Kierkegaard and The Political

Kierkegaard and the Political
Edited by
Alison Assiter and Margherita Tonon
Kierkegaard and the Political,

Edited by Alison Assiter and Margherita Tonon
This book first published 2012
Cambridge Scholars Publishing
12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Copyright 2012 by Alison Assiter and Margherita Tonon and contributors

All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
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ISBN (10): 1-4438-4061-0, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-4061-3
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements
vii
Introduction
Chapter One
The Singular Universal: One More Time

David Wood
Chapter Two
Kierkegaard, the Phantom of the Public

and the Sexual Politics of Crowds
Christine Battersby
27
Chapter Three
Love for Neighbours: Using Kierkegaard

to respond to iek
Alison Assiter
45
Chapter Four
Kierkegaards Aesthetic Age and its

Political Consequences
Thomas Wolstenholme
63
Chapter Five
Suffering from Modernity, an Assessment

of the Hegelian Cure
Margherita Tonon
83
Chapter Six
A Fractured Dialectic: Kierkegaard

and Political Ontology after iek
Michael ONeill Burns
103
Bibliography
125
List of Contributors
135
Index
137
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The editors would like to thank all the participants in the conference
Kierkegaard and the Political, from which this volume emerged. The
conference was hosted by the Department of Politics, Philosophy and
International Relations at the University of the West of England, Bristol, in
April 2010. But they would like to offer a huge thank you to Elisabeth
Salverda whose work as a copy editor vastly exceeded what one would
expect of someone in such a role. To our knowledge it is the first time she
has ever done this kind of work.
INTRODUCTION
To address the issue of Kierkegaard and the political appears at first
sight as a paradoxical task. The philosopher of inwardness and of
irreducible individuality seems to have little to teach us about the sphere
of the political: not only was this dimension never explicitly addressed in
writings of the Danish philosopher, but also the positions he took with
regard to such a domain were always marked by a strong critical attitude.
Moreover, he appeared to be a conservative with regard to any movement
towards democratisation and equality, opposing liberal democracy as well
as socialism, while not refraining from taking up explicitly misogynous
positions. With this in mind, one could easily dismiss Kierkegaardian
philosophy as exclusively relevant to the private domain of individual
existence and irremediably unable to speak to wider concerns such as
those encountered in the public dimension. In fact, the Danish
philosophers emphasis on the irreducible singularity of existence seems to
overlook all forms of participation in social and political institutions as a
dangerous diversion from the important task of being and becoming
oneself. For the sake of such a task, the only relation with the other that
really matters is with the absolute otherness of God. Thus, at first sight,
Kierkegaards turn towards interiority and transcendence seems to take
place at the expense of the political.
However, in spite of his emphasis on singularity, or perhaps precisely
because of it, over the years Kierkegaards philosophy has given rise to
interpretations that recognise its relevance for the political. For instance,
the crucial importance of ideas such as self-choice, earnestness and
subjective passion are easily imported from the individual sphere into the
realm of the political, coming to have a bearing on notions such as
responsibility and commitment. In addition, Kierkegaards accent on the
irreducibility of the individual to the universal interestingly resonates in
those forms of thinking that from the margins call into question the
domination of an exclusionary model of reason. Similarly, Kierkegaards
rejection of the institutions and values of his time does not resolve itself in
mere intellectual and spiritual isolation, but inaugurates a critique of the
ills of his age, which is rich in social and political implications.
Furthermore, the religious writings themselves, in outlining new models of
self-other relations, offer potentially subversive ways of political
resistance. In short, from Critical Theory to Existentialism, to
Deconstruction and Feminist philosophy (even despite the scattered
Introduction
misogynistic remarks of the Danish philosopher), the political potential of

Kierkegaards message never went undetected.
While the potential political ramifications of certain Kierkegaardian
themes come into focus in the 20th century philosophical reception of the
Danish philosopher, the available secondary literature never directly
addresses the theme of the political as such. 1 This book sets itself the
purpose of filling this gap, explicitly engaging with the political potential
and implications of Kierkegaards philosophy. The authors do so by both
directly interrogating Kierkegaards texts, in order to draw out his often
implicit politics, by engaging with his critics and putting his thought in
dialogue with other philosophical positions and traditions, as well as using
Kierkegaard in order to interpret and respond to contemporary issues. The
political Kierkegaard that emerges from such a new approach to the
question is a paradoxical figure that stands in the tension between
restoration and radical critique. On the one hand, the Danish philosopher
was a self-proclaimed conservative and his understanding of religion,
based on an asymmetric relation to a silent God, carries potentially
regressive consequences. On the other hand, Kierkegaards relational and
radically contingent notion of the self represents an objection to the
dominant liberal account of subjectivity, as well as a resource for an
understanding of the subject which is aware of sexual difference.
Moreover, his analyses of the ills of early capitalist society anticipate
important aspects of 20th century social criticism. Even more radically, in
his notion of agapeic love, understood as a task, there lies the possibility of
the rise of a truly collective subject, beyond the limitations of the
autonomous self.
Yet, writing about Kierkegaard and the political is by no means a
straightforward matter: the Kierkegaardian oeuvreboth the
pseudonymous texts and the religious discoursesoffers little direct
textual reference upon which to elaborate a Kierkegaardian theory of the
political. For this reason, any inquiry concerning the political cannot
1. An exception to this are Mark Dooleys 2001 The Politics of Exodus: Sren
Kierkegaards Ethics of Responsibility, New York: Fordham University Press and
Alison Assiters 2009 Kierkegaard, Metaphysics and Political Theory: Unfinished
Selves, London/New York: Continuum. Another helpful recent resource for the
study of Kierkegaard and politics is Kierkegaard and his Danish Contemporaries
Philosophy, Politics and Social Theory, edited by Jon Stewart, Farnham:
Ashgate, 2009.
simply rely on a systematic approach to Kierkegaards work, but instead

needs to organise itself around a specific text or cluster of texts. The most
relevant textual reference for an investigation of the political is the
anonymously published Two Ages: A Literary Review, where Kierkegaard,
analysing the fictitious characters of a novel, outlines a critique of his time
through a confrontation with the immediately preceding age. It is not by
accident that this is such a topical reference for a political reading of
Kierkegaard, insofar as it can be read as an early essay in culture critique
and a thoroughgoing and transparent examination of modernity at its very
outset. Kierkegaard analyses the mutations that take place in the public
space and the increasing influence of new social agents, such as the media.
Most importantly, he denounces the impersonal character of the force that
takes hold of public lifewhich he calls levellingand its fateful
consequences, first and foremost the reduction of any social or intellectual
interaction to a quantitative law and its increasing irrationality. Such an
analysis is particularly insightful insofar as the examined phenomena do
not only concern the public space of the city of Copenhagen, but can also
be inscribed into a larger trend that interests nineteenth century Europe
and go so far as to touch contemporary globalised media-dominated
culture.
Two Ages: A Literary Review is thus a pivotal text for a political
reading of Sren Kierkegaard, yet the pseudonymous writings and the
signed religious works, as well as the notes collected in the papers and
diaries, are replete with interesting material for such a reading. The
authors textual selection, however, has the merit of avoiding the most
commonly addressed Kierkegaardian texts, those which most obviously
engage with ethical or political themes, privileging instead the writings
which address the topic in a more subtle, indirect, or even controversial
manner. For example, writings such as the second part of Either/Or and
the Concluding Unscientific Postscript are not central to the present
discussion despite the fact that they engage with what traditionally may
appear as one of the most obvious political themes, that is, the question of
self-choice and passionate decision. In addition, Fear and Trembling,
another topical text for the political, is not tackled directly, even if it is
present in the background of many of the contributions.
A good deal of attention is paid instead to the aesthetic writings, insofar
as they outline elements of culture criticism and modernity critique.
Particularly important here is the essay on The Tragic in Ancient Drama
Introduction
Reflected in the Tragic in Modern Drama, where the salient features of

modernityindividual isolation, the disintegration of communities and
institutionsare examined against the backdrop of antiquity. The
Seducers Diary, on the other hand, is examined insofar as it sheds light on
Kierkegaards notion of the feminine, and on the emancipatory notion of
relationality which is attached to it. An in-depth examination is similarly
reserved for The Concept of Anxiety, where the anxiety of freedom that
qualifies self-positing is used to exemplify a socio-political situation
where no objective truths are given, and instead the subject is called to
engage in the creation of a truth in becoming.
The religious productionin particular the pseudonymous textsare
also interrogated, bearing in mind the question of whether Kierkegaards
uncompromising and irreducibly singular ideal of faith avoids lapsing into
fanaticism and fundamentalism. On the other hand, the otherworldly faith
of the religious pseudonyms can also be seen as the strongest objection
and oppositiona way towards a different type of politicsto the
alienating logic that dominates social life. A similar type of answer is also
worked out with the help of the signed religious writings, in particular the
Works of Love, where the notion of love for ones neighbouras care for
the stranger, and even for the abuserlies at the core of new
unconventional forms of political praxis.
David Woods article centres on the question around the meaning of
being religious today and its relation to politics. Wood identifies the
regressive and reactionary tendency of religion, but also its potential
source of resistance. In particular, Kierkegaards asymmetrical and nondialogical conception of the relationship with the divine can be seen as
reinforcing aspects of the bad reality such as patriarchy. However, Wood
suggests that from a seemingly conservative position, Kierkegaards
approach to the religious can provide tools to outline a more progressive
notion of the self as well as ontological, metaphysical and ethical
resources for the political. Wood identifies several ways in which
Kierkegaards philosophy can help us to overcome the dominating notion
of liberal subjectivity by outlining a new kind of relationality that reinvests
immanence with transcendence.
By examining the Two Ages, Christine Battersby asks how the
individual can counter the levelling of the crowd in such a way that makes
an impact on the political. She comes to the conclusion that the notion of
the individual is an anti-political category which does not constitute a
challenge to the social order. It is in the aesthetic writings that Battersby

finds more resources for the political, specifically in the account of the
female self as a relational self which is entangled in relations of
dependency and unequal power structures. Battersby suggests that, starting
from a similar account of the self, it would be possible with Iris Marion
Young to outline a political theory that is aware of relations of oppression
and domination and can differentiate degrees of responsibility.
Kierkegaards contribution to political theory however remains limited,
insofar as he does not furnish us with any model of resistance or criteria to
distinguish abusive and non-abusive forms of power.
Alison Assiter responds to ieks reading of Foucaults interpretation
of the Iranian revolution as well as to ieks critical reading of
Kierkegaards love of ones neighbour. She argues that Kierkegaards
notion of neighbourly love offers a notion of sublimity similar to that
found by Foucault in the Iranian revolution, and an idea of freedom that
overcomes determinism, thus outlining a universal subject and laying
bare the limitations and delusion of the autonomous self. Such a subject is
able to overcome the anxiety which is generated by the bankruptcy of the
goals of the people as a collective. Assiter maintains that the incredibly
difficult task of agapeic love founds a relationship akin to the sublime, and
allows us to act as part of the whole humanity, truly as a collective subject.
Thomas Wolstenholme examines Kierkegaards definition of his time as
an aesthetic age in Two Ages: A Literary Review and inquires into the
correspondence between the socio-political structure of a time and the
prevailing existential way of life. While such correspondence is not to be
understood deterministically, Wolstenholme argues that specific sociopolitical arrangements favour a certain type of existential comportment
over another. This brings us beyond a merely subjectivistic perspective
and links the individual existential endeavours to the whole of society.
According to Wolstenholme, a task for politics is to examine whether the
politics that it tries to implement favours or hampers the existential
development of the subject.
Margherita Tonons article considers Kierkegaards account of
individual suffering in modern society in the light of Axel Honneths
Hegelian characterisations of such a malaise. Tonon addresses the merits
and limitations of Hegels proposed cure and identifies Kierkegaards
rejection of such a cure in his refusal to recognise an underlying rational
structure that permeates reality. Following Lukcs and Adornos
Introduction
interpretation, Tonon suggests that categories such as alienation and

reification are more apt to capture the coercion and irrationality
experienced by the Kierkegaardian individuality in modern society. In
Tonons reading, Kierkegaards turn towards inwardness, however, leaves
the contradictions of modernity unchallenged and, in doing so, even calls
into question the possibility of the salvation of the individual self.
Michael ONeill Burns, by assessing Slavoj ieks interpretation of
Kierkegaard, argues that Kierkegaards political potential lies in his
ontological project more than in his ethical or anthropological
considerations. The leap of faith lays bare the ontologically inconsistent
and fractured nature of realilty. This sheds new light on the much
criticised turn towards inwardness, which is instead understood as a
preparatory moment for every political action. Burns submits that
Kierkegaards implicit ontology of contingencycentered upon that
radical interruption which is the leapcreates the conditions for
rigorously thinking through the possibility of socio-political novelty and
intervention.
Overall, therefore, the book sets out to challenge the assumption that
there are few resources in Kiekegaard for an analysis of the political. It
also raises serious doubts about the claim that Kierkegaard focuses on the
individual at the expense of the community or the whole. Whilst the
collection does not produce a single perspective on Kierkegaard and the
political, it provides resources that might indeed challenge the dominant
liberal model in political philosophy, of the subject as an abstract and
autonomous rational self.
CHAPTER ONE
THE SINGULAR UNIVERSAL: ONE MORE TIME
DAVID WOOD
Kierkegaard may be an essentially religious thinker but what does it
mean to be a religious thinker today? Does it mark a detachment from the
political or take one to its very heart?
My earliest philosophical hero as an undergraduate at Keele was
Anthony Flew, a hard-bitten atheist whose regular public debates with a
campus Christian scientist were the stuff of legend. Son of a Methodist
minister, he turned atheist at 15. I came to associate atheism with
intellectual freedom and enlightenment. Not long ago, he shocked me by
turning deist at the age of 81, after accepting a version of the argument
from intelligent design.1 More to the point, within the continental tradition,
Levinas has operated as the thin end of a wedge that has opened up what
has almost become an industry of postmodern theology, with names like
Marion, Nancy, Vattimo, Agamben, Derrida, and in the US, Caputo, Keller
and Kearney all strongly championing a new respectability to a certain
thinking about God, or at least God, or the divine. This too was a shock
to one taught by deconstruction to connect the very idea of God with a
metaphysical will-o-the-wisp, a transcendental signified. Unlike Flew,
however, this discourse, often drawing on a Catholic heritage, while
typically eschewing a personal God, understands the religious in what we
might broadly call an ethical, rather than a substantive sense. At the same
time, we have been witness to an extraordinary rise in the unashamed
politicisation of religious belief. iek inverts Dostoyevskys caution by
saying that If there is a God, then anything is permitted (especially
blowing up innocent bystanders) (iek 2012). Religion, whether
Christian, Muslim or Jewish is repeatedly marshalled as a justification of
public, even state, violence. This applies to US military intervention in
other countries, to Islamic extremism, to Jewish territorial claims to
Jerusalem, and to the murder of abortion doctors. What Kierkegaard
dubbed Christendom has often been at the forefront of intolerance. The
Catholic church has been shown to be deeply complicit in permissive
attitudes to child-molestation, the American Episcopal Church has refused
Chapter One
to recognise gay priests, and Christian evangelicals have taken the lead in
resistance to acknowledging anthropogenic climate change, or indeed
climate change as such, not to mention evolution. Women have borne the
brunt of religious dogmatism. American Christian churches have taken the
lead in resisting the availability of abortion and contraception especially in
parts of the world where birth control is a vital need. It is increasingly
thought perfectly legitimate for these religious preferences to inform not
just domestic public policy, but also foreign aid to those with quite
different religious views. And in the United States, with few exceptions
(Quakers, Universalist Unitarian Church), churches have resisted the
ordination of women into the clergy, and some (like the Southern Baptists)
have even reversed their earlier willingness to ordain women (2000). To be
fair, iek also recognises, and so should we, that
religion is one of the possible places from which one can deploy critical
doubts about todays society. It has become one of the sites of resistance.
(2008, 82)
But as we have seen, religion seems to be an equal opportunity resister,

resisting, for example, the protection of children, the equality of women,
as well as being in the forefront of famine, poverty relief and so on. And it
should not be surprising that in an increasingly secularised world, in which
many meanings, values, rituals and traditions are being challenged and
replaced by those with greater utility function, religious institutions and
movements are often looked to for an antidote. 2 This explains why
religions and churches can offer a home and a pulpit to the most regressive
practices, as well as offering alternative liberating spaces of significance in
an often alienating world. And there will be continuing disagreement about
which is which.
The regressive tendencies of many of the attitudes and beliefs in
question here offer a particular window on the affective aspect of
contemporary faith, especially in conservative faith-based groups. 3
Intolerance of others beliefs, a sense of certainty, patriarchal proclivities,
a refusal to engage creatively with complex issues, provide a
psychological backdrop to the most visible political power of religion.4
In What is Called Thinking? Heidegger offers us a choice between
going counter to a great thinker, and going to their encounter. If we want
to pursue the political dimension of Kierkegaards thought, given the

