing through his prefaces and
postscripts, original dramatic pseudonyms and iconic literary figures that
ensures that it is almost impossible to strictly categorise his thought as
theological, philosophical or literary; instead, his writing remains homeless, in
a sense. For example, to reduce Kierkegaard’s (indirect) politics to solely
philosophical terms would betray not only the very gesture and impulse of
indirect politics, but also would not manage to tease out the subtle forms and
hidden history in both Kierkegaard’s writings and the four prominent readers’
connection and relation to Kierkegaard. This approach of taking images and
figures seriously will pervade the whole of this work and supports my
prevailing argument that in conscious discontinuity there is continuity, and in
the apparent disintegration is a new form of integration.
In regard to terms and images, the first major one I introduce is the
Skillevei, translated as ‘crossroad’ in the Hong and Hong Princeton editions of
Kierkegaard, which is literally the separation of the road, indicating two ways,
rather than four as in a crossroad. The Skillevei becomes another vital aspect
of indirect politics as interlude or Mellemspil, which is another important term
representing the gap between God and world, eternity and temporality, the
priority of decision, and political and religious allegiance. The Skillevei
connects truth as subjectivity and inwardness (SKS7, 186 / CUP, 203). This is
not to say that via the Skillevei Kierkegaard argues for a Manichean or
Gnostic universe of ‘God or world’ and nothing in between, in the light of the
ominous passage from Revelation 3:15-16. Rather, it is the ongoing corrective
to the world’s confusion of not making distinctions. Rather than a
black/white, love/hate or friend/enemy distinction, it is the suggestion of
“honesty [Oprigtighed], rather than half measures [Halvhed]” (SKS7, 534 /
CUP, 588-589) as well as experiencing subjective thinking as plurality. There
is also the danger of fanaticism emerging in human beings loving only God.
Kierkegaard is not so puritanical, which is evident even at the beginning of his
hyper-Christian text, Practice in Christianity (the word “Practice” in the title
in the original is Indøvelse which can also be translated as “training”), which
opens with a motto from Virgil.
Chapter One extrapolates other word images such as the Halt, the
Traveller, and the Smile. In all the chapters that follow, the trend continues: in
Chapter Two, the use of the Reckoning and Homelessness; in Chapter Three,
the Exception, the Demonic, and the Preacher of Repentance; in Chapter Four,
Introduction 7
the Dagdriver, Flâneur, Loafer, Disintegration and Ruination, the Interruptive

Thinker, and Awakening; and in Chapter Five, Petrification, the Wrestling
Match, and Metamorphosis.
Socrates and Jesus are Kierkegaard’s two most important figures as
prototypes; they are present from the very beginning of his authorship and
remain central throughout. These two figures also strongly support the
political element in Kierkegaard’s thought in so far as the identity of both of
them is an open space that disrupts most of the official codes that they come
up against. They are figures of praxis and are all-inclusive, communicating to
all from king to beggar. I also use other figures regularly throughout this book
such as Faust, Mephistopheles, Hamlet, and Johanne Luise Heiberg. Most of
these figures are fictional, but Heiberg is an actress from Kierkegaard’s time
whose theatre acting demonstrates (for Kierkegaard) the transformative
individual self. I do not use the Wandering Jew explicitly because
Kierkegaard dropped this figure after 1838. But the figure of the Wandering
Jew is present implicitly in the images I apply such as in discussing
homelessness and the loafer. Three out of Kierkegaard’s four twentieth-
century ‘conversationalists’ are Jewish (Lukács, Benjamin and Adorno), and
all three can personify the exiled Wandering Jew.
Finally, in connection with image and terms, there is an overall theme of
walking and ambiguity. The two words are interlinked. As is already known,
like many writers before and after him, Kierkegaard considers walking almost
sacred. Long walks are made everyday which are vital for his writing
productivity. Hours would be spent walking the streets of Copenhagen,
observing and talking with the various denizens of the city. One can even
observe the increasing presence of nature in Kierkegaard’s writings after
escaping his feud with the satirical Corsair publications to walk outside the
walls of Copenhagen and into the surrounding countryside. This also helps us
to understand his increasing distrust and distaste of journalism and the masses.
Ambiguity might seem to utterly contradict the idea of the Skillevei. But if we
think of ambiguity as ambigere—to wander, as ambi designates ‘around’
while agere is ‘to act’, we have both the idea of wandering/walking and the
action. This must be kept in mind when I use the word ambiguity in this book.
The two most significant figures (Socrates and Jesus) for Kierkegaard’s
indirect politics are walkers and vagabonds. Both St. Paul and St. James (both
present in Kierkegaard’s authorship from beginning to end) are exemplars of
the walker. Finally, writing itself is a form of walking, especially in
Kierkegaard’s case. His voluminous journals are acts of wandering and
walking in themselves, and the act of writing is something that Kierkegaard
never abandons. In a letter from 1848 (which serves as the epigraph to this
introduction) Kierkegaard writes: “I who do not understand politics, do, on the
other hand, understand all about walking. My view of life is like that of a
parson: ‘Life is a path.’ That is why I go walking. As long as I am able to go
walking, I fear nothing, not even death” (LD, 253-255). Walking and
wandering around are at the essence of indirect politics, and their images and
metaphors set about unsettling the political world.
4. Interludes with Lukács, Schmitt, Benjamin and Adorno
The four thinkers placed in conversation with Kierkegaard are Georg Lukács,
Carl Schmitt, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor Adorno. Martin Heidegger
arguably deserves mention here. Heidegger does mention reification in Being
and Time, which has been given treatment by Lucien Goldmann, he
personally knew Schmitt, he was part of the Nazi Party for a short while, and
he has scattered writings reflecting on the changing world of the twentieth
century. But he does not engage with either Benjamin or Adorno, nor does he
explicitly offer a critical approach to the socio-political world while
commenting on other thinkers, including Kierkegaard. In addition, the relation
of influence between Kierkegaard and Heidegger is substantially better
documented than the other four here in question. Ernst Bloch is another
thinker relevant to this study; he was, of course, in conversation with the other
German thinkers considered here. However, Kierkegaard seems not to have
been a seminal figure in the way that he is for the others, although this does
not preclude attention being given him in future work.
The object-choices of this study demonstrate focus on a more directly
politically engaged group of thinkers (all writing in German), who are all
reading Kierkegaard, and who in one way or another take on his thinking and
strategies and use it against him. They are also all in conversation with each
other through the prism of Kierkegaard. This has not been explicated nor
brought out in the past, except in dealing one specific thinker with another.
There are also additional reasons for using these four specific thinkers: All
four are sensitive to the tension between the political and the religious realm,
such that they either annihilate one altogether (Schmitt), turn one into the
other (Lukács), merge the two (Benjamin), or attempt to keep them separated
though still relying on symbols (Adorno). Together, all four thinkers represent
the tragedy of at least the first half of the twentieth century of political
extremism and failures. They are all central figures in movements of thinking
(Marxism, National Socialism, the state of exception, the art of wandering,
and negative dialectics and the Frankfurt School) which can potentially point
back to and interact with Kierkegaard’s authorship. And, like Kierkegaard,
they are primarily attempting to tackle the chasm between thought and action,
and theory and praxis in the face of the malaise of the present age.
In Chapter One (Crossroads of Revolution and Reaction), I establish the
foundations for my enquiry into Kierkegaard’s indirect politics, initially by
exploring the significance of the year 1848 in Europe for Kierkegaard and
how it can mirror future generations. The theme of “Crossroads” pervades the
chapter, being established as something inextricably bound up with the
Introduction 9
outward socio-historical changes of the time, the decline of Christianity,

Kierkegaard’s fluctuating authorship and the problem of authority itself. I
explain the first aspects of indirect politics through Kierkegaard’s use of the
word Skillevei as a borderline space between disciplines and ways of choosing
to live, and I give a preliminary explanation of how and why it is manifested
in Kierkegaard’s writings via the other four thinkers. Christian Discourses has
a central role in this chapter as the text which provides an antidote to the
malaise of the present age. I argue that Christian Discourses offers a positive
solution to the critique and pessimistic descriptions given in Kierkegaard’s
earlier essay Two Ages:A Literary Review.
In Chapter Two (Inwardness as an Expression for Revolutionary Praxis),
I begin to delve into the various conversations between Kierkegaard and the
four twentieth century writers but show also the outcome of their reading of
each other. It is important to make clear that the subsequent chapters are not
separate essays but are bound together by the continuing conversation
between Lukács, Schmitt, Benjamin and Adorno, as well as the fact that the
four priniciple areas (dialectical leap, the exception, the exile/loafer, negative
dialectics and the fragment) emerge in all the chapters despite each area being
primarily connected with one of the four writers. Within the area of the
“dialectical leap”, I contrast Kierkegaard’s dialectic leading to continual
disintegration with Lukács’ dialectic advancing towards totality, arguing that
Kierkegaard’s indirect politics maintains a heterogeneous and inclusive
gesture, while Lukács moves further and further into an homogenous world of
an ‘all or nothing’. In dissolving boundaries, I also compare how drama—as a
mask for thought as praxis—is central to both Kierkegaard and Lukács and
how they transform drama into life and turn their own lives into potential
tragedies. This theme of the theatre arises again in the chapters that follow.
In Chapter Three (Zones of Exception), I show how Lukács’
contemporary Carl Schmitt appropriates Kierkegaard in his most famous
works (such as Political Romanticism, Political Theology, and The Concept of
the Political). Schmitt is no stranger to Lukács, Benjamin or Adorno, and all
three are sensitive to the legacy of this controversial jurist and engage with
Schmitt, entangling Kierkegaard’s thought even further. Out of all the
interlocutors in this book, Schmitt is the one who remains the most positive
towards Kierkegaard. I distinguish Kierkegaard and Carl Schmitt’s zones of
exception from each other, and reveal the potentially disastrous consequences
of relocating Kierkegaard’s ‘exception’ by Schmitt into the hands of the
people that govern rather than the people who are governed. Schmitt has
without doubt given the most succinct and famous definition of sovereignty in
the twentieth century. The sovereign, like Kierkegaard’s poet, decides on the
exception, which Schmitt describes as a borderline case. This is not something
vague but rather one “pertaining to the outermost sphere” (PT, 5). Here
indirect politics emerges through responding, via Kierkegaard’s writings, to
Schmitt’s insightful analysis that the borderline concept remains borderline
contrary to the goal of Schmitt’s thought for it to become the status quo. Both
Schmitt and Lukács applaud each other for finding a solution to the borderline
concept that early in their writing they articulated so brilliantly. Schmitt’s and
Kierkegaard’s favourite literary figure, Hamlet, provides the site for the
exception to reveal itself both on and off-stage. Via Schmitt, the “either/or”
problem and the “decision” and “exception” are explored, and this particular
rule of law of Schmittian “nomos” is confronted before discussing the
antithetic “nomad” in the following chapter in conversation with Benjamin.
Chapter Four (Loafers of History) focuses on Kierkegaard and Walter
Benjamin’s sabotage and subversion of history and politics, through
presenting them as loafers of the city—as the Dagdriver (literally translated
from Danish as ‘day-drifter’ but more usually as ‘loafer’ or ‘lounger’) and
Flâneur respectively. I show how they simultaneously flout and save tradition
by using the strategies of disintegration and ruination, which illuminates
politics as a kind of nihilism in contrast to the human being’s striving for
awakening and messianic power. The theme of indirect politics deepens as we
continue to explore drama and narrative from the perspectives of Kierkegaard,
transforming failure into triumph, and the dangers of rendering politics as
aesthetic and petrifying or totalising aesthetics. Lukács is instrumental for
Benjamin’s initial enthusiasm in Marxism, while Benjamin is important for
both Schmitt and Adorno in their struggle with understanding the gap between
politics and aesthetics.
In Chapter Five (Out of the Petrified Landscape), Adorno’s negative
dialectic is presented as that which is still before us and which acts as the foil
to all political and philosophical systems that regard themselves as the
end/terminus and/or the best. The indirect politics makes its way from
Benjamin’s dialectic at a standstill to the possibility of a more mercurial
landscape. Adorno, who dedicated himself to both musicology and
philosophy, declared that the dialectic of art and philosophy must remain
unreconciled and yet he continued to navigate between the two, and enter the
gap or interlude, such that, for example, he would dedicate his life to an
impossible, unfinished book on Beethoven with its paradoxical working title
The Philosophy of Music. Adorno continued to search for new ways of
thinking through the lens of the classic tradition and as a result was able to
appreciate and produce profound essays on twentieth century artists such as
Schoenberg, Kafka, and Beckett. Usually regarded as the negative and
pessimistic critic par excellence on contemporary culture, Adorno also reveals
the affirmative gesture of indirect politics for his confrontation with his time
and both lauding and disparaging contemporary artists and trends. And, I
argue, the most direct critique of Kierkegaard offered by any of the
interlocutors turns out to be the most direct manifestation of Kierkegaard’s
indirect politics, which continually unsettles all socio-political structures in
society, and is restlessly on-going and polemical.
Introduction 11
In delving deep into the conversation and juxtaposition of Kierkegaard

and Lukács, Schmitt, Benjamin, and Adorno, this book—if even indirectly—
points to the future relevance of the Frankfurt School, critical theory, and
political philosophy, by revealing the transformative nature of Kierkegaard’s
work as the catalyst of this continuing relevance. With increasing distrust of
closed political and philosophical systems, this new interdisciplinary space of
indirect politics provides a powerful tool for dealing with our multi-media
information world. Additionally, recent history has demonstrated examples of
the usurpation of the Kierkegaard/Schmitt exception in democratically elected
governments, while the unfinished fragment of both literary and philosophical
works that was paramount to the writings of Kierkegaard, Benjamin and
Adorno, is only now becoming more widespread and understandable in
various disciplines. The present fragile state of free market capitalism and the
sought-after unity and balance in such constructs as the EU and USA are on
each day since the most recent financial crisis revealing more cracks such that
the Kierkegaard/Lukács conversation and central questions of the Frankfurt
School are suddenly before us again in their guiding principle of critique,
distrust and ultimate affirmation of the human subject.
The following poetic and provocative question turns up in key moments
in Kierkegaard’s work: “To whom am I speaking?” This urgent demand
underlies the ‘indirect politics’ addressed in this book. Kierkegaard’s
philosophy and his form of indirect communication clearly found important
future intellectual interlocutors in the twentieth century, such as Lukács,
Schmitt, Benjamin, and Adorno. In light of the 200-year anniversary of his
birthday in 2013, there is no more fitting time to articulate passionately this
indirect politics for a new generation of Kierkegaard readers and
conversationalists.
One
CROSSROADS OF REVOLUTION AND

REACTION
We are sleeping on a volcano … Do you not see that the earth trembles anew? A
wind of revolution blows, the storm is on the horizon.
Alexis de Tocqueville, 1848
1848 has both an external and internal significance for Kierkegaard’s

authorship: the failed socialist uprisings of 1848 provide Kierkegaard and his
contemporaries with a historical backdrop underscored by revolution and
reactions to revolution(s); for Kierkegaard personally, his writings from that
year comprise the main action of his indirect politics. The year acts as the
Skillevei (‘separation of the road’) for the tension between the individual and
society. This Skillevei also highlights the conflict between the religious and
political realm articulated most powerfully in Kierkegaard’s overlooked work
Christian Discourses as critical discourses for the “present age”. 1848 can be
profitably interpreted as a Mellemspil, i.e. a dramatic gap between eras and
disciplines that embodies the spirit of indirect politics. This interpretation
reveals the continuing ambiguity between the individual and society both in
Kierkegaard’s and our time.
1. The Significance of 1848
Then came the year 1848—for me, beyond all comparison the richest and most
fruitful year I have experienced as an author.
Kierkegaard [Pap. X 6 B 249, 1850]
1848 represents an important moment in the history of modern Europe. The

year bore the marks of radically differing experiences, including moments of
euphoria, aspiration, action, mass movements of people, violence and failure.
An obscure writer in a small country on the edge of Europe in the throes of
this historic year looked on and scribbled furiously. The age of utopian
promise and disintegration was upon Europe; the ideas of modernity
witnessed a breakthrough in cities from Vienna to Berlin, Paris to
Copenhagen. 1848 symbolised, at least for the thinkers of the twentieth
century, the real possibility of self-awareness of the individual to change
society through action, which, unlike the French and American revolutions at
the end of the eighteenth century, held the actual promise of international
movement pointing towards world utopia. In the midst of this year,
Kierkegaard anticipated a radicalised politics that would find itself not during
his lifetime, but at the centre of the cataclysmic events of the twentieth
century and onward. This section combines external, historical and political
events with the internal, personal and intellectual events in Kierkegaard’s life
and work, and thereby offers a cross-section of the tense relationship between
the individual and society in 1848.
i. The Revolution of 1848
In 1848, Marx and Engels published The Communist Manifesto, and

revolutions flared up all across Europe, most dramatically in Germany,
Austria-Hungary, France and Italy. As has been well documented, national
and liberal movements were rapidly developing, the pro-German Schleswig-
Holsteiners in the area north and south of the present Danish/German border
were demanding a liberal constitution, and the incorporation of Holstein into
the German Confederation (bear in mind: almost a third of Denmark’s
population was German). Also, liberal circles in Copenhagen demanded a
democratic constitution for the monarchy and the inclusion within it of
Schleswig, which conflicted with a long-standing promise that the ‘duchies’
would never be separated. This triggered a revolt in the duchies, and led
Danish king Frederick VII to declare himself constitutional king (even though
the former king, Christian VIII, had already ordered for preparation of a
constitution in January 1848, just prior to his death), thereby paving the way
for a democratic constitution and the abolition of absolutism, which
eventually became codified in The Constitution of the Kingdom of Denmark
of 5 June 1849. Prussian troops marched into Denmark in May 1848 after the
revolt in the duchies, which was provoked by the liberals insisting on their
annexation to Denmark. From 1848 on, Denmark’s financial situation was
precarious and inflation rampant. The decline of the absolutist monarchy and
the rise of other classes were in full motion.1
In the European context 1848 is symbolic, as its aftermath triggered both
reactionism and further revolution with equal force. After the revolutions of
1848, the position of philosophy in the universities had become politically
compromised, bowing in the direction of Königsberg. Peripheral parts of
Europe were ripe for revolution, and it was a year that broke the spirit of
cultures from which some never fully recovered. However, in Denmark a new
national spirit was awakened from 1848. Even though conscription was
obligatory only to the peasant, after 1848 many of the bourgeoisies
volunteered. Additionally, in 1848 there was reaction to Marx and Engels’
revolutionary charter of the proletariat revolution. At Wittenberg, over the
grave of Martin Luther, K. H. Wichern replied with a counter-revolutionary
“Protestant Manifesto.”2 He chose the inner mission, but this inner mission
failed to stir the masses, and became increasingly alien to both the one who
followed the inner mission and to others living in the same society.
Crossroads of Revolution and Reaction 15
Kierkegaard’s thought is distinct from this alienated inner mission; the

political impact of Kierkegaard’s writings takes a decidedly different form.
In the midst of these events, Christian Discourses was published, the
only major text published by Kierkegaard (under his own name) that year.
This is followed by his ‘report to history’, The Point of View. Thereafter, the
pseudonym Anti-Climacus is created in order, quoting one commentator and
translator, to define “[…] the forms of despair as failures to sustain a
‘synthesis’ which expresses the structure of selfhood. The work introduces a
non-substantial but normative concept of the self or ‘spirit’.”3 Finally,
Practice in Christianity is written, prompting the reader to work out whether
Christianity should ‘clip its wings’ to fit the world, or whether the world
should clip its wings to fit Christianity; indeed, even to accept that our wings
had been clipped amidst the collapse of the metaphysics of philosophy and the
rationality of religion. In the rise of mass society, Marx and Engels were
attempting to rally individuals for a collective struggle to eliminate
oppression, while for Kierkegaard this was part of the general contempt for
the individual and the loss of religiosity amidst the new political hysteria (“In
these times everything is politics” (SKS16, 83 / PV, 103). Throughout late
summer of 1848 Kierkegaard was in regular correspondence with J.L.A.
Kolderup-Rosenvinge, a conservative lawyer and professor of Law. Kolderup-
Rosenvinge was also a walking companion for Kierkegaard. On their outings
they discussed both politics and the importance of walking (see for example
the letters from LD in 1848: 180, 184, 185, 186, 188, 189). The relationship
reveals the topical complexities of Kierkegaard’s political point of view. Of
course, Kierkegaard was, on the one hand, a conservative, who abided by the
laws, supported the monarchy, spoke with reverence to and about Bishop
Mynster when he was alive, and kept a servant. However, within the writings
of 1848, there is something quite different going on. It does seem unusual,
though, that, not unlike Tolstoy, Kierkegaard procrastinates, hesitating to act
on his principles for many years until finally he brings his praxis to the street
at the close of his life, moving from conservative to radical.
ii. Authority and Authorship
1848 was a remarkably productive year for Kierkegaard: he completed

Christian Discourses, The Crisis and a Crisis in the Life of an Actress (written
in 1847 and published in 1848), The Point of View of my Work as an Author,
Armed Neutrality, Sickness unto Death, Practice in Christianity, Two Ethical-
Religious Essays, parts of The Book on Adler, and the ideas and first draft of
The Lily in the Field and the Bird of the Air discourses. A journal entry (Pap.
X I A 615) from 1849 provides proof that everything under the pseudonym of
Anti-Climacus was written in 1848. In 1846, Kierkegaard had promised
himself that he would conclude writing and disclosed the relation of all the
pseudonyms to himself at the end of Concluding Unscientific Postscript.
However, in 1847 Kierkegaard wrote two substantial works under his own
name, Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits and Works of Love. And yet,
Kierkegaard was still considering terminating his work as a writer, what he
called an “emptying out” [at udtømme] (SKS16, 65 / PV, 86), and perhaps
even seeking an appointment as a country pastor. Kierkegaard also thought
about travelling again and there was a resigned acceptance at this time of
being ‘just a poet’ (see, for example journal entries X I A 266, X I A 273, X I
A 557). 1848 changed all that. Kierkegaard highlights the importance of 1848
for his authorship in significant journal entries, as well as constantly alluding
in his ‘report to history’ (The Point of View) to the changes in society brought
on by that explosive year. Kierkegaard recounts 1848 with journal titles such
as “Why I didn’t go abroad in spring 1848” (Pap. X I A 202, 1849) and “On
the Year 1848” (Pap X 2 A 66, 1849). In fact, Kierkegaard thought of
bringing much of his work from 1848 under one title – “Fulfilment’s
Collected Works [Fuldendelsens samtlige Værker]”, or even
“Consummation’s Collected Works”, bringing together four works in one
volume (Pap. IX A 390, 1848). The four works in question would have been
The Sickness unto Death, Come to Me, Blessed Is He Who Is Not Offended,
and Armed Neutrality. Come to Me and Blessed Is He Who Is Not Offended
form part of Practice in Christianity. Kierkegaard writes in a journal entry,
“In one sense 1848 has raised me to another level. In another sense it has
shattered me, that is, it has shattered me religiously, or to say it in my own
language: God has run me ragged” (Pap. X 2 A 66). In The Point of View,
Kierkegaard uses the word ‘shattered’ (sprængt) again to describe himself at
this time; “Without God I am too strong for myself, and in perhaps the most
agonising way of all I am shattered” (SKS16, 54/ PV, 75). After Christian
Discourses and The Point of View, Kierkegaard continued that year with the
Anti-Climacus writings. Although Practice in Christianity was delayed for
publication until 1850, Kierkegaard, in the preface to the text, informs the
reader and deems it wholly necessary that it was written in 1848. As for his
journal entry titled “On the Year 1848”, Kierkegaard recognises both his
achievement as an author and his own coming of age. In the same entry
Kierkegaard opines that Practice in Christianity “is quite certainly the most
complete and truest thing I have written.” 1848 would indeed be another peak
of Kierkegaard’s writing career, alongside 1844, before the ‘silent years’
began, years that would continue until he would return with his final public
polemic in The Moment (Øieblikket) in 1854-55.
In 1848 Kierkegaard attempts to establish coherence in his authorship,
and he is at pains to articulate this continuity both to himself as writer and to
posterity. But ambiguity and the space for yet another new mask seem only to
emerge with each new attempt at clarity and so-called coherence. In The Point
of View, Kierkegaard presents himself to the reader throughout his works
1842-46 as a loafer (Dagdriver), a frivolous bird and flâneur, and yet after
reading the text, one is left wondering what the text actually is—satire or
confession? This is Kierkegaard’s ‘report to history’ as the subtitle reads. This
‘report’ discloses the life and project of Kierkegaard, and creates a new mask
in the process. In his attempt to move away from his position of the ideal
presentation of the ‘poetic’, Kierkegaard reveals the difficulty: “The poet is
allowed to talk himself out, yet watching with Argus eyes lest the poet trick it
and it all becomes a poet” (SKS16, 57 / PV, 77). Argus becomes a memorable
metaphor: the warrior with many eyes, always changed upon awakening.4
There is a continuity of direction from the Postscript and Two Ages:A Literary
Review of 1846 to the publication of Practice in Christianity in 1850
(although written in 1848), contrary to some previous commentators’
arguments, such as those made by Johannes Sløk, whose influential case for
the dramatic turn in Kierkegaard’s authorship during these years appeared in
Da Kierkegaard tav: fra forfatterskab til kirkestorm. Johannes Climacus, in
the Postscript, sets out to articulate ‘becoming subjective’ in the face of
Hegelianism, the rise of mass-society, and the compromises of Christendom.
Two Ages:A Literary Review is more explicitly socially critical in content in
dealing with ‘levelling’, ‘the public’, ‘formlessness’, and ‘social prudence’.
Rather than a ‘break’ as such with his previous writings, Kierkegaard set out
to develop the themes at which he hints in Concluding Unscientific Postscript
on how to recognise and become aware of ‘inwardness’ (Inderlighed in
Danish, translated into Innerlichkeit in German). The discourses of
Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits and Works of Love of 1847 expand
this development. 1848 is the culmination of this development in the key
works of Christian Discourses, Point of View, Sickness unto Death and
Practice in Christianity, aimed at facing issues in their living forms, to
prepare the single individual to become free from his/her ‘objective times’ and
to face the world.
It was Easter 1848 when Kierkegaard had his ‘revelation’ of sorts. This
adds another interesting dimension to the Skillevei of 1848, in that (after
completing Christian Discourses) Kierkegaard wrote in his journals (on
Easter Monday) that God had forgiven him for all his sins. (Pap. VIII I A 645,
1848). A few days earlier, he wrote in his journals, “My whole being is
changed. My concealment and reserve are broken—I must speak” (Pap. VIII I
A 640, 1848). In this revelation of feeling that his sins had been forgiven and
the past had been eliminated, of now being “contemporary with oneself”
[samtidig med sig selv] (SKS10, 83 / CD, 74), perhaps the time had arrived
for him to become a priest in the world. Although this moment in
Kierkegaard’s journal was not to last long—less than a few days in fact—it
provides an important symmetry to his relation to and analysis of his
contemporary the Danish pastor P. Adler who claimed to have experienced a
revelation. Additionally, this revelatory moment relates as well to the idea of
Governance (Styrelsen) in his authorship—brought in constantly in the
writings of 1848. Kierkegaard is aware of the dangers of attaining revelation
as a human being and so he pulls back: “Christianity is really too blessed for
us humans. Just to think what it means to dare to believe that God has come
into the world for my sake too” (Pap. VIII A 648, 1848). A journal entry from
1853 supports this perspective in relating once again to 1848: “Then came
1848. Here I was granted a perspective on my life that almost overwhelmed
me. The way I saw it, I felt that guidance >Styrelsen@ had directed me, that I
had really been granted the extraordinary” (Pap. X 5 A 146, 1853).
1848, when Kierkegaard is face to face with society, also finds Karl
Marx (who shares the same birthday—5 May—as Kierkegaard, although born
five years later) writing his seminal works. A twentieth century commentator
highlights this shared historical moment of Kierkegaard and Marx:
Shortly before the revolution of 1848, Marx and Kierkegaard lent to the
demand for a resolution a language whose words still claim our
attention: Marx in the Communist Manifesto (1847) and Kierkegaard in
A Literary Review (1846). The one manifesto ends “Proletarians of all
countries, unite!” and the other to the effect each person must work out
his own salvation, prophecies about the course of the world being
tolerable only as a joking matter.5
These two works had a profound influence on politico-philosophical

movements in Europe in the first half of the twentieth century and were seen
in some quarters as the precursors to the various movements of the twentieth
century; the former being espoused by Lenin, Lukács and the formation of the
Soviet Union, the latter also by Lukács, but also by Heidegger and the French
existentialist movement.6 In Kierkegaard’s writings he warns of the emergence of
false prophets and the potential hysteria that can erupt at a time of revolution
and upheaval in society, something both Heidegger and Lukács lost
themselves to in their contrasting ideologies. This might explain why
Heidegger and Lukács were hardly able to tolerate each other, and did not
accept in any way each other’s predecessors or even masters: for Lukács,
Marx and Lenin; for Heidegger, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche.7 Lukács’
situation is complex, because he was under the spell of Kierkegaard and
Nietzsche before attacking them as he made the leap into Marxism.
Kierkegaard’s The Book on Adler is an analysis of the whole idea of authority,
and in the case of Adler, there is a real modern case of someone who publicly
claims to have heard the call from God. In the present age, “[…] the concept
of authority has been completely forgotten in our confused age” (BA, 4).
The Book on Adler is a complex, unfinished work in progress, and can also be
read as an analysis of the rise and legitimacy of leaders, prophets and
movements during and after revolution. In The Point of View, Kierkegaard
warns that at the time of revolution there arises:
[…] the confused spokesmen of newborn, romantic, obviously confused

thoughts and on the other hand have either silenced everything that
hitherto had in various ways been the spokesman or placed it in the
embarrassing position of having to obtain brand-new clothes in the
greatest haste, and every system has been broken up (SKS16, 49 / PV,
69).
With this sentence, Kierkegaard anticipates some of the changes and

movements in the second half of the twentieth century. The sudden arrival of
hundreds of prophetic songwriters and filmmakers at the end of the 1960s,8 or
the abundance of writings on a new, bright world and the death of
communism at the beginning of the 1990s are two examples of this hysteria,
rapidly turning genuine euphoria and change into lethargy, more corruption,
lies, artificiality, usurped by ‘the public’, ‘the mass’ and ‘the number’
presented in Two Ages:A Literary Review. Journalism, or the daily press,
becomes for Kierkegaard “the evil principle in the modern world” (Pap. VIII 1
A 137, 1847. See also Pap. IX A 320, 1848). The journalist, analogous to the
librarian, comes to know the surface of everything and the depth of nothing.
For Kierkegaard, the same could be said for much of academic philosophy in
the wake of Hegel.
iii. Christian Discourses
At the beginning of 1848 Kierkegaard writes Christian Discourses, stating its

importance in relation to his authorship and the upheavals of 1848: “>…@ one
will get the impression that the book was written after the crisis >…@ I
experienced the triumph of not needing to modify or change one iota—indeed,
what I had written before, if it were read now, would be much, much better
understood than when it was written” (SKS16, 49 / PV, 69). In The Point of
View, Kierkegaard clearly discloses the importance of the ‘single individual’
(den Enkelte) amidst the collapse of the system: “With the category the single
individual, the pseudonymous writers took aim at the system in a day when
everything here at home was system and system; now the system is scarcely
mentioned anymore, at least not as the shibboleth and as the demand of the
times” (SKS16, 99 / PV, 118-19). In a footnote to this passage he exclaims,
“And now in 1848!” The hype of Hegelianism had relented by the late 1840s,
and the ‘system’ was at its most fragile when Christian Discourses
(Kierkegaard’s first publication of that year) was written: “The threads of
sagacity broke; the shriek that announces chaos was heard! It was the year
1848; it was a step forward” (SKS13, 26 / PV, 19). Thus Kierkegaard is still
close to the early Marx (“There has been a history, but there no longer is
any”9) and Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (“Besides, it is not difficult to see
that ours is a birth-time and a period of transition to a new era. Spirit has
broken with the world it has hitherto inhabited and imagined, and is of a mind
to submerge it in the past, and in the labour of its own transformation. Spirit is
indeed never at rest but always engaged in moving forward”10). While so
much of political society and the intelligentsia is busy with the crisis of power
structures, the emancipation of the proletariat and the eruption of Marxist
publications, the Christian Discourses represents another dialectical text—as
political polemic and spiritual therapy, to counter the confusion of the eternal
and the temporal in the political and the religious in the single individual’s
journey towards praxis.
In Christian Discourses, Kierkegaard depicts a world governed by
material needs, status, pride, presumptuousness, strife, indecisiveness and
disconsolateness (the headings for each section in ‘Part I: The Cares
>Bekymringer@ of the Pagans’ explicitly restate my point). The book also
reaches the same level of intensity as Marx’s German Ideology, Communist
Manifesto and Theses on Feuerbach in reflecting on the malaise of the age,
and as an antidote to the political confusion, towards a rather different
direction than the Right and Left Hegelians. It provides the possibility of
always being able to break into something new, and act both as a guide for the
individual and a polemic within society. The ‘single individual’ was
disentangled from the system; this was to be both a release and a burden: a
release into freedom and possibility for the ‘single individual’, and a burden in
living amidst the ‘monstrous public’. Contrary to some views of
Kierkegaard’s elitism, Kierkegaard writes in 1848: “the possibility of the
highest is in everyone, one must follow it” (Pap. IX A 352, 1848). The single
individual stands at the point of decision where the ways part, at the Skillevei,
before the eternal as the religious realm, and before the temporal as the
political realm.
2. The Skillevei
Everywhere in life is the Skillevei.

Kierkegaard (SKS10, 25 / CD, 19-20)
The image of the Skillevei, translated as crossroad(s), is another borderline

motif (literally) that is symbolic of the year 1848. As part of indirect politics,
the Skillevei is the space, the between, another Mellemspil between moments
in human history, between living and dying, and in the formation of the
individual self that is challenged by society and in turn confronts society. This
ties in with the concept of indirect politics that is first and foremost the
negative space between disciplines.
i. Significance of Skillevei
The Skillevei is first mentioned in Either/Or II. Judge William uses the word
Skillevei twice at the beginning of his essay “Equilibrium between the
Aesthetic and the Ethical.” He has already been at the Skillevei: “I think of the
occasions in my later life when I stood at the crossroads >Skilleveien@, when
my soul was matured in the hour of decision” (SKS3, 149 / EOII, 157). He is
happy with his decision, because even by ‘choosing’ one is on the right track:
“As soon as one can get a man to stand at the crossroads >Skilleveien@ in such
a position that there is no recourse but to choose, he will choose the right”
(SKS3, 158 / EOII, 168). Thus, already, that ethical man Judge William has
associated Skillevei with choosing – that ‘hour of decision’. A year later in
one of the ‘upbuilding discourses’, the discourse “The Thorn in the Flesh”
concludes with the final remark: “[…] until the paths are separated [indtil
Veiene skilles]—one person fights the good fight of danger and terror: the
other becomes sagacious [klogtig] and spiritlessly rejoices over the security of
life” (SKS5, 334 /EUD, 346). The separation of the paths indicates an
either/or: struggle [Strid] or sagaciousness [Klogskab].
The Skillevei is mentioned again and developed in Concluding
Unscientific Postscript. Climacus explains: “When subjectivity is truth, the
definition of truth must also contain in itself an expression of the antithesis to
objectivity, a memento of that fork in the road >Veiskille@, and this expression
will at the same time indicate the resilience of the inwardness >Inderlighedens
Spaendstighed@” (SKS7, 186 / CUP, 203). This ‘moment of that fork in the
road’ is the virtue of not only being a human being, but it is also an expression
of ‘spirit’. It is at the Skillevei that the resilience or elasticity of inwardness is
made apparent. Thus, we have the ‘hour of decision’, the distinction in the
two paths and the ‘resilience of inwardness’. This resilience or elasticity is
mentioned again in Two Ages:A Literary Review in connection to epochs of
revolution. In revolutionary times, “the resilience of inwardness is the
measure of essential culture >Inderlighedens Spændkraft er nemlig den
væsentlige Dannelses Grad@” (SKS8, 60 / TA, 61). It is no accident that from
then on Kierkegaard uses the word Skillevei more regularly, reaching its peak
in the writings of 1848. In the preceding year, in “Purity of Heart”, a text that
provides an intense expression of inwardness, Skillevei is used three times,
always in connection to the double-minded person. The Skillevei is related
first to “the good and the reward”; second, to “the good and the dreaded shape
of punishment”; and third, to “the good and the good in its victory or even in
its victory through him” (SKS8, 42, 57, 64 / UDVS, 41, 56, 63).
In the Christian Discourses, the Skillevei provides the powerful
metaphor for Kierkegaard in the development of his authorship, the situation
of Europe in 1848, and as a metaphor for the politico-religious self in the
movement towards spirit. On the one hand, the Skillevei is the moment of
decision on a journey, perhaps conflating two of Kierkegaard’s catalysts for

writing, first in Hegel’s ‘highway of despair’ towards the synthesis in
‘absolute spirit’, and second in Christ’s ‘way’ in messianic encouragement.11
The Skillevei is then submerged in a certain tradition of ‘thinking’: one is
always on the way, underway, to the use the timeless image of the road, vej,
Weg, camino, chemin, caminho, Tao or bóthar. Kierkegaard’s Skillevei is
pivotal for the awakening of inwardness, and at the beginning of Christian
Discourses, he writes: “Everywhere in life is the crossroads. Every human
being […] stands at the crossroads—that is his perfection and not his merit”
(SKS10, 26 / CD, 20). This ‘perfection’ in the Skillevei is the choice that the
single individual can make. This is the perfection of that single individual as
the ‘antithesis to objectivity’ at ‘that fork in the road’. It is not a ‘merit’, and it
is no consolation. But like Anti-Climacus’ future reminder to ‘Christendom’
that Christianity is a ‘demand’, the Skillevei also provides a ‘demand’: a
demand to stand out from the melee of influence and begin to walk a path
through the ‘resilience of inwardness’.
Skillevei is used most frequently in Practice in Christianity, eight times
in all, seven of which are used in repetition, again at the beginning of the text,
in connection to Christ’s invitation (Indbydelsen) which “stands in at the
crossroads”. The Skillevei calls out:
[…] along the highways and along the lonely ways […] where there is a
way so lonely that only one person knows it […] loneliest of all fugitives
[…] where temporal and earthly suffering places its cross […] where
death distinguishes death from life […] where the road of sin veers away
from the hedge row of innocence […] where the way of sin turns more
deeply into sin […] where the way of sin turns off for the last time and
disappears from view in—perdition >i Fortabelsen@ (SKS12, 20 / PC, 16-
19).
Lastly, the Skillevei is the ‘possibility of offence’. Anti-Climacus

attempts to clarify that “the possibility of offence is the crossroad, or is like
standing at the crossroads” (SKS12, 90 / PC, 81), because one turns to either
offence or faith. Thus, from Anti-Climacus’ point of view, it is a call and an
invitation from Christ to human beings, as the moment of decision and the
‘resilience of inwardness’. But Kierkegaard’s Skillevei keep turning up, and as
a young man he prophesises in a journal entry the future multiplicity of his
authorship and many appealing roads that are on offer:
Here I stand like Hercules, but not at the crossroads [Skilleveien]—no, here
there are far more roads to take and thus it is much more difficult to choose
the right one. It is perhaps the misfortune of my life that I am interested in
far too much and not decisively in any one thing; all my interests are not
subordinated to one but stand on an equal footing (Pap. I A 71, 1835).
ii. The Halt
At the beginning of Practice in Christianity, Kierkegaard’s ‘higher’

pseudonym, Anti-Climacus, introduces Christ as the ‘inviter’ and suggests
how this relates to the Skillevei: “In this way the invitation goes out, and
wherever there is a crossroad, it stands still and calls […] the invitation
sounds wherever there is a crossroad, and not with an uncertain sound […] but
with the trustworthiness of eternity” (SKS12, 17 / PC, 16). The invitation or
call at the Skillevei is connected to the Halt (Standsningen), as made explicit
in Practice in Christianity. First, the Halt is significant as an interruption of
and obstruction to ‘history’. Anti-Climacus explains: “‘History’ is to be
understood as profane history, world history, history directly understood in
contradistinction to sacred history” (SKS12, 40 / PC, 25). Continuing his
polemic against assimilating Christianity into the established order or the
Hegelian system, Kierkegaard points out: “history, says faith, has nothing to
do with Jesus Christ” (SKS12, 44 / PC, 30). The Halt also further explores the
themes of ‘the leap’ from Fear and Trembling and the ‘break with time’ in
Philosophical Fragments, which come together at a Skillevei in a human
being’s life. For Anti-Climacus, a phenomenon like Christ must contradict
human history, for “he is the paradox that history can never digest into an
ordinary syllogism” (SKS12, 44 / PC, 30). Thus, the second point about the
Halt is that it is the offence (Forargelse): “you [the human being] are halted
by the possibility of offence” (SKS12, 53 / PC, 39). Later in Practice in
Christianity, Anti-Climacus began the central section on the ‘offence’ by
explaining that the very “possibility of offence is the crossroad, or it is like
standing on a crossroad” (SKS12, 91 / PC, 81). The offence here is that Christ
as the God-man comes into collision with an established order, with a world:
it is a collision between the religious and the political, a collision that is
necessary for ‘spirit’ to emerge. The third aspect of the Halt is then Christ
himself. He is an offence to the established order because this ‘saviour’, this
‘son of God’ in the world, is “a lowly man, born of a despised virgin, his
father a carpenter” (SKS12, 54 / PC, 40), and a friend to whores and tax-
collectors. He is an offence to all: to the sagacious and sensible person, the
clergyman, the philosopher, the statesman, the solid citizen, and the scoffer
(SKS12, /51-60 / PC, 42-52). Yet, he invites all at the Skillevei.
Fourthly, the Halt presents rest (Ro) from the restlessness (Uro) of
existence; similarly, perhaps we might say the Halt offers a Stillevei to the
Skillevei. Not Kierkegaard’s term but rather my own, the Stillevei implies
slowing down unto rest. The Halt as ‘Stillevei’ (literally quiet or still way) is
that ‘blessed state of the striving spirit’. This ‘blessed state’ is like a still
ocean in that: “No storm may agitate it, no sudden gust of wind may move its
surface; no drowsy fog may spread over it; there must be no dubious
movement within it; no fleeting cloud may darken it; but it must lie still,
deeply transparent” (SKS8, 222 / UDVS, 121). The human being who is
aware of the Skillevei and the ‘resilience of inwardness’ is a ‘striving spirit’.
Halting is not standing completely still: “Halting is not indolent resting (en
dorsk Ro); halting is also movement. It is the heart’s inward movement, it is
self-deepening in inwardness” (SKS8, 249 / UDVS, 153). The Halt can be
that Stillevei, that blessed state, which lasts only as long as a glance of the eye;
and that is Christ’s invitation to human beings—‘to all those that labour and
are burdened’. The human being is never at rest; Christ is at rest, and at the
Skillevei there is a moment of rest; that blessed state, that ‘perfection’ in the
human being, in which the moment of choice comes and the resilience or
elasticity of inwardness is made apparent.
iii. Between Living and Dying
The Skillevei can also be viewed as a reference to life and death, standing
between death and the roaring charge of the masses, that new phenomenon or
“spectre” which was on the move across Europe. The awareness and
anticipation of death pushes one out into life, and the Skillevei of the
individual and the mass provides this important distinction. Anti-Climacus
writes in unabashedly rhetorical language to the reader: “no one asks what
wrong you suffer, no one asks where it pains or how it pains, while the mob in
its animal health tramples you in the dust” (SKS12, 28/ PC, 17). The Skillevei
implies a decision, a decision that may save the reader from the unthinking
masses in transitional Europe. Anti-Climacus continues on the same page:
“the invitation stands at the crossroad, where death distinguishes death from
life.” The stakes have risen, and the Skillevei becomes a metaphor for the
crossing of life and death. Kierkegaard’s two most important prototypes,
Socrates and Christ, were both sentenced to death by the Law. Both died for
the ‘Truth’, and the idea of the ‘progressive’ West was born from these two
famous deaths: in philosophy with Plato’s Socratic dialogues and in
Christianity with the four gospels. This is the West of Christianity and
Athenian Greek Philosophy, and yet they began as marginal, revolutionary
figures, as Kierkegaard reminds us. There is always the marginal that reveals
pluralistic aspect of the West, and which inserts itself as the periphery, thorn
and inspiration to the ‘progressive’ West, such as in the Celtic, Judaic, Nordic,
Slavic, Muslim and Romani histories, among others.
Skille is correctly translated as ‘separation’, but the root of the word is
not visible in the English language. Kierkegaard begins the passage with the
Skillevei as the place where death distinguishes itself from life. In life
everyone is separated, for there is no rest in existence. Unity, or perhaps
reunion, is only possible in death: “Separation >Adskillelsen@ forced its way in
everywhere to bring pain and unrest” (SKS12, 27 / PC, 18). But the inviter
presents a ‘way’ (Vei) that is offered to the one without rest. And it is all-
inclusive, for the invitation is also to those to “whom human society cruelly
locked its doors and for whom no grave has yet mercifully opened”. It is death
that reunites the separated ones more firmly than nature unites parents and
children, for in death the ‘believer’ finds rest in Christ, and Christ in return
provides eternal life to and unity with the dead. Hence, one has both
‘separation’ (Skille) as actuality and ‘the way’ (Veien) as possibility, and
where they become most clear is at the Skillevei. The ‘place of rest’ is indeed
at the end of life, but also, and paradoxically, it is within the existing self:
becoming, moving, on the road (på Vei). In 1847, Kierkegaard explains this
point in a sentence, “but the place and the road are within a person, since the
place is the blessed state of the striving spirit, the road the continual
transformation of the striving spirit” (SKS8, 160 /UDVS, 49). Yet it is
difficult to combine the possibility of the way with the actuality of the
separation. Kierkegaard tries to show this difficulty and in addition guide the
reader: “Alas, how many are there in each generation who have the courage to
stick to a conviction when it involves the danger of insults, when it involves
life and death, and when in addition the decisiveness of the unforeseen danger
stands appallingly over one!” (SKS10, 273 / CD, 259).
“In the grave there is rest, but beside the grave there is no rest” (SKS12,
28 / PC, 16)—here we have a conflation of the idea of ‘on the way’, and the
death/life dichotomy. The inviter, who is Christ in Practice in Christianity,
invites wherever there is a Skillevei, as the “invitation goes out […] it stands
still and calls.” This invitation at the Skillevei follows on from the Øieblik of
Philosophical Fragments and Concept of Anxiety; that “glance of the eye” in
which “time and eternity touch each other” (SKS4, 359 / CA, 89). The
‘invitation’ stands at the Skillevei, at the edge of time, “there where temporal
and earthly suffering placed its cross, and calls” (SKS12, 27 / PC 16). There is
no rest beside the grave, because you never come any further than the day
before you visit the grave, and this, Kierkegaard explains, “is very strenuous
and does not express rest.” Too often, readers of Kierkegaard have interpreted
him as simply the ‘gloomy Dane’ obsessed with death and the graveyard. But
what brings Kierkegaard to meditate on the grave and death is his wish to
shed more light on life and existence and to awaken one from slumber, which
even his predecessors knew they needed, from Rousseau’s declaration “quit
thy childhood and awake”, to Kant’s awakening from his “dogmatic slumber.”
George Pattison reinforces this point by firstly referring to the Preface of
Philosophical Fragments, when Climacus tells us that his dancing partner is
death, and because of this, humans are too heavy for him (SKS4, 178 / PF, 8).
Pattison then explains: “Kierkegaard’s manner of keeping the remembrance of
death is not simply to turn aside from the world and remain among the graves.
It is to look upon the world with an intensity and luminosity that throws into
relief the shadow of death inscribed in every ephemeral phenomenon.”12 In
Works of Love, Kierkegaard states emphatically: “To the earnestness of death

belongs that remarkable capacity for awakening” (SKS9, 347 / WL, 353).
iv. Multiplicity of the Self
Kierkegaard’s writing on the Skillevei alludes both to society and to that

single individual that has been at the forefront of all his authorship. Amidst
the unities and fractures of Kierkegaard’s writing and the various
developments in the twists and turns in the authorship, there is a certain
change of mood in Kierkegaard’s writings in 1848. Apparently vanished are
the urbane, cigar-smoking Johannes Climacus, the Byronic Seducer, the self-
satisfied yet mysterious Judge William, the pathetic Werther-like torments of
Quidam, and the dialectical hero-poet Johannes de silentio. Instead, 1848
reveals the voice of a more clear-cut yet no less stylistically elegant author of
Christian Discourses, alongside the creation of the sharpened pathos of Anti-
Climacus. And yet an echo of Johannes Climacus cannot help but ring out at
the beginning of Christian Discourses and remind the reader to smile when
reading the ‘serious’ discourses, while there are still traces of Quidam even in
Anti-Climacus in the lonely confessional passages of Practice in Christianity.
The unity is in this fragmentation and multiplicity of moods, masks and
situations. Multiplicity and fragmentation always begin in the face of
transformations in societies. The so-called “emptying out” of his “aesthetic
writings” implies a part of the process of a multiplicity of the self in the
presentation of the various stages, possibilities and ways of life available to
the single individual.
In Practice in Christianity, Kierkegaard shows how ‘rigorousness’
(Strenghed) has been a defining factor in his solitary project in dispersing the
self. In one of the barely disguised, autobiographical passages of the text,
Kierkegaard, as Anti-Climacus, confides: “[…] through acquaintance with the
thoughtless light-mindedness and self-satisfied confusion of people—than one
learns in the desert and from the stillness of the night […] I have learned with
frightful veracity to understand that rigorousness is the only thing that can
help” (SKS12, 223 / PC, 228). Mockingly, in a ‘worldly sense’, Kierkegaard
calls himself powerless; his powerlessness is no different than everyone else’s
in relation to infinity. Therefore, let no one, whether he be bishop, politician
or systematic philosopher, look down on anyone else, and Kierkegaard strives
to point this out in another revealing journal entry:
Were a passerby, no matter who, a drunk peddler woman, to say to

me in passing: I am better than you—I would, perhaps not without
tears in my eyes, answer: I believe it. But woe to the person who
wants to instruct me about presenting the demands of infinity. Would
to God that no one I love makes the sad mistake of crossing me in

this way (Pap. X 5 B 30, 1849).
Kierkegaard likes to compare himself to the Guadalquivir River in

Spain; “Just as the Guadalquivir River at some place plunges underground and
then comes up again, so I must now plunge into pseudonymity, but I also
understand now how I will emerge again under my own name” (Pap. X 1 A
422, 1849). Fond of this metaphor, equating the part of the river that reaches
the surface again to his upbuilding works, while going underground with the
pseudonymous works, Kierkegaard is able to tunnel into dark recesses such as
anxiety, despair, seduction and philosophical experimentation. This idea of
going under, as subterranean and an action of excavation, allows Kierkegaard
to ‘empty out’, and at the same time, to venture out to the borders of thinking
and imagined living. It is not accidentally that Plato begins Republic with the
words “I went down” and that Nietzsche concludes the first paragraph of Thus
Spoke Zarathustra with “Thus Zarathustra began to go under.” At the same
time, Kierkegaard can write upbuilding works immersed in perseverance,
guidance, allusions to nature, and rebuilding in the midst of fragmentation and
multiplicity, and yet they never maintain a firm hold, and this, finally, is the
point of human existence. In the midst of thinking and trying to elucidate the
meaning of the Skillevei, multiplicity ensures the impossibility of complete
security.
3. Ambiguities in the Individual and Society
Shall I make spirits fetch me what I please, / Resolve me of all ambiguities?

Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus
The human being stands at the Skillevei at the time of decision to go one way
or the other, and yet the Skillevei can return again and again. 1848 symbolises
a year of change, and yet it is from that year that revolution and reaction
emerge in equal measure. Kierkegaard himself is supposedly a conservative,
bourgeois, isolated egotist supporting the monarchy and bemoaning the rise of
democracy, and yet his writings offer a radical reappraisal of the individual
that emerges as subversive, critical and dangerous. There remains an
ambiguity in Kierkegaard’s portrayal of the individual and his or her relation
to society. Ambiguity is a word that implies that a word, phrase, or work
avails itself of more than one meaning; an equivocal, or overdetermined
expression. Ambiguous (to repeat from the introduction of this book) ushers
from the Latin ambigere – to wander; ambi designates around while agere is
to act. Ambiguity is the very thing that is confronted in Kierkegaard’s
writings and via his image of Skillevei for the individual in pursuit of the
passionate life within society.
i. Break and Development
In The Point of View Kierkegaard gives a retrospective of his writings and

attempts to unite the disparities and different directions in the authorship. Is
there a break or Kehre of some kind or is there a continuous development to
the situation of the ‘single individual’ in Kierkegaard’s authorship? Clarifying
this question of break or development highlights the ambiguities in the
portrayal of the single individual. Calling himself a reader rather than author
(SKS13, 19 / PV, 11), Kierkegaard’s theatre of the self becomes a workshop
of writing that surveys the development of the one holding the pen. On the
very last page of the conclusion to the ‘Two Notes’ of the ‘Appendix’ to The
Point of View, Kierkegaard writes: “My entire work as an author has also been
my own development” (SKS16, 105 / PV, 125). To read The Point of View is
to experience the plays, confessions, ambiguities and contradictions in the
writer himself and the portrayal of the single individual in attempting to report
to history. The Point of View is post-pseudonymous authorship; it is post-
Concluding Unscientific Postscript; and it is post-deadline for Kierkegaard’s
death. Kierkegaard turned thirty-four years of age in May 1847. Kierkegaard
went as far as to check his date of birth in the parish records to make sure he
had his date of birth correct, so convinced he was that he would die at the age
of thirty-three, the age of Christ, due to Kierkegaard’s father’s anger at God
years back on a heath in Jutland. He writes in his journal: “Strange that I have
reached 34 years old. I can’t make it out at all; I was so sure that I would die
before that birthday [Geburtsdag] or on it that I’m tempted to assume that my
birthday has been recorded wrong, and that I’m still going to die on my thirty-
fourth” (Pap.VIII I A 100, 1847). The ambiguity in the portrayal of the single
individual comes to light again with the whole idea of this report to history
being the concluding report to yet another concluding report in Concluding
Unscientific Postscript from Climacus. This ambiguous portrayal also sets up
the argument for The Point of View as yet another point of view that attempts
to articulate the position of that single individual. From the inconclusiveness
of The Point of View one begins to see a book of epiphanies, failures and
stumbles over a frenetic pen, in attempts to loosen and articulate the single
individual from the clutches of ‘the public’ (Publikum), ‘the crowd’ (Mængde)
and ‘the numerical’ (det Numeriske) (SKS13, 17 / PV, 10).
In The Point of View, Kierkegaard repeatedly points out that he is ‘a
religious author’. This can be viewed as his stance of ‘development’, because,
for Kierkegaard, the religious is analogous to the single individual.
Kierkegaard defends the thesis that the religious was there from the
beginning. By the time of “On my Work as an Author”, Kierkegaard clarifies,
“There is in a religious sense no public but only individuals, because the
religious is earnestness [Alvoren], and earnestness is the single individual”
(SKS13, 17 / PV, 10). This reveals the weapon of the religious: the religious
emerges in defining the single individual; and when there is religiosity in the
single individual, s/he confronts the public. The religiosity of the single
individual enables the separation from the crowd/public/numerical, as
religiosity runs counter to political decision-making, such as Christ interfering
with crime and punishment, socializing with outsiders and distancing himself
from the state, separating God’s Law from Caesar’s.
The final part of The Point of View, and the most important for
Kierkegaard’s indirect politics, is in the Appendix (Bilag) with the title “‘The
Single Individual’: Two ‘Notes’ Concerning My Work as an Author”. In
attempting to argue that the author in question is and was a religious author at
present and from the beginning, the single individual is, once again,
confronted with the public (SKS16, 22 / PV, 37). This encompasses the
development, in light of the movement towards ‘the simple’ (det Eenfoldige).
At the end of “On My Work as an Author”, Kierkegaard writes: “To arrive at
the simple: the movement is from the public to the single individual” (SKS13,
17 / PV, 10). The aesthetes, such as Johannes the Seducer and Constantin
Constantius, seek to exhaust the potentiality of the interesting. Kierkegaard
explains that he had portrayed himself as “interesting and pungent” and as a
‘loafer’ (Dagdriver) and ‘idler’ (Lediggænger) in contrast to a simple or
serious life (Pap. III B 41:26, 1841 / EOI, 500). The idea of ‘simple’ is
important as it refers to Kierkegaard’s two central prototypes for praxis:
Christ and Socrates.13 In Christian Discourses, Socrates is not mentioned by
name but is continually referred to as “that simple wise person of old” and
appears throughout the text, broadening the horizon of the work beyond
Christianity. In regard to becoming a Christian, Kierkegaard explains: “The
movement is from the interesting to the simple—becoming a Christian”
(SKS16, 73 / PV, 94). The simple is also analogous to the movement from the
poetic to the religious, and Kierkegaard states this: “As for the movement,
which is described in a series of books, from the philosophical, the systematic,
to the simple, that is, the existential, this movement, only in another situation,
is essentially the same as from the poet to religious existing” (SKS16, 100 /
PV, 120). These final sections of The Point of View, in discussing “the crowd
is untruth” and articulating “the single individual”, provide some of the more
succinct presentations of Kierkegaard’s indirect politics. “The crowd is
untruth” and the use of the religious in connection to being a single individual
come forth here most directly. Kierkegaard declares that the “essentially
religious is the true humanity” (SKS16, 84 / PV, 104), remembering that the
religious is earnestness (Alvor) and earnestness is the single individual. The
single individual is also defined as the eternal truth (SKS16, 92 / PV, 112),
spirit, and contra politics (SKS16, 101 / PV, 121). The ambiguities usher from
the inconclusiveness of The Point of View and its portrayal of the single
individual as one who overcomes the societal trappings of the public, the
numerical and the crowd. This leads to the next point in the annihilation and
reconstruction of the individual.
ii. Annihilating and Reconstructing the Individual
There are two types of annihilation in Kierkegaard’s authorship which come

to the surface in the 1848 writings. The single individual is annihilated in the
face of God, and s/he is annihilated when usurped by the public, the crowd,
and the numerical. The ambiguity of the individual continues in The Point of
View and pre-empts the depiction of the not so useful protagonists in the epic-
modern novels by Proust, Joyce and Musil. Kierkegaard writes: “The single
individual can mean the most unique of all, and the single individual can
mean everyone” (SKS16, 95 / PV, 115). In Christian Discourses, the
Christian begins to “see nothing—because eternity blinds him, he cannot see
by this earthly daylight” (SKS10, 46 / CD, 35). The Christian as human being,
in letting go of his/her care, lets him/herself become nothing to the world’s
needs, care and worries, and thus begins to move towards another kind of
loftiness - loftiness in its lowliness to the world’s cares. Thus, Kierkegaard
writes in the discourses: “The bird’s loftiness is the shadow, the Christian’s
the reality, the pagan’s the nothingness” (SKS10, 68 / CD, 59). However,
there is the human’s possibility to make a relation with the eternal, to help
face being overwhelmed with anxiety and a slave to the worries of the world.
The other aspect of the nothing arises, the nothingness of the worries which is
anxiety, when we think of anxiety also as possibility which (for Haufnienis) is
“the weightiest all categories” (SKS4, 455 / CA, 156). Kierkegaard describes
the one succumbing to the world’s worries and slaving for nothing:
Then the light of the spirit goes out; a dull mist hangs before his eyes.
He is listless, but still he does not want to die […] the disconsolate
person becomes insanely busy with all sorts of things, if only nothing
will remind him of God. He slaves from morning to night, accumulates
money, hoards, engages in business transactions – yes, if you speak with
him you will incessantly hear him talk about the earnestness of life
(SKS10, 102 / CD, 90).
The ‘nothing’ in this passage is first the loss of the individual into the
‘public’ as described in Kierkegaard’s diagnosis of the present age. Second, it
is the anxiety of care or Bekymringer, when one is reminded that anxiety is
worry for the future that does not exist. Kierkegaard described the public as
follows: “The public is the actual master of levelling [Nivellerings-Mester],
for when there is approximate levelling, something is doing the levelling, but
the public is a monstrous nothing [et uhyre Intet]” (SKS8, 86 / TA, 91).
‘The Public’ is the most devastating aspect of ‘the present age’ presented
in Two Ages:A Literary Review. It is the “monstrous nothing”, the
“abstraction” the “phantom that does not allow any personal approach”
(SKS8, 87 / TA, 91). In the Preface, Kierkegaard expresses his

“incompetence” in writing periodicals and that no one is under any obligation
to read his book (SKS8, 9 / TA, 5). This gives us a clue as to what
Kierkegaard means by “the public”, i.e. that which wishes to label and absorb
everything, and which Kierkegaard again and again tries to escape in his
efforts to remain an outsider in literature, sixty years before the cult of Karl
Kraus and his tirade against journalism. Claudio Magris describes this idea
clearly: “But it can also be an advantage in literature to write for no one, now
that wherever one goes the machine of organised culture falsely claims to
represent everyone.”14
In a crucial journal entry, Kierkegaard makes the distinction between the
public and the community: “In ‘the public’ […] the individual is nothing,
there is no individual, the numerical is constitutive and the principle of
coming into being a generatio aequivoca [spontaneous generation].”
However: “the individual is crucial as the prior condition for forming a
community” (Pap. X 2 A 390, 1850). Contrary to the view of Kierkegaard as
an anti-social thinker, he is presenting the case, in his critique of ‘the public’
in the present age, that the individual can and must play a vital role in society;
and he thus gives us a hint that when ‘the public’ does begin to overwhelm the
social strata, it is vital that the single individual does not lose oneself in it or
become nothing within the public. Hence, the importance of the 1848
writings: it is Kierkegaard’s attempt to bring forth the idea of inwardness
being manifested in the individual, and again I must point out that, unlike in
the previous pseudonymous writings, the ‘single individual’, freed from the
system and the public, becomes closer to nothing in the face of a God, but
becomes greater because that ‘single individual’ has had to ‘empty out’ and
overcome his or her ‘cares’.
As the critique in Two Ages:A Literary Review continues, the reflective
age “gains in extensity what it loses in intensity” (SKS8, 92 / TA, 97).
‘Inwardness’, that slippery essential aspect of the individual, is being lost in
the present age. Objective uncertainty is held fast with passionate inwardness,
but with the success of ‘the public’, extensity prevails over intensity, and
objective certainty is held fast with chatter about ‘nothing’—as in not being
an actual and living part of one’s existence. Speculative thought still gives
power to the public, and in The Sickness unto Death, Anti-Climacus points out
that in speculative thought “To be an individual human being is to be
nothing!” (SKS11, 230 / SUD, 119)—that is, the nothing that is equated with
‘the public’. In his ‘report to history’, Kierkegaard warns of the powerful,
faceless public, in the rise of the media as a growing influence in society
allowing the public to swell, where there is no voice and everything is
nothing:
While light-mindedness and curiosity and sensuality grin and the

nervous cowardice that itself shivers before such an attack incessantly
shouts, ‘It is nothing’, and the cowardice that despicably ransoms itself
from an attack by bribery or by putting on a good face to the one
concerned says, ‘It is nothing’, and sympathy says, ‘It is nothing’. How
terrible it is when blather and grinning threaten to become ‘public
opinion’ in a little country (SKS16, 46 / PV, 659).
This description is also a personal experience of Kierkegaard’s in his

feud with The Corsair newspaper. It is an experience that swallows the human
being whole. To become nothing in the face of society is the greatest danger;
to become nothing in the face of a God is the beginning of salvation. In a late
journal entry, Kierkegaard makes clear what has been happening in the 1848
writings: “God creates everything out of nothing—and everything God is to
use he first turns to nothing” (Pap.XI I A 491, 1854). This entry, dating from
1854, enforces development from the first publication of the ‘authorship’ in
1843’s Either/Or in the final pages, where the Preacher declares that “we are
always in the wrong before God.” This ‘wrong’ liberates the single individual
from the nothing in the idea of the public and embraces the individual who is
triumphant over his/her cares or Bekymringer.
iii. As Political Individual
The third point in the ambiguities in the individual is the presentation of the
individual as political individual. We know Kierkegaard said things like
‘politics is not for me’, but we must also remember that when using the word
‘political’ in connection with Kierkegaard, it also stands for world, society
and the established order, such as the ruling government. Under these
circumstances, Kierkegaard has much to say about the political. Certain
passages from Practice in Christianity discussing the ‘established order’ (det
Bestaaende) help support this possibility, alongside The Point of View. From
becoming nothing in the face of God, the task of the single individual as a
political individual is to de-deify the established order or society as a whole.
Rather than abolish a God figure, or in the Hobbesian and even Hegelian
manner of incorporating God into the established order in the politics of the
Leviathan and the phenomenology of spirit into human history, Kierkegaard
presents God (this time through Anti-Climacus) who “uses the single
individual to prod [at pirre: to tickle or to stimulate] the established order out
of self-complacency” (SKS12, 98 / PC, 90). This is also a tactic to confront
the problem of the public in connection to Kierkegaard’s maxim “the crowd is
untruth”. The ‘established order’ becomes the inspiration or even end product
of a generation, and Anti-Climacus points out that “the deification of the
established order is the secularization of everything” (SKS12, 99 / PC, 91).
What becomes clear here is that the individual’s relationship to God is
manifested in one’s relationship with the world. In the ambiguities of the
individual, in the attempt to free one from the Bekymringer of the world
presented in Christian Discourses, Kierkegaard is seeking to de-socialise the
individual in order to de-deify society. In this way, the single individual can
be viewed as a political individual, when we discern that by prodding the
established order out of its self-complacency the de-politicisation is an
indirect politics. As if in conversation with himself on this point a year
previously in Works of Love, Kierkegaard remarks, “The noble rogue [Denne
ædle Skalkagtige] had understood in the profound sense that the highest one
human being can do for another is to make him free, help him to stand by
himself” (SKS9, 274 / WL, 276). As political individual, the individual stands
as the highly critical writer, unphased by the crowd’s hysterical power
struggle, and the writer of The Point of View maintains this in his remarks on
rule: “It is no truth that rules the world but illusions”, while the crowd
“always falls into the trap of appearances” (SKS16, 40 / PV, 59). It is in
another way a rebellion against God in its “rebellion of reflection, an insidious
rebellion, continued from year to year, from generation to generation”
(SKS16, 101 / PV, 122). To de-deify the established order is a reminder of the
instability of any order, which is the purpose of Climacus’ metaphor of
Venice being built upon the sea (SKS4, 261 / PF, 88). As critical thinker and
political individual, the human being is confronted with the established order;
already then, the individual is engaged in the political realm by his/her stance
of critical perspective. Anti-Climacus describes this opposition:
The established order, however, at that time insisted and always insists
on being the objective, higher than each and every individual, than
subjectivity. The moment when an individual is unwilling to subordinate
himself to this established order or indeed even questions its being true,
yes, charges it with being untruth, whereas he declares that he himself is
in the truth and of the truth, declares that the truth lies specifically in
inwardness- then there is a collision (SKS12, 97 / PC, 89).
The single individual, in order to de-socialise him/herself and in order to

disenchant the established order and thereby critically scrutinise society, the
individual experiences ambiguity, thus leaving him/her open to attacks from
all sides. This might be the intention of indirect politics, as this Mellemspil,
and like that other thinker of ambiguous positioning, Nietzsche (in the
introduction to Ecce Homo or the subtitle to Beyond Good and Evil: “Prelude
to a Philosophy of the Future”), speaks perhaps more so to future generations.
However, this does not sacrifice all possibility of community-building as a
result of de-socialising the individual and situating oneself away from any
allegiances. Chapter five of this book more closely addresses the problem of
engaging with community.
In The Point of View, Kierkegaard endeavours again to advocate a life of
public deception—both as writer and human being. This is not some trivial
biographical aside, which is always a danger when reading Kierkegaard;

rather, it has serious philosophical implications. Not only is it a way to
confuse the pseudonymous writers with Kierkegaard himself and a method to
make life more difficult for the reader, it is also a means of lifting the
individual out from the crowd and the status quo, and a strategy also to make
the reader truly engage with the texts and begin to scrutinize oneself.
Kierkegaard describes his position at the time of writing the pseudonymous
works of 1843-1846 as an attempt to “annihilate myself, to weaken the
impression of myself” (SKS16, 39 / PV, 58). In polarising the reader, the
single individual as political individual becomes inclusive and not exclusive
in offending both the elite and the proletariat of society. In the same work,
Kierkegaard confronts both classes seduced by the “wretched journalists
fighting for equality”, thus confronting the middle classes too in the attack on
the journalist: “It is in the service to the lie, to making the elite, in self-
defence, proud of their aloofness from the common man, and the common
man brazen in his rudeness” (SKS16, 41 / PV, 60). In this attack on all
classes, and the return attack from all classes, Kierkegaard can be defended as
being inclusive. He tries to defend himself on this point too when dwelling on
the attack on him from the common man: “If I had actually been exclusive,
this never would have happened to me” (SKS16, 68 / PV, 90). In conclusion,
Kierkegaard becomes the ‘spy’, maintaining the scrutinising eye for the single
individual as political individual: “I am no saint—in short, I am like a spy
who in spying, in being informed about malpractices and illusions and
suspicious matters, in exercising surveillance, is himself under the strictest
surveillance” (SKS16, 66 / PV, 87).
iv. As Political Spirit
The final point about the ambiguities present in the concepts of individual and
society lies in the single individual’s movement from political individual to
political spirit. Taking note of the positioning of the single individual in 1848,
especially in the juggling of the individual in The Point of View, ‘the crowd’
begins to correspond to untruth, while the individual begins to correspond to
truth. Both, however, are untruth in relation to a god. However, the only
moment where truth as eternal truth comes about is in the single individual.
How does this connect to the idea of political ‘spirit’? Kierkegaard continues:
“To relate oneself to God is far superior to relating oneself to the race or
through the race to God. This I have striven to express” (SKS16, 66 / PV, 88).
The single individual strives through a god, and this is the anchor for critical
scrutiny within the world, to the world, and to affirming the world. Thus, the
word ‘spirit’ can be used in this context, because that is the anchor of
Kierkegaard’s individual. Climacus’ metaphor of the ‘magic lamp’ unleashes
spirit if we rub it hard enough (SKS7, 129 / CUP, 138). The lamp represents
freedom and the ground of freedom is spirit. This is what separates

Kierkegaard from other moderns who perceive the ground of human beings as
solely an abyss of nothingness. This is analogous to that most remarkable and
encouraging of openings, in the eulogy on Abraham (Lovtale over Abraham)
in Fear and Trembling, when Johannes de silentio asks, “If there were no
eternal consciousness in man, if at the bottom of everything there were only a
wild ferment, a power that twisting in dark passions produced everything
great or inconsequential >…@ what would life be then but despair?” (SKS4,
112 / FT, 17). The anchor comes in the form of the hero and the poet or
speechmaker or even storyteller. As political spirit, the individual has
governance as its anchor, a god to enable him/her to be a critical scrutiniser
for the benefit of the world.
Anchors can always lose their grip on the ocean bed from which they are
entrenched, otherwise, the tyranny of the individual and a fundamental
movement of answering to no one may emerge in all its fury. There is always
in Kierkegaard an awareness of the instability in the world, and that is why
one finds Kierkegaard writing lines such as “Command the seaman to sail
without ballast—he capsizes; let the generation, let every individual in it try to
exist without the unconditional it is and remains a vortex” (SKS13, 26 / PV,
19). It is not such an easy way then, and to be still and silent in the face of
spirit, to be still in the face of governance—this is to be acutely aware of
one’s anchor. The discourse from Christian Discourses, “Watch your step
when you go into the House of the Lord”, comments on this situation noting
the difficulties in the stillness once one is away from the crowd: “What
earnestness of eternity, what a difficult position” (SKS10, 178 / CD, 166).
From this stillness in attaining spirit, there is then the task of returning to the
busy street outside. In the same year, Kierkegaard writes of another difficulty
though no less necessary: “Of all anguish, the greatest is this—to have the
task of being spirit and then have to live among men” (Pap. IX A 38, 1848).
Like his Christianity, Kierkegaard’s political spirit is a combination of
gentleness and rigorousness. There is stillness and joy in being an individual,
and a rigorousness of living as one in the world.
The single individual has the possibility of becoming political spirit,
because when one is connected to the religious or if one claims to be a
religious writer, one becomes, for Kierkegaard, a polemical writer.
Kierkegaard explains why: “Every religious author is eo ipso polemical,
because the world is not so good that the religious can be assumed to have
triumphed or to be in the majority” (SKS16, 47 / PV, 67). When Kierkegaard
uses the expression ‘religious poet’, especially in 1848, there is something of
a political spirit that comes out of this. The religious poet in Kierkegaard’s
authorship is the one “sailing with ballast” and through tempestuous storms
within the self. Anti-Climacus gives Kierkegaard’s most succinct description
of the supreme poet in The Sickness unto Death, revealing the tensions and
collisions in the extraordinary self who seems to be in an “impenetrable
dialectical labyrinth” striving between its powerful and free imagination and
its sin which is also limitation and the poet’s thorn in the flesh:
His relation to the religious is that of an unhappy lover, not in the

strictest sense that of a believer; he has only the first element of faith –
despair – and within it an intense longing for the religious. His conflict
actually is this: Has he been called? Does his thorn in the flesh signify
that he is to be used for the extraordinary? Before God, is it entirely in
order to be the extraordinary he has become? Or is the thorn in the flesh
that under which he must humble himself in order to attain the
universally human? (SKS11, 192 / SUD, 78).
In Kierkegaard’s writings there is always an infinite difference between

God and man in the affairs of the world, but as political spirit, the single
individual, though standing in the storm, does find shelter along the way in
the poet, the hero and even, at moments, the governance of a god. When all
seems lost, human beings over the last few thousand years have relied on
communication through the hero and the poet performed through deed and
storytelling. In Christian Discourses, Kierkegaard reveals the very ‘goods’ of
the spirit: “Not so with the goods of the spirit. In its concept, the good of the
spirit is communication, its possession merciful, in itself communication
[italics in the original]” (SKS10, 127 / CD, 116). Kierkegaard goes as far as to
say that communication “is the humanity of spiritual goods in contrast to the
inhumanity of earthly goods.”The single individual is ambiguously presented
as political spirit in 1848, and the possibility of community emerges precisely
through Kierkegaard’s contribution as a critic of community.
4. Discourses for the ‘Present Age’
He is no traveller; he is enslaved to the earth.

Kierkegaard, Christian Discourses
Kierkegaard completes The Point of View by stating that “in these times
everything is politics”; what does he consider the proper response to this? Two
Ages:A Literary Review was an all-out attack, and the lilies and birds
discourses of Christian Discourses provide solutions to the malaise of any age
in obstructing the ways of living as a human being. The layout of part one of
Christian Discourses is composed of opposites (except the last discourse):
poverty and abundance, lowliness and loftiness, and presumptuousness and
self-doubt. The seventh and final chapter breaks the structure of opposites and
is presented in a trinity of double-mindedness, vacillation and
disconsolateness, signifying the lack of decision-making at the Skillevei. For
Kierkegaard, there can be no opposite care for these last three cares. Their
opposite stands at the Skillevei.
Kierkegaard concludes his critique of the ‘present age’ with the fiery
words of the preacher: “That time is now past; they either must be lost in the
dizziness of abstract infinity or be infinitely saved in the essentiality of
religiousness” (SKS8, 103 / TA, 108). Published in the midst of revolutions
across Europe, the discourses in the first part of Christian Discourses provide
a description of being infinitely saved in the midst of symbolically world-
changing events such as those of 1848. With emphasis upon three terms
central to the first part of the text, the discourses suggest ways of staying true
to the essence of human life: specifically, by going against the age and
thereby serving it. In this it is reminiscent of Nietzsche’s comment: “The
better the state is established, the fainter is humanity. To make an individual
uncomfortable, that is my task.”15
i. The Smile
The first of the three terms that I have chosen from the first part of Christian
Discourses is in the gesture of the smile, which comes at the end of the
introduction to the discourses. Initially the smile (which can be the warm up
to laughter) specifically points to the lily and the bird. Similarly, the prayer at
the very beginning of the text signals a feeling of joy and optimism. Within
those few lines we have the words ‘springtime’, ‘freshness’, ‘beauty’,
‘instruction’ and ‘recover’. The lily and the bird are the ‘assistant teachers’.
They are also there by “way of the jest” (en Spøg bliver det dog) for the heavy
task of living as a human being. What sets Kierkegaard apart from other
thinkers is his use of the smile and laughter in the struggle “for the eternal to
be victorious in a person” (SKS10, 24 / CD, 12). After pointing out that “the
pagans who are found in Christendom have sunk the lowest”, Kierkegaard
reminds the reader “not to forget first and foremost to relax into a smile.” The
‘new freshness’ and ‘beauty’ of the bird and the lily enables Kierkegaard to
say: “Relax, you struggling one! One can forget how to laugh, but God keep a
person from ever forgetting how to smile.” The lily and the bird are connected
with this smile.
The one who smiles, like Climacus, “cannot help laughing at death”
(SKS7, 153 / CUP, 165) and the philosopher writes: “I do not deny that I am a
great friend of people, but an even greater friend of laughter” (Pap.VI B 74:
11 n.d., 1845 / CUPII, 103). This laughter accommodates the tension;
sometimes people lose their resiliency, their ability to move on, to recreate
themselves, to put things behind them. These people have lost the power of
the smile, of genuine laughter. Nietzsche had this awareness of the use of
laughter, the quality of the smile, and Zarathustra recommends
wholeheartedly that we laugh in the face of the abyss. James Joyce also
recognised the power of the jest when he writes, “He laughed to free his mind
from his mind’s bondage.”16 And John D. Caputo transfers the idea of
‘relaxing into a smile’ into an empirical example. He recounts the story of a
person who called a suicide prevention centre, and upon getting a recorded
message instead of a counsellor, burst into laughter at the absurdity of the
situation. That burst of laughter burst the tension and the crisis.17 ‘Relaxing
into a smile’ enables one to look down at oneself, to move on, and, as
Kierkegaard remarks, to “endure lightly and with a smile all the miseries of
maltreatment” (Pap. IX A 453, 1848). By the time of Christian Discourses,
Kierkegaard does not forget the jest, the smile and laughter, which began with
the special wish granted the aesthete of Either/Or I by the gods, who asked for
nothing more than “to have laughter on his side”. In response, the gods
laughed, and so it was granted to him (SKS2, 51 / EOI, 43). Taking
Kierkegaard’s advice of the smile at the beginning of Christian Discourses,
and remembering Kierkegaard’s self-description in The Point of View as “a
friend and lover of laughter” (SKS16, 94/ PV, 114), the reader enters the
discourses and comes upon the cares or worries.
ii. The Care
The care which begins every discourse has already been powerfully described
in Goethe’s Faust in the form of ‘Sorge’:
Care makes its nest in the heart’s deepest hole /And secretly torments the
soul; / Its restless rocking motion mars our mind’s content. / It’s masks
are ever-changing, it appears / As house and home, as wife and child, it
will invent / Wounds, poisons, fires and floods—from all / These blows
we flinch before they ever fall / And for the imagined losses shed
continual tears.18
What is Kierkegaard’s ‘care’ (Bekymring)? Kierkegaard writes: “A

craving [Tragten] to become more and more—for nothing [Intet], since the
whole thing is indeed nothing; a craving to rise higher and higher in
loftiness—that is to sink lower and lower in the care of the abyss—for what
else is the care of worldly loftiness than the care of the abyss!” (SKS10, 67 /
CD, 57). This craving for material goods is the care of loftiness, and in the
case of this care there is no end to its craving. It is enslavement to the world,
in being unable to travel at all. Kierkegaard continues in the same passage:
“What is the care? It is the care lest someone by slyness, by force, by lies, or
by truth will take away his delusion. Therefore he secures himself in every
way, since he sees danger everywhere, everywhere covetousness, everywhere
envy, everywhere ghosts.” The care, Kierkegaard concludes, “swallows its
prey.” There is always a dichotomy with the care. On the one hand, there is
the care to keep one’s goods safe and crave for more, and on the other hand,
there is the care to shut out all things suspicious, all things alien, for there is
danger everywhere. The human being’s world is thus reduced to the care for
loftiness or the care for security in one’s own present age, to huddle in and be
just like the others. Kierkegaard does not relent and concludes:
[…] his self does not exist; his innermost being has been consumed and
depithed in the service of nothingness; slave of futility, with no control
over himself, in the power of giddy worldliness, godforsaken, he ceases
to be a human being; in his innermost being he is dead; but his loftiness
walks ghostlike among us—it lives (SKS10, 67 / CD, 58).
One is either a slave to absolute security or to absolute wretched

rebellion in the world. The result is the same: the abyss of nothingness. This
pre-empts The Sickness unto Death of inclosing reserve [Indesluttethed] and
defiance [Trods].
To conform to the niceties and to avoid unsettling any cosy ambience,
the single individual finds her/himself in a world where s/he becomes less
able to speak her/his mind and encounter another who responds critically and
honestly. One might then turn to Kierkegaard’s remark from Two Ages:A
Literary Review that many conversations “leave the impression that one has
been speaking with an anonymity”, and further on in relation to human
speech: “there will no longer be someone who speaks, but an objective
reflection will gradually deposit a kind of atmosphere, an abstract noise that
will render human speech superfluous [overflødig], just as machines make
workers superfluous” (SKS8, 98 / TA, 103). An empirical example in a banal,
everyday possible situation might clarify this second aspect of the care; upon
looking at a certain person’s record collection, the person who was filtering
through asked, “do you have any normal music?” By ‘normal’, this perhaps
meant what one ‘should’ have in his/her record collection, which was, of
course, the demand of the times, or to be more precise the demand of
advertising and companies upon the anonymous and formless consumer. It
wasn’t a question of whether one felt a genuine attraction to the music, but
what the person should be drawn to in his/her ‘present age’. The care of
absolute security is also when one casually embraces both God and the world
in equal measure. With lazy aplomb, one passively pretends to be what one is
not, a hypocrite who encounters no Skillevei. The situation of this comfortable
citizen from ‘the present age’ is “[…] to lose one’s own self (to lose God) in
such a way that one does not even care to bend down to pick it up, or in such a
way that it entirely escapes one that one has lost it! […] but to lose God as if
he were nothing” (SKS10, 98 / CD, 90). One chooses both and thereby reveals
the care of indecisiveness and vacillation. The doubleness of serving two
masters is ‘double-mindedness’ (Tvesindethed) and ultimately despair when
we think in Danish and German: Fortvivlelse and Verzweiflung. The definition
of Fortvivlelse in The Sickness unto Death is wanting to be oneself and not
wanting to be oneself. The person wavers, wants time to consider things,
wants reasons, has two wills, and ultimately seeks to forget the problem of
God entirely by becoming busy with what Kierkegaard calls “life’s

earnestness/seriousness [Livets Alvor].” Counteracting this seriousness of the
worldly human being, the traveler has the lily and bird for jest, and the smile.
To escape God and the possibility of ‘travel’, the human being resorts to
busyness rather than remaining in self-torment, and thus one keeps busy living
which is really keeping busy dying. This becomes far more dangerous than
rebellion or defiance, for the energy of the defiant revolutionaries always
contains the possibility of overcoming the care. Instead, one resorts to
busyness to escape another care, that of disconsolateness [Trøstesløsheden],
where enslavement has finally triumphed. Whether in the care of busyness in
security or the care of busyness in lofty cravings, when one steps out onto the
busy street, nobody is really going anywhere, whether that be at hectic rush-
hour over London Bridge, or, in Kierkegaard’s case, over Knippelsbro
drawbridge. In a devilish example of the kind of loafer he can be, Kierkegaard
writes: “There’s no one I would rather have fall down, or have the
Knippelsbro drawbridge raised in front of, etc. than those hard-pressed
businessman who have so infinitely much to get done in the world, while the
rest of us, when Knippelsbro is raised, find it a good opportunity for falling
into thought” (Pap.III A 22, 1840).
There is the care of presumptuousness (Formastelige) which continues
trying to have it both ways in the two forms of despair: “Presumptuousness
[…] is either in a forbidden, a rebellious, an ungodly way to want to have
God’s help [the philistine bourgeois], or, in a forbidden, a rebellious, an
ungodly way to want to do without God’s help [the defiance of the romantic
rebel]” (SKS10, 72 / CD, 63). This is the human being of ‘the present age’
and ‘the revolutionary age’. These cares enslave the human being to the
seductions of the world, which Mephistopheles grins and sighs knowingly
“[…] civilization now licks us all to smooth, has taught even the Devil
tricks.”19 In conclusion, the human being has become a “slavish mind
[Trællesjel]” (SKS10, 46 / CD, 35). As Kierkegaard says: “He is no traveler,
he is enslaved to the earth” (SKS10, 45 / CD, 34).
iii. The Traveler
Who is the traveler in Christian Discourses? The traveler is one who is free
from the worldly cares. The traveler is like the lily and the bird, who are also
free from worldly cares. The traveler is also like the child, or childhood itself,
and the place where the whole of life is still open before him/her, and whose
imagination is open and active. Here we come closer both to the revolutionary
as the child of spring, and to the Christian who must be as a child to enter the
kingdom of God (Matthew 18:3). Yet, in overcoming the cares, the traveler
has matured from the child and the revolutionary. No longer ignorant, because
s/he has been exposed to the cares, the traveler becomes even greater than the
lily and the bird. The traveler is now one who does not carry much, and who
is able to release oneself from the goods of the world. S/he need not be one
who is moving from South America to China and making extraordinary
external discoveries. Climacus had already shown his dislike of this idea of
the traveler who sets off and must constantly be on the move; for him this
only reinforces that inwardness is being lost more and more (and also perhaps
a swipe at H.C. Andersen and late romanticism). This is not to do away with
the delights of travel, whether that be of the backpacking kind or Walter
Benjamin wanderings, but the traveler in this discourse is one who is released
from the care of one’s abundance of goods or lack of them. S/he is like the
bird, and continues to look to the birds and the lilies for guidance (as assistant
teachers). Kierkegaard writes: “The bird is a traveler, even the one that does
not travel is still a traveler; therefore it wants nothing to do with abundance
and nothing with its care” (SKS10, 36 / CD, 24).
The moment we prepare to go on a journey, we separate very quickly
what is ours and what is not ours. One is not to be like the house-holder
(Huusholderen), but to act as if one is on a journey. When one is on a journey,
we take only what we need, and leave behind what we don’t need. The
discourse provides the alternative to the present age of material need and
anxiety of what one should have: “[…] it is easy enough to keep what one
does not have, and he is indeed like one who does not have; he has no care
about losing it […] he has no care about others’ owning more, because he is
like one who owns nothing […]” (SKS10, 42 / CD, 31). The traveler is
playfully compared by Kierkegaard with the absent-minded person (en
Aandsfraværende), and this is proof of his lack of care for earthly wealth:
“[…] he himself is a traveler—that is how ignorant the rich Christian is of his
earthly wealth, yes, just like an absent-minded person” (SKS10, 42 / CD, 31),
and the way to become rich is “[…] to become ignorant of one’s wealth, to
become poor” (SKS10, 47 / CD, 36). This has deep social implications if the
Christian is to live like this, in contrast to the one who must always carry his
goods. The ‘absent-minded’ traveler as such upon ‘dying to the world’ is
awakened again by his release from the goods he carries or the lack thereof.
There are other teachers to help this traveler along his/her way.
Both Christ and Socrates are the travelers who dethrone the worldly
worries. The traveler exists “before his prototype” (SKS10, 53 / CD, 42). Both
prototypes fit Kierkegaard’s traveler of Christian Discourses: they have both
dethroned worldly worries, they travel lightly, they have no permanent home,
and they subvert knowledge, from declaring not to knowing much. They also
know the difficulty of becoming a traveler and the allegory of nature in the
lily and the bird are there to guide as the ‘assistant teachers’. Kierkegaard
admits the difficulty of being without care, compares it to a miracle performed
by Jesus: “To be without care—indeed, it is a difficult walk, almost like
walking on water […]” (SKS10, 32 / CD, 21). One can begin to travel once
one has committed oneself to one’s governance that is the eternal or this God.
Socrates and Christ represent the allegorical subjectivity of the world

when compared to the objective world of worries, or to quote a line from
Walter Benjamin: “Subjectivity, like an angel falling into the depths, is
brought back by allegories, and is held fast in heaven, in God, by ponderación
misteriosa [Calderón]” (O, 235). This ‘ponderación misteriosa’ is Calderón’s
‘mysterious balance’, and points to the position of Kierkegaard’s traveler who
is poised between two worlds, as the Mellemspil or interlude, compared in
Christian Discourses with the apparently absentminded person, one who
carries the heavy burden ever so lightly. The story of the Good Samaritan
(Luke 10:30-37) is the perfect example of the traveler, who walks the same
road as the robber, the priest and the Levite. Unburdened by worry or care, the
Samaritan as traveler picks up the victim on the road on his way and helps
him back on his feet, thus representing the finest allegory of the ‘neighbor’ in
the whole of the Christian tradition.
Like Marx, Kierkegaard’s thought that it is not the worldly things that
are dangerous or sinful as such but rather the manner in which we relate to
them. Yet in stark contrast to Marx’s thesis, Kierkegaard seeks to dethrone the
world and its worries by prioritizing the eternal first (stemming from the
Sermon on the Mount quoted at the beginning of Christian Discourses).
Parallels with Marx are visible in the critique of the present age, although we
might say simply that Marx seeks for the world to change externally as much
as internally in overthrowing the existing social order; Kierkegaard wishes for
us to change internally before any thought of external world changing events
should occur. The traveler of Christian Discourses seeks to prioritize the
eternally present, to be contemporary with oneself against the worldly worry
of status, economics, the next day, procrastination, and politics. I will return to
the traveler as one who also wears the mask of loafer, performing as
Dagdriver and flâneur and interrupting the political realm in connection with
Walter Benjamin in Chapter Four.
Focusing attention on the above terms from the first seven discourses of
the Christian Discourses reveals an underlying message which concerns ways
to confront the malaise of being a human being living in the world. Through
introducing The Smile, Care and the Traveler, the discourses help counteract
the ‘present age’, opening up Kierkegaard’s indirect politics. Theoretical
discussions never take place in a vacuum, and philosophical thought does
have political consequences.
Two
INWARDNESS AS AN EXPRESSION FOR

REVOLUTIONARY PRAXIS (GEORG LUKÁCS)
Revolution is a drama perhaps more than a history, and its pathos is a condition
as imperious as its authenticity
Auguste Blanqui
This book’s juxtaposition of Kierkegaard with other thinkers begins here, with
the response (to Kierkegaard) of influential twentieth-century Marxist thinker
Georg Lukács. Navigating through theatre, inwardness, and the dialectical
leap with Kierkegaard and Lukács discloses core aspects of Kierkegaard’s
indirect politics. In his essay “The Foundering [Zerschellen] of Form Against
Life” (1909), Lukács was among the first writers outside Denmark to write on
Kierkegaard. In the years from Soul and Form to The Theory of the Novel,
Lukács taps into a subtle tendency in the Zeitgeist in which certain quarters of
the Germanic intelligentsia were finding a Regine Olsen in their own broken
love affairs, and a Kierkegaard shadow in themselves: Lukács and Irma
Seidler, Ferdinand Ebner and Louise Karpischek, and Franz Kafka and Felice
Bauer, to name a few. Twenty years after this pivotal essay, Kierkegaard
becomes for Lukács the model of a desperate parasite, a born enemy of
humanity, a petty-minded and confused writer, eminent in the process of
modern philosophy that is the destruction of reason. I contend that Lukács is,
for most of his life, the embodiment of a certain reading of Kierkegaard: that
is “the power a man’s comprehension exerts on his life” (Pap. X 3 A 736,
1851). In examining Lukács’ texts, such as those still heavily under the
influence of Kierkegaard, such as Soul and Form and The Theory of the
Novel, as well as the explosive turn to Marxism in History and Class
Consciousness, to the Stalinist period of The Destruction of Reason which
places Kierkegaard as one of the key founders of irrationalism and precursors
to National Socialism, Lukács turns Kierkegaard’s inwardness into
revolutionary praxis, but in the process attempts to annihilate all traces of
ambiguity towards a homogeneous, all-unifying world. As a certain kind of
Hegelian, Lukács works his way through the history of Western thought,
revealing both his vast knowledge of German philosophy and love of German
literature, and in an attempt to find positive solutions to social and
philosophical problems he goes beyond both the Frankfurt School and
existentialism. Tracing the relationship between Lukács and Kierkegaard and
uncovering the complex political element in Kierkegaard’s thinking ultimately
separates him from Lukács.
1. The Faustian Phase
For Germany, there was only one way to culture: the inner way, the way of
revolution of the spirit, no one could seriously envisage a real revolution.
Georg Lukács, Soul and Form
What I call here the “Faustian phase” is Kierkegaard and Lukács’ early and
abiding fascination with Goethe’s Faust and how their reading of the legend
of Faust most especially through Goethe’s masterpiece serves as a foundation
to their philosophy of becoming. Both Kierkegaard and Lukács burst into their
respective writing careers out of a Faustian landscape made up of the magical
and surreal [from their readings of Goethe’s Faust, fairytales, Shakespeare
(Kierkegaard) and Ibsen (Lukács)], golden ages on the brink of change
(Golden Age Denmark and The Hapsburg Empire), love and death (Regine,
the death of five of Kierkegaard’s siblings; the affair and suicide of Lukács
lover Irma Seidler and death of Leo Popper—Lukács closest friend and
inspiration), and extravagant latenight living, music and theatre. These are the
early years of Kierkegaard and Lukács, before Kierkegaard finished
university, and up to the publication of Lukács’ first work, Soul and Form.
The Faustian phase becomes a symbol that resonates throughout their lives,
like so many intellectuals and artists, in the breaks and fragmentation in
existence itself and the yearning for spirit in the development of the
individual. One could also turn to the idea of Hamlet in the juxtapostion of
these two thinkers, but it is the Faustian element that first catches their
imagination. This comes in the form of the conflict between the elite and
common man on the streets, and the worldly and spiritual ambitions from the
Gospel of Matthew’s The Sermon on the Mount in gaining the whole world
and losing one’s soul, and transforming the act of thinking itself into external
action, or transforming inwardness into praxis.
i. Transitions
The Faustian character, as the ‘personification of doubt’ (Pap. I A 72, 1835),

as Kierkegaard called him, represents the search for the new, modern world.
Despite Lukács’ comment on “Kierkegaard’s constant attack on Goethe” (DR,
244), Kierkegaard maintained a passionate interest in Goethe, but a dislike for
Goetheans as much as Hegelians in Denmark, as they were usually made up
of the same group—Kierkegaard’s contemporary Martensen being the most
obvious target. For quite some time, Kierkegaard contemplated writing a work
on Faust (but Martensen beat him to it, writing a treatise on Nicolaus Lenau’s
Faust in 1837. See journal entry: “Oh, how unhappy I am—Martensen has
written a treatise on Lenau’s Faust!” [Pap.II A 605, 1837]). References to
Faust are scattered throughout his texts—most explicitly in The Concept of
Irony, Either/Or, Fear and Trembling and an inspiration for the posthumous
Inwardness as an Expression for Revolutionary Praxis 45
Johannes Climacus. Lukács devotes the last hundred pages to Faust in his
book Goethe and His Age. Goethe is spared the fate of Marxist criticism and
annihilation, and instead is depicted as the genius who, in his great dramatic
poem, analogous to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, already anticipated
what Marx later would articulate. It is significant that Lukács reminds us more
than once in his later, most Party-aligned phase that Pushkin called Faust
“The Iliad of the modern world” (YH, 111, 566; GA, 157). Lukács always
held the highest regard for Goethe, and for him the road on which Goethe’s
Faust (1808, 1832) travels is the same as Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit
(1807). For Lukács, “Goethe and Hegel stand on the threshold of the last great
and tragic blossoming of bourgeois ideology” (YH, 400). Both Goethe and
Hegel represent the new Faustian phase in literature and philosophy. The
Phenonemology of Spirit and Faust are the pinnacle of this expression, and
Lukács brings them together: “Both works express a similar aspiration: to
provide an encyclopaedic account of the development of mankind to the point
reached in the present, and to portray that development in its immanent
movement, in terms of its own laws” (YH, 566). The influence of Hegel on
both Kierkegaard and Lukács is, of course, immense. Lukács directly
appropriates and steadfastly defends Hegel, and after 567 pages of exploration
in The Young Hegel, he unites Hegel with Goethe in his final sentence: “[…]
the road on which Goethe discovers his Faust or Wilhelm Meister is, broadly
speaking, the same as that of the spirit in Hegel’s Phenomenology.”
What is the Faustian man? He represents transition and doubt, the
conflict between myth and reality, the complex and the simple, and the
divided self. The abiding question for the Faustian man is whether one’s soul
can be saved by embracing the whole world, or must the world be wholly
dismissed in order to save one’s soul? Does Lukács embrace the former first?
To say that Kierkegaard embraces the latter would overlook the radical
engagement that Kierkegaard undertakes in the writings of 1848. This
Faustian phase is part of a shattering of the self in transitional times, and it is
immersed in the arrival of the dictum ‘God is dead’ which both Hegel and
Nietzsche declared in their way, both before and after Kierkegaard,
respectively.1 Goethe’s Faust represents this progressive element of humanity
in a world of uncertainty and the loss of faith, hence its attractiveness to both
Kierkegaard and Lukács. Goethe’s Faust at one moment asks, “Am I a god?”,
and at another moment he compares himself to a worm: “I am not like a god!
[…] I am a worm stuck in the dust.”2 Emerging from Romanticism and the
Enlightenment, Kierkegaard and Lukács’ Faustian years are a cathartic
expression that cleared the way for their later works. This is also evident in
Kierkegaard’s journal entries during the years 1836–40, and Lukács’
correspondence with various friends from 1908–1919. This transitional man
arises out of the failures of both Romanticism and the Enlightenment. For
Kierkegaard this can be seen in his disenchantment with his own time: with
the Danish Church, Hegelianism and the rise of collectivity over singularity in
law, politics and journalism. For Lukács it was disenchantment with the ‘age
of anxiety’ amidst the collapse of empires (especially for Lukács growing up
in Budapest during the decadent peak and subsequent dramatic decline of the
Austro-Hungarian Empire) and hatred of the social and political inequalities
resulting from capitalism. The question is: where does this Faustian idea lead
the individual? By seeking God’s kingdom first, one might actually be
embracing the world because, remembering the preacher’s advice at the end
of Either/Or II that in the face of God we are always in the wrong, this gives
rise to continual critical scrutiny of oneself and the world. This is not a
negative stance, but, on the contrary, something wholly life-affirming, in that
it always allows room for healing and the attempt to improve the conditions of
the socio-political world.
In Scandinavian literature after Kierkegaard, both the Norwegian
playwright Henrik Ibsen and the Danish author Jens Peter Jacobsen are
probably the most notable bridge between Kierkegaard and Lukács.
Jacobsen’s novel, Niels Lyhne, which was translated into Hungarian by
Lukács’ friend Emma Ritoók, was the Werther of Lukács’ generation, read by
Rilke, Mann, Joyce, Strindberg and others. Niels Lyhne brings together
isolation, decay, death, failed relationships and the search for life’s unity, all
captured in a highly stylised form. Lukács writes in The Theory of Novel, on
the cusp of his leap into Marxism: “The novel remains a beautiful yet unreal
mixture of voluptuousness and bitterness, sorrow and scorn, but not a unity; a
series of images and aspects, but not a life totality” (TN, 120). Lukács is
correct in this estimation; however, in his critique he also reveals his own
tragic future pursuit of unity and totality, and his subsequent rejection of
Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and daring and radical writers of the twentieth
century. Both Kierkegaard and Lukács strive to find an alternative to ‘the
present age’, and they both draw influence from Hegel (who was directly
influenced by this ‘Faust of the spirit’ in Goethe’s work and Hölderlin’s
wayfaring poetry). Whereas Kierkegaard began in the ‘wide world’ of
Goethe’s Faust, and journeyed towards singularity and the ambiguities in the
individual, Lukács began by seeing the singular in Faust and attempted to
bring it out to the wide world and strive towards totality. Kierkegaard’s path,
through his Faustian beginning, is again manifested in the reiteration of The
Sermon on the Mount (which begins Christian Discourses) in the 1848
writings and isolates the ‘single individual’ from both political and religious
totalities. The Faustian element represents the transitional man as a prelude to
political praxis, a realm where “the spirit world is open wide” and where
thinkers emerge as “Pilgrims whose words renew man’s hope of glory.”3
ii. Drama and Reality
Both Kierkegaard and the pre-Marxist Lukács use ‘the stage’ in their writings
to merge drama on the stage with reality and ultimately reconcile the two.
Both Kierkegaard and Lukács look to ‘the stage’ for guidance in actuality
through performance. Kierkegaard’s early pseudonymous works such as
Either/Or, Fear and Trembling, Repetition and Stages on Life’s Way can be
called dramatic in that there is always a “drama in people” to quote the
Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa,4 and the curtains lift, intervals abound,
dialogues between characters ensue, narrators interject, and inspired quasi-
Shakespearean monologues emerge from the texts. They both comment on the
playwright Johan Ludwig Tieck and tragic theatre in their first writings: in
Kierkegaard’s Concept of Irony and Either/Or, and Lukács’ Soul and Form.
Lukács’ early Faustian works, Soul and Form and Theory of the Novel,
describe the fissure between existence and its meaning. For Lukács and
Kierkegaard, drama is part of the ethereal myth that lights up the world, and
the actor moves from anxiety at the wings offstage to being controlled
onstage. For “Drama”, Lukács explains in Soul and Form, “is always ruled by
a world necessity, by an inexorable, always self-fulfilling, all-embracing,
cosmic set of laws” (SF, 118). Lukács quotes Tieck in another essay in the
same text: “Why does a world not break into a thousand fragments? We are
the destiny that keeps it whole” (SF, 140). At the beginning of the final essay
in Soul and Form, “The Metaphysics of Tragedy”, Lukács states in his
sometimes medieval fashion: “A drama is a play about man and his fate – a
play in which God is the spectator.” (SF, 152) Kierkegaard’s Climacus
already states this in Concluding Unscientific Postscript: “But to God, world
history is the royal stage where he, not accidentally but essentially, is the only
spectator […] in that royal drama, Drama Dramatum” (SKS7, 146 / CUP,
158). The drama depicts the life and death of humanity, which for both
thinkers becomes more real than reality itself. In the Faustian phase, the
problem for both Kierkegaard and Lukács is that real life has become vague,
while the form of drama becomes real and clear: “Real life is always unreal,
always impossible, in the midst of empirical life” (SF, 153). For Lukács in
this final essay, the clash is between drama and reality because “Dramatic
tragedy is the form of the high points of existence, its ultimate goals and
ultimate limits”, and yet, “[…] realism is bound to destroy all the form-
creating and life-maintaining values of tragic drama” (SF, 159). That is the
danger of putting theatre into reality during this Faustian phase, yet both are
willing to take that risk. A decade after Soul and Form, the contradictions in
Lukács are manifested in his approach to art and the stage. Lukács still relies
on the ‘stage’ to convey his point, even in his turn to Marxism, by quoting
Marx’s The Poverty of Philosophy: “But the moment we present men as the
actors and authors of their own history, we arrive—by a detour—at the real
starting point” (HCC, 160). By making history a drama, Lukács in History
and Class Consciousness sees a concrete way of putting possibility into

praxis, while at the same time art can also cover up the responsibility of
contemplation: “The inner perfection of the work of art can hide this gaping
abyss because in its perfected immediacy it does not allow any further
questions to arise about a mediation no longer available to the point of view of
contemplation” (HCC, 158).
The aesthete of Either/Or remarks: “In drama, chatter is not tolerated;
action and situation are demanded” (SKS2, 140 / EO1, 130). This is
exemplified by the darling of the Copenhagen stage, Johanne Luise Heiberg,
on whom Kierkegaard published an essay in 1848 called The Crisis and a
Crisis in the Life of an Actress. Of course, Kierkegaard had already written
substantially on drama and the theatre in Either/Or and Repetition, and
Shakespeare is prevalent through his entire authorship. Johannes de silentio
eulogises Shakespeare as the one “who can say everything, everything,
everything just as it is” (SKS4, 154 / FT, 61).
The Crisis essay holds a unique position in Kierkegaard’s writings. The
essay is published in “The Fatherland” (Fædrelandet) directly below an article
on the same page on the plight of the working class in Denmark, appearing as
a contrast. On deeper inspection these two pieces together show an historical
moment as drama and the power of communicication in theatrical
performance shedding light on passionate praxis in reality. Jørgen Bukdahl,
Stephen Crites and Hugh Pyper5 have all argued convincingly for the
importance of the essay for Kierkgaard’s overall authorship and for
understanding the relation between performance and what it is to be a human
being. The essay, written by Kierkegaard’s last aesthetic pseudonym called
“Inter et Inter”—the embodiment of the Mellemspil—begins with a critical
remark on the demand of the crowd in the ‘newspaper critics’ that “is
dreadfully shabby” (SKS14, 93 / CD, 303) and “half-witted reviewers”
(SKS14, 94 / CD, 305), and on the fickleness of the public in its impatient
boredom through the “habit of admiration” (SKS14, 103 / CD, 318) and its
thirst for the immediate. Then Kierkegaard begins his explication of the
relation between onstage and offstage: it is this that relates the communication
of drama to reality, and points to the politics of 1848, in that the dramatic
artist is always anxious offstage, but onstage she is always calm (SKS14, 99 /
CD, 313). To explain further, the dramatic artist changes this anxiety, which is
a burden, into lightness in action onstage: “[…] the weight of the burden
continually transforms itself into lightness.” Inter et Inter explains that it is not
“casting off burdens”, but that “one soars high and free by means of—a pressure”
(SKS14, 99 / CD, 312). The overcoming of the Faustian phase by both
Kierkegaard and his subject the actress is achieved in this essay. The
distortion of an individual by the public corrupts the use of drama, such as by
trying to keep Johanne Luise Heiberg as this same beautiful young girl even
when she comes to play Juliet fourteen years later in her thirties. Yet, the
esteemed actress’ performance on stage turns her inwardness into a more

graceful and greater performance than the first time, achieving youth a second
time.
Inter et Inter’s essay provides a superb example of the communication of
drama as performance to transforming one’s reality. The complexities of this
essay will be investigated further in chapters Three, Four and Five in relation
to the word ”metamorphosis” and in connection to “the restlessness of
infinity”, which, like the human being at the Skillevei, is movement even
when standing still.
iii. The Divided Self
Lukács’ pre-Marxist works were viewed by the author as works written in a

“mood of permanent despair” (TN, 24). He interprets the period as a time
when he was still in a position of ‘double-mindedness’ (Tvesindetheden) as
Kierkegaard would define it, and the struggle in trying to work out the
direction of his thought by going through the past masters, in a reflection on
the present and hope for the future. Kierkegaard’s early Faustian works
(Either/Or, Repetition, Fear and Trembling, Stages on Life’s Way) are also
searching, in their conversation with the Bildung of Danish culture, and
include personal and individual struggle, through the masks of the various
pseudonyms and a labyrinth of stories leading towards infinite resignation,
nihilism, faith and earthly praxis. It is the dilemma of the Faustian man caught
between the Skillevei or certain kind of knowledge and faith, and which points
to Hamlet’s dilemma of action and resignation. Kierkegaard goes on an
extended journey in Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits in overcoming
double-mindedness in the year preceding 1848, and Lukács, once he has made
his decision to join the Bolsheviks, refutes his pre-Marxist writings as anti-
capitalist romanticism and despair.
Faust is exactly this double-mindedness: on the one hand, in having a
split self, in the age-old, stark dilemmas of choice amidst change, whether that
be towards Øieblikket or communism. In the 1967 Preface to History and
Class Consciousness, the seventy-seven year old Lukács reflects and explains
that his writings must be viewed critically, and that he is still coming to terms
with the split-self dilemma of modern identity: “If Faust could have two souls
within his breast, why should not a normal person unite conflicting
intellectual trends within himself when he finds himself changing from one
class to another in the middle of a world crisis” (HCC, x). One naturally
thinks of Faust’s two souls in Goethe’s masterwork: “In me there are two
souls, alas, and their / Division tears my life in two. / One loves the world, it
clutches her, it binds / Itself to her, clinging with furious lust; / The other
longs to soar beyond the dust / Into the realm of high ancestral minds.”6 One
is also reminded of the Pauline conflict of spirit and flesh, and even here in
the fascinating 1967 Preface, Lukács declares, “Mental confusion is not
always chaos” (HCC, xi). Another view of the divided self is apparent in
Faust’s muse Margarete: “Half sport of childhood, / Half God within thee”
[Halb Kinderspiele, / Halb Gott im Herzen], which is quoted in Either/Or I
(SKS2, 199 / EOI, 204). The Faustian character also relates to the radical
choice that has to be made, according to both Kierkegaard and Lukács.
Kierkegaard remarks in Fear and Trembling that Faust’s “[…] doubt has
destroyed actuality for him […] He is a doubter, and the doubter hungers just
as much for the daily bread of joy as for the nourishment of spirit” (SKS4,
156 / FT, 110). The ‘double-mindedness’ is given full treatment in Upbuilding
Discourses in Various Spirits in trying to articulate the ‘purity of heart to will
one thing.’ The Faustian character is the gateway between these paths of the
divided self: of desire and duty, of flesh and spirit, and it also represents the
break into the modern in the ambiguities of division. Lukács’ thought seeks to
merge this divided self into a unified whole. How is the movement made from
the sensitive, poetic literary theorist of Soul and Form to the ruthless,
dogmatic communist of The Destruction of Reason? The roots of this shift are
already present in Soul and Form in the journey towards curing the divided
self into a whole or totality at whatever cost. In the last pages of Soul and
Form, Lukács writes: “The human beings in whom destiny becomes form are
split into two fundamentally different parts: the ordinary human being
standing in the midst of real life is turned suddenly, in a single instant, into a
symbol, the vector of a supra-personal, historical necessity” (SF, 172).
Kierkegaard too seeks some kind of unity in the purity of heart to will one
thing, but even as he comes closer to Christianity, the human being never fully
escapes this inner division. In the analysis of despair, the human being is
never made whole but is always striving and as a result of this lack of totality
goes as far as being a “critical spirit” (SKS11, 141 / SUD, 25).
One must take note that ‘despair’ comes from the Latin desperare,
which literally means without hope (sperare). In Danish and German, despair
is Fortvivlelse and Verzweiflung, respectively. Etymologically, the Danish and
German words have to do with ‘two’ in connection with double-mindedness
and doubt. In Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits, Kierkegaard
compares Fortvivlelse with Tvesindethed. The definition of Fortvivlelse in
The Sickness unto Death is wanting to be oneself and not wanting to be one
self. In Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits, Kierkegaard writes: “[…]
Or is not despair [Fortvivlelse] actually double-mindedness [Tvesindethed]; or
what else is it to despair but to have two wills!” (SKS8, 144 / UDVS, 30). The
term Tvesindethed is mainly used in the edifying writings while Fortvivlelse is
mainly in the more ‘philosophical’ writings. In one of Kierkegaard’s favourite
passages from the Bible, James 4:8, it is written: “Draw nigh to God, and he
will draw nigh to you. Cleanse your hands, ye sinners; and purify your hearts,
ye double-minded.” This is the core of Kierkegaard’s discourse on the ‘purity
of heart’; which focuses on Tvesindethed. In using both words carefully,
Kierkegaard is emphasizing the ‘twofoldness’. The ‘double-mindedness’

(Tvesindethed) is closer to Fortvivlelse than despair, because it stresses the
division—but it does not render the state of painful agony as does
despair.This is double-mindedness and connection to despair is central to
Kierkegaard’s Faustian divided self.
iv. The Wise and the Simple
Finally, the Faustian idea is Goethe’s symbolic-realistic version of the Faust

character that has its root in myth and fairy tale. A well as the relation
between drama and reality, the Faustian phase heralds a dialectic of the ‘wise’
and the ‘simple’. The Faustian doubt hovers between ‘ideality’ and ‘actuality’,
something with which both thinkers are grappling. Faust represents the
doubting, noble intellectual grappling for Truth in the journey for knowledge
and/or salvation, in the offer made by Mephistopheles, “Eristis sicut Deus,
scientes bonum et malum” [You shall be as God, knowing good and evil]. At
the same time, Faust represents the symbol of the modern man, the ‘common
man’ (mendige Mand), the man of flesh and spirit in Faust’s lust for Margaret,
and yearning to stay with her as a common man. This tension between wise
and simple appears early on in Kierkegaard’s authorship in a comparison of
the extraordinary and the ordinary, which Kierkegaard’s Judge William
defends: “The genuinely extraordinary person is the genuinely ordinary
person. The more of the universally human an individual can actualise in his
life, the more extraordinary a human being is” (SKS3, 308 / EOII, 328). This
statement aligns Goethe’s goal with Hegel’s, and it is also reflected in the
epic-experimental, modern novels in the early twentieth century of the
individual amidst collapsing empires in the writings of Proust and Joyce.
Can Kierkegaard be accused of being a despiser of the masses, a
bourgeois gentleman (an aristocrat even?) intolerant of common people? It is
commonplace for intellectuals and aristocrats to become despisers of the
masses and the ordinary person on the street. Claudio Magris, in his beautiful
book Danube, gives a picture of this despiser, found in Herr Kyselak, assistant
in the court registry of Vienna in the nineteenth century, and who wrote two
volumes of travel sketches. He considers himself as the only one with noble
sentiments, the only one capable of appreciating what is genuine. Magris
succinctly points out that Kzselak:
[…] is one of those despisers of the masses, to be found in great numbers

even today; when crushed together in a crowded bus or caught in a
motorway traffic-jam, they think—each of them—that they are
inhabitants of sublime solitudes or of refined drawing-rooms, each one
of them despises his neighbour and is unaware of being repaid in the
same coin.7
It is the Kyselaks that are also subsumed in ‘superficiality’ and

‘flirtation’ in this inner showing-off, which outwardly only projects inertness
and bitterness. Although struggling, Kierkegaard is aligned with Magris’s
position, when he gives a similar observation in a journal entry in the same
year that he wrote Two Ages:A Literary Review leading up to 1848:
In our day almost the only form of aristocracy left is the sneaky kind.
The aristocrat sneaks through the streets, has no desire to exist for
anyone else but his clique, and then on the few great occasions for the
admiring crowd…One ought to exist for all men and not caste-
consciously and egotistically to seek his own advantage; even if a person
is mocked by the crowd, he is still a memento to them (Pap. VII A 163,
1846).
In another entry in the same year, he reveals an egalitarianism that puts

Lukács’ future diatribe in Destruction of Reason into question: “It is all very
well that by living only in certain select circles one is able to live securely,
aloof from the crowd etc.—but does one have the right to live this way? Did
Christ live this way? Has any really noble man ever lived this way?” (Pap. VII
A 212, 1846). The Faustian phase leads both Lukács and Kierkegaard to a
wholly new place, and it is through this Faustian interest that the interlinking
of Kierkegaard and Lukács and the question of the tension between the
religious and the political self is brought to light. Kierkegaard’s indirect
politics comes to fruition through these different aspects of the Faustian
human being: via human being as transition, the communication of drama to
reality, and the wise and the simple. This stance thereby presents a striving
thought that encompasses both idealism and actuality, and a division never
attaining full unity, which makes space for an inclusive political standpoint.
2. Inwardness as an Expression for Revolutionary Praxis
But, if possible, with a fervent inwardness that no one could resist, to invite them
to come, and in addition with a terror that could teach even the bravest to
shudder, to cry out, “Take care!”—indeed, that is difficult.
Kierkegaard, Christian Discourses
Inwardness (Danish: Inderlighed; German: Innerlichkeit) becomes an

expression for revolutionary praxis in juxtaposing Kierkegaard and Lukács. In
the face of a God, we are held up to continual critical scrutiny—self-scrutiny
and scrutiny of society—this is the beginning of praxis, and it is inwardness
that is its first expression. Ten years before his leap into Marxism, Lukács
publishes Soul and Form, a work of inwardness preparing the way for his
revolutionary praxis. The collected essays combine subjective and objective
worlds, in an unpredictable, original way that reflects the crisis of uncertainty
at the book’s troubled heart. The full, original title of Lukács’ collection of
essays is Soul and the Forms: Experiments (A lélek és a formák: Kísérletek),
since the essays are experiments, efforts and trials. Commentators overlook
the huge impact of inwardness in The Theory of the Novel, which etches its
way into nearly every page of the second half of the book. And in the 1962
preface to the work, Lukács admits: “Kierkegaard always played an important
role for the author of The Theory of the Novel” (TN, 18). By the time of
History and Class Consciousness, inwardness is hardly mentioned, partly
because the text itself is an expression arising out of inwardness and pointing
the reader towards praxis, and partly because the writer in question is moving
away from Kierkegaard. The same can be said of Christian Discourses and
the Anti-Climacus works where inwardness becomes manifest in the writing.
Inwardness becomes action in its confrontation with the demonic, inactivity,
and reification. Here four points will be made in viewing inwardness as an
expression for praxis: inwardness as beyond class categories, inwardness
combating the reified human being, inwardness as ambiguously placed
between finitude and infinitude, and inwardness as the basis for praxis. The
task now is to show that inwardness that Mark Dooley describes: “Inwardness
is thus a mode of more concrete and passionate understanding of the external
world, rather than an irrational exit from the concrete actuality.”8
i. Inwardness Beyond Class Categories
The one aspect of Kierkegaard’s thinking that Lukács continues to admire to

the end of his days is Kierkegaard’s ‘honesty’. Anti-Climacus writes,
summing up Kierkegaard’s aim in writing, that “Honesty before God is the
first and the last, honestly to confess to oneself to where one is, in honesty
before God continually keeping the task in sight” (SKS12, 77 / PC, 66). In his
first book, Lukács describes Kierkegaard’s ‘honesty’: “This, then, was
Kierkegaard’s honesty: to see everything as being sharply distinct from
everything else, system from life, human being from human being, stage from
stage: to see the absolute in life, without any shallow [flachen] compromises”
(SF, 32). Even in his most critical text on Kierkegaard, the latter is still
portrayed as that “subjectively honest thinker” and as being “more honest than
his imperialist successors” (DR, 296, 489). And Kierkegaard states in On My
Work as an Author: “[…] I have devoutly striven from the beginning to be
honest [redelig]” (SKS13, 25 / PV, 17). The sincerity and honesty here are
connected with inwardness, and are grounded precisely in the praxis of
inwardness in that reality will be changed by awakening man’s inwardness.
By the time of History and Class Consciousness, however, this is not enough;
it is even detrimental to bring inwardness into the equation. Lukács begins to
view Kierkegaard’s inwardness as most likely leading to the inner freedom of
the Max Stirner kind and not towards revolutionary praxis: “[…] for ‘inner
freedom’ presupposes that the world cannot be changed” (HCC, 193). Lukács
links Kierkegaard with his earlier pre-Marxist self as the decadent bourgeois.
In The Destruction of Reason, Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche are
presented as “pure apologists of bourgeois decadence” who are responsible
for the “parasitical subjectivism” of Heidegger and Jaspers. (DR, 243) And
yet, is it not ‘inwardness’ that is manifested and analysed in Soul and Form
and The Theory of the Novel and which enables Lukács to set his ‘road to
Marx’? Through Kierkegaard’s understanding of ‘honesty’, we find the basis
for praxis of which Kierkegaard informs the reader in Christian Discourses:
“What is honesty before God? It is that your life expresses what you say”
(SKS10, 179 / CD, 167).
In distinguishing bourgeois from proletariat, Lukács loses sight of the
‘inwardness’ which goes beyond class categories. The bourgeois world might
be overcome and destroyed yet inwardness is still as much a task for the King
of France as it is for a peasant in Siberia. The writings of Kierkegaard are as
much ‘anti-capitalist’ as those of the young Lukács. Witness the constant
allusion to the ‘lilies and the birds’ in 1848. Lukács recognises this, calling
him a “romantic anti-capitalist” (DR, 281) leading to the “Ash Wednesday of
the Romantic carnival” (DR, 278). However, unlike romantics such as Novalis
and Schlegel, Kierkegaard’s transformation of the self leads towards a
genuine and responsible self, with the conscious fragment not isolated in itself
but leading the reader on a journey towards passionate existence of which he
or she will have to throw the book away at some point. Throughout
Kierkegaard’s authorship, there is loathing for the ‘privatdocent’ or assistant
professor (a job the young Martensen had): “The common man I love, the
docents are an abomination to me” (Pap. XI 1 A 473, 1854).For both
Kierkegaard and Lukács, it is the docents who are closer to the definition of
bourgeois: “Bereft of imagination, as the philistine-bourgeois (Spidsborgeren)
always is, he lives within a certain trivial compendium of experiences as to
how things go, what is possible, what usually happens. In this way, the
philistine-bourgeois has lost his self and God” (SKS11, 156 / SUD 41). The
romantic self that descends into the bourgeois self always sees possibilities
everywhere, but through inwardness, the romantic self should become
transfigured, as these possibilities become tasks, thus bringing one beyond
class category distinctions. Lukács fights against ‘vulgar Marxism’ as he
would call it, and yet he endorses Marx’s belief that class consciousness and
class struggle are the living forces of historical transformation and that the
privileged agency of such transformation is the proletariat. Lukács begins the
central and most influential essay of History and Class Consciousness
(“Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat”) by declaring that
“Nor shall we consider its [the phenomenon of reification] implications for the
economic doctrines of the vulgar Marxists which follow from their
abandonment of this starting point” (HCC, 84). The originality of Lukács’
approach was to re-inject left-wing Hegelian dialectics back into Marxist
theory, and to absorb Germanic culture into the Marxist dialectic, unlike the
‘vulgar Marxists’. But Lukács is still in danger of heading towards a
homogeneous, reductionist view of the world in his separation of writers of
the fragment and writers of totality, in and from his own moulding of
Kierkegaard’s inwardness into an expression for his revolutionary praxis to
obedience to the earthly God of Bolshevism or even Stalinism.
The problem of the ‘bourgeois’ and ‘proletariat’ struggle is confused
with the radical position of ‘inwardness’. Lukács loses his respect for irony
once he makes the leap of faith into communism, when he loses sight of
enriching the landscape in which one is embedded through irony. Lukács
understood the use of irony before the leap: “For the novel, irony consists in
this freedom of the writer in his relationship to God, the transcendental
condition of the objectivity of form-giving” (TN, 92). In Theory of the Novel,
Lukács understood the ironic situation of the writer, and the idea of ‘creative
irony’ in relation to Goethe. Lukács’ project becomes a critique of the
modernist practice of symbolism and irony, which Lukács sees as draining
reality of its dialectical content and transforming it into a nihilistic allegory
whose final end is an impotent solipsism of absolute subjectivity and a
decadent contemplation of nothingness. Instead, the later Lukács wants to
introduce ‘totality’ and distinguish between those writers pursuing a totality
and those creating fragmented works. In History and Class Consciousness,
Lukács writes using classic Marxist terminology: “[…] the ultimate goal is
rather that relation to the totality (to the whole of society seen as a process),
through which every aspect of the struggle acquires its revolutionary
significance” (HCC, 22). Thus, some of the great modernist writers, including
Joyce, Kafka, and Beckett, all came under his attack. However, with the tools
of irony and the honest portrayal of a fragmenting world they become radical
writers of inwardness, and, like Kierkegaard, continually represent the vagrant
or nomad who obviates and subverts the available codes of identity—
religious, political, national—and yet refute all dogmatic or totalising forms of
identity which are both failing and oppressive. This stance in itself is a
political expression of anti-totalitarianism. At the same time these writers
describe perfectly the twentieth century condition of the human being in
Europe. Adorno concludes that what Lukács hates in these new kinds of
writers is what he himself betrayed (NL1, 243). Kierkegaard’s inwardness
goes beyond class categories and strengthens the individual from becoming
reified.
ii. The Reified Human Being
The final, supplementary part of The Point of View is called “‘The Single
Individual’: Two ‘Notes’ Concerning my Work as an Author”. The first ‘note’
is “For the Dedication to ‘That Single Individual’”, and the second is “A
Word on the Relation of my Work as an Author to ‘the Single Individual.’” It
is, alongside Two Ages:A Literary Review, Kierkegaard’s most explicitly

politically-charged piece. Before these notes, the Preface immediately sets the
tone in the first line: “In these times everything is politics.” The first ‘note’ is
governed by the dictum ‘the crowd is untruth’. The individual, lost in the
crowd becomes, in twentieth century language (due to Lukács), the reified
human being. Lukács begins his most famous essay by defining the
phenomenon of reification:
Its [the essence of commodity-structure] basis is that a relation between

people takes on the character of a thing and thus acquires a ‘phantom
objectivity’, an autonomy that seems so strictly rational and all-
embracing as to conceal every trace of its fundamental nature: the
relation between people (HCC, 83).
When the relation between people disappears, any attempt at equality is

lost. In the discussion of ‘the crowd is untruth’, Kierkegaard points out: “The
neighbour is the absolutely true expression for human equality [Menneske-
Lighed]” (SKS16, 91 / PV 111). Reification turns a human being into a thing,
and that thing is nothing in the face of society except a cog in the wheel of
mass society. The pre-Marxist diagnosis has already been described in
Kierkegaard’s ‘crowd is untruth’. Yet, for both Kierkegaard and Lukács, there
is no going back. This reification and ‘crowd’ brings forth the necessity of
inwardness more than ever. Lukács affirms the part that reification has to
play:
Reification is, then, the necessary, immediate reality of every living

person in capitalist society. It can be overcome only by the constant and
constantly renewed efforts to disrupt the reified structure of existence by
concretely relating to the concretely manifested contradictions of the
total development, by becoming conscious of the immanent meanings of
these contradictions for the total development (HCC, 197).
Both Kierkegaard and Lukács keep an eye on the most sophisticated

sections of society, where the most sophisticated human beings with the
longest history of European development of traditions, culture and education
have a very difficult task of breaking through reification. Lukács writes: “[…]
social institutions (reification) strip man of his human essence and that the
more culture and civilisation (i.e. capitalism and reification) take possession
of him, the less able he is to be a human being” (HCC, 136). Kierkegaard
already warns of the danger of ‘the present age’ in making all men have a
voice through the power of mass-man or the crowd, resulting in no one having
a voice, highlighting Climacus’ metaphor of seeing the forest rather than a
single tree (SKS7, 147 / CUP, 159). Lukács understood Kierkegaard’s fear of
the crowd as untruth in Theory of the Novel. He writes: “The outside world
today has become so exclusively conventional that everything, positive or
negative, humorous or poetic, can take place only within the sphere of
convention” (TN, 107). Yet, Lukács leaves this trajectory and thereby parts
from Kierkegaard’s thinking by striving towards the totality where, in
Marxism, it is the general that is always more important than the particular.
Trotsky illustrates this principle very clearly in his autobiography:
Later, the feeling of the supremacy of the general over the particular
became an integral part of my literary and political work […] Naturally,
this led me more than once into hasty and incorrect generalisations […]
But in every sphere, barring none, I felt that I could move and act only
when I held in my hand the thread of the general.”9
But for Kierkegaard, with Jesus Christ and Socrates, “[…] there live
only single individuals” (SKS11, 232 / SUD, 121). The crowd as untruth cuts
off the single individual, and the leap into a movement that is not self-critical
is always in danger of making this same cut off. Inwardness is the pathway
that can lead one out of this trap, as it shows the falseness of culture in which
s/he is placed, if we understand inwardness as always critical and self-critical.
The crowd as untruth is unleashed in Nazism as an example of ‘aesthetic’
ideology which becomes demonic, and Stalinism as an example of ‘ethical’
ideology which becomes demonic. This inwardness is connected to the
religious in the sense that there is no public but only individuals, because the
“religious is earnestness, and earnestness is the single individual” (SKS13, 17
/ PV, 9-10). This led Johannes Climacus to assert that ‘truth is subjectivity’,
which brought the reader back to the Skillevei where inwardness and
Climacus’ dictum came together (SKS7, 186 / CUP, 203). A year later,
Kierkegaard went as far as to say in Two Ages:A Literary Review that in
revolutionary times, “[…] the resilience of inwardness is the measure of
essential culture [Inderlighedens Spændkraft er nemlig den væsentlige
Dannelses Grad]” (SKS8, 60 / TA, 61). As surprising as it may seem to those
who have not read Kierkegaard closely, the writer wrote positively on
revolution. It is in revolution where inwardness is forced upon the individual,
while in the reflective age, as Kierkegaard calls it, which tends towards
complete security, there is an abandonment of any struggle to realise oneself.
In The Theory of the Novel, Lukács comes close to this thought: “[…] the
incongruence of interiority [Innerlichkeit] and the conventional world leads to
a complete denial of the latter” (TN, 144).
At the beginning of History and Class Consciousness, Lukács declares:
“to posit oneself, to produce oneself and reproduce oneself – that is reality
[Wirklichkeit]” (HCC, 15). This is the ‘inwardness as an expression for
revolutionary praxis’ component of Lukács that he carries into his Marxist
period from Soul and Form and The Theory of the Novel. In History and Class
Consciousness, one reads of the same distrust of the journalist that

Kierkegaard expresses, something which is embedded in the growth of
modern society in Kierkegaard’s Two Ages:A Literary Review and in
triumphant capitalist society in Lukács’ early Marxist period. This is a key
stage in the process of reification. Lukács explains: “The journalist’s ‘lack of
convictions’, the prostitution of his experiences and beliefs is comprehensible
only as the apogee of capitalist reification” (HCC, 100). Anticipating
Adorno’s diagnosis, Lukács writes: “[…] it became increasingly difficult and
rare to find anyone penetrating the veil of reification” (HCC, 86).
Kierkegaard’s individual has that task. In language reminiscent of
Kierkegaard, Lukács affirms this in the same passage, “Here it is precisely
subjectivity itself, knowledge, temperament and powers of expression that are
reduced to an abstract mechanism functioning autonomously and divorced
both from the personality of their ‘owner’ and from the material and concrete
nature of the subject matter in hand” (HCC, 100). Anti-Climacus continues to
describe the control of society by everyone and no one channeled through the
media/public relationship: “[…] we have learned that in governments the
masses intimidate the king and the newspapers intimidate the cabinet
ministers” (SKS11, 229 / SUD, 118). It is inwardness that cracks the reified
human being, and which has the potential to expose the media for its
dishonesty and fetishism.
Always using Socrates and Christ as the prototypes, Kierkegaard’s
expression of inwardness becomes ever starker, as disclosed in one of his
most succinct definitions of the ‘single individual’:
The term ‘single individual’ corresponds to suffering – that is, when it is

suffering in the spiritual and Christian sense, not in the physical sense of
engaging in a pitched battle, where it does not depend so much on the
single individual as on how many thousands there are, how many
cannons they have, etc. Christianly, struggling is always done by single
individuals, because spirit is precisely this, that everyone is an individual
before God (SKS12, 218 / PC, 223).
The crowd and politics as such become a means of avoiding danger and
suffering. Explained in The Point of View, truth pertains to eternal truth, and
eternal truth pertains to the single individual. That is why an aversion to
politics arises: because Kierkegaard’s single individual is “the category of
spirit, of spiritual awakening, as diametrically opposite to politics as possible”
(SKS16, 101 / PV, 121). This ‘politics’ implies the hysteria of the unthinking
crowd, because it is “[…] the untruth of wanting to exert influence by means
of the crowd, the numerical, of wanting to make the numerical the authority
for what truth is” (SKS16, 106 / PV, 126). Truth, according to Climacus in the
Concluding Unscientific Postscript, becomes inwardness, which clashes with
the ‘crowd’, and has the power to break through reification. Given the context
and substance in Lukács’ Soul and Form and Kierkegaard’s own
pseudonymous authorship, “‘Inward’ truths”, one commentator explains,
“require an ‘indirect’ expression.”10 There is either subversion from within
starting with each individual which Kierkegaard’s writings demand, or a total
annihilation of the existing order, which Lukács’ writings demand. Both bring
about the possibility for inwardness to become an expression for praxis.
iii. Between Finitude and Infinitude
Inwardness is the tension between finitude and infinitude. In diagnosing

despair, Anti-Climacus describes the dangers of both the infinite and the
finite. On the one hand, “Every moment in which a human existence has
become or simply wants to be infinite is despair” (SKS11, 146 / SUD, 30);
and on the other hand, “To lack infinitude is despairing reductionism”
(SKS11, 149 / SUD, 33). In History and Class Consciousness, Lukács states,
“‘inner freedom’ presupposes that the world cannot be changed” (HCC, 193).
Yet, it is this ‘inner freedom’ which maintains the tension between the infinite
and the finite, and without it we are once again reduced or, to use Lukács’
language, ‘reified’. Inwardness implies change by its very meaning, to bring
back Climacus’ words again—“inwardness in an existing subject is passion.”
Surely passion always implies that the world can be changed? Lukács refers to
Kierkegaard’s religion as a “Christian mythos” in comparison to
Schopenhauer’s “Buddhist mythos” (DR, 282). However, the Christian mythos
is abolished because ‘to lack finitude’ leads to mysticism and even fanaticism,
which Kierkegaard’s inwardness turns one away from. Lukács begins his turn
away from what he perceives as Kierkegaard’s inwardness by writing: “The
abandonment of the world by God manifests itself in […] interiority and
adventure […] either the world is narrower or it is broader than the outside
world assigned to it as an arena and substratum of its actions” (TN, 97). But
Kierkegaard’s interiority is never at rest with itself, contrary to Lukács’
diagnosis (TN, 112). The lack of infinitude in the self’s inwardness relates
once again to Kierkegaard’s dictum ‘the crowd is untruth’, in becoming “a
copy, a number, a mass man” (SKS11, 149 / SUD, 34). For both thinkers, the
bourgeois class will not change oneself or the society in its lack of
inwardness. But in Kierkegaard’s critique of the bourgeois class, he would say
the same for any class that was rising or growing and becoming too secure in
its position. Both the upper and lower classes were in a more difficult
position, but they would not escape criticism should they become in any way
secure in their position. This is the point of critical scrutiny, which is both
self-scrutiny and scrutiny of society in the face of a god, a god before whom
we are always in the wrong.
Soul and Form, written at the time of Kierkegaard’s greatest influence
on Lukács, is an ongoing discussion between gesture and form, already
dealing with finitude and infinitude, and calling the reader to transform
inwardness, that is caught between the infinite and the finite, into an
expression for praxis. Zachary Price concludes his essay on the young Lukács:
“Lukács’ utopia is an inwardly grasped possibility; it may be acted upon, but
no argument may prove its validity.”11 It is also exactly what the later Lukács
is trying to solve. And yet it is in the early Lukács writings that the
inwardness of Kierkegaard is most present, opening up to the possibility for
revolutionary praxis. Lukács perceives the danger of inwardness leaning more
towards finitude or infinitude, which points to the forms of despair in The
Sickness unto Death where the human being can be lost in either finitude or
infinitude: “This self-destruction of reality […] to the life experiencing
interiority of the individual lost in the labyrinth, or to the observing and
creative eye of the artist’s subjectivity: when they become objects of mood
and reflection” (TN, 79). Kierkegaard’s use of inwardness between finitude
and infinitude becomes apparent in Lukács’ Soul and Form when he writes
towards the end of the text: “[…] the longing of man for selfhood, the longing
to transform the narrow peak of his existence into a wide plain with the path
of his life winding across it, and his meaning into a daily reality” (SF, 162).
Yet, Kierkegaard’s individual must always return to inwardness in order to
continue his self-critique and critique of society. Kierkegaard had already
touched on this in his earlier discourse “Strengthening in the Inner Being”
from Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses. Johannes Climacus states the striving
human being’s in-between position: “But what is existence? It is that child
who is begotten by the infinite and the finite, the eternal and the temporal, and
is therefore continually striving” (SKS7, 90/ CUP, 92).
iv. Inwardness as Praxis
Prior to 1848, Kierkegaard had already clarified the idea of inwardness and its
inherent connection to action: “This self-consciousness, therefore, is action
[Gjerning], and this action is in turn inwardness” (SKS6, 443 / CA, 143).
And, further: “Certitude [Visheden] and inwardness, which can be attained
only by and in action [Handlingen]” (SKS4, 439 / CA, 138). I agree with
Mark Dooley’s definition of inwardness as “a mode of engaged action”12 and
not a turn away from action. In “Armed Neutrality”, Kierkegaard remarks:
“The more inwardness, the greater the fear and trembling before God”
(SKS16, 119 / PV, 137), and thus the greater fearlessness before the world.
Praxis (from Greek, which literally means ‘doing’) denotes the willed action
by which a theory or philosophy becomes a social actuality. Lukács begins his
polemic against Kierkegaard in Destruction of Reason by stating, “We are
therefore obliged to treat Kierkegaard from the outset merely as a figure
within the European philosophical development, omitting to discuss the
concrete social foundations of his mental foreshadowing of much later
irrationalist-reactionary tendencies” (DR, 244). But the paradox of Kierkegaard

is, in holding onto the religious element in his thinking, his authorship can be
viewed as the development of a powerful expression of concrete social
foundations—something far beyond merely reactionary. Why is it that his
favourite New Testament books are James and Matthew? They are the texts
that embody praxis. The epistle of James advocates faith with works, and in
Matthew, Jesus is presented as praxis, as the living embodiment of doing what
he says.Not coincidentally, it was the Gospel of Matthew that the Marxist
atheist Pier Paolo Pasolini used for his politically radical film portrayal of
Jesus: Il Vangelo Secondo Matteo from 1964 (translated as The Gospel
According to St. Matthew). The film script strictly adhered to the words from
the Gospel of Mathew. Inwardness is the bridge between reflection and praxis,
gesture and form. In 1848, Kierkegaard writes, “the one who is turned inward
in the sense of eternity perceives only what is of spirit” (SKS10, 119 / CD,
108). But from attaining spirit comes praxis. Taking the cue from The Epistle
of James, where it is written, “For just as the body without spirit is dead, so
also faith without works is dead” (The Epistle of James 2: 26), Kierkegaard, in
setting the stage for the 1848 writings, at the beginning of the final section in
Works of Love, writes, “To say it is no art, but to do it is” (SKS9, 353 / WL,
359). Christ and Socrates are prototypes of praxis because they do what they
say, embodying inwardness. Climacus again and again bemoans the loss of
inwardness in the world, and when Anti-Climacus calls for a new Socrates
instead of a new republic, or a new social order or a new religion, he is
calling for inwardness. “Inwardness,” writes Climacus, “transforms
everything” (SKS7, 230 / CUP, 254).
Lukács prepares himself for a turn from theory into praxis when he
attempts to break through the interiority that haunts most of The Theory of the
Novel:
The autonomous life of interiority is possible and necessary only

when the distinctions between men have made an unbridgeable chasm;
when the gods are silent and neither sacrifices nor the ecstatic gift of
tongues can solve their riddle; when the world of deeds separates itself
from men and, because of this independence, becomes hollow and
incapable of absorbing the true meaning of deeds in itself, incapable of
becoming a symbol through deeds and dissolving them in turn into
symbols; when interiority and adventure are forever divorced from one
another (TN, 66).
The unbridgeable chasm becomes possible to connect only when he

destroys any ambiguity of Kierkegaard’s inwardness and turns it into the
totality of Marxism, which calls for changing the whole world, and in the
process, destroying the particular in the form of inwardness and subjectivity.
The later Lukács is aware of this break that he defines as the “sharp
antagonism of ethics and history, the antithesis between a praxis conceived in

a purely subjective, individual light and an illusory immanence, an illusory
historical objectivity” (DR, 267). Kierkegaard’s ‘de-socialisation’ is a form of
re-socialisation in 1848 amidst the European revolutions, a re-socialisation in
which inwardness is re-instated in order to bring the human being back into
the fold by looking to the lilies and the birds away from reified society and its
commodified cares, before re-engaging with human society.
The later Lukács calls Kierkegaard’s inwardness that becomes praxis the
‘Kierkegaardian ethic’:
The Kierkegaardian ethic too acknowledges no common medium, no

real community between men; and with regard to the ethically essential,
the inner realm sharply divided from the exterior, those practicing this
ethic likewise live in an insuperable incognito […] his faith found its
appropriate medium in faith, paradox and in the absolute incognito (DR,
274).
In conclusion, this ‘insuperable incognito’ is praxis; it is only incognito

in the face of history, and in the face of both a reified and infinitised world.
But it is inwardness as praxis within living community. The incognito is the
unknown interrupter, the bridge between finitude and infinitude, and the
power within critical scrutiny to any theory of history or totality. Both Christ
and Socrates are incognito: the Messiah is a carpenter’s son and the wisest
man in Athens is a street loafer.
3. The Reckoning
When through the old oak Forest I am gone,

Let me not wander in a barren dream,
But, when I am consumèd in the fire,
Give me new Phoenix wings to fly at my desire.
John Keats, “On Re-Reading King Lear”
A sort of ’reckoning’ or ‘accounting’ plays an explicit role in both thinkers’

political gestures. The word that Kierkegaard uses is Regnskabet, which can
be translated as ‘the reckoning’. The Hong translations of Regnskabet into
English have been rendered as ‘The Accounting’, which resonates greatly
with cash flow and money. Johannes de silentio begins and ends Fear and
Trembling with comparing the present age to the business world where
everything is up for sale. In the Journals, Kierkegaard compares himself to a
bad banknote (Pap.V A 3, 1844). Thus, the accounting is both an ethical and
religious reckoning and an accounting, not unlike the account of one’s
affairs/work. For this context I prefer the word ‘reckoning’ in English (which
was the term used in older English translations) and the Danish Regnskabet.
From the Faustian phase to working through inwardness, the moment of
decision and clarity is eventually presented. “Regnskabet” is the title of the
first section of “On My Work as an Author”, published by Kiekregaard.
Lukács has his own accounting (Abrechnung). There is a difference between
Lukács’ reckoning of either/or and the black/white world-view and
Kierkegaard’s Regnskabet, which surely is a reckoning but is also an
accounting in order to settle affairs. But in The Point of View, his own ‘report
to history’, Kierkegaard’s reckoning becomes a collage of published and
posthumous notes with an epilogue, a conclusion, an appendix with a preface,
two notes and two postscripts: not exactly a decisive reckoning. Instead, the
ambiguity is brought to the surface—the ambiguere, wandering around the
action—leaving the texts open for a world-view that is far from definitive.
i. Triumph Over the Skillevei
I return to the metaphor of the Skillevei as the step which the individual must
take to break out of the ‘passionless age of reflection’ (in the case of
Kierkegaard) and the disintegrating bourgeois world (in the case of Lukács).
In his essay from 1909 on Kierkegaard, Lukács begins with the question,
“What is the life-value of a gesture?” (SF, 28) This is the recurrent theme of
Soul and Form, where thought and action, and dream and responsibility come
together. In the same essay, Lukács also comments on the Skillevei in
Kierkegaard’s thinking: “[…] to live out his life in accordance with poetic
principles, the duty to decide, the duty to go to the very end of every chosen
road at every crossroads [Scheideweg].” (SF, 31) It is worth noting that the
word Skillevei in German is Scheideweg (which has the same root as the
Danish—literally the separation of the way), and is used in the figure of
speech “am Scheideweg,” which means to face a crucial decision. In this
combined eulogy and critique of Kierkegaard, Lukács implies that
Kierkegaard never reaches the end of the road, only getting deeper and deeper
into an isolated poetic life, which Lukács memorably describes as: “[…] with
every appearance of victory and success – like Napoleon in Russia – into the
all-devouring desert.” (SF, 41) However, the same might be said of Lukács as
he marches further and further into the murderous, barren bankruptcy of
Stalinist Russia. It is Kierkegaard’s writing of 1848 that might triumph over
the Skillevei, as he begins the year with the signed publication of Christian
Discourses putting him on the path towards a more direct attack on both
church and state. With his broadsheet The Moment seven years later,
Kierkegaard finally steps out onto the street to engage with the common
person who has ridiculed and laughed at him as a result of the caricatures in
The Corsair and his attack on the whole establishment of Denmark, which,
remarkably enough, is still seen as a scandal today in Denmark by some
(culturally regressive nationalists).
In an impressive article with the provocative title, “Abraham the

Communist”, András Nagy investigates Lukács’ long and complex
relationship with Kierkegaard, and how Lukács tries to go about killing off his
master, so to speak. After quoting Lukács: “To raise the most exemplary case
of Kierkegaard, when Abraham sacrifices Isaac,”13 Nagy quite rightly
interprets this as Lukács’ ‘autocritique’ (one of the many). Part of the
reckoning is to overcome the philosophical paradoxes in Kierkegaard’s
thought, the thinker who showed Lukács how to lose God and discover
Hegel.14 This is Lukács’ decision at the Skillevei. Although already deeply
entrenched in Marxism, it is here that Lukács needs to make a decisive break
from Kierkegaard, because, as Nagy argues, History and Class Consciousness
is “still strongly inspired by Kierkegaardian themes.”15 Lukács keeps his word
with the reckoning until his death, while maintaining that the atheism that
Kierkeaard presents is the same as present day Christendom, and to follow
Christ’s life would entail destroying the Church itself. Thus, “the individual-
personal relationship with God has nothing to do with institutions.”16 This
brings one back to the tensions in the political and the religious individual,
where nothing is as clear-cut as it seems. Both thinkers try to make a clear
distinction, and yet they both still manage to find themselves caught between
the two in their writings. The triumph of the reckoning at the Skillevei is when
one chooses one path. By doing so, s/he is already affecting the other path
confirming the words from The Sermon on the Mount: “But seek first his
kingdom and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added to you”
(The Gospel According to St.Matthew 6:33). However, the self-critique, or
‘autocritique’, never ends.
For Lukács, the triumph over the Skillevei eschews both compromise and
ever going back. He asserts his position as a young man: “Drawn in hard and
ruthless outline, the soul stands naked before the face of life” (SF, 153). What
he essentially does, however, is to eliminate so much of what it is to live and
express oneself in the world in his attempt, paradoxically, to embrace life to
the fullest, which he expresses so eloquently in the final essay in Soul and
Form:
Real life is always unreal, always impossible in the midst of emprical

life. Suddenly there is a gleam, a lightning that illumines the banal paths
of empirical life: something disturbing and seductive, dangerous and
surprsing; the accident, the great meomtn, the miracle; an enrichment
and a confusion One has to deny life in order to live (SF, 153).
Once aligned with the Party ethos, Lukács makes this sacrifice. We
might call it a choice between Franz Kafka and Thomas Mann. The ambiguity
of Kierkegaard’s individual, with its interrupting aporias, stands in contrast to
Lukács’ either/or. Lukács turns Kierkegaard’s potential triumph at the
Skillevei into a dogmatic practice that allows for no change once the decision
has been made. He is in danger of becoming the orthodox conservative against
whom he once warned the reader, and as early as Soul and Form, bases his
mission on the principle of not looking back, to go as far as to erase the past:
But is even the past really necessary? […] A man can no longer walk
along the paths where he used to walk, nor can his eyes find any
direction in them; yet now he easily climbs pathless mountain peaks and
strides confidently over bottomless marshes (SF, 157).
This erasing of the past helps explain his attempted annihilation of

Kierkegaard and his fascinating prefaces to Theory of the Novel and History
and Class Consciousness. It did not help that major thinkers of Lukács´
generation in Germany, such as Martin Heidegger and Carl Schmitt, who were
also fervent admirers of Kierkegaard, also sympathised and joined the Nazi
Party. Additionally, the best editor of Kierkegaard’s works in Germany for
many years, Emanuel Hirsch, had also been a National Socialist. Heiko
Schultz explains:
Hirsch’s interpretation consistently ignored not only the late writings of

Kierkegaard but also forged a most fatal bond to National Socialism, in
which the risk character [Wagnis-Charakter] of the relation to God in the
leap to political decision was recoined for the fascist ideology,
completely ignoring he despicable human implications.17
Hirsch’s politics helps support Lukács’ arguments to reject Kierkegaard

so vehemently, while seeing himself acting on a ‘leap of faith’. However,
while Adorno writes: “Lukács’ thesis that Kierkegaard’s ‘leap’ was simply a
helpless flight from meaninglessness is justified by the same interpretation
that makes Kierkegaard a ‘nihilist’” (K, 118), it is precisely Lukács, and not
Kierkegaard, who takes the ‘leap’ from what he sees as ‘meaninglessness’. He
becomes just as closely aligned with this ’helpless flight’ in his political
gesture, as he refutes the past and will no longer accept any other worldview.
ii. “The Brutal Ending of Dreams Forced Upon Life”
In a pathos-filled passage from Soul and Form, Lukács explains the

‘reckoning’ (Abrechnung):
And the reckoning? I have already said it: the brutal ending of dreams
forced upon life. When destiny tears apart the finely woven harmonies of
dreams so harshly that art is great enough to weave a beautiful,
multicoloured carpet out of the frayed threads; when the soul, totally
exhausted by a game which is always new and yet forever repeated,
longs for truth, concrete, undeformable truth, and begins to recognise

that the all-absorbing, all-adjusting nature of its own self is a prison;
when every conceivable comedy has already been played on the stage of
dreams and the rhythm of the dance begins to become gentler and
slower; when one who is at home everywhere and yet nowhere begins to
want to settle down at last; when one who understands everything begins
to long for a single, powerful, exclusive feeling—that is the reckoning
(SF, 109).
This remarkable passage not only conveys both violence and ruthless
change, but also the homeless searcher and the conflict between destiny and
random existence, and finally it points to where Lukács’ thought will go. His
‘reckoning’ can be compared to Kierkegaard standing at the Skillevei, on the
threshold from the mightiest dreams to challenging responsibility. The ‘single,
powerful, exclusive feeling’ is inwardness, and the reckoning manifests itself
when inwardness becomes praxis. This reckoning is the break or fissure,
coming close to Kierkegaard’s his use of the Christ figure as the break,
offence and interruption to history. How then can Lukács be making the
Hegelian movement from anxious aristocrat to trapped Stalinist?
The ‘brutal ending of dreams forced upon life’ of Kierkegaard and
Lukács also entails a decisive break from the old to the new self. The method
of the break is both the thinkers’ continual self-scrutiny alongside their
scrutiny of society. The ‘reckoning’ is at once the awareness and description
of the movement into praxis for both thinkers. It is the moment to help
eliminate the past, and the stuggle for this continues at the end of Theory of
the Novel on the brink of his leap into Bolshevism: “Nothing is left of what
was there before; as the sand of the desert covers the pyramids, so every
spiritual thing has been swamped, annihilated, by animal nature” (TN, 149).
Kierkegaard’s reckoning is an attempt to understand himself as a single
individual which always has a past despite the quest to transform oneself
anew. Already in Soul and Form however, Lukács is hinting at the formation
of a hardened, purified and intransigent self in the aftermath of a reckoning:
“The self stresses its selfhood with an all-inclusive, all-destroying force, but
this extreme affirmation imparts a steely harshness and autonomous life to
everything it encounters and arriving at the ultimate peak of pure selfhood—
finally cancels itself out” (SF, 160). This reality moves from tragedy as “the
awakening of the soul” (SF, 161) in Soul and Form, to “[…] history
awakening into consciousness” in History and Class Consciousness (HCC,
199). As Lorenz Jäger remarks: “This was the blueprint of a life which,
without being religious, had a meaning comparable only to that of religion.”18
This apocalyptic word, ‘reckoning’, supposedly implies the movement
of Kierkegaard’s authorship from the aesthetic to the religious, and that of the
public to the simplicity of the single individual. Not wholly dissimilar,
Lukács’ own apocalyptic reckoning moves from the aesthetic to the political.
It is the ‘reckoning’ of his first published work that describes the individual
who “longs for a single, powerful, exclusive feeling”. Lukács’ reckoning
betrays both his secret desire for the ‘simple’ and enduring admiration for
Kierkegaard’s ‘honesty’ throughout the former’s long career, despite
Kierkegaard’s attack on the Hegelian philosophy of history. The idea of
shedding light on other thinkers in order to open the way for oneself runs
through Soul and Form. In describing the Jena generation at the end of the
eighteenth century, he could be describing his own predicament. The young
Lukács writes:
They [the Jena circle] felt that the way they had gone, the way that each
young generation of the newly-awakened Germany had gone before
them, led into nothingness; and almost simultaneously they saw the
possibility of coming from the nothing into a something, of freeing
themselves from the anarchy of living as mere literati – a necessity
forced upon them by outward circumstances – and hastening towards
fruitful, culture-creating new goals (SF, 45).
Dreams forced into life were now at hand. Kierekgaard writes in ‘The
Reckoning’: “To arrive at the simple: the movement is from the public to the
single individual” (SKS13, 17 / PV, 10). This is a continuation of the idea of
breaking free from the reified human being. Kierkegaard’s de-socialisation
becomes a re-socialisation, as the writer attempts to make clear in this
moment of ‘reckoning’ (Regnskabet). To further explain the ‘simple’, it is the
stark reality of the ‘single individual’. Kierkegaard’s ‘reckoning’ arrives at the
simple, de-socialised in relation to the lilies and the birds, re-socialised in
becoming a single individual. Kierkegaard then continues in the same passage
as above: “There is in a religious sense no public but only individuals,
because the religious is earnestness, and earnestness is the single individual.”
In the reckoning of the de-socialised single individual s/he confronts the
political realm of public, crowd and numbers. In the same essay, describing
the reckoning in his reflections on Beer-Hofmann’s work, Lukács presents the
new world: “This, then, is the new world, the way that leads out of
aestheticism; a deep, religious sense of everything being connected with
everything else” (SF, 112). While Kierkegaard takes the religious as the
greatest offence to the world, Lukács goes on to take the political in the form
of Marxism as the greatest offence to the world. Kierkegaard’s reckoning
becomes a movement away from historico-philosophical interpretation to a
quasi-religious one in relation to the lilies and the birds; Lukács’ reckoning is
an attempt to move away from a quasi-religious interpretation to a historico-
philosophical one. Both reckonings are an answer to the Kierkegaardian
anxiety of the “[…] dark abysses into whose depths we must fall one day; and
the desire to fall into them is the hidden content of our lives” (SF, 113).
Lukács then states in a very Dostoyevskian manner at the edge of his leap into
Marxism: “It will then be the task of historico-philosophical interpretation to
decide whether we are about to leave the age of absolute sinfulness or whether
the new has no other herald but our hopes” (TN, 153). Lukács brings together
both Kierkegaard and Dostoyevsky in this striking passage in 1910 to
conclude his essay “Aesthetic Culture”: “And in fear and trembling, I write
down here—as the only possible final chords after what has been said—the
name of the greatest one of all […] our most sublime epic poet, the sacred
name of Dostoyevsky.”19 The ‘autocritique’ comes in the prefaces of both
thinkers. Lukács’ ruthless and brilliant prefaces disregard his own previous
writings and maintain a definite alienation from them, to the point where he
speaks in the third person about his authorship. Kierkegaard, who always sees
himself as a learner in the process of his writing and that his works speak to
him from the different perspecitives, concludes in “The Reckoning” section of
On My Work as an Author: “I regard myself as a reader of books, not as the
author” (SKS13, 19 / PV, 11).
iii. The Transformation into Collective and Singular Individual
In 1900 there were supposedly only four cities in the world with populations
of one million or more—London, Paris, Berlin and New York—which gives
an inkling of how terms like ‘the public’, ‘levelling’ and ‘the masses’ can
acquire new currency. We have witnessed the rise and control of mass society
in the twentieth century in Hitler’s Germany, Stalinist Russia, communist
China, the capitalist democracy of the USA, and the emergence of
globalisation. On the one hand, individualism arose out of the urban era,
especially in post-war Europe, spreading rapidly through existentialism with
its ideas of the ‘death of god’, the world as absurd, and man as ‘a useless
passion’ trying to create one’s own values to combat the meaninglessness of
the universe. On the other hand, individualism continues today where people
refuse to involve themselves in the affairs of the world, refuse to accept that
they are part of the machine of ‘the public’, who refuse that they are in any
way a part of or responsible for the violence, poverty and injustice that occurs
everyday, to the point where no one is responsible. The latter is individualism
at its most successful; taking care of one’s own, and turning one’s back on
anything that is not familiar or involved in what s/he views as his/her own
life-existence. Both mass society and individualism suffer from opposite
effects of the same principle, the attitude of the individual who is a good
friend to his next-door neighbour, but fails to realise that other people can be
equally good friends to their next-door neighbours, and this helps create an
insular and exclusive world. On the other hand, there is the failure to see the
intimacy of family and friends and one’s life in the face of the greater ideal of
‘cause’, ‘revolution’ and the faceless suffering of others across the world.
Thus, there is either a lack of imagination in seeing the faces, features, and
expressions of real people behind the statistical lists of victims, a lack of
enthusiasm to attempt to take notice, and a lack of belief to change anything.
Or, there is a lack of inwardness in one’s particular daily surroundings.
How then do Kierkegaard and Lukács reckon with these dilemmas?
Kierkegaard asks the question, “To whom is this discourse addressed?” This
question might be asked in connection to life not only in the Stalinist world,
but also life in the ‘mass-society’ world of global capitalism and the
metropolis of today:
But to whom is the discourse addressed – where is he, has he not

completely forgotten himself? Perhaps there is no one at all in this most
honourable gathering who has been mocked; perhaps, but no, that is an
impossibility; how would a victim of mockery dare to venture into this
most honourable gathering! (SKS10, 233 / CD, 225).
To make the transformation, to turn inwardness into praxis is the task

that Kierkegaard and Lukács set themselves. The above passage can be
interpreted as the call for one to speak out even though no one will hear or
want to hear. This ‘most honourable gathering’ could be a meeting of Stalin’s
cabinet or at the White House. How many can stand in front of Stalin’s
cabinet and declare the barbarity of the purges, or appear at the White House
and decry the hypocrisy of the US Christian-crusade rhetoric and oil control
ambitions in the Middle East? Of course, the results will be usually different,
in Stalinist Russia—death; in the US—distrust and disfavor, and perhaps loss
of a job. That is the difference between living in a totalitarian and democratic
state. However, both regimes proclaim that they would be the saviours of
mankind. As self-proclaimed saviours, the danger for the derided becomes
more apparent. Kierkegaard’s Christ is utterly absent, and for Kierkegard, this
is exactly where the individual must stand in the face of the collective—better
to suffer derision for a good cause, otherwise reification has won.
There is the transformation into the collective with Lukács, while with
Kierkegaard, there is the transformation of the singular individual from the
collective sphere. ‘Transformation’ and ‘metamorphosis’ are favourite words
for Marx, present throughout Capital (especially Part Three) and A
Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy in the transformation of
use-value into commodities.20 Lukács’ interest in transformation already
precedes his conversion to Marxism. In Theory of the Novel, the novel itself
transforms into the state of movement encapsulating the possibility of new
hopes in a messianic gesture: “Thus the novel, by transforming itself into a
normative being of becoming, surmounts itself. ‘The voyage is completed:
The way begins’” (TN, 73). This explains Lukács’ comment in the preface to
the same work on his influence on messianic thinkers: “So far as I am able to
judge, The Theory of the Novel was the first German book in which a left ethic
oriented towards radical revolution was coupled with a traditional-

conventional exegesis of reality. From the 1920s onwards this view was to
play an increasingly important role. We need only think of Ernst Bloch’s
Geist der Utopie (1918, 1925) and the Thomas Münzer als Theologe der
Revolution, of Walter Benjamin, even of the beginnings of Theodore W.
Adorno, etc” (TN, 21). Transformation carries positive connotations
throughout the text: “[…] the hero’s life […] is actually transformed into a
pile of debris by the form-giving process” (TN, 120). Lukács is right in
writing: “The Theory of the Novel is not conservative but subversive in
nature” (TN, 20), and the transformation of the isolated heroic artist of the text
is always positive. A few years later, two distinct ‘transformations’ emerge:
the transformation of a human being into the reified human being, and the
transformation into the conscious proletariat ready to overthrow the existing
order. Both transformations are allied with the collective. The proletariat
becomes the chosen class, or even the last class, whose sufferings are
collective, and whose sufferings will be eradicated collectively. The Marx that
Lukács is thinking of here is from “Towards a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy
of Right”. “[…] the dissolution of all social groups […] that has a universal
character because its universal sufferings […] and thus can only recover itself
by a complete redemption of humanity.”21 This again shows the disparity
between Marx and Kierkegaard: the revolution coming from within or
externally. In her book The Melancholy Science, Gillian Rose succinctly sums
up the importance of Marx for Lukács: “The discovery of Marx encompassed
the discovery of society; that is of the social determinations of human activity,
and made it necessary for the writer to define his relationship with the
sociological tradition.”22 Transformation reveals itself in History and Class
Consciousness positively in the form of transition from theory to praxis. The
‘positive’ transformation not only entails transforming philosophy into praxis,
but Lukács and Marx also demand a transformation of “every manifestation of
the life of society” (HCC, 95) and “a transformation of totality” (HCC, 175).
The only way to break through the ossification of reification is metamorphosis
and transformation—so too is it in nature, in the caterpillar’s metamorphosis
into a butterfly. The essence of Lukács’ History and Class Consciousnes is
that only Hegel’s dialectic can overcome reification brought to consciousness
in the proletariat, and thus turn theory into praxis. Lukács quotes Hegel’s
Phenomenology of Spirit to support his point: “To transcend such ossified
antitheses is the sole concern of reason” (HCC, 141). In the footnote to this
quote, Lukács remarks that The Phenomenology of Spirit is unsurpassed in
attempting to “transcend such ossified antitheses.”
Kierkegaard, like Lukács of Theory of the Novel, recognises
fragmentation and lack of direction in future society and the dangerous
situation of the single individual given the growing hysteria of mass
movements. Kierkegaard does not call for a quest for a new totality on the
road to the perfect society, but instead for a more self-aware individual that
can confront any established order, old or new, conservative or radical. In a
journal entry, Kierkegaard makes some interesting remarks explaining the
idea of a community amidst this imminent fragmentation:
In community the individual is; dialectically, the individual is crucial as

the prior condition for forming a community, and within the community
the indiviqdual is qualitatively essential and can at any moment rise
above ‘community’, that is, as soon as ‘the others’ give up the idea.
What holds community together is that each is an individual, and then
the idea (Pap. X 2 A 390, 1850).
‘Community’ here does not lose sight of the individual, and the
individual in its hidden and manifest inwardness nourishes the community,
ensuring that the public will not overwhelm the community, and that levelling
is unable to triumph. In Post-National Identity, Matustík explains the job
ahead: “[…] only when we expand the radically honest individual so as to
envision a mode of community can we comprehend Climacus’ paradoxical
insistence that the individual is higher than the race and at the same time his
admission that community can become equal to the individual.”23 In
contradistinction to the community, ‘the public’ ensures that numbers are
everything and individuals are nothing. Kierkegaard continues: “‘Community’
is no doubt more than a sum, but is truly still a sum of units; the public is
nonsense; a sum of negative units, of units that are not units, that become
units with the sum, instead of the sum being a sum of units” (Pap. X 2 A 390,
1850). Kierkegaard’s transformation occurs in the ability of the individual to
decipher the ‘sum of units’ and to disrupt the totality where everyone can
become no one.
iv. Suspended between Social Prudence and a Tragic Sense of Life
Kierkegaard writes in Two Ages:A Literary Review: “That time is now past.
They either must be lost in the dizziness of abstract infinity or be infinitely
saved in the essentiality of religiousness” (SKS8, 102 /TA, 108).
Kierkegaard’s solution seems to leave us with a stark choice where one is
either utterly lost and swept away in the age of reflection, levelling, the public
and formlessness, or find faith in the ‘essentiality of religiousness’. “The leap
into the embrace of God” (SKS8, 103 / TA, 108) and the single individual’s
faith in the infinite is the immediate, literal reading of the ‘essentiality of
religiousness’. Notice how Kierkegaard uses the word ‘infinity’ in both
options of the ‘radical choice’ that seems to be offered to us: to be lost in
abstract infinity or be infinitely saved. This is the position of the individual: to
be suspended between social prudence and a tragic sense of life.
Where does this leave us with Kierkegaard? A choice is presented in

Two Ages:A Literary Review: to be lost in levelling, or to find oneself
religiously, where there is no finality or ‘end of history’, contrary to some
interpretations. Kierkegaard’s ‘essentiality of religiousness’ pertains to the
essentiality of incompleteness and becoming in existing in the world, within
any form of community. Lukács’s ‘essentiality’ is to be continually guided by
Marx’s final thesis on Feuerbach, in which the time of interpretation is over,
the time now for action is what matters. In the case of both thinkers, there is a
certain tragic sense of life, to use Miguel de Unamuno’s phrase,24 to describe
this element of choice and decision. In 1848, Kierkegaard explains his own
tragic sense of life: “I could not possibly succeed in finding the calm, secure
middle course in which most people have their lives – I either had to plunge
into despair and sensuality or absolutely choose the religious as the one and
only – either the world on a scale that would be dreadful or the monastery”
(SKS16, 20 / PV, 35). Philosophically, what is important is that both thinkers
continually make the reader aware of life’s dangers and perils that underlie
our every move. In 1848, Kierkegaard writes: “[…] but woe to you if you win
them in such a way that you leave out the terror” (SKS10, 186 / CD, 175). In
Soul and Form, the final essay, “The Metaphysics of Tragedy”, is an early
attemptto convey the tragic sense of life. Lukács explains: “Surrender is the
mystic’s way, struggle is the tragic man’s; the one, at the end of his road, is
absorbed into the All, the other shattered against the All” (SF, 160). The ‘All’
can epitomise life and death itself, and the universal which encompasses it.
“That is why tragedy”, Lukács has concluded, “is the awakening of the soul.”
In Philosophical Fragments, Climacus had already outlined the underlying
tragic sense of life that the individual must be aware of at every moment when
he describes the insecurity and uncertainty of living in the world in the
metaphor of Venice:
Is not Venice built upon the sea, even though it was built in such a way
that a generation finally came along that did not notice this at all, and
would it not be a lamentable misunderstanding if this latest generation
was so in error until the pilings began to rot and the city sank? But,
humanly speaking, consequences built upon a paradox are built upon the
abyss, and the total content of the consequences, which is handed down
to the single individual only under the agreement that it is by virtue of a
paradox, is not to be passed on like real estate, since the whole thing is in
suspense (SKS4, 261 / PF, 98).
1848 is this‘suspense’ as well as being a Mellemspil, and the authorship

of this time expresses the reality of the tragic sense of life and the solutions to
its potential terror. With Kierkegaard, there always remains the space to smile
and to see the jest. However, the humour and the jest of life is lost when
Lukács propels his thinking further into the tragic sense of life where action
has totally outweighed any space for interpretation and change, and although
in his last days there are hints that Lukács was preparing to critically interpret
his works from the 1930s and 1940s he died before he could properly carry
out this task. Adorno describes the danger of sacrificing oneself completely to
the tragic sense of life:
Lukács as a person is above suspicion. But the conceptual structure to

which he sacrificed his intellect is so constricted that it suffocates
anything that would like to breathe more freely in it; the sacrifizio
dell’intelletto does not leave the intellect unscathed. This puts Lukács
obvious nostalgia for his early writings in a melancholy perspective
(NL1, 217-218).
The solutions are not all doom and gloom with Kierkegaard, but rather a
call to life to find concrete solutions and stick with them amidst ‘the
restlessness of infinity’. Mark C. Taylor interprets the tragic sense of life to be
either utterly lost in worldly abstraction or saved in solitude. Taylor reads
Kierkegaard’s message, while focusing on the earlier pseudonymous
authorship, as a solitary journey to selfhood, in complete conflict with the
world, as a lonely journey to salvation, and “an individual in opposition to the
others.”25 He underlines this position by quoting Johannes de silentio in which
the road to selfhood “[…] winds along a solitary path, narrow and steep […]
without meeting a single traveler” (SKS4, 167 / FT, 76). He also uses the
words of Frater Taciturnus’s “Letter to the Reader” in relation to the dark
melancholy of Quidam: “[…] to follow the way is to embark upon an
extraordinary pilgrimage, a venture that suspends one above seventy thousand
fathoms of water, many, many miles from all human help” (SKS6, 434 /
SLW, 470). What Taylor sometimes fails to recognise is that Johannes de
silentio is meditating on the knight of faith Abraham, the one we cannot
comprehend, the one who teleologically suspends the ethical, and keeps the
ethical life in tension under critical scrutiny by the ‘essentiality of
religiousness’. Taciturnus is attempting to understand the encapsulated
Quidams of the world, and that lying out on the deep with seventy thousand
fathoms of water beneath him is to accept that “spiritual existence […] is not
easy” (SKS6, 410 / SLW, 444). The solitary one is a predominant figure in the
Kierkegaard authorship, but perhaps because, as Kierkegaard writes in 1848,
“the longing for solitude is a sign that there is still spirit in a person” (SKS11,
178 / SUD, 64). The solitary one comes from a de-socialisation in order for
the possibility of re-socialising to begin again and again. Perhaps it is because
the solitary one can “[…] give expression to the fact that it [the present age] is
going under” (Pap. X I A 167, 1849). The solitary one who has to choose for
himself is a recurring theme in Kierkegaard’s authorship, but it is not an
invitation to lose oneself in solitude, to remain a stranger to others in the
world. Kierkegaard’s sympathies for the solitary individual lie in his potential
to become a self in the face of the ‘levelling’, the ‘public’ and ‘formlessness’
presented in Two Ages:A Literary Review. It is to ensure that one does not feel
too secure at home in the socio-political world, when socio-political forms
function effectively, and when the coziness of one’s position has the
possibility of sending one to sleep in regard to what is happening in one’s
present age. This security and coziness away from a raw awareness of the
passion and fragility of existence can repress the possibility (and de silentio’s
impossibility) in the individual’s journey, and make him/her lose sight of both
the tension and suspension that is at the root of our society.
Kierkegaard’s disagreement at the end of his life with Arthur
Schopenhauer on the goal for the ascetic life (Pap. XI I A 144), and the
comments made in the Concluding Unscientific Postscript on the monastic
life, supports the thought that Kierkegaard continued to be serious about
social communication and praxis. Lukács brings both Schopenhauer and
Kierkegaard together as responsible for the origins of European irrationalism
in The Destruction of Reason. In Soul and Form, Lukács calls Schopenhauer
“a John the Baptist who goes out to preach in the wilderness about another
who is still to come” (SF, 16). Lukács’ descriptions in Soul and Form provide
an response to his radical journey deeper and deeper into Stalinist Russia. As
a result of his fear that the world is simply solitude, he sometimes also fits the
picture that Taylor depicts in his own eloquent descriptions of solitude: “We
understand everything, and our greatest understanding is a rapt marvelling, an
incomprehension intensified to the point of religiosity. We long passionately
to escape from our tormenting loneliness, yet what is closest to us are the
subtle pleasures of eternal solitude” (SF, 87). Kierkegaard’s solitary
individual does not have to lead us on a path of complete isolation and radical
choice towards the ‘end of history’; instead, Kierkegaard’ solitary individual
can perform as the outsider interrupting our pre-conceptions, disrupting the
collectivism and the levelling in the present age, and thus making a space for a
particular voice and opening within the socio-political world.
4. Dialectics of Totality and Disintegration
True revolt is the one inspired by the impossibility of ending.