David Wood
importance of religion to him, it would be something of a scholastic

project if religion had faded into insignificance as Dawkins and Dennett
might wish.5 But if anything the religious struggles of 19th century
Denmark make Kierkegaards contributions to religious thinking, and
hence to the political, especially significant to our own Present Age
(Kierkegaard 1962). In her essay Sexual Difference, Irigaray (1993)
suggests that every age has a defining issue, and that sexual difference
might play that role for us. I think by such an issue she means one with an
overriding concrete political urgency, one which radiates equally through
theory and practice. This suggests that the question of Being, as Heidegger
proposed it, might be too abstract ever to be a candidate for such a burning
question. Although sexual difference is hardly exhausted as an issue, the
kind of evidence I have cited makes it tempting to propose religion as the
central issue for our day. In the light of Kierkegaards anguished personal
response to this very question, he would seem like an especially plausible
candidate for scrutiny.
Nonetheless, on first reading, we might conclude that, fascinating
though Kierkegaard is on so many other topics, his political insights are
something like a reactionary residue we should walk past on our way to
his original thoughts. He was a royalist, a misogynist, 6 and fought a rearguard action against the more communitarian Christianity gaining
ascendancy in Denmark at the time. And yet people not obviously
associated with the intolerant right have taken him seriously. Sartre wrote
an extraordinary late piece in 1964, The Singular Universal extolling his
contemporary significance. Elsebet Jegstrup (1995), Christine Battersby
(1999), Alison Assiter (2009) and others have championed his political
importance. And Sylviane Agacinski (1988), Jacques Derrida (1996),
Mark Dooley (2001) and others have made Kierkegaard into a
deconstructionist avant la lettre.
In her excellent Hypatia review (1999) of Cline Lon and Sylvia
Walshs collection Feminist Interpretations of Kierkegaard (1997),
Christine Battersby lays out the map not only of that volume, but also
perhaps of the broader possibilities for thinking through the options for a
feminist reading of Kierkegaard. The first group of essays in this book
claim that he is no ordinary misogynist, arguing that he can and should be
read at different levels. The second reminds us, nonetheless, that he
presents dangers for feminism. The third group, as Battersby puts it,
(1999, 172) mix critique with commendation, while the last group
10
Chapter One
reclaims the feminine. Her own suggestion is that it may be his aesthetic
works that are more useful than his ethical or religious works. 7 These
works:
provide us with resources for rethinking the self in ways that privilege
natality, relationality, ontological dependency and epistemological
uncertainty[his writings] can help us reconstruct identity in ways that
take the female subject-position as the norm. (ibid., 175)
In many ways, it might be said, Kierkegaards position here mirrors

that of Nietzsche: a seeming misogynist, who nonetheless supplies the
tools for a broader deconstruction of the foundations of metaphysical, i.e.
patriarchal selfhood. Nietzsches most cutting remarks, disparaging
womens capacity for friendship, are immediately turned against men too.
And German feminist groups at the time are said to have found in
Nietzsche a powerful ally. Both Kierkegaard and Nietzsche raise the
fascinating question of quite how to see the relation between, let us say,
the emancipation of women, and success on a broader front. Superficially,
at least, it looks as if they were able to think further than they were able to
actthat as men they were stuck in the common dispositions of their time,
perhaps for peculiar personal/family reasons. (Battersby suggests that
Kierkegaard might have been abused; Nietzsche was brought up by
women with no father figure around.)8 This raises the question of whether
feminist philosophy is finding a potent path of access to a broader
philosophical summitlet us say the deconstruction of the metaphysical
self or subject, the grounds for which might be other or deeper than
patriarchy, but the structure of which is writ large there. This would be one
way of reading Irigarays claim (1996) that sexual difference could be the
defining issue of our timeone that vividly exhibits a broader pattern of
domination and exploitation found in race, class and international
relations. The other way would be that patriarchy, the subordination of
women, is fundamental, and that, as brilliant abstract thinkers, both
Kierkegaard and Nietzsche were only able to fumble at the buttons of
feminisms blouse, coming away with a good road map, but not really
knowing what country they were in.
On the broader front both Elsebet Jegstrup and Alison Assiter take up
the thought that one way or another Kierkegaard offers a way of displacing
the sense of self implied by the liberal individualism of someone like

David Wood
11
Rawls. Although these categories may not survive prolonged scrutiny,

these arguments all in effect find in Kierkegaard ontological or
metaphysical resources, quite as much as ethical ones, with which to
reinscribe the political.
The wider postmodern response to Kierkegaard (see Agacinski 2009)
could equally well be said to focus on the aesthetic dimension of his work,
taking seriously the importance of irony, indirect communication, the how
rather than the what, and the effective deconstruction of the authorial self
(and by extension the patriarchal self), implied by his pseudonymous
writing.
But the implication in each case, is that the more we get into
Kierkegaards ethical and religious thought, the more problematic it
becomes. Perhaps because it is more solidly encrusted with his own
idiosyncratic ways of filling out the fundamental relational, processual
insights. We may suppose, for example, that a relational self would be
filled out by reference to significant other humans. But it is clear in The
Sickness Unto Death (1980b) for example, that the constitutive
relationality Kierkegaard has in mind is with God, not with a lover or
friend or community.9 The self is a relation that relates itself to itself
though God.
Wittgenstein (1961, 73) articulates a relational sense of self when he
writes: Man is an essentially dependent being. He goes on: that on
which we depend we may call God. To which the obvious response is
yes, we may call this pole of dependency God, either in the permissive or
the modal sense of may. But we need not. Might it not be that the
tendency to call this dependency God, reflects a certain shape of desire,
one that itself needs interrogation? This was in effect Freuds claim in The
Future of an Illusionthat religious belief is a way of dealing with the
lingering sense of our infantile helplessness, long past the point at which it
need overwhelm us. The conversion of the elderly, such as Flew, could be
explained by their approaching again that same state of helplessness at the
other end of the line. Whether or not we accept Freuds analysis, what it
reflects is a particular interpretation of relationality, that of (utter
asymmetrical) dependency. This is not the dialogical inter-dependency of
two good friends, or a couple, but a hierarchical relation in which,
typically, power and authority are centrally in play. Where does
Kierkegaard stand on this? Battersby (1999, 175) suggests that the theme
of seducer/seduced in Kierkegaard, notably in the first part of Either/Or
12
Chapter One
(1987a), rewrites Hegels master/slave relation in a way that returns a

certain agency to the supposed victim. She writes:
Antigone becomes a (modern) daughter of Oedipus who is neither the fully
responsible, Kantian (male) person of modernity, nor simply a token of the
family to be punished by (pre-modern) fate.
I am not entirely sure how far all of this destabilises Hegels account of
the journey of Spirit towards the Absolute. His master/slave relation was
itself unstable; the slave had certain unanticipated advantages over the
master, not least being closer to nature. And Marx brought out these
instabilities in no uncertain way. Did Kierkegaard perhaps have to
oedipally idealise and then kill his Hegelian father to effect a break from
him? Might there not be a performative repetition of hierarchical
relationality in the very attempt to break with it? We might perhaps derive
a general formula from this lesson that would begin to explain the
paradoxes of Kierkegaards potential contribution to the political, in a
certain resonance with Derridas early remark that we do not necessarily
escape from the metaphysical structures we can expose. But to the extent
that we maintain our sense of the distinctive importance of religious
discourse today, we are still left with the question of whether we need to
develop another approach to the religious through Kierkegaards aesthetic
texts, or whether his discussions of ethics and religion can directly feed
into a new politics. Surely not if the relation to God is essentially vertical,
asymmetrical, and governed by authority.
In The Sickness Unto Death, Kierkegaard argues that the fact that there
are two forms of despair, despair at willing to be oneself, but also
despairingly willing to be oneself, proves that we cannot be completely
self-constituted. Only a being constituted by another Power could continue
in despairknowing, as it were, that he was not alone, that there was an
outside investor with an interest in the project. For Kierkegaard faith in
this Power is indeed a matter of fear and trembling, of obedience without
rational grounds. But does this really supply the basis for a new politics? It
is common, as we have seen, to contrast Kant and Kierkegaard when it
comes to the self, with Kant being attributed a self-contained self tailored
to liberalism. Kants response to Abrahams situation was that he should
have questioned whether it was really God speaking when he was told to
sacrifice Isaac.

David Wood
13
If God should really speak to man, man could still never know that it was
God speaking. It is quite impossible for man to apprehend the infinite by
his senses, distinguish it from sensible beings, and recognize it as such. But
in some cases man can be sure the voice he hears is not Gods. For if the
voice commands him to do something contrary to moral law, then no
matter how majestic the apparition may be, and no matter how it may seem
to surpass the whole of nature, he must consider it an illusion. (Kant 1992,
155)
Kant can prove that it is not Gods voice because it is contrary to the
moral law, which has its own authority, which can generate a must (
he must consider it an illusion). Kant is proposing a more complex, less
straightforwardly vertical relation to God, but only because he has
established an internal vertical relation with the moral law, which does not
replace God, but acts as a kind of security check. But even Kant is not
proposing a dialogue with God: Are you sure you have thought through
what would be involved in my killing Abraham? How could I then be the
father of the tribe of Israelwhich you want?
My point is that when it comes to the religious, Kierkegaard seems
pretty heavily invested in non-dialogical relationality. Can we really set
aside this aspect of his thought? And if we leave it intact, what purchase
would that give us on the contemporary politics of religiosity? Indeed,
worse flows. If Angst, fear and trembling, comes precisely at the point at
which the universal moral law is being superseded by a direct singular
connection to Gods will, does it not set the scene for any and every act of
terror committed in the name of God? I do not mean the Charles Mansons
of this world, but the sincere religiously motivated zealots who really do
believe, and are encouraged to believe that heaven will be their reward.
If, with Irigaray, we agree that the economy of desire to which we
individually or collectively subscribe is of paramount political importance,
is Kierkegaard a sound guide? We do need to understand, and find ways of
combatting, authoritarianism, fanaticism, nihilism, fascistic anger and so
on. And we learn a lot from Nietzsche, Adorno and Deleuze and Guattari.
But Kierkegaard? The desire for closure, for certainty, for simple solutions
can indeed be seen as responses to the problem of anxiety. In this light we
may applaud Kierkegaards complex psychological treatment. But the
question we are then left with is: does an existential treatment of anxiety,
one which locates its proper locus and resolution in my relation to God
14
Chapter One
does such an account address the political problem of anger, resentment,

intolerance and violence? Or does it, on the contrary, serve to legitimate
these attitudes? Isnt a God who can command death just the kind of God
from whom we might pray to be saved? Is there, to repeat, not a real
struggle between the kind of God we can construct through Kierkegaards
aesthetic writings, and the God of his religious writings?
For Kierkegaard, anxiety has its proper place at the instant of the
teleological suspension of the ethical. Along with Keats, when he wrote of
negative capability, Kierkegaard understands what religion is essentially
about, inwardness, as the ability to live with the anxiety that going beyond
the ethical entails. As the focus of political concern, this is surely a
momentous discovery, or at least reminder, 10 on Kierkegaards part. For
fear and anxiety increasingly seem to be the most powerfully manipulable
affects.11 Whether or not we tie this back to Freud and infantile
helplessness, it would seem that religiosity in general, and institutionalised
religion in particular, cannot but trade in fear and anxiety, and their
reduction and/or management. Whether it be fundamental existential
anxiety (Who am I? What is the meaning of life? What will happen to me
when I die?) or more concrete (How will I feed my children? How will we
escape the enemy? How can I deal with an incurable illness?), we seek
reassurances about many imponderables, some of which would paralyse us
if we could not answer them, at least formally. Religion could be said to
meet these needs. But it does so hand-in-hand with social policy and
political ideology. It is symptomatic that the US combines widespread
religious fervour with the absence of a proper healthcare system. Does
religious faith take up the slack in healthcare provision? Hysterical
national security measures seem to be attempting to repair a broken sense
of absolute security (before 9/11) that religious faith has accustomed
Americans to expect. And politicians not only pander to these absolutes,
but fan the flames of fear to prepare the ground for promises of protection.
The role played by religion here is highly complex. Islam is distorted into
a ground for terrorism (killing the infidel). It is also constructed as the
enemy by a hysterical Christianity. In each case God functions to contain,
shape and direct anxiety through faith, obedience, and dogmatism, even in
the most destructive ways. As Nietzsche (1998, 118) observes: man
would much rather will nothingness than not will...
It is tempting to say that whenever we come up with this sort of
troubling conclusion that Kierkegaard is to be found on the side of the

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15
angels, so to speak, because it is precisely what is at stake in his critique of

Christendom. Everything we worry about has to do precisely with the
externalities of religion, not the inwardness of faith. Is this true?
In his last years, as is well known, Kierkegaard mounted an attack on
the established Danish Church. But he also attacked attempts at its reform
by people like Grundtvig and Rudelbach, who, as it has been put,
emphasised a more joyful, celebratory and communal Christianity.
There is nothing about which I have greater misgivings than all that even
slightly tastes of this disastrous confusion of politics and Christianity, a
confusion which can very easily bring about a new kind and mode of
Church-reformation, a reverse reformation which in the name of
reformation puts something new and worse in place of something old and
better Christianity is inwardness, inward deepening. If at a given time
the forms under which one has to live are not the most perfect, if they can
be improved, in God's name do so. But essentially Christianity is
inwardness. (Kierkegaard 1982, 53)
The question we face is whether inwardness or subjectivity is best

understood as a justifiable refuge from a shallow mimetic sociality, in
which we have sacrificed the uncertainties of self for the comforts of
conformity. Or whether it is actually a refuge from the complex relational
exchanges of the public realm, one that attempts to manage the anxiety
that that human complexity generates by locating it all in one vertical
Man/God relation. It is as if we are being asked to agree to pay a steep upfront anxiety tax (to God), to avoid the unpredictable complexity of
negotiating relations with other humans. It is truewe dont know what
God wants of us, or why he wants what he says he wants, but is there not a
certain security in knowing we only have to deal with one Other, and one
that ultimately has our salvation at heart? My question, then, is whether
there is not a peculiar kind of comfort in consolidating all our debts with
one creditor, however hard to read. It might be said that reference to the
complexity of negotiating relations with other humans is existentially
underspecified. If the others with whom I am negotiating selfhood are all
shallow spiritless couch potatoes, the bar on what counts as an adequately
defined relational self might be set far too low. And anyway, on that
model, how does my singularity even get a look in? What these questions
suggest is that there can indeed be myopic unchallenging communities,
16
Chapter One
and social or historical circumstances in which certain arguably important

dimensions or possibilities of self-realisation, or of collective synergy, are
not adequately realised. That has to be right. What does not follow, not yet
anyway, is that these dimensions need be intrinsically connected to a God
relationship. The historical specificity and contingency of patriarchy, for
example, might be something to which a wide range of social
arrangements, ones that took it for granted, might fail to alert me. But
some forms of God relationship would merely repeat that relation rather
than question it. And one can surely imagine forms of communicative
engagement that would work to subvert and displace it that would not
require at least Kierkegaards version of the God relationship. One way of
thinking of this would be to imagine ways of suspending the ethical that
do not move into the religious quite as Kierkegaard understands it.
To explore this possibility, I will now consider four alternative ways of
understanding the religious each of which can in some way be grafted onto
Kierkegaards own position, but none of which replicates the hierarchical
God relation he seems to take for granted. It will be my claim that it is by
such means that we can address the contemporary political power of
religionand I am speaking (as was Kierkegaard) largely of Christianity
and the Westwithout endorsing its regressive tendencies. Just to be clear,
it is my guiding assumption that there may be a very high price to pay for
refusing to engage with a discourse that has a strong public presence
namely that one leaves the determination of its future shape and direction
to forces over which one has no control. In that context, I claim, it may be
better to work out how creatively to deploy the word God, than to
abandon it altogether to a dogmatic faith community.
To pursue this objective, I want now to look at four thinkers each of
whom offer us a way of moving forward in thinking about the relevance of
Kierkegaards theology to politics: Sartre, Derrida, Kearney and Irigaray.
1. Sartres 1964 essay The Singular Universal12 was part of a
UNESCO conference on Kierkegaard Vivant.13 The basic problem he deals
with is how Kierkegaard can live on for us when his whole message was
to contest the significance of the kind of knowledge, or positive content of
a life, that might be thought to survive death. Sartre shows however that it
is Kierkegaards existential appropriation of his historical contingency, his
performance of his own singularity, that lifts him out of history, his
Singular Universality. And in a way that anticipates Derridas sensitivity to

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the problem of a consuming totalisation of the other in his Memoirs The

Work of Mourning, Sartre honours Kierkegaards religiosity as opening the
way for Sartres own becoming-an-atheist. He finds categories by which to
connect Kierkegaards witnessing to a singular life with his own, without
appropriating one to the other. The deep atheism in Sartres thought has to
do with the ways in which immanence appears folded back onto the world
rather than as a transcendence set against the world: the infinite arises in
the finite, the absolute in the contingent. Bearing witness to my
contingency as an existent being transforms it without reaching for another
dimension. Sartre also salutes Kierkegaards refiguring of a certain
immortality in terms of inwardness, and freedom as tied up with historical
situatedness and particularity, not limited by it. It is in Kierkegaards
manner of response to Christianity, one that bears witness to these
connections, that Sartre connects with him. As Sartre put it, in words that
could not more profoundly or more beautifully honour a thinker he
disagreed with:
within each of us he offers and refuses himself, as he did in his own
lifetime; he is my adventure and remains, for others, Kierkegaard, the other
a figure on the horizon testifying to the Christian that faith is a future
development forever imperilled, testifying to myself that the process of
becoming-an-atheist is a long and difficult enterprise. (Sartre 2008, 166)
2. Irigarays essay Sexual Difference (and her related Questions to

Emmanuel Levinas in the same volume) weave an extraordinary dance
with the divine (Irigaray 1993). She is exploring the possibility that
through sexual difference, through the richest experiences of sexual
congress, something of the divine might be relocated, might find its proper
place. Sexual difference, she writes, would represent the advent of new
fertile regions as yet unwitnessed (ibid., 165). She imagines that this
place would save us from the displacements that the idea of God has
suffered. Wonder is to be found in the experience of the sexual other, not
in the heavens or in that fact that anything exists rather than nothing. This
erotic space transcends our temptation to merely negate the evils of the
world, among which she includes the regressive return to religion. She
links this transition to a new age to:
18
Chapter One
a change in the economy of desire, necessitating a different relationship

between man and god(s), man and man, man and the world, man and
woman. (ibid., 168)
As I see it, she is proposing a desire not based on lack, one in which:
man always tends towards something else without ever turning to herself as
the site of a positive element. (ibid.)
Woman, she writes, represents a place for man, offering him an envelope,
while having no place herself. In language that echoes Kierkegaards
discussion (in The Sickness Unto Death) of the self as constituted by its
mediated relation to God, she insists on such a third term in the form of
wonder, angels, the child, and other possibilities of birth. Her argument
is that God, traditionally understood, is taking up the existential slack in
human relationships constituted by an economy of desire based on lack.
Carnal intimacy offers the possibility of drawing the divine back to its
proper place, in which, through love as celebratory mutuality, as one might
say, transcendence becomes immanent again. As an example of the kind of
desire she is trying to move beyond, she cites Levinass account of the
caress as a touch that engages the other in a way that anticipates a future
for the toucher, nourishing his future pleasure. She opposes to Levinass
autistic, egological solitary love:
a shared outpouring, the loss of boundaries which takes place for both
lovers when they cross the boundaries of the skin into the mucous
membranes of the body, leaving the circle which encloses my solitude to
meet in a shared space, a shared breath. (Irigaray 1993, 180)
She continues:
In this relation, we are at least three, each of which is irreducible to any of
the others: you, me and our work, that ecstasy of ourself in us, that
transcendence of the flesh of one to that of the other become ourself in us,
at any rate, in me as a woman, prior to any child. (ibid.)
Her broken reflexive syntax is evidence of the struggle to articulate an

ecstatic relationality in ways that do not fall back on clichs of
sameness and difference.