Roland Barthes
Both Kierkegaard and Lukács greatly admired the ancient Greeks, but while
they both early on expressed that one could not live in nostalgia and longing
for the Greek world and that its society could not happen again, Lukács edged
further into the ideology of the Soviet Union in the pursuit of form over chaos
whatever the cost, which finally would lead to the earthly paradise; and
Kierkegaard might be accused of depicting a renewed, all too harsh
Christianity, but he always understood that his age was one of paradox and
chaos that could never truly be ignored or overcome. From these two thinkers,
we can see the possibility of two divergent paths: that of the dialectic towards
totality or continual disintegration and inviting continuous openness. Both
thinkers deal with dialectics in light of Hegel, but while Lukács tries to stay
true to the project of Hegelian dialectics, Kierkegaard does try to use
dialectics in order to show the limitations of the method, which he argues
leads to disintegration rather than wholeness and totality (over a hundred
years before Adorno’s Negative Dialectics). While Lukács views
Kierkegard’s project as reactionary, Kierkegaard’s method instead can be
interpreted as breaking down the infallibility of any system or order, and that
by his very insistence on the single individual in the midst of the political
changes of 1848, his publicly a-political action ultimately inspires a political
stance. As the international journalist and writer Ryszard Kapuciski
reflected: “The concept of totality exists in theory, but never in life. In even
the best-built wall there is always a chink (or we hope there is, and that means
something).”26
i. Dialectics
Lukács calls Kierkegaard’s dialectic a qualitative dialectic—a dialectic which

lays claim to a higher value. Lukács points out that Kierkegaard’s qualitative
dialectics is “a repudiation of dialectics,” replaced by “pseudo-dialectics”
(DR, 252). Kierkegaard uses dialectics as an antithesis to Hegel’s dialectics to
repudiate this “most advanced dialectical form of his time”, and thus for
Lukács, “[…] there arises a pseudo-dialectic, and irrationalism is clad in
pseudo-dialectical forms” (DR, 252). Lukács provides his materialistic
dialectical stance: “[…] the subjective dialectic in human knowledge is
precisely the reflection of the objective dialectic of reality, and that as a result
of the structure of objective reality, this process of reflection likewise
proceeds dialectically” (DR, 247). Thus, the subjective is just a reflection of
the objective. And instead, Kierkegaard has constructed a “subjectivist
pseudo-dialectic.” For Lukács, this kind of dialectic pertains to irrationalism,
which entails a turning away from the divinisation of human history and
turning dialectics into a tool that is useful but which must ultimately be
discarded. Lukács and Marx’s dialectic is still based on a higher value: the
process and destiny of history leading to the advocation of totality and
potential new forms of totatitarianism. There are plenty of pasages in History
and Class Consciousness advocating the totality of history. (See, for example:
HCC, 112, 115, 144, 151-152, 153, 180, 185, 186, and 188). Jean-Paul
Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason takes issue with Lukács’ later
Marxism, though not mentioning him by name. In line with Kierkegaard,
Sartre writes that “totalising is identical with terror” in its inflexible refusal to
differentiate.27 By describing Hegel’s dialectic, Lukács is paving the way for
his own thought: “By positive dialectics he […] understands the growth of a
particular content, the elucidation of a concrete totality” (HCC, 207). Gillian

Rose describes the search for harmony in Lukács’ dialectical thinking: “The
possibility of culture, for Lukacs, depends on conditions of ‘organic unity’
and the (now lost) ideal of harmony.”28
Lukács equates despair with the idea of not achieving a sense of totality.
In a ‘state of despair’ when writing Theory of the Novel, Lukács is still
cautious about totality: “For unity can surely be achieved, but never a real
totality” (TN, 55). He knows that the ‘Greek circle’ has been broken and
therefore if there is to be a totality in this world it is “[…] bound to be a
fragile or merely a longed-for one” (TN, 60). This position changes of course
with his joining of the Party. In the 1962 preface to Theory of the Novel,
Lukács points out his despair at the time of writing it: “Thus it [The Theory of
the Novel] was written in a mood of permanent despair over the state of the
world. It was not until 1917 that I found an answer to the problems which,
until then, had seemed to me insoluble” (TN, 12). Lukács views
Kierkegaard’s rejection of Hegel’s dialectics to usher from the latter’s
atheism. But it is because Hegel’s dialectic fits everything into the system,
including the religious realm and usurping the single individual into the
public, the faceless number. It is Kierkegaard’s distrust of historicism and his
allegiance to the ‘single individual’ in the face of the progress of history that
causes him to break with Hegelian and thus Marxist dialectics when it comes
to both the divinisation and reification of history. What Lukács fails to see is
that while in both Kierkegaard and Schopenhauer’s thinking there is the
prioritizing of the individual, Kierkegaard turns away from Schopenhauer’s
philosophy of asceticism and instead turns to a philosophy of praxis. For
Lukács, Kierkegaard’s irrationalism is a ‘destruction of history’, which is
asserting the priority of the existing individual over a philosophy of history. It
is Hegelian and Marxist historicism that leads towards the dangerous
possibility of irrationalism in the horrific realities of brutal totalitarian regimes
and triumphant declarations of the ‘end of history’. At the same time, Lukács
is aware of this real danger and Kierkegaard’s sensitivity to it. He writes that:
“[…] this—relatively—justified critique of a mere contemplation of history,
of a history […] has nothing to do with cardinal human problems in life” (DR,
265). However, Lukács continues to say that Kierkegaard uses this point for
his irrationalist denial of all real historicity. But Kierkegaard’s ‘qualitative
dialectics’ ensures an “infinitely interested human relation”, to quote Lukács
himself (DR, 266). It is also to warn of the trappings that can befall the
Hegelian dialectic when theory is prioritised at every moment, to the point
where it is not only comical but dangerous within a political environment. In
one journal entry we can see both Kierkegaard’s respect and disdain for
Hegelian philosophy: “If Hegel had written his entire Logic and said in the
preface that it was merely a thought-experiment in which he had even shirked
things in various places, he would no doubt have been the greatest thinker that
ever lived. As it is he is comical” (Pap. V A 73, 1844). Lukács is caught up in

the furor of twentieth century apocalyptic scholarship, in separating what is
rational and what is irrational, eventually ignoring Mephistopheles’ words that
he once quoted himself: “He calls it Reason, and it only has increased / His
power to be beastlier than a beast.”29 Lukács’ own quasi-Mephistophelian
pact has led to Adorno’s description of Lukács’ Destruction of Reason as
“a destruction of Lukács’ reason” (NL1, 217).
What then is the positive or useful aspect of Kierkegaard’s dialectic? In
1848, most notably in The Sickness unto Death, the dialectical method is put
into action, and in a footnote, Anti-Climacus even writes, “In the life of the
spirit everything is dialectical” (SKS11, 228 / SUD, 116), because in one
aspect of spirit in Christianity the act of sinning points towards faith. Despair
itself is dialectical, or as Anti-Climacus explains at the beginning of The
Sickness unto Death: “[…] despair is interpreted as sickness, not as a cure.
Despair is indeed that dialectical” (SKS11, 122 / PV, 6). Does Kierkegaard’s
dialectic fit with Lukács’ portrayal of the qualitative dialectic? In The Point of
View, Kierkegaard explains:
To endeavour (stræbe) or to work directly is to work or to work directly

in immediate connection with a factually given state of things. The
dialectical method is the reverse: in working also to work against
oneself, a redoubling (Fordoblelse), which is “the earnestness”
(Alvoren), like the pressure on the plough that determines the depth of
the furrow, whereas the direct endeavour is a glossing over, which is
finished more rapidly and also is much, much more rewarding – that is,
it is worldliness and homogeneity (SKS13, 15 / PV, 9).
One can see Kierkegaard’s positive use of the dialectic at work here. It is
unlike Lukács’ quantitative dialectic, which is the “mere approximation in the
knowledge of history”. Like Lukács’ dialectic, it is moving against itself, but
when it comes to Kierkegaard’s Christian time the negation of historicity
comes into play once again, because eternal truth has entered into time. That
is the break with history and Climacus’ paradox.
Lukács sums up the importance of History and Class Consciousness in
the preface to the book, claiming that it “[…] represents what was perhaps the
most radical attempt to restore the revolutionary nature of Marx’s theories by
renovating and extending Hegel’s dialectics and method” (HCC, xxi). But by
The Destruction of Reason, the rationality of the method had eclipsed
rationality itself and does indeed fall victim, with the benefit of hindsight, to
Adorno’s charges. By The Destruction of Reason, Lukács, as the true
dialectician, cannot keep quiet. It is once again the earlier, more
‘Kierkegaardian’ Lukács of Soul and Form who hints at the dialectic as a way
to struggle through the world but not as a final solution to its riddle. He
writes: “Life is an anarchy of light and dark: nothing is ever completely
fulfilled in life, nothing ever quite ends” (SF, 152). Earlier in the book, in
describing Stefan George’s songs, Lukács could well be describing the fate of
Kierkegaard’s dialectic as “songs of travel, stations on a long, apparently
endless road which pursues a definite goal yet, perhaps, leads nowhere” (SF,
81). In keeping with the project of dialectics, in uniting contradiction with
unity in the truth of history, contradiction fades away further and further from
Lukács’ project, until everything has become unity in the march towards
totality in The Destruction of Reason. Lukács’ biographer Kadarkay observes:
“It seems that Lukács, at some psychic level, craved ‘totality’ and accepted
with the good conscience the sacrifices he felt it demanded.”30 One must
return to the young Lukács when the difficulties of thought and the limits of
dialectics were still apparent: “Where is unity, where is contradiction? These
are not properties of works or artists, they are just the limits of our own
possibilities” (SF, 128). And yet, while describing life as an anarchy of life
and death, he manages to point out in the same text: “Anarchy is death. That is
why I hate it and fight against it” (SF, 129). Here we catch a glimpse of the
future Lukács. By History and Class Consciousness, any form of
fragmentation must be wiped out: “The different forms of fragmentation are
so many necessary phases on the road towards a reconstituted man but they
dissolve into nothing when they come into a true relation with a grasped
reality, i.e. when they become dialectical” (HCC, 141). Four years before his
death, Lukács admits his unswerving loyalty to Hegel: “My uncritical attitude
towards Hegel has still not been overcome” (HCC, xxxv).
ii. Prefaces, Postscripts and Crumbs
As Lukács uses the dialectic to guide Marxist theory and the destiny of
humanity towards totality, Kierkegaard’s dialectic is forever disintegrating.
The different interpretations of Kierkegaard’s use of Hegel’s dialectic are
usually related to either Kierkegaard’s use of Hegel’s dialectic for
Kierkegaard’s own ends, or to his use of Hegel’s dialectic as ironic and
actually in criticism of Hegel.31 Kierkegaard’s dialectic can be viewed as both,
despite the consternation of a certain Kierkegaardian who repeats one of his
favorite lines from the Bible: “I know thy works, that thou art neither cold nor
hot: I would thou wert cold or hot.”32 But this ‘hot or cold’ is the plea for
‘honesty rather than half measures’, and not for a black/white divide.
Kierkegaard, in his most developed presentation of the dialectical method
(The Sickness unto Death), is using a quasi-Hegelian method: the first part is
divided into three sections—“Despair is the Sickness unto Death”, “The
Universality of this Sickness”, and “The Forms of this Sickness”. The
overcoming of sin in the second part is also divided into the Hegelian triadic
form: “The Sin of Despairing over One’s Sin”, “The Sin of Despairing of the
Forgiveness of Sins (Offence)”, and “The Sin of Dismissing Christianity
modo ponendo, of Declaring it to be Untruth.” Yet, the irony is still present,

because, while using this Hegelian method, the dialectic continues to falter.
The whole or absolute spirit is never attained, the dialectic helps make one
aware, but the struggle is unceasing, and the authority of Anti-Climacus is a
very serious joke. Hence, the association with deconstruction is apparent
when the reader sees both the irony and the serious tone, understanding
deconstruction as described by John D. Caputo: “Deconstruction is ongoing,
always unfinished work, not a position but a praxis, not a theoretical outlook
or standpoint but an activity which is always in actu exercitu […]
Deconstruction is an exercise in disruption which displaces whatever tends to
settle in place.”33 In perhaps his most crucial passage in explaining his terms
“dissemination” and “outwork” in his book Dissemination, Derrida refers to
Concluding Unscientific Postscript as one of the key examples of a
paradoxical text or paratext that neither really begins or ends as “highly
differentiated in its structure […] to all possible treatises […] on the post-
scriptum”.34 For Derrida, here is a text that is a marvellous performance that
literally postfaces, postscripts or concludes (or all three) a fragment
(Philosophical Fragments). In this crucial passage, which is inserted as a
footnote, Derrida writes: “[…] one is also in fact starting over again, adding
an extra text, complicating the scene, opening up within the labyrinth a
supplementary digression, which is also a false mirror that pushes the
labyrinth’s infinity back forever in mimed—that is, endless—speculation.”35
As the philosophical concept of ‘deconstruction’ long postdates Kierkegaard,
I call Kierkegaard’s dialectic a ‘dialectic of disintegration’, because it does
not integrate the self first and foremost, but dis-integrates the self, and within
the dialectic itself is the process of disintegration. This also connects with the
‘present age’ as the ‘age of disintegration’, which will be explored later in this
book in connection with Benjamin and Adorno.
When Kierkegaard’s ‘qualitative dialectics’ seem to break down or reach
its limit, this is the process of disintegration, which, forever faltering, still
continues. Hence there are the countless prefaces to unfinished texts and
prefaces to other prefaces, enormous postscripts to short condensed
philosophical tracts, and books with “crumbs” (Smuler) for titles with the
section called “Interlude” (Mellemspil) to describe the history of motion and
change in philosophy in an incredibly dense thirteen pages. The figures of
Socrates and Christ in Kierkegaard’s authorship disrupt a philosophy of
totality. Christ embodies the individual who does not fit the dialectic of
totality and who laughs in the face of any destiny of history. Christ’s company
and friends are “the outcasts of human society”, and Christ himself “is a
person scorned as a seducer, deceiver, and blasphemer!” (SKS16, 66 / PC, 54).
The disintegration process ensures that Kierkegaard, as provocateur, is always
aware of the project of critical scrutiny, which is “to prod the established
order out of self-complacency” (SKS16, 98 / PC, 90).
The young Lukács comes close to this dialectic of disintegration in Soul

and Form. The subjective and objective worlds, the gulf between gesture and
form show how these opposites are related, how one is central, natural and
privileged, the other ignored, repressed or marginalised. Next, Lukács
temporarily undoes or subverts the hierarchy to make the text more
ambiguous and uncertain. Then in the last step, both terms of the opposition
are seen dancing in a free play of non-hierarchical, non-stable meanings.
Kierkegaard is always leaving something unfinished, by its very construct—it
cannot be otherwise. Kierkegaard even checks Cervantes on how the great
Spaniard should really have left his masterpiece Don Quixote unfinished and
open, epitomising the faltering, yet ever continuing dialectic:
It is a sad mistake for Cervantes to Don Quixote by making him sensible

and then letting him die. Cervantes, who himself had the superb idea of
having him become a shepherd! It ought to have ended there. That is,
Don Quixote should not come to an end; he ought to be presented as
going full speed, so that he opens vistas upon an infinite series of new
fixed ideas. Don Quixote is endlessly perfectible in madness, but the one
thing he cannot become (for otherwise he could become everything and
anything) is sensible. Cervantes seems not to have been dialectical
enough to bring it to this romantic conclusion (that there is no
conclusion) (Pap. VIII I A 59, 1847).
The dialectic of disintegration does not finish with the retrieval of the
marginalised—if it was only a matter of retrieval, it would merely have been
just another inverted metaphysics.36 Rather, Kierkegaard’s dialectic attempts
to show how the repressed or marginalised returns in order to disturb the
intended, metaphysical inscription. In disturbing the dialectics of totality, after
Lukács’ polemic against ‘qualitative dialectics’, Kierkegaard is disseminating
and dispersing the self and society in the face of God.
The Point of View, as report to history, disintegrates in the form of
prefaces, postscripts and crumbs. The text is stopping and starting before our
eyes in the apologia for the self as writer, and the reader is working just as
hard to make his/her way out of the labyrinth. Kierkegaard’s authorship is
praxis in the use of prefaces, postscripts and crumbs, whether it is in the early
upbuilding discourses that bring “the cold thoughts into flame again” and
“transforms the discourse into a conversation” (SKS5, 211 / EUD, 231), or it
is Kierkegaard acting as the Extra-Skriver coined in Fear and Trembling
(SKS4, 103 / FT, 7), which can be translated as literally extra-writer or
supplementary clerk (‘supplementary’ being a central word in Jacques
Derrida’s philosophy of deconstruction over a hundred years later). Anti-
Climacus’ layout and structures in The Sickness unto Death and Practice in
Christianity are riddled with prefaces, sections and sub-sections along the
way. The most faltering of all the texts, The Point of View, heralds in a Peer
Gynt for Kierkegaard who “confesses yet conceals”37 where the complexities
of Kierkegaard’s dialectic of disintegration both curse and bless the reader to
one Skillevei after another, as opposed to Ibsen’s single-minded Brand for
Lukács where dialectic of totality meets only one Skillevei, and from there on
in, the reader must ‘spit out what is neither hot nor cold’. The play Brand has
long been associated with Kierkegaard, due to Brand’s way of life according
to Rev. 3:15-16, and also the memorable piece from The Moment No. 6 called
“Hvad siger Brand-Majoren?” (What does the Fire-Chief say). Lukács opens
his extended critique of Kierkegaard in The Destruction of Reason by
referring to the influence of Kierkegaard on Ibsen’s Brand. Ibsen had long
been a central figure in Lukács’ life. Ibsen never came under his critique, as
his “[…] whole life was a harmony”38 according to Lukács, and who opened
up and transformed the bourgeois oppressive conditions for the woman and
the evolution of the human spirit.
iii. Homelessness
Both thinkers arrive at planetary and transcendental homelessness,39 which is

the absence of a firm place on earth and the absence of God, both of which
align with a post-Kantian era, in that Homelessness, to quote Heidegger, “has
become the destiny of the world.”40 Two of the three crucial mythical figures
for the early formation of Kierkegaard’s thinking, the Wandering Jew and
Faust, symbolize the state of planetary homelessness. What might be Lukács’
favorite painting, Tintoretto’s Crucifixion not only separates God from human
beings, but according to Lukács it shows that human beings are far more
absorbed in their own affairs than with God or even Christ’s suffering.41 One
can also observe with astonishment Bruegel the Elder’s magnificent painting
Christ Carrying the Cross from 1564. For Lukács, these kinds of paintings
represent the modern world, a world where the gods faded away from the
affairs of men—in contrast to the Greek world where gods regularly interfered
in the world of human beings, or in the Old and New Testament where
prophets and messiahs could perform miracles on a daily basis. Being more
alone today in the realm of the spirit, and in gaining so much in the
technological and information age, we have also closed off various doors that
need to be opened in the growth of the self. As the author Joseph Campbell
concludes on the things we gain and the things we lose in modernity: “Where
then there was darkness, now there is light; but also, where light was, there
now is darkness.42 In Theory of the Novel, Lukács reminds us of the ancient
Greek direct involvement with the gods: “The heroes of youth are guided by
the gods: whether what awaits them at the end of the road are the embers of
annihilation or the joys of success, or both at once, they never walk alone,
they are always led” (TN, 86). And in the dramatic opening of the same book,
he idealises this bygone world:
Happy are those ages when the starry sky is the map of all possible paths
– ages whose paths are illuminated by the light of the stars. Everything
in such ages is new and yet familiar, full of adventure and yet their own.
The world is wide and yet is like a home, for the fire that burns in the
soul is of the same essential nature as the stars; the world and the self,
the light and the fire, are sharply distinct, yet they never become
permanent strangers to one another, for fire is the soul of all light and all
fire clothes itself in light (TN, 29).
The quest now for Lukács is to find a way home again:
[…] the world of man that matters is the one where the soul, as man, god
or demon, is at home: then the soul finds everything it needs, it does not
have to create or animate anything out of its own self, for its existence is
filled to overbrimming with the finding, gathering and moulding of all
that is given as cognate to the soul (TN, 65).
With the abandonment of the gods and God, the solitary wanderer’s path
is darkened. Lukács goes as far as to say: “[…] for to be a man in the new
world is to be solitary” (TN, 36). On the opening page, he heralds in the ever
pressing place of philosophy by quoting Novalis, “Philosophy is really
homesickness, it is the urge to be at home everywhere” (TN, 29). Worth
mentioning is the fact that Heidegger quotes the same sentence at the
beginning of The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics in 1929, written just
after Being and Time. It is interesting to see the development of Heidegger,
who seems to always be one step behind Lukács in picking up on various
ideas of thinkers, e.g. on Kierkegaard, Eckhart, Novalis. It also might explain
the intense antagonism Lukács had for Heidegger’s thinking, in that it was
steeped in many of the same sources as Lukács’, and yet for Lukács
Heidegger’s thought had led to Hitler and the destruction of reason. There is a
contradiction here when Lukács says that happy ages have no philosophy
(TN, 29). Didn’t the ancient Greeks invent and perfect philosophy, whose age,
according to both Kierkegaard and Lukács, was happy in the pursuit and
experience of eudaimonia (as a whole, unified and in direct conversation with
the gods)? Lukács transforms his thought from Theory of the Novel to History
and Class Consciousness where the proletariat takes the flame in the quest for
a new and perfect world out of the homelessness of the present one.
Kierkegaard has no such intentions; instead, one must revel in the
disintegration of worlds, where it can often be much harder to be a Christian
or create a great work of art. We may find ourselves in a landscape of
homelessness, but this need not be a daunting situation: all the great
philosophical texts offer a sort of future path, whether of Plato, Parmenides,
Hegel or Heidegger—their common element is that these paths are still before
us. And in literature, James Joyce’s Ulysses, the supreme modernist novel of
the twentieth century, is an ambivalent and joyous book of universal
homelessness that is placed at the interlude where extremes meet, or
“Jewgreek is greekjew.”43 The novel follows the wanderings of Hungarian-
Irish Jew Leopold Bloom through the defeated city of Dublin, and goes to war
with and assimilates Dante’s Divine Comedy, Hamlet, Faust, Homer and the
Bible in order to open up new paths for future generations to venture down
again.
This homelessness helps explain the place of restlessness in
Kierkegaard’s writing in 1848, whether that be the restlessness of the
individual in his/her journey through despair, or the actress’ ‘restlessness of
infinity’ or even the restlessness in trying summarise one’s life project and
task in The Point of View. The Faustian element is still apparent, as Faust the
restless spirit in forever seeking: “He’d pillage heaven for its brightest star, /
And earth for every last delight that’s to be found; / Not all that’s near nor all
that’s far / Can satisfy a heart so restless and profound.”44 Yet Lukács
condemns Kierkegaard, in his first essay on the Dane, as a philosopher who
only leads one to the ‘all-devouring desert’, much like the conclusions of
Mark C. Taylor on Kierkegaard in his Journeys to Selfhood in comparing
Hegel and Kierkegaard, leading to that narrow, solitary path. It is Lukács who
starts to find himself in the ‘all-devouring desert’, and he knows it finding it
too late to escape the compromises he had made with Stalinism, and as in the
winter of his life he begins to question directions he had taken throughout his
epic intellectual and political journey. Kierkegaard’s ‘stages’ attempt to
present the aesthetic life of infinite possibility, the ethical life of infinite tasks
and the religious life of infinite suffering, ecstasy, passion, duty, and
impossibility. But each stage does not destroy the previous, but assimilates the
previous one in the landscape of homelessness. Kierkegaard’s Climacus
explains this development: “In the individual the point is to ennoble the
successive in contemporaneity. To have been young, then to have grown
older, and then finally to die is a mediocre existence, for the animal also has
this merit. But to unite the elements of life in contemporaneity, that is
precisely the task” (SKS7, / CUP, 348). Anti-Climacus also uses the image of
the desert, this time by quoting from Faust again: “Then when they [the
human beings in despair] encounter their first difficulties, they turn away; it
seems to them that this path leads to a dismal desert—When fine green grass
is growing all around” (SKS11, 172 / SUD, 57).45 Kierkegaard anticipates
Lukács’ own distrust and ultimate fear of the new complexities in the modern
literature of Kafka and Joyce, and throws them into the dustbin of history as
the consequence of irrational and bourgeois decadence. Earlier in the
authorship, Kierkegaard’s watchman Vigilius Haufniensis quotes the magus
of the north Johann Georg Hamann on the importance of anxiety which is
proof of our heterogeneity whether we like it or not:
However, this anxiety in the world is the only proof of our

heterogeneity. If we lacked nothing, we should do no better than the
pagans and the transcendental philosophers, who know nothing of God
and like fools fall in love with lovely nature, and no homesickness would
come over us. This impertinent disquiet, this holy hypochondria is
perhaps the fire with which we season sacrificial animals in order to
preserve us from the putrefaction of the current seculi (century) (SKS4,
460 / CA, 162).
Lukács stated: “The ultimate basis of artistic creation has become

homeless” (TN, 41). This is also expressed by Kierkegaard’s contemporary
and former editor of the famous Corsair Meïr Aron Goldschmidt, who stated
that “Homelessness is precisely the aesthetic” in his three-part novel Hjemløs,
first published in 1853-1857, which is translated as Homeless, or a Poet’s
Inner Life. Lukács’ position changed with the advent of his commitment to
Soviet Russia, where the dialectic of totality took over. But when one returns
to his first work, before he turns to the Marxist dialectic for the ‘good of
history’, the idea of homelessness is connected to freedom rather than to
suffocation, heralding in the optimism of a messianic impulse before either
Bloch or Benjamin. The early Lukács wrote: “[…] when the innermost centre
of the soul, pure longing, wanders through corporeal and harshly indifferent
reality—even if it wanders there as a stranger, an unknown pilgrim—then this
is a sublime truth and a miracle” (SF, 105). In Lukács’ final writings, the
young man from the ghostly past returns where renewal becomes essential—
Marx’s own work must not be approached as some unalterable sacred dogma
but as a dialectical method open to new investigations and capable of
responding to the changing circumstances of each new historical crisis. For
the first time Rosa Luxemburg and even Lenin are criticised in his Ontology
of Social Being.46
Alongside the future oriented texts of the great works of philosophy,
Kierkegaard’s prototypes still make way for what is ahead and there seems to
be no bankruptcy in the Socrates and Christ that Kierkegaard presents. There
is a difference between the prototype of Christ and Christianity, or between
the stories of Christ and the writings of Paul, in the same way as viewing the
life of Socrates in relation to the writings of Plato. Lukács sees this difference
in writing that “the possibility of the ethical democracy in everyone in Christ
is repeatedly opposed to the official Church.”47 Using biblical references to
support his point on seeking the lost in the landscape of homelessness,
Kierkegaard holds the view to the end, “A Saviour came to the world to
save—whom? The lost” (SKS13, 296 / M, 239). This Christ impulse of
including both the marginalised and the status quo is always present in
Kierkegaard’s writing, as in Luke’s Gospel, “For the Son of Man has come to
seek and to save that which was lost” (Luke 19:10), or in Matthew’s Gospel:
“Christ came to save the lost” (Matthew 18:11), when we consider that all
human beings have the potential to be lost in one way or another. There is
room for the darkness and despair of one’s spirit, for the moments when one
feels like a total stranger in the world, for the lost—there is still space to
disturb both the existing order and the marginalised itself, because no one is
exempt from the landscape of homelessness. One need not be afraid of these
quiet places or complex worlds created by the new, heterogeneously oriented
thinkers and writers. The idea of the Wandering Jew is still implicitly present
in the Jewish Lukács, and even echoes in Kierkegaard’s writings years after
the initial period when this myth flooded his journals. And the wandering
Faust articulates the way: “Can you not understand how my life’s strength /
increases / As I walk here in these wild places?”48 Although still revered in
many Eastern traditions, the wandering life is offensive and a threat to modern
totalitarian regimes, as we have witnessed in the twentieth century in the
brutal and murderous treatment of Jews, gypsies, and other homeless and
displaced peoples. But wandering does not have to be a neurosis; on the
contrary, it can actually bring humans closer to harmony with this world in its
wide-awake perspective on regimes, politicians and nations.
iv. Preparation and Performance
The final point of this section brings together the themes running through this
chapter, from the relation between drama and reality, the brutal ending of
dreams forced upon the life to the dialectic of disintegration and the overall
theme of inwardness transforming into praxis. Anti-Climacus’ dictum that the
condition of man when regarded as spirit is always critical is the central guide
in this project, where inwardness demands praxis, and preparation transforms
into performance.
In Soul and Form, poetic expression and praxis have been realised in the
style and content of that book itself. It is Lukács’ most poetic work and least
political. But it is this text where the reckoning is brought forth, the struggle
to triumph over the foundering of form against life, and the quest for an
alternative path for the twentieth century. In regard to the text, Kadarkay
writes: “The twilight condition of man is unmistakable.”49 The conflict
between the poet and the man of action is never more apparent than in this
work. We have seen the junctures in Kierkegaard’s life about just being a poet
and the ultimate insignificance of the poet, and yet it is the poet’s work that
has more value in describing the nightmares of existence than all the systems
of morality (SKS4, 194 / FT, 105). It is interesting to note that Marx, like
Kierkegaard, also uses Shakespeare in key moments rather than theoreticians
or experts in the field, such as for example in describing the relation between
money and personal peculiarity.50 Kierkegaard’s use of poetic expression is
the process of the dialectic of disintegration, because despite Kierkegaard’s
motto at the beginning of the last discourse in Works of Love, the use of
poetry is essential for the preparation for performance that is praxis. Yet, this
is exactly what Lukács fears once he has made his transformation to
Marxism.51 The greatness of History and Class Consciousness lies in Lukács’
self-criticism, alongside his criticism of society and warning of the sanctifying
of the powers that be. Lukács concludes the “Class Consciousness” essay:
“The proletariat must not shy away from self-criticism, for victory can only be
gained by the truth and self-criticism must, therefore, be its natural element”
(HCC, 81). The ominous description of the petrification of power
foreshadows Lukács’ future sanctification of the powers that be in the Soviet
Union: “What is crucial is that reality as it seems to be should be thought of as
something man cannot change and its unchangeability should have the force
of a moral imperative” (HCC, 191). Lukács becomes the realist, and all art
must become realist art, for realism aims at a ‘truthful reflection of reality.’
Therefore, no Joyce or Kafka, who are more ‘realistic’ than most, but whose
style does not conform to Lukács’ rules. Gillian Rose describes Lukács’
tragedy: he “[…] succumbs to the ills which he deplores far more than does
the work of those against whom he inveighs, by allowing his work to serve a
dogmatic and regressive praxis.”52 Yet, the early Lukács is free of dogmatics
and regressive praxis. Following Climacus’ Concluding Unscientific
Postscript, he writes: “In life there is only the separate and individual, the
concrete. To exist is to be different … the individual thing is the only thing
that is; the individual is the real man” (HCC, 32). Kierkegaard travels with the
homeless individual throughout his authorship, in looking at Christ as one
who “walked here on earth in the form of a lowly servant” (SKS11,240 /
SUD, 128) and who might be crushed under the ruthless dogmatism of
ideology, but whose critical self nonetheless is a confrontation to ideologies.
In the state of homelessness, everything is indeed uncertain, and what is
sedimented must not be trusted, where the proletariat revolution must also
have its critic.
How then, finally, does poetic expression connect to praxis? In Soul and
Form, Lukács articulates what for him is the essence of poetry: “Poetry cannot
live without dissonance because movement is its very essence, and the
movement can only proceed from disharmony to harmony and back again the
other way” (SF, 103). ‘Transformation’ is again a key word, as performance is
never the same from what is expected from the preceding preparation. In
History and Class Consciousness a certain kind of poetic gesture is added to
the dustbin with other such opiates:
The reified world appears henceforth quite definitively—and in

philosophy, under the spotlight of ‘criticism’ it is potentiated still
further—as the only possible world, the only conceptually accessible,
comprehensible world vouchsafed to us humans. Whether this gives rise
to ecstasy, resignation or despair, whether we search for a path leading

to ‘life’ via irrational mystical experience, this will do absolutely nothing
to modify the situation as it is in fact (HCC, 110).
Yet the poetic impulse still remains connected to Lukács’ reverence for
the effects and uses of art, while the political represents the practical life,
which is as frivolous and effervescent as the poetical realm. Lukács tried to
expose this as a young man in Soul and Form, which expresses a belief that an
incorrigible disjunction between art (as meaningful) and life (as meaningless)
exists. Yet by History and Class Consciousness, art becomes a mode to
conceal the gaping abyss, rather than reveal it, as mentioned already (HCC,
158). The pre-Marxist Lukács views Kierkegaard’s works as revealing the
reality of life rather than concealing it, which does not fit in with the former’s
later aesthetic realism: “[…] when Kierkegaard makes a poem of his life he
does so not in order to conceal the truth but in order to be able to reveal it”
(SF, 30). The poetic is now seen as a forceful reminder that humans have the
power to tell a story. Narrative forms or his dialectical theory of literature
both reflect existing social structures and project alternative ones. In Theory of
the Novel, Lukács expresses the function of literary form to awaken
inwardness and move towards social praxis. In Theory of the Novel, poetry
still has great power as the ”transfiguring and redeeming domination of the
entire universe” (TN, 140).
Lukács still uses the word ‘teleologically’ towards something that does
not yet exist but which belongs to humanity, to create something at the
expense of humanity on behalf of humanity. This kind of rhetoric is also
found in the rhetoric of The Year Zero projects of Marxist praxis. The early
Lukács writes: “But drama interrupts the eternal flow of time […]” (SF, 158).
The later Lukács is afraid of interruptions, while Kierkegaard’s love of
interruptions never ceases. Instead, Lukács prefers to say that “[…] action is
directed objectively towards a transformation of totality” (SF, 158). Yet
despite his objections to doing so, Lukács is still using poetic expression
alongside praxis on his own terms in the most extreme polemic in The
Destruction of Reason. Lukács still relishes in poetic expression—for example
in his chapter title “Ash Wednesday of the Romantic carnival”. He concludes
the first chapter of the text with a quote from Faust: “Scorn reason, despise
learning, man’s supreme / Powers and faculties […] / […] And I will have
you trapped!” (DR, 91).53 This passage is also the only piece from Faust that
Hegel quotes in Phenomenology of Spirit, though it is significantly condensed
and adapted, taking and modifying the first and last two lines from
Mephistopheles’ soliloquy. Lukács closes the final chapter with Faust as well:
“Yet worthier spirits whom deep insights bless / Place trust unbounded in this
boundlessness” (DR, 757). This is analogous to what triggers Kadarkay to
write: “Moreover, his disavowals of his own life and works were the only
elements of consistency and continuity in a life which otherwise knew only

discontinuity.”54
The poetic element of Kierkegaard’s authorship challenges, inspires and
repels the reader through its various styles and masks depicting disparate ways
of living. This is the preparation before the praxis, or rather transforming the
reading experience into a form of praxis. Kierkegaard does not take the reader
for a fool, and he writes for “no one” in one sense if the reader is merely a
passive reader. Contrary to Lukács’ conclusions that the poetic realm must
stay in line with the totality of the world through works that are ‘realistic’ and
unified, aesthetics in its various forms helps expose and challenge the
individual amidst all the Bekymringer in the world, preparing one for death
and expanding and deepening one’s sense of self.
Three
ZONES OF EXCEPTION (CARL SCHMITT)

Such indirect influences, which elude any documentation, are the strongest and
by far the most authentic.
Carl Schmitt, Letter to Ernst Jünger
However, we must always seek the enemy here in ourselves ... The objections
that are to be feared lie in ourselves. We must search them out like old but
unexpired claims, in order to ground perpetual peace on their annihilation.
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason
I’ll teach you differences.

William Shakespeare, King Lear
The name Carl Schmitt evokes controversy, anger, and both silent and
expressed admiration from diverse and contrasting political thinkers. Over the
last eighty years he has been censored, vilified, viewed as a relic of a
particular period, in some circles glorified as the modern political thinker par
excellence, and in some intellectual circles still remains virtually unknown.
Schmitt’s critique of liberalism points to an intersection where democracy
negates liberalism and liberalism negates democracy. In Political Theology,
he famously defines the sovereign as he who decides on the exception, and his
definition ofthe political declares the friend-enemy distinction to be the
foundation of all politics. In the last twenty years interest in Carl Schmitt
outside of Germany has grown. Celebrated philosophers and critical theorists
such as Jacques Derrida, Georgio Agamben, Jacob Taubes, Slavoj Žižek,
Chantal Mouffee and Antonio Negri have all referred to him in important
works spanning the past twenty years.1 This could be due to two primary
factors: 1) the changing political climate around the world triggered by US
foreign policy—specifically, at the very least, the neo-conservative movement
in the United States of America, which can be traced back to Carl Schmitt’s
intellectual influence (obvious examples are found in the wake of the terrorist
attacks on New York in September 2001, when the clear message from the US
government, channeling Schmittian friend/enemy political logic, was “either
you’re with us or against us,” and the Bush administration’s Iraq war
campaign slogans of the “Coalition of the Willing” and “Axis of Evil”);2 and
2) the disappearance of the reluctance of the political and academic
environment to approach and appropriate Schmitt, whose biographical links to
anti-Semitism and Nazism greatly complicate the matter.
Little has been written on Carl Schmitt and Kierkegaard despite the
reverence that Schmitt gives to the Danish thinker and given where
Kierkegaard turns up in Schmitt’s writing. Schmitt uses Kierkegaard’s

‘exception’ (Undtagelse, as found in Fear and Trembling and Repetition) as
the central thesis for some of his writing, and views Kierkegaard as the most
articulate thinker on the exception and subsequently using this word
‘exception’ to define the sovereign in Political Theology. Reading Schmitt
reading Kierkegaard is a fruitful exercise in teasing out various unsolved
issues in the latter’s writings, and also adds another surprising member to the
list of radical European thinkers in the Weimar inter-war years who came
under the spell of Kierkegaard and appropriated his thought in exciting and
polarising ways. In this chapter, we will go deeper into indirect politics as it
makes its way to the forefront of global politics in the twentieth century. What
is often overlooked when reading Schmitt is, like Kierkegaard, the injection of
theatre into his work, and how the motifs, masks, and figures from the stage
inform and infuse his work. Here we have the cautionary tale of an attempt to
fill the negative space and Mellemspil that is indirect politics.
However seldom, Kierkegaard does turn up in key points of Schmitt’s
writings. And the use that Schmitt makes of some of the thinking and writings
of Kierkegaard is fundamental to understanding the roots and backbone of
Schmitt’s political thinking. This has been overlooked by most Schmitt and
Kierkegaard scholars to the point even of being ignored. Kierkegaard is
prominent in the seminal works of the Weimar years both explicitly and
implicitly in Political Romanticism, Roman Catholicism and Political Form,
Political Theology and even in the either/or politics of The Concept for the
Political. It was especially in these years, from 1909 up until the National
Socialists took power in 1933 that many German intellectuals were
enthusiastically reading Kierkegaard’s existential and multifaceted writings.
Translations of Kierkegaard into German were coming out mostly via figures
such as Carl Dallago, Theodor Haecker and Ludwig von Ficker of the
influential journal Der Brenner from Innsbruck, Austria, and Haecker also
published Søren Kierkegaard und die Philosophie der Innerlichkeit in 1913.3
From Schmitt’s Nachlass and evidence in his own writings both in his
published works and his diaries, we know for certain that Schmitt had read or
at least was familiar with German translations of Either/Or, Repetition, Fear
and Trembling, the essay “The Present Age” and discourse “The Thorn in the
Flesh”4, Stages on Life’s Way, The Concept of Anxiety, The Point of View of
my Work as an Author, Attack on Christendom, The Single Individual and the
Church, a twelve-volume edition of Kierkegaard’s Collected Works,5 and a
German edition called Begriff des Auserwählten6 which he received as a gift
from the German translator in 1918, and in which there are markings all over
the book by Schmitt.7 His passionate enthusiasm for Kierkegaard is also
evident in his diaries from 1914 to 1918 (For example, here is one entry from
1914: “I ate this evening, drank tea […] read Kierkegaard’s Stages on Life’s
Way. It is ingenious in the highest sense; everything is brought out in
Zones of Exception 91
gleaming formulation >…@ The deceived is wiser than the not deceived, as
Kierkegaard says it. Correct. The weak one is more direct than the stronger
one; the considerate one is less considerate than the non-considerate. It all
makes sense >…@”).8 Ellen Kennedy, in her book on Schmitt, remarks in
Constitutional Failure regarding Schmitt and his copy of Begriff des
Auserwählten: “He seems to have been especially interested in Kierkegaard’s
analysis of the newspaper readers of the time, which Kierkegaard regarded as
a culture of the trivial, destructive of ‘geist’ and seriousness. ‘Our time shouts
constantly’ Kierkegaard wrote, and that is ‘political, a religious problem.’”9
The fascinating issue of Kierkegaard and Schmitt is divided into four sections
in this chapter, looking at the concept of the exception, the understanding and
place of political romanticism and political despair, and the notion of
Kierkegaardian praxis that can emerge from this conversation.
1. The Exception
[…] one thinks the general [det Almene] not with passion but with a comfortable
superficiality. The exception [Undtagelsen], however, thinks the universal with
intense passion.
Constantine Constantius, Repetition
i. The Exception in the Political Realm
Comprised of four chapters and published in 1922, Schmitt’s Political

Theology sets out to define the concept of sovereignty by utilising the ‘state of
exception’ (Ausnahmezustand). He states his purpose immediately by
beginning the text with the famous opening line—“Sovereign is he who
decides on the exception” (PT, 4). He closes the same first chapter with an
extended quote from Repetition. Without mentioning the writer by name,
Schmitt refers to Kierkegaard as “a Protestant theologian who demonstrated
the vital intensity possible in theological reflection in the nineteenth century”
(PT, 15). Schmitt writes:
The exception explains the general [det Almene] and himself, and if one
really wants to study the general, one only needs to look around for a
legitimate exception; he discloses everything far more clearly than the
universal itself. Eventually one grows weary of the incessant chatter [den
evindelige Passiar] about the general. There are exceptions. If they cannot
be explained, then the general cannot be explained. Generally [i
Almindelighed], the difficulty is not noticed because one thinks the general
not with passion but with a comfortable superficiality. The exception,
however, thinks the general with intense passion (SKS4, 93 / / R, 227).
Schmitt has modified and edited his quotation from Kierkegaard’s

Repetition. His translation is not to be found in any German editions. Schmitt
uses the word “actual” (wirklich) rather than the word that Kierkegaard uses
which is “legitimate” (berettiget). Preceding this passage, Schmitt is already
speaking in the language and ideas of Kierkegaard’s pseudonym of Repetition,
Constantin Constantius:
The exception can be more important to it [a philosophy of concrete life]

than the rule, not because of a romantic irony for the paradox, but
because the seriousness of an insight goes deeper than the clear
generalisations inferred from what ordinarily repeats itself. The
exception is more interesting than the rule. The rule proves nothing; the
exception proves everything (PT, 15).
What is the exception? Literally, the exception is a person or entity that

is ‘excepted,’ or that does not follow a rule. There is an old proverb that
Schmitt might be pleased with: “the exception proves the rule.” The fact that
some cases do not follow the rule proves that the rule applies in all other
cases. This applies to both Constantin’s poet and Schmitt’s idea of the
sovereign. Schmitt draws the sovereign from the exception, which in turn is
drawn from the single individual. The problem emerges when Schmitt takes
Constantin’s exception and puts it to political use.
Constantin concludes: “[…] the poet is ordinarily [Almindelighed] an
exception.” It is Constantine’s poet that fails as the exception, because he has
failed in his experiment of repetition and remains outside society, asocial and
nostalgic. He is lost in the melancholy of erotic love, he confides in a stranger
he does not wish to confide in, he in no way wins back the girl and he in no
way overcomes his attachment to her; in short, he is left in a worse state than
when he started out. Indeed, Repetition, perhaps the most aesthetic of the
corpus, is a book whose characters – the writer and the poet, fail in their
project. Frater Taciturnus, in the last section of Stages on Life’s Way, refers to
Repetition as “a venture that did not, however, succeed, for he remained
within the aesthetic” (SKS6, 221 / SLW, 402). Kierkegaard also fails
(intentionally perhaps) in his project of Repetition, as the writer behind the
writer, and both the poet (as the exception) and the writer fail when the
‘exception’ turns to praxis. Yet the political realm always implies praxis. This
brings out a neglected point, because the focus of the discussion on the
exception in Kierkegaard is almost invariably Fear and Trembling, where one
is tempted to think that the exception—Abraham—is vindicated. Abraham is
vindicated through God as the Absolute, and, as Johannes de silentio
concludes that this exception “stands in an absolute relation to the Absolute,
or Abraham is lost” (SKS4, 207 / FT, 120). Repetition suggests that, in praxis,
most exceptions fail. Schmitt presumes the achievability of the exception in
public practice—just what Kierkegaard would deny, or at least place in

question, in the context of Repetition. Nearing the end of chapter two of
Political Theology, Schmitt points out: “What matters for the reality of legal
life is who decides” (PT, 34). And yet, a few lines later, he concludes:
“Finally it [the juristic form] is also not the form of aesthetic production,
because the latter knows no decision” (PT, 35). But this simply alludes to the
failure of Repetition in the attempt to put ‘the exception’ to practice; and in
this discussion, the failure of the exception in public affairs, which differs
from the aesthetic worlds of the poet, and the religious worlds of the knight of
faith.
When Schmitt remarked on Kierkegaard being the one “who
demonstrated the vital intensity possible in theological reflection”, he
overlooked the distinction that Johannes de silentio makes in Abraham’s
‘teleological suspension of the ethical’ in relation to God and the individual’s
duties to the ethical in relation to the affairs of men. Taking note of Jesus’
advice to the Pharisees: “Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are
Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s”, Kierkegaard, moving from
Fear and Trembling, goes on to write extended discourses in 1848 on
distinguishing what serves God and what serves Mammon. In short, the same
exception should not be used in the same way in both religion and politics.
Yet, such an exception is something that Schmitt is at pains to
construct/contest because, for Schmitt, all significant concepts of the modern
theory of the state are secularised theological concepts. Schmitt writes: “The
exception in jurisprudence is analogous to the miracle in theology” (PT, 36).
What might be interpreted here, given the title he has been ascribed by both
his supporters and detractors as “the Hobbes of the twentieth century,” is a
return to the pre-modern conception of man and state. But Schmitt is not pre-
modern, but very much modern, if we view his modernity such that his
thought is not based on theological argument or scientifically deduced
arguments. He will always be more modern than Hobbes, because Hobbes
uses scientific argument as the ground for his thinking, whereas for Schmitt
there is only an existential ground, i.e. an abyss. Although Schmitt still relies
on the Catholic philosophers of the counterrevolution—Vicomte Louis
Gabriel Ambroise de Bonald, Joseph-Marie de Maistre and Donoso Cortés—
as his fellow theorists of the necessity of the exception, it is not to return to a
pre-modern conception, but to highlight the existential monstrosity of
humans. The title of his most famous book, Political Theology, calls for a
modern lawgiver who can omnipotently decide and bring out the exception,
and suppress the monstrous, existential potential of his subjects. There
remains a profound connection between the theological and the political, but
only for practical purposes: “There always exists the same inexplicable
identity: lawgiver, executive power, police, pardoner, welfare institution” (PT,
38). Democracy is, thus, the “expression of a political relativism”, and is
“liberated from miracles and dogmas and based on human understanding and
critical doubt” (PT, 42). Exactly! Render unto Caesar the things which are
Caesar’s and unto God the things that are God’s. Democracy becomes for
mortals an attempt towards providing increased possibility for equality, and
towards a world that ought to be rather than that which is—despite its vast
shortcomings: Schmitt’s authoritarian state becomes an ultimate deification of
the state designed to restrict the supposed stupidity and monstrosity of man.
“The essence of the state”, to quote Engels (the same quote which Schmitt
uses in Political Theology), “as that of religion, is mankind’s fear of itself”
(CPD, 56). It seems however that in both the Schmittian and the Marxist
states, the state becomes humanity’s fear of itself, and religion humanity’s
hope for itself.
The solution for Schmitt, therefore, is Constantin’s ‘exception’. A year
after Political Theology, Schmitt views his own form of progress arising from
the exception. He writes: “Development and dictatorship seem to be mutually
exclusive” (CPD, 56). This development is in keeping with the idea of the
exception central to the political realm. Giorgio Agamben explains the role of
the exception within the political state in his text on the exception: “[…] the
state of exception appears as the legal form of what cannot have legal form
[…] There is no doubt that his [Schmitt’s] theory of sovereignty represents an
attempt to anchor the state of exception unequivocally to the juridical
order.”10 In connection to the passage on rendering unto Caesar what is
Caesar’s, Anti-Climacus (who could easily have been speaking to Schmitt
here) points out:
O worldly party passion, even if you are called holy and national, no,
you do not extend so far that you can trap his [Jesus Christ’s]
indifference […] In a worldly way they wanted to make it into a God-
question […] this is the way the worldly mentality is so fond of prinking
itself up into [sminke sig op] godliness, and this is the way they had also
mixed God and the emperor together in the question (SKS12, 172 / PC,
169).
In a journal entry from 1848, Kierkegaard reflects on the same danger of

ascribing divine qualities to the state: “[…] and yet it is by no means so that it
is the witness to the truth who claims to be more than human: it is an acoustic
illusion; the flaw is in the establishment’s imagining itself to be the divine”
(Pap. IX B 51:4, 1848).
ii. ‘Exceptionless Exception’
Giorgio Agamben writes in State of Exception:
Two theses [the right of resistance and the state of exception] are at odds
here: One asserts that law must coincide with the norm, and the other
holds that the sphere of law exceeds the norm. But in the last analysis,
the two positions agree in ruling out the existence of a sphere of human
action that is entirely removed from law.11
Can Kierkegaard’s exception become the right of resistance to Schmitt’s

state of exception? In the case of Abraham in Fear and Trembling, the law of
the state was nearly broken, and Johannes Climacus assures the reader in his
concluding remarks in the Concluding Unscientific Postscript that he is in
favour of the well-ordered state that keeps out any idea of a peoples’ rule
(SKS7, 563 / CUP, 620-621). Kierkegaard’s exception or critical dissident is
most needed when stability seems most assured. Also unlike Schmitt’s
exception being the decision of the sovereign, and thus the exception
becoming the ruler governing a country, Kierkegaard’s exception acts as the
critic in the face of the universal or norm—and in extremis—in the face of
political totality (such as in the previous chapter of my project), thus giving
the exception to the individual being governed rather than to the powers that
govern. Kierkegaard’s exception emerges in normality, or when society
assures itself that it is stable and secure, in the case of the political realm, in
times of peace, in times of stability; the exception ought to provide the
exception to the rule, as the Socratic gadfly (Bremse) that confronts the ruling
powers, the one that speaks out, responsible for themselves as individuals
rather than as members of a faceless public. However, it is contrary also to the
modern phenomenon of the paparazzi which reveals the absence of the
exception in those who are governed in their claim for no responsibility for
whatever celebrity or figure they are chasing, they claim they are only
responding to a demand, and the public reader claims no responsibility either
because they claim that they don’t chase the figure in question, they only read
about them. This example helps us understand Kierkegaard’s dramatic
condemnation on journalism being the ‘evil principle in the modern world’.
Schmitt goes as far as turning the exception into an “exceptionless
exception”,12 where exception becomes the norm. When the sovereign defines
the exception and rules in a constant state of emergency as an “exceptionless
exception”, then it can no longer be considered an exception. It is in Schmitt’s
Political Theology and The Concept of the Political where the authoritarian
‘exceptionless exception’ is presented most clearly. When emergency
governments become the norm, politics has failed. It is in times of normality
(security, stability, supposed tranquillity) where exceptions are needed within
those that are ruled, and not within dictatorships by those who rule. This is
where Kierkegaard’s exception might find its space in actual existence.

However, Schmitt’s exception emerges in a world of exceptions and crises
and desires to consolidate its power; it feasts on crisis and catastrophe and
waits for the opportune moment to wield its ‘lawful’ power. Agamben poses
the pertinent question: “What then happens when exception and rule become
undecidable?” By way of an answer, he responds: “When exception becomes
the rule, the machine can no longer function.”13 When the ‘exceptionless
exception’ finds itself embodied in one individual with that authoritarian
power, then one can see that Kierkegaard’s exception is far removed from
Schmitt’s. Again, Agamben points out this danger too: “But when they tend to
coincide in a single person, when the state of exception, in which they are
bound and blurred together, becomes the rule, then the juridical-political
system transforms itself into a killing machine.”14
Kierkegaard’s exception emerges in a world of Klogskab
(sagaciousness/cleverness) and passive reflection with the interruption of the
stranger or “emigrant from the sphere of the universal [en Emigrant fra det
Almenes Sphære]” (SKS4, 202 / FT, 115). The ‘stranger’ here can be
understood in the sense of the outsider, orphan and marginal figure, and also
as the gadfly such as Socrates, the eccentric, the one who confronts
established ethical systems. It is important to note that on this point I am not
giving a full investigation of Schmitt’s analyses of judicial systems nor of
state law, but seeking only to distinguish Kierkegaard from Schmitt, and from
that distinction to tease out the political possibilities from Kierkegaard’s
authorship. So far, Kierkegaard’s exception fails as an authority within the
powers that be when implemented in or articulated by human affairs - witness
the blunders of Constantin and his poet, or the teleological suspension by
Abraham with his knife. And neither does Kierkegaard seem to welcome
chaos and impotency in the ‘exceptionless exception’—there must still remain
space for the exception.
iii. Exceptions Outside Political Authority
The space of the exception in Kierkegaard’s writings lies outside official or

direct political authority. What might have been the exceptions as examples in
Kierkegaard’s writings? Kierkegaard’s two most important prototypes,
Socrates and Christ, are exceptions that lie outside state and society, but who
have made an impact politically—this is Kierkegaard’s indirect politics at
work. This idea of Socrates and Christ as the prototypes of the exception
comes to light in the 1848 writings, especially in the Anti-Climacus works.
There are also other exceptions, both factual and fictional emerging in
Kierkegaard’s authorship, such as the Apostles, Mary Magdalene, Faust, Don
Quixote, and Hamlet, who make an impact in socio-political society, and who
can awaken and transform the reader.
The position of the exception as political authority or as political

scrutiniser distinguishes Schmitt’s thinking from Kierkegaard’s. The
exception that Schmitt has usurped for his political treatise belongs to the
nihilistic aesthete of Either/Or I and Repetition. The quote that Schmitt uses
in Political Theology relates to the description of the exception or
Undtagelsen made by Judge William in Either/Or II to the aesthete in the first
part of the book. He says: “[…] when I see you and your kind, who seem to
advance the doctrine that the exception is the more important—indeed, that
the rule exists only so that the exception can show up to advantage” (SKS3,
256 / EO2 270). He then speaks the hypothetical words of the aesthete,
saying: “At this point, he says, I have placed myself outside the general; I
have deprived myself of all guidance, the security, and the reassurance that
the general gives: I stand alone, without fellow-feeling, for I am an exception”
(SKS3, 311 / EO2 330). This is the exception, ‘without fellow-feeling’, the
doomed poet whom Schmitt inserts political authority, the failed painter who
becomes the infamous dictator. This has led to a critique of aestheticisation as
a characteristic of fascist politics, addressed in recent years by Philippe
Lacoue-Labarthe, Hans-Jurgen Syberberg, Jean-Luc Nancy and Bernard
Stiegler to name a few (all of which were inspired by Walter Benjamin’s
original commentaries on fascism as the aestheticization of politics). This
same aesthete sees his own special exceptions, such as in his coachman and
the god Eros: “The coachman was already blowing his horn, and although
ordinarily I am disinclined to obey the orders of others, I have always made an
exception of a coachman and his poetic motifs” (SKS2, 13 / EO1, 5); and on
Eros: “Insofar as the other gods or men detected the power of erotic love in
themselves, they attributed it to Eros, traced it back to him, but Eros himself
did not fall in love, and if it did happen to him once, it was an exception”
(SKS2, 69 / EO1, 63). Judge William attempts at the end of his response to
the aesthete to reconcile the exception with the universal, to view the
exception in all things, and echoing once again the Hegelian-Joycean maxim
of “in the particular lies the universal”, he concludes: “[…] he will once again
be reconciled with existence in perceiving that in a certain sense every person
is an exception, and that it is equally true that every human being is the
universally human and also an exception” (SKS3, 314 / EO2, 332).
However, the exception of 1848 differs from Judge William’s attempt at
reconciliation. Here, the exception does not bind itself so wholeheartedly to
the general, nor does it continue to use the exception in relation to such
pleasures as the coachman and Eros. The exception emerges as an indirect
political weapon, without official authority, but existing as critic and
prototype, and thus, as servant and betrayer of society. Anti-Climacus sees the
exception in relation to the individual and to metamorphosis, when he states,
“[…] one can make exception [Undtagelse] in the case of an individual and
alter his condition” (SKS12, 24 / PC, 14). Mary Magdalene provides a good
example of the exception, the woman of shame who transforms into one of
Jesus’ most loving companions, and one of the first to recognise him after his
resurrection. Anti-Climacus is aware of Mary Magdalene’s position without
mentioning her by name: “Indeed, with the exception [Undtagelse] of the
apostles, that woman was very likely one of the few who understood him”
(SKS12, 173 / PC, 170). Here we see the woman who remains outside the
political institutions of the church, forever the woman of shame without a
voice. The Apostles and Mary Magdalene are exceptions outside political
authority, and if ever they were to obtain power in the world, then they no
longer would belong to or be affiliated with the exception or Christianity.
Anti-Climacus elaborates on this point in his discussion the difference
between the results of Christ’s life and his life as lived. The former has no
relevance to Christianity, the latter epitomises Christianity (SKS12, 46 / PC,
31). Where would Schmitt position the exception in the form of Mary
Magdalene in his political theory? Such questions pinpoint the differences
between Kierkegaard and Schmitt. In The Point of View, Kierkegaard expands
on his exception: “An exception is made only for anyone who has been a
religious author, teacher, speaker, etc. in his lifetime and has been that on his
own responsibility and at his own risk” (SKS16, 48 / PV, 68). The important
part of this sentence lies in the latter part. And again, we see the position of
the religious writer and the speaker or speechmaker who writes or tells of that
which might be lost, to retell that what needs to be told, to keep political
society in check by bringing those outside history, those on the margins into
play.
Those who are outside history are seen in Kierkegaard’s exceptions
manifested most powerfully in Socrates and Christ. After seeing the
dichotomies of loftiness and lowliness in discussing the Bekymringer and the
lilies and the birds in the first section of Christian Discourses, this is
continued in Practice in Christianity. No. II of the text is divided into three
sections. The first deals with the offence (Forargelsen) that Christ as an
individual human being comes into collision with the established order. The
second deals with the offence in relation to loftiness. This loftiness arises
when “that an individual human being speaks or acts as if he were God,
declares himself to be God, therefore in relation to the qualification ‘God’ in
the composition God-man” (SKS12, 103 / PC, 94). The third deals with the
offence in relation to lowliness. Anti-Climacus outlines it in the subtitle as:
“[…] the one who passes himself off as God proves to be the lowly, poor,
suffering, and finally powerless human being” (SKS12, 111 / PC, 102). And
we have already seen this confrontation with the established order—that of the
single individual prodding [at pirre] the established order out of self-
complacency. Climacus’ emphasis on the poetic and the religious in the
world, and his bold statement that anyone who does not live poetically or
religiously is immersed in the world’s ‘vaudeville’ and is simply ‘dumb’
(dum) (SKS7, 415 / CUP, 457), has set the platform for a repeated emphasis
on lowliness and loftiness in 1848. By living poetically or religiously, one

finds oneself in the exception that lies outside official political authority, in
loftiness and lowliness that Kierkegaard presents in Christian Discourses.
Exactly halfway through Sickness unto Death, at the beginning of the second
of the two parts of the book, Anti-Climacus gives one of his most condensed
and autobiographical descriptions of the religious poet as one with the thorn in
the flesh, despairing over whether he has been called or not.
iv. Johanne Luise Heiberg and Hamlet: Exceptions on the Stage
One ‘exception’ in 1848 is presented in the essay on the brilliant and

celebrated Danish actress Johanne Luise Heiberg, more commonly known as
Fru Heiberg, and who once upon a time was called Hanne Pätges, who
became the wife of Johan Ludvig Heiberg who a poet, critic, dramatist and
president of the Royal Theatre in Copenhagen from 1849 to 1856 as well as
being a target for Kierkegaard especially in Prefaces. “The Crisis and a Crisis
in the Life of the Actress” essay is published in two parts in a newspaper
called “Fædrelandet” (“The Fatherland”). I view this piece as the clou to
Kierkegaard’s entire authorship and indirect politics. Why? It is by the
pseudonym Inter et Inter (literally “between and between”) representing the
Mellemspil between the publication of Christian Discourses and The Lilies of
the Field and the Birds of the Air—both under Kierkegaard’s own name.
Also, the essay portrays a certain actress providing an exception to the rule,
embodying the beautiful outsider who rises to the top of Danish cultural life,
the woman whose name changes and who becomes the master of her craft.
Her metamorphosis gives thought to what a great actor, actress or even
general artist should be, and opens up the gap and connection between
preparation and performance. The essay also celebrates the triumph of
repetition by focusing on Fru Heiberg playing Shakespeare’s Juliet for the
second time nearly twenty years after her debut. Shakespeare, the great bard,
remains an exception to the rule par excellence, who “stands unrivalled,
despite the progress the world will make, that one can always learn from him,
and the more one reads him, the more one learns” (SKS6, 419 / SLW, 454). As
an aside, P. L. Heiberg probably did not think much of Shakespeare, seeing
him as “too immediate”, so Kierkegaard’s championing of the English bardis
also another provocation. Kierkegaard outlines the ‘metamorphosis’ in the
essay on the actress, while, at the same time, he exposes the crowd’s lazy
habits and lack of inwardness. This essay goes beyond being simply aesthetic
as it investigates an aesthetic theme, but in its investigation it teases out the
essence of an exception through the possibility and actuality of the
metamorphosis. This aesthetic essay breaks from the earlier aesthetic works,
as the master of the Mellemspil writes: “[…] the interest really begins, there
where the inner being beautifully and with intense meaning becomes manifest
in the metamorphosis – there the crowd of people falls away” (SKS14, 94 /

CD, 305).
The “restlessness of infinity” is present in the exception, which is not
only the writer as eternal critic and single individual living in actuality, but
also in the artist and actress, Fru Heiberg. The “restlessness of infinity” is
explained as the actress who comes to play the role of Juliet many years after
her celebrated performance of the same role as a seventeen year old. The
restlessness of infinity “signifies that even when she is standing still one has
an intimation of this inner restlessness, but, not well, in repose” (SKS14, 97 /
CD, 309). She is both roguishness (Skjælmeri) and trustworthiness
(Tilforladelighed)—roguishness in the sense of youthfulness and good
fortune, that confidence of youth—and trustworthiness in the sense of
triumphant awareness of one’s role and the audience that comes to watch. The
exception reminds the crowd of the ‘restlessness of infinity’, when the crowd
loses itself in habit and forgets that change is existence, and the exception is
therefore the prototype of metamorphosis. Inter et Inter reminds the reader
that the “metamorphosis must be present from the beginning” (SKS14, 104 /
CD, 319), although it may not be used until some time has passed. The
metamorphosis is “force against force […] dialectics against dialectics”
(SKS14, 106 / CD, 322). For Kierkegaard, this is the greatness of Fru
Heiberg’s achievements, in the repetition of playing Juliet in Shakespeare’s
greatest tragedy of youthful love. Through her metamorphosis, the actress
performs an even greater Juliet fourteen years after her first performance.
The fictional character Hamlet provides an interesting exception on the
stage that both Kierkegaard and Schmitt share an interest in. Hamlet is
surrounded by conceit and lies. Unable to tease out the truth from his mother
and the new king, he sets about attempting to bring preparation into praxis,
resulting in the death of the new king and himself (among others). For
Schmitt, the myth of Hamlet represents the moment of decision. Schmitt
wrote a book on Shakespeare’s Hamlet, titled Hamlet or Hecuba: The
Intrusion of the Time into the Play, where indeed “Entire nations can also
appear as Hamlet” (HH, 9). Here Hamlet is also standing at the Mellemspil,
and the subtitle of the essay with the word “Intrusion” signifies an interruption
(for Schmitt here the intrusion being the “taboo of the queen” and “the figure
of the avenger”). The motto for Schmitt’s text is formed around Hamlet’s
soliloquy in Act II, Scene ii, where the prince mentions Hecuba, though the
passage is annotated and changed by Schmitt into German:
Warum fließen diesem Schauspieler / die Tränen aus den Augen? / Um

Hecuba! / Was ist ihm Hekuba? / Und was ist er ihr? / Was würde er tun,
wenn er verloren hätte, / was ich verlor? / Wenn sein Vater ermordet und
eine Krone / ihm entrissen wäre? [Why doth flow from the player / the
tears of his eyes? / For Hecuba! / What is Hecuba to him? / And what’s
he to her? / What would he have done if he had lost, / what I had lost? /
If his father had been murdered and his crown / from him had been
snatched?].
Why does Schmitt once more change the lines from a master writer? In
these lines, perhaps Schmitt modifies Shakespeare’s text to better fit his own
purposes, or perhaps he was simply quoting from memory. Schmitt places
three key authors as a great trinity of characters of modern European
literature, which Kierkegaard equally lauds in his own authorship—Don
Quixote, Faust and Hamlet. Don Quixote encompasses the ‘Spanish and
purely Catholic’, and Faust the ‘German and Protestant’, but it is Hamlet who,
as the Mellemspil, “stands between them in the middle of the schism
[Spaltung] that has determined the fate of Europe” (HH, 52). Jacques Derrida,
commenting on Schmitt and this particular point, sees this “between-the-two
[…] as a name for Germany” and a Hamlet that has been viewed, like
Germany, as ‘torn and divided within itself.’15 In the introduction to Hamlet
or Hecuba, Schmitt quotes from Ferdinand Freiligrath’s poem “Hamlet”
(published four years before 1848) which begins with “Deutschland ist
Hamlet!” (HH, 9: “Germany is Hamlet! Solemn and silent, / Within his gates
every night / Buried freedom wanders, / And beckons to the man on watch”
[Deutschland ist Hamlet! / Ernst und stumm / In seinen Toren jede Nacht /
Geht die begrabne Freiheit um, / Und winkt den Männern auf der Wacht]).
Kierkegaard’s Hamlet remains an ambiguity because he is uncertain, he stands
between the new Germanic Protestant order and the old Catholic tradition
(such are the complexities of this character that Climacus declares that to play
the role of Hamlet is like praying—one might get it right only once in life)
(SKS7, 150 / CUP, 163), and at the beginning of isolated, subjective existence
(Climacus interprets Hamlet as saying that existence and non-existence have
subjective significance) (SKS7, 177 / CUP, 193). Schmitt specifies that
Hamlet is neither Lutheran nor Christian “in any specific sense”; instead,
“Hamlet speaks of a special providence” (HH, 61). Something new is
emerging, and this ‘island’ which is England is diagnosed by Schmitt in
Shakespeare’s time as “a pre-state condition” (HH, 65), or on the way to
becoming a state. Thus, Schmitt also takes issue with Walter Benjamin, as
Hamlet for Schmitt is not a Trauerspiel (a Germanic, baroque mourning play),
because in England, the state is still in a pre-state condition. For Schmitt, it is
the sovereign who rescues the state from the chaos of the sixteenth century
civil wars (HH, 63). The system is divided into Politik (the Political as the
sovereign, Polizei (Police as the force of law), and Politesse (Political Body as
citizens). Schmitt turns Hamlet into the figure for the synthesis of modern
European culture into the era of decisionism and the authority of the sovereign.
Kierkegaard’s figure of Hamlet remains elusive, as one who has “foregone all
custom of exercises” and peers bravely into the “quintessence of dust” still
standing at the threshold and remaining a restless enigma.
The state of exception is described by Agamben as such: “The state of

exception is the opening of a space in which application and norm reveal their
separation and a pure force of law realises (that is, applies by ceasing to apply
[dis-applicando]) a norm whose application has been suspended.”16 This
“opening of a space” consolidates the state of exception as another Mellemspil
which, in light of Constantin’s description at the end of Repetition, exposes
the vacuity of the general in key moments. Schmitt, for his part, describes the
exception as follows: “There will always be a vanguard of the Weltgeist, the
apex of the development of consciousness, an avant-garde that has the right to
act because it possesses correct knowledge and consciousness, not as the
chosen people of a personal God, but as a moment in development” (CPD,
58). He states the ‘reality’ of democratic states when he makes the point about
the British Empire: “That is the political and constitutional meaning of the
nice formula ‘the colonies are foreign in public law, but domestic in
international law’” (CPD, 10). This is not a reason nor does it give licence to
form a dictatorship that instead lives by the reality that gives the Law the legal
right to subjugate its citizens. Given political authority, the ones being ruled
lose their authority, and these are the dangerous implications of Schmitt’s
exception, which runs counter to Kierkegaard’s exception. Agamben reminds
the reader: “It is important not to forget that the modern state of exception is a
creation of the democratic-revolutionary tradition and not the absolutist
one.”17 It is no accident that Schmitt published his major post-war work
Nomos of the Earth only six years previously to Hamlet or Hecuba, and which
explores the system of European law and what the new Nomos of the Earth
holds for us before his exploration of the formation of a modern nation
through the symbol of Hamlet. As a Kierkegaardian exception, however,
Hamlet remains the symbolic figure that questions the law of appropriation,
distribution and production that Schmitt concludes are the foundations of the
Nomos (NE, 324-335).
2. The Question of Political Romanticism
This, therefore, is the core of all political romanticism: The state is a work of art.
Carl Schmitt, Political Romanticism
i. Political Aesthetics
Schmitt’s seminal work Political Romanticism, first published in 1919, is also

inspired by Kierkegaard, referring to him in a footnote as “the only great
figure among the romantics” (PR, 166). Schmitt seeks out the etymology of
the word romantic, and says: “The word is derived from Roman, a “novel”, a
“work of fiction,” or a ‘romance’” (PR, 30). However, the human as the
romantic, as distinguished from the word ‘romantic,’ must act, and Schmitt
recognises this: “It is only the romanticising subject and its activity that are of
importance for the definition of the concept” (PR, 99). In the preface to
Political Romanticism, Schmitt introduces a term to help us understand what
he means by “romanticism”: “The romantic attitude is most clearly
characterised by means of a singular concept, that of the occasio. This concept
can be rendered in terms of ideas such as occasion, opportunity, and perhaps
also chance” (PR, 16). Schmitt calls romanticism “subjectified
occasionalism.” Explaining this definition, he writes: “[…] in the romantic,
the romantic subject treats the world as an occasion and an opportunity for his
romantic productivity” (PR, 17).
Schmitt shows the political romanticist as one who seeks to poeticize or
aestheticize politics to the point where all conflict disappears. As Schmitt will
write in a later work: “What always matters is only the possibility of conflict”
(CP, 39). In the preface to Political Romanticism, Schmitt writes:
“Romanticism is the antithesis of classicism […] rationalism and the
Enlightenment” (PR, 5). However, romanticism can also be the product of
rationalism such as that in Rousseau and even Descartes. For Schmitt, Roman
Catholicism is not romantic because it not a product of rationalism. Political
romanticism seems for him to have reached its culmination in the bourgeois
revolutions of 1848 and the writings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.
These romantics look back to Rousseau and the French Revolution: “The
spokesmen for the coming revolution of 1848 idolised Rousseau and the
French Revolution and saw here a grand model to which they appealed” (PR,
25). Schmitt presents what he views as the three ‘high priests’ of romanticism:
“We must see the three persons whose deformed visages penetrate the
colourful romantic veil: Byron, Baudelaire, and Nietzsche, the three high
priests, and at the same time the three sacrificial victims, of this private
priesthood” (PR, 20). The rise of political romanticism did not decline since
then, but only grew with the rise of liberalism, because romanticism,
according to Schmitt, depends on liberalism. Thereafter, it descended from
activity to passivity in the allegiance of romanticism and liberalism. Schmitt,
using his usual strategy of quoting another (this time Adam Müller) to make
his point, writes that even revolution “is an idolisation of abstract concepts”
(PR, 28). Hence, both conservatives and revolutionaries are both subject to
political romanticism, which leads to that ‘endless discussion’ that Schmitt is
so repelled by, and which ultimately weakens the sovereign.
Kierkegaard is also a critic of romanticism. Unlike the German
romantics, Kierkegaard attempts to make space for such loaded terms as
‘responsibility’, ‘duty’ and ‘decision’. Kierkegaard’s aesthetic pseudonyms
perceive the either/or but avoid it. A commentator today articulates
Kierkegaard’s relation with the romantics: “Like the German romantics,
Kierkegaard considers the poetic an intrinsic feature of the existential
condition. Unlike the romantics, however, he does not believe one should
endeavour to construct the self ‘through experimentation and play with an

infinity of possibilities.’”18 One ultimately must come to the point of duty,
decision and responsibility, and yet both Kierkegaard and Schmitt are still
interested in the use of the poetic. Both allude to Shakespeare’s characters as
providing a narrative to human existence. Are Kierkegaard and Schmitt then
immersed in political romanticism? In Political Romanticism, Schmitt warns
that this might indeed happen and tells the reader: “Indeed, I hope this book
remains aloof from every subromantic interest” (PR, 21). Yet it is not possible
for Schmitt to be exempt from every subromantic interest. In Schmitt’s
thought, is the world instead an occasion for constructing a political world of
friend and enemy? Is this not just another form of “occasionalism”? Schmitt
calls romanticism ‘subjectified occasionalism’. Explaining this definition, he
writes: “[…] in the romantic, the romantic subject treats the world as an
occasion and an opportunity for his romantic productivity” (PR, 17). Is not
Schmitt himself already aware of this when he asks the reader not to associate
his writings with any “subromantic interest”? Might Schmitt in fact be
aestheticizing the exception and carving out a politically aesthetic world with
the dynamic of the friend/enemy distinction which he bases on a presumed
existential reality? The conservative romantic is apparent when the
sovereign/exception has the power to do anything, which is the same power
that German romanticism wished to have and which Kierkegaard criticized:
the power that seeks the “infinite possibilities.” This time, romanticism is
found in the realm of those who hold power, which makes their power all the
more dangerous, as it allows for war, conquest and subjugation.
Paul Tillich renders a critique of political romanticism in his book The
Socialist Decision (Die sozialistische Entscheidung), published in 1933, and
which was suppressed immediately in Germany. This book makes an
interesting alternative to Schmitt’s writings of the 1920s, considering that, like
Schmitt, Tillich was a practicing Christian, though a Protestant pastor to
Schmitt’s God-fearing Catholicism in the wake of Donoso Cortés. Both were
attempting to lead Germany out of the chaos of WWI and the ‘age of anxiety’,
though Tillich moves towards a religious socialism and Schmitt moves
towards Nazism. At the beginning of The Socialist Decision, Tillich asserts:
“We stand in a period of dissolution.”19 He wishes to move the political
beyond Marxism-Leninism and mere reformism. In the form of war,
militarism and nationalism, political romanticm has taken the reins in German
politics from Bismarck to WWI. Unfortunately, it would begin again with the
takeover by the Nazis. Both for Schmitt and Tillich, political romanticism can
be conservative or revolutionary (or conservative-revolutionary). Both brands
adhere uncritically to myths of origin. Political romanticism enables the duty
of the allegiance of the individual to the state on behalf of the myth of the
origin, or in Schmittian language: the citizen in the form of the subject
becomes subjugated to the exception in the form of the sovereign. Tillich
writes: “Bondage to the origin and expectation of the end have something in
common;”20 hence the movement from Russian socialism (and return) to
Russian absolutism in the retreat to the rhetoric of the “Mother Russian”
rather than to the Red Flag to rally and unite the peoples of the Soviet Union
during WWII. That is another reason why Schmitt sides with Nazism over the
Soviets, because “the stronger myth lies in the national sphere”, and that
socialism therefore possessed a relatively “inferior mythology” (DR, 659).
There are two movements in Kierkegaard’s 1848 writings that intrude on
myth. The two movements are Kierkegaard’s drama and his Christianity.
Tillich, in The Socialist Decision, is also aware of the possibility of the
intrusion in these two movements. On drama, Tillich writes: “Wherever
drama is alive, the myth of origin has been broken. A drama deals with the
rightfulness and the tragedy of this break.”21 Drama breaks the myth of origin
by the use of metamorphosis, that “restlessness of infinity” that has no need
for the nostalgia of the myth of origin shown in Kierkegaard’s essay on the
actress. What about Kierkegaard’s Christianity? Is that not an example of the
myth of origin? Tillich incisively points out that “Christianity, on the other
hand, is an absurd innovation without any relation to political life and with a
kind of love of one’s fellow man that will inevitably break up the state.”22
Kierkegaard’s Christianity, articulated most directly by Anti-Climacus in
Practice in Christianity, breaks the myth of origin by presenting Christ as the
God-man, as contemporaneous, as a break with History, and as an offense to
political theory. Schmitt aestheticises the political; Kierkegaard’s 1848
authorship disturbs and weakens it.
ii. Ambiguity and/or Violence
Does political romanticism lead to an indolent ambiguity or brutal violence?