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19
For Irigaray the Song of Solomon represents a point prior to the

emergence of a God of law, associated with writing, in which flesh and the
feminine are still in play. She is trying to demonstrate that the language of
the divine, of transcendence, of ecstasy, and finally of God, can all be
powerfully inscribed in a post-egological eroticism, one which bears
witness to the residual power of the feminine. I understand this thought to
be political in that it projects a world governed by a new economy of
desire, and it offers a paththe re-opening of the eroticthrough which
we can imagine that this economy might more generally be realised.
3. I have written at length elsewhere about Derridas treatment of

Kierkegaard in The Gift of Death (1996) (see Wood 2002, 125-134).
Suffice it to say here that Derrida generalises from Abrahams situation
the moment of decision is madnessto the conclusion that any
serious decision, any truly responsible claim, takes us beyond the ethical
in the sense of rule-based behaviour, beyond the algorithm.
Such, in fact, is the paradoxical form of every decision: it cannot be
deduced from a form of knowledge of which it would simply be the effect,
conclusion, or explicitation. (Derrida 1996, 77)
For Derrida, God is, as he puts it, the figure and name of the wholly
other, (ibid.) which (again) allows the Abraham/Isaac story to illuminate
the structure of any ethical decision, to the extent that it responds to the
other person in his/her singularity.
But, intriguing though this account is, it does not obviously deal with
the distinctiveness of Abrahams relationship with God as an authority
figure with the power to demand sacrifice. That there is an excess to any
decision that cannot be codified seems correct. And it offers one way of
thinking transcendence in immanence, one that successfully secularises
God. But a generalised openness to otherness does not address the
irreconcilable conflicts this generates, and offers no protection against
extremist appropriations of religion. Derrida is clearly wary of giving
away everything to a new religiosity and its post-modern subject.
As we have mentioned, it is often argued, one way or the other, that
Kierkegaard is useful in attacking the essentially patriarchal liberal
subject, opening the way to a constitutively more relational subject,
whether this is intrinsically feminine, or simply writ large in the feminine.
20
Chapter One
This does seem both important, and of great consequence for politics and
the political. But we should not think that this new orientation is itself free
of ambivalence or uncertainty. We want the new Subject to be
interactional, open to negotiation, a bit fuzzier around the edges. But, as
we have suggested, this is a relationality with which Kierkegaard is not
altogether comfortable. And we cannot discount the importance of those
subject formations that, as Badiou suggests, bear a revolutionary potential,
refusing the current order, and struggling for a new one. And if, as is
common, we come to see problems with rights talktoo invested in
Kantian autonomyand insist on the importance of a capacity for
response to singularity, we must also bear in mind Derridas remarks:
We must more than ever stand on the side of human rights. We need human
rights. (Derrida 2004, 132)
They are not enough, but they are essential in standing up to the even
bigger sovereign authoritythat of the state. This is a hard political lesson
that yesterdays weapons may still be needed in tomorrows struggles,
that to avoid the worst violence, we may need at times, to work with the
subject-formation we have.
4. Finally I would like to mention Richard Kearneys treatment of the
religious in his recent book Anatheism: Returning to God After God
(2010), which follows on his book The God Who May Be (2001). In both
of these books, it might be said, Kearney flirts with atheism, but does not
embrace it. Atheism is a negative knowledge. His position, in his earlier
book, is to argue for God as possibility, not just in an extended Pascalian
sensethat God might existbut in the sense that much of the sense of
God is tied up with possibility. In The God Who May Be, he suggests three
senses of possibility: 1. the idea that our everyday assumptions are put in
question by an open future, and that opening ourselves to it is up to us:
Without us, no Word can be made flesh (2001, 4). 2. that if there is evil
in the world it is our responsibility, and 3. that what seems impossible to
us is only seemingly so, for with God all things are possible. These
thoughts are ones that Kierkegaard himself could have penned. He wrote,
after all, that higher than the actual is the possible, and,

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21
if I were to wish for something, I would not wish for wealth or power but
for the passion of possibility, for the eye, eternally young, eternally ardent,
that sees possibility everywhere. Pleasure disappoints; possibility does not.
And what wine is so sparkling, so fragrant, so intoxicating! (Kierkegaard
1987a, 41)
In Anatheism, he takes a slightly different tack:

it is only if one concedes that one knows virtually nothing about God that
one can begin to recover the presence of holiness in the flesh of ordinary
existence. (Kearney 2010, 5)
In particular Kearney finds the divine in the strangerboth in Levinass

ethical welcoming of the orphan, widow, and stranger, but also in the
monstrous, alien and fearful. He writes of the holy insecurity of radical
openness to the strange, and radical dispossession. In a way consonant
with Sartre, Irigaray and Derrida, Kearney is retrieving the God of
eschatology after the substantive metaphysical God has died. God the
noun may have passed away, but God the adverb is going strong.
Kearneys work essentially confirms what we have been arguing
through discussion of Sartre, Irigaray and Derrida, that there is
considerable potential for working religious language, the divine, the
sacred, the holyback into everyday existence, for re-investing
immanence with transcendence. What Sartre offers in his reflections on
Kierkegaard as singular universal is a way of understanding the general
structure of this re-investmentwitnessing, attesting, existential
performativity. One could say that the sacred appears at the moment at
which the individual re-emerges from under the cover of the universal in
the shape of a singularity. For Levinas, singularity appears in the call of
the other in needthis one here now. For Irigaray it appears in wonder at
the presence of my lover. For Derrida, it lies in my openness to the wholly
other. For Kearney, it lies in possibility, or the Stranger. Each of these
formulations names God in a new way, and translates the religious into
new subjectivities, new relationalities and new shapes of practice, each
with some claim to be listening to Kierkegaard.
5. I have worried about the privilege of vertical relationality in
Kierkegaard, but there is yet another political path, one with which
22
Chapter One
Kierkegaard seems less able to deal, and it is this with which I will
conclude. In Fear and Trembling, in a way not unlike Levinass rejection
of the sacred groves of paganism (Levinas 1997), Kierkegaard highlights
the spiritual dimension of human existence by contrast with a kind of
Homeric naturalism:
if there were no eternal consciousness in a man, if at the foundation of all
there lay only a wildly seething power which writhing with obscure
passions produced everything that is great and everything that is
insignificant, if a bottomless void never satiated lay hidden beneath all
what then would life be but despair? If such were the case, if there were no
sacred bond which united mankind, if one generation arose after another
like the leafage in the forest, if the one generation replaced the other like
the song of birds in the forest, if the human race passed through the world
as the ship goes through the sea, like the wind through the desert, a
thoughtless and fruitless activity, if an eternal oblivion were always lurking
hungrily for its prey and there was no power strong enough to wrest it from
its mawhow empty then and comfortless life would be! But therefore it
is not thus, but as God created man and woman, so too He fashioned the
hero and the poet or orator. (Kierkegaard 1985a, 49)
This stunning piece of prose is so constructed as to juxtapose a natural

world with and without spirit. Without spirit it would be without meaning,
and we would be driven to despair (This is not far from Flews position!).
What is billed as an argument for mans eternal consciousness ends up
explaining what poets are for, as Heidegger might put it. Arguably,
however, a lot of work is being done by animating eternal oblivion as a
monster seeking to devour us, a thoroughly naturalistic if nightmarish
image. And this perhaps opens up a line of dialogue with Kierkegaard. For
it is hard not to read him as a radically anti-naturalistic thinker, one for
whom inwardness, subjectivity and faith essentially constitute the human,
and our embodied being, and the shape of our engagement in the material
world, is something of an embarrassment.
There are those who have dubbed our Present Age the Anthropocene, a
geological term meant to capture the significant post Industrial Revolution
impact of humans on the planet. 14 For many, this impact has not been too
positive in terms of the health and vitality of non-humans and the
conditions that sustain life on earth. This opens up the space of biopolitics
in which what comes to the fore are precisely the collective material

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23
consequences of human practices, rather than their higher or less elevated

intentions. If a new spirituality is needed it is not one of inwardness, but
rather one that reinforces a pantheist or panentheist perspective, in which
we would learn to see ourselves as one with God-in-Nature, (or God-asNature). Moreover Kierkegaards version of spirituality would be a
candidate for just the kind of alienation that has led to our current crisis.15
24
Chapter One
Notes
1. I have followed the argument where it has led me. And it has led me to accept
the existence of a self-existent, immutable, immaterial, omnipotent, and
omniscient Being (Flew 2007, 155).
2. The worldwide growth of fundamentalist religion, both Christian and Muslim,
must be understood against the background of, and as a protest against, the even
more fundamental secularising consequences of global economics.
3. Looking at this scene through the lens of US public debates, it can seem that
intolerance and what I am calling regressive tendencies line up largely on the side
of fundamentalist Christian groups, and that atheists and agnostics are more
predictable homes for tolerance. For the latter, on the whole, intolerance is
reserved for views that are themselves intolerant. It cannot be disputed, however,
that there are atheists (like Dawkins) who hold their views with a certain dogmatic
conviction.
4. Richard Land (president of the Southern Baptist Conventions Ethics &
Religious Liberty Commission) told me (2007, pers. comm.) that if the Democrats
shifted their views on abortion, the SBC might well move their 20 million votes
behind them, permanently changing the course of American politics.
5. See for instance Richard Dawkins The God Delusion (2006) and Daniel
Dennetts Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (2007).
6. Another Defense of Woman's Great Abilities (1834). Very early workhe was
21.
7. It should be said that although Kierkegaard himself (in The Point of View for My
Work as an Author) gives us some justification for considering some of his works
to belong to his aesthetic authorship, it is by no means clear how helpful such a
concept really is.
8. When Nietzsche was nearly 5 years old, his father, Karl Ludwig Nietzsche
(18131849) died from a brain ailment (July 30, 1849) and the death of
Nietzsches two-year-old brother, Ludwig Joseph, traumatically followed six
months later (January 4, 1850). Having been living only yards away from Rckens
church in the house reserved for the pastor and his family, the Nietzsche family left
their home soon after Karl Ludwigs death. They moved to nearby Naumburg an
der Saale, where Nietzsche (called Fritz by his family) lived with his mother,
Franziska (18261897), his grandmother, Erdmuthe, his fathers two sisters,
Auguste and Rosalie (d. 1855 and 1867, respectively), and his younger sister,
Therese Elisabeth Alexandra (18461935). (Wicks 2011, The Stanford
Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
9. Having said that, it is noteworthy that Kierkegaard writes of a constituting
Power without immediately concretely specifying that power as God. This opens
up, for us at least, the possibility of giving greater direct emphasis to the formative

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25
significance of the human love for others (see Assiter 2009). In this way we may in
fact be restoring to its proper place the source of Kierkegaards reflection!
10. Reminder, because Hobbes and many political theorists have known this.
11. For a discussion of three major social events in terms of the related political
affects of fear and anger, see John Protevis recent book Political Affect:
Connecting the Social and the Somatic (2009) inspired by Deleuze and Guattari.
12. These remarks draw on my Thinking God in the Wake of Kierkegaard (Wood
1998, 53-74).
13. See Kierkegaard: The Singular Universal (Sartre 2008, 141-169).
14. Paul Crutzen (2000), a Nobel prize winning scientist.
15. Panentheism (from Greek (pn) all; (en) in; and (thes)
God; all-in-God) posits that God interpenetrates every part of nature.
Panentheism is distinguished from pantheism, which holds that God is
synonymous with the material universe (adapted from Wikipedia).
CHAPTER TWO
KIERKEGAARD, THE PHANTOM OF THE PUBLIC
AND THE SEXUAL POLITICS OF CROWDS
CHRISTINE BATTERSBY
Its sometimes hard to believe that Kierkegaard had no experience of
twitter, facebook, social network sites or, indeed, of the globalised
press. In mid-nineteenth-century Denmark, newspapers were aimed at the
local populace; even mass-market journalism had yet to emerge. Yet
Kierkegaard describes modernity with uncanny brillianceand with
prophetic accuracy insofar as a media age, the internet age and the age
of tweeting are concerned. Having been himself the subject of media
bullying and subsequent street harassment in the so-called Corsair affair,
he is acutely aware of the ways in which the press can incite the mob or
the crowd and function as an instrument of persecution of an individual
who seems to stand out from the throng. Registering the levelling effect
that the media exerts on the populace, Kierkegaard argued that in
modernity the public sphere does not function as an organic whole, and
neither does it enable the individual to flourish and fulfil her or his
potential, as the ancient Greek polis had been supposed to do. Instead, in
modernity, chatter distorts the sphere of the public whilst also
threatening the capacity of the citizen to become an individual in a
thoroughgoing sense.
Kierkegaard developed his arguments about the conflict between the
crowd and the single individual most clearly in two works that are not
pseudonymous in the manner of the so-called aesthetic works, but which
also dont fit straightforwardly into the category of the religious work
which Kierkegaard published under his own name.1 These works are Two
Ages: The Age of Revolution and the Present Age. A Literary Review 2
which was published during 1846 whilst the Corsair affair was at its
height (see Kierkegaard 1982), and The Point of View for My Work as an
Author which was published posthumously in 1859; but portions of which
appeared as On My Work as an Author in 1851 (see Kierkegaard 1998b).
In this essay I will examine Kierkegaards concept of the single
individual in some detail, especially in relation to sexual difference.
28
Chapter Two
In The Phenomenal Woman (Battersby 1998), I argued that

Kierkegaard is an honourable exception to the trend that I identified in the
history of western philosophy: that of failing to take seriously the
singularity of the femalenot femininesubject position. In particular,
western philosophy has failed to develop an ontology that is adequate for
modelling an identity that has the capacity to give birth to new selves out
of its own embodied self. Although Kierkegaard does not explicitly
discuss the capacity of the female subject to give birth, he nevertheless
delineates a self that is continually transforming, relationally configured,
and which is also born immature. Taking dependence and also unequal
power structures as integral to the human condition, for Kierkegaard the
latent possibilities within the self are gradually altered and rendered
definite through a network of relationships in which self and other
repetitively interact and intertwine over an extended period of time. The
range of possible selves is gradually configured into full individuality.
However, this configuration can be stunted, and this is the problem that
Kierkegaard addresses in the upbuilding texts that he published under
his own name, as well as in Two Ages: A Literary Review.
In Kierkegaards pseudonymous writings the emphasis is more on the
differential modes of freedom and the discrepant types of reality lived by
those whose individuality has been configured into dissimilarity by the
networks of relationships and dependencies that have shaped them as
selves. Such selves are neither autonomous nor passively reactive. And it
is here that the question of what it is like to live as a woman becomes key.
It was these texts that I focussed on in The Phenomenal Woman (148
184), as I showed how Kierkegaards pseudonymous voices make
womanand the male/female relationshipemblematic of masculine
illusions about the autonomy of the ego. As such, Kierkegaards aesthetic
writings often prefigure uncannily some of the current discourse about
woman in the postmodern and poststructuralist traditions which
privilege so-called difference feminismdespite the fact that some of
Kierkegaards characters explicitly argue against that detestable rhetoric
about the emancipation of women (Kierkegaard 1987b, 311).
Feminist political theorists fall into two broad types: equality feminists
and difference feminists. The former do not see that the position of women
makes it necessary to question in any fundamental sense the ideals of
autonomy, justice or equality that have been inherited from the past.
Instead, registering womens historical and social disadvantages, they
Kierkegaard, the Phantom of the Public and the Sexual Politics of Crowds 29
Christine Battersby
argue for the necessity of addressing inequalities and unfairness, making

women more like or more equal to men. By contrast, so-called difference
feminists argue that women cant simply be added in to the political
equation; instead, the distinctiveness of the female subject position means
that the ideals of justice, autonomy and freedom need themselves to be
changed (Burchard 2009). And its here that the model of the self that
Kierkegaard outlines in his aesthetic writings is so politically rich.
Unlike Hegel, who makes the master/slave relationship integral to
self/other interactions, and hence also to political and historical
development, for Kierkegaard it is the seducer/seduced relationship that is
key. In the aesthetic texts, Kierkegaard offers an account of the self which
privileges vertical relationshipsrelationships between unequals
between the seducer and the seduced; the father and his daughter; the
father and his son. Both seducer and seduced are locked into a relationship
of mutual dependence, within which each believes herself or himself to be
free; but where that freedom is controlled and limited by the other person.
This does not mean, however, that freedom is simply an illusion. The
seduced woman is not raped, but manipulated, as Kierkegaard insistently
asserts: what matters to the seducer is precisely the fact that the victim
gives herself freely, and is not simply coerced. Thus the key question for a
political theorist who takes the seducer/seduced relationship as
emblematic of all human agency is not abstract issues of autonomy,
equality or fairness, but the question of how to distinguish between
abusive and non-abusive exercises of power.
Its the emphasis on relational, embodied identities, and ambiguous
degrees of freedom that makes the ontology found in Kierkegaards
aesthetic works such a useful resource for difference feminists.
However, in this essay I will not be focusing on the singularity of
woman as it is portrayed in the aesthetic works; instead I will concentrate
on the related, but nevertheless distinct, category of the single individual
which emerges in Kierkegaards acknowledged writings. In these texts,
Kierkegaards position is closer to that of the equality feminists. 3
Nevertheless, I will suggest these works are less politically rewarding
from a feminist point of vieweven though the sharp contrast that
Kierkegaard draws between the single individual and the crowd does
not fit the pattern of pro-feminine misogyny that Andreas Huyssen has
described in After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture,
Postmodernism (1986).
30
Chapter Two
Huyssen argues that in modernity, crowds are everywhere