Which direction do Kierkegaard’s writings take us, and which direction do
Schmitt’s writings take us? We have already seen some of the reception
Kierkegaard has received at the height of world chaos (1939-45). There have
been accusations of “bourgeois radicalism” by Lukács (HCC, x) and
“violence” by Emmanuel Levinas,23 and as a precursor to National Socialism
by both. However, his writings strangely lend themselves to ambiguity, best
explained as uncertainty and in-between, whose violence lies only in the
critical execution; notwithstanding the ambiguity that remains in the use of
irony, humour and playfulness. This leaves the work open to the etymology of
‘ambiguity’, which is ambiguous in itself: as two-ness or wandering around
the act. It is, however, less difficult to associate Schmitt with these charges.
Schmitt carves out a new form of political romanticism that welcomes
violence and damns ambiguity, and overlooks the nuanced texture of text by a
thinker such as Kierkegaard. Already we have witnessed his contempt for the
‘age of discussion’. In The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, Schmitt
introduces the Red Army mastermind, Trotsky, to illustrate his valid point that
vagueness, ambiguity and discussion prevent one from committing a violent

act: “As Trotsky justly reminded the democrat Kautsky, the awareness of
relative truths never gives one the courage to use force and to spill blood”
(CPD, 64). It is interesting to note that the later, outcast Trotsky, after losing
all power in the new Soviet Union, concluded the end of his major critique on
the Stalinist state by writing: “Everything is relative in this world, where
change alone endures.”24 This distinguishes the one who usurps power from
the one who has no power, and the difference in the positioning of violence
and ambiguity. Hamlet might say: “Conscience doth make cowards of us all”,
but what is even more striking is Schmitt’s excitement when quoting other
writers on the necessity for violence. Quoting Marx: “The struggle needs no
education; rather it is a war in which the enemy will be destroyed”, Schmitt
adds his own: “It is a matter of life and death”. He then quotes Bruno Bauer to
further his point: “Only the man who knows his prey better than it knows
itself can trap it” (CPD, 106). There is no room here for ambiguity, it is a
matter of life and death, where the enemy must be pinpointed and destroyed,
and as long as there is an enemy, there is then a political sphere. That is the
essence of the political for Schmitt, and the words that Lukács and Levinas
level at Kierkegaard can be applied far more easily to Schmitt.
It is by the disruption of borders in the reciprocal or rotation methods25 in
Kierkegaard’s more satirical writing that alienates the conservative romantics and
provokes the revolutionary romantics. If one accuses Kierkegaard of
espousing a fanaticism before a Christian God and contempt for the common
man, a more careful reading is needed. In Christian Discourses, Kierkegaard
speaks of the dangers of fanaticism in the face of God, which very often leads
to violence. At the beginning of the third discourse from ‘Thoughts that
Wound from Behind’ (Tanker som saare bagfra), Kierkegaard depicts one
who loves only God, as his first and only love because God is the highest, the
holiest and most perfect being and has no other reason for loving God,
concluding: “[...] we might well be suspicious of him, that he was a fanatic”
(SKS10, 198 / CD, 188). Kierkegaard had previously, through Climacus,
made a critique of the monastic way of life of loving only God and turning
one’s back on the trials and tribulations of human existence. The real danger
of this fanaticism introduced at the beginning of this third discourse is that
one must “watch out lest this fanatic mood end in presumptuousness
[Formastelse].” The presumptuousness is dangerous because it allows for
violence that results from this fanaticism. Kierkegaard continues: “[...] in
loving God humbly it is most fitting and sure to remain on earth.” Schmitt, on
the other hand, sees fanaticism as something that fits in with the world,
whether it be the conservative or the radical revolutionaries: “[…] the
revolutionary use of force by the masses is an expression of immediate life,
often wild and barbaric, but never systematically horrible and inhuman”
(CPD, 72); and: “[…] a private enemy is a person who hates us, whereas a
public enemy is a person who fights against us” (CP, 29). Once again, Schmitt
is quoting someone else to give his point of view, writing here: “The most
clear-cut definition [the concept of enemy] with additional supporting material
is in Forellini’s Lexicon totius latinitatis” (CP, 29). And yet, Schmitt’s
diagnosis of romanticism is an either/or as well, which seems to fit Schmitt’s
schemata and contradicts his critique of romanticism and liberalism merging
together into the age of discussion: “With the definitive renunciation and the
perception of an either/or, the romantic situation was brought to an end” (PR,
93). However, loving God means also loving the world, it is just a question of
priority: God first, then world.26 This complex relationship is what moves
Kierkegaard’s ambiguity away from the tyrant; Schmitt’s persistent attempt at
clarifications moves towards the tyrant.
iii. Decision-Making
1848 is the year of decision for both Kierkegaard and Schmitt. Schmitt begins
his final section of Political Theology by maintaining the German romantics’
old trait—“everlasting conversation” (PR, 53). He defends the three Catholic
political philosophers—de Maistre, Bonald and Cortés from accusations of
political romanticism, by their emphasis on decision-making that separates
them from the everlasting conversation of the political romantics: “[…] for
what characterised their counterrevolutionary political philosophy was the
recognition that their times needed a decision” (PR, 53). The emphasis on
decision-making is intensified by 1848, and Schmitt informs the reader that
Donoso Cortés views that year as the end of royalism. Schmitt himself
prioritises the significance of 1848 and the necessity for decision in all three
of his major interwar texts. The time of ruthless decision was upon Europe:
“In 1848 this image [“the warlike image of a bloody, definitive, destructive,
decisive battle”] rose up on both sides in opposition to parliamentary
constitutionalism” (CPD, 69). For Schmitt, “The critical year of 1848 was a
year of democracy and of dictatorship at the same time” (CPD, 51).
Kierkegaard explains the importance of the decision at the Skillevei. In
Christian Discourses, the times need a decision in the face of the malaise of
passive cleverness or Klogskab (the word that Kierkegaard continually
sarcastically uses) in the modern era (SKS10, 31, 41 / CD19, 29). The
decision, which is presented so starkly and with such rhetorical force in Two
Ages:A Literary Review, distinguishes between God and world. And yet the
indirect politics is such that ambiguity informs the complexity in
Kierkegaard’s authorship. By choosing God, one is not, to repeat, refuting the
world, but paradoxically choosing the world too, not in the Hegelian sense of
absorbing all, but in Kierkegaard’s sense of acting honestly and keeping open
this fissure and difficulty. The same can be said for the way Kierkegaard
speaks of his authorship in The Point of View. To read this text at face value
and to take in every sentence of Kierkegaard’s as truth would be a gross
misreading of the text. In the labyrinthine, frenetic attempts by Kierkegaard to

shuffle and reshuffle, organise and reorganise his authorship, the text
illuminates the disintegration of borders between the aesthetic and the
religious, the writer and the reader, and the political and the apolitical.
Schmitt’s decision is an aggressive attempt to overcome political
romanticism to hold a disintegrating world together. Political romanticism is
an emotive response, but “Where political activity begins, political
romanticism ends” (PR, 160). This is reminiscent of the end of Works of Love:
“To say it is one thing: to do it is another.” Schmitt despises the potential
passivity of liberal democracy and chooses dictatorship. His decisionism
comes from the authoritarian government that is the sovereign. Kierkegaard’s
decisionism comes from the single individual and his/her guide that manifests
itself as the prototype in Socrates and Christ. The dictatorship must remain in
control of and wield the exception: “The decision on the exception is a
decision in the true sense of the word” (PT, 6). Schmitt continues:
And whereas the normativist in his distortion makes of law a mere mode
of operation of a state bureaucracy, and the decisionist, focusing on the
moment, always runs the risk of missing the stable content inherent in
every great political movement, an isolated institutional thinking leads to
the pluralism characteristic of a feudal-corporate growth that is devoid of
sovereignty (PT, 3).
This description distorts our conceptions of the dangers of democracy

and dictatorship. For Schmitt, the roles have been reversed—democracy
becomes a bureaucratic, kafkaesque hell in which nothing is ever done and it
is impossible to find clarity let alone make decisions, while dictatorship
provides the space for decision-making and clarity.
How can one rescue Kierkegaard from the same fate of so many modern
intellectuals that reject the democratic age? And should we rescue
Kierkegaard in the first place? Kierkegaard’s scathing remarks on
democracycy and liberalism (“But the liberals have, as it says in the fairytale,
a tongue and an empty head, like the tongue in a church bell” (Pap. II A 754,
1838) might contradict his unwavering argument for the single individual in
the world, for Kierkegaard’s prototypes need democracy in order to thrive and
pursue their life’s activity on the streets and in the marketplace, where
Socrates and Christ dwell and where Nietzsche’s dwarf man declares that
‘God is dead’. Giorgio Agamben, in his analysis of “state of exception” asks
the question: “What then happens when exception and rule become
undecidable?”27 Schmitt bases his fear on humanity; Kierkegaard bases his
fear on God and fearlessness in the face of one’s fellow human—something
that dictatorship will not tolerate and democracy will. Kierkegaard and
Schmitt wrote in the times of decision. For much of Europe there was an
appeal to either fascism or socialism. Paul Tillich appeals for the ‘socialist
decision’, Schmitt decides for Nazism, while Kierkegaard’s authorship
remains an undecidable, in his quest to save Christianity from itself, and
restore the single individual as critical spirit over and above political
romanticists and authoritarian theorists, repeating Anti-Climacus’ dictum:
“[…] the condition of man, regarded as spirit […] is always critical.”
In conclusion to this section, it is worth mentioning that Oakes devotes
nearly all of his introduction to Political Romanticism to a summary of “The
Seducer’s Diary” from Either/Or, Part One. He concludes that Johannes the
Seducer is the “romantic” that Schmitt is speaking of. This is the reason why
Schmitt states that Kierkegaard is both the greatest of the romantics and also
the only one to find a way out: though the decision. Either/Or presents the
alluring and seductive quality of the romantic lifestyle, ultimately also
showing the emptiness and nihilism of that position. Some of Kierkegaard’s
most memorable depictions of the aesthete’s nihilistic world are to be found in
this text. Consequently, as Oakes aptly puts it: “The world becomes nothing
more than an occasion for the free play of the individual imagination” (PR,
xx). For the aesthete, the world is divided among two kinds of people: the
bored and the boring, which one of Schmitt’s “high priests” of romanticism
(Byron) declares in none other than his magnum opus, Don Juan: “Society is
now one polish’d horde, / Form’d of two mighty tribes, the Bores / and
Bored.”28 Kierkegaard reiterates this point through the aesthete in the essay
“Rotation of Crops” from Either/Or I, but also goes even further to declare
that actually “All human beings, then, are boring” (SKS2, 278 / EO1, 288). In
Schmitt’s critique of “political romanticism” with his Bruder im Geist for
ammunition and inspired support, there is also a fundamental critique of the
bourgeoisie. In the foreword, Schmitt points out: “The bearer of the romantic
movement is the new bourgeoisie” (PR, 12). And further:
Psychologically and historically, romanticism is a product of bourgeois

security. One could fail to recognise this only as long as one committed
the error of considering as romanticism itself things that happen to be
favourite romantic objects, such as chivalry and the Middle Ages—in
other words, sundry themes and occasions for the romantic interest. A
robber knight can be a romantic figure, but he is not romantic. The
Middle Ages is a powerfully romanticized complex, but it is not
romantic (PR, 99).
This connects specifically with Kierkegaard’s depiction of the

bourgeoisie—that group which hides behind the valor of others and shelters
themselves in their protective Klogskab. Comments are rife throughout his
authorship with this kind of image of the bourgeoisie.In order to survive, the
bourgeoisie (Marx too would make this point in comparing the bourgeois with
the Jew29) oscillates between right and left, between fascism and communism,
between the either/ors—from hatred of monarchy and aristocracy and fear of

being dispossessed of private property. Schmitt concludes in Political
Theology: “He (the bourgeois) thus oscillated between his two enemies and
wanted to fool both” (PT, 61).
The oscillation (Schmitt) and vacillation (Kierkegaard discourses “Care
of the Pagans” from Christian Discourses) bring us to the passage again from
the Revelation of John 3:15-16: “I know thy works, that thou art neither cold
nor hot: I would thou wert cold or hot. So because thou art lukewarm—The
effect of lukewarm water is well known. I am about to spue thee out of my
mouth.” Dostoevsky appropriated this passage in his great novels, and in
Dante’s Divine Comedy, the lukewarm people are not even allowed enter Hell
such is their passionless mediocrity who lived without disgrace and without
praise.30 Schmitt carries this disdain of the ‘lukewarm’ into political thought
and for which the bourgeoisie, the liberal democrats, and the Jews are to
blame. In his essay on Hobbes, it is Spinoza, “the liberal Jew,” who “noticed
the barely visible crack” in Hobbes’ theory to conform it into liberalism (L, 57).
Yet out of this crack and beyond Schmitt, Spinoza courageously tried to bring
together Hobbes’ politics with a philosophical project imbibed with love,
affirmation and real life. Earlier in The Concept of the Political in stating his
friend/enemy distinction in politics, Schmitt confronts this “lukewarm”
bourgeois liberalism and declares: “If a part of the population declares that it
no longer recognises enemies, then depending on the circumstance, it joins
their side and aids them” (CP, 51). However, Schmitt and Kierkegaard differ
here ultimately. For Kierkegaard, it is the watering down of “spirit” and
“passion” that is the great problem of the bourgeoisie towards false faith in
God and lack of passionate responsibility and lack of awareness of one’s
death in order to seize life; for Schmitt this is transferred into the public and
political realm. And even though we of course have the benefit of hindsight
and history behind us and Schmitt was writing throughout the very unsettling
Weimar republic years, the danger still remains of eliminating the “everlasting
conversation” and the “discussion class” altogether from the political realm.
Instead, a whole generation of German jurists, including Carl Schmitt, trained
to uphold the independence of the courts, legalized murder and gave absolute
power to the sovereign as exception to transcend the law and the “everlasting
conversation.”
iv. The Friend/Enemy Distinction
Schmitt defines the ‘friend/enemy’ distinction in The Concept of the Political

as overcoming the malaise of political romanticism and articulating the
framework of the political. What one discovers is a highly charged form of
political romanticism that Schmitt had already warned the reader not to seek.
Still under the influence of his Kierkegaard, Schmitt presents his ‘either/or’ in
the tradition of a dualistic Gnosticism of light and dark, thus destroying the
blending of boundaries, and confirming the aestheticisation of the political.
Schmitt had already effected this movement towards Gnosticism in Political
Theology, when he was searching for “the decision in absolute purity” (PT,
98), or by the title of his article “The Pure State”, published in 1920.31 But it is
in The Concept of the Political where Schmitt makes his argument most
clearly: “The high points of politics are simultaneously the moments in which
the enemy is, in concrete clarity, recognised as the enemy” (CP, 67). This is
the basis of his political philosophy and what distinguishes him from the
indirect politics of Kierkegaard’s polyphonic authorship, which is not to be
confused with Kierkegaard’s pursuit of making clear-cut distinctions between
faith and philosophy.
The reader of Either/Or who forges the friend-enemy distinction fails to
see the dissolving of boundaries and theset of masks that continually displaces
disciplinary identity from one field to the next. The Either/Or text makes a
parody of the reader and even the writer himself, where this time Kierkegaard
has no signature on the book. There is the continual organisation of the world
through friend/enemy that is analogous to Schmitt’s contemporary Oswald
Spengler with his massive The Decline of the West (1918). With Westerners
representing Faustian man and Muslims representing Magians, Spengler’s
book serves as a precursor to Huntington’s acclaimed “clash of civilisations”
distinctions of East and West that gives momentum to this growing fear of the
stranger in the multicultural era. For Spengler, a world without empires
implies that there are no people. Analogously, for Schmitt, if there is no
enemy, there is no realm of the political. For Schmitt, the enemy must be
recognised, and the enemy must distinguish himself from the friend; if he
does not, he automatically becomes the enemy: “If a part of the population
declares that it no longer recognizes enemies, then, depending on the
circumstance, it joins their side and aids them” (CP, 51). Schmitt even wrote a
miniature poem to reiterate this point: “Woe to him who has no friend, for his
enemy will sit in judgment upon him. / Woe to him who has no enemy, for I
myself shall be his enemy on Judgment Day.”32 The friend-enemy distinction
is not a metaphor and Schmitt is emphatic on this point:
The friend and enemy concepts are to be understood in their concrete

and existential sense, not as metaphors or symbols, not as mixed and
weakened by economic, moral, and other conceptions, least of all in a
private-individualistic sense as a psychological expression of private
emotions and tendencies. They are neither normative nor pure spiritual
antithesis (CP, 27).
There is nothing private or spiritual about the friend-enemy distinction;

it is simply the political and how it functions: “The specific political
distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that
between friend and enemy” (CP, 26). For Schmitt, it is better to have violence
than a talk shop or ‘eternal discussion’ of the bourgeoisie. While Schmitt tries
to impart the friend/enemy distinction solely to the public sphere,
Kierkegaard’s single individual is immersed in the private and the public
sphere. Inwardness is action as the watchman Vigilius Haufniensis
proclaimed. There can be no absolute government or absolute subject. Liberal,
bourgeois democracy does not solely emerge from Schmitt’s political
romanticism; it also comes from man’s attempts to liberate himself from that
Hobbesian state of nature as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short” for the
vast majority of people. Democracy remains exceptionally flawed and
contradictory, but stands over and above the disasters of dictatorships. The
brutal clarity and conciseness of Schmitt’s writing in contrast to the
sometimes frustratingly labyrinthine writings of Kierkegaard separate the
interpretation of violence from ambiguity in the texts, though it is always vital
to take into consideration Adorno’s remark about the danger in bowing “to its
[Kierkegaard’s writings] grandeur without comparing it with concretion” (K,
11). The ambiguity is maintained by Kierkegaard’s constant love of paradox,
and the riddle invades all his texts. Schmitt concludes in The Concept of the
Political: “One cannot escape the political and the friend/enemy distinction”
(CP, 79). Towards the end of Critique of Pure Reason, Kant situates the
concepts of philosophy, mathematics and jurists:
Philosophy is swarming with mistaken definitions, especially those that

actually contain elements of definition but are not yet complete […] In
mathematics definitions belong ad esse [to the being]; in philosophy ad
melius esse [to the improvement of being]. Attaining them is fine, but
often very difficult. Jurists are still searching for a definition of their
concept of right.33
Kant’s words should be taken into account when one is dealing with a
critique of political romanticism, and what should be clarified and what
should not. Kierkegaard’s distinction is not the abolishment of the other, but
the priority of one over the other, or even, by prioritising one, the relations to
the other becomes stronger, such as again in Christian Discourses (as already
in Works of Love), where love of the world comes through love of the eternal,
God and dethroning the worldly worries, but it is not there to destroy the
enemy. Kierkegaard’s final Kirkestorm stems from this position also, because
he asks not for the destruction of the church but for the church and the
establishment to admit that their Christianity is wholly different than the
Christianity of the New Testament, and that, finally, Christianity has been
politicised for the comfort of society and state. However, Schmitt’s thesis is a
precursor to authoritarian power and absolute control in distinguishing friend
and enemy, paralleled tellingly in the words of Mao Zedong that “we should
support whatever the enemy opposes and oppose whatever the enemy
supports.”34 This friend/enemy distinction finally allows the sovereign to be
an outlaw that works within the law, ultimately controlling society and
legitimizing itself. Then there are terrorist faction groups such as the Red
Army Faction/Baader-Meinhof Group who claim the friend/enemy distinction
for their motto: “A clear dividing line must be drawn between ourselves and
the enemy!”35 Within democracy, the exception such as the above group that
takes the law into one’s own hands becomes a criminal rather than a legislator
in a dictatorship. In contrast, as when Krishna tells Arjuna that “the self alone
is the friend of the self and the self alone is the enemy of the self”,36
Kierkegaard’s only friend/enemy distinction lies within oneself and one’s own
struggle: “an authentic religious individuality is always so lenient with others,
so inventive in thinking up excuses; only toward himself is he cold and severe
like a grand-inquisitor [Stor-Inqvisitor]. With others, he is as a kindly old man
usually is with a young person; only with regard to himself is he old and
uncompromising” (SKS7, 354 / CUP, 389).
3. Political Despair
Why am I always so cautious and hesitating when I deal with human beings?
Sometimes I am under the impression I only do that because I am afraid of my
own ruthlessness, because I only know one thing: to dominate people until they
are eliminated or submit to them in excitement, and when I cannot do the second
I fear people will notice the first and thus I am timid and cautious.
Carl Schmitt, diary entry
Is it possible to call Schmitt’s politics a form of ‘political despair’, through

using Kierkegaard’s analyses of despair? From distinguishing Kierkegaard’s
modernity from Schmitt’s in bringing out the idea of what kind of ‘humanity’
might be underlying their thinking, this section demonstrates how Schmitt’s
sovereign is potentially despair, and Schmitt’s point of view is a
Kierkegaardian despair but which has no salvation except through a
reductionist view of political organisation where human beings are
fundamentally living in an abyss, where fear is the only reality. Kierkegaard’s
articulation of the single individual in society serves as the power of the
citizen or Politikos in contrast to Schmitt’s Macht-Politik or power politics.
Finally, Kierkegaard’s articulation of the demonic throughout his writings,
especially in The Sickness unto Death, is manifested in Schmitt’s interwar
political writings. Thus, insights from Kierkegaard’s writings lead to a
(indirect) critique of Schmitt’s thought.
i. Ideas of Humanity
Like all influential political theorists, Schmitt’s conception of the political is

based on a conception of human nature. The conception of human nature is
also where Schmitt comes closest to Hobbes or at least what he admires most
in Hobbes. Schmitt goes even further than his predecessor by calling the
political “the most intense and extreme antagonism” (CP, 29). For Schmitt,
the political enemy need not be morally evil or aesthetically ugly, but he is
“[…] nevertheless, the other, the stranger, existentially something different
and alien” (CP, 27). Following Hobbes’ depiction of human life in a ‘state of
nature’ as “nasty, brutish and short”, Schmitt describes fellow Catholic
political philosopher Cortés’ conception of human nature as “[…] a contempt
for man that knew no limits: Man’s blind reason, his weak will, and the
ridiculous vitality of his carnal longings appeared to him so pitiable that all
words in every language do not suffice to express the complete lowness of this
creature” (PT, 58). Schmitt says of Cortés that he lacks ‘organic thinking’
(PT, 61). What Schmitt means here by ‘organic thinking’ is that of unifying
philosophy into a system such that systematic and metaphysical compromise
is necessary. According to Schmitt, this is unthinkable for writers such as
Cortés or Kierkegaard, and the very definition of the decision implies
ruthlessness and zero compromise.
What can be observed here, whether in Hobbes’ ‘Leviathan’ to protect
the governed from a barbaric state of nature, incapable of knowing how to
control themselves, or Cortés’ utter disgust at humanity, or even Schmitt’s
definition of the political as protection from the enemy, is that all are
embroiled in ‘political despair’. Political despair is to be understood here as
fear of itself and lack of trust or hope in oneself and/or others. Hobbes, Cortés
and Schmitt view the political as strictly based on the enemy and fear. Schmitt
makes his point clearly on the political thinkers he is aligned with: “These
political thinkers [Bossuet, Maistre, Bonald, Cortés, Stahl, Hobbes] are
always aware of the concrete possibility of an enemy. Their realism can
frighten men in need of security” (CP, 65). The enemy excludes ‘humanity’ as
in love and trust of oneself and/or others. There is in fact no room for
humanity within Schmitt’s friend-enemy construction. In Schmitt’s words:
“The concept of humanity excludes the concept of the enemy, because the
enemy does not cease to be a human being—and hence there is no specific
differentiation in that concept” (CP, 54). Schmitt agrees that there is no
philosophy of humanity that is politically relevant and yet there is no
philosophically irrelevant politics (CP, 60). There cannot be a philosophy of
humanity that is in any way politically relevant because humanity recognizes
that the enemy can become the friend. Given Schmitt’s view on human nature
when aligned with the likes of Cortés, and his abolition of humanity within
the sphere of the political, the political despair becomes situated in Darwinian
nihilism: “If a people no longer possesses the energy or the will to maintain
itself in the sphere of politics, the latter will not thereby vanish from the
world. Only a weak people will disappear” (CP, 53).
In a diary entry from 1918, Schmitt again applauds Kierkegaard, this
time for exposing the Ungeist of the nineteenth century: “Such a formation
and great work on the Ungeist >Unsense/Nonspirit@ of the 19th century were
reserved for someone else: Kierkegaard, who articulated again for his time the
ever same truth like a Father of the Church.”37 The idea of ‘spirit’ and
‘humanity’ has a special place in Kierkegaard’s 1848 authorship. Kierkegaard
places special emphasis during this period on the parable of the lilies and birds
in depicting the single individual in a joyful state. In Christian Discourses,
Kierkegaard asks the question, “What is humanity [Menneskelighed]?”
(SKS10, 128 / CD, 117). His answer is that it is human likeness or equality
(Ligelighed). The word Menneskelighed is important here, and contains rich
connotations in the Danish (coming from the German), as it represents
‘human’, ‘humanity’, ‘likeness’, and ‘equality’. This is also connected with
the slogan of the French revolution of ‘equality, ‘qualified equality’ and
‘likeness’. Yet, Kierkegaard’s ‘humanity’ exists as equality in the face of God
and nature (the lilies and the birds). The complexity and richness of the word
is enhanced by Kierkegaard’s use of it in The Point of View, in the final parts
that have direct importance for Kierkegaard’s indirect politics, where
humanity, as Menneskelighed, is the religious. Unlike Schmitt, Kierkegaard’s
concept of freedom is spirit articulated by Climacus with the metaphor of
rubbing the magic lamp, where if one rubs hard enough, the spirit of God can
be discovered. This spirit is the eternal. The magic lamp represents freedom
which follows a trajectory from John Locke to Charles-Louis de Montesquieu
to Karl Popper that prioritises the human being over and above political states
and systems. Kierkegaard’s Menneskelighed is brought forth in the three
discourses from Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits, with ‘To be
contented to be a human being’, ‘How glorious it is to be a human being’, and
‘What blessed happiness is promised in being a human being’. This also
points back to Genesis 1:27: “So God created man in His own image, in the
image of God He created him; male and female He created them.” This leads
on to Cicero’s reflections on humanity, to the German tradition of Kant,
Herder, Humboldt and Goethe (not that Kierkegaard quotes them on their
reflections on humanity). For Schmitt, one must view “Humanity as the
revolutionary demiurge, history as the conservative demiurge” (PR, 59).
Kierkegaard separates Menneskelighed from history, and in seeking the
prototype first (i.e. Christ or Socrates) he confronts the world and profane
history as the political critic on behalf of the idea of humanity. Thus,
Kierkegaard’s conception of human nature remains open-ended and focused
on the responsibility of the reader, and in the light of this responsibility, it is
worth remembering the words of the narrator in Borges’ short story Deutsches
Requiem. This particular narrator is of German nobility who becomes a Nazi
commandante in charge of a death camp where many Jewish intellectuals are

murdered. He speaks of his passionate love of metaphysics (Schopenhauer)
and music (Brahms), and who declares shortly before being executed: “He
who pauses in wonder, moved with tenderness and gratitude, before any facet
of the work of these auspicious creators, let him know that I also paused there,
I, the abominable.”38 Like the opening motto from Lichtenberg in Stages in
Life’s Way on the mirror, monkey and apostle (“Such works are mirrors: when
a monkey looks in, no apostle can look out” (SKS6, 16 / SLW, 8),
responsibility rests with the reader or the individual as much as the writer.
Unlike Schmitt’s conception, another voice of Kierkegaard declares:
“Inhumanity toward human beings is also importunity toward God” (SKS6,
163 / SLW, 174). In the face of eternity resides this deep humanity, which
indicates the idea that the true humanity is the religious. Anti-Climacus
writes: “The situation of the guilty person travelling through life to eternity is
like that of the murderer who fled the scene of his act—and his crime—on the
express train” (SKS11, 235 / SUD, 124). The friend/enemy distinction is
eradicated through Kierkegaard’s use of the watermark theory in Works of
Love, revealing humanity under Spinoza’s expression sub specie æternis:
“Dissimilarity is temporality’s method of confusing that marks every human
being differently, but the neighbour is eternity’s mark on every human being”
(SKS9, 94 / WL, 89). This ‘mark of eternity’ is Kierkegaard’s
Menneskelighed. It is far from Schmitt’s occasionalist or conservative
romantic, but is the confirmation of the Mellemspil of the single individual
that is critical to the sovereign. In the introduction to the self in The Sickness
unto Death, Anti-Climacus shows eternity as the judge over the single
individual as critic: “[…] to be a self, is the greatest concession, an infinite
concession, given to man, but it is also eternity’s claim upon him” (SKS11,
137 / SUD, 21). Given his conception of human nature, Schmitt appropriates
political authority as the judge and executor of the friend/enemy human public
landscape.
ii. The Sovereign as Despair
The word sovereign originates in the old French soverain, from the Latin
‘super’ and ‘above’. The sovereign usually refers to a king or queen who is
the supreme ruler of a country. As an adjective, sovereign implies possessing
supreme or ultimate power. And of a nation or its affairs, the sovereign is
what is acting or done independently and without outside interference. The
political derives from the Greek word politikos. Politikos, ‘of citizens’,
indicates a person embedded in a society or city-state (polis), and the
relationship between citizens and the institutions and the influence they have
on each other. The political as an adjective relates to the government or public
affairs of a country. It is related to or interested in politics. There is a problem
in Schmitt’s theory of the political in that he begins with the sovereign, and
then proceeds to give the sovereign unconditional powers as the one who
decides on the exception. The word political ultimately originates from the
word polis and, as Hannah Arendt reminds us: “The Greek polis will continue
to exist at the bottom of our political existence—that is, at the bottom of the
sea—for as long as we use the word ‘politics’.”39 However, Schmitt attempts
to resituate the political as no longer belonging to the citizen (politikos) or the
city (polis), but to the friend/enemy distinction and to the sovereign who
decides on the exception: “It is precisely the exception that makes relevant the
subject of sovereignty, that is, the whole question of sovereignty” (PT, 6).
Such a harsh perspective of human nature and the exclusion of
‘humanity’ in politics allow Schmitt to forge this conception of the political.
Rather than secure the political, the very reason of its existence ensures
insecurity and violence. Agamben notes this danger and the ‘gap’ that
emerges, that very gap that allows the sovereign to have complete control of
the political: “The sovereign, who should decide every time on the exception,
is precisely the place where the fracture that divides the body of the law
becomes impossible to mend: between Macht and Vermögen between power
and its exercise, a gap opens which no decision is capable of filling.”40
Schmitt’s sovereign becomes the “infinite form”, to use Anti-Climacus’
language in the section on defiance at the end of the first part of The Sickness
unto Death. In its desperate attempt to gain absolute control over polis and
politikos, by usurping the eternal, the sovereign becomes despair. One can
begin to see the potential emergence of exclusiveness and purity. Thus
Schmitt writes: “The exception is […] the decision in absolute purity” (PT,
13), and writes the article called “The Pure State”. Given “[…] the wretched
political situation of Germany” (PR, 25), like so many of his generation,
Schmitt finds it rational, even righteous, to join the Nazi Party. This is based
on his shifting of the political from politikos and polis to friend/enemy and
sovereign as exception. The politician becomes the soldier and the legal
system becomes usurped by the sovereign: “[…] the politician is better
schooled for battle than the soldier” (CP, 34), and: “What matters for the
reality of legal life is who decides” (PT, 34).41 To define the political as a fear
of the other as a threatening otherness and to form the sovereign as
omnipotent is despair.
In his texts, Schmitt has been using the word Souveränität, and Anti-
Climacus’ decision to use the word Herredom in the section on “defiance,”
which is translated as “sovereignty” by the Hongs, indicates the relation
between sovereignty and master or lord (SKS11, 183 / SUD, 69). Hegel uses
the equivalent German word in one of the most influential passages in his
whole authorship, namely in the Herrschaft und Knechtschaft (Lordship and
Bondage) section of the Phenomenology of Spirit. Sovereignty becomes more
precise as a power over something, the exercise of lordship over the slave or
subject. Schmitt’s sovereign is despair as it struggles and desperately attempts
to keep its power wholly for itself: “[…] he himself wants to compose his self
by means of being the infinite form” (SKS11, 182 / SUD, 68). Anti-Climacus’
diagnosis of this form of despair, like Hegel before him and that of his
contemporary Marx, entails a collapse of the sovereign as absolute master.
The flux of binary opposites emerges as “[…] the negative form of the self
exercises a loosening power as well as a binding power” (SKS11, 183 / SUD,
69). The sovereign as despair, basing its legitimacy on friend/enemy
distinctions and as the exception to every rule, becomes, as Anti-Climacus
states it: “[…] a king without a country, actually ruling over nothing; his
position, his sovereignty [Herredom], is subordinate to the dialectic that
rebellion is legitimate at any moment” (SKS11, 183 / SUD, 69). This is the
case of Schmitt that rebellion is imminent at any given moment, and where a
strong authoritarian state led by the exception is absolutely necessary.
“Rebellion is legitimate [the word Anti-Climacus uses is Legitimitet which is
literally ‘the legitimate’ or ‘legitimacy’] at any moment” is the point that
sovereignty cannot be exercised in a vacuum and that, as Hegel argues, the
Lord comes ultimately to depend on the servant, and the king depends on the
assembly. For Kierkegaard, the individual cannot exercise dominion over
himself and his world except on the premise that he first receives it from God
or the eternal.
iii. Politikos vs. Macht-politik
The distinction between politikos and Macht-Politik helps to distinguish

Kierkegaard’s indirect politics from Schmitt’s direct politics. Schmitt’s
concept of the political is far removed from the idea of ‘the political’ coming
from politicos—of citizens, and political as servant to the polis, releasing
Kierkegaard’s exception as the critic in the face of the dangers of political
totality whether that be in the form of democracy or authoritarianism.
Democracy and dictatorship do not concern Kierkegaard, but the freedom of
the single individual within the modern polis—the city. Within Kierkegaard’s
modern polis, the single individual is allowed to walk freely whether as
flâneur or priest; he/she is only sub specie aeternis (the flâneur on the city
streets will discussed in detail in the next chapter). The Anti-Climacus works
of 1848 present the negative and the positive conditions (living in despair and
faith) of existing in the world. The writings cater to both those under
dictatorship and to those (whom Kierkegaard wrote for in his own lifetime)
living in the dawn of modern democracy. In an era of posterity and possibility,
the modern polis is inclusive of human beings more than before, and
Kierkegaard’s texts guide the reader to remain undeterred by material wishes,
or lust for power and supremacy, yet at the same time not to turn one’s back
on human existence but to live as the critic within the modern realm of
possibilities, of the politikos of modernity and postmodernity.
Kierkegaard’s indirect politics is exactly what Schmitt wants to

demolish. Yet this is the same author of Fear and Trembling and Repetition
that Schmitt saw as the “[…] only great figure among the romantics” (PR,
166) and “[…] who demonstrated the vital intensity” (PT, 15). In Leviathan in
the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes, Schmitt speaks of Hobbes’ noble
confrontation with the “murky distinctions of indirect powers” (L, 86).
Schmitt wants to clarify and purify the political, shown by his stark prose:
“We have to recognize that the political is the total” (PT, 2), and in the
opening line of The Concept of the Political: “The concept of the state
presupposes the concept of the political” (CP, 19). The ‘murky distinctions of
indirect powers’ only disturb this clarity of the political in creating a world of
a ‘with us or against’ mentality which one experiences in times of war,
violence and catastrophe. Schmitt blames liberalism most of all for slowing
down the power of the sovereign, of Macht-Politik. Schmitt is correct when he
explains that “[…] liberalism provides a series of methods for hindering and
controlling the state and government’s power” (CP, 70). In this sentence we
can substitute Kierkegaard’s single individual for Schmitt’s liberalism.
Schmitt changes Descartes formula: “The protego ergo obligo is the cogito
ergo sum of the state” (CP, 52). Here we have the contract that we owe to the
sovereign, the contract that forces us to live under a Macht-Politik of the
friend/enemy condition. We can change this formula again for the single
individual as cogito ergo ago instead.
Kierkegaard’s indirect politics is also at odds with Schmitt’s direct
politics by Schmitt’s appropriation of war in his Macht-Politik. Schmitt’s use
of the potential of war is based on the despair of the Macht-Politik. The
condition of Macht-Politik needs war or at least the subjects’ constant fear of
it. Schmitt writes: “What always matters is the possibility of the extreme case
taking place, the real war, and the decision whether this situation has or has
not arrived” (CP, 35). War needs politics then and politics needs war: “[…]
war as a real possibility is still present today, and this fact is crucial for the
friend-enemy antithesis and for the recognition of politics” (CP, 37). George
Schwab makes a note in The Concept of the Political that Schmitt “has never
entertained the thought of a totalitarian state” (CP, 39). Yet how does one
defend this statement when Schmitt welcomed the usurpation of power by the
Nazi Party which became the Third Reich and with which Schmitt showed no
remorse or regret in having aligned himself despite their totalitarian state and
annihilation of six million Jews, even years after the fall of the Third Reich?
His only regret was that the Nazis did not win WWII. In his critique of
liberalism, Schmitt is looking for its adversary: “Dictatorship is the opposite
of discussion” (PT, 63), to forge his own friend/enemy distinction because
liberalism is “everlasting discussion”, and, even worse, “negotiation” (PT, 63).
War is the extremis of the decision that creates anew. It is war, for Schmitt,
that is “the father of all things” (PR, 138). As Schmitt’s predecessor de
Maistre declares, “War is divine.”42
For Ernst Jünger, Carl Schmitt’s friend, war is real life where there are
no rules. For Schmitt there is one way or the other, and a great void in
between. But there is a way other than simply drawing friend/enemy
distinctions, and that position is the in-between, the Mellemspil, the margin or
‘note well’ of a pseudonym such as Nicolaus Notabene or Hilarius
Bookbinder. With Schmitt, once a decision is made, all conversation is over.
But there is a pact in democratic discussion, as there is a modification and
corrective in Kierkegaard’s writings. And although Climacus makes remarks
such as this: “To me that just as there is something human even in the horrors
of the bloodiest wars compared with this diplomatic silence” (SKS7, 315 /
CUP, 344), Kierkegaard also makes clear: “Nothing is more foreign to my
soul and nothing is more foreign to my nature (the dialectical), nothing more
impossible than fanaticism and fury” (SKS16, 114 / PV, 133). In
Kierkegaard’s authorship, there is always space for the lowly and the outcast
present everywhere in the world, and his writings demand a corrective to any
form of government, whether led by one or many. Schmitt demands Macht-
politik, where a strong leader must rule over the barbarity that is inherent in all
human beings. Schmitt’s exception must only come in the form of
authoritarian rule, otherwise there will be chaos because the exception is real
life: “In the exception the power of real life breaks through the crust of a
mechanism that has become torpid by repetition” (PT, 15). What Schmitt
forgets is the age-old Judeo-Christian principle of hospitality, as difficult as it
has been, brought into modernity in lending one’s hand to “the widow, the
orphan and the stranger” (see for example: Exodus 22:21-22, 23:9; Jeremiah
7:6; Ezekiel 22:7; Zechariah 7:10), ironically enough grounded in the
foundation of Israel. This breaks with the friend/enemy distinction, and aligns
with the idea of politikos. Hence, there is a break with the children of light and
children of dark idea. Rather, there is a voice for the other, even of the most
despicable kind; witness Johannes de silentio‘s rendition of the merman story
in Fear and Trembling, or of the depiction of the aesthete of Either/Or, or
even the place of Richard III, Shakespeare’s most demonic creation, as
providing a better glimpse into humanity than all the moral systems of
philosophy. These are types of exceptions that cloud the world-view of
children of light and children of dark and confront Schmitt’s fear of “murky
distinctions of indirect powers” which finds itself in Kierkegaard’s diverse
examples of passionate existence on the stage of life such as Socrates, Christ,
or Fru Heiberg.
iv. The Demonic
The final point of this section on ‘political despair’ is the presence of the
demonic in Schmitt’s political thinking from the perspective of The Sickness
unto Death and even from within Schmitt’s own texts. Schmitt closely read
the passages on the ‘demonic’ and ‘inclosing reserve’ (det Indesluttede) from
The Concept of Anxiety which he quotes and comments on in his diaries from
1914.43 Later in The Concept of the Political, Schmitt’s declares: “The
political is the most intense and extreme antagonism” (CP, 29). Hence, the
only worthy conversants in modernity are the likes of Donoso Cortés and
Mikhail Bakunin. Schmitt shows great interest and respect for both thinkers
because they both view the political as extreme antagonism: the former
representing Catholic authoritarianism; the latter now the father of anarchism
and syndicalism. By continuing his method of quoting others to present his
point, while pretending to remain objective, Schmitt forges the demonic with
some relish. What emerges is a two-fold demonic: that of the anarchist-defiant
type, most perfectly realised in the character of Stavrogin in Dostoyevsky’s
Demons; and of the fascist-absolutist type, manifested in Hitler. Bakunin
seeks to destroy this idea of God, and does so, as Schmitt says, “[…] with
Scythian fury” (PT, 50). With the era of monarchism coming to a close, and
with 1848 as another highpoint in its demise, Cortés’ authoritarianism
becomes more extreme by attempting to bring back a ruthless God of all-
consuming fire: “[…] he thus retained the self-confident grandeur of a
spiritual descendent of the Grand Inquisitors” (PT, 57).
Cortés’ contempt for humanity knows no bounds, so why does Schmitt
align himself with and proceed to quote Cortés throughout his two most
famous texts? The friend/enemy distinction reaches its apex in the likes of
Cortés and Proudhon as a parallel to Schmitt and Bakunin. The use of
religious symbolism is unrelenting in Cortés, almost portraying himself as the
angel to Proudhon’s demon, triggering Proudhon to jest that the Second
Inquisition was on its way.44 This friend/enemy distinction was polarised in
that, for Cortés, the people are evil and the sovereign is good, and for
Proudhon and Bakunin, the opposite is the case. In The Concept of the
Political, Schmitt gives nearly a whole page to describing Oliver Cromwell’s
hatred of the Spaniard as an example of “the high points of politics.” This
‘high point of politics’ is evident in Cromwell’s clarity when revealing the
enemy by declaring the Spaniard to be the “natural enemy,” and “so make it
not to be” (CP, 68). This clarity in viewing the enemy is the fear of the enemy
and of oneself of refusing to view the eternal in humanity, and instead living
each moment intensely aware that rebellion is possible at any given second.
That is a form of the demonic that we find in The Sickness unto Death. There
is not only the demonic of Dostoevsky’s Stavrogin or Ivan Karamazov who
personally reject all rules and authority in their failed quest for meaning and
descent into despair, but there is also a more terrifying demonic power in the
nineteenth and twentieth century, that of paranoid militarism and homogenous
nationalism. Kierkegaard does not take the opposite view of Schmitt, for that
very often ends up in the same place. Kierkegaard fears the public or crowd as
much as he would fear Schmitt’s dictator. The anarchist Bakunin inverts
Schmitt’s political stance, dissolving government altogether and giving power
to the people, thereby making the people the ultimate sovereign. Schmitt is
aware of this and gives his last sentence in Political Theology to Bakunin:
“Bakunin had to become in theory the theologian of the antitheological and in
practice the dictator of an antidictatorship” (PT, 66). In investigating the effect
of Schmitt’s political with the idea of the demonic, Walter Benjamin’s
intriguing statement has some significance here: “The concept of the demonic
comes into play where the concept of modernity converges with Catholicism”
(A, J4a, 4).
When the novelist Robert Musil has a protagonist say: “It is
Dostoyevsky, Strindberg and Freud who have laid bare the demonic sub-
strata,”45 he could have included Kierkegaard because of his psychological
explorations of the demonic in The Concept of Anxiety and The Sickness unto
Death. Anti-Climacus describes the one in defiance as seeing himself as “[…]
infinitely superior over other men, his justification, demonically understood,
for being what he is” (SKS11, 185 /SUD, 72). But this demonic quality is
only really found in the poets, “the real ones”, which are, returning to Schmitt
and Constantin’s thesis, ordinarily the exception. When this exception is
brought to political paradigms, the result can be disastrous. The roles are
reversed: Schmitt and Cortés’ fear of the demonic in the people is replaced by
the demonic in the powers that govern that were subsequently manifested in
Stalinism and The Third Reich. Thus, Schmitt becomes more adamant and
severe. Towards the end of The Concept of the Political, Schmitt declares:
“The high points of politics are simultaneously the moments in which the
enemy is, in concrete clarity, recognised as the enemy” (CP, 67). Given this
argument, Cromwell and Cortés become understandable allies. The demonic
man is also “afraid of eternity, afraid that it will separate him from his,
demonically understood, infinite superiority over other men, his justification,
demonically understood, for being what he is. —Himself is what he wills to
be” (SKS11, 186 / SUD, 72). The demonic one, in his political despair, usurps
the eternal into the sovereign on earth in a new, modern form of absolute
authoritarianism.
Earlier in Kierkegaard’s authorship, Johannes de silentio writes: “The
demonic can also express itself as contempt for men, a contempt, please note,
that does not lead the demonic himself to act contemptuously; on the contrary,
he has his strength in his awareness that he is better than all those who judge
him” (SKS4, 194 / FT, 106). The sovereign becomes the judge over all, and
while Stavrogin’s story ends in suicide, the sovereign as demonic in the
political ends in totalitarianism and sometimes extreme violence. Anti-
Climacus’ description of the demonic man in defiance is one holding tighter
and tighter to his sovereignty, building into a “demonic rage”, with one slip of
inconsistency or hesitation he will be exposed: “Precisely because the
demonic person has an internal consistency and is consistent in the
consistency of evil, he also has a totality to lose” (SKS11, 220 / SUD, 108).
Not only is there the danger of rebellion coming from the outside at any
moment in his creation of the political realm, the demonic one rebels against
existence in his adherence to totality: “Rebelling against all existence, it feels
that it has obtained evidence against it, against its goodness” (SKS11, 187
/SUD, 73). Eerily echoing the rule of a Stalin figure, Anti-Climacus
articulates the inner torment and ruthlessness of the ‘demonic tyrant: “It is
possible to imagine a demonic tyrant like that, one who craves to speak with
someone about his torment and then successively consumes a considerable
number of people, for to become his confidant means certain death: as soon as
the tyrant has spoken in his presence, he is put to death” (SKS11, 181 / SUD,
66). Political despair reaches a peak in Cortés’ fear of the new world and is
neatly formulated in Schmitt’s theory of the sovereign and definition of a
political world of only friends and enemies, constantly threatened by the
philosophical pathos heard in Macbeth’s cry of demonic despair of a world
that is fundamentally “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”
Shakespeare’s Macbeth, in contrast to the intellectual Hamlet, suffers from an
even more overflowing imagination that unleashes his anxiety, and from
anxiety to despair, he becomes ‘a demonic tyrant’ referred to in The Sickness
unto Death, committing regicide, creating civil war, and condemning himself
and anyone he can with him, to death.
4. Kierkegaardian Praxis
Popular opinion maintains that the world needs a republic, needs a new social
order and new religion—but no one considers that what the world, confused
simply by too much knowledge, needs is a Socrates.
Anti-Climacus, The Sickness unto Death
This section presents Kierkegaard’s form of praxis as not only a contrast and
foil to Schmittian politics but as a method of also living within a Schmittian
political system. This will emerge out of political dialogue
(Marxist/Schmittian), through the inner (‘preacher of repentance’) and the
outer (the polemical writer) aspects of praxis, and through the use of
prototypes (Kierkegaard’s Christ and Socrates) for existing and engaging in
and with the world. This is not an argument for an official philosophy of
community in Kierkegaard’s authorship, but at the same time it does not leave
out the possibility of community, as Kierkegaard’s writings act as a foil to the
passive comfort of community that becomes somnambulant in life and
accepting of intolerance and the lazy refusal of seeing the connection between
a plurality of the self and plurality within a community. This final section
explores the possibilities of a Kierkegaardian praxis in an evolving
community in light of the relationship and conversation with Schmitt.
i. The Marxist-Schmitt Conversation
Lukács had already discovered Schmitt by the time of the publication of

Political Romanticism, and gave a favourable review of the latter’s book in
1928.46 Lukács’ hatred for all things ‘imperialistic’, ‘capitalistic’ and
‘bourgeois’ propelled him to desperately seek an alternative in the age of
anxiety in the first two decades of the twentieth century. For Lukács, Schmitt
seemed to be heading in the right direction with his critique of ‘political
romanticism’. In the preface to Political Romanticism, Schmitt maintains that
society has not found its own ‘form’ (PR, 13). Schmitt continues in the
preface to Political Romanticism: “Today the ‘backstage’ that conceals the
real movement of reality is constructed everywhere. This betrays the
insecurity of the time and its profound sense of being deceived” (PR, 14). Not
only is Schmitt using the stage in his language (as Lukács does throughout his
authorship), he also shows the problem of his times as living in deception,
following Kierkegaard’s ‘doing something and saying another’ from Works of
Love, and the gap between gesture and form within a new, fragmented
worldview that interests Lukács in his early writings. In Political Theology,
Schmitt uses the word ‘form’ again, this time more clearly in reference to the
Law: “Form can thus mean, first, the transcendental “condition” of juristic
cognition; second, a regularity, an evenness, derived from repeated practice
and professional reasoning” (PT, 28). By ‘transcendental condition’, Schmitt
is moving towards the exception that takes the place of form that is able to
withstand and make the law, and which becomes stable. For Schmitt and
Lukács, the gesture comes first, followed by the form. By the time of The
Destruction of Reason, Lukács refers to Schmitt of Political Romanticism as
Schmitt’s pre-fascist phase (DR, 652), and has long since become the enemy.
Lukács devotes ten pages to Schmitt towards the close of The
Destruction of Reason. As with every interlocutor in the book, it is a critique,
yet it is more moderated than with his other contemporary Heidegger.
Schmitt’s language speaks for itself. What emerges in the discussion of
Schmitt is Lukács’ own formation of the friend-enemy distinction, thus falling
into the criterion of decisionism in Schmitt’s friend-enemy and Kierkegaard’s
‘infinitely saved’ and ‘infinitely lost’ of Two Ages:A Literary Review in
making the radical choice of either fascism or socialism where bourgeois
mass-democracy and the middle-class would be thereby crushed in the
middle. Taking note of the hysteria and apocalyptic chaos in the war of all
wars between Stalin’s Russia and Hitler’s Germany, Lukács still manages to
give a noteworthy summary of Schmitt’s 1920s work. Lukács recognises that
Schmitt is not a restoration theorist but a reactionary thinker, in that a
restoration thinker wants to bring back or restore say the king into his rightful
place, while the reactionary thinker might call for a dictatorship to oppose the
revolutionary forces. Lukács points this out through Schmitt’s allegiance with
Cortés: “Cortés was important because he achieved a break with ‘restoration’

ideology and grasped that since there were no longer any kings, there was also
no legitimacy in the traditional sense. For this reason, he called outright for a
dictatorship to oppose the revolutionary forces” (DR, 653). Here we have the
classic friend/enemy distinction of Bolshevik versus Nazi, where dictatorship
must have complete control of the law. All three thinkers (Schmitt, Cortés and
Lukács) fall into this way of thinking, and both ideologies need to be
aggressive to eliminate the other. Lukács quotes one of Schmitt’s more
alarming sentences: “The core of the matter is found in war. The character of
total war determines the character and shape of the State’s totality. But total
war receives its meaning through the total enemy” (DR, 660). What is erased
is rationality, or that the rational becomes irrational by the very madness of
the Russian Front in WWII. The form has usurped the gesture and the form as
exception allows the political to remain within the realm of the Russian Front.
In The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, Schmitt, commenting on Marx,
writes: “The result must be, as with all rationalisms, a dictatorship of the
leading rationalists” (CPD, 54). And anticipating the disasters the befell so
many people in various sectors of society in their political rationalisations in
the twentieth century, he points out in Political Theology that: “Precisely
because of its massive rationalism, this philosophy can easily turn into an
irrationalist conception of history, since it conceives all thought as being a
function and an emanation of vital processes” (PT, 43).
What lies in the middle is mass-democracy, and for both Schmitt and
Lukács, the decadence of bourgeois democracy. Commenting on 1848, the
protagonist from Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities comments: “You
see, it was that fateful year, ’48, which made the middle classes independent
of the aristocracy, to their common loss.”47 Kierkegaard, Marx, Lukács and
Schmitt all view the middle-class as having their cake and eating it, in feeding
off the upper and the lower classes, in their hatred of the monarchy and their
obsession for private property. The concept of the political cannot and does
not exist as such and Lukács shows Schmitt’s point of view as the political
that only develops in democracy in the antithesis of democracy and liberalism
leading to “[…] the inevitable growth of mass democracy into dictatorship”
(DR, 655). This is what Schmitt hopes will happen, as the dictatorship decides
on the exception at all times. Schmitt says it so clearly himself: “The Führer
himself determines the content and scope of a transgression against the law”
(DR, 660). Lukács discerns Schmitt’s fear in the developments in the
nineteenth century as it “[…] placed culture, progress, education and non-
political science in this false antithesis to politics. And Schmitt [like all the
Nazis and their followers] saw in this tendency hostility towards a ‘strong
Germany’ (DR, 659).
Where does that leave Kierkegaard? Does he also fall victim to the
friend/enemy distinction? The answer is no. Kierkegaard’s indirect politics
disrupts Schmitt’s concept of the ‘political’, creating instead a Mellemspil in
the political sphere that the ruling power might not be able to pin down or
even control. For both Schmitt and Lukács (by the time of History and Class
Consciousness, 1922), there is no space for indirect politics. Everything in
society is assimilated in the political. With mass-democracy, the exception
cannot function. In the same way that Kierkegaard rails against the crowd
(Mængde), Schmitt and Lukács fear the potential for success of mass-
democracy. Schmitt cannot choose the Bolsheviks because, first, nationalism
will always be stronger for him than socialism and, second, “Communism
would be the first true democracy” (CPD, 29). Later Lukács describes
Schmitt’s position on mass democracy: “In Schmitt’s view, mass democracy
exploded that homogeneous basis of fundamentally aligned interests which
had been the bedrock of liberal ideas in, for instance, the English
parliamentary system” (DR, 656). Schmitt sees mass democracy as that which
is to blame for the collapse and confusion of so many countries in modern
Europe: “[…] the crisis springs from the consequences of modern mass-
democracy and in the final analysis from the contradiction of a liberal
individualism burdened by moral pathos and a democratic sentiment governed
essentially by political ideals” (CPD, 17). Kierkegaard’s indirect politics
confronts both mass-democracy (the crowd) and the friend/enemy distinction
in dictatorship and democracy. Schmitt sees democracy as a fallacy, because it
is in fact related to dictatorship: “Bolshevism and Fascism by contrast are, like
all dictatorships, certainly anti-liberal but not necessarily antidemocratic”
(CPD, 16). But the Marxist–Schmitt conversation fails to grasp the necessity
of the gadfly in the political system, the negative critical subject, such as
Socrates, and in this case, a writer such as Kierkegaard, even after the triumph
of a political system, because soon after cracks emerge and the negative
subject must always have breathing space.
ii. The Preacher of Repentance (Inward Praxis)
Kierkegaard’s inward praxis comes in the form of the ‘preacher of repentance’

(Bodsprædikant). The preacher of repentance “[…] wants to castigate
rigorously the vices of the age […]” (SKS16, 32 / PV, 49). This term is
mentioned most substantially in Christian Discourses. The figure is a like a
secret agent from navigates between being a dandy of the salons to a solitary
hermit, as Kierkegaard describes in his journals in 1848:
But here lurked the secret agent—that went unobserved. For someone first
to be a dissipated voluptuary, a hero of the salons, and then many years
later act the saint, as they call it, this holds no fascination. But then they
are not quite used to having a penitent, a preacher of repentance, begin for
safety’s sake in the costume of a party lion. This has also enriched almost
beyond measure my knowledge of mankind (Pap. IX A 155, 1848).
This figure presses hard on the single individual; it is something that is

rigorous (streng), but is also compared to the breeze, the gentle breeze from
Kings I: 19:12, which is as “rigorous as the earnestness of eternity” (SKS10,
202 / CD, 192). Through the fog of doubt comes the clarity and earnestness of
the preacher of repentance but who paradoxically approaches like a gentle
breeze: “Perhaps you think that a preacher of repentance is like a rushing
violent wind that terrifies physically. No, the true preacher of repentance, like
God’s voice, also comes in a gentle breeze.”
The preacher of repentance is found in the discourse: “All things must
serve us for good—when we love God”. The ‘God’ again acts as the eternal
that emerges from within the ’preacher of repentance’. It is life as conviction,
as decisiveness, and as face to face with the abyss. The ‘preacher of
repentance’ is the ‘when’, which “[…] becomes like an arrow in your heart; it
will remain there until the end” (SKS10, 202 / CD, 193). Every individual is
to be prepared for this, and this message is: “Deep within every person’s
heart, there dwells his preacher of repentance […] he preaches only to you. He
does not preach in any church to an assembled crowd.” Instead this ‘when’ is
inclusive to all, but difficult to accommodate. It is the dichotomy of burden
and release, the fear and trembling and the gentle breeze. Away from state,
church and sovereign power, this ‘when’ “[…] preaches in the secret recesses
of the soul [i Hjertets Lønkammer] […] when the stillness makes you
completely solitary.”
For Kierkegaard, there is also a consolation belonging to the ‘suffering
one’ however, in the ‘God’ who, as the eternal, confronts exclusiveness and
gives the preacher of repentance space within every single individual: “In the
dark night of despair, when every light has gone out for the sufferer, there is
still one place where the light is kept burning—it is along this way the
despairing one must go” (SKS10, 205 / CD, 195). The sovereign ruler will
inevitably see the possibility of each individual possessing such an internal
preacher of repentance as dangerous. This is the way the Jesuits were viewed
in the Catholic Church and the Spanish and Portuguese Empires, as they were
a threat and a destabilisation to the sovereign power, in that they strictly
answer to someone else. This can take different forms, and helps one to
scrutinise oneself within political society and community—inwardly. A
comment is made by Lukács at the age of eighty-one under the aspect of a
Kierkegaardian ‘preacher of repentance’ and as an example of an awareness
of inward deepening, when looking back at his development and his life.
Lukács had written: “Mental confusion is not always chaos. It may strengthen
the internal contradictions for the time being but in the long run it will lead to
their resolution. Thus my ethics tended in the direction of praxis, action and
hence towards politics” (HCC, xi). Lukács had made various transformations
in his writing career, through the use of his own preacher of repentance, going
from Soul and Form (1911) to Theory of the Novel (1920), to History and
Class Consciousness (1923), and yet again onto Destruction of Reason
(1954). Schmitt seems to sidestep the preacher of repentance. Schmitt does

not use this form of inwardness, and his politics enters the sphere of violence,
exclusiveness and tyranny as a result. The idea of the ‘preacher of repentance’
is the way to the ‘dark recesses’ of human nature, the ‘gentle breeze’ that is
‘as rigorous as the earnestness of eternity’. There could be an interesting
discussion in this connection with the argument about the private judgement
in religion carried in Catholic circles in the nineteenth century. Basically, the
dominant strand of Catholicism committed itself to the principle of authority,
and that the Pope of Rome had supreme authority in all matters of doctrine
and order, and that the private judgement would lead to anarchy—as Catholic
apologists such as Cardinal Mercier believed was happening in the Protestant
world.
Kierkegaard tells a story about a great thinker who writes a masterpiece
on the nature of God, it becomes world famous, and he becomes “[…]
protected by favourable conditions, which are indeed a necessity for scholarly
research” (SKS10, 207 / CD, 198). But soon after, he finds himself ‘plunged
into wretchedness’, and a ‘doubt awakens in his soul’. So he seeks a pastor to
help him through these difficult days. The only advice the pastor can offer the
thinker is to read a special book on God’s love, the very book the same
thinker had written! The thinker had no awareness of his own self, and
Kierkegaard concludes: “[…] he [the great thinker] had lived under the
delusion that when it had been demonstrated that God is love it followed as a
matter of course that you and I believe it.” He did not have the ‘preacher of
repentance’, that ‘when’, which keeps the spirit of man fructifying and young,
and which keeps the love of ‘the God’ “eternally young, as God is eternal, in
the first tension of passion, but more and more inwardly” (SKS10, 208 / CD,
199). The preacher of repentance is present throughout the 1848 authorship:
the sub-title of the first part of Practice in Christianity is called “For
Awakening and Inward Deepening”. The epigraph is from Virgil—Procul o
procul este profani, and shows Anti-Climacus as the preacher here warning
those without the ‘preacher of repentance’, to encourage self-awareness and to
combat self-deception and comparison—two important deterrents thriving in
modernity and which the writer of Christian Discourses is confronting.
Kierkegaard writes in that text:[…] this little ‘when’ has infinitely more
power when in a person’s inner being it is the preacher of repentance who
says the word to this person. The power of the word has overturned thrones,
changed the shape of the world” (SKS10, 204 / CD, 194). This ‘when’ is a
form of love. The ‘preacher of repentance’ is present to make the human
being aware and “to seek the certitude of spirit.” This continues the trajectory
of Kierkegaard’s humanity - from rubbing the magic lamp to unleash spirit, to
the restless seeking of spirit that can change the shape of the world.
Kierkegaard writes: “Keep him awake in incertitude in order to seek after
certitude, this the preacher of repentance can do” (SKS10, 204 / CD, 194).
iii. The Polemical Writer (Outward Praxis)
Schmitt focuses on the outward praxis of the polemical writer briefly when he
writes: “First, all political concepts, images, and terms have a polemical
meaning” (CP, 30). Schmitt is certainly a polemical writer to the extent that he
gives seminal critiques of liberalism, political romanticism and democracy.
We have seen that his critique of political romanticism brings him closer to
Cortés and another form of political romanticism in his teleological
reactionary stance, and that his critique of democracy ultimately usurps
democracy into a form of dictatorship which he wishes to re-establish, which
transforms into a new, more ruthless form of authoritarianism. From
beginning to end Kierkegaard remains a polemical writer, from his first
articles as a student to his last days with selling his first nine issues of
Øieblikket on the streets. A quote from the introduction to Tillich’s The
Socialist Decision highlights where one loses the distinction of being a
polemical writer: “A movement that no longer questions the rightness of its
own assumptions has become ossified.”48 Kierkegaard separates himself from
Schmitt by his constant refusal to view the establishment as the sovereign as
absolute in any way: “[…] and yet it is by no means so that it is the witness to
the truth who claims to be more than human: it is an acoustic illusion; the flaw
is in the establishment’s imagining itself to be the divine” (Pap. IX B 51:4,
1848). Climacus already advised to give to the relative what is relative, and to
the absolute what is absolute. Kierkegaard views the dangers of the allegiance
of the public in the form of the crowd with the establishment as the sovereign
power on the single individual in Two Ages. He gives consideration to the eras
of revolution, when at least both the polemical writer and the ‘preacher of
repentance’ are heard and projected outwardly: “In spirited times, times of
passionate upheaval, even when a people wants to put the desolate idea of
destruction and total subversion into effect, at least there is no public; there
are parties and there is concreteness” (SKS8, 86 / TA, 90). And yet while we
can accuse Kierkegaard of being uncritical towards his Christian God, he is
always doubting, questioning, and seeing this paradox in his difficult loyalty
this Christian God, which keeps the authorship and inquiry open.
Central tenets of Marxism include raising self-critical questions and re-
evaluating the traditional Marxist attitude towards society. This has been
distorted in various ways in Soviet Russia into consolidated dictatorships.
Schmitt’s polemical position ends with nationalist authoritarianism and the
clear consolidation of the friend/enemy distinction. Kierkegaard’s polemical
writing might end with the Christian God, but because the Christian God is
nowhere to be found, the communication is indirect, and the eternal is within
each single individual, and thus the writing remains polemical and open to all.
The democracy that Schmitt fears is the democracy of critical doubt, of the
polemical sort that sits comfortably with Kierkegaard’s indirect politics:
“Democracy is the expression of a political relativism and a scientific
orientation that are liberated from miracles and dogmas and based on human
understanding and critical doubt [the italics are my own]” (PT, 42). The
emergence of Kierkegaard’s indirect politics is also helped by the emergence
of the modern city and mass culture. The 1848 writings provide a thorn to the
establishment and ‘the present age’. Schmitt needs the crowd in order for the
friend/enemy distinction to establish itself:
An enemy only exists when, at least potentially, one fighting collectivity

of people confronts a similar collectivity. The enemy is solely the public
enemy, because everything that has a relationship to such a collectivity
of men, particularly to a whole nation, becomes public by virtue of such
a relationship (CP, 28).
At the same time, the age of discussion must be erased for Schmitt, and
this can be done with a crowd that is governed by an absolute sovereign that
decides continually on the exception without controversy. Kierkegaard’s
polemical writer always remains controversial and a corrective to the
established power.
Kierkegaard’s texts, when viewed as polemical texts, confront the
dangers apparent in parts of Christian Discourses on the forgiving heart and
suffering derision leading to martyrdom. Hamlet’s question is at issue here:
“Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer / The slings and arrows of
outrageous fortune, / Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, / And by
opposing end them?” The particular discourse, “The Weaker I become, the
stronger God becomes in me”, shows another aspect in the tension and
dilemma of Hamlet’s question. For Schmitt, in politics, “What always matters
is only the possibility of conflict” (CP, 39), while for Kierkegaard what
matters is that the religious spirit is in conflict with politics and the world.
Becoming aware of inwardness and transforming one’s existence into
passionate praxis is central when reading Kierkegaard’s 1848 texts. It is then
that the preacher of repentance can become outward in the guise of the
polemical writer in the case of Kierkegaard, and that inwardness becomes an
expression for praxis. This idea of a ‘spirit in conflict’ is the conflict that
“God pertains unconditionally to every human being.” (SKS10, 136 / CD,
125) But this is the secret conflict, and in this particular discourse one must
become weaker so that God becomes stronger. Does a human being then
become stronger through the power of God in this contradiction? Does one die
to the world? This is the dilemma, but it is the polemical writer as the
representative of outward praxis who remains struggling with this dilemma.
iv. Socratic-Christlike Citizenship
With Kierkegaard’s vision of Socrates and Christ, there emerges a radicalised

kind of citizenship, away from the liberal tradition. While there is much
difficulty in arguing for a form of community in Kierkegaard’s authorship,
there is much validity in arguing for contributing effectively and positively
within political communities. This comes in the form of Kierkegaard’s
Socrates and Christ, both executed by the State. Both are prototypes of
indirect politics; and both offer examples of ways to break down the
friend/enemy distinction in Schmitt’s political practice. In the very last two
pages of The Point of View, Kierkegaard begins and ends the “Postscript to
the ‘Two Notes’” with reference to Christ and Socrates. This is a conscious
construction on behalf of the text’s author, as it was to be another final say
that Kierkegaard begins and ends with Socrates and Christ, embodying the
preacher of repentance and the human being as polemical. One vital
distinction between Kierkegaard and Schmitt is the imitative backdrop of the
prototypes of Christ and Socrates, who are concerned about the single
individual, and the prototype guides one through a concrete praxis, which is
social and open to the polis. They are also both individuals with no sovereign
power, preferring to live on the streets, amongst the people, providing the
thorn to the establishment and powers that be. Perhaps the weaker aspect of
Marx’s doctrine and the various subsequent Marxist projects implemented in
twentieth century politics is a result of a lack of critical-polemical prototypes,
which lead us to imitate as concrete human beings over abstract human ideas,
and away from pathological collectivism and subservience to an uncritical
sovereign.
In Part I of Christian Discourses, Kierkegaard’s argument contains
deep-rooted social theory aligned with the prototypes, which is in stark
contrast to the horrific results of rigid nationalism aligned to the exception in
the sovereign manifested in Nazi Germany, Mussolini’s Italy and Franco’s
Spain, and in Marxism in the forms of Stalinism, later Maoism and Pol Pot’s
‘Year Zero’ regime in Cambodia. Both Kierkegaard and Lukács took up the
call to go to the very end of the road from the Skillevei, but Kierkegaard’s
prototypes might yet prove more fruitful and have less disastrous
consequences, in the use of them as living men. Socrates is the quintessential
gadfly and thorn to the status quo and political authority, and incites fellow
human beings to self-critique, awareness and action through irony, the
maieutic method and questioning. Christ gives a ‘sermon on the mount’ that
would offend almost any political regime. Kierkegaard’s two favourite texts
from the New Testament are Matthew and James, because they both imply
praxis. Schmitt’s ‘political’ cannot abide by these sorts of prototypes: for
Schmitt’s ideas, Kierkegaard’s prototypes must remain solely within
philosophy and religion respectively. But the perseverance and lasting power
of these two particular prototypes is due to the indirect and essential relevance
they have on the political realm by their very movements and actions in the
polis.
The clash between individual and state is actually overcome through
reading Kierkegaard’s 1848 authorship, and this establishes a powerful
critique of the Schmittian friend/enemy distinctions, between the national
sovereigns, the bourgeois-proletariat clash and the Huntington ‘clash of
civilisations’. Agamben articulates these theorists’ fears of situations in which
the praxis of the individual (such as with the prototypes of Socrates and
Christ) begins to influence and have a genuine impact on sovereign power:
“What is a human praxis that is wholly delivered over to a juridical world? It
is as if when faced with the opening of a wholly anomic space for human
action both the ancients and moderns retreated in fright.”49 Added to the two
prototypes, Kierkegaard creates his own prototype, Anti-Climacus, to confront
the establishment as well as the single individual as reader. Anti-Climacus is
another ambiguous figure who is not strictly scholarly and who is not strictly
upbuilding, as he tells us this in the first line of The Sickness unto Death. He
uses Socrates and Christ as examples through his two texts. He tackles the
varieties of despair, the difficulties of attaining selfhood, the release in living
in imitation of someone like Christ, and the presentation of the seven
categories of offence (Forargelsens). Schmitt, on the other hand, at all times
wants to keep state and society separate, with the state maintaining its strong
grip on an otherwise powerless society: “The concept of the state should be
determined by political means, the concept of society (in essence non-
political) by economic means” (CP, 76). According to Schmitt, the great
catastrophe of 1848 is that the distinction between state and society lost its
previous clarity (CP, 24). Schmitt is resigned to saying that: “The entire
world, the universe, is a conversation” (PR, 140). Society, for Schmitt, has
become “[…] a region of brutal immorality” (CP, 77), which must be kept at
all times under the rein of the state and prevented from any impediment to the
state. Here Schmitt is arguing again in the same vein as Donoso Cortés. In
contrast, Kierkegaard’s indirect politics is assured through the constant
reminder and use of Socrates and Christ as prototypes in helping the reader
understand how one goes about utilising and articulating the preacher of
repentance and the polemical human being in the face of the state and society.
In conclusion, there is a difference between Kierkegaard and Schmitt’s
respective zones of exception, and through this distinction a critique of
Schmitt via Kierkegaard can be made. Kierkegaard’s masked exception and
inward and outward praxis in the writings shed more light on the inherent
ambiguity and Mellemspil of Kierkegaard’s authorship. Schmitt is present in
the writings of the ‘enemy’ of Georg Lukács where they are initially allied in
attacking indolent, irresponsible democracies, and he emerges again in
another ‘enemy’ in the writings of Walter Benjamin who is Jewish, stateless
and quasi-Marxist. And although I have confronted and exposed the dangers
and problems in Schmitt’s political thinking via indirect politics, Schmitt’s

thought nevertheless provides a powerful warning to liberal-democracies and
reminds us of the very real possibility of Schmittian politics getting the upper
hand at the cost of losing our original concepts and pursuit of freedom as
critical, transformative and inclusive individuals and citizens. Just as
Kierkegaard is the hidden observer in the psychological analysis of anxiety in
the human being, Schmitt is the “besieged watcher” who desired at all costs to
protect, restore and preserve structures and boundaries. Many today still take
his thought for the best option to use for practical politics. Derrida uses this
term “beseiged watchman” for Schmitt in a key footnote from The Politics of
Friendship:
[…] this thought and this work repeatedly presaged the fearsome world
that was announcing itself from as early as the 1920s. As though the fear
of seeing that which comes to pass take place, in effect had honed the
gaze of this besieged watchman. Following our hypothesis, the scene
would be thus: lucidity and fear not only drove this terrified and
insomniac watcher to anticipate the storms and seismic movements that
would wreak havoc with the historical field, the political space, the
borders of concepts and countries, the axiomatics of European law…etc.
Such a “watcher” would thereby have been more attuned than so many
others to the fragility and “deconstructible” precariousness of structures,
borders and axioms that he wished to protect, restore and “conserve” at
all costs.50
Four
LOAFERS OF HISTORY (WALTER BENJAMIN)
Ah, where have they gone, the amblers of yesteryear? Where have they gone,
those loafing heroes of folk song, those vagabonds who roam from one mill to
another and bed down under the stars? Have they vanished along with footpaths,
with grasslands and clearings, with nature?
Milan Kundera, Slowness
I loafe and invite my soul,

I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass
Walt Whitman, Song of Myself
Not unlike Kierkegaard’s body of work, the sprawling mass and wealth of
Walter Benjamin’s writings leads the reader into a vast labyrinth, because as
Kierkegaard offers up a variety of perspectives and ways of living via his
colourful pseudonyms, Benjamin writes with equal aplomb and passion on
such topics as Marxism, Kafka, The Bible, hashish, cities such as Paris and
Naples, and nearly forgotten German Baroque drama. Placed in conversation,
an important symbiosis and allegiance emerges between Kierkegaard and
Benjamin. They are linked together as Dagdrivers and flâneurs of history,
thinkers that question and invert human progress through interruptions and
interludes, and where the notions of ‘messianic’ time and ‘awakening’
become central. This chapter brings Kierkegaard and Benjamin together as
polyvalent thinkers who are equally fascinated and repelled by the emergence
of the city. For Kierkegaard, the city is the natural playground of the nihilistic
aesthete, as well as being the most difficult place for a human being to believe
in God; for Benjamin, it is the inevitable nexus point of modernism, where old
and new ideas collide and what is most important often seems so insignificant.
Benjamin’s diverse interests and methodological approaches enable
various lines of thinking to have a claim on him in the same way as on
Kierkegaard. One can move through Benjamin’s eighteen aphorisms on the
concept of history, and find oneself utterly immersed in the writer’s entire
oeuvre. Benjamin is always a challenge to write about within specific frontiers
and he makes sure that future readers will experience this difficulty, in a
similar manner when reading Kierkegaard. Benjamin’s Arcades Project is a
case in point. It does not take the shape of a conventional argument as such in
that the huge text unravels as a poetic and disparate collage of ideas. And yet
The Arcades Project is part and parcel of one form of indirect politics. Both
thinkers mostly avoid directly construing a political argument, and often
pursue various ploys of indirect argumentation on topics political and beyond.