distinguished by feminine characteristics (52). 4 In the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries, he claims, male fears of an engulfing femininity are
projected onto the metropolitan masses, as:
the haunting specter of a loss of power combines with fear of losing ones
fortified and stable ego boundaries. (Huyssen 1986, 53)
Mass culturein particular, serialized feuilleton novels and fictional

bestsellers and the like (ibid., 49)becomes associated with woman
while real, authentic culture remains the prerogative of men (47). For
Huyssen, Flaubert typifies this trend (4546). The latter fetishized and
identified with the idealised femininity of his heroine Madame Bovary
even to the extent of proclaiming Madame Bovary, cest moi (46).
However, Flaubert also manifested animosity toward real-life women,
participating in a pattern of imagination and of behaviour all too common
in modernism (45). On the one hand, Madame Bovary is positioned as a
reader of inferior literaturesubjective, emotional and passive; on the
other hand, Flaubert portrays himself as a writer of genuine, authentic
literatureobjective, ironic, and in control of his aesthetic means (46).
Huyssens more general and more political point is that male avantgarde and modernist writers systematically ignored the work of
comparable women artists, writers and critics whose work is dismissed as
popular and assigned to a feminised mass culture, with its threatening
and disorderly crowd. This produced an understanding of what is
modern that is pro-feminine, but that is premised on the exclusion of
female perspectives on contemporary historical debates. Overlooking what
actual women writers and artists say and create has, as a consequence,
overemphasised such features as the autonomy and purity of the art
work:
Only by fortifying its boundaries, by maintaining its purity and autonomy,
and by avoiding any contamination with mass culture and with the
signifying systems of everyday life can the art work maintain its adversary
stance: adversary to the bourgeois culture of everyday life as well as
adversary to mass culture and entertainment which are seen as the primary
forms of bourgeois cultural articulation. (Huyssen 1986, 54)
Christine Battersby
Huyssen supports this analysis by reference to Sartres treatment of

Flaubert in The Family Idiot: the 197172 work of philosophical
biography in which Sartre develops the category of the singular
universal to describe the individual whose life is oracular in the way it
reflects the life of the epochthus, developing further the concept that he
first used in writing about Kierkegaard in 1964 (McBride 1995).
Elsewhere (Battersby 1994) I have argued that it is because Simone de
Beauvoir internalises Sartres notion of the singular universalwith its
links to male patterns of reasoning and of expressionthat she asserts I
am not a philosopher, but a literary writer; Sartre is the philosopher
(Simons 1989, 13).
In my own philosophical writings I have attempted to use the
singularity of the female subject position to map out a kind of singular
universal; and one that is linked to the female subject-position that Sartre
himself does not register and that Beauvoir notices, but seems unable to
validate (Battersby 2011). But as will become clearer later on in this essay,
it is Kierkegaard himself, rather than Sartre or Beauvoir, whom I find
helpful with respect to this paradoxical ideal. And here I should briefly
explain that by the terms male and female I understand ways of
categorising life forms, based on specific bodily and morphological
features. In the case of humans, this categorisation is usually ascribed at
birth, but can be sometimes altered later, after sex change operations,
hormonal supplements and the like. By contrast, genderbeing
feminine or masculinerefers to behavioural, psychological and
social attributes that are culturally more associated with one sex, rather
than the other. Ways of marking both sex and gender differences change
across time and also across cultures, as well as varying amongst subgroupings of particular cultures.5 However, there is no necessary link
between being feminine and being female, or being masculine and
being male.
Those who know my Gender and Genius (Battersby 1989) will also
know that I think Huyssen has correctly identified the problems of an antifemale modernism that does, nevertheless, promote the femininity of male
writers, artists and other male geniuses as the ideal. So with Huyssens
trenchantand, I would argue, largely correctanalysis in mind, I now
want to turn to Kierkegaards own extraordinarily insightful analysis of
the crowd, and see to what extent it fits in with the anti-female (but profeminine) syndrome that Huyssen has identified in relation to both the
32
Chapter Two
crowd and to popular female writers. Two Ages: A Literary Review is

perhaps Kierkegaards most explicitly political work, but it is one that is
written in the form of a literary critique and analysis of Thomasine
Gyllembourgs last novel Two Ages which appeared in 1845 when the
author was aged 72. The novel was published simply under the
nomenclature By the Author of A Story of Everyday Life: referring to
one of Gyllembourgs previous, best-selling, novellas which Kierkegaard
had written about as a student. 6 Kierkegaard refers to Gyllembourg using
male pronouns throughout his review. However, although the introduction
to the standard English translation states that Kierkegaard did not know
the identity of the author (Kierkegaard 1978b, vii), other evidence
suggests that by the time Two Ages was published, the identity of the
author of the novel was an open secretand one that Kierkegaard would
certainly have known, given his links with the literary salon linked to
Gyllembourg and her son (Kirmmse 1990, 79, 139; Hannay 2001, 108;
Nun 2003, 286 n.36).
Given Huyssens analysis, it is thus notable that Kierkegaard once
again provides a counter-example to a dominant trend, insofar as he is
taking the writings of a woman author seriously, and is privileging a
female perspective as he develops his own critique of the public and
the present age. Thus, whereas Kierkegaards pseudonymous aesthetic
writings were often about woman and directed towards a hypothetical
female reader (his jilted ex-fiance, Regine), here he aligns himself with
an actual female author as he develops a corrosive (but never explicitly
stated) attack on a hidden and implied male reader: the novelists son. In
this, Kierkegaards first non-religious work to be written in a nonpseudonymous voice since his doctoral dissertation, On the Concept of
Irony in 1841, Kierkegaard deploys irony to great effect insofar as he is
utilising the writings of the elderly Thomasine Gyllembourgwho has an
interesting revolutionary pastagainst those of her son: the Hegelian and
far more academic Johan Ludvig Heiberg who had himself offered an
analysis of modernity in his 1833 work entitled On the Significance of
Philosophy to the Present Age, and who had offered a defence of the
notion of the public in a series of essays called On the Theatre, published
in 1840.
Heiberg declares that all art, poetry and religion sprang forth and
also gain their whole meaning from philosophy (cited in Kirmmse 1990,
144). As such, the responses of the public are to be trusted, as long as
Christine Battersby
that public is an organic unity which remains true to its origins and is not
corrupted by mediocre reviewers (ibid., 157). As Heiberg puts it in his
1840 essays, there is a distinction to be made between the good public
with its infallible responses, and the bad public which has been
corrupted by the press:
The good public is not, as the bad, an atomistic juxtaposition of the most
different sorts of individuals who are all, nevertheless, equal in rights,
but is an aristocracy of those who do have rights, whose tutelage is
accepted by those who do not have rights, who have not attained the age of
majority, and who then cultivate themselves until they attain the same sort
of mastery, instead of instantly and immediately asserting their atom of
opinion. (cited in Kirmmse 1990, 157)
The emphasis that Heiberg places on the good publicand his

privilege of philosophy in grounding an idealised public sphere of critical
responseis sharply different from the analysis of the public that we
find in Kierkegaards own analysis of Two Ages, as we will see. But
Heiberg was announced as the editor of the anonymous novel, and it
was to Heiberg that Kierkegaard sent two copies of Two Ages: A Literary
Review: one for Heiberg himself and one for the unnamed author
(Heibergs mother) who shared a house with her son in what was the
leading Copenhagen literary salon of the day. No longer pseudonymous
himself, Kierkegaard thus still practises a type of indirect communication
as he plays with the anonymity of the mother as a way of indirectly
addressingand answeringher son. The irony is made all the deeper in
that it is not only Thomasine Gyllembourgs novelistic output, but also her
life, that can be construed as providing the model for The Revolutionary
Age that is counterposed to that of The Present Age in both
Kierkegaards analysis and also the novel itself. Thus, Gyllembourgs own
novel, Two Ages, is not straightforwardly autobiographical, but
nevertheless repeatsto use one of Kierkegaards own favourite words
many of the passions and tensions in the novelists life.
Thomasine Gyllembourg (a best selling author and writer of twenty
five novels or novellas, four plays and a literary testament) became a bestselling author late in her life: at age 53, after her son commissioned her to
write a story for the weekly journal that he published. Infused with moral
realism and also with the romantic ideals of Rousseau, her stories reflect
her own complex life history. This involved being married young (age 16)
34
Chapter Two
to a much older man, Peter Andreas Heiberg, who was subsequently

banished from Denmark in 1799 because of his political writing; a divorce
in 1801 that she initiated in order to marry her lovera Swedish Baron
who had been exiled from Sweden for his involvement in the murder of
the tyrannical Swedish King Gustav IIIand a long period of widowhood
which included sharing a house with her son and his wife, Johanne Luise
Heiberg, one of Denmarks most celebrated actresses and the focus of
Kierkegaards 1848 essay, The Crisis and a Crisis in the Life of an Actress
(Kirmmse 1990, 266; Holk and Hansen 2004).
Kierkegaards Two Ages: A Literary Review follows the structure of
Gyllembourgs novel, which contraposes the psychology of those who
lived in The Revolutionary Agethe 1790s and 1800s (in other words,
the generation of the mother)with the prosaic present of the 1840s
(the generation of her Hegelian son). The Present Age, in Kierkegaards
analysis, is characterised by an excess of reflection, indecision and an
inability to act. In the novel, names are repeated across generations,
adding to the difficulties of following Kierkegaards summary of the dense
network of family relationships, lovers, sons and generational
intertwinings. On the surface, Kierkegaards review reads like a paeon of
praise to the anonymous author for reflecting in a kind of mimetic way the
kind of action, willing and passionate intensities that are no longer
available to the present age. At a deeper level, however, Kierkegaards
review offers a caustic critique of the account of the present age proffered
by Gyllembourgs son, Johan Ludvig Heiberg (Kirmmse 1990, 26478).
By pretending not to know the author of the novel and also siding with the
mothers generation against that the son, Kierkegaard effectively blocks
off any retort that the sonand perhaps also the mothermight have
wished to offer as a defence against Kierkegaards corrosive analysis of
the modern public whose tastes Johan Heiberg purported to lead, and
who had catapulted his mother to literary fame.
According to Kierkegaard, an entirely new notion of the public has
emerged in the present age. This mirage or phantom surfaces first in
modernity and involves a monstrous abstraction (Kierkegaard 1978b,
90). This public is a kind of non-existent and abstract community that
alienates individuals from each other through a process of levelling
that treats each human being as simply a number or a unit.
Christine Battersby
Only where there is no strong communal life to give substance to the
concretion will the press create this abstraction the public. (ibid., 91)
There is nothing organicas Heiberg had asserted (Kirmmse 1990,

157)about the public in this modern sense; instead, it is a monstrous
nonentity which is claimed to be a whole, but which is made up of
unsubstantial individuals who never come together to act in concert
and who never could come togetherbecause it cannot even have so
much as a single representative (Kierkegaard 1978b, 91).
Does Kierkegaard think of this modern public in gendered terms, as
Huyssens analysis might lead us to expect? The answer to this question is
by no means straightforward. Curiously, given that Kierkegaard explicitly
denies that the public existed in ancient times (ibid.), he uses the figure
of an ancient Roman Emperor to personify this phantom:
If I were to imagine this public as a personI most likely would think of
one of the Roman emperors, an imposing, well-fed figure suffering from
boredom and therefore craving only the sensate titillation of laughter.
(Kierkegaard 1978b, 94)
Here Kierkegaard associates the public with a degenerateand

definitely maletyrant, who is more sluggish than he is evil, but who is
also carelessly cruel and domineering in his tastes for sensuality and for
amusement (ibid.). On the other hand, of the characters in Thomasine
Gyllembourgs novel, it is the second Mrs Walleri.e. the Mrs Waller of
the second generationwhom Kierkegaard describes as embodying the
superficiality of the present age (ibid., 55).
The second Mrs Waller displays a lack of character; an unstable
emptiness, an unstable flurry of busyness and an exhibitionist
maternalism (54). She is ostentatious, and is a plated past-mistress at
being anybody and everybody (53). Using the (somewhat unconvincing)
excuse that it is the novel (and not he himself) that depicts the second Mrs
Waller in this way, Kierkegaard makes a tight link between Mrs Wallers
character and our present age, which pontificates and thereby does
disservice to every work of art (55), before explicitly remarking on the
way in which it is her feminine figure which represents the distinctive
superficiality of the present which annuls the distinction between
hiddenness and revelation (55, 102). Kierkegaard thus uses a particular
36
Chapter Two
type of modern woman to represent the crowd and the new type of
public which hovers between the spheres of the fully private and
individual, on the one hand, and that type of (lost) community that is
organic (the Greek city-state or polis). Deploying a twenty-first century
acronym, one might say that the second Mrs Waller is a WYSIWYG
phenomenon: what you see is what you get. Because modernity has not
allowed her to develop fully as an individual, theres no hidden
individuality that is waiting to be revealed.
As well as linking the feminine to tawdry surfaces, Kierkegaard also
connects women to the kind of chatter that prevents individuality from
developing. This is evident in a short piece entitled For the Dedication to
That Single Individual which Kierkegaard worked on during 1846 and
1847, and which was published posthumously as an appendix to The Point
of View for My Work as an Author. Here, on the one hand, Kierkegaard
draws a contrast between the single individual and the crowd in ways
that seem gender neutral, asserting in a footnote that
crowd is number, the numerical; a number of aristocrats, millionaires,
important dignitaries, etc.as soon as the numerical is operative, it is
crowd, the crowd. (Kierkegaard 1998b, 107n)
On the other hand, in the text itself Kierkegaard gives as his example
of a crowd a group of three or four gossiping women who, conscious that
they were a crowd, dared put forward an untruth, hoping that no one
could definitely say who it was that started the rumour (ibid., 107). This
group of gossiping women is contrasted with the individual Barbarian
soldiers who, in Plutarchs Lives, found themselves unable to follow the
orders to kill Caius Marius (ibid.). This occurred when Caius confronted
the soldiers with his gaze, and challenged them loudly, Man dost thou
dare to slay Caius Marius? (ibid., 319, n.8, editorial note).
This example shows clearly the distinction that Kierkegaard is drawing
between the crowd, which functions as an anonymous plurality, and the
single individual who stands in a network of relationships with other
fully individualised selves. Although at an abstract level Kierkegaard
allows both women and men equal status as individuals, he also gives in to
the temptation to use women to emblematise those humans who lack full
individuality and who are simply the crowd. As such, it might be argued
that some elements of misogyny do remain in Kierkegaards approach
Christine Battersby
even though Kierkegaard clearly also does not fit with the type of antifemale modernism that Huyssen detects in later avant-garde male writers
who pay no attention to real-life women writers, and instead fetishize the
autonomous (male) self and also an overly purified and formal
understanding of art.
Thus, Kierkegaard reads and engages with the popular fiction of
Thomasine Gyllembourgand even gives it philosophical weight. In his
review, he uses emblematic female figuressuch as the figures of
Claudine and Mariane from Gyllembourgs novelto stand for what
Sartre would have called (following Kierkegaard) the singular
universal.7 These two women remain individuals and emblematise
faithfulness, whether or not the times are favourable to romantic love (as is
the case with Claudine who belongs to the age of revolution) or are more
reflective and non-individualistic (as is the case with Mariane who lives
only in the present age). However, what is also clear is that for
Kierkegaard a woman does not stand in the same relation to individuality
as does a man. As such, she is not oracular in the Sartrean sense: she
does not represent all individuals who exist in a given epoch. It is,
however, the case that the modern woman resembles the modern man for
Kierkegaard, insofar as each has a problem in gaining any substantive
individuality. Levelling and the crowd always threaten.
Two Ages: A Literary Review reworksrepeatsmany of the
themes of Kierkegaards pseudonymous Repetition (1843); but in
Repetition the pseudonymous author, Constantin Constantius, explains that
we are not born as individuals; instead, individuality is something that can
emerge over the course of a lifeif we can only get in a productive
relationship with our selves and with others:
the individual is not an actual shape but a shadow, or, more correctly, the
actual shape is invisibly present and therefore is not satisfied to cast one
shadow, but the individual has a variety of shadows, all of which resemble
him and which momentarily have equal status as being himself. As yet the
personality is not discerned, and its energy is betokened only in the passion
of possibility, for the same thing happens in the spiritual life as with many
plantsthe main shoot comes last. (Kierkegaard 1983, 154)
Constantius used the metaphor of an alien wind to explain the gradual

emergence of individuality through a process of repeated movements and
habits. The alien wind gradually takes on an identityas a west (or north,
38
Chapter Two
or south or east wind)as it repetitively journeys across the landscape that

is itself configured and shaped by the winds own power. The wind has no
privileged knowledge about its own emergent identity. The wind:
produced now a shriek almost startling to itself, then a hollow roar from
which it itself fled, then a moan, the source of which it itself did not know,
then from the abyss of anxiety a sigh so deep that the wind itself grew
frightened. (Kierkegaard 1983, 155)
The wind is not the lone shaper of itself, but neither does the landscape
alone determine the identity of the wind. Instead, the identities of the wind
and of the landscape are mutually interdependent. The landscape is itself
radically transformedinto a desert, a canyon or a gentle valeas the
alien wind adapts to, and swerves round, the landscape features that are
configured as obstacles or, alternatively, as channels that intensify its
power.
In Two Ages: A Literary Review, Kierkegaard returns to the wind
metaphor when he suggests that what happens in the case of the
modernity, and when levelling and chatter dominate, is that the
individuals relationship with his or her self is stunted, so that full
individuality fails to appear. Now, writing in his own voice, Kierkegaard
insists that levelling is like a tradewind that consumes everything
(Kierkegaard 1978b, 87). It is like the sharp Northeastera wind that
cuts through one and all, in identical ways:
the abstraction of leveling is a relation that forms no personal, intimate
relation to any individual, but only the principle of abstraction, which is the
same for all. (ibid., 88)
As such:
No particular individual (the eminent personage by reason of excellence
and the dialectic of fate) will be able to halt the abstraction of leveling, for
it is a negatively superior force, and the age of heroes is past. (ibid., 87)
No singular or heroic individual can stand out against this spontaneous

combustion of the human race (ibid.). In modernity the individual
remains under-configured, and simply remains at the level of the crowd.
Christine Battersby
However, as Kierkegaard also indicates, the inability of the hero to

block the tradewind of levelling that marks the present age does not
prevent a altogether different kind of single individual from emerging.
As he explicitly remarks in the draft for The Point of View, although the
concept of the single individual was there in every one of the
pseudonymous works, in the aesthetic works it meant a single individual
in the eminent sense (Kierkegaard 1998b, 276). By contrast, when the
phrase single individual appears in the religious works, it signifies what
every human being is (ibid.). Kierkegaard then explains how his
technique in his religious texts is to switch between both meanings of the
phrase in quick succession, hoping thereby to seduce those who desire to
be the single individual of the pseudonyms, only to repel them by the
thought of the single individual as used in the upbuilding texts.
In the latter texts, the single individual is the category through which,
in a religious sense, the age, history, the human race must go (118, italics
in the original), and Kierkegaard also insists that one becomes a single
individual in this second sense only through finding a way to act once it
has been realised that the present age is an age of disintegration (119).
To return to the tradewind metaphor, we might say that, for Kierkegaard,
the bitter, north-easterly tradewind of modernity will render the self
chaotic and unformed, unless an adequate counteractive force can be
found. Kierkegaard is clear that no isolated individual is strong enough to
resist levelling, but resistance also cannot come via the political. Instead,
for Kierkegaard, the necessary strength will come from awakening
inwardness and also from fostering composure. As Kierkegaard puts
it, in an unpublished note on the single individual written in 1848:
never will this category, the single individual, rightly applied, cause
damage to the established order. Used in times of tranquillity, its purpose
will be to awaken inwardness to heightened life in the established order
without changing anything in the externals. In times of commotion, its
purpose will be to support the established order more directly by leading
the single individual to be indifferent to external change and thus to
support the established order. Earthly reward, power, honor, and the like
can never be involved in the proper application, because what is rewarded
in the world is, of course, only changes and working for changes in
externalsinwardness does not interest the world. (Kierkegaard 1998b,
280).
40
Chapter Two
In the second sense of being a single individualand of becoming in

actuality what every human being iswhat is required, according to
Kierkegaard, is a one-to-one relation with God and with others. It is this
non-trivial relationship with others that will deepen ones own relation
with oneself, and enable one be that type of single individual who has
the strength not to join in with the crowd which mocks and spits at Jesus
as he walks towards the Hill of Calvary (Kierkegaard 1997a, 259). Its
perhaps with this dreadful episode (ibid.) in mind that Kierkegaard
indicates that this strong, but nevertheless not heroic, single individual is
to be found in the congregation, which above all must not be confused
with what politically can have validity: the public, the crowd, the
numerical, etc. (Kierkegaard 1998b, 10 n., and see 26566). Since
Kierkegaard also states that unconditionally every human being, which
one indeed is, can be, yes, should bethe single individual (ibid., 10), it
would thus once again seem that being a single individual in the second
sense isat least in theorygender neutral. Unfortunately, however, as
we have also observed, it is the gossiping women and also the WYSIWYG
wife who come to stand for the conformity and lack of inwardness of the
crowd.
Although Kierkegaard evidently admired the housewife (Hustru)
commenting explicitly in a draft of Either/Or on the richness of this term
which links the married woman to faithfulness to both husband and
home (Kierkegaard 1987b, 375)he also seems to have regarded
marriage as a perilous state. The contrast between the girl (who exists in
the infinite, outside time, as an object of elusive desire) and the married
woman (who is rendered temporal via marriage) was also a feature of
some of the aesthetic works (Kierkegaard 1988, 80, and see 4023; 1987b,
30313). In the acknowledged works we discover that too many of the
women who have become temporal and found a place in historical time
are simply members of the crowd and, as such, at odds with
Kierkegaards own religious, subjective and, presumably, also social
ideals.
If Kierkegaards analysis is right then, politically speaking, he needs to
show us how to find a counter to the phantom of the public which does
in modernity, vampire-like, suck the potential for individuality out of the
self. Or, at the very least, it would be helpful to indicate how the single
individual might be nurtured politically and socially, so that it can
become a locus for group change. However, as we have seen,
Christine Battersby
Kierkegaards 1848 note insists that this notion can never cause damage
to the social order (Kierkegaard 1998b, 280); and the published text of
On My Work emphasises that we must not confuse his writings about the
crowd and the public with what politically can have validity (ibid.,
10 n.). As such, its clear that the category of the single individual that
emerges in Kierkegaards religious works is not simply apolitical, it is
anti-political. Its not simply the case that Kierkegaard puts forward an
ideal of gender neutralityat least at a spiritual levelbut then betrays
this ideal insofar as modern housewives tend to be associated with
spiritual failure. The problem is rather that Kierkegaard blocks out any
attempt to locate his key notions of freedom, individuality or community
either within civil society or within the state.
This means that it is rather more difficult to employ Kierkegaards
acknowledged writings as a basis for political philosophy than is the case
with respect to the aesthetic writings. And this is deeply ironic, since in the
latter any notion of gender equality is absenteven as an ideal. As one of
Kierkegaards charactersVictor Eremitaexplicitly claims:
To be a woman is something so special, so mixed, so compounded that
there are no predicates to describe it, and the many predicates, if they were
used, contradict one another in a manner only a woman can tolerate,
indeed, even worse, can relish. (Kierkegaard 1988, 56)
In these pseudonymous writings, this singular entity that is woman

who is simultaneously treated as both more than and also less than man
is strategically elevated to a new kind of paradigm: that of a relational self
who is not autonomous, but whose freedom is exercised as she or he lives
through and with dependence on other human beings and also on God.
Such a freedom is modelled not on domination and force (in the manner of
Hegels master/slave dialectics), but on indefinite degrees of freedom
(analogous to that of the seduced woman in the seducer/seduced
relationship).
To take on board the insight that human existence always involves
being-with and existing alongside others makes it necessary to re-imagine
the grounding principles of political theoryand along much the same
lines as Iris Marion Young (1990, 3) who argued that a conception of
justice should begin with the concepts of domination and oppression. For
Young (2006, 127), the parameters of power, privilege, interest, and
42
Chapter Two
collective ability always impact on the differential responsibility that

agents have for their actions. Influenced both by difference feminism and
by phenomenology, Young criticised a narrow, liability model of
responsibility, and began to develop instead a social connection model of
responsibility (1023). She maintained that, in addition to the guilty/not
guilty model of justice that our law courts require, we also needand in
fact already work witha looser model of responsibility which considers
how one fits in with social groupings which are likely to make others
vulnerable to harm (122). For Young, in other words, we are liable insofar
as we simply go along with the crowd, if that crowd or institution does
not respect the vulnerabilities of others.
For Young (123), responsibility derived from social connection, then,
is ultimately political responsibility, and elsewhere (2000) she explores
those communal groupings of the State, civic associations and the
democratic social sphere that are enabling to the development of
individuality, as well as those that are also potentially disabling. For
Young, aligning with others and acting collectively as a political or social
collective can also produce positive social and personal change. And this
means that although Youngs enterprise for re-imagining justice and
responsibility is broadly in line with some of the insights to be found in
Kierkegaards aesthetic writings, she is far less in tune with the
Kierkegaard of Two Ages and the religious writings since in the latter, as
we have seen, the crowd and the modern public are always and only
negatively portrayed.
Although Kierkegaard argues that it is blameworthy to abrogate
individuality by allowing oneself to simply be a member of the crowd,
he does not go on to make the political move which would outline how
resistance is to be accomplished. This is left as a task for others: for
Hannah Arendt, for example, who does, in effect, build on Kierkegaards
account of the phantom of the public to delineate her own (very
problematic) concept of the social which she portrays as inadequate in
respect to both the public and the private spheres (Arendt 1989, 3847;
Bernasconi 1996).
Arendt was profoundly influenced by Kierkegaard (Sjursen 2003).
However, she is also ultimately dismissive of his own non-worldly,
inward-directed approach to agency and to the political (Arendt 1989,
313 n.76). And in this respect I am inclined to agree with her.
Kierkegaards aesthetic writings are rich and suggestive for political
Christine Battersby
theorists, but his acknowledged texts are evasive insofar as the political
issues are concerned. Thus, whilst its true that Kierkegaard does provide a
valuable counter to models of the political that fail to register dependency
and the co-dependencies of embodied selves, he ultimately fails to address
what for me has become the key ethical and political questions of the new
present age which is, indeed, also a new media ageand one which
he pre-visioned with uncanny accuracy. Kierkegaard does not help me to
distinguish between abusive and non-abusive exercises of power, and he
also does not address the question of how individuality (or, indeed, also
the political) can flourish in a world in which the phantom of the public
islike poweralways and everywhere pervasive.
44
Chapter Two
Notes
1. In The Point of View Kierkegaard does to some extent undermine the distinction
between the aesthetic and the religious works when he insistently plays with
the notion that his authorship was from the start religious. Whether this is
retrospective justification or an accurate report, it nevertheless does not detract
from the distinction between those pseudonymous textsthe aesthetic
writingswhich address religious themes indirectly (if at all) and the owned
writings which were produced, often contemporaneously, and which tackled
religious themes in a more polemical and direct way. Two Ages belongs with a
handful of owned texts which tackle aesthetic themes.
2. Hereafter shortened to Two Ages: A Literary Review in order to distinguish it
from Thomasine Gyllembourgs novel, Two Ages, which I also discuss.
3. I am not suggesting that all disagreements between feminists who engage with
Kierkegaards politics and ethics reduce to this single issue. Thus, for example,
Assiter (2009 and 2011a) draws on difference feminism, whilst also reaching some
strikingly different conclusions about the importance of Kierkegaards religious
writings for political thought.
4. Huyssen is quoting Gustave Le Bons classic and influential study of The
Crowd (La Psychologie des Foules, 1895) to make his point.
5. That the ways of marking the boundaries between male and female humans
vary, and are also in the process of changing now in Western cultures, is shown by
recent discussion of the case of Thomas Beatie, the so-called pregnant man.
Beatie, who is to all outward appearances a male, was born female and had his sex
reassigned after puberty. He retained his female reproductive organs, and has now
given birth to three children. He counts legally as a male in the two US States
where he has recently lived (Oregon and Arizona), but this attribution has attracted
much controversy, as both hostile and approving online comments on the ongoing
media stories make clear (see Roberts 2011; Battersby 2011).
6. In his reflections on Hans Christian Andersens novel Only a Fiddler, published
whilst he was a student in 1838 (see Kierkegaard 1978b, viiiix, 1213, 12328).
7. On this point, see Assiter (2011a). Assiter engages with my own reading of
Kierkegaard in The Phenomenal Woman, but privileges Kierkegaards religious
view of the person in a way I do not. She is also more individualistic in terms of
the way she summarises both the novel and Kierkegaards review, emphasising the
role of Claudine (the fictional surrogate for Thomasine Gyllembourg herself),
rather than that of Mariane (who belongs physically, but not spiritually, to the
present age). Assiter comments in some detail on Kierkegaards Two Ages: A
Literary Review, as well as on an earlier, unpublished draft of this paper.
CHAPTER THREE
LOVE FOR NEIGHBOURS:
USING KIERKEGAARD TO RESPOND TO IEK
ALISON ASSITER
There are two themes in ieks work In Defence of Lost Causes
(2009) to which I would like, in this paper, to offer a response. The first is
his reference to the sublime in relation to Foucaults positive commentary,
late in his life, on the Iranian revolution of 1979. I am sure that one reason
for my interest in this is my deep and abiding hope that the present
struggles inside Iran might lead to some fundamentally altered and
preferable political system for the Iranian people. 1 For iek (2009, 115),
the revolutionary moment of 1979 represented Foucault doing the right
thing for the wrong reason. In Foucaults view, like that of Kant on the
French Revolution in his Conflict of Faculties (Kant 1992), the
significance of the Iranian revolution lay at least in part, in the way in
which it presented for the western political observer, a new form of
spiritualised political collective (iek 2009, 108). In its turn, for iek
reading Foucault, the actors in the drama were perhaps already acting for
an observer: the moment of revolution is an act of freedom which
momentarily suspends the nexus of historical causality, that is, in revolt
the noumenal dimension transpires (109). iek goes on to argue that the
noumenal paradoxically coincides with its oppositethe revolution was
purely a surface, merely a phenomenal event. iek writes (110) that what
was significant about 1979 in Iranthe moment of the revolutionwas
that it was the event of a becoming people. Foucault himself compared
the myth of a political collective to the Kantian God or Soul. He points out
that, as it is for Kant, the appearing of the sublime is linked with horror.
As Foucault wrote:
at this stage, the most important and the most atrocious minglethe
extraordinary hope of remaking Islam into a great living civilisation and
various forms of virulent xenophobia (cited in iek 2009, 112)
In other words, the Iranian revolution was somehow unique in that, in the
46
Chapter Three
moment, it presaged the hope of some genuinely alternative political form

neither conventional liberal democracy nor any other known state
formation.2
For iek, in the moment of revolution, the Iranian people were both
acting collectively as a people and, they were, in some significant sense,
properly free; their actions were not determined. This view of freedom
might not fully satisfy those libertarians for whom free acts, to be such,
must literally be causa sui. 3 Even if it did not demonstrate a truly
libertarian notion of freedom, one could argue that the revolution, at its
inception, was an act that broke with conventional causal patterns. It was
not an act that clearly flowed from a regularity of connection between
cause and effect (see Hume 1975). The Iranian revolution, in the moment
of revolution, perhaps also constituted the ultimate political act, the
ultimate act of a people acting as a collective, as a universal.4
I would like to turn now to ieks critical comments (2009, 165-66)
about loving ones neighbour: the second theme of the paper. iek
refers to Lacans description of the neighbour as the Thingthe
inhuman core (ibid., 165) of the neighbour lurking behind every human
face. Freud and Lacan, iek argues, are not only making the point that
the neighbour invariably excludes some people. They are making, he
argues, the stronger point that the neighbour is incompatible with the
universality of ethicsthere is an inhuman dimension of the neighbour.
Neighbourliness, in his view, goes hand in hand with a feigned dimension
of civility. Underlying the surface politeness is violence and hatred. At the
heart, the neighbour has an inhuman core.
iek refers also to Simon Critchleys Infinitely Demanding (2008) as
expressing a point of view with which he radically disagrees. Following
Levinas, Critchley argues that the subject is constituted by the ethical call,
engendered by the experience of injustice and wrongdoing. The subject
emerges as a traumatic reaction to the helpless suffering of the other. The
paradox of the self is that the demand of the other is one that the subject
can never meet unless it becomes God; since it cannot, it becomes the
others hostage.
I am the others hostage, taken by them and prepared to substitute myself
for any suffering and humiliation that they may undergo. (Critchley 2008,
61)
Love for Neighbours?