But, the complexity of their kaleidoscopic canvas in their indirectness and
multifarious directions is a complex and subversive way of confronting
evolving political society.
1. Dagdrivers and Flâneurs
The city is the realisation of that ancient dream of humanity, the labyrinth. It is
this reality to which the flâneur, without knowing it, devotes himself.
Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project
Although I was never lazy, all my activity was nevertheless only a splendid
inactivity, a kind of occupation I still much prefer and for which I perhaps have a
little genius. I read a great deal, spent the rest of the day loafing and thinking, or
thinking and loafing, but nothing came of it […] So there I sat and smoked my
cigar until I drifted into thought […] and then suddenly this thought crossed my
mind: You must do something, but since with your limited capabilities it will be
impossible to make anything easier than it has become, you must, with the same
humanitarian enthusiasm as the others have, take it upon yourself to make
something more difficult […] to make difficulties everywhere.
Johannes Climacus, Concluding Unscientific Postscript
“Christianly, newness comes from God; politically, it comes—from the

street” (Pap. XI I A 17, 1854). In the nineteenth century with the great capitals
of Europe, the city became a metropolis. Kierkegaard and Benjamin are urban
loafers through their activity as thinkers reflecting on the growth of the city,
the development of the new dwelling place for rich and for poor, and the
terrain of the flâneur in the midst of the crowd. Everything that Benjamin
brings together in The Arcades Project is based on the moments of the
beginning and creation of the modernist city in 1841-1846 (the peak years of
Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous authorship), through train travel, photography,
steam power and gas lighting industrialisation. Kierkegaard is situated in this
very epochal transformation, in which Copenhagen metamorphoses from
market town to modern city. From the old Greek word polis comes the city, a
realm of labyrinths and theatres of the old and the new, a realm where the
media will thrive, and where actors, musicians, architects and business moguls
all come to find fame and fortune on the stage and various arcades in this
ever-expanding urban landscape. The city opens the political sphere into a
realm that is also socio-geographical. In both Kierkegaard and Benjamin’s
work, the city has a strong socio-geographical sense in addition to the political
polis. There have been several theological and sociological approaches taking
this into account, such as, for example, Jacques Ellul’s Meaning of the City
(1970), Max Weber’s The City (1958), Harvey Cox’s The Secular City (1965),
and more recently, George Pattison published two books dealing directly with
Kierkegaard and the city: Poor Paris! And Kierkegaard, Religion and the
Loafers of History 137
Nineteenth-Century Crisis of Culture. Pattison remarks that when reading

Kierkegaard’s Two Ages:A Literary Review one must be aware of the
“dynamics of modern urbanity” as this can “extend and deepen our reading of
Kierkegaard’s own text.”1 The city introduces a new kind of consciousness. It
provides the landscape for both thinkers to work and deviate in order to
articulate indirect politics, with the tension of repellence and fascination: “It is
not in wandering that man takes to the street, but rather in submitting to the
monotonous, fascinating, constantly unrolling band of asphalt. The synthesis of
these twin terrors, however—monotonous wandering—is represented in the
labyrinth” (A P2, 1).
i. Cities of Revolution and Reflection
Copenhagen and Berlin are the two cities that Kierkegaard is seduced and
repelled by. Benjamin was more widely travelled than Kierkegaard; in fact the
term ‘wandering scholar’ ought to be synonymous with ‘Walter Benjamin’.
Benjamin grew up in Berlin, and later visited and wrote much about his home
city, as well as other cities where he lived for a time, such as, among others,
Moscow, Marseilles, Naples, Riga, Valencia and Paris, or la ville qui remue
(A, P1, 1). Kierkegaard and Benjamin’s indirect politics is directed within the
real and imaginary walls of the city, it is where Kierkegaard makes his daily
walks, starving for conversation with whomever he might meet, and it is on
the city streets where he makes his final and most aggressive on attack on
Christendom. The city is where Benjamin conjures his “dialectics at a
standstill”, where he smashes together the old and the new, the archaic and the
new trends from the seemingly insignificant details of day-to-day life in the
cities of Paris, Berlin and Moscow. Before 1848, Kierkegaard created his
most urbane pseudonyms—Johannes Climacus, Johannes the Seducer and
Constantin Constantius—these Dagdrivers who loaf (at drive) around
Copenhagen’s streets, graveyards and parks, smoking cigars and pondering on
how to make things more difficult amidst the nineteenth century philosophies
and societies of progress. Two Ages:A Literary Review both extended and
deepened this critique into a polemic against the rise of apathetic, mass-
society, in the forms of the ‘public’, ‘levelling’, ‘formlessness’,
‘superficiality’ and increasing passive reflection, which all have equal allure
and repellence for a citizen of the city. Benjamin’s unfinished work, The
Arcades Project, presents a compendium of meditations on history, fashion,
boredom, Baudelaire, social movement, the interior, prostitution and the
streets of Paris. Like Kafka’s novels, its completeness lies in its
incompleteness, and the text is left open for others to continue amidst the
ever-increasing sprawl and dimensions of the city.
The modern phenomenon of the city was born from the nineteenth
century in which Kierkegaard lived and wrote and with which Benjamin
became obsessed—most obviously demonstrated in his Arcades Project,
where Paris is the “capital of the nineteenth century.” Benjamin reminds the
reader: “In 1848, there were only four cities [not including Paris, in France]
with a population above a hundred thousand souls” (A, a9a, 2). Copenhagen,
hardly a city in Kierkegaard’s time, which Kierkegaard would both fondly and
mockingly call a market town (market/trading harbour: Kjøben-havn), was in
the throes of becoming a city, and as thinker, his diagnosis of the city and
social critique makes it applicable to a critique of the city. And for Benjamin,
the flâneur is the “observer of the marketplace (A, M5, 6). As a wink to
Hegel’s “way of the soul” in Phenomenology of Spirit, Constantin Constantius
records his ironic ‘journey of discovery [Opdagelses-Reise]’ to the
cosmopolitan Berlin as distraction, amusement and ultimately insight.2 As
early as The Concept of Irony, one can see Kierkegaard’s enthusiasm for the
city in his descriptions of Athens charging towards it ruin:
Everything concentrated in Athens – wealth, luxury, opulence, art,

science, recklessness, the enjoyment of life –in short, everything that, as
the city hastened towards its ruin, could also help to glorify it and
illuminate one of the most brilliant intellectual dramas conceivable.
There was a restlessness in Athenian life; there was a palpitation of the
heart intimating that the hour of disintegration [Opløsningens Time] was
at hand” (SKS1, 246 / CI, 200).
The city is where both revolution and reflection begin and end. It is
where the 1848 revolutions take place, it is where Kierkegaard attends
Schelling’s lectures, and Hegel emerges as the zeitgeist philosopher. Benjamin
declares: “Revolution disenchants the city” (A, M3, 3). It is where the
revolution comes alive in the “revolutionary tactics and barricades […]” (A,
718). In 1848, revolutions marked a pivotal point of history from Paris
through Vienna to Berlin. Within the city, the tripartite class idea is seen most
clearly. Yet, Kierkegaard’s writings might on first reading seem uninterested
and repelled by the historical events, persuading the reader instead to look to
the lily of the field and the bird of the air, while Benjamin attempts to find the
solution in the form of an elusive messianic power. But that would be a
superficial reading. Texts such as Christian Discourses, The Sickness unto
Death and Practice in Christianity do not encourage the reader to leave the
city—quite the contrary.
Christian Discourses is brought forward again in the dual aim of
supporting and criticising society. The city is home to the bekymringer and
Kierkegaard’s indirect politics as urban, vagabond thinker is to present a text,
at the dawn of the 1848 revolutions, to counteract this malaise which is at its
most intense within the city environment. Part I of Christian Discourses gives
voice to the worries of materialism, status and uncertainty in the present age.
In The Arcades Project, the ode to nineteenth century Paris, Benjamin gives
voice to the origins of commodity fetishism in the aftermath of the age of

revolution. Benjamin’s city becomes a multifaceted, complex structure in his
analysis of phantasmagoria, arcades, porosity, ruination, fashion, the flâneur
and ambiguous use of social movement, words and themes that will be further
developed in this chapter. In the city of revolution and reflection, the thinker
is a “sort of peripatetic, a street philosopher pondering his way endlessly
through the vortex of the great city” (A, M9a, 5).
ii. Interiors
Benjamin points out that “the nineteenth century like no other century, was
addicted to dwelling” (A, I4, 4). Kierkegaard frequently used the word
Klogskab throughout his authorship, which is connected with comfort and
security of knowledge. Benjamin refers to the etymology of the word
‘comfort’ in the section “The Interior, The Trace” of The Arcades Project in
which Kierkegaard makes key appearances. The word comfort moves from
‘consolation’ to ‘well-being’ to ‘rational convenience’ (A, I6a, 2). It is the
opposite of Anti-Climacus’ Christianity: this ‘comfort’ is fitting it with
Christendom and the society of Copenhagen. This ‘dwelling’ phenomenon is
not news to Marx in the different ways of living in society, whether that be in
the comfortable conditions of the rising bourgeois, or in the filthy, cramped
conditions of the rising industrial city of London—it is the panic of finding
space and comfort within the rising phenomenon of the city. The city
becomes, on the one hand, a trap for the less secure and less-‘comforted’
individuals as they are forced to compromise to the extremes in finding a
dwelling, and, on the other hand, the interiors of the city provide safe haven of
inclosed comfort and security for the more affluent in society. But the interior
dwelling of the more secure and comfortable individuals is not as cosy as
might seem. Both Kierkegaard and Benjamin set out to expose the
claustrophobia and hideaway from a passionate existence in the interior
dwelling place in the city.
The earlier pseudonymous works have many passages depicting the
potential claustrophobia of the interior dwelling place. In Benjamin’s case,
this applies to the over-furnished dwelling; in Kierkegaard’s case, this applies
to the relatively sparse interiors of 1830s-40s Copenhagen. There are many
occasions in “The Seducer’s Diary” where the seducer surveys the room. The
following example is quoted by both Benjamin and Adorno:
Surroundings and setting do have a great influence upon a person and

are part of that which makes a firm and deep impression on the
memory [Hukommelse] […] When I come to visit her, the maid usually
lets me in by the door to the large drawing room; Cordelia herself
enters from her room, and as I open the door to enter the small drawing
room, she opens the other door, so that our eyes meet in the doorway.
This drawing room is small, cosy [hyggelig], is almost the size of a

private room […] (SKS2, 377 / EOI, 389).
The domestic interior becomes an inclosed space that reeks of cosiness

or in the infinitely more resonant Danish word: Hyggelighed. It is this
cosiness for which Benjamin saves his most scathing remarks. At that time
and to this day it is a scandal to damn Denmark’s most prized word and
feeling which can encompass both everything and nothing, sheer delight and
banal mediocrity. For Benjamin, the domestic interior for Benjamin becomes
“petty and banal” which points to nihilism:
Such nihilism [the petty and the banal in the material things in the
domestic interior] is the innermost core of bourgeois cosiness – a mood
that in hashish intoxication concentrates to satanic contentment, satanic
knowing, satanic calm, indicating precisely to what extent the
nineteenth-century interior is itself a stimulus to intoxication and dream
(A, I2, 6).
This nihilism also pervades the rooms of “The Seducer’s Diary” far
away from praxis and a passionate life:
Sitting in the centre of the room, one can look out on two sides beyond
everything in the foreground; there is the limitless horizon on both sides;
one is alone in the vast ocean of the atmosphere. If one moves nearer to
a row of windows, a forest looms far off on the horizon like a garland,
bounding and inclosing […] One turns to the other side, where the sea
spreads out before one’s eyes, which are stopped by nothing and are
pursued by thoughts that nothing detains (SKS2, 428 / EOI, 442).
Living in the domestic dwelling can also bring up a mood that involves
“an aversion to the open air.” This mood is connected with Anti-Climacus’
diagnosis of the despairing individual in Sickness unto Death, as the condition
of Indessluttethed which is translated as inclosing reserve (Hongs) and
encapsulation (Kirmmse). This condition is such that one is unable to release
one’s despair in the world, and so hides it or even represses it within oneself
and from society. Anti-Climacus gives a few passages of the bourgeois
dwelling individual living and hiding amongst others and one’s livelihood in
the modern city:
He now acquires a little understanding of life, he learns to copy

others, how they manage their lives—and he now proceeds to live
the same way. In Christendom he is also a Christian, goes to
church every Sunday, listens to and understands the pastor,
indeed, they have a mutual understanding; he dies, the pastor

ushers him into eternity for ten rix-dollars—but a self he was not,
and a self he did not become (SKS11, 168 / SUD, 52).
Elsewhere, Anti-Climacus describes the running into hiding again this

time mentioning the word Klogskab: “Surrounded by hordes of men [Mængde
Mennesker], absorbed in all sorts of secular matters, more and more shrewd
[klog] about the ways of the world—such a person forgets himself” (SKS11,
149 / SUD, 33). Benjamin’s domestic dwelling nightmare and Kierkegaard’s
individual becoming self-inclosed or hiding behind one’s job, church, and
social structure in the writings calls for the eccentric urban vagabond such as a
Socrates or a Christ which Kierkegaard uses as a critical prototype.
Concluding with Hyggelighed, it is a concept that can be crucial to
understanding the potential suffocation and emptiness of the domestic
dwelling. Kierkegaard and Benjamin are not calling for the elimination of
Hyggelighed, simply a constant warning and critique when confronted by the
consoling question in the interiors of the city: “Why do you want to expose
yourself to all those annoyances and efforts, and all that ingratitude and
opposition? No, let us two enjoy life in cosiness and comfort [Hyggelihed og
Behagelighed]” (SKS12, 125 / PC, 117). A section from Two Ages:A Literary
Review articulates the claustrophobic and nullifying situation of the
Hyggelighed that curbs any possibility for praxis:
Neither the powerful, inspired, excited call to battle, to enjoy, to flout

life’s opposition, nor the shriek of despair is heard here; such episodes
are not depicted here and the resolution is not of that kind. Here it is the
inviting intimacy of the cosy inner sanctum [det hyggelige Kabinets
indbydende Fortrolighed] from which heated discussions and extreme
exertions are excluded, because there is no room or forbearance for such
things (SKS8, 22 / TA, 19).
An interesting addition to this discussion of the interior with

Kierkegaard and Benjamin would be the novels of Jens Peter Jacobsen (1847-
1885). The subtitle of his first great novel (Fru Marie Grubbe) is “Interiors
from the Seventeenth Century” (Interiurer Ra Syttende Aarhundrede), and his
second and final novel, the masterpiece Niels Lyhne, also revolves around the
interior.
iii. Exteriors
The Hyggelighed of the interiors has the potential to creep out into the exterior
of the city as well if the exterior becomes exemplified by Lukács’ increasingly
homogeneous view on the world, which is echoed in a singular, metaphorical
description by Kierkegaard’s seducer: “The pleasant, friendly buildings of
Blegdam [Blegdammens hyggelige Bygninger] were reflected on the water,

which further out was as dark as metal” (SKS2, 321 / EO1, 331). Instead,
Benjamin brings forth heterogeneous exteriors. The term porosity (Porosität)
is introduced into his writings, in the essay “Naples”: “Porosity is the
inexhaustible law of life in this city, reappearing everywhere. A grain of
Sunday is hidden in each weekday. And how much weekday there is in this
Sunday!” (SW1, 417). Porosity applies to and is understood in both spatial
and temporal terms. ‘Naples’ is Italy’s capital of indolence (SW1, 418), the
metaphor for spatial and temporal fluctuation, the interpenetration of private
and public, old and new, where “building is still in progress and where
dilapidation has already set in” (SW1, 416). There is no fixity in the city of
Naples, and that is why this particular city as a metaphorical example
counteracts Lukács’ homogenous view, a city where devotion and despair live
side by side in Benjaminian porosity:
His private existence is the baroque opening of a heightened public

sphere. For here his private self is not taken up by four walls, among
wife and children, but by devotion and despair. Side alleys give glimpses
of dirty stairs leading down to taverns, where three or four men, at
intervals, hidden behind barrels as if behind church pillars, sit drinking
(SW1, 416).
This idea of Naples disturbs the unheimlich coziness of the city interior:
“Here, too, there is interpenetration of day and night, noise and peace, outer
light and inner darkness, street and home” (SW1, 420). In reading
Kierkegaard, the single individual and the crowd rely on each other; in
Benjaminian language there is porosity between the two. Anti-Climacus leads
the reader outside the ‘comfortable’ interior onto the streets by describing the
‘invitation’ by Christ. It is at the Skillevei where the invitation is given, ‘along
the highways and along the lonely ways’ for ‘all fugitives’ (SKS12, 25 / PC,
17). The invitation is a call to the different sectors of society away from the
interior of dwelling, to the ‘sagacious and sensible person’, the ‘clergy man’,
to the ‘philosopher’, the ‘sagacious statesman’, the ‘solid citizen’, and the
‘scoffer.’ The porosity and the invitation to all along the city-streets depict
and juxtapose Kierkegaard and Benjamin’s work. Benjamin’s text and
existence becomes the charter for the nomadic thinker, an exemplar of modern
experience. An analysis of aristocratic, sprawling, slum-ridden Catholic
Naples (which might not even be viewed as a modern city at all, but a city
from the ancient world surviving into modernity) might not seem to be
relevant to Protestant, orderly 19th century Copenhagen. It has been described
as “the most mysterious city in Europe […] the only city of the ancient world
that has not perished […] It is not a city: it is a world - the ancient pre-
Christian world—which has survived intact on the surface of the modern
world.”3 But that would be narrowing Kierkegaard’s imagined horizons. He

sees a city that is heterogeneous, a city that will become more heterogeneous,
the territory for the walker and observer of the world, the intermingling of
trivial and profound ideas, and the home to where the single individual will
triumph or fall. The exteriors of the city becomes the inclusive space that
intermingles rich and poor, and saint and sinner, where: “Even the most
wretched pauper is sovereign in the dim, dual awareness of participating, in
all his destitution […] and of enjoying in all his poverty the leisure to follow
the great panorama” (SW1, 417).
The nomadic thinker appears in many places in Kierkegaard and
Benjamin’s writings. Adorno calls Benjamin’s thinking a “homeless thought”
(NL2, 225). Benjamin quoted Lukács’ ‘transcendental homelessness’ in the
essay “The Storyteller” (I, 98), and the theme resurfaces in The Arcades
Project when Benjamin quotes from the preface to Stages on Life’s Way while
reading and absorbing Adorno’s Kierkegaard text: “The art would be to be
able to feel homesickness even though one is at home” (A, I3, 5; SKS6, 20 /
SLW, 13). This is indeed for many thinkers and poets (following Novalis’
statement) the formula for thinking and writing. To be “able to be homesick,
even though one is at home” becomes for Benjamin the “formula for the
exterior.” Benjamin gives another extensive quote from Baudelaire in The
Arcades Project on the quintessential flâneur and the relation to “home”:
For the perfect flâneur, … it is an immense joy to set up house in the

heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow … To be away from home,
yet to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the
centre of the world, yet to remain hidden from the world […] the
spectator is a prince who everywhere rejoices in his incognito […] We
might also liken him to a mirror as vast as the crowd itself; or to a
kaleidoscope endowed with consciousness, which, with each one of its
movements, represents the multiplicity of life and the flickering grace of
all the elements of life (A, M14a, 1).
Benjamin and Kierkegaard’s ‘homesickness while being at home’ moves

from the interior out onto the city, exemplified in the philosopher as practicing
peripateia. Kierkegaard’s two most important prototypes, Christ and Socrates
are viewed then as revolutionary peripateia in the face of Klogskab, interiors
and attempts to hide from oneself. The few references to Christ in The
Arcades Project are indeed noteworthy and relevant to this image of the
revolutionary peripateia in Benjamin and Kierkegaard’s thinking. Christ is in
the everyday and the unreliable: “It is an unsurpassably spectacular gesture to
place even Christ in the realm of the provisional, the everyday, the unreliable”
(O, 183). And quoting Balzac in the same text: “Jesus Christ […] who gave us
no vestige of a political code, left his work incomplete” (A, a151, 1). These
words ‘incomplete’, ‘provisional’ and ‘unreliable’ contrast with the idea of
Hyggelighed as complete, comfortable, permanent and habitual. The

revolutionary peripateia takes on a new form in nineteenth century modernity
through Kierkegaard’s reanalysis of Christ and Socrates which shake the
foundations of the coveted Hyggelighed.
Benjamin calls the crowd the “veil hiding the ‘masses’” (A, J59, 2). In
another essay, he refers to the ‘public’ as “an examiner, but an absent-minded
one” (I, 234). This immediately brings to mind Kierkegaard’s dissection in the
last section of Two Ages:A Literary Review. In the essay “On some Motifs in
Baudelaire”, Benjamin investigates the crowd and the flâneur together under
the rubric of Baudelaire’s poetry. The concept of ‘mass’ is central for
Benjamin’s Les Fleurs du Mal: “The presence of the mass determines one of
the most famous components of Les Fleurs du Mal” (I, 164). And in The
Arcades Project, the crowd once again makes an appearance this time coming
closer to Kierkegaard’s depiction in Two Ages:A Literary Review and the
“crowd is untruth” appendix to Point of View, when Benjamin quotes Valery
Larbaud: “In this crowd the inferior is disguised as the superior, and the
superior as the inferior—disguised morally, in both cases” (A, M1a, 2). When
Benjamin quotes Valéry in the Baudelaire essay, he could well have quoted
Kierkegaard: “The inhabitant of the great urban centres reverts to a state of
savagery—that is, of isolation” (I, 170). Kierkegaard ensures his flâneur
walks amidst the crowd that is controlled by the ‘public’ from Two Ages:A
Literary Review. Benjamin comments, in a way that has special relevance to
Kierkegaard’s flâneur hiding amidst the crowd: “[…] the flâneur […] takes on
the features of the werewolf restlessly roaming a social wilderness” (A, M1,
6). In Kierkegaard’s most consciously aesthetic works, instead of a werewolf,
the protagonist comes across more inconspicuously as kind of vampire,
residing in the shadows of the city streets, deftly moving in and out of the city
crowds, and always alert with the sleepless eye. The references to this image
are numerous in “The Seducer’s Diary” such as “living in a kingdom of mist”,
“eyes in a cape” and “continually seek my prey.” Through the use of the cape
(Kappe) or cloak (Kaabe) throughout the diary, the seducer’s shadow world is
vividly evoked.4 Deleted from the final draft, Kierkegaard actually does write:
“…this vampyric tendency of his. Just as the shadows of the underworld
sucked the blood out of the real human beings and lived so long, so did he”
(EOI, 553). This vampire image is also apparent in Repetition where, in
Berlin, Constantin relishes watching the city by a window at moonlight, and
desiring to throw on a cape after midnight, looks out his window and “sees the
shadows of passersby hurrying along the walls” where a “dreamworld
glimmers in the background of the soul” (SKS4, 28 / R, 151). And in the
closing passages of the essay “In Vino Veritas” in Stages on Life’s Way, when
the meeting breaks up, the men dissolve into the nocturnal shadows of the
night. Benjamin quotes Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables in The Arcades Project:
“Cities, like forests, have their dens in which all their vilest and most terrible
monsters hide” (A, L5, 4).
The experience of modernism is the experience of the transformative and
expanding city with its new machines and technology outpacing culture and
assimilating culture. Benjamin, as city nomad, has access to varieties of
architecture, urbanism, art and political situations that both colour his
experience of modernism and help create the idea of modernism. On the
streets, the individual is open to a panorama of experience and visuals. The
Seducer’s description of the girl on the street could describe Benjamin’s own
position: “In the street, she is on the open sea, and therefore everything affects
her more, and likewise everything is more enigmatic” (SKS2, 316 / EOI, 326).
The city holds the world in the form of streets, ways, labyrinths, and an array
of crossroads. Throughout “The Seducer’s Diary”, the seducer as narrator and
protagonist refers to various street names and squares, which all add to the
early stages of modernism and the intrigue that these streets as exteriors bring.
For Kierkegaard and Benjamin also, with the advent of advertisement and
mass-media, “through its street names, the city is a linguistic cosmos” (A, P3,
5). The vampiric figure of Kierkegaard’s aesthetic works turns into the form
of revolutionary peripateia, following Benjamin’s line, this time quoting
Lissagaray: “One need only be in touch with the people to become
revolutionary” (A, a8, 4). This peripateia comes in the form of the flâneur
who unites the interior with the exterior within the city: “[…] the city splits
for him into its dialectical poles. It opens up to him as a landscape, even as it
closes around him as a room” (A, M1, 4).
iv. The Urban Loafer
The flâneur, deriving from the French word signifying “saunter” or “lounge”,
is the man about town who strolls around and observes society. The flâneur’s
greatest gift is the imagination, whether parading ironically down the busy
street or remaining in one’s small room. One hundred years later, Wallace
Stevens will confirm the centrality of imagination in one of his last poems:
“We say God and the imagination are one”.5 Kierkegaard’s urban traveller is a
flâneur that has imagination as his key and vista. This begins at an early age
(recounted in the posthumous Johannes Climacus) when Johannes Climacus’
father plays a game to compensate for not actually going outside, bringing his
son by the hand around the room and showing him the city in all its detail and
activity (SKS15, 19 / PF, 120). This beautiful description by Kierkegaard is
also supplemented by Benjamin’s section on the flâneur (A, M2a, 2). The
thinker, as flâneur, strolls the streets, observes the movements of the city, and
absorbs its conversations and developments. The flâneur represents mental
and physical travelling. He may be compared with the tourist of today, except
that he is ironic towards his experiences and is not what he appears to be and
plays the role of a spy, and his eyes and imagination are his camera. The
flâneur is the native tourist who has no itinerary for the day. For both
Kierkegaard and Benjamin, existence and thinking intermingle. Thinking
engulfs the life, and the life engulfs the thinking. This also explains why one
can claim that they both affect the city with their socially critical thinking and
rather indirect political stances.
In Point of View, Kierkegaard refers outwardly to himself as the flâneur,
in the eyes of the public and how he presents himself on the city-streets:
I was a street-corner loafer [Dagdriver], an idler [Lediggænger], a

flâneur, a frivolous bird, a good, perhaps even brilliant pate [Hoved],
witty, etc.—but I completely lacked “seriousness” [Alvor]. I represented
the worldly mentality’s irony, the enjoyment of life—the most
sophisticated enjoyment of life—but of “seriousness and positivity”
there was not a trace; I was, however, tremendously interesting and
pungent (SKS16, 42 / PV, 61).
In its sound and construction the Danish word Dagdriver (literally ‘day-
drifter’) perfectly captures the image of Kierkegaard as flâneur strolling the
streets of Copenhagen. Poets, prophets, philosophers and even messiahs
appear in the guise of Dagdrivers or loafers. Kierkegaard’s contemporary
Walt Whitman in North America begins his monumental Leaves of Grass
(1855) which is the great expression of the plurality of the self as subject by
declaring: “I loafe and invite my soul”; and coincidentally John Keats’ poem
“Ode to Indolence” is published in 1848 for the first time (posthumously),
where he uses as the motto for the poem the lines from The Sermon on the
Mount that follow the reference to the lilies and bird: “They toil not, neither
do they spin”. The paradox of the flâneur is that, as the Dagdriver, he is most
productive. Taking long walks everyday can be salvation for the writer or a
thinker. The Greek philosophers believed that the best thinking came while
one walked and talked with others. Benjamin quotes Pierre Larousse who
associates men of genius with the flâneur: “Most men of genius were great
flâneurs—but industrious, productive flâneurs […] Often it is when the artist
and the poet seem least occupied with their work they are most profoundly
absorbed in it” (A, M20a, 1). Johannes Climacus is a classic Dagdriver, an
insignificant eternal student who spends the evening hours of the day “[…]
loafing [at drive] and thinking, or thinking and loafing”, and makes his long
walks until he hits upon his idea to “make difficulties everywhere” (SKS7,
172 / CUP, 187). In the tradition of the great loafers, Kierkegaard finally
drives his polemic along the city streets with his editions of The Moment. In
his diary, Kierkegaard writes: “To make everyday life literally one’s scene, to
go out and teach on the street, was gradually done away with, and in the end
became quite the most laughable exaggeration” (Pap. X 2 A 7, 1849). In tragic
and seemingly antiquated fashion, Kierkegaard does exactly that in his last
days, following his prototypes Christ and Socrates.
Anti-Climacus calls out for a new Socrates rather than a new religion
or new social order or republic. The Dagdriver, rather than being concerned
with world history, is concerned with human beings. Who was Socrates?
Climacus ironically affirms: “Socrates was a loafer [Dagdriver]” (SKS7, 81 /
CUP, 83). Who was Kierkegaard? In the eyes of the public he was a street
corner loafer, the Dagdriver, an idler of wit. Kierkegaard views the people’s
perception of the flâneur in himself as negative, but what Kierkegaard
becomes through his writings is exactly that, in the Benjaminian way; as
observer, walker and critic of the city and the society within which one lives
and breathes. The flâneur comes out from the nineteenth century, but through
the readings of Kierkegaard amongst others, it goes much further back to
Socrates and Christ as observers, walkers and critics of society. The flâneur
has the advantage of being bohemian and limitless in his search behind the
surface of the workings of society. For Benjamin, it is Baudelaire who may be
viewed as a flâneur par excellence—exuding idleness and indolence or the
spirit of the Dagdriver. This travelling Dagdriver helps shape the city, and as
the city grows, the observing, critical eye of the Dagdriver must survive, for
as Benjamin asks: “Hasn’t his eternal vagabondage everywhere accustomed
him to reinterpreting the image of the city?” (A, 882). Benjamin speaks for the
flâneur when he writes: “In our standardized and uniform world, it is right
here, deep below the surface, that we must go. Estrangement and surprise, the
most thrilling exoticism, are all close by” (A, M14a, 4). Also, on the
bohemian, he writes: “It may be asserted of the bohème, in particular, that
throughout its existence it studies its own milieu” (A, m3a, 6). The first
statement can be appropriated to Kierkegaard’s pre-1848 pseudonymous
authorship; the second statement can be appropriated to his authorship
ensemble. Benjamin aligns with Kierkegaard when he writes: “The man of the
crowd is no flâneur” (I, 148). A new kind of flâneur emerges out of Benjamin
and Kierkegaard’s analyses and self-analyses. Upon bringing Kierkegaard and
Benjamin together, the flâneur transforms into the critical single individual
living in the city. The city embodies both the bourgeois and the beggar. This
is something that Kierkegaard became more and more sensitive to in his
writings, which infuses the traveller of Christian Discourses and which
eventually takes him to the streets with his authorship in hand in 1854-55.
The second of two times Kierkegaard uses the word flâneur in his entire
published authorship is in the same paragraph in Point of View: “if you people
only knew what it is you are laughing at, if you only knew with whom you are
involved, who this flâneur is!” (SKS16, 44 / PV, 63). Earlier in Either/Or II,
Judge William says the same in imagining what the aesthetician of Either/Or I
thinks when he makes people laugh (SKS2, 197 / EOII, 205). Here we have
Kierkegaard exposing the fear and trembling that lies underneath the flâneur,
the deadly serious thinker behind the witty mask. But one is always reliant on
the other. While the classic flâneur in Baudelaire becomes the seedy city
dweller immersing himself in prostitution, drugs and sleepless nights
alongside the critical writing, Kierkegaard brings the walkers of Socrates and
Christ into the modern fold, and though without the prostitution and drugs,
equally provocative, the sleepless ones with the various masks of seduction
are present alongside the thinker as apparently useless in society. Mark Katz
argues that “Benjamin’s categorisation of Kierkegaard as a flâneur in the
Baudelairean mode overlooks the fact that Kierkegaard deliberately mobilises
this fear of doubles as the very form-giving principle of his travelogue.”6
Benjamin sees this in his flâneur: “The idler’s imitation dei: as flâneur, he is
omnipresent” (A, m4, 3). The flâneur disturbs the man of the crowd, and it is
no coincidence that Benjamin is using the flâneur amidst his concept of
ruination in the city, and that Kierkegaard concludes his extended description
of the “age of disintegration” in the journals as “hiding for the time being in
the cautious incognito of a flâneur” (Pap. IX B 63: 7, 1848), both of which I
will analyse in section two of this chapter. Even though Kierkegaard does not
use the word flâneur in “The Seducer’s Diary”, there are more numerous
references to street names and walking along the various streets of
Copenhagen than in any other Kierkegaard text, whether that be standing
under a street light (SKS2, 304 / EOI, 314), or “alone in the evening on
Østergade” (SKS2, 307 / EOI, 317), or walking along Vestergade (SKS2, 310
/ EOI, 320). The Seducer perceives the woman exposed in the exteriors: “In
the street, she is on the open sea” (SKS2, 316 / EOI, 326). The Seducer is the
manifestation of the flâneur, though he may be heading towards despair. The
flâneur in the form of the Seducer follows the woman through the streets and
knows the movements of people in the cafés, and continues walking into the
day’s twilight.
The thinker acting as flâneur on the streets does not sit still, after all: “In
the life of the spirit there is no standing still” (SKS11, 206 / SUD, 94). In
Fear and Trembling, by writing of the knight of faith as one who was “[…]
able to come down in such a way that instantaneously one seems to stand and
to walk, to change the leap into life into walking [i Livet til Gang], absolutely
to express the sublime in the pedestrian [det Pedestre]—only the knight can
do it, and this is the one and only marvel” (SKS4, 136 / FT, 41), Johannes de
silentio presents an urban vagabond who leads the reader to an inkling of
indirect politics when crisscrossed with the twentieth century thinkers of this
project.
2. Tradition and Destruction
To defend something is always to disparage it.

Anti-Climacus, The Sickness unto Death
In the first two parts of this section, Benjamin’s essay “Critique of Violence”
is discussed alongside Kierkegaard’s authorship, with the topic returning at
points to Carl Schmitt and his Political Theology, which Benjamin references
in his Trauerspiel book on the concept ‘sovereign’ and ‘state of exception’.
The last two parts of this section tease out Benjamin’s ‘ruination’ and
Kierkegaard’s ‘disintegration to challenge and confirm tradition’. I also
introduce the idea of ‘the interruptive thinker’ of indirect politics in contrast
Lukács’ diagnosis of Kierkegaard as a ‘reactionary thinker’. The interruptive
thinker disrupts ideas of progress and totality, yet takes progress to its limits
in the process of writing and active thinking.
i. Critique and Violence
The task of the critic as set forth by Benjamin is that criticism is to engage his
or her entire person. The same can be said for Kierkegaard, remembering that
‘spirit’, which is the beginning and end of selfhood, is always critical. What
can Benjamin mean then when he writes: “The derogation of the critical spirit
begins directly after the victory of the bourgeoisie in the July Revolution”?
(A, N10, 5). The answer lies in the transition from the age of revolution to the
present age, which Kierkegaard had put forward in Two Ages:A Literary
Review. In an age of the ‘public and ‘crowd’, the critic as engaging one’s
entire person is more urgent than ever. Hence, Kierkegaard’s constant allusion
to Socrates and the necessity of remembering who he was and that the city
always needs a Socratic figure. Adorno’s book on Kierkegaard is written in
that very manner via the critique of Kierkegaard. The publication of Adorno’s
text causes Benjamin to comment: “It is, in any case, one of those rare first
books in which inspiration manifests itself in the guise of criticism” (SW2,
705). As secure and safe as the present age may seem, the concept of criticism
should never be secure and safe. The ‘Corsair Affair’ is an example of the
mass/public succeeding in character assassination. Not unlike the tactics of
twentieth-century satirist Karl Kraus, who was inspired by Kierkegaard, the
pamphlet Øieblikket is proclaimed in hand during Kierkegaard’s last days on
the streets, turning to established Christendom, attacking it on behalf of
‘persecuted truth’ and taking on single-handedly the Danish church and its
comfortable majority. For Benjamin amongst others, the figure of Karl Kraus
serves as an exemplar of the ‘critical spirit’. Like Kierkegaard and his
prototypes, “Just as this dancing demon is never still, in Kraus eccentric
reflection is in continuous uproar” (SW2 441). Virtually unknown in the
English speaking world, yet an inspiration to the German and Austrian
intellectual avant-garde, Karl Kraus revolutionised journalism in his intense

satirical tirade against the Viennese press in his newspaper, Die Fackel (The
Torch; 1899-1936), which he started in 1899. He was admired by both
Heidegger and Wittgenstein, and was called “a true Kierkegaardian” and one
“who lives his ideas and tries to proclaim them publicly” by Theodor Haecker,
the author of Søren Kierkegaard und die Philosophie der Innerlichkeit (1913)
and the person largely responsible for introducing Kierkegaard to the German-
speaking world as one of the editors of Der Brenner. Kraus became the sole
person running his own paper (editing and writing every article) for the last
twenty years of its existence, and many in Vienna’s intellectually charged
atmosphere saw Kraus as carrying the torch for what Kierkegaard started in
Two Ages:A Literary Review and what Kierkegaard experienced from his
confrontation with the media.7
Benjamin is extremely sensitive to the history of violence that moves
within culture: “There is no document of culture [Kultur] which is not at the
same time a document of barbarism” (SW4, 392). That is also why Benjamin
gives attention to Marxism and historical materialism because the movement
regards the history of culture as equally a history of barbarism: “He [the
historical materialist] regards it as his task to brush history against the grain”
(SW4, 392). It is tragic that we have been unable to overcome this history of
violence, or as Lukács writes: “[…] to leave the age of absolute sinfulness”
(TN, 153). Benjamin published an essay called “Critique of Violence” in
1921. The word ‘violence’ is translated from the German word Gewalt which
can mean violence and force, bringing to mind the intermingling of barbarism
and civilisation. In “Critique of Violence”, Benjamin attempts to distinguish
justice and law. In doing this, there is a distinction drawn between criticism
and violence. It is violence that breaks the state through revolution, and it is
the second violence that preserves the state, the violence of Carl Schmitt’s
political philosophy. It is this second violence which Benjamin and
Kierkegaard combat. Benjamin presents these two phases of violence: “If the
first function of violence is called lawmaking function, this second will be
called the law-preserving function” (SW1, 241). Kierkegaard’s 1848
authorship shows Christendom doing violence to the essence of Christianity
by abolishing it, and the rise of the mass, crowd and public in the growth of
the city of people’s government by abolishing the single individual. Hence the
call for spirit as critical in The Sickness unto Death and the self-proclamation
of the polemical writer in Point of View. The only harshness located in
Kierkegaard is in his polemical writing and uncompromising critique in the
affirmation of the single individual and the challenge offered by the figure of
Christ confronting the violence of civilization in which we are embedded.
Paraphrasing the philosopher John Moriarty, it is Christendom that needs to
catch up with Christ.8
The symbols of violence are in the form of the military and the police.
“Militarism”, Benjamin writes in “Critique of Violence”, “is the compulsory,
universal use of violence as a means to the ends of the state” (SW1, 241).
What both thinkers fear is the place of legal force and legal authority in
society. Benjamin specifies this dilemma: “[…] in absolute monarchy […]
their spirit [the police] is less devastating than in democracies, where their
existence, elevated by no such relation, bears witness to the greatest
conceivable degeneration of violence” (SW1, 243). It is not a call to a return
to theological heteronomy connecting to political forms, but to the distinction
between the creation and preserving of a state: the means and an end of the
function. The creation becomes the myth, preserving becomes the law.
Throughout this preservation, the role of the critic is to warn against the
dangers of the violence of the state. The violence comes at the beginning, at
the creation, at revolution. The real danger is when the violence creeps into
the norm. This brings a return to violence governed my myth, theology, divine
right, a language that has by no means become antiquated but continues to be
used by political leaders of democratic countries the world over. Benjamin
describes this mythic violence: “Mythic violence in its archetypal form is a
mere manifestation of the gods” (SW1, 248). Kierkegaard’s love of
Matthew’s Gospel includes Jesus’ response: give to God what is God’s and to
Caesar what is Caesar’s; never shall the two be permanently united. The critic
confronts society in his or her polemical affirmation. Benjamin develops this
complex study further by distinguishing divine and mythic violence:
If mythic violence is lawmaking, divine violence is law-destroying; if

the former sets boundaries, the latter boundlessly destroys them; if
mythic violence brings at once guilt and retribution, divine power only
expiates; if the former threatens, the latter strikes; if the former is
bloody, the latter is lethal without spilling blood (SW1, 249).
Divine violence resonates in the vast canvas of Old Testament

retributions of God, where thousands are slaughtered; mythic violence is the
attempt by man to reach the heights of a god, the heights that will go as far as
divinising the human sovereign. In regard to mythic and divine violence: “The
first demands sacrifice; the second accepts it” (SW1, 250).
Benjamin’s approach to mythic violence is ambiguous, and the reader
begins to ask whether the writer is rejecting or accepting it. There seems to be
a dichotomy in the essay, when Benjamin, on the one hand, says: “If the rule
of myth is broken occasionally in the present age, the coming age is not so
unimaginably remote that an attack on law is altogether futile” (SW1, 252),
and, on the other hand, says: “Once again all the eternal forms are open to
pure divine violence, which myth bastardised with law” (SW1, 252). The true
danger might arrive when mythic violence is bound with law. This danger
points to Schmitt’s solutions which take up the second point in this section.
Benjamin concludes the essay distinguishing once again mythic and divine
violence, this time giving his seal of disapproval as critic of the mythic
violence, and merely revealing divine violence which is beyond our control:
“But all mythic, lawmaking violence, which we may call ‘executive,’ is
pernicious. Pernicious, too, is the law-preserving, ‘administrative’ violence
that serves it. Divine violence, which is the sign and seal but never the means
of sacred dispatch, may be called ‘sovereign’ violence.” The critic’s role is to
oppose the violence of the mythic lawmaker, to expose its fallacies, however
dangerous that might be for the critic, which indeed was experienced by
Kierkegaard and Benjamin, and also Karl Kraus, whom Benjamin unites with
Kierkegaard in the another essay called “Karl Kraus”, in the suffering that the
critic had to endure in the struggle against mythic violence: “[…] a station of
his martyrdom, a state experienced, apart from Kraus, by no one as deeply as
by Kierkegaard” (SW2, 442). A reader might say that the references to
Benjamin’s views on violence in democracies are germane, but an
unsympathetic reader might say: this is all very well in relation to 1930s
Germany but is it not an exaggeration in relation to 1840s/50s Denmark?
However, Kierkegaard explicitly makes the point in the journals in 1848 that
the tyranny of the people (which had made its first appearance in Two Ages:A
Literary Review) over the single individual becomes another form of
tyranny—a fear of men. Kierkegaard explains that he called attention to this in
the fifth discourse (“We are Closer to Salvation than when we first Believed”)
of the third part of Christian Discourses. The danger is that the tyranny is “not
directly obvious.” No one is held responsible and violence can break out with
muddled reasons for why it did so. A look at the origins of World War I might
be a case in point, and the first thing that Denmark’s newly democratised
government of 1848-49 did was wage war. Kierkegaard’s journals support this
irresponsible gesture: “The tragedy at this moment is that the new ministry
needs war to survive, needs all the agitation of national feeling possible. Even
though we could easily enough have peace—if the ministry is not completely
stupid, it must see that it needs war” (Pap. VIII A 609, 1848).This passage
reeks of the contemporary malaise of the twenty-first century, and opens up
the argument of Kierkegaard as a contemporary, not specifically topical but
whose writings at this time are a form of critique that often transcends
historical time and place such as 1840s/50s Denmark.
ii. Subverting the Sovereign
Benjamin writes in his book The Origin of German Tragic Drama (hereafter
referred to as the Trauerspiel—from the original title: Ursprung des
deutschen Trauerspiels): “Whereas the modern concept of sovereignty
amounts to a supreme executive power on the part of the prince, the baroque
concept emerges from a discussion of the state of emergency, and makes it the
most important function of the prince to avert this” (O, 65). This reference to
the state of exception can be viewed, in connection with the baroque as odd or
strange and on the margins in the form of Trauerspiel, as a response to
Schmitt’s Political Theology, which in turn can be a response to “Critique of
Violence”, in inserting ‘violence’ into Schmitt’s ‘state of exception’. The
word ‘baroque’ has its root in the Portuguese word barroco, meaning rough or
irregular shaped pearl, and which implies absurdity, bizarre, and extravagant.
The baroque speaks through allegory. Schmitt’s sovereign speaks with clarity,
decision and resolution. First then, let us look at Schmitt’s response to
Benjamin.
Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence” makes the distinction between
mythic and divine violence, and the concept of mythic violence is ultimately
criticised in its usurpation of the preservation of law in human society from
the creation of the law. Schmitt is setting up this mythic sovereign only a few
years after Benjamin’s essay. Agamben remarks: “The state of exception is
the space in which he tries to capture Benjamin’s idea of a pure violence and
to inscribe anomie within the very body of the nomos.”9 As argued in an
earlier chapter, Schmitt is usurping the exception into the norm, and thereby
nullifying the exception by annihilating the norm. Like Schmitt, Benjamin
sets out to clarify what the exception is, and this can sound rigorous and
strong (as in Schmitt) in the clarification. Benjamin explains: “Kings are
never moderate. They are judged to be either very good or very bad” (O, 69).
In monarchy and kingship there is no middle-ground, unlike democracy, and
this is what attracts Schmitt to a monarchy over and above democracy. The
study of extremes does not necessarily mean that one’s views must become
extreme. Benjamin’s exception emerges from his study of baroque theory of
drama, and transforms into an interruption and thorn to the sovereign, and
should not be usurped by the sovereign power. Benjamin plainly makes his
point in his last writings: “Then we shall clearly realise that it is our task to
bring about a real state of exception, and this will improve our position in the
struggle against fascism” (SW4, 392). Benjamin has attempted to set out the
criterion of violence in his early essay, Schmitt attempts to mould mythic
violence into the political sovereign that decides on the exception, and
Benjamin returns again in the year of his death to distinguish himself from
Schmitt’s theory by stating clearly: “The tradition of the oppressed teaches us
that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the
rule” (SW4, 392).
How does Benjamin ultimately respond to Schmitt? The affiliation of
Schmitt to Benjamin is surprising and to some commentators embarrassing,
given that Schmitt became a Nazi and Benjamin was a Jew, sympathetic to a
messianic Marxism. After WWII, Schmitt, perhaps in a gesture to endear
himself to the Left, an opportunistic moment or to show a more expansive
political thought, explains that Benjamin sent him the Trauerspiel text with a
personal letter thanking him for Political Theology: “Benjamin makes
reference in his book to my definition of sovereignty. In 1930, he expressed

his personal gratitude to me in a personal letter” (HH, 62). When Agamben
points out that “Benjamin’s description of the baroque sovereign in the
Trauerspielbuch can be read as a response to Schmitt’s theory of
sovereignty,”10 he is in accordance with my argument of Benjamin’s response
to Schmitt, which is parallel to my use of Kierkegaard as a hypothetical critic
of Schmitt. Where Schmitt portrays the sovereign as a ‘success’ in taking
upon himself the identity of the exceptionless exception, Benjamin’s
Trauerspiel shows us sovereign, i.e. ‘princely’ figures (such as Hamlet) who
are unable to make this move. But this is not just because they are failures or
weak personalities. Rather, it is because the sovereign should not, in
Benjamin’s view, rule by virtue of the law of the exception (the state of the
emergency). The sovereign should rule by the law of the universal, the general
and the common. Thus Benjamin, like Kierkegaard, shows that the exception
is justifiable only as a critical or marginal figure. At the very beginning of
Trauerspiel in the “Epistemo-Critical Prologue” (Erkenntniskritische
Vorrede), Benjamin sets out his fragile parameters: “The general [Das
Allgemeine] is the idea. The empirical, on the other hand, can be all the more
profoundly understood the more clearly it is seen as an extreme” (O, 35).
The sovereign in the Trauerspiel is a failure like the exception that
Kierkegaard treats in Repetition, and from which Schmitt grounds his project.
But this failure is the secret to subverting the sovereign. In the Trauerspiel,
the prince is the sovereign, the exception, and the prince is “the paradigm of
the melancholy man” (O, 142). In Repetition, the poet is the exception, and
the poet is the “poetic-melancholic nature” (SKS4, 16 / R, 139). The baroque
reflects the melancholic, and is exemplified in Hamlet. This points back to my
section on Hamlet as an exception, this time Hamlet is developed further as
the embodiment of the sovereign, but who also fails tragically. He is the
embodiment of the baroque mourning play, as the melancholic prince. He is
the sovereign who cannot decide, and the sovereign must never decide on the
exception when the sovereign is in the position of the one who governs.
Benjamin, echoing Kierkegaard, states the use of melancholy and the figure of
Hamlet: “Melancholy betrays the world for the sake of knowledge. But in its
tenacious self-absorption it embraces dead objects in its contemplation, in
order to redeem them. The poet, of whom the following has been said, speaks
from the spirit of melancholy” (O, 157). For Kierkegaard, Hamlet is the single
individual in the play that is the theatre of the world. In Stages on Life’s Way,
the tortured Quidam is a re-written Hamlet, and Frater Taciturnus tries to find
answers in understanding the religious self in making his “side-glance
[Sideblik] at Hamlet and in his many movements to articulating the religious
hero whose greatness is in suffering. But Benjamin and Kierkegaard are also
striving to overcome the melancholy malaise that can transform the all-seeing
single individual into an inlcosed tyrant. This is also confirmed by the several
inclusions in Quidam’s diary of tales of sovereign figures, such as Periander

and his macabre story of murder, and Nebuchadnezzar who has a kafkaesque
dream of turning into a beast, the old, dying father of “Quiet Despair”, and
wise old Solomon who “[…] could help many people, but he could not help
himself” (SKS6, 234 / SLW, 255).
Benjamin’s concept of the one who is in the sovereign position of power
attempts to ignore or reject the exception, rather than deciding on the
exception. Agamben has already made this argument in the reading of
Benjamin’s Trauerspiel.11 Benjamin himself writes:
The antithesis between the power of the ruler and his capacity to rule led
to a feature peculiar to the Trauerspiel which is, however, only
apparently a generic feature and which can be illuminated only against
the background of the theory of sovereignty. This is the indecisiveness
of the tyrant. The prince, who is responsible for making the decision to
proclaim the state of emergency, reveals, at the first opportunity, that he
is almost incapable of making a decision (O, 70-71).
Benjamin describes the task of the sovereign in the very terms that
Schmitt rejects: the sovereign becomes indecisive. Benjamin’s interest in the
‘mourning play’ is to uncover the exception, in the Trauerspiel’s “necessary
tendency towards the extreme” (O, 57). Kierkegaard’s strategy is similar in
The Sickness unto Death and Practice in Christianity: one must go through
every form of despair and blow apart the concept of sovereignty within the
self, and one must go to the extremes of Christianity both to show the fallacies
of Christendom and enable one to understand an exceptionality of
Christianity. Both Benjamin and Kierkegaard as thinkers become the plotters
between the tyrant and the martyr (O, 72-74), who can see themselves as the
little hunchback (bucklicht Männlein, I, 11) in the case of Benjamin, or the
Socratic gadfly, spy and secret agent in the case of Kierkegaard. The plotter
later becomes the intriguer in the Träuerspiel (O, 92-95), the one who writes
at the Mellemspil, a Hamlet who probes too deep within a play that becomes
the archetypal Trauerspiel, a drama of ambiguity, intrigue and delay which
ends in catastrophe. Blowing away the earlier Goethian idea (which is fearful
of discords unresolved) of Hamlet being too weak to act, Nietzsche (that other
thinker of the nineteenth century writing at the Mellemspil) makes his brilliant
insight on Hamlet as one who knows and sees too much:
For the rapture of the Dionysian state, with its annihilation of the
ordinary bounds and limits of existence contains, while it lasts, a
lethargic element in which all personal experiences of the past become
immersed. This chasm of oblivion separates the worlds of everyday
reality and of Dionysian reality. But as soon as this everyday reality re-
enters consciousness, it is experienced as such, with nausea: an ascetic,
will-negating mood is the fruit of these states. In this sense, the

Dionysian man resembles Hamlet: both have once looked truly into the
essence of things, they have gained knowledge, and nausea inhibits
action; for their action could not change anything in the eternal nature of
things; they feel it to be ridiculous or humiliating that they should be
asked to set right a world that is out of joint. Knowledge kills action;
action requires the veils of illusion: that is the doctrine of Hamlet, not
that cheap wisdom of Jack the Dreamer who reflects too much and, as it
were, from an excess of possibilities does not get around to action.12
The plotter has no home; he is only at home in the court, or on the stage.
Hamlet as plotter has a different experience of time, an unresolved one, which
is modern, and which is always subverting Schmitt’s sovereign. Benjamin’s
‘mourning plays’ reveal the disruption and undecidability of sovereignty, and
both thinkers are united in presenting Hamlet as the apex of this
undecidability, thus corrupting and criticising Schmitt’s political theory.
Benjamin’s prince in German baroque drama, although responsible for
making the decision to proclaim the state of emergency, is almost incapable of
making a decision. Hamlet reveals the tragic difficulty in taking responsibility
when one sees too much, and this figure emerges amidst the historical
background of the birth of a superpower and empire. Kierkegaard and
Benjamin’s writings provide the foil to the comfortable restoration of the state
of emergency by the sovereign as political ruler. The sovereign as political
power is, after all, the beast (O, 86), the demonism that rears its ugly head into
the political realm that falls into political despair, occurring in my reading of
Schmitt as “[…] A desolate wilderness. Nebuchadnezzar in chains with the
eagle’s feathers and talons he has grown among wild beasts … He makes
strange gestures … He growls and shows his ill-nature” (O, 86). The state of
exception remains as exception and not as sovereign as exception who moulds
himself into iron law: “The function of the tyrant is the restoration of order in
the state of emergency: a dictatorship whose utopian goal will always be to
replace the unpredictability of historical accident with the iron constitution of
the laws of nature” (O, 74).
iii. Progress 1: Ruination
The first aspect of ‘progress’ under the rubric of tradition and destruction
comes in the guise of Benjamin’s ‘ruination’. Ruination comes in many
forms; it is that which is somewhat lost and becomes fragmented from the
past but from which survives in disintegrated form. It is also the process of
pulling away the outer skin of the work of art, which he early on states in his
dissertation “Critique of Romanticism as a Work of Art” (SW1, 116-200).
And, as famously stated, what ruins are in the realm of things, allegory is in
the realm of thoughts (O, 178). Thus, his study here of the Trauerspiel is
essential as the ruin is to be found in this genre, or as Benjamin puts it: “The
allegorical physiognomy of the nature-history, which is put on stage in the
Trauerspiel, is present in reality in the ruin” (O, 177). The very essence of
fragmentation is Benjamin’s only means towards unity in the same way that
Kierkegaard’s indirect politics comes to be through a conscious sense of
fragmentation throughout Kierkegaard’s authorship. Fragmentation, not in the
sense of the romantic fragment but as unfinished, teleological suspension and
repetition, is the ‘unity’ of Kierkegaard’s authorship. Hence, both thinkers
conjure the image of the shipwreck to articulate their role in the progress of
thinking. Benjamin writes: “Like one who keeps afloat on a shipwreck by
climbing to the top of the mast that is already crumbling. But from there he
has a chance to give a signal leading to his rescue” (I, 24). In Christian
Discourses, Kierkegaard writes:
Therefore if you are in danger and you do not come closer to salvation—
then you are of course sinking deeper and deeper into danger. Just as the
shipwrecked person who saved himself by means of a plank and now,
tossed by the waves and hovering over the abyss between life and death,
strains his eyes for land, so indeed should a person be concerned about
his salvation (SKS10, 228 / CD, 220).
Both Benjamin and Kierkegaard are philosophers of ruination, following

the maxim: “One solitary man cannot help or save the age; he can only
express that it is floundering” (Pap. X A 171, 1849). Both Benjamin and
Kierkegaard focus on the fragment to respond to the totality of thinking in
humanity’s conception of progress. Thus, in the case of Benjamin, we have
‘ruination’; in the case of Kierkegaard, we have ‘disintegration.’
Benjamin concludes the Trauerspiel text with these lines: “In the ruins
of great buildings the idea of the plan speaks more impressively than in lesser
buildings, however well preserved they are” (O. 235). It is to the ruins that we
must keep a close eye, to keep it in conversation with the present. Benjamin
and Kierkegaard are contributing to tradition by resurrecting the ruins of
philosophy, literature and theology. Benjamin puts his magnifying glass to
baroque drama and 19th century Parisian arcades; Kierkegaard to Socrates,
Christ, the Bible, Shakespeare’s dramas and contemporary actresses. The
‘ruin’ is Benjamin’s way to progress. It is by no means to replace progress per
se, but Benjamin’s ‘ruin’ is to have a place amidst whatever preconception or
idea of progress one may have. The tension is what matters and what
continues to exist. The final sentence of the Trauerspiel text reminds the
reader of the durability of the ruin: “In the spirit of allegory it [the
Trauerspiel] is conceived from the outset as a ruin, a fragment [Trümmer].
Others may shine resplendently on the first day; this form preserves the image
of beauty to the very last” (O, 235). Benjamin’s ambiguous position, “[…] to
renew the old world […]” (I, 163) comes with the premise of The Arcades
Project: “The pathos of this work: there are no periods of decline” (A, N1, 6).
Any unity of his thought demands sensitivity to the fragmentation, failures
and rupture of his writings on the incredibly diverse material he moves
through. The ruin offers a glimpse into our place in the past and hence the
present and is compared to the proverb: “A proverb, one might say, is a ruin
[Trümmer] which stands on the site of an old story and in which a moral
twines about a happening like ivy around a wall” (I, 107).
Ruination is a combination of a certain sort of traditionalism (i.e. we
start where we are, in actual history) and a certain sort of catastrophism
(where we are now is, in fact, a situation of chronic loss). The concept of
ruination binds Benjamin close to Kierkegaard in what I view as a
continuation of the place and role of the thinker from Kierkegaard’s
perspective. First, ruination is remembering and re-using old or perhaps
forgotten thoughts, works of arts, and modes of expression. Second, ruination
is a way to acute and sensitive critique. This is the point of access that
Benjamin has to Kierkegaard as a thinker of indirect politics: by thinking and
writing in the tension of preserving and destroying. Following the point made
in Chapter One on the traveller of the present age, Benjamin’s ruination as a
form of critique continues that Kierkegaardian tradition of ‘critical spirit’, as
simultaneously tearing down our Klogskab notions of progress, while at the
same time giving progress its due. Benjamin is clear and adamant on this role
of the critical thinker: “A critique of the concept of such a progression must
underlie any criticism of the concept of progress itself” (SW4, 395). Arendt
interprets the heir and preserver of Benjamin’s essays “Unpacking my
Library” and “Eduard Fuchs: Collector and Historian” as becoming the
destroyer: “The true, greatly misunderstood passion of the collector is always
anarchistic, destructive. For this is its dialectics: to combine with loyalty to an
object, to individual items, to things sheltered in his care, a stubborn
subversive protest against the typical, the classifiable” (I, 49). Arendt likens
Benjamin’s collector to the revolutionary:
Like the revolutionary, the collector “dreams his way not only into a
remote or bygone world, but at the same time into a better one in which,
to be sure, people are not provided with what they need any more than
they are in everyday world, but in which things are liberated from the
drudgery of usefulness” (I, 46).
Then Arendt eloquently concludes: “Collecting is the redemption of

things which is to complement the redemption of man” (I, 47). Kierkegaard
and Benjamin’s writings are dialectical in evoking tension between serving
and betraying, preserving and destroying. Even their own self-perception and
presentation is situated in this tension, and it is this tension that brings about
the purpose of ruination. Benjamin places and quotes Baudelaire and

Kierkegaard together, presenting his conception of the disintegrated man: the
thinker of ruination in the present age. Kierkegaard’s aesthete’s “soul is like
the Dead Sea, over which no bird can fly; when it has flown midway, then it
sinks down to death and destruction”, and Baudelaire is “a graveyard that the
moon abhors” (A, J62a, 3). Benjamin refers to himself as “the little
hunchback” (buchlicht Männlein), the element of bad luck and
unclassifiability, but more importantly as the symbol of an interruptive
thinker, who, in the German fairytale Des Knaben Wunderhorn, tripped the
children up and knocked things out of one’s hand. Both Benjamin and
Kierkegaard are interruptive thinkers in that “Thinking involves not only the
movement of thoughts, but their arrest as well” (SW4, 396). Thinking
becomes polemical in relation to its time, as in Kierkegaard’s 1848 writings
(if one views them as a revolt), because they are no longer a flow, but an
interruption.
Arendt refers to Benjamin as one who “[…] knew that the break in
tradition and the loss of authority which occurred in his lifetime were
irreparable, and he concluded that he had to discover new ways of dealing
with the past” (I, 43). That is why Arendt gives Benjamin the title of ‘pearl
diver,’ inspired by Ariel’s famous song in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, which
gives the reader a memorable image of the kind of role Benjamin plays as a
thinker: “Like a pearl diver who descends to the bottom of the sea, not to
excavate the bottom and bring it to light but to pry loose the rich and the
strange, the pearls and corals in the depths, and to carry them to the surface,
this thinking delves into the depths of the past” (I, 54). But Benjamin is loyal
to the idea of progress also in that he is not a completely nostalgic thinker who
longs for humankind to return to our long lost roots, but to remind us of the
strange past we have been through and may have forgotten: ruinations that
preserve “the image of the past” (SW4, 391). His use of quotations is a way of
articulating this ruination and the power of quotations (as Arendt quotes
Benjamin) on this also, is “[…] not the strength to preserve but to cleanse, to
tear out of context, to destroy” (I, 43). The tension of ruination remains and
can be applied to both Benjamin and Kierkegaard. Arendt recognises this
when she concludes her reflections on Benjamin by writing that “[…]
although the living is subject to the ruin of time, the process of decay is at the
same time a process of crystallization […] as everlasting Urphänomene” (I, 55).
One can find scattered sentences to support this view, in the essay on Karl
Kraus: “Neither purity nor sacrifice mastered the demon; but where origin and
destruction come together, his reign is over” (SW2, 457) and in the
Trauerspiel text: “A major work will either establish the genre or abolish it;
and the perfect work will do both” (O, 44). James Joyce’s Ulysses does
exactly that—bringing together the ruins of the past for a lost and defeated
generation and at the same time creating something new and revolutionary.
This process of decay is the make-up of all that we know, taking into account
also rejuvenation, and the universe itself a site of lingering catastrophes (A,
D5, 7). The Trauerspiel text is taken from the outset as a ruin, and yet
Benjamin’s analysis of allegory in baroque drama reveals to him the origin of
modernity. Ruination discloses the fragmented nature of modern experience
and that experience’s discontinuous form, in which “the false appearance of
totality is extinguished” (O, 176).
iv. Progress 2: The Age of Disintegration
Can the concept of ruination be aligned with the idea of disintegration in

Kierkegaard’s writings? The age of disintegration (Opløsningens Tid) exists
on three levels with Kierkegaard. First, disintegration applies to Kierkegaard
himself, what he sees himself representing and where his writings should be
placed. He is clear on this from the beginning: “I was born in 1813, the wrong
fiscal year, in which so many bad banknotes were put in circulation, and my
life seems best compared to one of them. There is something of greatness
about me, but because of the poor state of the market I am not worth much”
(Pap. V A 3, 1844). Even before this journal entry, Kierkegaard, both as the
Seducer in Either/Or I and more significantly as Johannes de silentio,
describes himself as an Extra-Skriver (SKS4, 103 / FT, 7). Another word lost
in translation, the Extra-Skriver, literally ‘extra-writer’, is the marginal writer
who writes at the Mellemspil, on the border of philosophy, theology, literature
and even politics. Kierkegaard writes a book called Prefaces, inspired by
Johan Georg Hamann’s Socratic Memorabilia (1759)—which in many ways
is the unconscious of Prefaces (as master of the fragment, the use of humour
and indirect communication, proponent of Shakespeare and Socrates over
German philosophy, and advocate of radical Christian existence). This little
work, published on the same day as the more celebrated Concept of Anxiety,
contains nine prefaces for books that do not exist, and mocks both the literary
establishment of Copenhagen led by J.L Heiberg and the fusion of Danish
Hegelianism and Christendom led by Hans Lassen Martensen. Prefaces is
signed by the pseudonym Nicolaus Notabene as noteworthy footnote to
speculative philosophy and ‘important’ books. The enormous Concluding
Unscientific Postscript begins with a quote from Plato’s Greater Hippias
positioning the book’s place in philosophy: “It is really the scraping and
shavings of argument, cut up into little bits.” The author of Concluding
Unscientific Postscript, Johannes Climacus, declares that he is a useless,
indolent thirty-year old, a ‘man without qualities’, with potential in every
area, but finding himself useless in the modern world, a man of ruination in a
world of progress, where he can only come up with books Johannes Climacus
reiterates that he is a useless, indolent thirty-year old, a ‘man without
qualities’, with potential in every area, but finding himself useless in the
modern world, a man of ruination in a world of progress, where he can only
come up with books with titles such as Philosophical Fragments (Smuler:

literally ‘crumbs’ in Danish) and Concluding Unscientific Postscript to
Philosophical Fragments. In the actual “Mellemspil” of Philosophical
Fragments between the penultimate and ultimate chapter of the book which
will be concluded by a book six times its size, Climacus expresses his role in
the philosophical tradition:
My dear reader! We assume then that this teacher has appeared, that he
is dead and buried, and that an interval of time has elapsed between
Chapters IV and V. Also in a comedy there may be an interval of several
years between two acts. To suggest this passage of time, the orchestra
sometimes plays a symphony or something similar in order to shorten
the time by filling it up. In a similar manner, I, too, have thought to fill
the intervening time by pondering the question set forth (SKS4, 272 /
PF, 72).
From these few examples, the concept of ruination for the thinker which
points to the conscious fragment and which is also allegory in the realm of
thoughts can be applied to Kierkegaard.
For Kierkegaard, then comes the year 1848: the year of revolution,
overcoming death, an awakening from the forgiveness of sins, and the “age of
disintegration.” The second aspect of disintegration is levelled at the present
age, the age of modernism. The “age of disintegration” is the expression
Kierkegaard uses in his journal entry from late 1848, literally a time of
dissolution or disintegration. In this journal entry, Kierkegaard marks all the
various aspects of disintegration which includes aesthetic, effeminate
disintegration, philosophical and political disintegration, and national
obsession, material want and prioritisation of history as aspects of
disintegration. What then does a thinker of ruination do in an age of
disintegration? How can these two aspects be combined? Kierkegaard’s age of
disintegration is still an age of self-importance. The thinker of ruination, in the
case of Kierkegaard’s Climacus as ‘superfluous thinker’, and Johannes de
silentio as Extra-Skriver, a role which supports the position of indirect
politics, unleashes himself as flâneur. The flâneur and Dagdriver are
interruptive thinkers. It is by loafing as the Dagdriver that Climacus discovers
his task—that of making difficulties everywhere. The image of his description
of loafing and stopping to light up another cigar provides the symbol for the
moment of interruption. In the midst of loafing, he interrupts his idling with
lighting his cigar and suddenly the ‘great thought’ comes to him. Benjamin’s
flâneur introduces a kind of progress or inverts progress, the kind which he
describes in The Arcades Project: “Progress has its seat not in the continuity
of elapsing time but in its interferences—where the truly new makes itself felt
for the first time, with the sobriety of dawn” (A, N9a, 7). Here we have the
space of the interruptive thinker amidst, in the case of Kierkegaard, the “age
of disintegration”. Very often, the most creative and best moments occur
when something interrupts some preconceived thing you may have had or
when you are chugging along in a straight line and then the break comes and
that is where profundity and even something new emerges. Benjamin’s
insistence on the important role of this kind of thinker in the world goes back
to his essay on Goethe’s Elective Affinities, when he ends with the sentence:
“Thus, the critic inquires into the truth, whose living flame continues to burn
over the heavy logs of what is past and the light ashes of what has been
experienced” (SW1, 298).
This leads to the third aspect and a return to the overall theme of
tradition and destruction. The essence of tradition is to break with tradition, a
point that confirms the thesis that Kierkegaard’s work is marked by the
underlying tension of serving and betraying, destroying and preserving.
Benjamin echoes Kierkegaard in the repeated formulation that “‘Construction’
presupposes ‘destruction’” (A, N7, 6). Further, Benjamin elaborates on this
tension within tradition: “There is a tradition that is catastrophe” (A, N9, 4).
This in turn connects tradition with progress and the role of the thinker of
ruination that articulates the catastrophe: “The concept of progress must be
grounded in the idea of catastrophe” (A, N9a, 1). To repeat, the thinker of
ruination in turn becomes the interruptive thinker: “Progress has its seat not in
the continuity of elapsing time but in its interferences—where the truly new
makes itself felt for the first time, with the sobriety of dawn” (A, N9a, 7).
Benjamin presents “The Destructive Character”, always standing at the
Skillevei, paradoxically affirmative, and providing the link between the past
and the present: “While others encounters walls or mountains, there, too, he
sees a way […] Because he sees ways everywhere, he always stands at a
crossroads” (SW2, 542). The destructive character’s sole activity is clearing
away, and yet the ‘destructive character’ “stands in the front line of
traditionalists.” This brings us back to the idea behind the Trauerspiel text: to
loosen the old, fixed assumption that we give to certain periods in history, to
the point that they become forgotten. In the age of disintegration, it is the role
of the interruptive thinker in his/her indirect politics to disrupt and unsettle
this assumption of those who decide, of those who govern and of those who
forget, and this thinker comes in the guise of Extra-Skriver in the ruins of
unfinished texts. Benjamin’s seventh thesis on the philosophy of history
states: “Every age must strive anew to wrest tradition away from the
conformism that is working to overpower it” (SW4, 391).
In conclusion, these reflections on ruination and the age of disintegration
bring forth the following beautiful lines: “‘Write.’—‘For whom?’—‘Write for
the dead, for those in the past whom you love.’—‘Will they read me?’—‘Yes,
for they come back as posterity’” (Pap. III A 203, 1841). Originally from
Johann Gottfried Herder,13 these lines are used again by Kierkegaard in the
last discourse in Works of Love. Like Nietzsche after him, Kierkegaard writes
for a tradition in writing for no one, which means not succumbing to the
demands of the present age, but writing for those who are long gone and for
those who are still to come. Reflecting on this quotation, George Pattison, in
making a significant comparison to the theme of ruination and disintegration
in a chapter called “Learning to read the signs of the times”, writes:
“Kierkegaard’s authorship is founded on loss […] we [the readers] become
the posterity in whom the return of the lost is enacted.”14 Aligned with the
idea in this book of the homeless thinker interrupting progress by writing
discontinuously and with paradoxically carefully constructed fragments,
Pattison concludes his book on the importance of Kierkegaard as the writer of
loss to articulate and retrieve the single individual through the combined force
of tradition and destruction after the crisis of culture in the nineteenth century,
and after “the twentieth century compounded that loss immeasurably,
smashing one after another of the signs of hope to which the nineteenth
century could still cling […] to be wandering ever further into the condition
that Heidegger called ‘planetary homelessness’”.
3. The Messianic, Awakening, and Politics as Nihilism
For several hours, with my eyes wide open, I gaped at the face of civilization.
Leon Trotsky, My Life
In this section, Benjamin’s ‘messianicity’ and Kierkegaard’s ‘awakening’ are

brought together as a response to profane history and politics, noting points of
both convergence and divergence. The Benjaminian centerpiece is his
“Theological-Political Fragment”, which declares politics as nihilism and
eternal transience. In this extremely dense fragment, and in light also of the
use of the traveler from Christian Discourses from the first chapter, I locate a
key point in the argument for the possibility of a Kierkegaardian indirect
politics. I begin however with looking at Kierkegaard and Benjamin’s
“insignificant discoveries” as a strategy for both recovering and exposing the
various voices of history.
i. Insignificant Discoveries
By focusing on the particular rather than the universal, the loafer of history
transforms the insignificant into the significant, deepening the argument of
ruination and age of disintegration. Though Benjamin has a genuine interest in
the concept of historical materialism in a way Kierkegaard never would or
could, his interest and his interpretation are very different from classical
Marxist thought, as the latter focuses on a universal idea of history rather than
the particular. The dangerous prioritisation of the destiny of history being
played out like a preordained drama is firmly rooted in Marx. Despite
Benjamin’s interest in someone like Leon Trotsky, his thought ultimately
differs from the latter. At the beginning of the Trauerspiel text, Benjamin sets
out his parameters: “The general is the idea. The empirical, on the other hand,
can be all the more profoundly understood the more clearly it is seen as an
extreme. The concept has its roots in the extreme” (O, 35). The interest in
someone like Trotsky comes from the open-ended idea of “permanent
revolution” and the myth of the wandering Marxist, which also interested a
generation of Surrealists. However, in Trotsky’s autobiography (which
Benjamin owned and read), the revolutionary clearly sides with the general,
and thereby provides a sinister description of the excuse made for the deaths
of millions in the name of historical necessity: “The feeling of the supremacy
of the general over the particular, of law over fact, of theory over personal
experience, took root in my mind at an early age and gained increasing
strength as the years advanced.”15 It is not a digression to bring up Trotsky
here for the reasons that his descriptions of historical materialism in his
autobiography are clear which Benjamin read most carefully, Trotsky also
represents the idea of ‘permanent revolution’, and finally, Benjamin’s interest
supplies the reader with a deeper understanding of Benjamin as the open and
complex thinker who comfortably studies both Schmitt and Trotsky as he
expresses his cosmopolitan thought.
It is with the insignificant that Benjamin allies himself, following his
concept of ruination. The epitaph (written by Benjamin himself) on the
monument to Benjamin in Portbou on the Spanish-French border close to
where he died confirms this position and clearly distinguishes him from the
active Marxist tradition in the first half of the twentieth century: “It is more
difficult to honour the memory of the nameless than it is to honour the
memory of the famous. Historical construction is devoted to the memory of
the nameless” (SW4, 406). Benjamin reiterates his position more clearly in
giving voice to the insignificant from the rubble of history as the “[…] attempt
to capture the portrait of history in the most insignificant representations of
reality, its scraps, as it were” (I, 17). Benjamin’s writings travel through
canonized aspects of thought and works of art to the seedier side of modern
living; from a child’s view of colour, Naples, hashish, Trauerspiel, the
Parisian arcades to Baudelaire, Goethe and Marx. Adorno attempts to sum up
Benjamin’s project: “The measure of the experience that supports every
sentence Benjamin wrote is its power to move the centre out to the periphery,
instead of developing the periphery out of the centre as the practice of
philosophers and of traditional theory requires” (NL2, 222).
Where does Kierkegaard fit in with this magnified focus on the
“insignificant”? Like Benjamin, Kierkegaard sees the significant in the scraps
and rubble of history and existence. In Stages on Life’s Way, the reader
catches a glimpse of Kierkegaard as Quidam staring intensely as a child into
the insignificant: “When I was a child, a little pond in a peat excavation was
everything to me. The dark tree roots that poke out here and there in the
murky darkness were vanished kingdoms and countries, each one a discovery
as important to me as antediluvian discoveries to the natural scientist” (SKS5,
336 / SLW, 363). He is alluding here to his adventurous and gifted cousin
Wilhelm Lund who went on to have an extraordinary life as a scientist but
whose discoveries and excavations led him to the frontiers of madness. As
well as writing letters to Lund he never sent as early as 1835, later in a journal
entry from 1850 Kierkegaard alludes again to Lund this time explicitly:
“Today it occured to me that my life resembles his [Wilhelm Lund]. Just as he
lives out there in Brazil, lost to the world, condemned to excavating
antediluvian fossils, so I live away as though I were outside the world,
condemned to excavating the Christian concepts” (Pap. X 3 A 239, 1850). To
transform the ”insignificant things” is see like a child, and, as Matthew’s
gospel tells the reader, to enter the kingdom of God one must become a child
again, brimming with curiosity and a liberated and open imagination.
Kierkegaard bears witness to this in his upbuilding discourse “Patience in
Expectancy” in becoming nothing and opening onself again to the wonder of
existence:
The child is astonished at insignificant things. The adult has laid aside
cildish things; he has seen the wondrous, but it amazes him no more;
there is nothing new under the sun and nothing marvelous in life. If,
however, a person knew how to make himself truly what he truly is –
nothing – knew how to set the seal of patience on what he had
understood- ah, then his life, whether he is the greatest or the lowliest,
would even today be a joyful surprise and be filled with blessed wonder
and would be that throughout all his days […]” (SKS5, 224 / EUP, 226).
The glance towards the insignificant emerges all over his varied
authorship. The extended essay on Mozart in Either/Or I reveals the
insignificant in the subtitle: “Insignificant Introduction” [Intetsigende
Indledning]. Kierkegaard’s focus on the individual of the cityscape stems
from this same premise: to be able to see each one from the crowd, a power
that a god has, and that we should receive knowledge as both a blessing and a
curse on our way towards death. And regarding the subject of world-history,
Kierkegaard’s Johannes Climacus has always been worried. For Climacus, the
observer world-historically only sees the general, and the philosopher’s
abiding fear of movements that launch the mob is that the insignificant in the
form of the subjective is lost, shown by Trotsky’s declaration above.
Climacus presents the point through the image of separating the tree from the
forest: “The observer stares numbly into the immense forest of the
generations, and like someone who cannot see the forest for the trees, he sees
only the forest, not a single tree” (SKS7, 147 / CUP, 159). Climacus begins
his most famous sections with the eighteenth century writer Gotthold Ephraim
Lessing, who, like Kierkegaard and Benjamin, is an ‘insignificant thinker’.
The section on Lessing from Concluding Unscientific Postscript is “an

expression of gratitude” after all, for it is this insignificant thinker who makes
it his task to becoming essentially subjective in contrast to the present age
with its philosophy of objectivity. Lessing, too, has been forgotten in the
progress of history: “Lessing belongs, of course, to the distant past, a receding
little station on the systematic world-historical railroad” (SKS7, 69 / CUP,
67). The name Johannes Climacus should be added to this list, who cheerfully
declares: “I am so insignificant that I am an outside in literature. I have not
added to subscription literature, nor can it truthfully be said that I have a
significant place in it” (SKS7, 171 / CUP, 185). And in the upbuilding
discourses on the lily and bird, it is in looking at the way these insignificant
creatures of nature and the world live where one may find joy and redemption
and learn even to live in the today, when we remind ourselves again of
Kierkegaard’s definition of joy [Glæde] in his startling and most affirmative
text as “truly to be present to oneself [...] truly to be today” and that “when
you obey as the creation obeys, tomorrow does not exist” (SKS11, 43 / WA,
38-39).
The priority of the insignificant confirms Kierkegaard and Benjamin’s
emphasis on a messianic hope: the hope for that which was lost, hope for the
insignificant to keep contaminating the grand progress of history, and hope
that dwells within each individual. Even, and perhaps most of all, in the
failure is hope made possible. Coming to the close of Christian Discourses,
Kierkegaard discloses the tension in existing tenderly balanced between loss
and hope: “[…] as long as one lives it is still possible that one could be lost.
As long as there is life there is hope—as long as there is life there certainly is
also the possibility of danger” (SKS10, 304 / CD, 283). And Benjamin
concludes his essay on Goethe’s Elective Affinities with rousing lines of an
insignificant author in the face of world history: “Only for the sake of the
hopeless ones have we been given hope” (SW1, 356). The thinker’s relation to
the public becomes a paradoxical relationship; one is writing for no one and
writing within the ‘public’ sphere. For those who are dead and for those who
are to come, and in that way, one can understand Kafka’s claims that writing
is a form of prayer. Like Hamlet’s ghost who is also Marx’s spectre, the
forgotten ghosts of history are recovered by Benjamin to disrupt and to say to
the profane, progressive history that the time indeed is out of joint. And for
Kierkegaard, even the ethical Judge William is afraid of this ghost who he
sees as a shadow hovering around the aesthetic of Either/Or and who Judge
William wants to discard as an irrational Don Quixote: “[…] you are
continually fighting […] just like that Spanish knight, for a bygone time
[svunden Tid]. Since you are in fact fighting for the moment against time, you
actually are always fighting for what has disappeared” (SKS3, 138 / EOII, 141).
ii. The Messianic
Lukács introduced Benjamin to a rich and sophisticated Marxist theory of

culture, but there is clear disparity between the two in their journeys as
thinkers, with Lukács seeking unity and totality of thought and Benjamin
signaling fragmentation for modern age. As noted previously, the example of
Naples reveals a far more heterogeneous world than Lukács imagines. In the
1967 Preface to History and Class Consciousness, Lukács refers to that period
of writing his famous text as his ‘revolutionary messianism’ and ‘messianic
utopianism’ (HCC, xv, xxvii). This moment soon evaporates for Lukács, but
for Benjamin it is only the beginning. Benjamin moves from his reading of
Lukács’ History and Class Consciousness to developing his own form of
messianic thought. There are other factors that led to Benjamin’s messianic
thought, such as the influence of Gershom Scholem, his discovery of Kafka
and his reading of sacred Jewish texts. My investigation comes in the context
of the loafer of history and philosopher of the city which heralds in an indirect
politics alongside Kierkegaard. Benjamin makes his way towards thinking
about the messianic time through his disruption of historical materialism. In
this regard, there is a similarity to Kierkegaard’s ‘qualitative dialectic’ which
disrupts the destiny of history that infuriated Lukács when writing The
Destruction of Reason. Benjamin’s dialectician is an irreverent critic of
history relying on the rubble rather than the Waterloos of history. Benjamin
writes: “What matters are never the ‘great’ but only the dialectical contrasts,
which often seem indistinguishable from nuances. It is nonetheless from them
that life is always born anew” (A, N1a, 4). The critique of progress is
progress, and for Benjamin, there are no major or minor points of history. The
possibility to express disunity brings unity to Benjamin’s thinking and to
history. Benjamin continues on his treacherous path: “What is even more
decisive is that the dialectician cannot look on history as anything other than a
constellation of dangers which he is always, as he follows its development in
his thought, on the point of averting” (A, N7, 2). The disruption (breaking
apart) of secular history makes room for the messianic. The messianic in the
secular world is always fragmented and discontinuous, exemplified by
Benjamin’s angel of history on his way:
This is how the angel of history must look. His face is turned toward the
past. Where a chain of events appears before us, he sees one single
catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it at
his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole
what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise and has
got caught in his wings; it is so strong that the angel can no longer close
them. This storm drives him irresistibly into the future, to which his back
is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows towards the sky.
What we call progress is this storm (SW4, 392).
Is this a glimpse into the possibility of messianic time? Or is it an image

of the conflict between the sacred and the profane through history? In The
Concept of Anxiety, Kierkegaard has his pseudonym Vigilius Haufniensis,
another seer, another watchman (Vigilius is, after all, Latin for watchman),
say: “Just as an angel has no history but is only himself without participating
in any history” (SKS4, 341 / CA, 34). There is the Benjamin/Kierkegaard
distinction: Kierkegaard’s Christian should always looks to the present, and
take the Christ figure from the past as incarnated, actual, living, and
contemporaneous. Benjamin’s idea of the messianic looks to the past and
tunes in to a past that is seemingly lost but the remnants remain, as a ruin. The
angel of history is swept up in this mess. The knight of faith stands firm in the
present. Yet both thinkers think consciously in fragments. Their unity again is
found in the fragment. As Benjamin states in his essay “One Way Street” and
which was aptly used as the motto by the editor of Adorno’s unfinished
monograph on his favourite artist Beethoven (B, vii): “To great writers,
finished works weigh lighter than those fragments on which they work
throughout their lives” (SW1, 448). The angel and the man, and the sacred
and the profane, ensure fragmentation and an interlude, and a usurpation of
one by the other brings on a disaster.
What is the messianic? It is originally inspired by hope of the Messiah,
by the belief that the Messiah will arrive imminently. It is always a priori in
the future and the past, for a messianic power that is always to come, and that
it is always before us, can blast through the historical continuum at any
moment. The messianic also indicates that that something will come when one
least expects it. In Benjamin’s last thesis on the philosophy of history, he
supports this idea: “For every second was the small gateway in time through
which the Messiah might enter” (SW4, 397). This small gateway might refer
back to the “strait gate” and “the gate is small” from The Gospel of Matthew
7:13-14. The editors of Benjamin’s Selected Writings also mention that
Benjamin’s “small gateway”, the translation of “die kleine Pforte”, might be
an echo of Martin Luther’s phrase “die enge Pforte” in his translation of the
aforementioned passage from Matthew in the Luther German Bible (SW4
400). Kafka also writes of the unexpected arrival of the Messiah: “The
Messiah will come only when he is no longer necessary; he will come only on
the day after his arrival; he will come, not on the last day, but on the very
last.”16 One cannot wholly incorporate this messianic element into politics,
because this aestheticizes politics, giving it a destiny that is divine. The
concept of the messianic instead supports the case for ruination, which
rediscovers that which might have been lost in the past and makes it new
again, simultaneously disrupting world-historical progress: “Then, like every
generation that preceded us, we have been endowed with a weak Messianic
power, a power on which the past has a claim” (SW4, 390). Terry Eagleton,
an ardent admirer of Benjamin, articulates Benjamin’s intention in the
Trauerspiel text. He writes: “The Trauerspiel, obsessed with the transience of
the present and the need to redeem it for eternity, blasts coherence apart in
order to salvage them”17 (as in the ruination of the past, outside the history
books and dubious labels such as ‘canon’ and ‘classics’). The eternal
embodies this messianic power, which is contained in humanity, and from this
eternal spark comes hope for the hopeless and a retrieval of the oppressed
past: “In this structure he [the historical materialist] recognises the sign of a
messianic arrest of happening, or (put differently) a revolutionary chance in
the fight for the oppressed past” (SW4, 396).
At the same time, one is obliged to live in the present, a present that at
any point may be shot through by the messianic power: “At any given time,
the living see themselves in the midday of history. They are obliged to prepare
a banquet for the past. The historian is the herald who invites the dead to the
table” (A, N15, 2). Benjamin uses Jeztzeit—literally ‘Now-Time’ or ‘presence
of the now’—in his fourteenth thesis on history. Harry Zorn quite rightly
points out that Jetztzeit is not an equivalent to Gegenwart (present), but that
Benjamin is thinking more of the mystical nunc stans (‘everlasting now’) (I,
253). Benjamin states: “History is the subject of a construction whose site is
not homogenous, empty time, but time filled by the now-time [Jetztzeit]”
(SW4, 395). This is reminiscent of Anti-Climacus’ remarks on sacred history
in Practice in Christianity, and both Anti-Climacus and Climacus’ distaste for
world-history that becomes sedimented and something we take for granted
especially concerning the Jetztzeit moments of history that changes everything
such as the figure of Socrates, Christ, or Napoleon. And the messianic is a
universal glimpse in a singular moment. But also, reminiscent of the ‘glance
of the eye’ (Øieblikket) from Philosophical Fragments and The Concept of
Anxiety it is fulfilled time, which has reemerged in universities through
renewed studies of Saint Paul’s texts stemming from Jacob Taubes’ final
lectures, and thereafter with Badiou, Žižek and Agamben. Agamben views
Paul’s Letters as “the fundamental messianic text for the Western tradition,”18
and Žižek wants to recoup a materialist form of Christianity, and does so by
appealing to the Pauline church community as one of the first revolutionary
communities, and thereby begins to meld Marxism and Christianity, much
like what the movement of Liberation Theology was attempting to do in South
America in the 1960s. In the anticipation of messianic time, sacred history
becomes the contemporaneous, the eternal present, a place where past and
future converge explosively in the present, such that the presence of the now
through Benjamin’s historical materialist is to “blast open the continuum of
history [das Kontinuum der Geschichte aufzusprengen]” (SW4, 396). Only
then might the Messiah enter, and this is Benjamin’s heterogeneous time in
which “every second of time was the strait gate through which the Messiah
might enter” (SW4, 397). There is an affinity to Anti-Climacus’ concept of

authentic time: “In relation to the absolute, there is only one time, the present”
(SKS12, 76 / PC, 63). Access to the future is temporary and unclear, an access
where the movement of passionate inwardness is to propel one forward
towards praxis. I move now to Kierkegaard’s ‘awakening’ which is distinct
from both Benjamin’s messianic power and Kierkegaard’s use of the ‘glance
of the eye’.
iii. Awakening
Europe seems to be resting in the arms of Morpheus, lulled to sleep by the

usurpation of all that is messianic and theological into the political, into
secular life. The enlightenment led us into the secular world, and yet
enlightenment (Aufklärung, Éclarissement) signifies light, illumination, and
clarity. Can ‘enlightenment’ have paradoxically lulled us back to sleep again?
Following his long journal entry at the close of 1848 on the “age of
disintegration”, Kierkegaard sets out the individual’s role in combating both
catharsis and catastrophe. He writes that:
‘The single individual’ is a category that lends itself to being used in two
ways: in times where all is security and life is as though held in an
indolent trance, ‘the single individual’ is the category of awakening,
when everything is tottering [faltering, shaking] it is the category of
conciliation [soothing, appeasement] (Pap. IX B 63:8, 1848).
The single individual is the category of awakening. Kierkegaard’s asks

and answers the question:
But what is it to stay awake? It is unsureness [Usikkerhed] in fear and

trembling. And what is faith but an empty delusion if it is not awake?
And if faith is not awake, what else is it but that pernicious sureness?
The person who never concerned himself about his salvation did not
become sure either; but the faith that fell asleep, that is sureness (SKS10,
220 / CD, 212).
According to Kierkegaard, in times of peace, the single individual is “to

awaken inwardness”; in times of rebellion, the single individual is “to draw
attention away from the external.” The two Anti-Climacus works include the
word awakening as their epigraph at the beginning of each text; in The
Sickness unto Death: “For Upbuilding and Awakening [til Opbyggelse og
Opvæggelse]”, and in Practice in Christianity: “For Awakening and Inward
Deepening [til Opvækkelse og Inderliggjørelse].” When reflecting on his
writings, Kierkegaard describes his project as “posing the riddle of
awakening” (Pap. X I 118, 1849), the riddle being “[…] a balanced aesthetic
and religious productivity, simultaneously.” The one who is fully awakened
however may turn out to look like one of the slumbering ones: a loafing
insomniac who is neither awake nor asleep. Again in 1848, calling himself
“the Sleepless”, Kierkegaard says that “[…] the more spirit one has, the more
sleeplessness” (Pap. IX A 367, 1848). Perhaps it might help to think back to
the question Johannes de silentio asks in reference to the story of Abraham:
“[…] how many did it render sleepless?” (SKS4, 124 / FT, 28). Benjamin’s
flâneur “has no right to sleep” (A, M6a, 2), and is as much alert at night as
during the day.
Kierkegaard always returns to the example of the child as wide-awake
and with a supreme and fertile imagination. The child, like the revolutionary
age in Kierkegaard’s Two Ages:A Literary Review, is sheer life and motion,
unalloyed attention all day long. And the youth is awake as an adult rarely is,
his mind restless early and late, stirred in passion so he can scarcely sleep:
“The child is sheer life and motion, unalloyed attention all day long. And the
youth is awake as an adult rarely is, his mind restless early and late, stirred in
passion so he often can scarcely sleep […] The child is turned entirely
outward, its inwardness is outwardness, and to that extent he is wide-awake”
(SKS10, 119 / CD, 108). Another writer of multiple voices, the poet Fernando
Pessoa expresses magnificently the power of seeing like a wide-eyed child in
two lines in a poem: “For I am the size of what I see / And not the size of my
height.”19 And in Practice in Christianity, Anti-Climacus paints a picture of
the single individual awakened and hovering between the dream-world and
reality: “[…] he walks like a dreamer, and yet one can see by the fire and
flame in his eyes that he is wide awake; he walks like a stranger, and yet he
seems to be at home” (SKS12, 188 / PC, 189). This description conjures an
image of the awakened one, and an image of the homeless wanderer who is at
home everywhere. This unleashes a two-fold form in Kierkegaard’s
Dagdriver, as both recognizable (to the eternal, God and/or the awakened
human being) and unrecognizable (to the public, mass and number in the
world), living out the indirect political activity as the astute, Socratic
questioner on the street, sleepy-eyed and fully awake. The problem arises, and
always will, when the secular world usurps the awakened one. And then
comes the prioritisation of the Skillevei: God first, then world. Even if the
community is to meet at the altar, it is through the call of a God that they do it.
The individual with the prototypes of Chris and Socrates is the category of
spirit and awakening, interrupting the idea of the political, and makes the
seemingly powerful political treatise trivial. Hannah Arendt points out that
childlike openness and sophisticated erudition are Benjamin’s hallmarks, and
I agree here with her when she writes that when Adorno criticizes Benjamin’s
“wide-eyed presentation of actualities”, “he hit the nail right on its head; this
is precisely what Benjamin was doing and wanted to do” (I, 17).
Benjamin’s motif of the messianic, which is present in his On the