Alison Assiter
47
But instead of reverting to anguish, the subject is able, through humour, to

put itself at a distance from its guilt.5
iek challenges Critchleys interpretation of Lacan, suggesting that
there is a self underlying the process of subjectification or there would be
nothing to engage in this process. Following Lacan, however, he identifies
this core self with the Freudian death drive. There is, for him, an infinity
at the core of the self which comprises a Lacanian Real (see Lacan
1977) identified with the death drive. The limit of the idea of loving
ones neighbour is the Nazi thug: Can we imagine inviting a Nazi thug to
tell us his story? (iek 2009, 12)6 This notion of the self is also outlined
by iek in his work The Parallax View (2006), where he reads
Kierkegaard as articulating:
the most radical authentic core of being-human,.. as a concrete practicoethical engagement and/or choice which precedes (and grounds) every
theory. (ieks italics, 2006, 75)
He argues that it was Kant who laid the groundwork for what he calls antiphilosophy, which, for him, includes the work of Kierkegaard. Kant, he
claims, laid this groundwork through asserting the primacy of practical
over theoretical reason (iek 2006).
It is important to note that iek recognises that Kierkegaard is
Hegelian insofar as he recognises that human beings are ontologically
interconnected in a dynamic process. iek also notes that God, for
Kierkegaard, is not a substance, but rather, is beyond the order of Being
(iek 2006, 79). Although I do not have the space to argue the point here,
in my view iek makes Kierkegaard out to be too much of a Fichtean in
his prioritising of practical reason. I argue elsewhere (Assiter 2012; see
also Kosch 2006 for evidence of the influence of Schelling on
Kierkegaard) that an important predecessor in the German Idealist
tradition is Schelling, and, following Iain Grant (2006), I read Schelling
naturalistically. For Schelling, as for his pantheist predecessor Spinoza,
the Absolute is Nature; nature can be articulated both dynamically and as a
substance. Finite rational beings, in this picture, are determinations of this
absolutethey evolve dynamically. Kierkegaard quotes Schelling fairly
frequently in The Concept of Anxiety and there are references, throughout
his work, to the human being as a dynamic natural being (see Assiter,
forthcoming 2012 for this evidence).
48
Chapter Three
I would like, in this paper, to respond to ieks appropriation of

Foucault in two ways. Firstly, it seems to me that iek, despite his
critique of Kant, remains within a Kantian frame which shapes his
thinking. It seems to me that there is, in Kierkegaard, both a critique of
this Kantian view and an interpretation of the notion of loving ones
neighbour that can overcome the limitations iek finds in it. Indeed I
will argue in this paper that Kierkegaards notion of loving a neighbour
has resonances of the sublime in precisely the sense iek applauds in
Foucaults appropriation of the 1979 Iranian revolution. It offers a moment
of freedom, in a stronger sense than that offered standardly by
compatibilists between freedom and determinism and indeed than that
offered by Hegel; it represents, in a sense I will outline, a universal
subject; it depicts the overcoming of fear or anxiety and it, finally,
characterises a subject somehow caught between its finitude and its
apprehension of infinity.
The Sublime
First, however, I would like to clarify what might be meant by the
sublime here. It is a concept that is widely used, particularly amongst
those sympathetic to post Kantian European philosophy. It is indeed a
concept that is used by Kierkegaard himself (or by his pseudonyms):
indeed, in Fear and Trembling, Johannes de Silentio refers to the
sublimity of Abrahams proposed sacrifice of Isaac (1985a, 70).7
For Kant, in The Critique of Judgment (1987) the sublime is the
precise point where appearances resist being formed into one beautiful
representation. According to him, when we make judgements about the
sublime in nature, we are involved in a kind of astonishment bordering on
terror. The observer, however, does not experience actual fear (1987, 261).
The sublime, for Kant, arouses fear but it also presupposes the capacity to
attempt to overcome this terror. The mind is moved in response to the
sublime; we experience fear mixed and modified by reason. We are
educated to transcend fear. The sublime is the point where the phenomenal
subject, governed by the category of universal causation, in some way
meets the noumenal self, which acts purely autonomously. iek himself
writes in The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989, 203), using a Lacanian

Alison Assiter
49
reading, that the sublime is an object raised to the level of an impossible

thing. I would like, in the final section of the paper, to return to this and
to the contrasting Lacanian notion of the sublime. I argue in two other
places that Kierkegaard both deploys this notion and moves beyond it in
so far as he both naturalises the self and the Absolute or God. This
Absolute indeed lies beyond the frame of the possible experience of finite
limited beings, as it does for Kant, but this does not mean that it cannot
also be natural (see, for the elaboration of this argument, Assiter 2011b,
2012).
Anxiety
I will begin this section of the paper by describing Kierkegaards, or
sometimes his pseudonyms, accounts of behaviours or characteristics that
lead the subject into anxiety. This notion must be understood both in an
ontological and a psychological manner. One well-known Kierkegaardian
form of behaviour leading to anxiety is the various depictions of the
aesthetic approach to life, mainly in Either-Or I (1987a) although some
of these points also appear elsewhere. As Adorno has pointed out, there
are several senses of the aesthetic in Kierkegaard. One sense of the
expression, which does appear in Either-Or is simply the concern with
works of art. This sense appears partly in the essay on Don Juan and
elsewhere (see Adorno 1999, 14). But the aesthetic approach is also
characterised by the pursuit of pleasure; by immediacy; by living in the
moment.
The aesthetical in a man is that by which he is immediately what he is; the
ethical is that whereby he becomes what he becomes. (Kierkegaard 1987a,
182)
One character who exemplifies the aesthetic approach to life is the

intellectual seducer who devotes his life to making every instant unique
and unrepeatable. But the attempt, on the part of this character, to
complete gratification, leads to anxiety and desperation, since he is never
able to experience his emotions to the degree to which he would like. He is
unable really to live in the moment. It might seem that Don Juan could
best be interpreted as ballet; at the same time, the ballet presents almost
50
Chapter Three
nothing but the torments of despair (ibid., 106).

There are various ways in which Kierkegaard critiques the aesthetic
approach to life. One critique he might be offering, as hinted above, is that
the goals of the aesthete are impossible to realise. If the seducer is
involved wholly in the pursuit of pleasure, as is the case with Don Juan,
his exploits are really not possible at all (ibid., 163). Pleasurable goals of
this kind are not within the power of the aesthete, who therefore feels
despair when they are not attained.
But, as Michelle Kosch has pointed out (2006, 141-45), there could be
more limited aesthetic or pleasurable goals which are not at all
impossible to attain and which ought not therefore to lead to despair.
Perhaps therefore, another reading of what is wrong with the aesthetic
stage is that the goals themselves are inappropriate in some way. An
Aristotelian would rank pleasures into those that are morally appropriate
and those that are not. The pleasures of the aesthete, in this approach,
therefore, would be inappropriate and would lead to anxiety in some form.
One difficulty, however, pointed out once again by Kosch (2006) is
that if this was primarily what Kierkegaard believes to be wrong with
these kinds of goals, then it is difficult to see why he suggests that there
are other forms of behaviour that are not characterised by these kinds of
goals, that also lead to despair. (For Adorno, this amounts to a criticism of
Kierkegaard; the former remarks that the aesthete thinks remarkably like a
Christian.)
One form of political behaviour which is precisely analogous to the
aesthetic, in the respect that it leads to despair, is described in a late work
of Kierkegaards. Indeed the critique given by Kierkegaard of a form of
political life offers a parallel critique to that presented by iek of similar
forms of political behaviour. In Kierkegaards work entitled The Present
Age, or, as it is also known, A Literary Review, with the subtitle Two Ages,
A Novel by the Author of A Story of Everyday Life (1978b) Kierkegaard
writes about the social and the political. He does not seek to challenge the
political organisation of his society in any immediate way. He was a
monarchist and he did not advocate changing political institutions. But he
made a deeper point about the period in which he lived in Denmark. He
claimed that the age in which he lived was essentially poverty stricken
ethically and is essentially a bankrupt generation (1992, 546). He was
especially critical of the tendency in his period to use reflection to provide
clever ways of avoiding decision (ibid., 76). Just as the aesthetes goals

Alison Assiter
51
cannot be realised, thus leading to despair, so too is the period in which he

lived characterised similarly by despair.
The despair of the aesthete arises from the goals being impossible to
attain and by the bankruptcy of these very goals; the despair of the
individual, in so far as he is a political agent in Kierkegaards period in
Denmark, also arises from the bankruptcy of the goals of the collective
people. His people refrain from challenging the ethics underlying his own
political order. He is critical of what he calls the crowd and of the
herd. Both involve people simply going about their daily lives without
challenge.
His people are described as engaging in chatter. They form the
herd or the crowd which, he suggests, leads to a loss of individuality,
but individuality conceived in a very specific sense. Individuals are truly
individuals when they accept that they are ethical beings and when they
accept that their freedom leads to their having responsibilities. There are
some some, such as Grene (1959, 39) who claim that Kierkegaard rejects
any concept of community. In fact, Kierkegaards focus on the individual
is not at all at the expense of the community, but it is rather the active,
passionate, revolutionary individual who is valorised by Kierkegaard. This
individual is contrasted with the overly reflective, careful prudent
individual of his own Hegelian present age.
There are undoubtedly reservations about Hegels philosophy
expressed here, as there are, often in elliptical form, throughout
Kierkegaards corpus. Indeed, there is perhaps an ironic reference to Hegel
in the style of the work, which sees the stage of liberal democracy
surpassed by a social form Kierkegaard suggests is superior.
But Kierkegaard is specifically sceptical about the idea that freedom is
somehow expressed through the development of some ideal that shapes
itself through history. The Hegelian philosophy that he believes underlies
the ideology of his period leads to a form of political and ethical
quietism that is equivalent to despair.
One of the crucial elements, in other words, of these various
approaches to life that lead to despair, is, for Kierkegaard, their
determined character: the fact that each one of the acts, whether it is
engaged in collectively or individually, lacks a vital component of
freedom. Indeed it lacks precisely the element that iek believes Foucault
found in the Iranian revolution of 1979, that of being willed by the agent
or by the people collectively. Kierkegaard also valorises the notion of
52
Chapter Three
revolution in a precisely parallel sense to that of iek, in the following

passage:
When individuals (each one individually) are essentially and passionately
related to an idea and together are essentially related to the same idea, the
relation is optimal and normative. (Kierkegaard 1978b, 62)
In other words, Kierkegaards own age in Denmarkhis present age

is reactive; it is over-focussed on reflection as opposed to action. An
individual, for him, by contrast, is truly an individual in the revolutionary
age, the age of passion. In this age, individuals act, in the manner of a
swimmer who dives into the tossing waves.
These latter claims bear out the ontological dimension of
Kierkegaards thought herethe idea that anxiety is a core element of
freedom. Indeed, freedom, he argues in The Concept of Anxiety (see again
Assiter 2012) emerges out of a natural world that shares many features in
common with the world that includes rational beings.
The Ethical
If this is the case with the various forms of behaviour outlined above,
then is it not the case that what Kierkegaard characterises as ethical
behaviour might escape these limitations? But the ethical has its own
limitations for him. It seems to me, as has often been noted, 8 that it is
specifically a kind of Kantian ethics which Kierkegaard believes is
limited.
The autonomous individual of Kantian practical reason freely chooses
the moral law; he or she freely chooses to act well. Autonomy, for Kant, is
so important because it is intimately related to the essence of a person. In
the Critique of Practical Reason (1956), Kant claims that, as rational
agents, we simply are aware of the moral law. Our relationship to the
moral law is akin to our link with the laws of theoretical reasoning. Just as
the concept of cause is objectively valid in the natural world, so the
practical law applies in the intelligible world. But, as several
commentators have pointed out, this leaves a significant difficulty for Kant
(Green 1992, Kosch 2006 and Assiter 2012). How does Kant account for
moral evil, moral wrongdoing?

Alison Assiter
53
In The Concept of Anxiety (1980a) Kierkegaard develops his critique of

Hegelian and Kantian ethics as well as offering his account of the origin of
evil. This critique can also be found throughout his works, particularly in
the pseudonymous works. Much of The Concept of Anxiety is about the
concept of sin or evil; sin is not construed here in the way in which it is
often seen by Christians, as something with which we are born. Indeed, for
Kierkegaard, or at least for Haufniensis, if sin is viewed in this fashion
then it ceases to be something for which individuals can be held
responsible. The work as a whole is a response to Kants late work
Religion within the Limits of Mere Reason Alone9 and it is about making
sense of the concept of evil (see Green 1992). Kierkegaard argues, in The
Concept of Anxiety that the ethical standpoint, which is characterised as
the ethics of modern philosophy is, in Koschs words (2006, 170) at
one with Greek ethics in denying the distinction between practical ethics
and the will. This includes the Kantian view of autonomy and evil. In
The Sickness Unto Death, Kierkegaard writes that these ethical views lack
the courage to declare that a person knowingly does wrong, knows what
is right and does the wrong (1980b, 205). The Concept of Anxiety, then,
offers a psychology and a metaphysics of the self that sets out to account
for the origin of evil. In my view, evil comes into Adam suggesting that
Adam already existed, in a natural world that contained events and powers
and capacities, but where Adam was neither free nor not free (see Assiter,
forthcoming 2012).
In his work, The Sickness Unto Death, Kierkegaard articulates in a
different way some of the limitations of the concept of autonomy. The
character anti-Climacus describes the despair of defiance in which the
individual attempts to become master of his own self. Such a self, he
argues, is actually no self at all: it is a king without a country, actually
ruling over nothing (1980b, 69). A self who attempts to engage in
radical choice, as the purely autonomous self would, is no self at all. It is a
self that is effectively prevented from acting ethically. In other words,
Kierkegaard could be read as expressing the limitations of a perspective
that relies to too great an extent upon the notion of autonomy. Such a self
is depicted as existing somehow separately from others, as a rational entity
that can deliberate about its actions as though it is disconnected from its
bodyfrom its emotions and interests and also from others. Importantly,
it is also a self whose freedom can only come from its own rationality
54
Chapter Three
from the moral law, or from some transcendent source outside the natural
phenomenal self.
One concept that is key in liberal political theory, then, of which
Kierkegaard is critical, is an over-reliance on the concept of autonomy.
This does not mean that he denies the concept exists. That is not at all the
case. Indeed, freedom is necessary, he believes, in order for people to act
morally at all. It is rather the over-reliance on the concept, and the model
of the self underlying some expressions of this, particularly those that
appear in Kant and Hegel, of which he is critical.
There is a parallel, therefore, between the various approaches to life
outlined earlier in the paper and Kierkegaards critique of the ethical as
it appears in Fear and Trembling, Either-Or, The Sickness Unto Death and
The Concept of Anxiety. The desire to create oneself, to be a purely
autonomous, purely moral self is an end or an aim that is impossible to
achieve, in just the way that the pure aesthetes goals cannot be achieved.
The purely rational, purely moral Kantian person who desires to be
perfectly good is an impossible ideal and it leads, as well, to despair. For
such a person the possibility of wrong doing never occurs. Just as, for the
pure aesthete, the possibility of not attaining his goals is something he
does not wish to consider, so too for the pure Kantian moral person his
goals are unattainable and he is led into despair. The desire of Critchleys
self insofar as it sets out to create itself is also likely to lead to despair.
Both the purely aesthetic being and the purely ethical being are
impossible creatures, since they each, in their different ways, somehow
deny the finitude of real human beings.
Ironically though, for Kierkegaard, the Kantian ethical self is still in
some way caught in the nexus of determination. A human being is
necessarily a finite, needy and embodied creature. Kant attempts to ground
the freedom of the human moral person in our own rationality: in the
rationality of limited, embodied beings. But human beings cannot be pure
rational autonomous moral persons in Kants sense and this is why the
ethical outlook also leads to despair. Rationality cannot ground itself.
Another way of putting this is that, for the Kant of the Critique of
Practical Reason, it is only morally good actions that are truly actions, and
since human beings, in fact, carry out both good and bad actions, then they
are inevitably led into despair at the impossibility of being the kind of
moral being advocated by Kant.

Alison Assiter
55
In Either-Or, one personification of the ethical is the good husband;

he chooses what he wants to be and imposes on himself the discipline
necessary to realise his projects. In some way, his life consists in doing his
duty. In Either-Or, Judge Wilhelms existence is defined by family, work
and loyalty towards the State. This characterisation has led some to see the
ethical in Kierkegaard as being defined by adherence to existing social
norms (see Dudiak 2008, for example), and this is, indeed, Kierkegaards
critique of the Hegelian sittlichkeit (see Hegel 1979). But there is also
an important sense in which these characteristics are precisely those of the
Two Ages, outlined above, and there is therefore a further parallel critique
offered both of the aesthetic and of the ethical.
There is this commonality between the two, despite Kierkegaards
claim:
In Either/Or the aesthetic component was something present battling with
the ethical, and the ethical was the choice by which one emerged from it.
For this reason there were only two components, and the Judge was
unconditionally the winner, even though the book ended with a sermon and
with the observation that only the truth that builds up is the truth for me.
(1987a, 431)
But there is a further and deeper commonality between the aesthetic and
the ethical for Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard is specifically critical of Kants
ethics, but he sees the Hegelian expression of Kantian ethics as being even
more problematic. As the pseudonymous character Haufniensis puts it in
The Concept of Anxiety, at least Kant recognised that evil was a problem.
For Kant, guilt or sin or the possibility of evil is something that we are
never without. The problem with Hegels thought, however, is even more
acute according to Kierkegaard:
Hegels misfortune is exactly that he wants to maintain the new quality and
yet does not want to do it, since he wants to do it in logic. (1980a, 30)
Hegel, one might interpret this as saying, removes the qualitative problem
of the possibility of sin or evil in human beings, to the domain of logic.
Hegelian philosophy, then, is often the target for Kierkegaard, even when
Hegel is not explicitly mentioned, but it is Hegel insofar as he attempts to
outdo Kant on autonomy and morality. In Fear and Trembling, de Silentio
makes the point that
56
Chapter Three
interiority is higher than exteriority, there is an interiority that is

incommensurable with exteriority, an interiority that is not identical, please
note, with the first, but is a new interiority. (1985a, 97)
Silentio agrees that Hegel may have got ethics rightand here the
ethics that Hegel got right is Kantian ethics, but he did not prove that
ethics is the highest form of development of human beings. Hegel
attempted to transpose the whole of philosophy into conceptual form
(ibid., 7). So Kierkegaard develops a critique of both Kant and Hegel.
However, Hegel, for Kierkegaard, is worse than Kant because the former
suggests that ethical problems can be definitively resolved. Throughout
Fear and Trembling, as we have seen, Silentio questions the view that
philosophy goes further than doubt, further than faith. Hegelian
idealism, indeed as one commentator has put it, ends in political
totalitarianism (Direk 2008, 212).
Love for Neighbours

In the Upbuilding Discourses of 1847, Kierkegaard writes about
responsibility. Responsibility for others is implied in being human and any
divisions between people are in opposition to the universally human
(1990b, 122). In Works of Love, which Kierkegaard unusually published in
his own name, he wrote love is a revolution (1995, 265). He writes
about the importance of love for all human beings. Human beings, he
argues, need love. Works of Love speaks about our responsibility to and
for other people and about our concrete relations with others. Human
beings viewed in the way Kierkegaard sees them, in this work, are
intrinsically social beings. The concept of equality is viewed in terms of
the equal need of all human beings, whoever and wherever they are, for
love. Love is love for oneself and for a stranger.
The word love in ancient Greek has at least three senses. There is
erosor erotic love. Philia is brotherhood or non-sexual affection; the
affection one feels for those to whom one is close. But there is also,
thirdly, agape. This notion has been interpreted in a number of ways,
from the ancient Greek notion of unconditional, self-sacrificing,
thoughtful love, to a later Christian interpretation as an intentional
response to promote well being when responding to that which has

Alison Assiter
57
generated ill being. There is no doubt that this Christian sense: love your
neighbour as yourself influenced Kierkegaard. In the 2nd century,
Tertullian remarked how Christian love in this sense attracted pagan
notice. What attracted their attention was the notion of loving ones
enemies (Tertullian 2004).
As individuals we can choose how we live (see Kierkegaard 1985a).
This choice of how we live removes us, in his view, from crass
materialism (ibid. 75). Each of us lives our life, in anticipation of our
own death, but each of us is living this way in relation to others who live
the same way. This proximity to our death brings us into a relation of
sympathy with others.
Only when the sympathetic person in his compassion relates himself to the
sufferer in such a way that he in the strictest sense understands that it is his
own case that is in question; only when he knows how to identify himself
with the sufferer in such a way that when he fights for an explanation he is
fighting for himself rescinding all thoughtlessness, softness and cowardice,
only then does the sympathy acquire significance. (Kierkegaard 1980a,
120)
As Westphal has put it (for Kierkegaard):

the task and surely it is the task of a lifetime, is triple: to learn to love God
aright, to learn to love myself aright, and to learn to love my neighbour
aright. (Westphal 2008, 26)
Love for Self and Others

Kierkegaards neighbour, whom he exhorts us to love, includes any
and every human being including the stranger, the abused and the abuser.
Some commentators (see for example Evans 2004) have argued that
Kierkegaard suggests that we should all love our neighbours because this
is Gods command. For him, however, loving God or loving humanity is
equivalent to living in a good way. Kierkegaard (1956) is quite critical of
the claim that anyone can behave well out of fear of divine punishment.
Instead, the command to love ones neighbour is rooted in the claim that
God actually desires human flourishing. Indeed, even Evans, who defends
a religious reading of Kierkegaard, accepts in the conclusion to his book
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Chapter Three
that
[Kierkegaards] theory does not even claim that a person must be a theist in
order to see moral claims It is not committed to the implausible claim
that a person must be religious to recognise the ideals of morality.
(Evans 2004, 321)
Neighbourly-love is not only about loving another more than we love

ourselves for he believes that sometimes people do not love themselves in
a good way.
Whoever has any knowledge of people will certainly admit that just as he
has often wished to be able to move them to relinquish self-love, he has
also had to wish that it were possible to teach them to love themselves.
(Kierkegaard 1995, 23)
He offers examples of people who fail to love themselves in a good way:

there is the light-minded person who throws himself into the folly of the
moment; there is the depressed person and the person who wishes to
torture himself. One has to learn, Kierkegaard suggests, to love oneself
in the right way. The abuser has to do this and so does the victim. Indeed,
he suggests that we have to learn to love ourselves and indeed those to
whom we are close, in the way in which we love those who are merely
neighbours.
Neighbourly love, he suggests, can transform personal relationships
and transform ones view of oneself. Often ones sense of self is bound up
with anxiety, envy, and depression. In some psychoanalytic literature it is
argued that the abuser is a shame-based person; he is partially a victim (in
many cases of previous abuse) and no doubt has a low sense of selfesteem. Love should be understood here as agapeone is learning to
care for and to respect oneself and others, including the one of whom one
is most ashamed and who has hurt one the most. Learning to love
ourselves in a good way will be an important part of learning to love
those to whom we are close, and then, as an extension of this, those who
are strange to us.
Indeed, for Kierkegaard, genuine love for another is encapsulated, in
Noddings sense, in the other person seeing it as such (Noddings 1984,
68). It does indeed incorporate love for God, but in my view this can be
read in a sense that need not presuppose Christianity, contrary to the

Alison Assiter
59
claims of some commentators who question whether Kierkegaards

thought can be of any use to non Christians (see for example Direk 2008,
220). It incorporates God in the partial sense that loving another is an
infinitely difficult task. Even if we are atheist, Kierkegaard would extol us
to love our neighbour. For the atheist this would simply involve the
recognition that the task is supremely difficult.
For Kierkegaard, our neighbour includes any and everyone. One way
of interpreting this, which I have outlined in my book Kierkegaard,
Metaphysics and Political Theory (Assiter 2009) is that each one of us
ought to be concerned about the basic needs of strangers.
Furthermore, as the son of a father who may possibly have been
abusive to him, Kierkegaard enjoins us to love the one who has abused
us. He may well mean, for example, what Mandela meant when he set up
the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa. It may mean,
for example, doing what some Palestinian parents whose children were
killed by the Israelis are doing, looking for some other solution than
continuing the hatred and the bloodshed. At the very least, it may mean
attempting to forgive.
All of these tasks, of course, are supremely difficult. They may not
involve going so far as to become the others hostage because they
presuppose, for Kierkegaard, learning to love oneself as well. But they
constitute the recognition that the mere relation of one self to another is
akin to a relation to the sublime, since the task of recognising ones
interconnection with many others, is a supremely, if not infinitely, difficult
task. But whilst this is the case, it is also true that the self is not exhausted,
at its core, either by a pure death drive or, as its opposite, by a pure
rational self. For Lacan, the Real is outside language and is that against
which the self is set up in opposition. The Lacanian Real, like one element
of the Kantian sublime, is awful and engenders terror. But the Kantian
sublime is also equivalent to the purely rational moral law. The
Lacanian pure chaos underlying the self and the Kantian autonomous
rational being are outside the real human being. In reality, we are finite
beings with the capacity both for good and for evil. It is important to
remember, however, that the Lacanian Real is only one element even of
the contradictory ideal that is implicit in the sublime. For Kierkegaard, as I
have suggested earlier, the ground of evil lies not in pure chaos or in the
mysterious violation of the demands of the moral law, but rather in a
nature that pre-exists the finite self (see again, Assiter 2011b).
60
Chapter Three
For Kierkegaard, loving a neighbour involves believing what one

cannot think. Each of us is a finite and limited being. The sense in which
we are the infinite in the finite is that we can attempt to follow norms that
originate outside each of us. These norms are never fully realisable by us
in this sense they may be infinitebut we can set out to follow them.
Abraham, in Fear and Trembling, although he is an exception, is similar to
the rest of us in this respect, that he touched the infinite. Perhaps perfect
love of ones neighbour would be akin to what he was required to do by
God in the sense that it would lie beyond what any of us can
conceptualise. Yet for Kierkegaard we have the capacity to choose a way
of life that happens to be the one commanded by the Christian God. We
have the choice to take up, and to be guided by, a moral ideal. He does not
argue that our choices must go this way. Indeed, he argues that we must be
held responsible for wrong doing as well as for doing good (and here I
agree with iek). We might fail, and often we do, to be guided by any
ideal, and in this sense we might be overtaken by something like a
Lacanian Real. Since we are these finite and imperfect subjects, some
violence may be necessary in responding to a regime that is itself prepared
to use extreme violence. This very violence may itself involve reference to
some chaotic underbelly of the self as opposed to its ability to follow ideal
norms.
But we have the capacity to be truly free both from our own reason and
from our finite and limited natures, in making the choice to care both
about ourselves, and indeed, about others including strangers and those
who might have abused us. Insofar as we do this, we are acting as part of
the whole of humanity, and not merely as isolated individuals. In this
sense, we are acting as part of a collective subject.

Alison Assiter
61
Notes
1. As the partner of an exiled Iranian who has seen many of his compatriots, family
and friends killed, the issue is close for me. Perhaps there is also some link, but a
more tenuous one, with the events in Tiananmen Square.
2. In this sense it was indeed importantly very different from the events of
Tiananmen Square.
3. In my paper Kant and Kierkegaard on Freedom and Evil (2011b) I argue that
freedom arises in Adam out of a pre-existing nature that has powers and capacities
that are different but also akin to those possessed by finite and rational beings. This
is in response to Kant, for whom it is impossible to explain the freedom to do
wrong.
4. It is very important to point out that Foucaults view of this revolution was not
universally shared, and that there were strong critics of it even as it was happening.
Many leftist Iranians were initially sympathetic and then came to be critical (see,
for example, Mohadessin 2004). But there were othersnotably Iranian as well as
French feministswho were critical right from the beginning (see Afary and
Anderson 2005).
5. I wonder whether Critchley recalled Judith Butlers reference, in Bodies that
Matter (1993, 221), to ironic laughter as woman is produced? For Butler, woman
has no essential messy bodily reality. Rather, woman becomes the enemy within,
constantly pushing against the boundaries of the patriarchal self and the patriarchal
tradition. For both Butler and Critchley, woman and the radical self are purely
oppositional sites of contest.
6. It seems to me that the infinity at the core of the self that might constitute the
subjects deep freedom, could be identified with a nature that lies outside the
experience of the finite limited being (for further reference see Assiter 2011b).
7. Amongst commentators on Kierkegaard, Walther (1997) claims that
Kierkegaard is obsessed with sublimity; Milbank (1996) that he does have a
concept of the sublime but that it is a radically different concept from, for example,
that of Kant. Pattison (2002) by contrast, suggests that he probably did not use the
concept. See also Agacinski (1998), but she suggests that the sublime is too closely
related to vastness, to infinity, whilst what seems to me to be crucial is its
contradictory nature. Pattison, in Sublime and the Experience of Freedom (2000)
offers an account of the relation between Abraham in Fear and Trembling and the
Kantian sublime.
8. See John Lippitt (2008, chapter 3), for an account, with references to others, of
the Kantian influence.
62
Chapter Three
9. Michael Green in his book Kierkegaard and Kant: the Hidden Debt (1992) has
pointed out the strong similarities between the two texts and the way in which
Kierkegaard appears to be responding to Kant. In my view (see again Assiter
2011b) Kierkegaard can account for evil whereas Kant admits that the origin of sin
cannot be explained.
CHAPTER FOUR
KIERKEGAARDS AESTHETIC AGE
AND ITS POLITICAL CONSEQUENCES
THOMAS WOLSTENHOLME
Introduction
That Kierkegaard delineated three existential life-styles, the aesthetic,
the ethical, and the religious, is a well known tenet of his philosophy. 1 But
the idea that these existential spheres are in a relation with externalities
such as political changes is often not looked into. I argue here that the
spheres of existence are in fact in large part reliant upon the socio-political
establishments of an age.
A consequence of this reading is that it gives us insight into why
Kierkegaard may have called his (or any) age an aesthetic age. 2 The use
of an existential term for an age would otherwise be somewhat of a
peculiarity in the authorship.
But there are other consequences of this reading. One is that it gives us
more evidence for suggesting that Kierkegaard was not a mere
subjectivist. The effects ones subjective efforts alone can bring about in
ones relation to an existential way of life are limited. A change in the
objective, political conditions may fundamentally alter the life-view one
was subjectively relating to, and this may even require that the subject
instead participate in political action in order to continue their existential
development.
The final consequence of this reading is that we may have grounds for
rejecting political changes which negatively affect the existential
development of the citizenry of its intended policy. Political efforts which
hinder ones religious development are, by todays liberal standards, liable
to be revised or rejected on the grounds that the political realm and the
religious space of the individual are to be kept separate. I think
Kierkegaard, though by no means a liberal by todays standard, would at
least agree with this conclusion.
64
Chapter Four
In putting forward these theses I shall also inadvertently argue against

the view that Kierkegaard came to neglect the ethical aspect of
existential development, a thought-provoking view Daniel Conway has
recently advocated (Conway 1999). Instead, I shall continue the thesis that
social and political factors influence the existential spheres by arguing that
the ethical way of life is in fact rendered ineffective by those sociopolitical practices. I argue that this has existentially crippling
consequences in that it fosters aestheticism. As such, I argue that this is
another reason we might call an age an aesthetic age.
An aesthetic age
Many scholars (Pattison 1992, 62, 1999a, 18, 1999b, 16; Tajafuerce
1999, 69; Perkins 1999, 178, 2009, 318; and Dalrymple 2009, 169, 193)
have noted that near the end of his authorship, Kierkegaard calls his age an
aesthetic one. This is somewhat of a novelty: the authorship which had
preceded this comment reserved the terms aesthetic, ethical, and
religious, exclusively for the individual. In general, however,
Kierkegaards varying aesthetes are represented as akin to hedonists,
seekers of pleasure (or at least the interesting as in the case of A
(Kierkegaard 1987a, 304) with no concern for one of the most
fundamental ethical principles: that of treating others as ends in
themselves.
In Kierkegaards earlier authorship then (Either Or I (1987a), Stages on
Lifes Way (1988) and Repetition (1983)) represented aesthetes as
individual people, and gives no intimation of using this term to describe an
age. In fact, on numerous occasions Kierkegaard had expressed the
opinion that an age does not develop dialectically in the way an individual
can.3
Kierkegaard typically thought that the opinion that an entire age had
developed dialectically was a convenient way of presenting individuals
with an excuse not to bother developing themselves ethico-religiously.
One born in an age which is inherently ethical or religious was thought to
be eo ipso an ethical or religious person, so long as one unquestioningly
conformed to the ethico-religious practices already established. This view,
ironically, happens to foster the kind of mindset that prevents the
Kierkegaards Aesthetic Age and its Political Consequences

Thomas Wolstenholme
65
individual from attaining ethical and religious development. For it neglects

features of ethico-religious development that Kierkegaard thought
necessary: the individuals personal, subjective, and passionate
appropriation of the life-view. Given Kierkegaards insistence on these
latter qualities we may ask again: what sense does it make in calling an
age aesthetic?
Perhaps an age could be called aesthetic precisely because the prevalent
practices and ideology of that age are marked by the same elements of the
aesthetic way of life i.e., a dispassionate willingness to go along with the
status quo, coupled with an absolute aversion to the kind of personal
choice required to lead one into the ethical or religious ways of life. Under
such an interpretation, Kierkegaard could still maintain it is impossible for
an age to be an ethical age, or a religious age, (for no ideological view
or cultural practice could be such that it leads the individual into the
ethical or religious way of life, given the requirements of personal,
subjective appropriation, unique to these latter two existential spheres),
though there would not be anything inconsistent in calling an age
aesthetic. Therefore, Kierkegaard could still deem it impossible for an
age to develop, for an age could be aesthetic but could never go on to be
ethical or religious.
But this reading is problematic for two reasons. The first is that surely
an age could be an aesthetic age, as Kierkegaard stated that his was. But
if the claim that a given age is aesthetic is to be meaningful then any given
age also might not be aesthetic. Let us assume that the default position of
an age is, as is the case with individuals, aesthetic. If the age can not
develop beyond this then Kierkegaards expression of his own age as
being an aesthetic age would appear to be an altogether vacuous
comment: so is every other age! Presumably, then, an age might not be
aesthetic; and presumably a non-aesthetic age is a development to an
aesthetic age.
Presumptions aside, the second problem with the above reading is that
it appears to overlook a key Kierkegaardian theme, namely that of the
absolute priority of the individual to all other categories. 4 To call an age
aesthetic could surely not mean that every individual in that age is an
aesthete, or even that the majority are. Such a generalisation would be a
disregard of the unique development of every individual in that age, and
this is characteristically not Kierkegaardian. Besides, wholehearted
engagement in the established cultural norms could not count as
66
Chapter Four
irrefutable evidence that such a person is therefore an aesthete, given that

the bustling tax collector who has reached the highest state of religious
development could be, from the perspective of outward behaviours,
exactly the same.5
Arguably, it is inwardness alone that separates the life-views, and so I
doubt that any diagnosis of the existential state of individuals which is
based on outward appearances would be made by Kierkegaard. When
Kierkegaard calls an age aesthetic then, I take it that he must mean
simply this: the conditions of the age are such that it tends to
(inadvertently or not) foster the aesthetic existential life-view, or shunt
the other possible life-views, perhaps simply by removing, or making
more difficult, the necessary conditions for these latter two life-views.
But what reasons have other Kierkegaard scholars given for suggesting
that an age may be aesthetic? A mixed and interesting array of
suggestions have been made, which are not necessarily exclusive. One
way may be by showing that the supposed ethical and religious practices
are in fact simply further manifestations of aesthetic values. Perkins takes
this line and concludes his piece by arguing that in Kierkegaards age,
aestheticism triumphs in Christendom (Perkins 2009, 318). In the same
volume, Dalrymple backs this reading up by showing how widespread and
supposedly ethico-religious sermons and artworks on the sufferings of
Christ were also used to provoke aesthetic, not religious, sentiments
(Dalrymple 2009, see especially 169, 193).
In another work, Perkins extends Kierkegaards criticism of the
aestheticism inherent in Christendom, to the aestheticism inherent in the
modern age, an age of widespread modern hedonism (Perkins 1999,
178). The charge here is that the aesthetic way of life is a modern
phenomenon. The criticisms of the aesthetic way of life are in part
criticisms of a distinctive feature of modernity (ibid., 171).
Tajafuerce (1999, 69) gives a similar reading, claiming that
Kierkegaards attack of his age could be presented in aesthetic-literary
terms against the aesthetic status quo. By this it is meant to be an
attack:
...against aesthetic conventionalism and indifferentism, understood both as
the paradigmatic expression of apathetic indolence and as stagnation
[stilstanden] in reflection. It is directed against aesthetic hollowness, which

Thomas Wolstenholme
67
eventually turns into the celebrated pattern of an abstract anything-goes...

(ibid.)
Finally, George Pattison thinks that the problem lies in the fact
Kierkegaards Danish contemporaries practised a philosophy that
assimilated both the aesthetic and the political, mixing the two categories
indistinguishably together. For Pattison, this leads to paving
the way for the kind of transfer of aesthetic categories into social and
political categories that we find again in Kierkegaard, both in the Literary
Review and, e.g., in The Point of View. (Pattison 1999b, 16)6
In a work of the same year (1999a, 17) Pattison correctly remarks that
Kierkegaards designation of his age as an aesthetic one is a strong claim
and is not immediately or adequately justified in its context in The Point of
View. Instead, Pattison suggests that a reading across all of
Kierkegaards works is necessary to validate this claim. In his informative
study, Poor Paris! Pattison seeks to show that it is:
the representation of the city as an aesthetic phenomenon [through
Kierkegaards entire authorship, that] underwrites Kierkegaards claim that
it is the age as a whole (and not just a random sample of decadent
individuals) that is aesthetic. (ibid., 18; emphasis mine)
Pattisons study is both impressive and extensive.