Concept of History (1940) and goes all the way back to his “Theological
Political Fragment” (1921), heralds the dialectic at a standstill which affirms
Benjamin’s own form of awakening. This ‘dialectic at a standstill’ is
connected to the Jugendstil: “a first attempt to reckon with the open air […]
Jugendstil is the dream that one has come awake” (A, K2, 6). In The Arcades
Project, the Jugenstil supports the Jetztzeit, which is ‘the presence/being of
the now’. Jugendstil, a style of architecture (from late nineteenth and early
twentieth century), is important for Benjamin because it crosses the cultural
barriers that separate ‘high’ from ‘low’ art. Both awakening and Jetztzeit are
concerned with the present that Kierkegaard’s Christian can grasp. The break
with history is made with the eternal coming of the messiah and the blasting
of the continuum of history through being contemporary with oneself
(samtidig med sig selv). Here again, there is the distinction from Marx and
Lukács. In his “Paralipomena to On the Concept of History”, Benjamin
confirms this: “Marx says that revolutions are the locomotive of world
history. But perhaps it is quite otherwise. Perhaps revolutions are an attempt
by the passenger on this train—namely, the human race—to activate the
emergency brake” (SW4, 402). This emergency break is the “dialectics at a
standstill” which is an image (A, N2a, 3). Can we say then that Benjamin’s
essay on Eduard Fuchs parallels Anti-Climacus’ disruption of ‘profane
history’? It is in this essay where Benjamin repeats Thesis XVI from On the
Concept of History: “The latter [historical materialism] is directed toward a
consciousness of the present which explodes the continuum of history” (SW3,
262). How can one articulate “dialectics at a standstill”? Here—by
audaciously navigating through the prism of Kierkegaard’s awakening. This
awakening becomes a moment of recognisability for the single individual
living as the unrecognisable in the face of the world and the public/mass and
number. Benjamin writes: “The dialectical image is an image that emerges
suddenly, in a flash. What has been is to be held fast—as an image flashing up
in the now of its recognisability” (A, N9, 7). I agree with Adorno when he
writes: “[…] dialectics at a standstill […] a name that he [Benjamin] hit upon
without knowing that Kierkegaard’s melancholy had long since conjured it
up” (NL2, 228). The dialectics at a standstill can be seen as an historical
index, and perhaps even, as one commentator audaciously put it: “[…] a time
of truth.”20 And yet, unlike Kierkegaard, Benjamin’s awakening still contains
a messianic waiting as he enigmatically expresses in The Arcades Project:
“The imminent awakening is poised, like the wooden horse of the Greeks, in
the Troy of dreams” (A, K2, 4).
Buried deep between countless quotations, Benjamin states in The
Arcades Project: “The now of recognisability is the moment of awakening”
(A, N18, 4). This is a vital statement for distilling the essence of this section,
with its focus on the insignificant, heralding in the messianic and the use of
awakening by both Kierkegaard and Benjamin. 1848 is a year of awakening

for Kierkegaard: it is the year where he uses the word explicitly in the texts,
and a year which is symbolically and in actuality the year of revolution and
potential, and Kierkegaard’s confrontation (inspired by Matthew 6:24) with
new political ideas. Benjamin concludes his nomadic writing life with his
eighteen theses on the concept of history and the unfinished Arcades Project,
which spirals more and more out of control in terms of being an acceptable,
scholarly work—that it took sixty years for it to be translated into English
gives some indication to its epic, unorthodox sprawl. The arcades are the
landscape in which both the dreamer and the one who is wide-awake reside, a
realm where one indeed paradoxically a dreamer who is wide-awake, and a
homeless stranger who is at home everywhere.
iv. Reading the Theological-Political Fragment
I conclude this chapter by looking at one of Benjamin’s most compressed and

enigmatic fragments, the Theological-Political Fragment. This fragment was
untitled until Adorno gave it a name for the posthumous publications. The
date of the piece remains uncertain, most probably from 1920-21 according to
Gershom Scholem and Rolf Tiedemann, and not 1937-38 as thought by
Adorno. Benjamin begins the fragment: “Only the Messiah himself completes
all history, in the sense that he alone redeems, completes, creates its relation
to the messianic” (SW3, 305). Politics is nihilism, or as Benjamin writes, “the
task of world politics, whose method must be called nihilism” (SW3, 306).
Behind politics is the vortex or, in Kierkegaard’s case, the Hvirvel, because it
comes to nothing, unlike the Messiah and messianic power. Friedrich
Heinrich Jacobi (1743-1819) brought the term ‘nihilism’ in philosophical
discussion in Europe in the wake of Kant’s critical philosophy. According to
Jacobi, every demonstrative method in the world ends in fatalism which is
nihilism, and the keystone (Element) of all human knowledge and activity is
belief. Johannes Climacus introduces Jacobi in his discussion on ‘the leap’
and its connection to Lessing (See SKS7, 98-102 / CUP 100-105). Benjamin
uses the word messianic nine times within the space of a page. Reading this
fragment helps shed light on the political gesture of Kierkegaard.
Kierkegaard’s standpoint is that only the Messiah can complete history, while
politics is full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. The reader as single
individual is told this in Christian Discourses and Practice in Christianity.
What makes Kierkegaard’s indirect politics intriguing and complex is its
alternative to Gnosticism and Schmittian politics. For once we accept that
politics is nihilism for the spiritual endeavor, then we can begin to work
praxis in the world, because politics is the order of the profane or the world.
This profane or secular order is “erected on the idea of happiness” (SW3,
305). The sacred, however, has nothing to do with earthly happiness.
Kierkegaard’s prototypes struggle and suffer in their constant conflict with the
profane order which includes politics, a happy, comfortable life and finally,
nihilism. Benjamin’s final sentence from the fragment reads: “To strive for
such a passing away—even the passing away of those stages of man that are
nature—is the task of world politics, whose method must be called nihilism”
(SW3, 306). Politics is nihilism because it ultimately goes to the dust from
where it rose. This is certainly a re-appropriation and reinterpretation of
nihilism from the cryptic final lines of the fragment. Politics, as nihilism,
strives for happiness, and thereby finds its downfall; i.e. in the nothing.
God or the Messiah cannot enter world politics, as the Messiah and God
have a religious significance, which are an end yet not a telos. Both
Kierkegaard’s and Benjamin’s writings find themselves in conversation with
politics, while both seek the religious/spiritual truth. For it is in the political
realm and its method of nihilism that ensures the forever disintegrating and
present religious realm. Benjamin, in the fragment, shows the paradox with
two arrows: “[…] by virtue of the path it is moving along, can augment
another force on the opposite path, so the secular order—because of its nature
as secular—promotes the coming of the Messianic Kingdom” (SW3, 305). To
bring about the consolidation of experience with history, which is original for
every present, is the task of historical materialism, which explodes the epoch
out of its reified ‘historical continuity’. Yet this results in the preservation and
removal of the course of history in the epoch. How does one bring together
these two extremes of history, after presenting both ‘the messianic’ and
‘awakening’? It is the paradox of the two arrows as ‘eternal transience’. For
both Kierkegaard and Benjamin, nature is eternally transient. Kierkegaard’s
lilies and birds are eternal and all pass away. Kierkegaard’s traveler is
transient to the world, as much as politics is transient in relation to the eternal.
Although there is a lack of transcendence in Benjamin’s fragment, nature is
still messianic “by reason of its eternal and total passing away.” In the
Trauerspiel text, Benjamin writes:
In nature they [the baroque dramatists] saw eternal transience, and here
alone did the saturnine vision of this generation recognise history. Its
monuments, ruins, are, according to Agrippa von Nettesheim, the home
of the saturnine beasts. In the process of decay, and in it alone, the
events of history shrivel up and become absorbed in the setting (O, 179).
History is a space for a certain beastly force, the beast of nihilism

coming and going like a vortex out of and into nature as eternal transience, in
a way analogous to the secular or profane world of politics that comes and
goes, not annihilating the sacred world, but through turning it into a ruin. The
eternal is the transient realm in the world.
Kierkegaard’s politics finds its place in Benjamin’s fragment or ruin, a
curb to all varieties of totalitarianism. Kierkegaard’s and Benjamin’s writings
come across as an inconclusive theory of crisis, yet the individual in their

writings is political in so far as he keeps the political fallible. Kierkegaard’s
thought is not a political theology, but a subversion and critique of the
political, an indirect politics, using awakening as a foil, a break, and a halt.
Benjamin’s writings are continually interruptive. This follows from Johannes
Climacus’ advice to relate the absolute to the absolute, and the relative to the
relative, for when we relate the relative to the absolute, or the absolute to the
relative, the danger begins (SKS7, 496 / CUP, 547). The trick is to use the
messianic power and awakening to critique and show the fallibility of politics,
and not join forces. This is another way to reveal the delicate unity in the
disunity of sacred and profane.
I have travelled some distance in bringing together Kierkegaard and
Benjamin as loafers of history through the theme of indirect politics. I have
presented them as urban vagabonds in the city of revolution and reflection,
interiors, exteriors and the realm of the Dagdriver and the flâneur. I have
traversed the themes of tradition and destruction, through the complexities of
critique and violence and subverting Schmitt’s sovereign, through the use of
ruination and disintegration. The final and most complex section on politics as
nihilism welcomes Benjamin’s idea of the messianic and Kierkegaard’s
awakening, the place of eternal transience in the conflict between sacred and
profane, and the transformation of “insignificant discoveries”. Given the
scope of these two extraordinary authorships that in so many areas remain
unfinished, there is an impossibility of summing them up together. Both are
‘loafers’ equally ironically and earnestly, writing for “no one”—for that
solitary reader, so when all lights have gone out there is still a path that one
can take, as well as playing a kind of Socratic gadfly role to the comfortable,
secure citizen. Benjamin wrote a few months before his death, etched on the
memorial at Portbou: “Every line we succeed in publishing today […] is a
victory wrested from the powers of darkness.” In the ruination and
disintegration of history and civilization, the loafer as a modern day
troubadour has a unique place in human society as the affirmative and critical
actor always watching and walking with searching wide eyes and restless feet.
Johannes de silentio who states wonderfully that he only pays attention to
movements (SKS4, 133 / FT, 38); likewise the seer in the city expresses his
own movement in body and language: “And my soul danced, danced, old
sailing barge / Without masts, upon a monstrous, shoreless sea [Et mon âme
dansait, dansait, vieille gabarre / Sans mâts, sur une mer monstrueuse et sans
bords! – Baudelaire; Les Sept Vieillards]”.
Five
OUT OF THE PETRIFIED

PRIMORDIAL LANDSCAPE
(THEODOR ADORNO)
Open up, open up, you’ll be alright, you’ll see. What a joy it is, to turn and look
astern, between two visits to the depths, scan in vain the horizon for a sail, it’s a
real pleasure, upon my word it is, to be unable to drown, under such conditions.
Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable
When Walter Benjamin reviewed Adorno’s first major work, Kierkegaard:

Construction of the Aesthetic, he presented Kierkegaard as a latecomer to
idealism (SW2, 703). For Adorno, Kierkegaard paradoxically becomes an
idealist by virtue of his critique and undermining of idealism. Adorno’s
critique of Kierkegaard brings out the most fundamental elements of
Kierkegaard’s thought in Adorno. Of all the thinkers in conversation with
Kierkegaard in this book, Adorno quotes Kierkegaard’s work most
extensively, and it is fitting that the book culiminate in Adorno’s relationship
to Kierkegaard’s work. Adorno directly confronts and engages with
Kierkegaard in his first published book Kierkegaard: Construction of the
Aesthetic. Following his precocious critique, Adorno adopts Kierkegaard’s
indirect politics more stridently than the other key figures in this book. It is
incredible to see that Adorno is mentioned so rarely in Kierkegaard
scholarship, and when he is it is often with distaste and dismissal by some of
the most excellent Kierkegaard scholars—mostly because of Adorno’s
intermingling of pseudonyms in Kierkegaard’s oeuvre. For example, Merold
Westphal calls Adorno’s Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic “the
most irresponsible book ever written on Kierkegaard.”1 Westphal attacks
Adorno for taking Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms literally, thereby constructing
an entire philosophy of Kierkegaard which, according to Westphal, makes
Kierkegaard seem incoherent and unintelligible; and Alastair Hannay cites
Adorno as an example of “ignoring the interpretational challenges of the
pseudonymity.”2 And yet he is one of few major figures of twentieth century
European philosophy and critical theory to have devoted a whole book on
Kierkegaard and penetratively explore many overlooked aspects of the writer.
There are a few works who have treated the subject of Adorno seriously
alongside Kierkegaard such as Hermann Deuser’s Dialektische Theologie:
Studien zu Adornos Metaphysik und zum Spätwerk Kierkegaards, Geoffrey
A. Hale’s Kierkegaard and the Ends of Language, Isak Winkel Holm’s
Tanken i Billedet: Søren Kierkegaards Poetik, Thomas Pepper’s Singularities
Extremes of Theory in the Twentieth Century, and Roland Boer’s article “A

Totality of Ruins: Adorno on Kierkegaard”.3 The book’s controversy is not in
doubt, as Adorno freely conflates various pseudonyms and uses now obsolete
translations, while his critique is unrelenting. Adorno’s merciless critique is a
similar kind to the type that Kierkegaard practiced in relation to Hegel at
times. However, Adorno’s Kierkegaard, to quote from a recent text that
tackles this relationship, is “[…] a testament to the importance of
Kierkegaard’s work for Adorno’s understanding of philosophy.”4
Adorno regarded his book, as his “farewell” to Kierkegaard,5 after many
years of obsessive reading (in his youth) of him. Paul Tillich was the
supervisor of Adorno’s Kierkegaard, which was ‘passed’ in 1931 and
published on the day Hitler came to power in 1933. In the book, Adorno
argues that Kierkegaard fails to develop a dialectic, and that Kierkegaard’s
turn towards inwardness leads further into despair and to the exclusion of the
possibility of historical change. Yet Adorno’s affinity with Kierkegaard
operates on multiple levels: the belief in the connection between philosophical
thinking and literary reflection, the perception of the beginnings of a faceless
society, opening up Hegel’s system, the engagement with music, bringing
Christianity to an extreme tension with bourgeois society, the use of paradox
and unresolved contradiction in thinking, the eternal position of non-
compromise, and the many allusions to metaphor, image and fairytale for
philosophical use. And yet Adorno criticises Kierkegaard for so many of these
aspects latent in the latter’s thinking, such as falling prey to the bourgeois
interior, sacrificing intellect for belief by using paradox, mixing literature or
art with philosophy or truth content, distorting Hegel’s philosophy, and
turning inwardness into myth and metaphor.
I will examine Adorno’s texts, most especially Kierkegaard:
Construction of the Aesthetic, Minima Moralia, Negative Dialectics, Aesthetic
Theory, Dialectic of Enlightenment, essays from Notes on Literature 1-2,
Prisms, and the later essays on Kierkegaard: “Kierkegaard’s Doctrine of
Love” and “Kierkegaard Once Again”, and develop my points further that,
first, Kierkegaard’s inwardness can be used as an expression for praxis, and
how it does not succumb to Adorno’s critique of inwardness as petrified;
second, Adorno’s negative dialectic is rather a continuation of Kierkegaard’s
dialectic of disintegration; third, through the use and analysis of myth, both
Adorno and Kierkegaard incorporate their melancholy into philosophical
writing; and finally, by exploring Adorno’s critique as well as his own
philosophy as a form of Kierkegaardian praxis, the negative space and sets of
masks that make up indirect politics are deepened in this final chapter.
Out of the Petrified Primordial Landscape 179
1. Inwardness as a Petrified Primordial Landscape
Wanderer tritt still herein; / Schmerz versteinerte die Schwelle [Wanderer steps
silent indoors; Pain has petrified the threshold].
Georg Trakl, “Ein Winterabend”6
Adorno begins his critical monograph on Kierkegaard with a passage by

Edgar Allan Poe called “A Dream into the Maelstrom”, originally published
in 1841, in which a man recounts how he survived a shipwreck and a
whirlpool. This could be Kierkegaard and Adorno’s story also:
The boat appeared to be hanging, as if by magic, midway down, upon

the interior surface of a funnel vast in circumference, prodigious in
depth, and whose perfectly smooth sides might have been mistaken for
ebony, but for the bewildering rapidity with which they spun around, and
for the gleaming and ghastly radiance they shot forth, as the rays of the
full moon, from that circular rift amid the clouds … streamed in a flood
of golden glory along the black walls, and far away down into the inmost
recesses of the abyss (K, vi).
What one is left with after reading this remarkable piece of prose is an
image of nihilistic inwardness, suspended between ground and
groundlessness, allied to neither, an abundance of colour behind which lies a
black hole of futility. This is the philosophy of Kierkegaard according to
Adorno. Kierkegaard’s ‘inwardness’ is a problem for Adorno and, in his view,
for thinking in general. Two of the seven chapter titles from the Kierkegaard
text include the word inwardness. Adorno had been avidly reading Lukács’
Theory of the Novel, where Lukács invokes Innerlichkeit most often, as early
as 1920 (when he was just seventeen years old), and he borrowed some of the
tools and themes employed by Benjamin by the time he began writing his
critique of Kierkegaard. Among the first courses that Adorno taught was a
seminar on Benjamin’s Trauerspiel book, in 1932, a year before the
publication of Kierkegaard. Adorno’s lecture “The Idea of Natural History”
(1932) is deeply influenced by the Trauerspiel book. The first section of this
final chapter focuses on inwardness as petrification, the sovereign and/or
nihilistic realm, the aesthetic of inwardness and the transformation of
inwardness. By dissecting Adorno’s critique of Kierkegaard’s inwardness, it
becomes possible to free both from potential petrification.
i. Petrification
For Adorno, Kierkegaard’s inwardness petrifies the human being, leaving one
in a cul de sac, and estranged and isolated from society. On a close reading of
Adorno, the word petrification (die Versteinerung) has a significant place. The
word first comes to light in Benjamin’s Trauerspiel: “[…] in allegory the

observer is confronted with the facies hippocratica [Hippocratic face] of
history, as a petrified primordial landscape” [liegt in der Allegorie die facies
hippocratica der Geschichte als erstarrte Urlandschaft dem Betrachter vor
Augen] (O, 166). It is cited by Adorno both in “The Idea of Natural History”
and Kierkegaard, where he writes:
[Images at a standstill] may be called dialectical images, to use

Benjamin’s expression, whose compelling definition of ‘allegory’ also
holds true for Kierkegaard’s allegorical intention taken as a figure of
historical dialectic and mythical nature. According to this definition, ‘in
allegory the observer is confronted with the facies hippocratica of
history, as a petrified primordial landscape’ - In Kierkegaard nature is
mythical as proto-history, cited in the image and concept of his historical
moment (K, 54).
It is clear here that Adorno connects Benjamin’s expression with

Kierkegaard, and Adorno uses the same description a few pages later:
“Inwardness is the historical prison of primordial human nature [Innerlichkeit
ist das geschichtliche Gefängnis des urgeschichtlichen Menschenwesens]” (K,
60). The facies hippocratica is the manifestation of the petrified human being
consumed by inwardness. The face is described by Francis Adams in The
Genuine Works of Hippocrates (1886) as being marked by “a sharp nose,
hollow eyes, collapsed temples, the ears cold, contracted, and their lobes
turned out: the skin about the forehead being rough, distended and parched;
the colour of the whole face being green, black, livid, or lead coloured”.7
Inwardness isolates the individual from history and the world, and ensures the
self-imprisonment of the individual; in short, inwardness petrifies the
individual. For Adorno, the effect of this prison [of primordial human nature]
is melancholy [Schwermut]” (K, 60). (The issue of melancholy is addressed in
section three of this chapter.) The argument that Adorno has with Benjamin
runs even deeper with Kierkegaard also because of the effect and influence
Kierkegaard had within the German intellectual milieu of the twentieth
century, not least on the likes of Schmitt, Heidegger and Jaspers. Benjamin
quotes his own passage on the primordial landscape again in The Arcades
Project (in the section “On the Theory of Knowledge, Theory of Progress”),
this time by showing that Adorno also uses this passage in Kierkegaard:
Construction of the Aesthetic. The word ‘petrified’ turns up when describing
the ‘privileged self’ in aphorism 88 of Adorno’s Minima Moralia: “their
[individualities] petrified [erstarrtes] otherness, they plunge passionately into
the privilege of their self and so exaggerate themselves that they completely
eradicate what they are taken for” (MM, 135). What emerges is potentially a
new ideology, solidified, oppressive and repressive. It is everything that
Adorno is trying to escape from. He is apprehensive of the same direction in

Benjamin, with hints of a return to petrification in Benjamin’s ‘dialectics at a
standstill’. For Adorno, petrification is a sure way to ideology and
totalitarianism. At an early age Adorno is reading and indebted to Lukács’
pre-Marxist works, guiding the reader in a post-unified world where the idea
of epic is over or no longer possible. The shadow of new movements and calls
for totality was looming but which also brought us back to old oppressive
systems, on which Adorno reflects in aphorism 150 of Minima Moralia at the
end of WWII:
The new, sought for its own sake, a kind of laboratory product, petrified
[verhärtet] into a conceptual scheme, becomes in its sudden apparition a
compulsive return of the old, not unlike that in traumatic neuroses. To
the dazzled vision the veil of temporal succession is rent to reveal the
archetypes of perpetual sameness; this is why the discovery of the new is
satanic, an eternal recurrence of damnation (MM, 236).
Even the enlightenment movement can become petrified, as famously

argued by Adorno and Horkheimer in Dialectic of Enlightenment:
The gods cannot take away fear from human beings, the petrified
[versteinerte] cries of whom they bear as their names. Humans believe
themselves free of fear when there is no longer anything unknown. This
has determined the path of demythologisation, of enlightenment, which
equates the living with the nonliving as had equated the nonliving with
the living. Enlightenment is mythical fear radicalised (DE, 11).
Once again for Adorno, a new form of petrification emerges in the

Enlightenment, where this idea first took root in Adorno’s study of
Kierkegaard. Adorno interprets Kierkegaard’s inwardness as a new and more
powerful petrification stemming from an attempt to free itself from Hegelian
totality, while the Enlightenment enters a new petrified myth from its reaction
to the concept of myth: “Enlightenment’s mythic terror springs from a horror
of myth” (DE, 22).
Yet, Adorno seems to favour this landscape and expression of
petrification in the poet and the artist, most especially in the likes of Trakl,
Kafka and Beckett. He favours these twentieth-century artists because they
both describe and have their characters and poems hellishly inhabit the
petrified primordial landscape. Adorno’s Kierkegaard seduces the reader (as
the single individual) into the petrified, primordial landscape. What makes
Adorno’s critique interesting is that, like Anti-Climacus, he circles around his
subject and uses tradition’s tools and language to aid his relentless critique.
Unlike Lukács, who consciously betrays and attacks his tradition as a way to
make the utopian ideal a reality, Adorno’s remains on the border between
radical transformation while remaining loyal to his tradition. One of Trakl’s

most famous short poems, “Ein Winterabend”, memorably uses the word
‘petrified’ (versteinerte): “Wanderer tritt still herein; Schmerz versteinerte die
Schwelle [Wanderer steps silent indoors; Pain has petrified the threshold]”. In
aphorism 45 of Minima Moralia, Trakl heads a section with a line from the
poem “Heiterer Frühling” followed by a startling sentence by Adorno:
‘How sickly seem all growing things’ [Wie scheint doch alles Werende
so krank]—Dialectical thought opposes reification in the further sense
that it refuses to affirm individual things in their isolation and
separateness: it designates isolation as precisely a product of the
universal (MM, 71).
This sentence might be interpreted as a riposte to Kierkegaard and his

‘dialectic of inwardness’. But Georg Trakl is the example of isolation and
separateness in this case. Addicted to various narcotics, he is a master
conjurer of macabre images, and as a result of his experience as a medical
official during WWI, Trakl suffered deep bouts of depression and sank deeper
into a nightmarish world of imagination magnificently expressed in his last
poems “Grodek”, “In the East [Im Osten]” and “Lament II [Klage II]”, until
he died of a cocaine overdose at the age of twenty-seven. Adorno attacks
Kierkegaard’s Haufniensis under a section with the title “The Abstract Self”
in chapter four of his monograph. Haufniensis both reveals the difficulty of
pinning down the concept of inwardness; “It is no doubt difficult to give a
definition of inwardness” (SKS4, 446, CA, 146). There are few if any
definitions of inwardness to be found, but this is also where Kierkegaard and
his pseudonyms want to go—to that place which conventional thought cannot
comprehend—pointing towards the realm of faith, passion, inwardness, and
anxiety. Notes in his journal point to earnestness/seriousness (Alvor) and the
eternal (Pap. V B 66, 1844 / CA, 209-210), and while Haufniensis does
advocate that “Inwardness is […] eternity or the constituent of the eternal in
man” (SKS4, 451 / CA, 151), it (inwardness) “can be attained only by and in
action [Handlingen]” (SKS4, 439 / CA, 138). At one moment, Johannes
Climacus does try to define inwardness whose definition in itself contains all
the key terms for Kierkegaard’s philosophy: “Inwardness in an existing
subject is passion, truth as a paradox corresponds to passion, and that truth
becomes a paradox is grounded precisely in its relation to an existing subject”
(SKS7, 181 / CUP, 199).
Adorno mentions Trakl again in Minima Moralia, this time by quoting
from the poem “Along [Entlang]” with the line “Tell how long it is we have
been dead [Sag wie lang wir gestorben sind]” as a way into explaining
expressionism: “The unity of Expressionism consists in expressing that people
wholly estranged from one another, life having receded within them, having
thereby become, precisely, dead” (MM, 191). Notable as Trakl may be, he is
imprisoned in a petrified, primordial landscape more than Kierkegaard‘s
philosophy could ever be. Trakl’s art is mentioned again in Minima Moralia
in aphorism 142 as “helpless verses” (MM, 222). But there is a way out in
Kierkegaard’s philosophy, because there is constantly a call to action at the
end of the various explorations of faith, anxiety and despair. Just because
there is a way out does not imply that the next step is totality (as in the case of
Lukács), but there is still a call for praxis. In Adorno’s last work Aesthetic
Theory, under the section “Semblance and Expression” (Schein und Ausdruk),
in the final pages with the guiding title “Dialectic of Inwardness; Aporias of
Expression”, Adorno makes this judgement:
The category of inwardness, according to Max Weber’s thesis, is to be

dated back to Protestantism, which subordinated works to faith” […]
With the growing powerlessness of the autonomous subject, inwardness
consequently became ideological, the mirage of an inner kingdom where
the silent majority are indemnified for what is denied them socially;
inwardness thus becomes increasingly shadowy and empty, indeed
contentless in itself (AT, 152).
Thus Luther becomes the founder of inwardness, or as Adorno calls him

in aphorism 87 of Minima Moralia—“the inventor of inwardness” (MM, 135).
Thirty-five years previously, Adorno presents “[…] the ‘historical painting of
inwardness’ as the theological prototype of all melancholy” (K, 112).
However, Adorno’s philosophy of ‘melancholy science’ comes closer to a
retreat to the petrified landscape than does Kierkegaard’s inwardness which is
passion, earnestness and action. Also, Adorno quotes from Christian
Discourses only once in the whole of his critical text: “[…] every individual
who is born is by being born and becoming part of the race, a lost individual
[…]” (K, 59). Christian Discourses explicitly articulates the praxis of
inwardness, and is the text that shows how one can overcome petrification and
act as a engaging, responsible and complex human being.
ii. The Sovereign and Nihilistic Realms of Inwardness
In the pseudonymous works, Kierkegaard vividly describes the tyrant via the
mythical-historical figures such as Nero, Richard III, Periander,
Nebuchadnezzar and Macbeth. For Adorno, Kierkegaard’s martyr opposes the
tyrant as a creature of sovereign despair. Sensual imperialists, such as the
Seducer and Nero, reside in the petrified primordial landscape of inwardness
in sovereign power. Judge William provides the memorable description:
The immediacy of the spirit cannot break though […] Then the spirit
masses around him like a dark cloud, and becomes an anxiety that does
not cease even in the moment of enjoyment. This, you see, is why his
eyes are so dark that no one can bear to look into them, his glance so
flashing that it alarms, for behind the eyes the soul lies like a gloomy
darkness. This is called the imperial look and the whole world quakes
before it (SKS3, 180 / EOII, 186).
What is useful in probing these various tyrants is precisely that

inwardness becomes imprisoned and expressed as a sovereign power, which
can either be grounded in sovereign tyranny, or find itself groundless in
sovereign nihilism. By getting inside the character of the demonic personality,
such as Nero, one catches a glimpse of the intensity of despair. It is not only
the demonic tyrant that experiences this sovereign inwardness, it is also the
great poets. Thus, Haufniensis mentions Byron, Shelley and Shakespeare
together in the section on the demonic in The Concept of Anxiety, three poets
Kierkegaard held in the highest esteem, having their complete works (in
German) in his room. Anti-Climacus described sovereign inwardness via the
religious poet in his “intense longing for the religious” with his “thorn in the
flesh” to being “extraordinary” and/or “humble” in that remarkable passage at
the beginning of part two of The Sickness unto Death (more extensively
quoted in chapter one of this book).
Adorno overlooks Kierkegaard’s use of the Shakespearean characters.
The opening soliloquy by Richard III has great value because, as Kierkegaard
reminds us, it expresses more powerfully and honestly the “nightmares of
existence” (SKS4, 194 / FT, 105) than an academic philosophical text could
ever do. This is exactly in line with Adorno’s defence of Trakl, Kafka and
Beckett over and above the descriptions made by the so-called existentialist
philosophy of Heidegger and especially Sartre for distilling philosophical
messages in in his novels and plays. In fact, Adorno is reiterating what
Johannes de silentio says in Fear and Trembling, except he replaces
Kierkegaard’s favourite artist, Shakespeare, with one of his own, Beethoven:
When, just before the close of the first movement of Beethoven’s sonata
Les Adieux, an evanescently fleeting association summons up in the
course of three measures the sound of trotting horses, the swiftly
vanishing passage, the sound of disappearance, which confounds every
effort to pin it down anywhere in the context of the phrase, says more of
the hope of return than would any general reflection on the essence of
the fleetingly enduring sound (AT, 453).
Kierkegaard may not be a literary artist in the slightly more traditional

way Kafka or Beckett may be, but when he describes the situation of the
petrified primordial landscape and its dweller as the sovereign despairing
tyrant, he uses those very tyrants from great works of art to express and
articulate both his point and their situation such as for example the figures
Richard III in Fear and Trembling and Macbeth in The Sickness unto Death.
Adorno writes: “Kierkegaard’s absolute self is mere spirit. The
individual is not the sensuously developed person […] Inwardness does not
consist in its fullness but is ruled over by an ascetic spiritualism” (K, 51). But
there can be no absolute spirit in the self. That belongs to God. This is
declared in the opening pages of The Sickness unto Death. Humanity
(Menneskelighed) may have the eternal in humans, but that is not to say that
humans can attain spirit absolutely, or rather, absolutely not! Johannes
Climacus reiterates that the relative must relate to the relative and the absolute
must relate to the absolute. If the relative begins to relate to the absolute, than
the inwardness of sovereignty reigns supreme. This is what both Adorno and
Kierkegaard by all means want to avoid.
Commenting on Don Juan in aphorism 54 of Minima Moralia, Adorno
draws on Kierkegaard to make another attack on inwardness as the
‘sovereignty of thought’:
When Kierkegaard says that in him sensuality is comprehended as a

principle, he touches on the secret of sensuality itself. In the fixity of its
gaze, until self-reflection dawns, is the very anonymity, the unhappy
generality, that is fatefully reproduced in its negative, the unfettered
sovereignty of thought (MM, 90).
This sovereignty of thought belongs to the tyrant of sensuality.

Kierkegaard gives examples of these tyrants of sensuality, such as Nero and
Don Juan. Through their sensuality, they abuse their power as much as they
can. Nero’s sensuality burns down Rome; Don Juan’s sensuality beds a
thousand and three women. Adorno’s inwardness is either inclosing reserve
(Indesluttethed) or defiance (Trods) and stops there, whereas Kierkegaard‘s
inwardness is also the gateway for the possibility of praxis. In aphorism 99 of
Minima Moralia, Adorno defines the two aspects of inwardness, as inclosing
reserve: “Attempts like Kierkegaard’s, in which the individual seeks
abundance by retreat within himself, did not by accident end up in the
sacrifice of the individual”; and as defiance:
The whole philosophy of inwardness, with its professed contempt for the
world, is the last sublimation of the brutal, barbaric lore whereby he who
was there first has the greatest rights; and the priority of the self is as
untrue as that of all who feel at home where they live (MM, 155).
Adorno’s critique of inwardness can be further extended in this passage

from Kierkegaard:
The contradictory elements in Kierkegaard’s formulation of meaning,

subject, and object are not simply disparate. They are interwoven with
one another. Their figure is called inwardness. In The Sickness unto
Death, inwardness is deduced as the substantiality of the subject directly
from its disproportionateness to the outer world (K, 29).
This description points more to Adorno’s philosophy of negative

dialectics which, like Kierkegaard’s philosophy, consciously falters and
stumbles to expose the inevitable failure of philosophy. The main force of
Adorno’s criticism is really aimed at Heidegger, Sartre and other “priests of
authenticity” (MM, 154). The founding ‘priests of authenticity’ are most
likely Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, who are mentioned in this
section in Minima Moralia, and all of whom figure prominently in Lukács’
Destruction of Reason as the founders of irrationalism. Sometimes unlike
Lukács, Adorno continues a critique aligned with that of Kierkegaard, while at
the same time branding Kierkegaard alongside those ‘priests of authenticity’.
However, Kierkegaard’s 1848 texts such as Christian Discourses, The Crisis
and a Crisis in the Life of an Actress and The Sickness unto Death break out
of the sovereignty of inwardness and do not wallow in the twilight of Trakl’s
autumnal wake. These same texts bring out a Kierkegaard that is polyphonic
and still evolving, while at the same time unleashing a subversive and
ultimately affirmative indirect politics. Through Kierkegaard, Adorno
introduces ‘objectless inwardness’: “In the image of the concrete individual,
subjectivity rescues only the rubble of the existent. Subjectivity, in the form of
objectless inwardness, mourns in its painful affects for the world of things as
for “meaning” (K, 30). Subjectivity rescues the individual from the rubble, but
only for a moment. Kierkegaard rescues the individual only for the reader to
then realise that inwardness must be continually worked for. Inwardness is
malleable, as earnestness, passion, subjectivity and action—an expression for
living as a socially critical human being. All these descriptions reemerge
throughout Adorno’s philosophical journey. But Adorno is still not so sure,
and as late as his posthumous work he writes of a sovereignty of inwardness
that is petrified to the point of servitude:
With the growing powerlessness of the autonomous subject, inwardness

consequently became completely ideological, the mirage of an inner
kingdom where the silent majority are indemnified for what is denied
them socially; inwardness thus becomes increasingly shadowy and
empty, indeed contentless in itself (AT, 152).
Not only is there petrification in the inwardness of sovereignty, there is

nihilism. Only those who fear nihilism cannot handle their own rage and
insecurity over mastering their inwardness of sovereignty. The Seducer of
Either/Or lives in a “kingdom of mist [Taage-Rige] […] a dreamland where

one is frightened by one’s own shadow at every moment” (SKS3, 299 / EOII,
310). In the probing Minima Moralia aphorism 99, “Gold assay,”
Schopenhauer too makes an appearance alongside Kierkegaard.
Schopenhauer’s diagnosis of the individual found in a fascinating footnote to
his masterpiece The World as Will and Representation, quoted in full by
Adorno, is of one who searches longingly and intensely yet finds nothing,
presenting a highly articulate vision of nihilism in comparison to
Kierkegaard’s ‘false infinity’ and ideology of sovereignty grounded in
objectless inwardness:
Every individual is the subject of knowing, in other words, the

supplementary condition of the possibility of the whole objective world,
and, on the other, a particular phenomenon of the will, of that will which
objectifies itself in each thing. But this double character of our inner
being does not rest on a self-existent unity, otherwise it would be
possible for us to be conscious of ourselves in ourselves and
independently of the objects of knowing and willing. Now we simply
cannot do this, but as soon as we enter into ourselves fully by directing
our knowledge inwards, we lose ourselves in a bottomless void; we find
ourselves like a hollow glass globe, from the emptiness of which a voice
speaks. But the cause of this voice is not to be found in the globe, and
since we want to comprehend ourselves, we grasp with a shudder
nothing but a wavering and unstable phantom.8
Yet the title of Adorno’s most elegantly structured text gives the
philosopher away even if he is attempting so-called ‘Kierkegaardian’ irony:
section one of Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life begins with
the epigraph “Life does not live” and the third and final part starts with a line
from a Baudelaire poem: “Avalanche, veux-tu m’emporter dans ta chute?
[Avalanche, will you take me in your fall?]”. The poem is called “Le Goût du
Néant” [Desire for Oblivion]. This all sheds light on Adorno’s own place as a
victim of the abyss, alongside his reference and extended quotation from
Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation. Preceding this
passage, Adorno had already written in Kierkegaard: “Schopenhauer’s
experienced thought mourns a bad reality; Kierkegaard’s loneliness never
reached it” (K, 8). This tendency to patronise Kierkegaard, in presenting
philosophers of the world such as Schopenhauer and Dostoyevsky as opposed
to the inward, pathos-filled philosopher that is Kierkegaard, misses the point
here, and it is strange that Adorno does not see that in Kierkegaard’s
labyrinthine authorship there breaks out a universe much like those created by
his artists of choice Kafka and Beckett. Kierkegaard’s inwardness can be seen
in the child who is “turned entirely outward; its inwardness is outwardness,
and to that extent it is wide awake” (SKS10, 119 / CD, 108), just like the
inwardness that is manfestied on the stage by Johanne Luise Heiberg to

accomplish her metamorphosis. These examples from the 1848 texts are
overlooked in Adorno’s diagnosis: “[…] there is only an isolated subjectivity,
surrounded by a dark nothingness. Indeed, only by crossing over this abyss
would subjectivity be able to participate in ‘meaning’ that otherwise denies
itself to subjectivity’s solitude” (K, 29).
iii. The Aesthetic of Inwardness
Kierkegaard’s aesthetic is concerned with confession and concealment, or as

Peer Gynt says: “To speak, yet be silent? Confess, yet conceal” (Tale, og dog
tie; skrifte, og dog dølge—?).9 Adorno’s text is, after all, called Kierkegaard:
Construction of the Aesthetic, and the opening line of Adorno’s Kierkegaard
reads: “Whenever one strives to grasp philosophical texts as poetry, one
misses their truth content [Wahrheitgehalt].” This reflects Adorno’s lifelong
dilemma shown in his desire to quote from Friedrich Schlegel to serve as a
motto for Aesthetic Theory: “What is called the philosophy of art usually lacks
one of two things: either the philosophy or the art” (AT, 464). Forever caught
between Kant and Beethoven, Adorno was well aware of the complexities of
mixing philosophy with art, and vice versa, and his opening sentence is as
much a warning to himself as to readers of Kierkegaard, and finally offers an
indication of why Adorno trenchantly critiqued existentialists such as Jean-
Paul Sartre. In pondering Adorno’s opening sentence of the Kierkegaard
book, Geoffrey Hale asks: “What, then, does it mean to read?”10 To read here
might be to follow the unfolding of the author’s thought and use of language.
Edification and pleasure are combined in Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous
works. The aesthetic in the case of Kierkegaard helps him to “to speak, yet be
silent; confess, yet conceal”, in other words to help him to articulate
inwardness, without being utterly drowned by pathos. His writing is a
performance for the reader to experience and unravel. Hale writes:
In his reading of Kierkegaard, Adorno traces out the multifarious and

ultimately inconsistent and contradictory usages of aesthetics. Hardly
grounds for condemnation pure and simple, it is in the very
discrepancies of its various appearances and its inability to be contained
within any single, unifying category that Adorno finds the
Kierkegaardian aesthetic most liberating.11
Hale views Adorno’s interest in the aesthetic in Kierkegaard as twofold:

first, in its lack of formal organisation, the aesthetic is the place of
contradiction; and second: “because there is no point at which one could
summarise the aesthetic, there is accordingly no point at which one might
leave it behind.”12 Kierkegaard himself is not fully in control of the aesthetic,
his own aesthetic purposes least of all. That is not to say that we cannot learn
much from it in regard to inwardness out of the petrified, primordial
landscape. Johannes Climacus brings the aesthetic and the religious closer
together, while sidelining the ethical. Both the religious and the aesthetic are a
form of artistry, and “the greater the artistry, the greater the inwardness”
(SKS7: 77 / CUP 77; K 15). Adorno makes a point on Climacus’ ‘opinion’:
“this may be the regulating principle of Kierkegaardian ‘communication’” (K,
134). And yet later, Adorno points out, Kierkegaard will say: “that the
aesthetic has nothing to do with the inward” (K 18; SKS6, 431 / SLW, 468).
Adorno concludes that this statement “[…] alone fully determines the
scurrilous figure [die scurrile Figur] of his aesthetics” (K, 19). The aesthetic,
however, has much to do with the inward. It is, after all, a very elusive, silent
brother (Frater Taciturnus) who makes this statement in the middle of his
gracious, over-long ramble towards solving Quidam’s depression. But the
story gets more complex: Kierkegaard tries to sum everything up in his own
‘report to history’ which turns out to be one of the most fascinating and
frustrating pieces of proto-deconstructive, confessional writing ever written. A
return then to Johannes Climacus who arrogantly remarks: “Between poetry
and religiousness, worldly wisdom about life performs its vaudeville. Every
individual who does not live either poetically or religiously is stupid [dum]”
(SKS7, 414 / CUP, 457). This judgement prevails with Kierkegaard, and the
piece written and published alongside Sickness unto Death called “The
Difference Between a Genius and an Apostle” is a testament to that. Preceding
Nietzsche, Climacus states: “The subjective thinker is not a scientist-scholar
[Videnskabsmand]; he is an artist. To exist is an art” (SKS7, 320 / CUP, 351).
Some of the value of Kierkegaard’s aesthetic works lies in their very
failure and faltering: their continuing disintegration is what unifies the style
and coherence of his philosophy. This is the prelude to Adorno’s aesthetic
theory. Why he had to kill off Kierkegaard is open to debate, but when
Adorno writes that “disintegration is the secret of its integration” (MM, 46), it
is not only inspired by his reading of Kafka and Beckett but also the
philosophy of Kierkegaard. The ‘scurrilous figuration’ of Kierkegaard’s
aesthetics is compatible with the principle which prefigures Aesthetic
Theory—Adorno’s idea that “Disintegration is the truth of integral art” (AT,
389). Hale expresses the scurrilous figuration with dialectical precision:
“Figuration is simultaneously its own disfiguration”, much like when Adorno
insists that words themselves are already words in disintegration.
Kierkegaard’s “artistic insufficiency” is due to the condition of the aesthetic
attempting to explain inwardness, and Johannes Climacus is aware of this
problem, which also causes problems for Kierkegaard, his pseudonyms and
the possibility of inwardness breaking out of the petrified, primordial
landscape:
The poet can explain (transfigure) all existence, but he cannot explain
himself, because he does not want to become religious and comprehend
the secret of suffering as the form of the highest life, higher than all good
fortune and different from all misfortune. The rigor of the religious is
that it begins with making everything more rigorous, and its relation to
poetry is not as a new wishing device, not as a totally new subterfuge
that poetry has not dreamed of, but as a difficulty that creates men just as
war creates heroes (SKS, 403 / CUP, 444).
Inwardness has a very close relation to both the aesthetic and the
religious. Thus the difficulty of writing on inwardness ties in with the
difficulty of writing on art and the religious. Adorno is aware of the
difficulities of articulating art, but is fearless in his objective: “The task of a
philosophy of art is not so much to explain away the element of
incomprehensibility, which speculative philosophy has almost invariably
sought to do, but rather to understand the incomprehensibility itself” (AT,
440). Kierkegaard articulates inwardness also through faltering aesthetic
realms, producing a dialectic of inwardness out of the aesthetic realm. The
dialectic of inwardness is plausible here in that inwardness is inexhaustible
(uudtømmeligt) and always striving (stræbende) (SKS7, 77 / CUP, 77). These
terms also describe Adorno and Kierkegaard’s dialectic, thus in true
dialectical fashion we can also invert this by saying the inwardness of the
dialectic. The dialectic of inwardness deepens the relation between the
religious and the aesthetic to what we can call the aesthetic of inwardness.
iv. “Inwardness Transforms Everything”
In this last part of section one, I argue for the transformation

(Verwandlung/Forandring) that arises from inwardness, allowing the human
being to break out of petrification, distinguishing inwardness from affiliation
with sovereign and nihilistic realms, and the use of aesthetic for inwardness.
Climacus once writes: “inwardness transforms everything >at forvandle Alt i
Inderlighed]” (SKS7, 230 / CUP, 254). The only compass that inwardness has
is the dialectic, which I discuss in the next section. To make matters more
complicated, inwardness supposedly cannot be communicated. Can one then
not blame Adorno for his relentless critique, which he takes such effort to
execute on this peevish thinker? Climacus turns up again to explain why
inwardness cannot be directly communicated:
Inwardness cannot be communicated directly, because expressing it

directly is externality (oriented outwardly, not inwardly), and expressing
inwardness directly is no proof at all that it is there (the direct outpouring
of feeling is no proof at all that one has it, but the tension of the
contrasting form is the measure of the intensity of inwardness) […]

(SKS7, 235 / CUP, 260).
The pseudonym of The Crisis and a Crisis in the Life of an Actress, Inter
et Inter, articulates this aspect of using inwardness when commenting on
Johanne Luise Heiberg. Kierkegaard’s essay on the actress provides the
perfect platform for him to articulate the relationship between anxiety and
repose and how they come together in dramatic performance. Even the
Seducer finds peace in the restlessness: “When the waves rock the boat on
their breast, when the clouds swiftly drift before the wind, making the moon
disappear for a moment and reappear, I find rest in this restlessness” (SKS2,
316 / EOI, 325). Note that Adorno does not once refer to the essay on Johanne
Luise Heiberg. This is a missed opportunity for Adorno, as he would have
found the essay useful in the use of the transformation of inwardness
manifested in Inter et Inter’s ‘metamorphosis’, and the new and sharpened
addition to the so-called aesthetic writings of Kierkegaard. (More on
metamorphosis in section three of this chapter.) The tension presented in the
actress essay is developed by Gillian Rose in her ‘introductory’ book on
Adorno: “The unsolved antagonisms of reality reoccur in the work of art as
the immanent problem of its form. This, not the entry of objective moments,
defines the relation of art to society.”13 This insightful sentence expresses
Kierkegaard’s approach to the aesthetic, especially the more mature
perspective in the actress essay. Inwardness transform in both the aesthetic
and religious realm. The ‘restlessness of infinity’ indicates that “in the life of
the spirit there is no standing still” (SKS11, 206 / SUD, 94).
When Adorno remarks that “inwardness knows no truth beyond its own
life” (K, 128), this clearly shows that he has swept aside Inter et Inter’s
thoughts on the actress, her ‘restlessness of infinity’ and ‘metamorphosis.’
The discussion of the loss of inwardness by Kierkegaard, Climacus, Johannes
de silentio and Anti-Climacus and which is intensified by Ortega y Gasset’s
The Revolt of the Masses, Heidegger and his concept of Dasein, and Sartre
with his concept of ‘bad faith’ (mauvaise foi), has been effectively exhausted.
What is useful, however, is leaving open this flexible, mercurial inwardness
which makes its way to passion, truth, madness, earnestness and so on, yet
which is the exemplar of the single individual as reader and writer, and the
relationship between the two, through transformation, triggers deep-rooted
praxis. In The Politics of Exodus, Mark Dooley notes in reading The Concept
of Anxiety: “Inwardness is thus a mode of more concrete and passionate
understanding of the external world, rather than an irrational exit from the
concrete actuality.”14 When Dooley defines inwardness as a mode of engaged
action, his goal is also “to demonstrate how the responsible individual—one
who has succeeded in developing a form of intense subjectivity by relating to
the ‘idea’—transforms the manner in which he or she engages with
actuality.”15
Adorno’s “Commitment” (Engagement) essay calls for a new praxis

away from creating art for philosophy’s sake, but rather showing the horror of
existence in a post-WWII world through the experience of art, which is not
didactic or completely direct, otherwise it would no longer be art. That is why
for Adorno, Kafka and Beckett’s art is more valuable than the existentialist
philosopher’s attempt to use literature simply to express the major themes of
the movement:
Kafka’s prose and Beckett’s plays and his genuinely colossal novel The
Unnameable have an effect in comparison to which official works of
committed art look like children’s games—they arouse the anxiety that
existentialism only talks about. In dismantling illusion they explode art
from the inside, whereas proclaimed commitment only subjugates art
from the outside, hence only illusorily (NL2, 90).
According to the editors (Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann) of

Aesthetic Theory, Adorno intended to dedicate his final book to Beckett (AT,
465). Adorno forgets that Kierkegaard’s overlooked novella “Guilty/Not
Guilty” can easily arouse the same anxiety as the works of Kafka and Beckett.
Who has not read the whole of “Guilty/Not Guilty” and not felt exhaustion
parallel to experiencing Beckett´s remarkable prose Trilogy? The six stories or
inserts of quasi-autobiography and psychology such as “Quiet Despair” (the
silent, melancholic relationship between father and son), “A Leper´s Self-
Contemplation” (charting in highly condensed form the journey through
aesthetic, ethical and religious spheres of existence), “A Possibility”
(exploring repression, mental disorder and a visit to a brothel), “The Reading
Lesson” (Periander´s story of guilt and murder precursing Freud´s Oedipus
Complex), and “Nebuchadnezzar” (the dream and anxiety of the king
transforming into a beast) are also on a par with Kafka´s nightmarish,
shadowy world. Who, indeed, has got to the end of the work? It is no joke
when Frater Taciturnus wonders if he has any readers left: “My dear reader—
but to whom am I speaking? Perhaps no one at all is left?” (SKS6, 446 / SLW,
485). In a typical Kierkegaardian moment of mischief, in his utter isolation,
the elusive Taciturnus closes the book with one of the most beautiful passages
ever written in the Danish language (SKS6, 450-451 / SLW, 489-490).
Perhaps for Adorno, Kierkegaard’s literary failure is that he remains trapped
or petrified as much as his characters like Quidam. But Quidam is attempting
to move towards liberation from his predicament, and he is also just one
character alongside numerous others in Stages on Life’s Way, as Kierkegaard
presents a multitude of characters, voices and life-views that is constantly
displacing identities. Adorno confirms a Kierkegaardian universe when he
writes in Negative Dialectic: “To use the strength of the subject to break
through the fraud of constitutive subjectivity” (ND, xx). And as Climacus
relates inwardness to art, and art to inwardness, both only endure by

transformation. Here, Adorno would agree: “Either to leave art behind or to
transform its very concept” (AT, 79).
2. Dialectical Journeys
Ich bin der Geist der stets verneint [I am the spirit of perpetual negation].
Goethe, Faust I
What is the negative dialectic? How does it help my case for indirect politics
within the thinking of Kierkegaard? The dialectic that informs Kierkegaard’s
thinking is a thought which ceaselessly reflects on itself and which is in
ceaseless motion. Contrary to Heidegger’s conclusion that the dialectic is a
philosophical embarrassment (“The ‘dialectic’, which has been a genuine
philosophical embarrassment [Verlegenheit], becomes superfluous
[überflüssig]”16), it can inform the best of Plato and Hegel, and it is wielded
with equal power and more complex ways for contemporary thinking by the
likes of Kierkegaard and Adorno. In the case of Adorno, the dialectic is
directly used for socio-political purposes; Kierkegaard’s dialectic has an
indirect impact on the socio-political landscape, manifested both in Adorno’s
thinking and as negative space and sets of masks. The dialectic is not solely
Hegelian when it is thought of as thinking for the sake of contradiction.
Whether revolutionary or reactionary, texts such as Christian Discourses, The
Sickness unto Death and Practice in Christianity serve thinking for the sake of
contradiction. Hale reflects on Adorno’s Negative Dialectics: “the function of
dialectic in critique, precisely because of its construction out of an always
only discontinuous reality, is neither ‘method’ nor ‘reality.’”17 And the
opening passage of Negative Dialectics itself declares:
The formulation “negative dialectics” transgresses against tradition.

Already in Plato dialectics intended to establish something positive
through the thought-means of the negation; the figure of a negation of
the negation named this precisely. The book would like to emancipate
dialectics from these types of affirmative essence, without relinquishing
anything in terms of determinacy. The development of its paradoxical
title is one of its intentions (ND, Prologue).
Adorno explicitly articulates this ‘negative philosophy’ (MM, 245) in

Kierkegaard, Minima Moralia, Negative Dialectics and his essay “Cultural
Criticism and Society.” In the essay, Adorno argues for the importance of
dialectics as an intermediary between reflection and action, for his purposes
and (unintentionally) Kierkegaard’s purposes: “Dialectics also includes the
relation between action and contemplation […] Dialectics means
intransigence towards all reification” (P, 29, 31). What most likely drew
Adorno to a study of Kierkegaard in the first place was the ambiguity between
thought and reality, in the same way that inspired the twentieth century
existentialists, but the results were different. Gillian Rose succinctly points
out: “Adorno was most sympathetic, however, to Kierkegaard’s refusal to
posit identity between thought and reality and to deposing of the ‘autonomous
ratio’ as the foundation of knowledge.”18 That 1848 emerges both
symbolically and as a reality as a Skillevei does not escape Adorno either, and
in Minima Moralia, he points out the analogy between the dialectic and 1848:
“The splitting of the Hegelian school into a left and right wing was founded in
the ambiguity of the theory no less than in the political situation preceding the
1848 revolution” (MM, 245). In 1848, Kierkegaard wields a negative
dialectic, which encompasses the whole structure of The Sickness unto Death.
Concerning the essay on the actress, Kierkegaard reflects in the journals:
“Strange, strange about that little article—that I was so close to being carried
away and forgetting myself. When one is overstrained as I was, it is easy to
forget momentarily the dialectical outline of a colossal structure such as my
authorship” (Pap. IX A 241, 1848).
This section emphasizes four points: first, on Adorno and Kierkegaard as
Mephistophelian negative thinkers; second, the struggle of their respective
writings as a kind of wrestling match; third, the use of constellations; and
fourth, the method of disintegration and discontinuity arising from the
negative dialectic. In this section, Kierkegaard and Adorno are first and
foremost dialectical critics:
No theory, not even that which is true, is safe from perversion into
delusion once is has renounced a spontaneous relation to the object.
Dialectics must guard against this no less than against enthrallment in
the cultural object. It can subscribe neither to the cult of the mind nor to
hatred of it. The dialectical critic of culture must both participate in
culture and not participate. Only then does it do justice to his object and
to himself (P, 33).
i. Mephistopheles as a Socio-Political Figure
Chapter Two delved into the Faustian phase of Kierkegaard’s writing

workshop alongside the formative years of Lukács, and there is explicit
mention of Mephistopheles throughout Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous works
such as in Either/Or, Fear and Trembling, The Concept of Anxiety, Stages on
Life’s Way, and The Sickness unto Death. In the connection between Adorno
and Mephistopheles, there is an essay by Hans Heinz Holz called
“Mephistophelische Philosophie”, and Lyotard wrote another essay called
“Adorno as the Devil.”19 In William Heinesen’s novel from 1950, The Lost
Musicians, one of the characters comes to the conclusion that:
Kierkegaard belongs to the Mephistopheles category. Like that devil’s

chargé d’affaires in Goethe, he is possessed of a superior intellect,
which he deploys with the same supple facility and tirelessness. They are
both, in their at once witty, impudent, and dazzling ways, irresistible. In
fact, Kierkegaard goes one better than the devil, being without rival in
the art of attacking reason with its own weapons. He is not just
Mephistopheles, he is at the same time Mephistopheles’ victim, man,
Faust. It is not only against others that he turns his weapons, in the end
he turns them without mercy on himself […] [While] Mephistopheles
simply dissolves in a smoke of brilliant conversation […] Kierkegaard is
the dire sufferer of his own satanism. He is, one might say, the tragic
satan […]20
Adorno quotes the mountain description from the last scene of the
second part of Goethe’s Faust on becoming and the place of rescue in his
essay “On the Final Scene of Faust”. By the waterfall in the mountains, the
self “pauses, a figure of its becoming”, and “we catch a glimpse of the
reconciliation of the natural” (NL1, 116)—a place that may turn out to be
Adorno’s final place of rest. Goethe’s passage on striving and redemption
from the same scene in Faust II a few lines later is quoted in Adorno’s Faust
essay and Minima Moralia (NL1, 116; MM, 127): “Wer immer strebend sich
bemüht, / den können wir erlösen [He who strives with ceaseless toil / can we
redeem].” One of Adorno’s favourite composers, Gustav Mahler (whom he
wrote an extended monograph on), bases his Eighth Symphony on this last
scene of Faust II. And Thomas Mann models the devil on Adorno in his last
major novel Dr. Faustus (whose central theme is arguably the Kierkegaardian
demonic), who appears when the protagonist of the novel is reading
Kierkegaard’s essay on Don Giovanni. Mann’s Mephistophelean character is:
“ […] an intellectualist, who writes of art, of music, for vulgar newspapers, a
theorist and critic, who is himself a composer, in so far as thinking allows […]
the voice, nasal, distinct, schooled to please, had remained the same; it
preserved identity for the transitory figure.”21 The connections run even
deeper: Adorno picks up much from Benjamin’s Trauerspiel,which depicts
the allegorical world as that belonging to Lucifer and the demonic, and this
allegorical world is again found by Adorno in Kierkegaard. Throughout
Benjamin’s Trauerspiel, Lucifer represents knowledge, and as such is the
“ruler of deep mournfulness” and the “king of the abyss”. Benjamin writes:
“Knowledge, not action, is the most characteristic mode of existence of evil”
(O, 230). His only mention of Kierkegaard by name comes in the last section
of this extremely dense text and is directly connected with the devil and
knowledge:
Knowledge of good, as knowledge, is secondary. It ensues from practice.

Knowledge of evil—as knowledge this is primary. It ensues from
contemplation. Knowledge of good and evil is, then, the opposite of all
factual knowledge. Related as it is to the depths of the subjective, it is
basically only knowledge of evil. It is ‘nonsense’ (Geschwätz) in the
profound sense in which Kierkegaard conceived the word. This
knowledge, the triumph of subjectivity and the onset of an arbitrary rule
over things, is the origin of all allegorical contemplation (O, 233).
This ‘nonsense’ (chit-chat, babble, idle talk, blather, gibberish, prattle,

drivel) as Geschwätz stems from Kierkegaard’s direct discussion of at snakke
in Two Ages:A Literary Review and which turns up again and again
throughout his authorship via a colourful array of Danish words (e.g. snak;
ævl; vås; blær; sladder; passier; vrøvl; pjadder; ordgyderi; pølsesnak; gas; tøv;
munddiarré; bragesnak; barl; pip). Through this nonsense or gossip
(Geschwätz), we may ultimately find ourselves in that ominous place not
unlike that image of “gnashing of teeth” that runs through the Bible which is
associated with being banished and full of hateful words with the attempt to
eternally slander, insult and blaspheme (See, for example, Psalms 37: 12,
112:10; Lam. 2:16; Job 16:9; Mark 9:18; Mat. 8:12, 13:42, 13:50, 22:13,
24:51, 25:30; Luke 13:28). However, Mephistopheles uses words with jest
and irony, contemplated before he speaks, and we can envision him as the
mediator and messenger of the Mellemspil between action and contemplation.
The ‘depths of the subjective’ forces itself against the totality of the objective,
and that is where the allegiance of Kierkegaard and Adorno might be forged
when we can turn Mephistopheles into a socio-political figure via intertwining
Kierkegaard and Adorno.
Mephistopheles is irony and wields irony as his weapon. Even ‘The
Lord’ (Der Herr) in Goethe’s Faust is charmed by this standpoint: “Among
the spirits who negate, / The ironic scold offends me least of all [Von allen
Geistern, die verneinen, / Ist mir der Schalk am wenigsten zur Last]”. As early
as The Concept of Irony, Kierkegaard follows up on Hegel’s absolute
principle of negativity, Kierkegaard makes clear: “[…] we see the correctness
of Hegel’s view of irony as infinite absolute negativity” (SKS1, 292 / CI,
254).22 A few years later, Anti-Climacus wields his dialectic of despair, and
inspired by another Irish fairytale, points out: “Despair 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 magic
spell is true: the piece has to be played through backwards or the spell is not
broken” (SKS11, 159 / SUD, 44).23 The fairytale has a special role to play in
The Sickness unto Death and other major works of Kierkegaard as these are
universal stories that help us understand our anxieties through indirect
communication and are a form of spiritual teaching that precede Christianity.
Mephistopheles becomes the dialectic to help unfold Faust’s despair, just as

Kierkegaard and Adorno’s writings wield a dialectic in an attempt to journey
out of despair. This labyrinth of despair that we carry within us enables the
critic to be a gadfly in this complex world, as a foil to any pretensions that
society has had, does and will do towards paralyzing or petrifying us. Through
the continuation of despair, society is kept constantly on guard. Anti-Climacus
confirms this: “every minute that despair is kept open, there is the possibility
of salvation as well” (SKS11, 176 / SUD, 62). The central maxim of The
Sickness unto Death is to be found in this line: “Is despair an excellence
[Fortrin] or a defect [Mangel]? Purely dialectically, it is both” (SKS11, 130 /
SUD, 14). Anti-Climacus informs the reader at the beginning of the text that
despair is dialectical. The ‘dialectic of resignation’ (SKS11, 184 / SUD, 70)
follows like a shadow throughout Kierkegaard and Adorno’s work by the way
their thinking is on the verge of collapse - here one can see why Adorno
returns again and again to Kafka and Beckett. Not only is despair dialectical,
it is also a negativity. Despair and negative dialectics are united for a time so
that the Mephistophelian character impacts on the socio-political realm.
Anti-Climacus anticipates Adorno’s critique of inwardness as entering a
petrified, primordial landscape, isolated within totalities and thus inwardness
becomes the most singular totality of them all. Anti-Climacus describes this
position on the road through the different forms of despair, much like Dante’s
circles of despair on the way to paradise:
But the more spiritual the despair becomes and the more the inwardness
becomes a peculiar world of its own in inclosing reserve
(Indesluttethed), the more inconsequential are the externalities under
which the despair conceals itself. But the more spiritual despair
becomes, the more attention it pays with the demonic cleverness to
keeping despair closed up in inclosing reserve, and the more attention it
pays to neutralising the externalities, making them as insignificant and
inconsequential as possible (SKS11, 186 / SUD, 73).
Kierkegaard’s despair is connected with spirit as he reminds the reader

throughout The Sickness unto Death, and spirit belongs to the eternal, and the
negative dialectic is eternal in the sense of “infinitely striving”. As human
beings, we are changeable and incomplete in contrast to God, who is
supposedly complete and unchangeable (SKS, 249-266 / M, 263-281). In the
preface to The Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel gives the maxim, “The True is
the whole [Das Wahre ist das Ganze].” Adorno inverts this sentence, stating
that “The whole is the false” (MM, 50), which is one of the central tenets and
inversions in Minima Moralia alongside “The Health unto Death”—an
inversion of Kierkegaard’s Sickness unto Death, the opening three words “the
melancholy science”—an inversion of Nietzsche’s Gay Science, and the title
of the book itself which is an inversion of Aristotle’s Magna Moralia. The
negative dialectic, like the figure of Mephistopheles, is the spirit of perpetual

negation. In “Cultural Criticism and Society”, Adorno brings the spirit of
perpetual negation into the realm of culture and society: “To accept culture as
a whole is to deprive it of the ferment which is its very truth—negation” (P,
28). And going back to the Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Climacus
affirms the use of the negative thinker:
The negative thinkers therefore always have the advantage that they
have something positive, namely this, that they are aware of the negative
element; the positive thinkers have nothing at all, since they are
deceived. Precisely because the negative is present in existence
[Tilværelse] and present everywhere (because being there, existence
[Existents] is continually in the process of becoming), the only
deliverance from it is to become continually aware of it. By being
positively secured, the subject is indeed fooled (SKS7, 81 / CUP, 81).
But what is more revealing is another passage from Climacus which

brings together the contradiction of spirit and existence together, providing the
analogy of restlessness and despair as informing the negative dialectic:
The negativity that is in existence, or rather the negativity of the existing

subject, which his thinking must render essentially in a reflected form),
is grounded in the subject’s synthesis, in his being an existing infinite
spirit. The infinite and eternal are the only certainty, but since it is in the
subject, it is in existence [Tilværelse]; and the first expression for it is its
elusiveness and the tremendous contradiction that the eternal becomes,
that it comes into existence [det bliver til] (SKS7, 81 / CUP, 83).
The contradiction becomes more acute when Climacus argues that

Christianity requires that the individual risk his thought, and to venture
believing against the dialectic (SKS7, 390 / CUP, 429). And yet,
Kierkegaard’s uncompromising Anti-Climacus never ceases to wield the
dialectic through the various circles of despair. The figure of Mephistopheles
makes its way into the formation of the the character of Anti-Climacus who is
described by Kierkegaard in his journals as “fantastic” and “malicious” (Pap.
X 6 B 48, 1849).
ii. The Wrestling Match
The second focus of this section on the negative dialectic appearing in

Adorno’s critical theoretical conversation with Kierkegaard is the
juxtaposition of ‘wrestling club’ with ‘wrestling match.’ In Repetition,
Constantius describes the struggle between the general (det Almene) and the
exception (Undtagelsen) as a wrestling match (Brydning): “The whole thing is

a wrestling match [Brydning] in which the universal breaks [bryder] with the
exception, wrestles with him in conflict, and strengthens him through his
wrestling” (SKS4, 92 / R, 227). This first of all brings to mind Carl Schmitt’s
use of the ‘exception’ in Political Theology, given that the words he uses are
taken from the same page. There is a constant struggle between the general
(det Almene) and the exception, and this is the dialectic at its most affirmative,
and not anything to be wary of, or to transform into a theory of friend and
enemy. If we have learned anything from intellectual history in the twentieth
century from Freud to Derrida, it is to smash such simplistic ways of forming
societies by such apparently clear-sighted, but naïve and extremely dangerous,
binary opposites. Neither the general nor the exception counts so much as the
struggle between them. Adorno falls into the trap of the friend/enemy
dichotomy by erasing the name Carl Schmitt from Benjamin’s Collected
Works, and by concealing the fact that Benjamin wrote that grateful letter to
Schmitt. Whether Adorno likes it or not, Schmitt holds a key place in
Benjamin’s Trauerspiel. Adorno attempts to erase the intellectual history of
the oppressor, and is thus in danger of becoming the authoritarian personality
himself.
In Minima Moralia, the notion of ‘the wrestling motion’ arises again,
this time in the form of ‘the wrestling club’ (Ringverein) in aphorism 87
(MM, 133). I concur with Gillian Rose in The Broken Middle who argues that
Adorno is alluding here to ‘The Concluding Letter’ by Constantius.24 The
section from Minima Moralia with the title ‘Wrestling Club’ begins with what
could easily fit a description of Kierkegaard (at least from Adorno’s point of
view):
There is a type of intellectual who is to be the more deeply distrusted the

more appealing his honest endeavour, his ‘intellectual seriousness’ and
often his modest objectivity may seem. These are the wrestlers with
difficulties, permanently locked in a struggle with themselves, living
amid decisions demanding the commitment of the whole person (MM,
133).
The thinker in question indeed appears as someone wielding and

struggling with a negative dialectic. There are also wrestling and fighting
images elsewhere in Kierkegaard, such as in the last four Eighteen Upbuilding
Discourses, such as “To Need God Is a Human Being’s Highest Perfection”,
“The Thorn in the Flesh”, and “One Who Prays Aright Struggles in Prayer
and Is Victorious—in That God is Victorious” (SKS5, 285-382/ EUD, 291-
401). Earlier in Minima Moralia, Adorno reminds the reader and himself what
dialectical thought does: “Dialectical thought opposes reification in the further
sense that it refuses to affirm individual things in their isolation and
separateness: it designates isolation as precisely a product of the universal”
(MM, 71). However, Adorno’s Kierkegaard is locked in the isolation of

inwardness which both protects the thinker and makes him a victim of society.
In ‘Wrestling Club’, Adorno goes straight to the problem:
The vigorous vocabulary makes one wonder about the fairness of these
wrestling bouts arranged and contested by inwardness. The expressions
are all taken from war, physical danger, real destruction, but they
describe mere processes of reflection, which may indeed have been
connected with the fatal outcome in the cases of Kierkegaard and
Nietzsche, whom the wrestlers are fond of quoting, but not in that of
their unsolicited followers, who claim to be at risk (MM, 133).
Adorno’s dialectic has emerged from these wrestlers he is critical of, for
the negative dialectician is always wrestling with the exception and the
general, individual and society, as one cannot exist without the other. Similar
to Hegel’s master/slave dialectic, it is not the one who comes out victorious
that matters; it is rather the struggle, the wrestling itself, or the process that is
key. Adorno points out in the essay “Cultural Criticism and Society”: “As
Hegel argued, every method which sets limits and restricts itself to the limits
of its object thereby goes beyond them […] Dialectics means intransigence
towards all reification” (P, 31). That the struggle is what counts is what
wrestlers such as Marx, Lukács and Schmitt abandon once they accept that the
goal has been achieved, or that history is on their side. Constantin’s repetition
fails because he thinks the exception is always in the right and that the
exception must be the victor, but the exception, Abraham, in Fear and
Trembling is a troubling figure in the world, or, as Johannes de silentio
surmises, a potential madman or murderer: his secret can only be understood
by a god. But that is not to say that we do away altogether with the exception.
Abraham renders us sleepless, and Constantin shakes the whole foundations
of traditional philosophical conceptions of time starting with the Greeks. The
struggle goes on, and neither Kierkegaard nor Adorno are isolated because:
“No wrestling match is without a referee: the whole brawl has been staged by
society internalised in the individual, which both supervises the struggle and
takes part in it” (MM, 134).
In her study of Adorno, Rose writes: “The individual is ‘absolutised’ by
Kierkegaard because the latter’s philosophy depends on notions to which
Kierkegaard cannot admit, and is thus irredeemably antinomical.”25
Antimony is kept in play, and thereby the individual is not ‘absolutised’, and
Kierkegaard continues to rely on Hegel’s dialectic while at the same time is
attempting to subvert it. To call Kierkegaard’s individual absolutised to the
point of isolated inwardness is to miss the point of The Sickness unto Death
where Anti-Climacus wields the negative dialectic moving the self through
oneself, others, society and God. There is no completion, but for pointing
towards the elusive faith, but that faith remains incommensurable and we
forever falter when we try to talk about it (otherwise it would no longer be
faith). Adorno places Kierkegaard’s ‘man’ with the exception:
It could almost be said that in Kierkegaard the image of man is identical

with that of the ‘exception’; for Kierkegaard, man exists humanly only
by becoming an exception—insofar as he emancipates himself from
contingency, anonymity, and reified universality. Both the ‘genial’
aesthetic and the ‘religious’ existence are for him ‘exception’ (K, 104).
But the exception, to reiterate, is precisely the exception by wrestling

with the general, that ‘man’—the single individual—is precisely what he is as
a result of contact and interaction with society. Both Kierkegaard and Adorno
are in agreement when Adorno writes: “There is no way out of entanglement”
(MM, 27). Paradox embodies so much of Adorno’s thinking that sometimes
he forgets how much of Kierkegaard’s thought is embedded in his own. Hale
describes this association: “Reconciliation is possible only as it is,
paradoxically, irreconcilable.”26 When diagnosing Kierkegaard’s ‘exception’
in the 1933 text as “nothing else but the reincarnation of objectless inwardness
itself” (K, 104), Adorno forgets the various exceptions that Kierkegaard
brings forth in his writings, most significantly Socrates and Christ. The
position is dialectical because it is never at rest, and the wrestling match of
general and exception comes in various forms such as master/slave or even
exception/conformity, epitomised in the woman as actress, for the idea of
woman is both extreme conformity and exceptionality. Hegel’s dialectic in the
Phenomenology is “never at rest”, Goethe’s Faust is “always striving”, and
Kierkegaard’s depiction of the actress is the performance and outward
expression of inwardness, which contains that “restlessness of infinity”, which
“means that even when she does stand still one intuits this restlessness in her
very repose” (SKS14, 9 / CD, 74). From the magisterial eulogies to the
actresses of his time (Anne Nielsen in that remarkable footnote by Judge
William in Stages on Life’s Way (SKS6, 123 / SLW, 131), and Johanne Luise
Heiberg), Kierkegaard notes that the figure of the supreme actress represents
both roguishness (Skjælmeri) and trustworthiness (Tilforladelighed), and
“inwardness that animates the interaction” (SKS5, 123 / SLW, 131). There is
roguishness in the sense of youthfulness and luck or good fortune (Lykke), that
confidence of youth; and there is trustworthiness in the sense of triumphant
awareness of one’s role and the audience who come to watch. Exception and
conformity come together in the infinity of restlessness. And the greater the
conformity, the more the exception is needed. As an aside, it is worth noting
that Kierkegaard did write another aesthetic essay at the end of 1848
(although he didn’t publish it), a few months after the essay on the actress,
analysing and celebrating the actor (and neighbour) Herr Phister’s
performance as Captain Scipio in the comic opera Ludovic. This essay was
written under the pseudonym “Procul” (meaning “at a distance”—probably

referring to the relationship between critic and artist), and which focused on
“reflection”, which is Herr Phister’s forte, in contrast to Johanne Luise
Heiberg’s mastering of repetition and metapmorphosis (SKS16, 128). This
Captain Scipio is a military man, stout and proud with his “stomach in and
chest out” (SKS16, 136), which Kierkegaard delights in the mockery made of
the military man by the great comic actor Herr Phister. The difference is that
this essay was intended only for Herr Phister, while the essay on the actress
Heiberg, though written for her also, was published in four parts and grapples
with the serious issue of repetition, womanhood, the trials of the artist, and the
“wrestling match” that ensues—which is always the exception wrestling with
the general.
iii. Constellations
The word constellation (Konstellation), containing the Latin word ‘stella’

(star), signifies a group of stars forming a recognized pattern, deriving from
the Latin ‘stella’ which means ‘star’. Martin Jay describes the constellation as
“a juxtaposed rather than integrated cluster of changing elements that resist
reduction to a common denominator, essential core, or generative first
principle.”27 In Kierkegaard’s authorship, the existence spheres make up a
constellation, as do the various metaphors and allusions to fairytales alongside
Kierkegaard’s use of terms such as ‘discourses’ and ‘stages’. Thus, the
constellation is a configuration of a variety of ideas, concepts and other
materials taking shape. Rose explains: “To examine something by a
‘constellation’ means to juxtapose a cluster of related words or connotations
which characterise the object of investigation without implying that the
concepts used are identical with their objects.”28 As early as the Kierkegaard
text, Adorno has already taken up Konstellation from Benjamin’s Trauerspiel
and applied it to explaining Kierkegaard’s authorship: “The constellations of
the spheres are in every case conjuring signs, collectively allegorical” (K, 91).
Like the figure of Mephistopheles and the wrestling club between the
exception and the general, the constellation insight that is borrowed from
Benjamin and which starts out as a critique of Kierkegaard, is thereafter
moulded by Adorno to explaining his own method in Negative Dialectics.
Adorno explains in a letter that his argument must use constellations
rather than continuous argument: “[…] one cannot construct a continuous
argument with the usual stages, but one must assemble the whole from a
series of partial complexes … whose constellation not [logical] sequence
produces the idea.”29 In Kierkegaard, Adorno compares Kierkegaard’s
‘spheres’ with the constellation, and goes as far as to say that Kant’s starry
heavens of the metaphysical universe “have collapsed into the blind self, and
the law of its freedom has been transformed into natural necessity” (K, 91).
On the same page, Adorno quotes from what he calls “the openly astrological”
Sickness unto Death: “Such a poet-existence, as is discernible in the position
and conjunction of the categories, will be the most eminent poet-existence.”
This quote is taken from the beginning of Part II of The Sickness unto Death
which is followed by a remarkable two page description of the supreme poet-
existence bordering on the religious who struggles between his extraordinary
gift of insight and vision and the Pauline “thorn in the flesh” to remind him of
the humility of living and dying as a human being. This kind of poet uses
constellations rather than argument in order to “break the silence” and portray
or depict an insight into feeling, a world, a way of life. At the end of the
passage from The Sickness unto Death, Kierkegaard, thinly disguised now as
Anti-Climacus, once again stops himself and asks “to whom am I speaking?”
and concludes the section by referring to the mass-produced copies of the
Nürnberg pictures that the pastor painted for all to see. This passage
communicates the poet’s isolation and vanity of his position as well as the
power of mass distribution of the image in the copy of a copy of a painting.
Adorno in this miniature section on the constellation in Kierkegaard writes:
“Individual existence is interpreted according to constellations in order to
avoid definitions” (K, 92). This is a strange kind of philosophy of image over
definition but one that is present throughout the last two thousand years from
Plato to Augustine, Nietzsche to Kierkegaard. Adorno returns again to
constellation in his final years in Negative Dialectics:
The unifying moment survives, without the negation of the negation, yet
also without delivering itself to the abstraction as the highest principle,
not by advancing step by step towards the general master-concept from
the concepts, but by these latter entering into a constellation (ND, 164).
By taking the constellation form, Adorno is able to continue his negative

dialectic, by preserving the endless tension between the universal and the
particular, subject and object. With the constellation, the contradictory
arguments in his works are maintained. In The Arcades Project, Benjamin had
already said that “Dialectical images are constellated between alienated things
and incoming and disappearing meaning, are instantiated in the moment of
indifference between death and meaning” (A, N5, 2). It is from this
understanding of dialectical images that Adorno finds ‘the passion narrative’
(“Guilty/Not Guilty”) of Stages in Life’s Way as the most penetrating and
allusive of Kierkegaard’s authorship. Before quoting the anecdote on the
punishment of having to ride the wooden horse as an example of
Kierkegaard’s dialectic (SKS6, 203 / SLW 217), Adorno makes his point that
“nothing distinguishes this dialectic better from the total dialectic between the
spheres than the statement that it is a movement in place. The entire ‘passion
narrative’ is its allegory” (K, 100). Adorno’s fascination with “Guilty/Not
Guilty” reveals his own fascination with and desire to appropriate allegory
and fairytale. This makes him all the greater as the post-war thinker par
excellence, forever faltering and rising again on his dialectical journey and
letting the final words of Beckett’s disembodied anti-narrator in The
Unnameable wash over him: “I can’t go on, I’ll go on.” This ‘passion
narrative’ (Lidelseshistorie) provides the most dangerous seduction for the
Kierkegaard reader. Filled with Nordic, Germanic and Celtic fairytale allusion
alongside mythical and factual figures from Nebuchadnezzar to Hamlet, it is a
prime text of constellations in the dialectical journey. That is an expression of
the multiplicity of the self and myriad possibilities both before us and within
us. Kierkegaard interrupts philosophy by writing Stages on Life’s Way as a
book of constellations, a book that does not fit into any particular discipline
but which is an example of a set of masks—masking religion, literature,
praxis, ethics and law, while also displacing disciplinary identity. Out of his
particular reading of Kierkegaard (and inspired by Benjamin’s dialectical
images), Adorno continues throughout the next thirty years of his life (after
the publication of Kierkegaard) to use the constellations and images, thereby
inserting into philosophy what Kierkegaard began.
iv. Disintegration and Discontinuity
The final themeof this section is the pairing of disintegration and

discontinuity. This topic continues the trajectory in Chapter Four on
Benjamin’s ruination and Kierkegaard’s age of disintegration. Again, Adorno
has taken up Benjaminian themes in introducing the themes of disintegration
and discontinuity. Adorno’s interest in what he calls ‘late style’ (Spätstil) is
connected explicitly to disintegration and discontinuity. Adorno has long had
an interest in the last works of specific artists, most especially Beethoven,
Hölderlin, Nietzsche. But it is not any later works. For example, Lukács’ later
writings are explicitly rejected by Adorno. “Spätstil Beethovens” or
“Beethoven’s Late Style” is dated 1937 and included in a 1964 collection,
Moments musicaux, and again in his posthumously published book on
Beethoven. Beethoven’s late style belongs to his third and final period which
includes his last five piano sonatas, the Ninth Symphony, the Missa Solemnis,
the last six string quartets, and seventeen bagatelles for the piano.
Adorno uses the word ‘parataxis’ as the title of the essay investigating
the ‘late style’ of Hölderlin (See NL2, 109-149: “Parataxis: On Hölderlin’s
Late Poetry”). Gillian Rose gives a concise definition: “‘Parataxis’ means
placing propositions one after the other without indicating relations of co-
ordination or subordination between them.”30 When Adorno describes
Kierkegaard’s faltering constellation in Kierkegaard, he not only incorporates
Benjamin’s Trauerpiel, but paves the way for his own mature work in
aesthetics: “It [the stages] is rather a totality of ruins, and in the depth of the
chasms between them a dialectic surges that does not flow uninterruptedly
from one to the other” (K, 90). In Aesthetic Theory, Adorno expresses the
place of disintegration in his thinking: “The collapsing constellations of
symphonic music, as in Mahler’s works, have their true analogue in the
kaleidoscopic patterns in which a series of slightly varying images collapses
and a qualitatively transformed constellation emerges” (AT, 258). The
collapsing constellations can also serve to describe most notably
Kierkegaard’s Repetition, Philosophical Fragments, The Concept of Anxiety,
Stages on Life’s Way, Concluding Unscientific Postscript and Point of View
and The Sickness unto Death. A sentence by Seamus Deane in the
introduction to Joyce’s Finnegans Wake describes the same landscape from
which Kierkegaard and Adorno’s dialectical works of disintegration emerge:
But Joyce, unlike T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, D.H. Lawrence and many
others, saw that collapse [European civilisation up to WWI] as a
disintegration that was to be welcomed because it had been brought
about by the coercive exercise of that very patriarchal authority that
many other writers wished to rescue and re-establish.31
Aesthetic Theory remains unfinished. While some may mourn the fact
that Adorno died before he could complete the final draft, its incompletion
however is an expression of its content. This is why Kierkegaard mourns the
fact that Cervantes’ Don Quixote was completed, when he thinks that the book
would have been far more complete if it had ended with the hero running
deeper into the La Mancha desert or onto further adventures without end (Pap.
VIII A 59 n. d. 1847). Kierkegaard points out that Cervantes was not
dialectical enough. Adorno returns to Kafka because the fractured framework
of Kafka’s novels, he feels, is what gives them their power. Adorno concludes
at the end of chapter four of Kierkegaard: “Kierkegaard’s philosophy renders
the true image of man: shattered, separated, and condemned” (K, 85). Adorno
refers only once to Christian Discourses in quoting the line about the “lost
individual” (K, 59). Like many after him, this is a missed opportunity as it is
in Christian Discourses where Kierkegaard tackles the issue of the ‘lost
individual’ most clearly. Adorno reveals his sensitivity to reading closely and
carefully as a philosopher on our journey in the unfinished story of life: “The
text which philosophy is given to read is incomplete, contradictory and
fragmentary, and much of it may be consigned to blind demonics; yes,
perhaps reading is precisely our task.”32 Adorno combats the consciously
fragmentary strategy of Kierkegaard’s authorship, but ignores, like other
influential readers after him, key texts such as Christian Discourses that give
coherency to the overall authorship.
Inspired by Lukacs’ Soul and the Forms, Adorno strives to perfect the
essay form. In “The Essay as Form”, Adorno sets the terms: “Discontinuity is
essential to the essay; its subject matter is always a conflict brought to a
standstill” (NL1, 16). Even the dialect is apparent in the essay, where the
‘essay’ per se is both more opened and more closed (NL1, 17). The
disintegration is present also in the Joycean celebration of not only accepting
but also causing further disruption: “Hence the essay’s innermost formal law
is heresy” (NL1, 23). The essay can be to the larger philosophical work what
the short story is to the novel. The essay is a good example for Adorno
because it “thinks in breaks (in Bruchen) because reality is brittle (bruchig)
and finds its unity through the breaks, not by smoothing them over” (NL1,
25). This not only shows the paradigm of the ‘wrestling match’ (Brydning)
but also more clearly the use of disintegration and discontinuity in the
dialectic both in Kierkegaard and Adorno by introducing the term
‘intermittent dialectic’ in Kierkegaard: “The dialectic begins anew in each
sphere; its continuity is fractured. The discontinuity of the large movement is
confirmed by the movement in place of the psychological and individual
movement, and by the model of an ‘intermittent’ dialectic” (K, 100). But
Adorno begins to indirectly criticise himself in defining the intermittent
dialectic. There is a similar pattern in his criticism of Benjamin’s ‘dialectic at
a standstill.’ Adorno attacks Kierkegaard for (once again) petrifying the
dialectic to a paralysis, rather than towards a Hegelian continual movement:
The latter’s true instant is not a going farther but a hesitation, not a
process but a caesura; and it is posited at the centre of Kierkegaard’s
existential philosophy as the protest of transsubjective truth against the
mythical universal domination of the spontaneous subject (K, 100)
The irony is that Adorno develops his own negative dialectic out of
Kierkegaard and Benjamin’s intermittent and ‘standstill’ dialectics. A few
paragraphs later, Adorno reiterates in more concise form. The intermittence,
he says, is “a movement in place, not one of progress and continuity” (K,
101). Adorno’s critique of Kierkegaard enables his own development as a
thinker. Once again, Adorno’s critique of Kierkegaard brings out the
expression of both thinkers’ dialectics and that only through critique is the
dialectical journey possible.
3. Melancholy and Myth
It was a spring evening; the sun shone so red into the parlour, just about to set.
The vanes of the mill up on the city ramparts drove their shadows across the
windowpanes and the walls of the room, appearing, disappearing, in a
monotonous alternation of shadow and light—one moment shadow, two
moments of light.
J.P. Jacobsen, Niels Lyhne
At the heart of Adorno’s reading of Kierkegaard is the theme of melancholy

and myth. For both thinkers melancholy and myth are connected. What is
striking in Adorno’s text and his own works that follow is that, like
Kierkegaard, he continues to assimilate melancholy and the use of myth and
allegory into his philosophical works, rather than eradicate them. This is due
in large part to his affiliation and loyalty to Benjamin’s use of allegory, which
stems from Kierkegaard as Adorno himself already points out: “There are
good reasons why Benjamin’s [dialectic] is a dialectic of images rather than a
dialectic of progress and continuity, a “dialectics at a standstill”—a name,
incidentally, he found without knowing that Kierkegaard’s melancholy had
long since conjured up” (NL2, 229). And Robert Hullot-Kentor states in the
introduction to Adorno’s Kierkegaard: “Since Benjamin’s theory of allegory
stands at the centre of Kierkegaard, as it does at the centre of Adorno’s
philosophy altogether” (K, xix).
It is well known that in nearly every work by Kierkegaard there are
countless allusions to fairytale, allegory and metaphor, with his various
descriptions of melancholy (Tungsind) weaved within them. This section
illuminates another aspect of indirect politics via the paired theme of
melancholy and myth, which communicate aspects of philosophy as lived and
as a way to communicate inwardness that the conventional tools of
philosophy cannot do as effectively. As a part of indirect politics, melancholy
and myth dissolve boundaries and point towards a new framework of using
images, figures and motifs as new (and ancient) forms of philosophical
methodology. Four points are elaborated here under the appellation of
melancholy science, semblance and cipher, blasting through myth, and
metamorphosis.
i. The Melancholy Science
Adorno begins the ‘dedication’ in Minima Moralia (the book that is

‘reflections on a damaged life’) by stating that it is a ‘melancholy science’
(Die traurige Wissenschaft). The German adjective traurig (‘sad’ in English)
shares a root with the noun Trauer, meaning mourning, sorrow, or
lamentation, and is found in the title of Benjamin’s Ursprung des deutschen
Trauerspiels. As mentioned already, Minima Moralia gives an ironic nod to
the icons of philosophy with its inverted titles such as ‘minima moralia’ in
contrast to Aristotle’s ‘magna moralia’; the ‘melancholy science’ to

Nietzsche’s ‘gay science’; the ‘health unto death’ to Kierkegaard’s ‘sickness
unto death’ and ‘the whole is the false’ to Hegel’s ‘whole is the true’. Hegel
melancholically concludes in the prologue to Philosophy of Right: “When
philosophy paints its grey in grey, a shape of life has grown old, and it cannot
be rejuvenated, but only recognised, by the grey in grey of philosophy; the
owl of Minerva begins its flight only with the onset of dusk.”33 This is far
from the exuberant optimism of The Phenomenology of Spirit, where the
‘whole is the truth’. The dialectic remains, but not the optimism. By contrast,
optimism can emerge again as a result of this present melancholic outlook of
philosophy. Adorno begins his prologue to Negative Dialectics by writing:
“Philosophy, which once seems obsolete, lives on because the moment to
realise it was missed” (ND, 3). Out of the rubble of Hegel’s philosophical
kingdom where the night owl spreads its wings in the gloaming, and where
Trakl’s “owl calls the drunken from black melancholy [Öfter ruft aus
schwarzer Schermut das Käuszchen den Trunknen]”, Kierkegaard’s
pseudonymous writings (like Benjamin’s thought) come wrapped in
melancholy. This aspect of Kierkegaard’s authorship is given central focus in
Adorno‘s text on Kierkegaard when Adorno interlinks melancholy with
mourning: “Mourning [Trauer] can be shown, pragmatically, to be
Kierkegaard’s central affect in the foundational nexus of his philosophy” (K,
30). This, like many of the judgements that Adorno makes about Kierkegaard,
can be said of Adorno too. Rose deciphers the ‘melancholy science’ as “[…]
precisely an attempt to redefine the relation between theory and praxis”34. But,
unlike Adorno, Kierkegaard will ultimately make the leap into action,
spending his final days selling his highly polemical, and very focused and
concise Øieblikket on the streets of Copenhagen.
Post-WWII thinking, especially after the decline of French
existentialism, is no stranger to mourning as an end and as a way of beginning
to do philosophy again. Heidegger, Levinas and Derrida can be viewed as
philosophers of mourning (albeit a rather selective mourning), with their
meditations on eschatology and the death of philosophy (Gillian Rose attacks
this notion of mourning, and she distinguishes Derrida’s mourning from
Benjamin’s Trauerspiel and prevalent melancholy in connection to the Law.
See Gillian Rose’s Mourning becomes the Law: Philosophy and
Representation). Human beings are no longer innocent, and the ancient
dictum of ”increasing knowledge increasing sorrow” speaks is rooted in many
ancient civilisations. Optimism becomes a possibility again when the
overcoming or at least the facing of melancholy and mourning is achieved,
when a second innocence is experienced. Following the Trauerspiel:
“Knowledge, not action, is the most characteristic mode of existence of evil”
(O, 230). Adorno does not discern Kierkegaard’s thought in full: he does not
perceive the answer to his ‘melancholy science’ in Kierkegaard’s Christian
Discourses where the Christian is the most blessed state because unlike the
lily and the bird, he or she is not ignorant but through inwardness becomes a
child again and experiences innocence a second time. If Adorno is so adamant
in taking all of Kierkegaard’s tricks and descriptions as metaphor, allusion
and cipher, he limits himself to not accepting Kierkegaard’s particular
Christian individual that is overcoming melancholy and mourning while being
painfully aware of it. To call the Seducer the most spiritual of Kierkegaard’s
characters is a mistake on Adorno’s part (K, 52). This Seducer, the nihilistic
king without a country whose only realm is his powerful imagination,
sensuality and ruthless wit, similar to Dostoevsky’s Stavrogin, who burns out
his spirit in self-indulgent superiority and appetite towards an emptiness that
ultimately leads to self-destuction. This great Seducer is one who has sunk
down to the absolute narcissism and the egocentric reassurance of
melancholy. Judge William discerns “melancholy [Tungsind] as “the hysteria
of the spirit” (SKS3, 183 / EOII, 188). The hysteria of the spirit is when
melancholy breaks forth into either a demonic defiance of praxis that leads to
malevolent action in destruction or self-destruction, or the disappearance of
oneself due to the petrifying, inclosing reserve. Melancholy if triumphant also
becomes ultimately the slow death of spirit.
In his journals, Kierkegaard drafted the outline of a work under the
poignant title “Let not the heart in sorrow sin” (Pap. IX A 499-500, 1848),
which might have become one of his most elegant works. He would analyse
the abandonment of faith in God and men, the hope of eternity and this life,
and love to God, men and oneself. He called these forms “the finest, humanly
speaking, most lovable forms of despair” (SUD, 163). Kierkegaard’s
‘melancholy science’ does not belong to the Seducer nor to the journal writer,
but is the road to overcoming the oppression of melancholy to the point of
paralysis that prevents praxis. Kierkegaad’s most allegorical and melancholy
text actually leads the reader to the possibility of salvation in contrast to the
late Hegel, when Frater Taciturnus reminds the exhausted reader: “Herein lies
also the significance of his melancholy. Its nature is the concentration of
possibility [...] the deep dark night of his soul should become still darker, for
then he will recover” (SKS6, 392 / SLW, 424). Following one commentator’s
remark that “Adorno depicts Kierkegaard’s melancholy as the quintessential
moment of dialectical possibility between subject and object,”35 melancholy is
used as a factor within the faltering state of philosophy towards critical action.
What one does not want to occur is the fall into nostalgia, a desperate search
for something that is no longer attainable such as Rousseau’s idyllic world or
Heidegger’s Ursprung. Adorno quotes Taciturnus’ remark that “melancholy is
concentrated in the image of catastrophe as the extreme limit of its potential”
(K, 124). Both Kierkegaard and Adorno may mourn “the ‘subject’ which has
lost its ‘substance,’” and carry a thought that is “haunted by this ghostly,
missing agency,”36 but neither do they desire to rediscover this agency.
Instead, fragmentation and discontinuity is their integration of critical thinking
and the possibility for persistent action and reaction. Benjamin, in his review
of Kierkegaard in April 1933, describes the panorama of the book: “Pascal
and the allegorical Hell of the Baroque are presented here as the vestibule to
that cell in which Kierkegaard abandons himself to melancholy and which he
shares with Irony, his false mistress” (SW2, 704). Whereas both “Guilty/Not
Guilty” and the Trauerspiel are “dominated by the gloomy tone of intrigue”
(O, 97), it is Adorno who calls his most beautiful work a ‘melancholy
science’. For Kierkegaard, there is no abandonment to melancholy but rather a
fearless confrontation with it, which not even the ‘real poets’ overcame. For
example, Shakespeare has Prospero say in the last soliloquy in The Tempest,
probably his last play that he wrote alone: “Gentle breath of yours my sails /
Must fill, or else my project fails, / Which was to please. Not I want / Spirits
to enforce, art to enchant; / And my ending is despair / Unless I be relieved by
prayer, / Which pierces so, that it asaults / Mercy itself, and frees all faults.”
From conversation with himself in various disguises, whether it be his
performative pseudonyms, or Solomon, Hamlet, and Nero, Kierkegaard works
his way out of the vestibule of resignation and labyrinth of melancholy with
dialectical irony and persistent war on hypocrisy. Adorno concludes his
monograph on Kierkegaard with this last line: “For the step from mourning
[Trauer] to comfort is not the largest, but the smallest” (K, 141). And yet,
many years later, Adorno confirms the use of Kierkegaard’s heterogeneous
melancholy and mourning: “Melancholy is the shadow of what in all form is
heterogeneous, which form strives to banish: mere existence” (AT, 139).
ii. Semblance and Cipher
As a reader of Benjamin’s Trauerspiel, Adorno picks up the terms semblance

and cipher to help extricate the essence of Kierkegaard’s oeuvre. Semblance
holds a key place in Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory as literally the outward
appearance or apparent form of something. Originating from the French
sembler, ‘seem’, tracing back to the Latin similare, ‘simulate’, semblance as
image becomes a central motif in Adorno’s critique of Kierkegaard. Once
again this critique turns into another example of an appropration of
Kierkegaard’s method and expression. This is not unlike the strategy of
Socrates or Nietzsche whose “creative conversation” (to use an expression
from Edward Clarke37) with those they are closest to they then absorb,
appropriate, attack and overcome. Adorno concludes chapter three of his
monologue on Kierkegaard:
Semblance, which illuminates thought from the remoteness of the

images like the star of reconciliation, burns in the abyss of inwardness as
an all-consuming fire. It is to be sought out and named in this abyss, if
the hope that it radiates is not to be forfeited by knowledge (K, 67).
In using the words ‘all-consuming fire’, which is the description of God

(see for example Deuteronomy 4: 24 in the Old Testament and Hebrews 12:29
in the New Testament), Kierkegaard’s semblance illuminating his thought is in
a permanent state of turmoil for Adorno, which cannot be pinned down or
overcome as we encounter one image and allusion after another such as, for
example, in “Guilty/Not Guilty” and Either/Or I. Earlier in his monograph,
Adorno equates inwardness and melancholy with the semblance of nature and
the actuality of judgment (K, 46). But Adorno also points out:
Through melancholy, inwardness conjures the semblance of truth to the

point that melancholy itself becomes transparent as semblance; to the
point, that is, that melancholy is wiped out and at the same time rescued;
melancholy conjures images, and these stand ready for it in history as
enigmatic figures (K, 64).
Unlike Kierkegaard as the writer who is still a kind of philosopher at the

Mellemspil between philosophy and literature, a supreme artist like Beethoven
can freely rely on semblance to communicate: “[…] the tour de force of each
of his great works is literally Hegelian, in that the totality of nothing
determines itself as a totality of being, though it does so only as semblance
and not with the claim of absolute truth” (AT, 243). But to Adorno’s irritation,
Kierkegaard continually uses semblance in the pseudonymous works in order
to counteract any conceptions of truth and possibility of conclusion. In the
dichotomies of exception/general and exception/conformity, semblance
creates a labyrinth that allows disintegration to become a form of integration,
and discontinuity a form of unity. This is what enables Adorno to say:
“Semblance is not the characteristica formalis of artworks but rather
materialis, the trace of the damage artworks want to revoke” (AT, 141).
Adorno forgets that it is from the legacy of Kierkegaard and not Benjamin that
he gets his semblance, and it is his reading of Kierkegaard that brings out the
best in Adorno. The confusion remains when both Benjamin and Adorno get
lost in what they perceive as Kierkegaard’s web of inwardness and interiority
to the point where Adorno wastes time getting irritated by the story of
Climacus as a young child being shown the world by his father without
leaving the room. How many fathers have played this game with their
children? The story is a way to entertain the highly inquisitive child without
leaving the room and the duties of the house (and poor old senior Kierkegaard
might have been a bit too creaky in the joints to take a tour out of doors), but,
just as important, it is a memorable example of the powers of imagination and
the possibility to see the whole world at one’s window (“He did not require
forests and travels for his adventures but merely what he had: a little room
with one window” (SKS15, 22 / PF, 124)). And rather than treat this image as
a real life encounter brought to vivid descriptions by an insightful,
imaginative writer, Adorno and Benjamin naively reduce the story to an

example of the decadence of Kierkegaard’s interiority. Later in his essay “The
Essay as Form”, Adorno explicitly celebrates Benjamin as the master of using
expression when definition is no longer available: “The manner of expression
is to salvage the precision sacrificed when definition is omitted, without
betraying the subject matter to the arbitrariness of conceptual meanings
decreed once and for all. In this, Benjamin was the unsurpassed master” (NL1,
12). This is what Kierkegaard is doing with his own manner of expression,
irritated by the Danish Hegelian know-it-alls of his time, he tries to find a way
out of a totality of melancholy and myth while at the same time appropriates
his own experience of melancholy into his authorship, and takes seriously the
tradition of myth and fairytale from the perspective of one who, like the
philosopher John Moriarty, often sees human beings to be living in a tale told
rather than in a world.38 Adorno is right then when he concludes: “This
criticism neglects the best dialectical truth in philosophy as much as in art: the
truth that presents itself in semblance” (K, 137). That is as close as we are
going to get. The dialectic goes on and “thus truth subordinates itself to
melancholic semblance through semblance’s own dialectic” (K, 61).
But what of the ‘cipher’? The cipher is a code or the key to a code, and
there are ciphers everywhere in Kierkegaard’s work. So many of
Kierkegaard’s mottos and dedications are ciphers, such as the use of
Hamann’s aphorism on the messenger and the poppies for Fear and
Trembling (the text itself is cipher for theology, philosophy, biography, ethics
and politics), and the monkey/apostle mirror motto for Stages on Life’s Way.
The dedications to Poul Martin Møller, to Kierkegaard’s father, and to ‘the
single individual’ are never accidental or random; all are central ciphers to
unravelling the texts or the writer in question. Also terms such as despair and
faith can be ciphers for both damnation and salvation. Adorno’s cipher, in the
aftermath of Benjamin’s idea of ruination, is a concept in a way that defies
historical deterioration. Adorno states: “History engraved the fissure between
the unreadable cipher and truth” (K, 26). Constellation, as a “doctrine of
ciphers” (K, 92), drives the negative dialectic of both Kierkegaard and
Adorno. Semblance as the outward appearance contains the cipher throughout
Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous works right up to the Anti-Climacus works.
Again, when Adorno points to Benjamin, he is really encapsulating
Kierkegaard’s influence: “Paradoxically, the absolutely hidden is
communicated by the cipher. It is, as is all allegory according to Benjamin,
not merely a sign but expression” (K, 26 / O, 162). The constellation of
ciphers follows a trajectory from Kierkegaard to Benjamin to Adorno where
the secret of writing also accounts for the secret conversation: “Implicit in
Kierkegaard’s metaphor of scripture [Schrift] is: the unalterable givenness of
the text itself as well as its unreadableness as that of a ‘cryptogram’
[Geheimschrift] composed of ‘ciphers’ whose origin is historical” (K, 25).
Overwhelmed by the influence of Benjamin’s Trauerspiel, Adorno describes

melancholy’s ruins as “[…] the ciphers on which Kierkegaard reflects, […]
where Kierkegaard supposes only the discontinuity and contingency of total
melancholy […]” (K, 124). Like Benjamin after him, Kierkegaard uses cipher
to disrupt history once more, such as focusing on ‘insignificant discoveries’
and the idea of “disintegration” as mentioned in Chapter Four. This
playfulness has a deadly serious intention, namely, to awaken the slumbering
individual in the face of politically tumultuous times. Close to the end of his
book on Kierkegaard, Adorno confirms the affirmation that lies behind the
ciphers in Kierkegaard´s work: “No truer image of hope can be imagined than
that of ciphers, readable as traces, dissolving in history, disappearing in front
of overflowing eyes, indeed confirmed in lamentation. In these tears of
despair the ciphers appear as incandescent figures, dialectically, as
compassion, comfort, and hope” (K, 126). And in his final work, Adorno
argues that semblance “heralds the ineffable” and yet “even in its ultimate
form in the hermetic artwork, is truth” (AT, 137). Texts as disparate as Stages
on Life´s Way and Practice in Christianity are still before us because of
Kierkegaard´s masterly use of semblance and cipher to express the ineffable
and interrupt the ways of comfortable thinking that has been drilled into us.
iii. Blasting through Myth
From the very beginning, Kierkegaard dwells on the aspect of myth in

philosophy, theology and the history of ideas. In The Concept of Irony, Plato
and Hegel are the philosophers who transform both myth and history and
attempt to reconcile them. Constantly at odds with the ‘poet’ as a figure on the
side of myth, the closing discourse of Works of Love begins: “To say it is no
art, but to do it is”, implicating the poet in barring the way to the religious and
to action. But the poet is depicted in various ways in Kierkegaard’s
authorship, at one point the height of demonic defiance, at another—the only
one who “[…] wrenches us out into the middle of life” (SKS8, 180 / UDVS,
73), in contrast to the philosopher who Adorno describes as “like a man who
has his spectacles on but goes on searching for them; he searches for what is
right in front of his nose, but he never looks there and so never finds them (K,
28). At various moments in his authorship Kierkegaard resigns himself to
being only a poet, yet he concedes at the same time that it is the poet
(Shakespeare) who is able to come closest to illuminating the “nightmares of
existence.” To come after Hegel warrants sensitivity to history, and the two—
history and the poetic representing the myth—enact a kind of master/slave
struggle. Adorno remarks: “As an opponent of Hegel’s doctrine of objective
spirit, Kierkegaard developed no philosophy of history” (K, 32). Judge
William is the spokesman for a certain Hegelian conception of history, and
later in Practice in Christianity, Anti-Climacus, while not conjuring a
philosophy of history, distinguishes sacred from profane history. Even after
Aristotle’s distinction of poetic history from factual history, the Homeric

qualities of mythology as truth provide a counterpart to the logos of Greek
philosophy. We cannot escape Borges’ remark that “it may be that universal
history is the history of the different intonations given a handful of
metaphors.”39 In Homeric fashion, a young Kierkegaard will write
enthusiastically that “myth is the idea of eternity” (Pap. I A 300, 1836) and
thus begin his journey through key figures of myth such as the Wandering
Jew, Don Giovanni and Faust.
Throughout his journals, Kierkegaard transforms this classic view of
myth versus logos into his own contradictory use of the poet into something
quite particular as a contrast to the rule or general verges, but which also
knows at the same time the folly of the position of being a poet. It was after
all the poet who claimed the exception as superior to the general, but it was
also that same poet who failed in his endeavour, succumbing to his own
supposed superiority and negligence of the general. Kierkegaard always
leaves room for the mythical, but it is a blasting through myth, in that
Kierkegaard turns the myth on itself and on philosophy through the use of the
many masks of the poet in the drama of voices in his authorship. Via
Adorno’s critique of Kierkegaard is the foundation of the former’s attack on
the Enlightenment:
Any intellectual resistance it encounters merely increases its strength.

The reason is that enlightenment also recognises itself in the old myths.
No matter which myths are invoked against it, by being used as
arguments they are made to acknowledge the very principle of corrosive
rationality of which enlightenment stands accused. Enlightenment is
totalitarian (DE, 3).
In Chapter Three, I argued that Paul Tillich, Adorno’s supervisor for the
Kierkegaard project, attacked the mythologizing of the political. However,
Tillich does not do away with myth altogether:
Prophets and philosophers have attacked the immorality of many myths.

These attacks are only partially justified. The relations of the
mythological gods are transmoral; they are ontological; they refer to
structures of being and to conflicts of values. The conflicts between the
gods stem from the unconditional claims which each of the gods makes.
They are demonic, but they are not immoral.40
The extremity of the Enlightenment is that the movement attempts to

create the polar opposite of its so-called ‘enemy’—fantasy and myth. Adorno
is right when he says that Enlightenment “amputates [schneidet] the
incommensurable” (DE, 9), but he contradicts himself when, on the one hand,
he attacks Kierkegaard for merging the mythical with philosophy and leaving
a gap and room for the incommensurable, while condemning the
Enlightenment for eliminating any space for the incommensurable. The first
sentence of Kierkegaard: “All attempts to comprehend the writings of
philosophers as poetry have missed their truth content,” is all well and good,
but how far should one use the fairytale and allegory to fortify and persuade
one’s presentation through various texts? One can be poetic without being a
poet; an artist can be philosophical without being a philosopher. And both
Kierkegaard and Adorno are situated in the gap between philosophy and art
(Minima Moralia and Either/Or I as prime examples), provoking both
disciplines.
Fairytale and allegory weave their way throughout Kierkegaard and
Adorno’s authorship. Adorno justifiably warns: “Fascination is the most
dangerous power in his [Kierkegaard’s] work. Whoever succumbs to it […]
has fallen under its dominion and become the servant of a mythical realm” (K,
11). One can read Kierkegaard and forget the argument, and instead surrender
to the sound and image of passage after passage where “On a dark night, there
is nothing more dangerous for other ships than to hang out a lantern, which is
more deceptive than the darkness”, and yet these passages “[…] held off the
death sentence by telling stories” (SKS2, 376, 410 / EOI, 388, 422). These
references from “The Seducer’s Diary” show that myth has its place in
melancholy, but does it imply that we remain in the harbour of fairytale and
allegory forever? Judge William counteracts the Seducer in his own eloquent
way by calling out the man behind the myth: “[…]the midnight hour when
everyone must unmask […]” (SKS3, 156 / EOII, 160). Yet Kierkegaard
neither completely destroys the myth, nor loses himself completely in myth as
the Seducer does (See SKS2, 431 / EOI 444: “Everything is a metaphor
[Billede]; I myself am a myth about myself, for is it not as a myth that I hasten
to this tryst [Møde]?”), but instead, like Benjamin, manipulates the mythical
realms. Repeating Benjamin’s sentence from the ‘Flâneur’ section of The
Arcades Project: “As long as there is still one beggar around, there will still
be myth” (A, K6, 4), Adorno is unconvinced, and considers whether it is such
a good thing that the beggar continues to live: “Would not, in the end, the
disappearance of the beggar make good that was ever done to him and can
never be made good?” (MM, 199). But the beggar should never disappear if
he exists: he is the reminder, the hope and the reality rather than the unheard
and unseen voice displaced outside the city walls. Kierkegaard contaminates
philosophy with allegory and at the same time restores allegory as something
we might get philosophical and spiritual wisdom from.
In The Sickness unto Death, the Irish fairytale already mentioned above
painted another image of ways to express breaking through despair in going
through every negativity. Adorno, despite his reservations, blasts his way
through myth through the fairytale titles of Minima Moralia. At the same
time, there is the influence of aspects of the fairytale in Adorno’s text with its
innuendos, riddles and parabolic communication, and passages with titles

such as, for example, “Wolf as grandmother”, “Struwwelpeter”, “Over the
hills”, “Magic Flute”, and “Princess Lizard”. Adorno gives himself away by
saying: “More perfectly than any other fairy-tale, Snow White expresses
melancholy” (MM, 121). To blast through myth, the melancholic call must be
answered. Benjamin has expressed this call already: “For the only pleasure the
melancholic permits himself, and it is a powerful one, is allegory” (O, 185).
The communicator of allegory is the cipher, as sign and expression.
Kierkegaard as Johannes de silentio shows himself to be the master allegorist
through his manipulation of the Merman and Agnete—one of the supreme
expressions of the despairing seducer through its combined description of the
scene of failed seduction, innocence and the possibility of bringing out the
musicality of the Danish language. This is not to say that myth remains
untouched, or the origin the goal. That is why I use the word ‘manipulation’
and ultimately ‘blasting’ through myth. I adhere to Adorno’s equation of
origin with the superstructure of society that endlessly needs to be shook up:
Even now, the blind context of nature, myth, perpetuates itself in culture,
and this is precisely what the essay reflects on: the relationship of nature
and culture is its true theme […] what lies beneath culture is itself thesis,
something constructed, the false society. This is why the origin has no
more value for the essay than the superstructure (NL1, 19).
This recalls Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence” (written a number of

years before Adorno’s Kierkegaard) where the danger remains of the mythical
realm bringing forth the tyranny of the sovereign. Even in the Kierkegaard
text, Adorno writes: “[…] the origin of structure is mythical: the tyranny of
spirit, of the created that enthrones itself as creator and sinks so much deeper
into nature the higher that spirit imagines itself towering above it” (K, 57).
What can prevent the myth becoming the origin leading to faraway
Rousseauan pastures or Heideggerian huts built from the Germanic soil? It is
the ‘metamorphosis’ brought forth by Kierkegaard’s Inter et Inter in the essay
on Johanne Luise Heiberg, which leads to the final part in this section on
melancholy and myth.
iv. Metamorphosis
The first full-scale English speaking biographer of Kierkegaard, Walter

Lowrie, names the title of the chapter on 1848 as “Metamorphosis.”41 Two
classic works of literature from the ancient and the modern world bear the title
metamorphosis: The Metamorphoses by Ovid, describing the creation and the
history of the world in terms of Greek and Roman myth, where the
procreating power is everywhere and various gods wear masks and change
form; and The Metamorphosis by Kafka, the now iconic twentieth century
fable of a working man waking up one morning to find himself transformed
into a gigantic insect, whose main anxiety is that he will be late for work and
annoy his family by his surprising misfortune.Aside from the essay on
Johanne Luise Heiberg, amidst a few fragments, the word metamorphosis
rarely turns up in Kierkegaard’s authorship, twice in The Concept of Irony,
not more than three times over the course of eight hundred pages in Either/Or
(though these are important) and in a footnote in The Concept of Anxiety and
The Sickness unto Death. Yet a footnote by Kierkegaard in a pseudonymous
work can give us the key to an entire text, so let us try to dig deeper.
The word metamorphosis makes its first appearance in connection with
death: “To be sure, death is and always remains a negative factor, but as soon
as it is understood only as factor, then the positive therein, the emancipating
metamorphosis, will also triumphantly survive the negative” (SKS1, 122 / CI,
64). The second mention of metamorphosis in The Concept of Irony is in
connection with myth: “[…] there is at every moment a possibility that the
mythical will undergo a metamorphosis” (SKS1, 153 / CI, 103).
Metamorphosis enables one to break out of myth and out of death. To be
overwhelmed by melancholy is to die without dying, to despair in not even
being able to die while still living in the world (SKS11, 134 / SUD, 18: “[…]
despair is the sickness unto death […] perpetually to be dying, to die and yet
not die, to die death [at døe Døden].”) Metamorphosis is a way out of this
paralysed condition. This brings me back to the final point of the first part of
this chapter, where “inwardness transforms everything”, expressed in The
Crisis and A Crisis in the Life of an Actress. As a prelude to the use of
metamorphosis by Inter et Inter, both the protagonists of Either/Or I and
Either/Or II mention also metamorphosis in passing, clearly hinting of things
to come. When the author of the essay on Mozart’s Don Giovanni attempts to
explain his use of ‘stage’ (Stadium), he helps the reader to distinguish a leap
from a metamorphosis: “When I use the term ‘stage’ as I did and continue to
do, it must not be taken to mean that each stage exists independently, the one
outside the other. I could perhaps more appropriately use the word
‘metamorphosis’” (SKS2, 80 / EOI, 74). There is no complete eradication of
the past lives, but a going through, a wading and struggling through, not by
leap but by transformation; metamorphosis (Forklare and Metamorphose).
Adorno’s synopsis of the ‘logic of the spheres’ in chapter five of his
monograph never suggests metamorphosis, which disrupts the ‘logic of the
spheres’ of the aesthetic, ethical and religious. Lukács has adhered to the logic
of spheres by making his leap without the metamorphosis elucidated in the
actress essay, thus stifling insight and paralysing possibility. Judge William,
responding to the author of Either/Or I, links melancholy with
metamorphosis: “But the persons whose souls do not know this depression are
those souls who have no presentiment of a metamorphosis” (SKS3, 183 /
EOII, 190). In Kierkegaard, Adorno argues that Kierkegaard’s dialectic
destroys the spheres: “Torn apart by Kierkegaard’s dialectic, as though by a

natural force, the spheres that it had earlier created as stages become
autonomous ‘ideas’ and rule over the existence from which they originated as
articulating elements of its unity” (K, 90). Again, Judge William warns of
movement without metamorphosis:
This by no means says that the person who lives aesthetically does not
develop, but he develops with necessity, not in freedom; no
metamorphosis takes place in him, no infinite internal movement by
which he comes to the point from which he becomes the person he
becomes (SKS3, 215 / EOII, 225).
It is only utter destruction and autonomous sovereignty if the reader

naively perceives the spheres as going from one leap to another without any
recognition of metamorphosis.
Let us return to Kierkegaard’s essay on Johanne Luise Heiberg. Here
Kierkegaard, as Inter et Inter, examines metamorphosis most explicitly. With
awareness of inwardness, metamorphosis becomes possible. As said in the
section on the exception in Chapter Three, this ‘metamorphosis’ has been
present from the beginning, but has not been necessary to use until time has
passed, in the case of the actress—when fourteen years have passed from
being the “damned pretty and devilish wench of eighteen years” (forbandet
nydelig og satans rask Tøs paa 18 Aar) (SKS14, 94 / CD, 305), to the
esteemed and admired actress of her generation, precisely because of the
‘metamorphosis’. Many years pass, until one may have need of the
metamorphosis. The actress was related to the idea of feminine youthfulness
which is not prey to the years. Even the most ‘idea-less’ girl reaches the
phenomenal state of seventeen years old, but will not undergo the
metamorphosis. The trial of Johanne Luise Heiberg and embracing
metamorphosis is in this conquest of time, making youthfulness the task rather
than simply having youth. The young beautiful seventeen year old actress has
no need of metamorphosis; the thirty something year old does. Heiberg notes
this in her enormous memoirs: “I played Juliet like a child that sings a
charming song without knowing about notes.”42 When, fourteen years later,
she comes to play Juliet for the second time in one of the most famous love
stories of them all, metamorphosis comes into play. The second performance
is dialectical because it engages the old and the new. Youthfulness and
wearied experience come together to bring about the greater performance and
the greater woman. She stands in opposition to time, and yet time reveals the
metamorphosis. The Seducer had found rest only in restlessness in every
aspect of life; Johanne Luise Heiberg also finds rest in restlessness, but
through metamorphosis in her performance and in herself. Without
metamorphosis, the Seducer can only sink into inclosing reserve or end his
life by suicide.
Metamorphosis does not solely belong to the aesthetic realm, although
the one place where it is explicitly discussed in 1848 is in Kierkegaard’s only
‘aesthetic’ publication of that year via the analysis of the actress.
Metamorphosis helps transform melancholy and myth into action. If we want
to enter the territorial debate of the religious and the aesthetic, The Sickness
unto Death analyses the various forms of despair and how we, as human
beings, can transform or metamorphose ourselves out of despair. The action of
the actress, although presented within an ‘aesthetic’ text, is a supreme
example of one overcoming the despair of temporality through the use of
metamorphosis. Metamorphosis also overcomes death. The failed
experimentalist of repetition writes: “There must also be the vital force to slay
this death and transform it to life” (SKS4, 15 / R, 137). Of course, this ‘death’
is be taken metaphorically as well as literally, and most of all it is to awaken
any possibility of inwardness (which is why Heidegger developed his own
phenomenological analysis of death in Being and Time). Haufniensis, in a
footnote, remarks: “[…] partly truly and partly cleverly, partly enthusiastically
and partly frivolously, that death is a metamorphosis” (SKS4, 395 / CA, 92).
There is the great danger also in the anticipation of death in succumbing to
melancholy and myth forever, which both Kierkegaard and Adorno’s most
autobiographical writings are always almost on the verge of doing. Adorno
knew this early on: “For dying means that it is all over, but dying the death
means to live to experience death; and if for a single instant this experience is
possible, it is tantamount to experiencing it forever” (K, 83). Judge William
advises A. of Either/Or I to see creative despair as metamorphosis, not as a
break: “That is why in the very next moment the despair proves to be not a
break but a metamorphosis. Everything comes back again, but transfigured
[forklaret]” (SKS2, 263 / EOII, 271). In Minima Moralia, ‘Health unto Death’
is Adorno’s ironic reposte to the ‘sickness unto death’, if one views despair as
humanity’s constant companion and constant challenge. The ‘health unto
Death’ comes by way of metamorphosis shown in the career of Johanne Luise
Heiberg. Despair, being dialectical, thus continues just as Kierkegaard and
Adorno’s negative dialectic does. In the actress essay, for example, the man
between the lines writes: “And this is just the metamorphosis. Might [Haardt]
against might, it is said, and so also here: dialectic against dialectic, so that
time has no power really to take away, but only a subservient power, which
serves to make manifest” (SKS14, 106 / CD, 322). The experience of
melancholy can be broken by metamorphosis, although both myth and
melancholy will reemerge each time and that is why there is restlessness in
repose in the great actress, and the narrative of melancholy and myth within
the human self is a part of us and continues to tell our story.
4. “Who’s There?”
So we’ll live,
And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh […]
And take upon’s the mystery of things
As if we were God’s spies.
William Shakespeare, King Lear
An entry on Adorno in an encyclopaedia of philosophy reads: “Even to ignore

socio-political relations is to justify them, by suggesting, for example, that the
individual is more autonomous than he is.”43 Kierkegaard’s individual is never
more autonomous than when he has become aware of self-deception and
pretending and is able finally to see himself stripped bare. Another reader of
Kierkegaard gives well-founded advice for gaining autonomy: “To learn to
live and to die, and in order to be a man, to refuse to be a god.”44 This final
section offers four points: 1) freeing Kierkegaard’s sacrifice in the face of
society from Adorno’s critique; 2) arguing that there is a way to combat
reification in Kierkegaard’s texts; 3) examining the ‘art of commitment’; and
4) in light of Kierkegaard’s question “To whom is this discourse addressed?”
from Christian Discourses, providing the final component to the concept of
indirect politics out of the petrified, primordial landscape from this journey
through Lukács, Schmitt, Benjamin and Adorno in reading Kierkegaard’s
pseudonymous authorship as a “godly satire [gudfrygtig Satire]” (SKS13, 24 /
PV, 17) and his audacious vocation as the spy of God. The Jewish philosopher
Fackenheim described Kierkegaard as “[…] the first Christian thinker to
perceive the nature and extent of modern idolatry, who would surely have
been put into a concentration camp had he lived and written in Nazi
Germany.”45 As one who continually asks Faust’s question “Am I not the
fugitive? The unhoused? [Bin ich der Fluchtling nicht? Der Unbehauste? ]”
(Faust 3348-51), when we return to the question—“Who’s there?”—that
begins Hamlet and concludes this final chapter, Kierkegaard is by turns
incognito, the masked multiplicity of the self, the philosophical loafer with
cigar, the troubled religious poet searching for the purity of heart to will one
thing, and one of God’s spies.
i. Sacrifice and Society
A sacrifice (sacrificium) or Offer in Danish, being the act of giving up

something one values for the sake of something that is of greater importance,
is an intense form of praxis. Kierkegaard’s two central prototypes, Socrates
and Christ, make the ultimate ‘sacrifice’: to die for the truth. Sacrifice may
well be a central element of Kierkegaard’s religiosity and Christianity. Let us
look at the connection between Kierkegaard and Adorno’s comments on
sacrifice in the service of society. Preceding Christian Discourses and the
Anti-Climacus writings, Kierkegaard, as H.H., wrote two essays to be read by
the theologian: on whether one had the right to die for the truth, and the
difference between an apostle and a genius (SKS11, 51-111 / WA, 47-108).
We can use the parallel of the genius of Beethoven transformed into praxis in
Adorno’s analysis of the musician’s late works with the sacrifice of the
messiah and apostle turned into praxis in Kierkegaard’s works. Both the
genius and the apostle set their sights on the impossible. In his later two
essays on Kierkegaard dealing with the upbuilding and more direclty religious
Kierkegaard’s texts, the spectre of indirect politics is acknowledged by
Adorno: “All Kierkegaard’s gloomy motives have good critical sense as soon
as they are interpreted in terms of social critique. Many of his positive
assertions gain the concrete significance they otherwise lack as soon as one
translates them into concepts of a right society.”46
So how can sacrifice be beneficial to indirect politics and ultimately
praxis? This particular action of sacrifice is linked to the marginal figure or
the outsider who at the same time serves and transforms society aand holds
the mirror up to it. Adorno writes: “Like his countryman, Gustav Mahler,
Kafka sides with the deserters” (P, 270). Both Kafka and Mahler are two key
protagonists in Adorno’s quest for societal progress. They side with the
deserters, and yet they are articulating the twentieth century and driving forth
their art towards new horizons. Kierkegaard sides with the deserters through
an intricate web of pseudonyms and eccentric titles in order to overturn the
disintegrating society. Rose points out that “Adorno tried to development a
critique of society by producing a critique of its intellectual and artistic
products.”47 Edward Said, commenting on Adorno’s diagnosis of Beethoven’s
late style sums up this affirmative sacrifice as:
[…] a moment when the artist who is fully in command of his medium
nevertheless abandons communication with the established social order
of which he is a part and achieves a contradictory, alienated relationship
with it. His late works are a form of exile from his milieu.48
Sacrifice and estrangement from society thereby also become a kind of

engagement with society. In contrast to Adorno, Kierkegaard tried to develop
a critique of society by producing a critique of his own intellectual and artistic
endeavour, before confronting society directly in his final months alive. For
Adorno, there supposedly can be no conflation of philosophical and artistic
endeavour: Kant must be kept separate from Kafka—the philosopher must be
separated from the artist. However such is the entangled and masked make-up
of our society, that Kierkegaard’s complex and borderline method and
polyphonic style becomes a way to combat this society.
Adorno deals explicitly with the topic of sacrifice in Chapter Six of
Kierkegaard, under the title “Reason and Sacrifice” (Vernunft und Opfer),
which contains such subtitles as ‘Self-Destruction of Idealism’, ‘Mythical
Sacrifice’, ‘Gnosis’, ‘Paradox Sacrifice of Mere Spirit’ and ‘Passio’. For
Adorno, the root of Kierkegaard’s sacrifice is always to be connected with

myth. The sacrifice of consciousness, he writes, “constitutes the nexus of the
mythical and the intrahistorical in his [Kierkegaard’s] categorical structure”
(K, 107). If Adorno’s argument is to be accepted, the only consolation offered
by Kierkegaard is ‘hope’. Hope, as empty promise, becomes false for Adorno.
For a philosopher, hope is always false, and for a religious poet it is silence. In
his own stretch for artistic merit in writing, Adorno describes Kierkegaard’s
‘hope’: “The twilight of Kierkegaard’s hope is the sallow light of the twilight
of the gods that proclaims the vain end of an age or the aimless beginning of a
new one, but not salvation” (K, 110). Adorno adds the God-man to the
sacrifice: “Through sacrifice, the difference between Christ and man is
abolished” (K, 111). Yet if hope is to have any place, it consists in the fact
that for humanity there is no certainty (whereas for Christ there is). The
Gospels say that the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head. On earth, this is
true, but he has the ‘knowledge’ that he will be resting in paradise very soon,
but human beings do not have direct access to this ‘knowledge’, so we turn to
storytelling, parable, and myth or even “monomyth” (this is a term coined by
James Joyce in Finnegans Wake and taken up by Joseph Campbell to become
a central idea in his great work The Hero with a Thousand Faces in the
journey of the hero that combines myths from various traditions) which gives
us a deep universal form of ccommunication and conversation through
generations and civilizations. In Point of View (which Adorno quotes in the
‘sacrifice’ chapter) Kierkegaard singles himself out for the fate of martyrdom
(SKS16, 60 / PV, 81; K, 111). But the writings that deal most specifically on
living a life as a Christian are Works of Love, Christian Discourses and
Practice in Christianity, which all call for a life of engaged, life-embracing
praxis. Like Adorno’s Beethoven and his ‘late style’, Kierkegaard calls for the
reader to emancipate himself from a society before combating the very same
society. The dialectic of betraying and serving is in evidence here. In the last
paragraph of the chapter on sacrifice, Adorno equates the governance of
sacrificed reason to the outline of passion (K, 119). It is true that sacrifice and
passion go hand in hand, especially when one remembers that passion has its
root in passio—suffering, and that Stages in Life’s Way carries ‘the passion
narrative’, where on one level Quidam unleashes page after page of
melancholy and suffering in an attempt to come to terms with the aftermath of
a love affair. He does not succeed, and it takes Frater Taciturnus to try to fill
in the gaps, make his hermeneutic exegesis, and work out what to do next.
The transformation into praxis won’t come to pass until the 1848 writings
through the expression of ‘metamorphosis’ and the emergence of the Christian
in Christian Discourses and the Anti-Climacus works. Without knowing the
consequences of his statement, Adorno forsees his own negative dialectic
through his excavation of Kierkegaard’s authorship: “Sacrifice, as renunciation,
once more breaks into the fleetingly reconciled landscape” (K, 121).
In the essay “Commitment”, Adorno speaks of “[…] an apolitical stance

that is in fact highly political” (NL2, 76). While hardly advocating a
community in his writings, despite recent efforts by scholars to argue for a
Kierkegaardian community mostly through re-reading Works of Love,
Kierkegaard’s disentanglement/entanglement dialectic through his paradoxical
sacrifice ensures a fruitful relationship with society. Communication begins,
after all, with the individual, goes through the human race, and ends with the
individual. Sacrifice is not forgetting about the world; rather it entails making
amends with the world, and confronting it. As Stephen Dedalus states in
Joyce’s Ulysses: “There can be no reconciliation […] if there has not been a
sundering.”49 Adorno points out: “Culture is the perennial protest of the
particular against the universal as long as the universal is unreconciled with
the particular.”50 Adorno’s thought in this essay ”Committment” can be
reconciled with Kierkegaard, when we are reminded of Kierkegaard’s
writings of praxis in the 1848 writings, the Øieblik of 1854-55, and Anti-
Climacus’ descriptions of the ‘militant church’ or ‘striving church’ (stridende
Kirke). The striving church blasts through the self-congratulatory position of
the established church and thereby is reconciled with the world through its
unreconciliation. And a few years earlier in Stages on Life’s Way, in the
cemetery, one of Kierkegaard’s favorite places to walk, the voice of the leper
sheds light on the relationship between sacrifice and society: “[…] out among
the graves, where I sit comforted as one who offers his life to save others, as
one who freely chooses exile to save others” (SKS6, 218 / SLW, 234).
ii. Combating Reification
A critique of philosophy is a critique of society. This is central to

Kierkegaard’s indirect politics. Adorno’s first three quotations in Kierkegaard
are not a reference to any Kierkegaard text but rather to Hegel’s
Phenomenology of Spirit and Lukács’ History and Class Consciousness. We
know that Adorno’s reading of Hegel and Lukács was significant. It is Lukács
who had written the seminal essay on reification, and from which (alongside
Theory of the Novel) both Adorno and Benjamin drew inspiration. On the
opening page of her study on Adorno, Rose states: “Adorno’s thought
depends fundamentally on the category of reification.”51 She also offers us a
concise definition of the term, situating it neatly within its theoretical and
ideological context: “In the Marxian tradition ‘reification’ is most often
employed as a way of generalising Marx’s theory of value with the aim of
producing a critical theory of social institutions and of culture, but frequently
any critical force is lost in the process of generalisation.”52 This is precisely
what attracts Adorno to Marxist theory, most especially to Lukács, because
reification involves a change of perspective rather than being a concept. Rose
muses on this element in Adorno, her central chapter is called “The Lament
over Reification”, and in the first chapter she describes the Frankfurt School
along the same lines: “The school sought to define Marxism as a mode of
cognition sui generis on the assumption that there is no longer any privileged
carrier of that cognition, any universal class.”53 Adorno views Kierkegaard as
a philosopher, after Hegel, who attempts to overcome reification, if we
recognise reification as a category of totality where qualitative values have
been transformed into quantitative ones, and people are reduced to the status
of mere spectators.54 The heart of Adorno’s critique has to do with
Kierkegaard’s attempt at overcoming reification, by the latter’s refusal to
combat reification: “Kierkegaard recognised the distress of incipient high-
capitalism. He opposed its privations in the name of lost immediacy that he
sheltered in subjectivity. He analysed neither the necessity and legitimacy of
reification nor the possibility of its correction” (K, 39).
Adorno’s non-political stance is in fact a highly charged political stance,
while Kierkegaard is one of the few thinkers who actually tries to provide an
alternative to the rapidly increasing reification of the world. Fleeing to the
isolation of the interior, Kierkegaard’s potentially powerful response to
reification is seemingly lost. His philosophy of existence is “[…] realism
without reality [Wirklichkeit]” (K, 86). Reification is the category that
encapsulates ‘reality’, while Adorno and Kierkegaard are imposing
differentiation upon this reality. Human beings are predicated on
differentiation; reification is predicated on sameness. This is what
distinguishes Lukács’ increasing homogeneity from Benjamin’s
heterogeneity. The foundering of form from early Lukács onto Joyce, Kafka
and Beckett opposes the totality of form in later Lukács and Stalinist
orthodoxy. Yet there are moments in Kierkegaard when Adorno sees
Kierkegaard as proto-Marxist: “But he [Kierkegaard] did nevertheless […]
note the relation of reification and the commodity form in a metaphor that
need only be taken literally to correspond with Marxist theories” (K, 39). For
Adorno, it is Kierkegaard’s brand of Christianity that “brings rescue from the
extremity of reification”, primarily via Practice in Christianity. Adorno’s
extended quote from the text on reification, only ultimately brings one back to
the realm of inwardness: “Inwardness takes hold of the reified person and
breaks its own spell” (K, 40). Might Kierkegaard’s single individual befall the
same fate as a protagonist in a Kafka novel? Adorno seems to think so: “The
subject seeks to break the spell of reification by reifying itself. It prepares to
complete the fate that befell it” (P, 270).
How then does Kierkegaard combat reification in the world? Can
Kierkegaard respond to Adorno? Adorno thinks that he has answered these
questions—in the isolated, petrified inwardness of Christianity. Returning to
Adorno’s synopsis of Beethoven and his ‘late style’, we see him levelling the
charge of isolated inwardness at the composer, by virtue of Beethoven’s
having avoided combat with reification, instead conversing with reified
society in the foundering and alienation of his form. This is also the key to
Kierkegaard’s Anti-Climacus works and Christian Discourses, with the

prelude given with the ‘unrecognisables’ of Two Ages:A Literary Review.
Before going further with the ‘unrecognisables’ which I bring into the final
part of this chapter, it is still worthwhile reminding Adorno, the critic par
excellence, that Kierkegaard in Two Ages:A Literary Review presents a reified
society in 1846, two years before Marx’s Communist Manifesto and two
decades before Capital. Marx’s writings delve deep into human beings living
in capitalist society falling into alienation and the usurpation of economics in
all sectors of society, but Kierkegaard’s account introduces ‘reflection’,
‘levelling’, ‘the public’, ‘formlessness’, ‘chatter’, superficiality’, ‘flirting’ and
‘prudence’ (Klogskab), which are all characteristics of reification. In an age
where technology is moving far faster than culture or has now assimilated it
and has become in many ways our culture, these themes are as relevant to
equate with society now as when Kierkegaard was writing. Again, this is a not
doomsday, high-culture conservatism; rather, it is simply an evocation of the
world we live in today. Thus reification becomes another aspect of our lives
encountered everyday, through talking to one another, the media, at our
workplace and in intimate relationships. Reification is not a sigh of despair,
but a wake up call to how society functions. It is the task of philosophy to
question the significance of reification in society. It is no accident that Lukács
uses the word ‘reification’ a number of times in History and Class
Consciousness when describing journalism. The new medium of journalism
plays a central role in Kierkegaard’s Two Ages:A Literary Review as a central
tool of a reified society, and yet Kierkegaard’s writing life begins and ends
with journalism. Adorno—no stranger to hypocrisy and contradiction—
viewed Hollywood films as the height of reification, and yet in the 1940s
(during WWII no less!), he teamed up with Igor Stravinsky to compose
motion picture scores for movies in Hollywood.
Adorno tries to articulate that culture can continue only if we view
culture as related to criticism. Otherwise, reification triumphs absolutely. He
writes in his dense essay (“Cultural Criticism and Society”) on this very
theme: “Culture is only true when implicitly critical, and the mind which
forgets this revenges itself in the critics it breeds” (P, 22). As in Kierkegaard’s
critique, cultural criticism’s “very meaning […] is the suspension of
objectification” (P, 22). But the critic in turn must not become the sovereign
exception, unheeded by anyone. Kierkegaard is painfully aware of the border
between arrogance and sovereignty upon which he stands. His prolonged
study of the case of Adler reveals this awareness of going too far. The critic,
in combating reification, must always remember that the power of criticism is
fleeting and forever foundering. When the critic becomes frozen under a
sovereign power, then he or she, like culture in periods of history, becomes
idolised or petrified, and is thus neutralised and reified.
iii. The Art of Commitment
For both Kierkegaard and Adorno, the artist and the philosopher must be
committed. What does that mean exactly? For Kierkegaard, philosophy ceases
to have any function if it has no relevance to the reader’s own life, in terms
both of what has gone before, and of the possibility to transform what will
come. There are certain artists or, in the case of Kierkegaard, poets who
wrench the reader out in life, and continually push the very perimeters of art
and existence. These are the artists of commitment. Thus, the art of
commitment has a twofold makeup—to throw us into the middle of life,
unlocking the awareness of the existential sense of our time on Earth and on
the certainty of death; and to continue the tradition of passionate and
innovative creativity and expression. Does Adorno’s Kierkegaard come under
the same fire as Sartre, who has blended his philosophy into art for the sake of
praxis, and thus may “have missed their truth content”? Adorno concludes the
first chapter of Kierkegaard with the assertion: “The first concern of the
construction of the aesthetic in Kierkegaard’s philosophy is to distinguish it
from poetry” (K, 5). Coming out of the first major reception of Kierkegaard in
the German speaking world, most notably from Austria, Adorno is also
demythologising the cult of Kierkegaard. Kraus, Rilke, Haecker, Heidegger,
and Lukács had all fallen under the spell of Kierkegaard between the two
major wars of the twentieth century. Adorno was a precocious critic of
Kierkegaard and while resisting and warning against poeticising and
politicising philosophy, goes on to practice what he discovered in
Kierkegaard. This is what makes the Kierkegaard text still such an intriguing
work. Though much of it may be borrowed from Benjamin, one can discover
so much in Adorno’s thought, and in what he has borrowed from Kierkegaard,
and finally uncover the art of commitment as another point in the argument
for indirect politics inherent in Kierkegaard’s work.
Adorno is forever caught between Kant and Beethoven, between
philosophy and music, and he attacks Kierkegaard for choosing neither, but
instead living in a shadow world of both areas. In Aesthetic Theory, Adorno
allows himself to say: “Philosophy and art converge in their truth content: The
progressive self-unfolding truth of the artwork is none other than the truth of
the philosophical concept” (AT, 172). Fear and Trembling is as much a
desecration of silence as Beckett’s artwork. Adorno’s loftiness rears its head
when he gives himself the authority to decide what the artwork is and what
the philosophical work is. Fear and Trembling is a text dealing with an
impossible theme, which only art or religion seem to have access to. Hence
the conundrum of Johannes de silentio, the Extra-Skriver who calls himself
both a poet and one who practices dialectics, and thereby writing this
paradoxical ‘dialectical lyric’ to approach the terrifying the story of Abraham
which is an offense to ethical law. Adorno published one book called Quasi
Una Fantasia after Beethoven’s piece of music. The essays are organised in
sections in a way that imitates the organisation of a musical composition, with

the first and second sections called “Improvisations” and “Representations.”
The musicality is in evidence in Kierkegaard’s work, from the Stemning
(which can mean ‘setting the mood’ or ‘tuning in/up)’ of Fear and Trembling
and the organisation of Christian Discourses with its four sections with each
section containing seven discourses. In preparation for Christian Discourses,
Walter Lowrie informs the reader that although Kierkegaard did not provide a
preface for Part II of Christian Discourses, Kierkegaard says in the journal
that if any had been used, he would have written: “The bravest nation of
antiquity (the Lacedemonians) prepared themselves for warfare by music: so
these are notes [Stemninger] of triumphant joy which tune [stemme] to
warfare, and so far from dejecting [forstemme] one, will make one well
disposed [velstemt] for the contest.”55 Most of all is the centrality of a preface
in Kierkegaard’s works, which he dedicates a whole book to (Prefaces) and
which he begins the first preface of eight prefaces by stating that a preface is a
Stemning, before proceeding to give one metaphor after another to describe a
preface which brings to life the whole idea of musicality through language
within the text (later Heidegger develops this Kierkegaardian Stemning in the
concepts of Stimmung [mood] and Gestimmtheit [attunement] in Being and
Time). Adorno’s critique of Kierkegaard is a critique that combines art, poetry
and musicality with philosophy; thus exposing the fact that both thinkers are
dancing on the margins of both genres. The contradictory stance of the art of
commitment is such that critical philosophy usurps a form of artistic gesture,
then appearing as something marginal but in fact is pointing both towards
something central in society and even something possibly new.
Let me continue playing Adorno against Adorno. For Adorno, there is no
real praxis in Kierkegaard: “The lack of any developed concept of praxis, in
contrast to idealist philosophy since Kant and Fichte; the polemical-
retrospective attitude toward an overwhelming capitalist external world is, in
terms of its impulse, private” (K, 49). Adorno oversimplifies the inward world
of Kierkegaard’s thinking. The private inwardness of Christian Discourses
becomes public and is externalised, and the writer demands that of the reader.
One may find shelter in the solitude and security of ‘Our Lady’s Church’ (Vor
Frue Kirke) in Copenhagen, but “watch your step when go into the house of
the Lord” as the discourse goes, because the visitor’s security only lasts a
moment once an awareness of the actual plight and adventures of Christ and
his followers sink in. The great statues by Thorvaldsen are sculpted as heroic
figures who are presented as martyrs, warriors and poets inspried by their
messiah, and the splendour in the artwork awakens the visitor’s imagination
like a child. And the child is pure inwardness and whose inwardness is
projected outward and is visible to all, which the adult as single individual is
struggling to attain again. Praxis is expressed inwardness. Judge William’s
dictum that “Inner history is the only true history” (SKS3, 132 / EOII, 137)
breaks out into commitment in the discourses in Christian Discourses.
Adorno says it himself about the artwork: “Praxis is not the effects of works:
rather, it is encapsulated in their truth content” (AT, 322). And while rejecting
in part Kierkegaard’s subjectivity, Adorno nevertheless sees committment
coming out of subjectivity: “The accepted term for this subjective intention is
commitment […] Commitment aims at the transformation of the
preconditions of situations” (AT, 320).
The art of commitment arises also in the call for a new Socrates by Anti-
Climacus. This Socrates appears in fragments, from Climacus’ Smuler to the
scraps and bits in the motto for Concluding Unscientific Postscript to the
unfinished committed and investigative texts of The Book on Adler, Point of
View and The Moment. Is there a call for a ‘Socratic citizenship’ (to borrow a
term from Dana Villa)? Yes, if we follow the role that Adorno gives to
Beethoven’s late style of discontinuity and disintegration; no if we are
attemptingto construct a solid ethical society out of Kierkegaard’s authorship.
Adorno’s lauded artists on the surface abstain from praxis, but where “[…] art
becomes the schema of social praxis: every authentic artwork is internally
revolutionary” (AT, 299). Kierkegaard’s writings, especially the ones written
in the face of the revolutionary year 1848, break away from coherent praxis
for the cause of the revolutionary and instead, defying the topical jargon of its
day, heralds in a praxis for a Socrates to give an everlasting critique for the
sake of affirmative existence. Like the artist, the writer of Christian
Discourses “attacks from behind [som saare bagfra]” (SKS10, 172 / CD,
162). Kierkegaard is working within the perimeters of his target in order to
dismantle it. The ‘single individual’ is the attacker, never the defender, yet
attacks from behind, or in other words from different unexpected angles, a
subversive, surprising approach, indirect, like a stain in the functioning
system that reveals the system’s flaws. Such is this art of commitment. The
house metaphor in The Sickness unto Death can imply the failure of human
beings to unleash and empower inwardness, to act inadequately in their
engagement with society and themselves:
Imagine a house with a basement, first floor, and second floor planned
so that there is or is supposed to be a social distinction between the
occupants according to floor. Now, if what it means to be a human being
is compared with such a house, then all too regrettably the sad and
ludicrous truth about the majority of people is that in their own house
they prefer to live in the basement …he loves it so much that he is
indignant if anyone suggests that he move to the superb upper floor that
stands vacant and at his disposal, for he is, after all, living in his own
house (SKS11, 58 / SUD, 43).
One can find oneself as much in the top floor of the house as in the
basement. Lukács creates a similar metaphor for a slightly different focus for
a certain kind of philosopher (such as Schopenhauer and later Adorno): “A

considerable part of the leading German intelligentsia, including Adorno, have
taken up residence in the ‘Grand Hotel Abyss’ (Hotel am Rande des
Abgrundes)” (TN, 22). It is the top floor, the isolated captain’s tower or ivory
tower in which Lukács places Adorno. It is a similar judgement that the young
Adorno and Lukács make about Kierkegaard, but at the same time they fail to
see the art of commitment underlying texts like Christian Discourses and
Practice in Christianity.
iv. “To Whom am I Speaking?”
The close of this chapter brings up the question that Kierkegaard and his
pseudonyms ask: “To whom am I speaking?” This is a question that resonates
with the ages, and a reason that Kierkegaard so admires Hamann, about whom
Climacus writes: “With heart and soul, down to his last drop of blood, he is
concentrated in a single word, a highly gifted genius's passionate protest
against a system of existence” (SKS7, 227 / CUP, 250). The haunting
question of the self and to the self is what Quidam’s Simon leprosus will ask
at the beginning of one of the densest parables in Kierkegaard’s authorship:
(The scene is among the graves at dawn. Simon leprosus is sitting on a

stone, has dozed off, wakes up and shouts:) “Simon!—Yes!—Simon!—
Yes, who is calling—Where are you Simon?—Here; with whom are you
speaking?—With myself. Is it with yourself; how loathsome you are
with your leprous skin, a plague upon all the living […] Does not the
artists hide in order to be a secret witness to how his work of art is
admired?” (SKS6, 215 / SLW, 232).
“To whom am I speaking?” is a question which the ‘silent brother’ will

repeat at the end of Kierkegaard’s most pathos-filled book (SKS6, 446 / SLW,
485), what Kierkegaard will ask again in Christian Discourses (SKS10, 233 /
CD 225), and what Anti-Climacus asks exactly halfway through The Sickness
unto Death. This is the Mellemspil of this particular text where Kierkegaard as
Anti-Climacus looks face to face with himself, in the mask behind the mask
and before his God, just after giving his most concise description of the
religious poet’s dilemma, and just before turning to the chapter on “The
Gradations in the consciousness of the self (the qualification: ”before God”)”.
This question might also remind us of the predicament of Hamlet, that
complex, modern genius par excellence who ”holds the mirrror up nature”
and who demands to ”speak the speech”, in a play whose first two words are
“Who’s there?”! If there is any chance of finding this elusive self, all
modernists know that we must lose that self first, in the total dilution of the
self as subject in the quest for the self as subject.
I admire Adorno’s critique of Kierkegaard despite having little access to

decent translations and his free and intermingling use of Kierkegaard’s
various voices, characters and pseudonyms, as it is done in the great tradition
of learner overcoming teacher, and the reader becomes as involved as the
writer such that when the writer asks “To whom am I speaking?”, it is a task
for the reader to answer—to the past, present and future, and, perhaps, to a
god. Remembering Kierkegaard’s fondness for Herder’s lines, we might think
again about answering Hale’s question: “What, then, does it mean to read?”
Continuing the tradition begun by Herder, Derrida also asks the question, “To
whom am I speaking?” in his later works that edge closest to silence such as
Aporias and On the Name. The question is repeated, and the poet—as the
incognito or the unrecognisable—asks the question to himself and the reader,
who is also incognito. One of the most incognito creations of Kierkegaard is
the nameless young man of Repetition who states that: “even as I myself am
nameless, one who, although he has no name, nevertheless may always be
something to you and in any case remain, yours devoted” (SKS4, 71 / R, 203).
Kierkegaard’s position is such that he is constantly in danger of speaking or
writing to no one, Hamann’s subtitle for his Socratic Memorabilia is “for the
Boredom of the Public by a lover of Boredom with a double dedication to
Nobody and to Two”56, and later Nietzsche would repeat in his subtitle for
Ecce Homo—a book for no one and everyone. Conscious of this solitude, the
philosopher and the artist must go on in their place in society, in their
foundering, they mirror the foundering of society. And through the
foundering, this particular form is found. Adorno confirms this position, upon
reflecting on Beethoven: “In foundering, the particular elements dissolve into
each other and determine the form through the process of their foundering”
(AT, 243).
‘Unrecognisability’ is introduced in Two Ages:A Literary Review by
Kierkegaard and developed further in Practice in Christianity as one of the
central aspects of ‘offence’. The critical thinker in his or her indirect political
stance as ironist is incognito. In The Politics of Exodus, Dooley states aptly:
“The ironist is incognito, or inward, only to the extent that he or she sees the
need to escape the purely human point of view in order to become passionately
self-aware.”57 While meditating on Benjamin, Adorno prefigures Derrida by
continuing to articulate the supplementary part of philosophy that
Kierkegaard’s Extra-Skriver had delivered so powerfully before:
[…] those things […] which fell by the wayside—what might be called
the waste products and blind spots that have escaped the dialectic. It is in
the nature of the defeated to appear, in their impotence, irrelevant,
eccentric, derisory. What transcends the ruling society is not only the
potentiality it develops but also that which did not fit properly into the
laws of historical movement. Theory must deals with cross-gained,
opaque, unassimilated quality, but is not wholly obsolete since it has

outwitted the historical dynamic (MM, 151).
The incognito finally is seemingly unmasked when Kierkegaard sells his

highly polemic pamphlet—The Moment—in his lasts days on the streets of
Copenhagen. But from our perspective today, how much more ‘recognisable’
is ‘Kierkegaard’ than Climacus, Inter et Inter or Anti-Climacus? The
groundless ground of the incognito is Kierkegaard’s reality in his place as a
critic of society and as thinker of indirect politics. There is always the
possibility to pull down Kierkegaard’s whole authorship, just as there is
always the possibility to pull down the whole backbone of the society in
which we live. “Mythical dialectic consumes Kierkegaard’s god” (K, 113) in
the same way as the melancholic dialectic consumes Adorno’s god.
Both Kierkegaard and Adorno are homeless thinkers and orphans that
represent a new world rising out of the fragments and ruins of the old, and
whose writings become the space and guide for a new kind of praxis within
this new fragile landscape:
In the text, the writer sets up house. Just as he trundles papers, books,
pencils, documents untidily from room to room, he creates the same
disorder in his thoughts. They become pieces of furniture that he sinks
into, content and irritable. He strokes them affectionately, wears them
out, mixes them up, re-arranges them, ruins them. For a man who no
longer has a homeland, writing becomes a place to live (MM, 87).
The opening pages of Kierkegaard’s first major opus, a book by at least

five authors which represents far more than an either/or, fits Adorno’s
description, in name (‘Victorious Hermit’), content (obsession with the
writing desk in the furniture shop and the house, and written word) and
profession (editor and collector of papers and books). The myriad of voices
keep speaking in Victor Eremita, the aesthete A., Johannes the Seducer, Judge
Wilhelm, the preacher at the very end of the massive book, perhaps the
aesthetic is a younger self of the Judge, and then there is Kierkegaard himself
as the omniscient presence. “Whom am I reading?” the reader indeed asks.
The writer as thinker, philosopher and instigator of poetic praxis remains
incognito in the reified society, endlessly faltering and providing the thorn in
the flesh of society in the guise of indirect politics. Adorno warns:
But the sinister, integrated society of today no longer tolerates even

those relatively independent, distinct moments to which the theory of the
causal dependence of superstructure on base once referred. In the open-
air prison which the world is becoming, it is no longer so important to
know what depends on what, such is the extent to which everything is
one (P, 34).
Adorno’s ‘morality’ is such that: “Today we should have to add: it is

part of morality not to be at home in one’s home” (MM, 39). When the
philosopher writes for no one, it is the attempt to not write for the system, to
not write on behalf of reified society, while at the same time, like Adorno’s
interpretation of the meaning behind Beethoven’s last works, they can only be
writing within the system and society via their estrangement “To whom am I
speaking? Perhaps no one at all is left” (SKS6, 444 / SLW, 485). There is
always a reader left that can transform into a writer, reminding us of
Kierkegaard’s statement again: “I regard myself as a reader of books, not as
the author” (SKS13, 19 / PV, 11). The writer’s critique must communicate,
and this communication moves from hidden inwardness to the manifest
inwardness of “To whom am I speaking?” Adorno and Kierkegaard repeat the
event again, the event of the fugitive writer in the indirect political gesture,
painfully aware of his or her dubious position. Beneath the magnificent,
Renaissance splendour of Venice lies the fragile infrastructure of a sinking
city, where the restless city dweller keeps awake those around him or her, lest
they should ever forget.
CONCLUSION
Life is like a poet and thus different from the contemplator, who always comes
to a finish; the poet wrenches us out in the middle of life.
Kierkegaard, Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits
We have come to the end of this book, and yet ambiguities still may remain
and new questions have no doubt arisen. But as refracted through and
reflected in Lukács, Schmitt, Benjamin, and Adorno, Kierkegaard’s indirect
politics sets into relief (at the very least) three significant motifs: intellectual
non-conformism, indirect communication in and through ambiguous identities
and negative dialectics. Though it is in the nature of the ‘indirectness’ of this
conception of politics to undermine systematic definition, these three motifs
create and sustain the contradictorily coherent nature of Kierkegaard’s indirect
politics.
1. Against the Tide
A central aspect of indirect politics as explored in this book is Kierkegaard’s

influence on the formation of the political thinking of Lukács, Schmitt,
Benjamin and Adorno, and how these four interlocutors in turn read and
critique each other in the shadow of Kierkegaard. At some point all four
thinkers follow Kierkegaard’s wake and go against the tide, whether that be
Lukács’ obliteration of his extremely wealthy background and leap into
Bolshevism; or the Catholic Schmitt publishing incisive, piercing essays in
the Weimar Republic, sticking to his convictions even after the fall of The
Third Reich and up until his dying day; or Benjamin being forced to wander
as itinerant scholar and thereby transforming his mode of existence into a new
and innovative mode of writing and thinking; or Adorno’s unrelenting
negative dialectic, and his increasingly dense, uncompromising prose amidst
the triumph of the culture industry. Perhaps Lukács comes closest to
Kierkegaard in the act of working against oneself in a writing life. In the Point
of View, Kierkegaard states explicitly that in his authorship he is working
against himself (SKS16, 40 / PV, 59). For what is Kierkegaard’s dialectic but
a method that works against itself [det Dialektiske er det Omvendte: i at
arbeide tillage at modarbeide sig selv]? (SKS13, 15 / PV, 9). It supports the
dictum that “adversity is prosperity,” which he espoused in Christian
Discourses. Kierkegaard sees “worldliness” and “homogeneity” as opponents
of his dialectical endeavor. In his own analysis, then, his dialectic contains the
qualities of the eternal and heterogeneity. Even the Seducer from Either/Or
recognises this working against oneself, when he discerns that “love prefers to
beat its own path” (SKS2, 393 / EOI, 405). Adorno highlights an example of
working against oneself when analysing Beethoven: “Beethoven’s late works
mark the revolt of one of the most powerful classicistic artists against the
deception implicit in the principle of his own work” (AT, 379). Working
against oneself is embodied in the pursuit of a form of truth that cannot be
completed and is constantly battling aspirations of totality. Kierkegaard’s
indirect politics remains the fragment of “that part of the totality of the work
that opposes totality” (AT, 57). Jazz’s most famous musician Miles Davis was
supposed to have said: “You know why I quit playing ballads? ’Cause I love
playing ballads.”
In this unceasing restlessness, indirect politics is both the call to
response and engagement alongside the difficulty of never being quite sure if
one is doing the right thing. Kierkegaard’s authorship as indirect politics can
be compared to Adorno’s aesthetic theory as polemical and independent, yet
social: “That art on the one hand confronts society autonomously, and, on the
other hand, is itself social, defines the law of its experience” (AT, 442). But
society is always evolving and politics is both fickle and fallible.
Paradoxically, here we have one of the most meticulous writers in
Kierkegaard who revised his works again and again to sharpen the writing to
more fluid and exacting language and yet despite (and perhaps because of)
this scrupulous and uncompromising dedication to writing (see for example
this journal entry from 1846: “I am fully convinced that no Danish author, to
the extent that I do, treats every single word with utmost meticulosity” (Pap.
VII I A 127), we are left with consciously unfinished works, heaps of journal
entries, titles without books, vacillation in what to do and where to go, and
repetition in attempting the write the same book over and over. This is the
great art of writing as walking: as recycling, evolving, working in progress,
with the recurring fear that life might mean nothing, and always returning to
that space that is between disciplines—the interlude or Mellemspil—that in
turn forces the various disciplines to rethink themselves. It would be another
hundred years before Adorno expresses this idea when turning Hegel’s dictum
of the true being the whole to the whole being the false. Always instead there
is the striving to be present to oneself or to live in contemporaneity, which is
both to serve and betray the present age in equal measure—as they are same
thing with indirect politics.
2. Incognito or Set of Masks
This is no ordinary politics when we juxtapose Kierkegaard with Lukács,

Schmitt, Benjamin and Adorno. Kierkegaard famously brought ‘indirect
communication’ to philosophical literature and revealed himself as the creator
of all the pseudonyms up to that point at the end of Concluding Unscientific
Postscript. Yet the question “to whom am I speaking?” does not disappear nor
does the question “who is speaking”, nor can the pseudonyms keep quiet as
new ones emerge that are never killed off. Different books have emerged in
Conclusion 235
the last few decades which do not shy away from thinking about the serious
intent of an indirect politics as a set of masks that infiltrates society and how
various thinkers and peoples have taken this position, sometimes by force and
tenacity and sometimes by sheer will and intellectual courage. Books such as
Benjamin’s Trauerspiel text, Adorno’s Minima Moralia and Aesthetic Theory,
Magris’ Danube, Rose’s Broken Middle, Villa’s Socratic Citizenship and
most recently Slezkine’s The Jewish Century are all works that displace
disciplinary identity from one field to the next. They take the ironic stance of
writing for no one—that ‘no one’ is the one who is ready to respond, engage
and put on the mask to reveal and expose the other masks of society.
Revolutionaries never need to ask, and yet figures at the interlude are always
condemned to wear a mask.
“Who’s there?” are the opening two words of Hamlet, the famous story
of a character standing on the threshold between the old and new identity of a
nation, Catholicism and Protestantism, and pre-modern and modern life. We
can often repeat the opening lines of Hamlet in response to Kierkegaard’s
texts. The same can be turned around and put to the reader, as diverse voices
of Kierkegaard ask this question through, for instance, the mouthpiece of
Lichtenberg in the motto to “In Vino Veritas”, or the secret welcome to the
reader in the prefaces of the upbuilding discourses, or to wondering if anyone
is still there as one of the characters finishes Stages on Life’s Way. Indirect
politics remains open as incognito and masks keep appearing and reappearing.
We can recognise Kierkegaard in his final year, out of the incognito, on the
streets, exposed with his Øieblikket in hand in his final direct assault on the
Danish church. And yet is this also another mask—a theatrical figure
performing his revolutionary praxis with a pamphlet that is still riddled with
innuendos, jokes, satire, and irony? As Goethe’s Mephistopheles declared
with glee: “I like to go incognito on most occasions; / But on a gala night one
wears one’s decorations [Zwar bin ich sehr gewohnt incognito zu gehn; Doch
lässt am Galatag man seinen Orden sein]” (Faust, 4065). And Christian
Discourses, the overlooked Kierkegaard text which has a special place in this
book, can be viewed as a work written as an exegesis of the unrecognisable,
and a subversion to perceived socio-political progress. Through reading the
1848 texts closely and exploring the conversation with the writers included
here, this book has argued that this ‘insuperable incognito’, as Lukács calls
the “Kierkegaardian ethic” in Destruction of Reason, is that negative space
that transforms into a praxis of affirmation.
As a set of masks and incognitos, indirect politics is that “emigrant from
the sphere of the universal” (SKS4, 204 / FT, 115) that another incognito,
Johannes de silentio, stated and which connects to Derrida’s term the “politics
of exodus”: “This is the politics of exodus, of the émigré. As such, it can serve
as a political ferment or anxiety, a subversion of fixed assumptions and a
privileging of disorder.”1 For the twenty-first century, as a French-Algerian,
heretical, Jewish philosopher of deconstruction, Derrida states in his essay on
Kierkegaard that these philosophers and poets that he is reading (and he might
very well see himself among them) consist in “proposing a nondogmatic
doublet of dogma, a philosophical and metaphysical doublet, in any case a
thinking that ‘repeats’ the possibility of religion without religion is seeking a
religion without religion.”2 It is no accident that Kierkegaard’s contemporary
across the Atlantic, Herman Melville, begins Moby Dick with the word “call”
and ends with the word “orphan”. The “call” for Kierkegaard is the awakening
of the rare, exceptional poet that silences the hypocrisy, false prophets and
short cuts to fame and fortune. The “orphan” is that particular writer who
opens up new vistas for us to see—who, like mercury or Proteus, is shifting,
transforming and changing colour, and who represents the symbolic, exiled
wanderer and son or daughter of a parent that is no longer with us or even has
abandoned us. The figure of the orphan here does battle with the orthodox,
established texts, systems and doctrines that we forget to question, and who
moves along the boundaries of disciplines in its heterodoxy and restlessness.
In a journal entry from 1850, Kierkegaard confirms this:
[…] To some extent every person of depth has some degree of

heterogeneity. For so long as he goes about pondering something in
himself and only lets drop indirect utterances, he is heterogeneous. With
me, it has happened on a larger scale […] Absolute heterogeneity
remains in indirect communication to the last, since it refuses absolutely
to put itself in context with the universal (Pap. X 2 A 375).
Kierkegaard celebrates actresses on the stage before established

philosophers and continues to transform his own inwardness into various
masks to unmask other disguises. He is projecting inwardness over and above
the ‘objective’ global-techno-capitalist network which can force its way into
our lives like a suffocating matrix. As Kierkegaard wrote later in his life: “It is
part of my nature to hide my inwardness, and that itself is inwardness” (Pap.
X 3 A 252).
3. Keeping Open the Wound of Negativity
Indirect politics is that inter-disciplinary space which keeps “open the wound
of negativity,” to quote Kierkegaard’s philosophical pseudonym Johannes
Climacus. Climacus explains that the subjective thinker (such as the thinkers
he points to in Concluding Unscientific Postscript: e.g. Socrates, Hamann and
Lessing) always keeps open the wound of negativity. Such a thinker:
[…] is cognizant of the negativity of the infinite in existence

[Tilværelse]; he always keeps open the wound of negativity, which at
times is the saving factor (the others let the wound close and become
Conclusion 237
positive—deceived); in his communication, he expresses the same thing.

He is, therefore, never a teacher, but a learner, and if he is continually
just as negative as positive, he is continually striving (SKS7, 84 / CUP,
85).
In this passage, which would fit well as a motto for Adorno’s Negative
Dialectics, we can discern the thinker who is striving, who is homeless, and
whose work is never finished. The infinite gives space for the negative aspect
in existence; but, tellingly, Kierkegaard’s thinker is “continually just as
negative as positive”. This book attempted to reveal this aspect in
Kierkegaard’s writings through his use of a negative dialectic, and I have
contrasted what I call Kierkegaard’s dialectic of disintegration with Lukács’
dialectic of totality, and explored the parallels between Kierkegaard’s
sacred/profane distinction and messianic/secular distinction in politics in
Benjamin’s enigmatic “Theological-Political Fragment”. I also endeavored to
keep open this wound of negativity in the chapter on Kierkegaard and Carl
Schmitt, constantly bringing in the exception as a negativity providing a foil
to the powers that be in contrast to Schmitt’s positive exception who rules.
Prototypes such as Socrates and Christ disrupt the friend/enemy distinction
and undermine the absolutism favoured by Schmitt. Because in light of the
concept of indirect politics, “Human reason has a boundary, and that is where
the negative concepts are” (Pap. X 2 A 354).
The finite world that Kierkegaard presents in 1848 is utterly transient
and unreliable:
When I see the brook running along briskly, I will say: Just keep on
running; you will never fill the sea. To the wind I will say, yes, even if it
tears trees up by the roots, I will say to it: Just keep on blowing; there is
no meaning or thought in you, you symbol of inconstancy. Even if the
loveliness of the field, which charmingly captivates the eye, and even if
the melodiousness of the birds’ singing, which deliberately falls upon the
ear, and even if the peacefulness of the forest, which invitingly refreshes
the heart—even if they were to use all their persuasiveness, I will not
allow myself to be persuaded, will not allow myself to be beguiled; I
will call to mind that all of it is deception. Even though through
thousands of years the stars remain so fixed and without changing their
positions in the sky, I will still not allow myself to be deceived by this
reliability; I will call to mind that they at some time will fall down
(SKS10, 269 / CD, 255).
Where do we go from here? This kind of passage is often left out of

studies on Kierkegaard, for its apparent bleakness. But the bleakness comes
about through the view of one who does not discover nor affirm the negative
dialectic, the interruptive thinker, the Skillevei, the traveller of Christian
Discourses, and the loafer who dares to dream and disrupt all political systems
and presumptions about history. This book shines a light on these various
regions of Kierkegaard’s thought, revealing the affirmative action of indirect
politics. This affirmative element in the “wound of negativity” is confirmed in
another journal entry in the midst of his pseudonymous writing: “Keeping
open a wound can indeed also be healthy—a healthy and open wound—at
times it is worse when it closes” (Pap. VI A 16). Adorno has also offered
visions of a hopeless world in which even the most supreme moments of
experience—which in Adorno’s case are those occurring in the contemplation
of music, his greatest love—“resembles a continuum of nothing” (AT, 243).
And yet in this nihilistic world, a heterogeneous, inclusive landscape breaks
through, as “There is no longer any homeland other than a world in which no
one would be cast out any more, the world of a genuinely emancipated
humanity” (NL1, 85).
Critics and observers may question the role of the prototype in
Kierkegaard’s indirect politics: “Is he fighting for nationality, or is he aiming
at a communist revolution, does he want a republic or a monarchy, which
party will he join and which oppose, or does he want to be in favour with all
parties, or does he want to contend with all parties?” (SKS12, 62 / PC, 50).
Kierkegaard’s indirect politics summons neither a Holger Danske nor a
Martin Luther (SKS8, 85 / TA, 89). Rather, the single individual moves along
the winding Venetian alleyways of existence, knowing that, no matter where
one is situated in the world and in existence, “the most one person can do for
another is to unsettle him” (SKS7, 352 / CUP, 387).3
NOTES
One: Crossroads of Revolution and Reaction
1. For an account of the year 1848 in Denmark, see Claus Bjørn, 1848: Borgerkrig og
revolution, (København: Gyldendal, Nordisk Forlag A/S, 1998). For an
overview of the role of Prussia in 1848 and within the history of Europe in
general, see Christopher Clark, Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Fall of Prussia
1600-1947 (London: Penguin Books, 2006). See especially pp. 500 – 502, 506.
2. See William O. Shanahan, German Protestants Face the Social Question, Vol. 1,
The Conservative Phase: 1815-1871, (Indiana: University of Notre Dame
Press, 1954), p. 193.
3. Alastair Hannay, Søren Kierkegaard. Papers and Journals: A Selection, (London:
Penguin Classics, 1996), p. 285.
4. An analysis of the metaphor of the ‘Argus eyes’ in Point of View is undertaken by
Joakim Garff, “The Eyes of Argus: The Point of View and Points of View with
respect to Kierkegaard’s ‘Activity as an author’”, in Kierkegaard: A Critical
Reader, (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1997), pp. 75-102.
5. Karl Löwith, From Hegel to Nietzsche, (New York: Columbia University Press,
1964), p. 201.
6. Heidegger, in Being and Time, uses many of the ideas and observations in
Kierkegaard’s Two Ages:A Literary Review, and it could be easily argued that
this had an enormous influence on Heidegger’s path towards membership of
the Nazi Party. Two Ages:A Literary Review’s impact can be felt in Camus’
The Rebel, and Sartre’s trilogy novel Roads to Freedom and the major
existentialist work Being and Nothingness, which all emphasise the ‘malaise of
the age’.
7. Note the utter lack of reference to Marx and his followers by Heidegger in any of
his writings, and yet Marx was one of the most influential (German no less)
thinkers of his time coming out of the legacy of Hegel. Lukács points this out
in Destruction of Reason, p. 836. What distinguishes Kierkegaard from both
Lukács, Marx and Heidegger is in his idea of history, that it is not some
determined force of history (I will bring in Kierkegaard’s conceptions of
history in the section ‘The Halt’ in section two of this chapter, and again in
chapters Two and Four when in conversation with Lukács and Benjamin). The
only time that Heidegger mentions and responds positively to Marx is in the
Marxist conception of history, inherited from Hegel and that which
Kierkegaard attacks. See Martin Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism”, in
Pathmarks, trans. Frank A. Capuzzi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1998), p. 259: “Because Marx by experiencing estrangement attains an
essential dimension of history, the Marxist view of history is superior to that of
other historical accounts.”
8. Bob Dylan, in his memoirs, perhaps gives the most memorable account of the
hysteria of the late 1960s and the media’s insatiable quest to find spokesmen
and prophets for the ‘counterculture generation’, Chronicles, (New York:
Simon & Schuster Ltd, 2004): “Whatever the counterculture was, I’d seen
enough of it. I was sick of the way my lyrics had been extrapolated, their
meanings subverted into polemics and that I had been anointed as the Big
Buddha of Rebellion, High Priest of Protest, the Czar of Dissent, the Duke of
Disobedience, Leader of the Freeloaders, Kaiser of Apostasy, Archbishop of
Anarchy, The Big Cheese. What the hell are we talking about?” (p. 120).
9. Karl Marx, Selected Writings, ed. David McLellan (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1977), p. 206.
10. G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977),
p. 6.
11. The road is the site for the recognition of Jesus after his resurrection and Paul’s
conversion on the road to Damascus. For Kierkegaard’s contemporary
Dostoevsky, the road is an important metaphor, perhaps most memorable in
Crime and Punishment when, on the road, Sonya (from Sofia—wisdom) orders
Raskolnikov to go and kiss the ground and confess his fault.
12. George Pattison, Poor Paris!, (Berlin and New York, Walter de Gruyter, 1999),
pp. 140 – 141.
13. For an interesting and concise description of Christ and Socrates’ deceptive
simplicity, see Erasmus’ The Sileni of Alcibiades (1515) See Thomas More,
Utopia with Erasmus’s The Sileni of Aclibiades, ed. and trans. David Wootten
(Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Co., 1999), p. 170. Erasmus
puts forward an argument over three hundred years before Kierkegaard, when
the church was far stronger and authoritarian, of presenting Christ and Socrates
as marvellous Sileni, which, “[…] if you open this Silenus, who is outwardly
so ridiculous, you find within someone who is closer to being a god than a
man, a great and lofty spirit, the epitome of the true philosopher.”
14. Claudio Magris, Danube, trans. Patrick Creagh (London: The Harvill Press, 2001),
pp. 311
15. Friedrich Nietzsche, “Notes VII, 216” in The Portable Nietzsche, trans. and ed.
Walter Kaufmann (Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1976), p. 50.
16. James Joyce, Ulysses, ed. Jeri Johnson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008
[1922]), pp. 204.
17. John D. Caputo, Against Ethics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press), pp. 287.
John D. Caputo discusses laughter in Against Ethics p. 241 and in Radical
Hermeneutics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), pp. 290 – 293.
18. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust I, trans. David Luke (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1987), lines 644 – 651 : “Die Sorge nistet gleich im tiefen
Herzen, / Dort wirket sie geheime Schmerzen, / Unruhig wiegt sie sich und
störet Lust und Ruh; / Sie deckt sich stets mit neuen Masken zu, / Sie mag als
Haus und Hof, als Weib und Kind erscheinen, / Als Feuer, Wasser, Dolch und
Gift; / Du bebst vor allem, was nicht trifft, / Und was du nie verlierst, das mußt
du stets beweinen.” Might there be a connection between Kierkegaard’s
Bekymring and Heidegger’s Sorge, even though Heidegger does say that his
Sorge is correlated with the Latin cura?
19. Goethe, Faust I, lines 2495 – 2496: “die Kultur, die alle Welt beleckt / Hat auf den
Teufel sich erstreckt.”
Notes 241
Two: Inwardness as an Expression for Revolutionary Praxis
1. See Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, pp. 455 and 475-6, Nietzsche’s Gay Science
(sec. 125) and Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Part I: Prologue, Part IV: “The Ugliest
Man”).
2. Goethe, Faust I, line 438: “Bin ich ein Gott?”; lines 652 – 653: “Den Göttern
gleich’ ich nicht! Zu tief ist es gefühlt: / Dem Wurme gleich’ ich, der den
Staub durchwühlt.”
3. Ibid, lines 443-446: “Die Geisterwelt ist nicht verschlossen”; lines 804-805:
“Predigend Reisenden / Wonne Verheißenden.”
4. Fernando Pessoa, Teoria da Heteronímia, ed. Fernando Cabral Martins and Richard
Zenith (Lisbon: Assírio & Alvim, 2012), p. 228: ”É um drama em gente, em
vez de em atos.”
5. See Jørgen Bukdahl´s Søren Kierkegaard and the Common Man, trans. Bruce H.
Kirmmse (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2001), p. 61;
the introduction by Stephen Crites to Crisis in the Life of an Actress and other
Essays (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1967). p. 2; and Hugh Pyper´s “The
Stage and Stages in a Christian Authorship” in International Kierkegaard
Commentary Volume 17: Christian Discourses and The Crisis and a Crisis in
the Life of an Actress, ed. Robert L. Perkins, (Macon: Mercer University Press,
2007), pp. 299 – 319.
6. Goethe, Faust I, “Vor dem Tor” [Before the Gate], lines 1112 – 1117: “Zwei Seelen
wohnen, ach! in meiner Brust, / Die eine will sich von der andern trennen; /
Die eine hält, in derber Liebeslust, / Sich an die Welt, mit klammernden
Organen; / Die andre hebt gewaltsam sich vom Dust / Zu den Gefilden hoher
Ahnen.”
7. Magris, Danube, pp. 155 – 156.
8. Mark Dooley, The Politics of Exodus: Kierkegaard’s Ethics of Responsibility (New
York: Fordham University Press, 2001), p. 71
9. Leon Trotsky, My Life, trans. Joseph Hansen (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1970
[1930]), p. 88.
10. Zachary Price, “On young Lukács on Kierkegaard,” Philosophy and Social
Criticism 25, no. 6, (1999): p. 74.
11. Ibid. p. 80.
12. Dooley, The Politics of Exodus, p. 71.
13. András Nagy, “Abraham the Communist,” in Kierkegaard: The Self in Society, ed.
George Pattison and Steven Shakespeare (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan,
1998), p. 212.
14. Georg Lukács, Curriculum vitæ, ed. János Ambrus (Budapest: Magvetö Kiadó,
1982), pp. 281, 271 – 6.
15. Nagy, “Abraham the Communist,” p. 209.
16. Ibid., p. 215.
17. Heiko Schultz, “Die theologische Rezeption Kierkegaards in Deutschland und
Dänemark”, in Kierkegaard Studies, Yearbook 1999, ed. Niels Jørgen
Cappelørn and Hermann Deuser (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter,
1999), p. 229.
18. Lorenz Jäger, Adorno: A Political Biography, trans. Stewart Spencer (New Haven
and London: Yale University Press, 2004), p. 22.
19. Georg Lukács, The Lukács Reader, ed. Arpad Kadarkay (Oxford: Blackwell,
1995), p. 158.
20. See especially the negative role of transformation in HCC: pp. 84, 89, 90, 93, 95,
100, 176.
21. Karl Marx, “Towards a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,” in Selected
Writings, ed. David McLellan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), pp. 72
– 73.
22. Gillian Rose, The Melancholy Science: An Introduction to the Thought of Theodor
W. Adorno (London: Macmillan Press Ltd., 1978), p. 35.
23. Martin J. Matustík; Post-National Identity: Critical Theory and Existential
Philosophy in Habermas, Kierkegaard, and Havel (New York and London:
The Guilford Press, 1993), p.180.
24. Miguel de Unamuno’s major philosophical work is called Tragic Sense of Life
(1912), trans. J. E. Crawford Flitch (New York: Dover Publications Inc.,
1954). It is a book that is deeply inspired by Kierkegaard whom Unamuno
refers to as “what a man! (p. 3), “our brother” (p. 109), and “this same tragic
thinker” (p. 257). There has been a number of essays combining Kierkegaard
and Unamuno, the latest book in English by Jan Evans, Unamuno and
Kierkegaard: Paths to Selfhood in Fiction (Lexington: Lexington Books,
2005).
25. Mark C. Taylor, Journeys to Selfhood: Hegel and Kierkegaard (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1980), p. 272.
26. Ryszard Kapuciski, Another Day of Life, trans. William R. Brand and Katarzyna
Mroczkowska-Brand (London: Penguin Books, 2001), p. 85.
27. Jean Paul Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason I: Theory of Practical Ensembles,
trans. Alan Sheridan-Smith (London: NLB, 1976), pp. 45 – 47.
28. Gillian Rose, Melancholy Science, p. 115.
29. Goethe, Faust, pp. 285 – 286: “Er nennt’s Vernunft und braucht’s allein, / Nur
tierischer als jedes Tier zu sein.” Lukács quotes this line in his essay on Faust
showing how these lines define Mephistopheles’ view of life and the direction
of his will. See GA 194.
30. Arpad Kadarkay, Georg Lukács: Life, Thought, and Politics (Cambridge: Basil
Blackwell, 1991), p.312.
31. See Jon Stewart, Kierkegaard’s Relations to Hegel Reconsidered (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2003) for an argument for the former
interpretation and a thorough description of Anti-Climacus’ dialectic, pp. 572 –
587. See Roger Poole, Kierkegaard: The Indirect Communication
(Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 1993) for a position
of the second view, pp. 19 – 20.
32. At Kierkegaard’s funeral, his nephew Henrik Lund made a ‘scandalous’ speech (to
continue Kierkegaard’s own battle with the church) and referred to this passage
from Revelation 3:15 – 16 as the place “where all of his [Kierkegaard’s] views
are set forth.” See Encounters with Kierkegaard, p. 134. Kierkegaard refers to
Revelation 3:15 – 16 throughout his authorship. See for eample SKS1, 37 /
POSL, 82; SKS5, 200, 371 / UD, 198, 389; SKS6, 162 / SLW, 175; SKS7, 209
/ CUP, 229; SKS9, 34 / WL, 26; SKS12, 248 / PC 256.
33. John D. Caputo, Radical Hermeneutics, pp. 193.
Notes 243
34. Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (London: The Athlone
Press, 1993), pp. 27.
35. Ibid. pp. 27.
36. Analogously, Heidegger says: “But the reversal of a metaphysical statement
remains a metaphysical statement.” “Letter on Humanism”, Pathmarks, trans.
by Frank A. Capuzzi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 250.
37. Henrik Ibsen, Peer Gynt, III. iii, line 84 (See Ibsen’s Peer Gynt / The Pretenders,
trans. Michael Meyer (London: Methuen, 1994)): “To speak, yet be silent?
Confess, yet conceal – ?” (Tale, og dog tie; skrifte, og dog dølge –?).
38. See “Thoughts on Ibsen” in The Lukács Reader, pp. 97. Kresten Nordentoft has
written a book on Kierkegaard called Hvad Siger Brand-Majoren?
(København: G.E.C. Gad, 1973) which includes a juxtaposition of Kierkegaard
and Lukács near the close of the text, pp. 262 – 272.
39. Lukács uses the phrase “transcendental homelessness” (der transzendentalen
Heimatlosigkeit) directly in TN 41, 61, 121, as opposed to abstract idealism’s
“transcendent homeland” (transzendenten Heimat) TN129. See p. 244 in
Kierkegaard, Religion and the Nineteenth-Century Crisis of Culture
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002) for George Pattison’s remark
on “the condition that Heidegger called ‘planetary homelessness.’” See also
George Pattison’s The Later Heidegger (London: Routledge, 2000) for more
on this idea of planetary homelessness in connection with Heidegger, pp. 60,
178, 180.
40. See Heidegger’s “Letter on Humanism,” p. 258.
41. On this point, see Kadarkay’s biography Georg Lukács: Life, Thought and
Politics, pp. 451 – 452.
42. See Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (Novato: New World
Library, 2008) for his poetic and inspiring exploration of this problem through
civilisations and of the disappearance of miracles and the recurrence and need
of myth in human history.
43. James Joyce, Ulysses, p. 474.
44. Goethe, Faust I, lines 304 – 307: “Vom Himmel fordert er die schönsten Sterne /
Und von der Erde jede höchste Lust, / Und alle Näh’ und alle Ferne /
Befriedigt nicht die tiefbewegte Brust.”
45. Ibid, lines 1830 – 1833: “A philosophic ponderer / Is like a poor beast led astray /
By some malignant sprite, to graze on desert ground / When fine green grass is
growing all around” (Ich sag’ es dir: ein Kerl, der spekuliert, / Ist wie ein Tier,
auf dürrer Heide / Von einem bösen Geist im Kries herumgeführt, / Und rings
umher liegt schöne grüne Weide.)
46. See Lukács’ Zur Ontologie des gesellschaftlichen Seins, Zweiter Band. Werke
Band 13 (Darmstadt: Luchterhand 1984), pp. 234 – 235. Lukács criticises them
both for a failure to grasp the fundamental economic categories.
47. Georg Lukács, Dostojewski Notizen und Entwürfe (Budapest Akadémiai Kiadó:
1985), p. 102. See Nagy’s article “Abraham the Communist”, p. 223.
48. Goethe, Faust I 3277 – 3279: “Verstehst du, was für neue Lebenskraft / Mir dieser
Wandel in der Öde schafft?”
49. Kadarkay, Georg Lukács, p. 40.
50. See Marx and Engels’ The German Ideology (New York: Prometheus Books,
1998), p. 248: “How little connection there is between money, the most general
form of property, and personal peculiarity, how much they are directly opposed
to each other was already known by Shakespeare better than to our theorizing
petty bourgeois.” Marx follows this remark with passages from the
protagonist’s mouth in Act 4, sc. iii in Timon of Athensin Shakespeare’s The
Complete Works, ed. Peter Alexander (London and Glasgow: Collins, 1966),
pp. 958 and 962); “Thus much of this will make black, white; foul, fair; /
Wrong, right; base, noble; old, young; coward, valiant […] This yellow slave
[...] / Will make the hoar leprosy adored […] This it is / That makes the
wappened widow wed again; / She, whom the spittle-house and ulcerous sores
/ Would cast the gorge at, this embalms and spices / To th’ April day again [...]
/ Thou visible god, / That solder'st close impossibilities, / And makest them
kiss!”
51. This also brings to mind the complex contradiction in Adorno’s critique of
Kierkegaard, which, on the one hand, is a critique of bringing poetic expression
into philosophy, but, on the other hand, is a primary reason why Adorno is drawn
to him and who subsequently bases his aesthetics on a dialectic of disintegration.
We will see more of this relationship in Chapter Five.
52. Rose, Melancholy Science, p. 148.
53. Goethe, Faust, pp. 1851 – 52, 1855: “Verachte nur Vernunft und Wissenschaft, /
Der Menschen aller höchste Kraft / … So hab ich dich schon unbedingt!”
54. Kadarkay, Georg Lukács, p. 303.
Three: Zones of Exception
1. See for example: Slavoj Žižek, ed., The Neighbour: Three Inquiries in Political
Theology (University Of Chicago Press, 2006); Giorgio Agamben, State of
Exception (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); Jacob Taubes, The
Political Theology of Paul (Standford; Stanford University Press, 2004);
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 2000); Jacques Derrida, Politics of Friendship (London and New York:
Verso, 1997) and “Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority’”, in
Acts of Religion, ed. Gil Anidjar (London: Routedge, 2002); Chantal Mouffe,
The Challenge of Carl Schmitt (London and New York: Verso, 1999);
Nicolaus Sombart, Die deutschen Männer und ihre Feinde: Carl Schmitt, ein
fdeutsches Schicksal zwischen Männerbund und Matriarchatsmythos
(München: Hanser, 1991).
2. Leo Strauss was a student of Schmitt’s (Schmitt was instrumental in Strauss
receiving a Rockefeller Fellowship) in Berlin. Strauss wrote on political
theology and Spinoza at the time: Religionskritik Spinozas als Grundlage
seiner Bibelwissenschaft: Untersuchungen zu Spinozas Theologisch-
politischen Traktat (1930). Strauss came to the University of Chicago, where
he taught, along with a few other notably conservative philosophers (e.g. Allan
Bloom). In the George W. Bush neo-conservative government, Paul Wolfowitz
wrote his Ph.D. in political science in the University of Chicago and was
taught by Strauss. Wolfowitz (with Karl Rove) very explicitly used the
ideological tools gleaned from these influences to help the Republicans get
Bush elected, and in spinning all news/decisions.
Notes 245
3. Theodor Haecker, Sören Kierkegaard und die Philosophie der Innerlichkeit

(Munich: Schreiber, 1913).
4. See Sören Kierkegaard, Kritik der Gegenwart [“The Present Age”], in Der Brenner,
trans. and ed. Theodor Haecker, (Innsbruck: Brenner Verlag 1914);.See
Kierkegaard´s Der Pfahl im Fleisch [“The Thorn in the Flesh”], in Der
Brenner (Innsbruck: Brenner-Verlag, 1914); and Carl Schmitt, Die Militärzeit
1915 bis 1919, ed. Ernst Hüsmert and Gerd Geisler (Berlin: Akamie Verlag,
2005), p. 66, footnote 71.
5. Sören Kierkegaard, Gesammelte Werke, vols. 1-12, trans. and ed. by Hermann
Gottsched and Christoph Schrempf, Jena: Diederichs 1909-1922. Cf. Schmitt,
Tagebücher: Oktober 1912 bis Februar 1915, ed. Ernst Hüsmert, Berlin:
Akademie Verlag 2003, p. 416, notes; and Schmitt,Die Militärzeit 1915 bis
1919, p. 577.
6. Søren Kierkegaard, Begriff des Auserwählten (Hellerau: Hellerauer Verlag Hegner,
1917). See Karl Schmitt, Tagebücher: Oktober 1912 bis Februar 1915, ed.
Ernst Hüsmert(Berlin: Akademie Verlag 2003), p. 416.
7. Cf. Ellen Kennedy, Constitutional Failure: Carl Schmitt in Weimar (Durham and
London: Duke University Press 2004), p. 205.
8. This entry is found in Schmitt’s Tagebücher: Oktober 1912 bis Februar 1915, 3
October 1914, p. 216 (all translations are my own in this footnote). See also
Tagebücher: Oktober 1912 bis Februar 1915, 5 October 1914, p. 218: “Ate in
the house in the evening, read with joy and pride Kierkegaard >…@”. Also
during an evening of reading chapter three, section two from Kierkegaard’s
The Concept of Anxiety, Schmitt notes in the Tagebücher: Oktober 1912 bis
Februar 1915, 8 October 1914, p. 222: “>…@ read Kierkegaard and suddenly
opened up on the place of destiny and genius.” In 1915, he refers to Two
Ages:A Literary Review in the diaries from Die Militärzeit 1915 bis 1919,
Tuesday, 12 May 1915, p. 66: “Went down the street, when the Captain had
left for an hour, accidentally saw a book by Kierkegaard in a shop and bought
it: Kritik der Gegenwart [Critique of the Present]. Was excited with joy (the
translator is Theodor Haecker and lives in Munich), delved inside the book and
didn't get any other work done. Ate with Cari and Georg in the Neue Börse for
lunch, then we all had coffee on the first floor of cafe Bauknecht. Cari went to
see the doctor, I went to the office. Horrible, this idleness; something for
Däublers paper, but it's not working out yet. Eagerly reading Kierkegaard. In
the evening happily at home. It’s beautiful weather >…@.” See also
Tagebücher: Oktober 1912 bis Februar 1915, 5 October 1914, p. 218, 6
October 1914, p. 219, and Die Militärzeit 1915 bis 1919, 25 May 1915, p. 73
and Munich, Autumn, 1918, p. 475 for more evidence of Schmitt reading
Kierkegaard.
9. Cf. Ellen Kennedy, Constitutional Failure. Carl Schmitt in Weimar (Durham and
London: Duke University Press 2004), p. 205.
10. Agamben, State of Exception, pp. 1, 35.
11. Ibid., p. 11.
12. This expression is used by Oren Gross, “The Normless and Exceptionless
Exception: Carl Schmitt's Theory of Emergency Powers and the ‘Norm-
Exception’ Dichotomy” 21, Cardozo Law Review 1825 (2000).
13. Agamben, State of Exception, p. 58.
14. Ibid., 86.

15. Derrida, The Politics of Friendship, p. 170.
17. Ibid, p. 5.
19. Paul Tillich, The Socialist Decision (New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1977),
p. xiii.
20. Ibid., p. 23.
21. Ibid., p. 40.
22. Ibid., p. 156.
23. Emmanuel Levinas, “Existence and Ethics” (Existence et Èthique, 1963), in
Kierkegaard: A Critical Reader, ed. Jonathan Rée and Jane
Chamerlain (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1997), p. 34: “What shocks me
about Kierkegaard is his violence”.
24. Leon Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed, trans. Max Eastman (Dover: Dover
Publications, 2004), Chapter 5.
25. In Danish, the word is vexel. A Vexel-Forhold is a ‘reciprocal relationship’ which
is the relation that Kierkegaard describes between God and a human being. In
Kierkegaard’s texts, a reciprocal relationship is also contained within the
ambiguity, such as between writer and reader, signed writer and
pseudonymous writer, the negative and positive use and presence of despair
and cares, and so on, where the boundaries are no longer clear.
26. Reading Fear and Trembling and following Johannes de silentio’s use of the
notorious passage Luke 14:26, Derrida reiterates the point of not simplifying
the distinctions of love and hate. Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, trans.
David Wills (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1996), pp. 64
– 65: He [Abraham] hates them not out of hatred, of course, but out of love
[…] Kierkegaard rejects the common distinction between love and hate, he
finds it egotistical and without interest.”
28. George Gordon Byron, Don Juan (1821), in Poetical Works, ed. Frederick Page
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 819.
29.Marx and Engels, The German Ideology (New York: Prometheus Books, 1998), pp.
58: “The bourgeois has the same attitude to the institutions of his regime as the
Jew to his law; he dodges round them as often as is feasible in every single
case, but expects everybody else to abide by them.”
30. See especially Demons, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (London
and New York: Everyman’s Library, 2000), when the passage is read out at the
end of the novel to the father of the two principle characters, p. 653. The
character Stavrogin might represent the lukewarm figure par excellence, who
shifts from one idea to the next, one country to another, from seducing one
woman to another, and infects all those around him like a cult and shadowy
leader. In regard to Dante’s Divine Comedy, see Canto III of Inferno, lines 34 –
9, (The Divine Comedy, trans. Allen Mandelbaum (London and New York:
Everyman’s Library, 1995): “This miserable way is taken by the sorry souls of
those who lived without disgrace and without praise. They now commingle
with the coward angels, the company of those who were not rebels nor faithful
to their God, but stood apart.”
Notes 247
31. “Der reine Staat”, Zeitschrift für die gesamte Staatswissenschaft 75: pg. 199 – 229.
32. Carl Schmitt, Ex Captivitate Salus (Cologne: Greven Verlag, 1950).
33. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 639; A731/759
34. Mao Zedong, “Interview with Three Correspondents from the Central News
Agency, the Sao Tang Pao and the Hsin Min Pao” (September 16, 1939),
Selected Works, Vol. II, p. 272
35. Motto for the group’s manual; Red Army Faction: The Urban Guerilla Concept
(Montreal and Quebec: Kersplebedeb: 2005).
36. The Bhagavad Gita, ed. S. Radhakrishnan (New Delhi: Harper Collins Publishers
India, 1993), p. 189, vi. 5: ”tmai ‘va hy tmano bandhur / tmai ‘va ripur
tmanah.”
37. Schmitt, Die Militärzeit 1915 bis 1919, Munich, Autumn, 1918, p. 475 (The
translation is my own).
38. Jorge Luis Borges, “Deutsches Requiem,” in Labyrinths (London: Penguin Books,
1984), p. 174.
39. Hannah Arendt, “Walter Benjamin: 1892-1940”, p. 53. This essay is included as
introduction to Walter Benjamin’s Illuminations, trans. Harry Zorn (London:
Pimlico, 1999 [1955]).
41. In a law book on civil procedure dealing with the procedural contradictions of any
legal system, Stephen Dowling articulates the dangers of the swift decision and
self-righteousness of the ruling power: “In an ideal system of civil litigation all
cases would be decided swiftly, inexpensively, fairly and correctly. In the real
world no such system exists. This is not simply because of the propensity for
human error, but because these qualities of civil justice often point in different
directions, vying against each other for primacy in the determination of what is
truly just. A judgment may be without error on the merits, but this may be at
the expense of swift resolution or could involve a disproportionate allocation
of resources. Similarly, a case may be progressed with exceptional speed, but
this might jeopardize the rectitude of the result.” Stephen Dowling, The Irish
Commercial Court (Dublin: Thomson Round Hall Publisher, 2012, 2nd
edition), Chapter 2 at paragraph 2-04.
42. Joseph Marie de Maistre, The Works of Joseph de Maistre (New York: Schocken
Books, 1971), p. 254. (Quoted from St. Petersburg Dialogues, 1821).
43. Schmitt, Tagebücher: Oktober 1912 bis Februar 1915, 4 October 1914, p. 218.
Schmitt quotes here from SKS4, 426 – 427, 430 / CA, 125, 129 –130:
“Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety: The demonic is the inclosing reserve
and the unfreely disclosed: “It is incredible what power the man of inclosing
reserve can exercise over such people, how at last they beg and plead for just a
word to break the silence, but it is also shameful to trample upon the weak in
this manner.It might be thought that inclosing reserve would have an
extraordinary continuity; yet the very opposite is the case, although when
compared with the vapid, enervating dissolution of oneself continually
absorbed in the impression, it has the appearance of continuity.”
44. Proudhon, Les confessions d’un Revolutionnaire. Found in later editions from
1876 and 1929. The first edition appeared in Paris in 1849. Also referred to in
PT 63.
45. Robert Musil, The Man without Qualities (vol. I), trans. Eithne Wilkens and Ernst
Kaiser (London: Minerva, 1995), p. 232.
46. Jan-Werner Müller, A Dangerous Mind: Carl Schmitt in Post-War European
Thought (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2003), pp. 21, 253;
Schmitt quotes Lukács in 1927 but only in a note in relation to contemporary
Marxist interest in Hegel. See CP 63: “The actuality of Hegel is very much
alive in Georg Lukács.”
47. Robert Musil, The Man without Qualities (vol. 1), p. 222.
48. Paul Tillich, The Socialist Decision (New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1977),
p. xxxiii.
50. Derrida, The Politics of Friendship, pp. 107.
Four: Loafers of History
1. George Pattison, Kierkegaard, Religion and the Nineteenth-Century Crisis of

Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p.53. There are also
articles by Robert L. Perkins (dealing with Concluding Unscientific Postscript
and politics) and Hugh S. Pyper (dealing with the polis of the dead and Works
of Love) with the word polis in their titles in Pattison and Shakespeare’s
Kierkegaard: The Self in Society (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 1998), p.
125 – 138.
2. For a glimpse of Constantine’s “journey”, see SKS4, 26 – 29 / R, 150 –153. Hegel
previously describes his dialectical method as “[…] the way of the Soul which
journeys through the series of its configurations as though they were the
stations appointed for it by its own nature, so that it may purify itself for the
life of the Spirit, and achieve finally, through a completed experience of itself,
the awareness of what it really is in itself”. See Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 49.
3. See Curzio Malaparte, The Skin (La Pelle, 1948) (llinois: Northwestern University
Press, 1997.
4. See, for example, SKS2, 299, 321, 310, 314, 341, 352, 428 / EOI 310, 314, 321,
323, 352, 363, 441. The seducer is the hunter with his cape (Kappe) chasing
Cordelia as the prey with her green cloak (Kaabe) SKS2, 315, 317, 319 –321 /
EOI, 325, 327, 329 – 31.
5. Wallace Stevens, “Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour” (1953), in Selected
Poems (London: faber & faber, 2010), p.128.
6. Mark Katz, “Rendezvous in Berlin: Benjamin and Kierkegaard on the Architecture
of Repetition,” The German Quarterly 71, No. 1 (Winter 1998): p. 9.
7. For a fascinating account of this period in Vienna, see Habib C. Malik’s Receiving
Søren Kierkegaard (Washington, D.C: The Catholic University of America
Press, 1997),p. 368 – 382 and Allan Janik & Stephen Toulmin’s Wittgenstein’s
Vienna (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1973), pp. 178 – 179. In Søren
Kierkegaard und die Philosophie der Innerlichkeit (Munich: Verlag von
J.F.Schreiber, 1913), p. 57, Theodore Haecker describes Kraus as the only
person “capable of leading a life of the spirit unnoticed, and he becomes
infinitely closer to this than most people writing today.” Georg Trakl (some of
his greatest poems were published in Der Brenner alongside some of the first
translations of Kierkegaard into German) dedicates his riveting sonnet “Psalm”
Notes 249
to Kraus. He also wrote a four line poem called “Karl Kraus”, which expresses
the rigorousness and struggle in the task of the ‘interruptive thinker’ caught
between tradition and destruction: “Weisser Hohepriester der Wahrheit, /
Kristallne Stimme, in der Gottes eisiger Odem wohnt, / Zürnender Magier, /
Dem unter flammendem Mantel der blaue Panzer des Kriegers klirrt” (“White
high priest of truth, / Crystal voice wherein God’s icy breath dwells. / Wrathful
magus, / Whose blue warrior’s breastplate beneath blazing mantle rings”).
8. See the excellent introduction by Brendan O’Donoghue in A Moriarty Reader:
Preparing for Early Spring, ed. Brendan O’Donoghue (Dublin: Lilliput Press,
2013), p. 24.
9. Agamben, The State of Exception, p. 54.
10. Ibid., p. 55
11. Ibid., pp. 55 – 56.
12. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings, section 7, ed.
Raymond Geuss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
13. See J.G. Herder’s Abhandlungen und Briefe uber schöne Literatur und Kunst, II,
45, Sämmtliche Werke. Zur schönen Literatur und Kunst, I-XX (Stuttgart,
Tubingen: 1827 – 30).
14. Pattison, Kierkegaard, Religion and the Nineteenth Century Crisis of Culture, pp.
242 – 243.
15. Leon Trotsky, My Life, trans. Joseph Hansen (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1970
[1930]), p. 87.
16. See Kafka’s “The Coming of the Messiah”, in Kafka, Franz; The Basic Kafka, pp.
182.
17. Terry Eagleton, Walter Benjamin or Towards a Revolutionary Criticism (London:
Verso, 1981), p. 23.
18. Giorgio Agamben, The Time that Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the
Romans, tr. Patricia Dailey (Standford: Standford University Press, 2005), p. 1.
19. Fernando Pessoa, A Little Larger than the Entire Universe, ed. and tr. Richard
Zenith (London: Penguin Books, 2006), p. 16. Original: “Porque eu sou do
tamanho do que vejo / E não do tamanho da minha altura…”. Attributed to
Pessoa’s heteronym Alberto Caeiro in the collection O Guardador de
Rebanhos, poem no. VII.
20. Max Pensky, Melancholy Dialectics: Walter Benjamin and the Play of Mourning
(Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993), pp. 216 – 217.
Five: Out of the Petrified Landscape
1. Merold Westphal, A Reading of Kierkegaard's Concluding Unscientific Postscript,

p. 9.
2. See Alastair Hannay’s introduction to Kierkegaard’s Concluding Unscientific
Postcript, ed. Alastair Hannay (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2009), pp. xxvii.
3. Roland Boer, “A Totality of Ruins: Adorno on Kierkegaard,” Cultural Critique 83,
(Winter 2013): pp. 1 – 30.
4. Geoffrey Hale, Kierkegaard and the Ends of Language (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2002), p. 38.
5. In conversation with Martin Jay. See Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A
History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923-
1950 (Boston: Little Brown, 1973), p. 68.
6. Trakl, Georg,,Poems and Prose, trans. Alexander Stillmark (London: Libris, 2001),
pp. 60 – 61. Heidegger has written on this poem in the essay “Language” in the
text On the Way to Language (Unterwegs zur Sprache, 1959) (New York:
Harper Collins, 1982). It is highly significant that a special collection of
Trakl’s poems after his death was published in Der Brenner in 1914 alongside
the first translation of Kierkegaard’s discourse “By a Graveside.” These
particular poems and discourse are key to understanding some of Heidegger’s
thinking, who was a subscriber and keen reader of the periodical from Austria.
For more on the background for the reception of Kierkegaard in the German
speaking world and the connection to Der Brenner, see Habib Malik’s
Receiving Søren Kierkegaard, esp. pp. 367 – 72.
7. See Francis Adams’ introduction to The Genuine Works of Hippocrates (New York:
William Wood, 1886), p. 195. Robert Hullot-Kentor, the translator and editor
of Adorno’s Kierkegaard, refers to this quotation in K 151.
8. Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation I (1819), trans. E.F.J.
Payne (New York: Dover Publications, 1969), p. 278.
9. Ibsen, Peer Gynt, III. iii, 84 / 59.
10. Geoffrey A. Hale, Kierkegaard and the Ends of Language (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2002), p. 39.
11. Ibid., p. 44.
12. Ibid., pp. 45 – 46.
13. Rose, The Melancholy Science, p. 114.
15. Ibid., p. 71.
16. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John MacQuarrie and Edward Robinson
(New York: Harper & Row, 1962), p. 47 / H.25
17. Hale, Kierkegaard and the Ends of Language, p. 51.
19. Telos 19, (Spring 1974).
20. William Heinesen, De fortabte Spillemænd (Copenhagen: Gyldendalske
Boghandel, 1950), p.145.
21. Thomas Mann, Dr. Faustus (1947), tr. John E. Woods (New York: Vintage
Books, 1999), p. 253.
22. See Hegel, Philosophy of Fine Art, I, trans. F. P. B. Osmaston (New York:
Hacker, 1975), pp. 217: “No doubt we find in irony that absolute principle of
negativity, in which the subject of consciousness becomes self-centred through
the annihilation of definite relations and particulars; but in this case the act of
annihilation of definite relations and particulars, as we have already pointed
out when discussing the principle, is not, as in comedy, essentially in its right
place, simply exposing its own want of substance, but is directed quite as often
against everything else excellent in itself and of sterling worth.”
23. The allusion to “the old legend” is from Irische Elfenmärschen, tr. Jakob and
Wilhelm Grimm, Leipzig: 1826, ASKB 1423, p. lxxxiii (originally from T.C.
Croker, Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland, I-III, London:
1825-28, published most recently as Fairy Legends and Traditions, Forgotten
Notes 251
Books: 2007). Kierkegaard still revels in the potential glories of the pagan
world and the joys and adventures of the fairytale that he is drawn to, by
comparing himself to an Irish rogue mostly likely inspired by Croker’s
collection, in contrast to a strict, austere Protestant life: “If I didn’t know I was
a genuine Dane I could almost be tempted to attribute the contradictions astir
in me to the hypothesis that I was an Irishman. That nation hasn’t the heart to
immerse its children totally when it has them baptised, they want to keep a
little paganism in reserve. And while usually one immerses the child
completely, they leave the right arm free, so that with it he can wield a sword,
embrace girls.” Pap. III A 223 (loose 1840-42).
24. Gillian Rose, The Broken Middle: Out of our Ancient Society (Oxford: Blackwell
Publishers, 1992),p. 9.
26. Hale, Kierkegaard and the Ends of Language, p. 66.
27. Martin Jay, Adorno (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), pp. 14 – 15.
29. Ibid., p. 13.
30. Ibid., p. 13.
31. Seamus Deane’s introduction to James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (London: Penguin
Books, 1992), p. xiv.
32. See Hale’s Kierkegaard and the Ends of Language (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2002), p. 44.
33. G.W.F Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, trans. H.B. Nisbet, ed. Allen
W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 23.
35. Pensky, Melancholy Dialectics, p. 143.
37. See Edward Clarke’s The Later Affluence of W.B. Yeats and Wallace Stevens
(Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) for his close reading of a few poems
and the creative conversation that ensues between poets (pp. 1, 9, 21, 24, 30).
38. John Moriarty, Dreamtime (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 1994), p. 103: “We say of
ourselves that we live in a world. But it would perhaps be truer to say that we
live in a tale told.”
39. Borges, “The Fearful Sphere of Pascal,” in Labyrinths, p. 227.
40. Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, Volume I (Chicago: The University of Chicago
Press, 1951), p. 224.
41. Walter Lowrie, Kierkegaard (London and New York: Oxford University Press,
1938), pp. 391 – 408.
42. Johanne Luise Heiberg, Et Liv gjenoplevet in Erindringen (4 vols.), rev. and eds.
Auge Friis and Elisabeth Hude (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1944), vol. 1,
”Confirmationen.”
43. Ted Honderich, ed., Oxford Companion to Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1995), p. 7. (The entry on Adorno is by Michael Inwood).
44. Albert Camus, The Rebel (1951), tr. Anthony Bower (Middlesex: Penguin Books,
1973), p. 269.
45. Emil L. Fackenheim, The Jewish Return into History (New York: Schocken,
1980), p. 33.
46. Theodor Adorno, “On Kierkegaard’s Doctrine of Love” (1939), Studies in

Philosophy and Social Science [Zeitchrift für Sozialforschung] 8, no. 3 (1939-
1940), p. 423. “Kierkegaards Lehre von der Liebe” in back of German edition
of Adorno’s Kierkegaard, pp. 281 – 82.
48. Edward Said, On Late Style (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2006), p. 8.
49. Joyce, Ulysses, p. 187.
50. See Gillian Rose´s Melancholy Science, p. 116.
51. Rose, Melancholy Science, p. ix.
52. Ibid.
53. Ibid., 3.
54. See Lucien Goldmann’s Heidegger and Lukács: Towards a New Philosophy, trans.
William Q. Boelhower (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2009), p. xix.
55. See introduction by Walter Lowrie to Christian Discourses, tr. and notes by
Walter Lowrie (Princeton: Princeton University Press: 1971), p. 96.
56. Johann Georg Hamann, Socratic Memorabilia (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1967), p. 138.
57. Mark Dooley, The Politics of Exodus, p. 55.
Conclusion
1. See Richard Kearney´s Dialogues With Contemporary Continental Thinkers: The

Phenomenological Heritage (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984),
p.120.
2. Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, p. 49.
3. Another of Kierkegaard’s American contemporaries, Ralph Waldo Emerson, makes
a similar declaration in his essay “Circles” (1841): “[…] let me remind the
reader that I am only an experimenter. Do not set the least value on what I do,
or the least discredit on what I do not, as if I pretended to settle any thing as
true or false. I unsettle all things.” See The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo
Emerson, New York: Modern Library Classics, 2000, pp. 260.
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Wyschogrod, Edith. Spirit in Ashes: Hegel, Heidegger, and Man-Made Mass Death.
New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Bartholomew Ryan is currently a postdoctoral fellow (2011- ) at the

Instituto de Filosofia da Nova, at the New University of Lisbon, Portugal.
He holds degrees from Aarhus Universitet, Denmark (PhD, 2006),
University College, Dublin (MA, 2002), and Trinity College, Dublin (BA,
1999). He was visiting lecturer at the European College of Liberal Arts in
Berlin (2007-2011) and Lady Margaret Hall, University of Oxford (2010),
and was a guest scholar at the Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre in
Copenhagen (2007 and 2005) and Hong Kierkegaard Library at St. Olaf
College, Minnesota (2005). He has written extensively on Kierkegaard, and
also published articles on Nietzsche, Pessoa, Joyce, Shakespeare and
Schmitt. He is also a composer and performer of music.
INDEX
Abraham xiii, 35, 64, 73, 92–93, Beer-Hofmann, Richard 67

95–96, 171, 200, 226 Beethoven, Ludwig 10, 168, 184,
Adler, Adolph Peter 17, 18, 225 188, 204, 211, 221–222,
Adorno, Theodor 1–2, 7–11,55, 224, 226–228, 230, 232–
58, 65, 70, 73, 75, 77–79, 233
112, 139, 143, 149, 164, Benjamin, Walter 1–2, 8–11, 41–
168, 171–173, 177–235, 42, 70, 79, 84, 97, 101,
237–238, 244 122, 132, 135–175, 177,
Agamben, Giorgio 90, 94–96, 179–181, 195, 199, 202–
102, 108, 117, 132, 153– 204, 206–208, 210–213,
155, 169 215–216, 220, 223–224,
allegory 41–42, 55, 153, 156–157, 226, 230, 233, 237, 240
160–161, 180, 203–204, Berlin 13, 68, 137–138, 144, 244
207, 212, 215–216 Bhagavad Ghita 247
ambiguity 7, 13, 16, 27–28, 30, Bible, the
33, 43, 62–63, 65, 101, Genesis 115
105–107, 112, 132, 155, Exodus 120
194, 246 Deuteronomy 211
anxiety 27, 30, 41, 46–48, 68, 84, 1 Kings 127
104, 123–124, 133, 182– Job 196
183, 191–192, 217, 235 Psalms 196
Arendt, Hannah 117, 158–159, Jeremiah 120
172 Ezekiel 120
Aristotle 3, 197, 207, 213 Matthew 40, 44, 61, 64, 85,
Augustine, St. 203 131, 151, 165, 168, 173
authority 2, 4, 9, 15, 18, 59, 79, Mark 196
96–99, 101–102, 116, Luke 42, 85, 246
121, 128, 131, 151, 159, Epistle of James 50, 61, 131
205, 226 Revelation of John 110
awakening 2, 7, 10, 17, 22, 25–26, Bjørn, Claus 239
53, 58, 66, 72, 128, 135, Blanqui, Louis Auguste 43
161, 163, 170–172, 174– Bloch, Ernst 8, 70, 84
175, 236 Boer, Roland 178
Bonald, Vicomte Louis Gabriel
Baader-Meinhof Group (Red Ambroise de 93, 107, 114
Army Faction) 113 Borges, Jorge Luis 115, 214
Bakunin, Mikhail 121–122 Bruegel, Peter (the Elder) 81
Baudelaire, Charles 103, 137, Bukdahl, Jørgen 3, 48
143–144, 147–148, 159, Byron, Lord 103, 109, 184
164, 175, 187
Beckett, Samuel 10, 55, 177, 181, Campbell, Joseph 81, 222, 243
184, 187, 189, 192, 197, Camus, Albert 239
204, 224, 226 Caputo, John D. 3, 37, 79, 240,
242
Cervantes 80, 205 dagdriver 10, 16, 29, 135, 137,

chatter 31, 48, 91, 196, 225 146–147, 161, 171, 175
Christ, Jesus 7, 22–25, 28–29, 41– Dante, Alighieri 83, 110, 197, 246
42, 52, 57–58, 61–62, 64, Deane, Seamus 205
66, 69, 79, 81, 84–86, 93– death, 22–26, 28, 37, 44, 46, 68,
94, 96, 98, 105, 108, 115, 72, 78, 88, 106, 110, 123,
120, 123, 131–132, 141– 157, 161, 165, 175, 197,
144, 147–148, 150–151, 203, 207–209, 215, 217,
157, 168–169, 201, 220, 219, 226
222, 227, 237, 240 decision 2, 6, 10, 20–23, 27, 63–
Christendom 17, 22, 37, 64, 137, 65, 72, 93, 95, 100, 103–
139–140, 149–150, 155, 104, 107–109, 111, 114,
160 117, 119–120, 124, 153,
Christianity xxiv, 3, 5, 9, 15, 18, 155–156, 199, 247
22–24, 29, 35, 50, 75, 77, demonic 53, 57, 114, 120–123,
79, 84, 98, 105, 109, 112, 184, 195, 197, 205, 209,
139, 150, 155, 169, 178, 213–214, 247
196, 198, 220, 224 Denmark xxiii, xxiv, 14, 43–44,
cipher 207, 209–210, 212–213, 48, 64, 140, 152, 239
216 Derrida, Jacques 79, 81, 89, 101,
city 3, 5, 7, 10, 72, 83, 117–118, 133, 199, 208, 230, 235,
130, 135–150, 167, 175, 246
207, 215, 232 Deuser, Hermann 177
Clarke, Edward 210, 251 despair 15, 22, 27, 35–36, 39–40,
commitment 84, 192, 199, 220, 49–51, 59–60, 72, 76–77,
223, 226–229 79, 83, 85, 87, 91, 113,
communication (indirect) xix, 11, 116–123, 127, 132, 140–
129, 160, 196, 233–234, 142, 148, 155–156, 178,
236 183–184, 192, 196–198,
concealment 17, 188 209–210, 212–215, 217,
constellation 167, 194, 202–205, 219, 225, 246
212 dialectic 9–10, 51, 55, 70, 75–81,
Copenhagen 5, 7, 13–14, 48, 99, 84–86, 118, 167, 171–
136–139, 142, 146, 148, 172, 178, 180, 182–183,
160, 208, 227, 231 190, 193–194, 196–201,
Corsair Affair 5, 7, 32, 63, 84, 203, 205–208, 212, 212,
149 218–219, 222–223, 230–
Cortés, Donoso 93, 104, 107, 114, 231, 233, 237, 242, 244
121–123, 125, 129, 132 disintegration 4, 6, 9–10, 13, 75,
Crites, Stephen 3, 48, 241 79–81, 83, 85–86, 108,
Cromwell, Oliver 121–122 138, 148–149, 157, 160–
crossroad. See skillevei 163, 170, 175, 178, 189,
crowd 3, 28–30, 32–35, 48, 52, 194, 204–206, 211, 213,
56–59, 67, 99–100, 121, 228, 237, 244
126–127, 129–130, 136, Don Giovanni 195, 214, 217
142–144, 147–150, 165 Dooley, Mark 3, 53, 60, 191, 230
Dostoevsky, Fyodor xxiii, 110,
121–122, 209, 240, 246
Index 271
Dowling, Stephen 247 Haecker, Theodor 90, 150, 226,

245, 248
Eagleton, Terry 168 Hale, Geoffrey A. 177, 188–189,
Emerson, Ralph Waldo 252 193, 201, 230
Enlightenment 45, 103, 170, 181, halt, the 6, 23–24, 175, 239
214–215 Hamann, Johan Georg 84, 160,
exception 1, 9–11, 89–100, 102, 212, 229–230, 236
104, 108, 110, 113, 117– Hannay, Alastair 177
118, 120, 122, 124–126, Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich
130–132, 149, 153–156, 19, 22, 45–46, 51, 64, 70,
199–202, 211, 214, 218, 75–78, 83, 87, 117–118,
225, 237 138, 178, 193, 196–197,
exteriors 142–143, 145, 148, 175 200–201, 208–209, 213,
Extra-Skriver 80, 160, 162, 226, 223–224, 234, 239, 248,
230 250
Heiberg, Johan Ludvig 99, 160
Fackenheim, Emil 220 Heiberg, Johanne Luise 7, 48, 99–
fairytale 5, 44, 108, 159, 178, 196, 100, 120, 188, 191, 201–
202, 207, 212, 215–216, 202, 216–219
251 Heidegger, Martin 8, 18, 54, 65,
faith 22–23, 36, 45, 49, 55, 61–62, 81–83, 124, 150, 163,
65, 71–73, 77, 93, 110– 180, 184, 186, 191, 193,
111, 118, 148, 168, 170, 208–209, 219, 226–227,
182–183, 191, 201, 209, 239–240, 243, 250
212 Heinesen, William 194
flâneur 10, 16, 42, 118, 135–136, Herder, Johann Gottfried von 115,
138–139, 143–148, 161, 162, 230
171, 175, 215 Hirsch, Emanuel xxiv, 65
Freud, Sigmund 122, 192, 199 history 10, 19–20, 23, 28, 32, 43,
Friend-Enemy Distinction 89, 47, 62, 66–67, 72, 74–80,
111, 114, 119, 124 83–84, 98, 105, 110, 115,
125, 135, 137–138, 147,
Garff, Joakim 239 150, 157–158, 161–169,
George, Stefan 78 172–175, 180, 199–200,
Germany xxiii, 14, 44, 65, 67–68, 211–214, 217, 225, 227,
89, 101, 104, 117, 124– 238–239, 243
125, 131, 152, 220 Hitler, Adolf xxiv, 68, 82, 121,
Goethe 45–46, 49, 51, 55, 115, 124, 178
162, 164, 166, 195 Hobbes, Thomas 3, 93,110, 114,
Faust 7, 38, 44–47, 49, 50–51, 81, 119
83, 85, 87–88, 96, 101, Hölderlin, Friedrich 46, 204
111, 193, 195–197, 201, Holm, Isak Winkel 177
214, 220, 235, 242 Holz, Hans Heinz 194
Mephistopheles 7, 40, 51, 77, 88, homelessness 7, 81–86, 143, 163,
194–198, 202, 235, 242 243
Goldmann, Lucien 8 Horkheimer, Max 181
Goldschmidt, Meïr Aron 84 Hullot-Kentor, Robert 207
Gross, Oren 245 humanity 29, 36–37, 43, 45, 47,
70, 78, 87, 94, 108, 113,
humanity, con’t. Jacobsen, Jens Peter 46, 141, 207

114-117, 120–121, 128, Jaspers, Karl 54, 180
136, 157, 169, 185, 219, Jay, Martin 202
222, 238 jetztzeit 169, 172
hyggelighed 140–141, 144 journalist/journalism 7, 19, 31, 34,
Ibsen, Henrik 44, 46, 81, 188 45, 46, 48, 57, 58, 75, 95, 150,
imagination 36, 40, 44, 54, 69, 225
109, 123, 145, 165, 171, Joyce, James 30, 37, 46, 51, 55,
182, 209, 211, 227 83, 86, 159, 205, 222–224
imitation 132, 148 Jünger, Ernst 89, 120
impossibility 1, 27, 69, 74, 83,
175 Kadarkay, Arpad 78, 85, 88
incognito 62, 143, 148, 220, 230– Kafka, Franz 10, 43, 55, 65, 83,
231, 235 86, 135, 137, 166, 167–
indirect communication 11, 160, 168, 181, 184, 187, 189,
196, 233–234, 236 192, 197, 205, 217, 221,
indirect politics 1–3, 5–11, 13, 20, 224
29, 33, 42–43, 52, 90, 96, Kant, Immanuel 25, 89, 112, 115,
99, 107, 111, 115, 118– 173, 188, 202, 221, 226–
119, 125–126, 129–133, 227
135, 137–138, 148–149, Kapuciski, Ryszard 75
157–158, 161–163, 167, Kearney, Richard 251
173, 175, 177–178, 186, Keats, John 62, 146
193, 207, 220–221, 223, Kennedy, Ellen 91
226, 231, 233–238 Kierkegaard, Søren
insignificant discoveries 163, 175, Pseudonyms:
213 A. See Johannes the Seducer
interlude 1, 6, 10, 13, 20, 33, 42, Anti-Climacus 15–16, 22–24,
48, 73, 79, 83, 90, 99– 26, 31–33, 35, 53, 58–
102, 116, 122, 125, 132, 59, 61, 77, 79, 81, 83,
135, 155, 160–161, 168, 85, 94, 96–99, 105, 109,
196, 211, 229 116–118, 122–123, 128,
interiors 139, 141, 143, 175 132, 139–142, 147, 149,
interruptive thinker 149, 159, 169–172, 181, 184, 191,
161–162, 237, 249 196–198, 200, 203, 212,
inwardness 4,6, 17, 21–22, 24, 31, 214, 221–223, 225,
33, 41, 43–44, 49, 52–63, 228–229, 231, 242
66, 69, 71, 85, 87, 99, Constantin Constantius 29, 92,
112, 128, 130, 170–171, 137–138
178–191, 193, 197, 200– Frater Taciturnus 73, 92, 154,
201, 207, 209–211, 217– 189, 192, 209, 222
219, 224, 227–228, 232, Hilarius Bookbinder 120
236 Inter et Inter 48–49, 99–100,
irony 55, 79, 92, 105, 131, 146, 191, 217–218, 231
187, 196, 206, 210, 235, Johannes Climacus 5, 17, 21,
250 25–26, 28, 33–34, 37,
41, 45, 47, 56–57, 59–
Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich 173 61, 71–72, 83, 86, 95,
Index 273
Johannes Climacus, con’t. love 1, 6, 27, 43–44, 54, 84, 87,

98, 101, 106, 115, 120, 92, 97, 100, 105–106,
129, 136–137, 145–147, 110, 112, 114, 116,
160–161, 165–166, 173, 127–128, 151, 162, 209,
175, 182, 185–192, 198, 218, 222, 233–234, 238,
211, 228–229, 231, 236 246
Johannes de silentio 26, 35, 48, Lowrie, Walter 216, 227
62, 73, 92–93, 120, Lukács, Georg 2, 5, 7–11, 18, 43–
122, 148, 160–161, 47, 49–50, 52–78, 80–
171, 175, 184, 191, 88, 105–106, 124–127,
200, 216, 226, 235, 246 131–132, 141–143,
Johannes the Seducer 29, 109, 149–150, 167, 172, 179,
137, 231 181, 183, 186, 194, 200,
Judge William 21, 26, 51, 97, 204–205, 217, 220,
147, 166, 183, 201, 209, 223–226, 229, 233–235,
213, 215, 217–219, 227 237, 239, 242–243, 248
Nicolaus Notabene 120, 160 lukewarm 4, 110, 246
Quidam 26, 73, 154–155, 164, Lund, Henrik 242
189, 192, 222, 229 Lund, Wilhelm 165
Victor Eremita 231 Luther, Martin 14, 168, 183, 238
Vigilius Haufniensis 84, 112, Luxemburg, Rosa 84
168 Lyotard, Jean-François 194
Kirmmse, Bruce 3, 140
Klogskab 21, 96, 107, 139, 141, Magris, Claudio 31, 51–52, 235
158, 225 Mahler, Gustav 195, 205, 221
Kraus, Karl 31, 149–150, 152, Maistre, Joseph Marie de 93, 107,
159, 226, 248–249, 114, 119
Kundera, Milan 135 Malik, Habib C. 248, 250
Mann, Thomas 46, 65, 195
labyrinth 36, 49, 60, 79, 80, 135– Marlowe, Christopher 27
137, 145, 197, 210–211 Martensen, Hans Lassen 44, 54,
laughter 37–38, 240 160
leap 1–2, 9, 18, 23, 43, 46, 52, Marx, Karl 14–15, 18–20, 42, 45,
55, 57, 65–66, 68, 71, 47, 54, 67, 70, 72, 75,
148, 173, 208, 217–218, 77, 84–85, 103, 106,
233 109, 118, 125, 131, 139,
Lenin, Vladimir 18, 84 163–164, 166, 172, 200,
Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim 165– 223, 225, 239, 243–244,
166, 173, 236 246
levelling 17, 30, 68, 71–72, 74, mask 9, 16–17, 26, 42, 90, 111,
137, 224–225 147, 178, 204, 214, 217,
Levinas, Emmanuel 105–106, 220, 221, 229, 235–236
208, 246 Matustík, Martin 3, 71
Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph melancholy 73, 92, 154, 172, 178,
116, 235 180, 183, 197, 207–213,
loafer, the 1, 7, 9–10, 16, 29, 40, 215–217, 219, 222
62, 136, 146–147, 163, mellemspil. See interlude
167, 175, 220, 238 Melville, Herman ix, 236
Locke, John 5, 115
Mercier, Désiré-Félicien- 140, 165, 173–174, 211,

François-Joseph 128 234, 238
messianic, the 10, 22, 70, 84, 135, Novalis 54, 82, 143
138, 153, 166–175, 237
metamorphosis 49, 69–70, 97, 99– O‘Donoghue, Brendan 249
100, 105, 188, 191, 207, Øieblik (glance of the eye) 24, 25,
216–219, 222 169, 169 (for Øieblikket, see entry
mirror 8, 79, 116, 143, 212, 221, for the Moment).
230 Olsen, Regine 43
Moment, the (Øieblikket) 16, 25, Ortega y Gasset, José 191
49, 63, 81, 129, 146, 149, 208,
228, 231, 235. paradox 23, 61–62, 64, 72, 75, 77,
Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de 5, 92, 112, 129, 146, 174,
115 178, 182, 201
Moriarty, John 150, 212, 249, 251 Paris 13, 68, 135, 137–138
movement 24, 29, 34–35, 45, 49– Pasolini, Pier Paolo 61
50, 57, 66–67, 69, 86, passion 5, 35, 59, 68, 74, 83, 91,
105, 111, 124, 129, 150, 94, 110, 128, 135, 158,
159, 170, 175, 181, 184, 171, 182–183, 186, 191,
192, 203, 206, 214, 218, 203–204, 222
231 Pattison, George 3, 25, 136–137,
Musil, Robert 30, 122, 125 163, 243
Mynster, Jacob Peter 15 Paul, St. 7, 84, 169, 240
myth 45, 47, 51, 85, 100, 104– Pepper, Thomas 177
105, 151, 164, 178, 181, Pessoa, Fernando 47, 171, 249
207, 212–217, 219, 222, petrification 86, 179, 181, 183,
243 186, 190
Phister, Joachim Ludvig 201-202
Nagy, András 64 Plato 24, 27, 83–84, 160, 193,
negation / negative 1–2, 8–10, 20, 203, 213
46, 57, 71, 77, 90, 118, poet 9, 16–17, 26, 29, 35–36, 47,
126, 147, 178, 185–186, 68, 85, 92–93, 96–97,
193–194, 197–200, 203, 99, 122, 143, 146,
206, 212, 222, 233, 235, 154, 171, 181, 184,
237, 242, 246 190, 203, 210, 213–
Nielsen, Anne Helene Dorothea 215, 220, 222, 226–
201 227, 229–230, 233,
Nietzsche, Friedrich xxiii, 5, 18, 236, 251
27, 33, 37, 45–46, 54, poetic 11, 17, 29, 50, 57, 63, 85–
103, 108, 162, 186, 189, 88, 97–98, 103–104,
197, 200, 203–204, 208, 135, 154, 214–215,
210, 230 231, 243–244
nihilism 10, 49, 109, 115, 140, poetry 46, 86–87, 144, 188–190,
163, 173–175, 184, 215, 226–227
186–187 polemical writer 35, 123, 129–
nothing 19, 30–32, 38–39, 56, 66– 130, 150
67, 71, 78, 84, 118, 123, Poole, Roger 242
Popper, Karl 5, 115
Index 275
praxis 1, 7–9, 15, 20, 29, 43–44, Sartre, Jean-Paul 76, 184, 186,
46, 48–49, 52–55, 58– 188, 191, 226, 239
62, 66, 69–70, 74, 76, Schmitt, Carl 1–2, 5, 8–11, 65,
79–80, 85–88, 91–92, 89–98, 100–126, 128–
100, 123, 126–127, 133, 149–151, 153–156,
129–132, 140–141, 164, 175, 180, 199–200,
170, 173, 178, 183, 220, 233–234, 237,
185, 191–192, 204, 244–245, 247–248
208–209, 220–223, Scholem, Gershom xxiv, 167, 173
226–228, 231, 235 Schopenhauer, Arthur 54, 59, 74,
preacher of repentance 126–132 76, 116, 186–187, 229
present age, the 4, 8–9, 18, 30–31, Schultz, Heiko 65
39–42, 46, 56, 63, 74, self. See single individual and
90, 130, 138, 149, selfhood
151, 158–159, 161, selfhood 15, 60, 66, 73, 132, 149
163, 166, 234 semblance 207, 210–213
Price, Zachary 60 Shakespeare, William 44, 48, 85,
prototype 7, 24, 29, 41, 58, 61, 84, 89, 99–101, 104, 120,
96–97, 100, 108, 115, 123, 157, 159–160, 184,
123, 131–132, 141, 210, 213, 220, 244
143, 147, 149, 171, Romeo and Juliet 48, 99, 100,
173, 183, 220, 237– 218
238 Hamlet 7, 10, 44, 49, 83, 96,
Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph 121 100–102, 106, 123, 130,
Pyper, Hugh 48, 248 154–156, 166, 204, 210,
220, 229, 235
reckoning 62–68, 85 King Lear 68, 89, 220
reification 8, 53–54, 56, 58–59, Macbeth 123, 183, 185
69–70, 76, 182, 193, Richard III 120, 184–185,
199–200, 220, 223–225 The Tempest 159, 210
repetition 22, 92, 99–100, 120, Timon of Athens 244
157, 200, 202, 219, 234 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 184
resignation 49, 87, 197, 210 single individual 2, 4, 17, 19–20,
romanticism (political) 91, 102– 22, 26, 28–36, 39, 46,
105, 107–110, 112, 124, 55, 57–58, 66–67, 71–
129 72, 75–76, 92, 98, 100,
Rousseau, Jean Jacques 25, 103, 108–109, 112–113,
209, 216 115–116, 118–119, 127,
Rose, Gillian 3, 70, 76, 86, 191, 129, 131–132, 142–143,
194, 199–200, 202, 204, 147, 150, 152, 154, 163,
208, 221, 223, 235 170–173, 181, 191, 201,
ruination 10, 139, 148–149, 156– 212, 224, 227–228, 238
164, 168–169, 175, 204, skillevei (crossroad) 6–7, 9, 13,
212 17, 20–27, 39, 49, 57,
63–66, 81, 107, 131,
sacrifice 33, 61, 64–65, 78, 151, 142, 162, 171, 194, 237
159, 185, 220–223 Slezkine, Yuri 235
Said, Edward 221 smile, the 37–38, 40, 42
society 3, 10, 13–16, 18, 20, 25– subjectivity 6, 21, 33, 42, 55, 57–
27, 31–34, 52, 55–56, 58, 60, 62, 186, 191–
58–60, 62, 66, 68, 70– 192, 196, 224, 228
71, 74–75, 79–80, 86, suffering 22, 25, 58, 69–70, 81,
92, 95–98, 109, 112– 83, 98, 127, 130, 152,
113, 116, 124–127, 129, 154, 190, 222
132, 136–140, 142, 145, symbol 44, 50–51, 61, 102, 111,
147–148, 151–153, 175, 159, 161, 237
178–179, 191, 197–198,
200–201, 216, 220–223, Taubes, Jacob 89, 169
225, 227–228, 230–232, Taylor, Mark C. 73–74, 89
234–235 theatre (drama) 7, 9, 28, 43–44,
Socrates 7, 24, 29, 41–42, 57–58, 47–48, 90, 136, 154
61–62, 79, 84, 96, 98, thorn in the flesh 21, 36, 90, 99,
108, 115, 120, 123, 126, 184, 799, 203, 231, 245
131–132, 141, 143–144, Tieck, Johan Ludwig 47
147–149, 157, 160, 169, Tiedemann, Rolf 173, 192
171, 201, 210, 220, 228, Tillich, Paul 104, 105, 109, 129,
236–237, 240 178, 214
sovereign 9, 89–92, 95, 101–104, Tintoretto (Jacopo Comin) 81
108, 110, 113, 116–119, Tolstoy, Lev 15
122–123, 127, 129–132, totality 1, 9, 46, 50, 55, 57, 62,
143, 149, 151–156, 175, 70–71, 75–76, 78–81,
179, 183–184, 190, 216, 84, 87–88, 95, 118,
225 122–123, 125, 149, 157,
Soviet Union xxiv, 18, 75, 84, 86, 160, 167, 181, 183,
105–106, 129 196–197, 204, 211–212,
Spengler, Oswald xxiii, 111 224, 234, 237
Spinoza, Baruch 110, 116, 244 Trakl, Georg 179, 181–184, 186,
spirit 2, 5, 14–15, 19–25, 27, 29– 208, 249–250
30, 32, 34–36, 44–46, travel 38, 40–41, 51, 78, 136
49–51, 58, 61, 74, 77, Trotsky, Leon 57, 105–106, 163–
79, 81, 83, 85, 88, 109– 165
110, 115, 128, 130,
147–151, 154, 158, 171, Unamuno, Miguel de 72, 242
183, 185, 191, 193,
196–198, 209, 213, 216, Venice 33, 72, 232
240, 248 Villa, Dana 228, 235
spy 34, 145, 155, 220 violence 13, 66, 68, 105–106,
Stalin, Joseph 69, 123–124 112, 117, 119, 122, 128,
Stemning 227 150–153, 175, 246
Stevens, Wallace 145
Stewart, Jon 242 walking 7, 15, 41, 148, 175, 234
Stirner, Max 5, 53 wandering Jew 7, 81, 85, 214
Stravinsky, Igor 225 Weber, Max 136, 183
Strindberg, August 46, 122 Westphal, Merold 3, 177
Whitman, Walt 135, 146
Wittgenstein, Ludwig 150
Index 277
wrestling match 194, 198–202,

206
Žižek, Slavoj 3, 89, 169
1848 3–4, 5, 7–8, 13–21, 26–27,

30–32, 34–37, 45–46,
48–49, 52, 54, 60–63,
72–73, 75, 77, 83, 93–
94, 96–97, 99, 103, 105,
107, 115, 118, 121,
125–126, 128, 130, 132,
138, 146, 150, 152, 159,
161, 171–172, 186, 188,
194, 201, 216, 219,
222–223, 228, 235, 237,
239
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Kierkegaard's Indirect Politics

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KIERKEGAARD’S INDIRECT POLITICS

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2014

Cover design: Studio Pollmann

Leonidas Donskis and J. D. Mininger

Other Titles in PLP

Jakob Lothe and Jeremy Hawthorne, Eds. Narrative Ethics. 2013.

Giorgio A. Pinton. The Conspiracy of the Prince of Macchia & G. B. Vico.

Raymond Angelo Belliotti. Shakespeare and Philosophy:Lust, Love, and Law.

Leonidas Donskis, Ed. Yet Another Europe after 1984:Rethinking Milan

Yuval Lurie. Wittgenstein on the Human Spirit. 2012. VIBS 248

Leonidas Donskis and J. D. Mininger, Eds. Politics Otherwise:Shakespeare as

Leonidas Donskis, Ed. Niccolò Machiavelli:History, Power, and Virtue. 2011.

Restlessness, in the sense of the hubbub of finitude, soon palls; but

EDITORIAL FOREWORD xix

PREFACE BY GEORGE PATTISON xxiii

1. Indirect Politics as Interlude (Mellemspil) 1

ONE Crossroads of Revolution and Reaction 13

1. The Significance of 1848 13

TWO Inwardness as an Expression for Revolutionary Praxis 43

1. The Faustian Phase 44

THREE Zones of Exception (Carl Schmitt) 89

FOUR Loafers of History (Walter Benjamin) 135

1. Dagdrivers and Flâneurs 136

FIVE Out of the Petrified Primordial Landscape 177

1. Inwardness as a Petrified Primordial Landscape 179

1. Against the Tide 233

ABOUT THE AUTHOR 267

For their advice, encouragement and stimulating conversation relating to

Throughout the book I have abbreviated the works of Kierkegaard, Lukács,

BA The Book on Adler

A The Arcades Project (each quote is abbreviated to A followed by the

SW2 Selected Writings: Volume Two

DR The Destruction of Reason

CP The Concept of the Political

Whether the notion of an indirect politics borne of Kierkegaard’s

anew, over and over again, for it is nothing ready-made or exchangeable.

Bartholomew Ryan’s study of Kierkegaard’s ‘indirect politics’ takes up a task

Does it make sense to write a book on ‘Søren Kierkegaard’ and ‘politics’?

to be a major influence in certain radical political thinking of the twentieth

his engagement is not directly political. Kierkegaard’s ‘politics’ is such that

2. Reliving the Present Age

The age of revolution is essentially passionate, and therefore it

The magic lamp represents a freedom which follows a trajectory from

3. Images, Figures, and Drama Motifs

the Dagdriver, Flâneur, Loafer, Disintegration and Ruination, the Interruptive

4. Interludes with Lukács, Schmitt, Benjamin and Adorno

outward socio-historical changes of the time, the decline of Christianity,

In delving deep into the conversation and juxtaposition of Kierkegaard

CROSSROADS OF REVOLUTION AND

1848 has both an external and internal significance for Kierkegaard’s

1. The Significance of 1848

1848 represents an important moment in the history of modern Europe. The

i. The Revolution of 1848

In 1848, Marx and Engels published The Communist Manifesto, and

Kierkegaard’s thought is distinct from this alienated inner mission; the

ii. Authority and Authorship

1848 was a remarkably productive year for Kierkegaard: he completed

These two works had a profound influence on politico-philosophical

[…] the confused spokesmen of newborn, romantic, obviously confused

With this sentence, Kierkegaard anticipates some of the changes and

iii. Christian Discourses

At the beginning of 1848 Kierkegaard writes Christian Discourses, stating its

Everywhere in life is the Skillevei.