I shall also argue that that Kierkegaard criticised his age for being as an
aesthetic one.7 But I take the justification of this claim to be a little
simpler. As I see it, we only really have to look in one of Kierkegaards
works, Two Ages: A Literary Review (1978b), to see why he might come
to qualify his age as aesthetic. For in that book Kierkegaard sets out to do
exactly what I would have thought was necessary to qualify an age as
aesthetic. Kierkegaard assesses the various practices that the present
age engages in and analyses the impact they have on inwardness. Doing
so highlights the ways that these practices affect the conditions required
for the ethical and religious life-views: passion, individuality, personal
space to relate to God and to others, and so forth. The outcome is that the
present age inadvertently favours the aesthetic way of life and makes
more demanding, perhaps even impossible, the ethical and religious ways
of life.
68
Chapter Four
A modern scholar may here see two direct infringements of liberal

politics: 1) the state ought to be neutral towards individual attempts at the
good life and 2) the state ought not to interfere with the individuals
freedom to pursue religious development, so long as that religious
development does not itself violate state laws. Whilst Kierkegaard may
have had rather prescient forebodings of the problems that may occur if
these liberal principles were violated, it would be anachronistic to attribute
these modern liberal ideas to Kierkegaard. Thus, whether or not
Kierkegaard would have supported any political action to remedy the ails
of the present age shall also be assessed.
The present age

Thus far the term present age has been given in inverted commas.
This is because Kierkegaard occasionally used the term to simply refer to
his age, i.e. the time period and place he lived and wrote in: 19 th century
Denmark. In some ways this is a far cry from the present present age.
But in his book Two Ages: A Literary Review, Kierkegaard also uses the
present age as a purely philosophical and not an empirical concept. For
example, Kierkegaard says that he wishes to engage in
...an analysis of the present age in terms of the dialectical categoryqualifications [levelling, the public, etc.] and their implications,
regardless of their being factually present at the given moment or not.
(1978b, 76; my emphasis. See 96 for a very similar comment)
Kierkegaards task is, I take it, twofold. He certainly wishes to delineate

the distinctive characteristics of the age and to evaluate (although, not
judge) them (ibid., 32, 110). A great deal of excellent scholarship has been
focussed in this area, in delineating the various complex dialectical
category-qualifications Kierkegaard attributes to the present age. But the
other aspect of Kierkegaards project is to undertake a similar exercise that
Fru Gyllembourg had in the original novel, To Tidsaldre [Two Ages], here
under review. Where Gyllembourg portrayed the effects the differing ages
have on the familial life and social relations of the characters of the novel
Kierkegaard wishes to analyse how the age affects the typical individual.

Thomas Wolstenholme
69
Kierkegaard does not imply that an age will necessarily lead to a certain
kind of individual. This fatalistic way of thinking would go against much
of what Kierkegaard has to say not only about individual choice but
individual self-constitution too. The individual is in part defined by the
age, and vice-versa (ibid., 47), but never reducibly so. 8 Thus Kierkegaard
can concede that:
The most extreme variant can appear in any and every age; for example, a
man who could be said to belong essentially in the Middle Ages or in
Greece could be living in our age... The question is... [what kind of person
may] appear as typical in the present age. (ibid., 33, original emphasis)
Given that the present age is later called an aesthetic age (as we noted
previously) it may be thought that Kierkegaard comes to conclude that the
present age is one where aesthetic individuals are typically encountered.
But what do we (and Kierkegaard above) mean here by typical? We can
interpret this in two ways: 1) the aesthetic individual is most commonly
found, i.e., the aesthetic way of life is the majority life-view held, or 2) the
aesthetic way of life is typical of the age in the way that it exemplifies,
or is a product of, the distinctive characteristics of the age.
It does not seem to be merely a matter of numbers, and so the first
interpretation is questionable. For it is indicated that in the previous age,
the age of revolution, the person one typically encountered was still an
aesthetic individual.9 The masses still looked to the ethical or religious
exemplar for guidance on self-development, the latter being a minority.
Even if it were the case that the majority of people encountered in the age
of revolution were aesthetes, it still does not appear that this alone would
warrant us to term the age an aesthetic age. The reasons an age can be
called aesthetic then, are indeed to do with the way the individual relates
to the distinctive characteristics of the age. A study of the differences in
the ethical and religious spheres between the present age and the age of
revolution will, perhaps surprisingly given our interest in the aesthetic,
nevertheless best highlight what it might be that warrants us calling an age
aesthetic.
70
Chapter Four
The distinctive characteristics of the present age

In the age of revolution then, Kierkegaard admits that aesthetic
individuals exist, but they relate differently to those who have attained the
ethical and religious ways of life. Kierkegaard gives a description of an ice
skater to draw a distinction between both ages. An ice skater appears to be
skating directly towards a point in the ice where it is known to be
dangerously thin but manages, with expert effortlessness, to make just
such a last second turn that they can once more glide to safety, showing
the whole thing to have been a deliberate trick (1978b, 72-73).
In the age of revolution, this feat would command respect from
onlookers. The onlookers would, impressed by the performance, be given
fresh impetus to pursue their prospective tasks, whatever they may be. The
commitment which had gone into rehearsing such a trick and the bravery
of executing it would be admired and people would be inspired to develop
themselves ethically in a like-minded manner (ibid., 72).
The present age, however, is marked by an unnaturally high amount of
rationalisation in place of action. (We might call this an example of a
distinctive characteristic of the age.) Thus in the present age the
onlookers would dispute whether or not the action was one which should
be mimicked looking at it from a practical-minded point of view.
Undoubtedly they would have to agree that, whilst an interesting spectacle
to observe from a safe distance, such an action is just not a sensible one to
imitate. The onlookers would also, if they reasoned long enough, console
themselves with the thought that if they had invested such an impractical
amount of time and effort into the feat themselves, then they could just
have easily performed the action. Thus, if there is anything worthy of
admiration, the onlookers find it in the fact that they could just have easily
performed the feat themselves but what they find even more admirable is
that they listened to practical wisdom and instead devoted their time and
efforts to other sensible tasks. We can see that the passion stirred in the
individuals of the present age (and Kierkegaard at least admits that passion
has not been wholly stifled by an abundance of rationality10) is directed not
towards the imitation-worthy action another had produced which would
inspire personal change and development, but is instead used as a
justification for the current status quo!

Thomas Wolstenholme
71
This explains Kierkegaards comment that ...the age of the great and
good action is past (1978b, 71; my emphasis). Occasionally Kierkegaard
makes a stronger claim: he says that in the present age there is no hero,
no lover, no thinker, no knight of faith [...] (75). As an ontological claim
that such ways of life are rendered impossible by the agethis is not
given philosophical justification. Apart from this, such a reading would be
at odds with his earlier claim that any variant of a person ...can appear in
any and every age (33). Therefore, I take it to be the less demanding
claim that such figures simply do not have the same kind of import and
impact as they did previously: they no longer inspire ethico-religious
development. That is to say, even though it is possible that such figures
exist in the present age their actions are viewed by the majority as further
justifications for the present age! If we take hero to mean one who
inspires ethico-religious action, then no hero exists in the present age.
Kierkegaard pushes this point in another vivid example (86-87). He lets
us imagine that three men are maltreating a single fourth one.
Outnumbered and overpowered by the sheer number of the assailants, the
victim is relatively defenceless. Onlookers to this abuse finally become so
restless that three of the onlookers assail one of the original assailants.
They justify their actions as so: He had it coming, he himself had
partaken in ganging up against a defenceless individual, etc. The irony of
the situation is strikingly obvious, but the point of the parable perhaps less
so.
Kierkegaards claim is that the abandonment of individual, passionate
development has gone hand in hand with an unbalanced focus on the
numerical in the present age. Again, the focus is on imbalance; like
rationality, Kierkegaard accepts that the numerical has a legitimate scope
(Sltoft 1999, 118, n. 17). Practices such as balloting are acceptable and
even praise-worthy when the decision in hand is a legitimately political
one, for example, whether or not a new road ought to be built. But when it
comes to answering ethico-religious questions about what is right and
wrong, and how one ought to act and live, a majority vote is out of
place. Acting in conformity to a majority vote once again abandons the
personal, subjective reasons for acting and thus eo ipso cannot be acting
ethically or religiously.
The onlookers protest attests to the fact that just because three people
think an action is morally acceptable it does not necessarily make it so.
But their remedy then instantly betrays that original sentiment as they take
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matters into their own hands and, backed up by the opinion of two others,
think it is just to assail one of the original assailants. All this is to say that
Kierkegaard believes that the remedy for the disproportionate interest in
the numerical cannot be a political one because this is yet another
numerically guided practice. It would be, so to speak, another way of once
more justifying the status quo that matters in how one ought to live and act
are to be determined by numerical strength. But this brings with it a
second important implication. The ethical realm also involves itself with
the finite, the universal, the temporal (Kierkegaards second ethics being
an exception which will be discussed below). Presumably, the following
concluding quote can thus be applied as equally to political as well as
ethical attempts to solve the problem of levelling:
...the moment it wants to halt leveling, it will once again exemplify the law
[of leveling]. It [leveling] can only be halted if the individual, in individual
separateness, gains the intrepidity of religiousness. (1978b, 86)
Ethical action, presumably then, brings individuals back into the realm
of the temporal. Far from being an example of distinction as it was in the
previous age, ethical action in the present age becomes another way of
integrating oneself back into the numerical comfort of the public. This
temptation, away from the religious, presumably explains why
Kierkegaard believes that in the present age, ...the thralldom of reflection
transforms even virtues into vitia spendida [glittering vices] (ibid.).
All this, however, may be said to neglect Kierkegaards so-called
second ethics, an ethics which realises the limitations of an ethical
system which presumes itself to be self-sufficient. The second ethics
presupposes an external other, something outside of the universal, a
value-giverGod. If this God is the Christian God, a second ethics
would also mean an ethical system with such Christian concepts as grace
and forgiveness. Since it is partially reliant on the realm of the infinite,
perhaps the practices of second ethics escape exemplifying the law of
levelling.
Loving ones neighbour, for example, appears to be just such an action.
Whilst Kierkegaard would agree that this action escapes levelling, he
thinks that even this partly religious action will have no effect in the
present age. Loving ones neighbour will only be interpreted by others as
that individual acting through pride alone (Kierkegaard 1978b, 90).

Thomas Wolstenholme
73
Furthermore, all action that deviates from that of the crowd, which
includes religious and ethical action, will ...only be met with indolence
(104). Similarly, intense enthusiasm will be misunderstood as grand
folly, wholly impractical (111). These are disheartening claims given that
Kierkegaard goes on to portray an ideal political situation where love of
ones neighbour, and genuine sociability, would be eminent practices (see
Kierkegaard 1995).
The claims that works of love will have no effect in the present age
are not only disheartening, but are also not immediately justified
(empirically or philosophically). They show that the importance of the
ethical way of life is greatly diminished in the present age. A sceptic
may even think that the ethical realm disappears altogether. I shall,
however, defend the view that the ethical still remains the middle term
between the religious and the aesthetic. The difference is that Kierkegaard
thinks it now impossible for an ethical person to teach, or be an exemplar
for, the aesthete of the present age. If this is the case then that does not
imply that the ethical way of life disappears altogether.
The claim that ethical teaching vanishes does swerve somewhat from
the authorship hitherto. How, for example, did Judge William attempt to
help his aesthete friend take the decision to move from the aesthetic to the
ethical way of life?by explaining to the latter that the aesthetic way of
life was self-defeating, and that the ethical way of life was aesthetically
superior to the aesthetic way of life! If the reason the age is termed an
aesthetic age is, as Perkins has argued, that the prevalent mindset of
people in the aesthetic age is one geared toward practical sensibility and
self-concern, an aesthete living in the present age may coolly decide to
live ethically as simply a more practical way of living. This practicallyminded decision would of course betray Judge Williams original
emphasis on subjectively motivated, passionately engaged choice of the
ethical and would not in fact be a movement out of the aesthetic at all.
If the ethical person cannot teach another what to do, cannot commit a
truly ethical action, two questions immediately arise. Firstly, what gives
such a person the right to even be called an ethical person? Secondly, how
does one become ethical, given that no one can teach one how to do so?
That is, what, if anything, makes it possible for an individual to be pulled
out of the temptation of the numerical in the present age, or (if it is indeed
different) out of the aesthetic way of life?
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Chapter Four
Kierkegaard gives one curious, and unfortunately, under-explained clue.

In a passing comment he states that if a person was to try and lead the
process of levelling s/he would automatically escape levelling (1978b, 84).
Levelling is thus escapablebut how, given that within levelling
inwardness and character are automatically ruled out? Since
Kierkegaard does not expand upon this point further, we may be forced to
make some suppositions. For now, let us suppose that a person is wholeheartedly engaged in self-satisfaction. They live comfortably within the
numerical mass that is the public. Such a person decides that there may be
an even better way to satisfy their wants than the current widespread
practices, and makes an attempt to pursue these. One reason this person
may escape levelling is because they recognise a difference between
themselves and the public. In an age concerned with quantity over quality,
where it is thought that a certain amount of people make one individual
(ibid., 85), the recognition that one is qualitatively different to the rest may
be one which brings one out of the quantitative mindset of levelling.
Whether or not the person then goes on to simply re-enter the numerical
way of thinking is another question. It may be that the individual simply
recognises that complete forfeiture of individuality may be the most
aesthetically beneficial thing to do. But the individual was at least brought
to a rupture. And it is from here that a real decision could be made.
Having (quite accidentally) escaped levelling, we can presume that the
individual also escapes the restrictions on inwardness and character which
were within levelling. The person is at least given insight into the fact that
it is possible to be an individual, possible to live set apart from the crowd,
and thus that an alternative way of life is available.
Thus, whilst Kierkegaard does not think that within the present age an
ethical individual can inform another, he does believe that levelling itself
can be educative. This, presumably, is what allows for individuals to still
develop ethically and religiously. What I have described above may be an
example of ethical development in the present age. Although I made
certain suppositions, I did not have to presuppose that the developing
individual had any ethical characteristics. Indeed, I described the
movement in aesthetic terms: the individual was self-absorbed in
increasing their aesthetic satisfaction! The rupture which brought an
alternative way of life out as a possibility came about not only despite this
but even because of this.

Thomas Wolstenholme
75
If this is where the ethical resides in the present age, it is indeed quickly
superseded. For the person in this position, the individual separated
momentarily from the crowd, soon realises that remaining separated will
necessarily mean undergoing great hardship. Standing aside from the
crowd creates a dichotomy which will quickly be noticed by both parties.
Remaining there, Kierkegaard insists, will inevitably entail ostracism, as
well as being crushed under the overburdening numerical force of the
crowd bearing down upon this single individual.
Kierkegaard explains that such a person must have religious inwardness
to survive this. Some have been sceptical of this solution, where the
ethical way of life is suddenly rendered useless and religiosity becomes
the only way to escape the problems of the present age. One Kierkegaard
scholar even terms this religious solution a deus ex machina (Conway
1999, 41), brought in presumably from nowhere to clear up any of the
problems Kierkegaards philosophical classifications may have otherwise
created. It certainly seems as if the ethical becomes a vanishing point for
Kierkegaard as his writings develop into his late authorship. But
Kierkegaard does at least give reasons for his claims. I have tried to show
why Kierkegaard believed that the ethical way of life (both the
ungenuine and the second ethics) no longer helps the individuals of
the present age. But as stated before, this claim does not entail that one
cannot act ethically,11 only that ethical action will not have the intended
effect and would perhaps even be misinterpreted as aesthetic action.
What all of this entails, and whether Kierkegaard has a political solution
to the problems of the present age, will be the focus for this concluding
section.
Concluding remarks
The first thing that can be concluded is that this piece hopefully brings
into question the charge that Kierkegaard is a mere subjectivist.
Kierkegaards ontological view of the individual is that they are
necessarily related to their external situation (see note 5 below). To inspire
ethico-religious action in an individual in the present age requires a
fundamentally different activity than in a previous age. The individual that
truly wishes to develop his or herself, and to help others develop in a
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Chapter Four
similar fashion, cannot be blind to the fact that the given socio-political
setup imposes certain limitations on this activity, rendering some
existential life-views altogether useless. Furthermore, contrary to being
apolitical, Kierkegaard shows us that developing authentically requires
some basic knowledge of the socio-political conditions of the age.
A second result of this reading is that it draws links between
Kierkegaards earlier pseudonymous literature, which are most typically
thought of as being apolitical, and the later, signed works. Judge
William, for example, notes both that his age was depressed (1987b, 23,
189) and that the predominant culture of the times was an aesthetic one
(ibid., 226). And even earlier than this, in his review of Only a Fiddler,
Kierkegaards pseudonym12 claims that Andersens aesthete-like
personality (his: lyric self-absorption; merely phenomenological
personality; and personality wrapped up in...a web of arbitrary moods
(1990a, 70, 82, and 70 respectively) is in large part a result of the
tumultuous political times. Kierkegaards earlier writings, which examine
the aesthetic and the ethical way of life and their shortcomings, would thus
be examinations of social phenomena, of lives that are partly products of
their socio-political surroundings.
I also argued in this piece that the ethical way of life is radically altered
in the present age. In other ages, one can quite comfortably exist as an
ethical individual. In the present age, staying in the ethical realm brings
with it such pressures that one must either buckle, and return to the
aesthetic realm of the crowd, or (and this requires religious strength)
choose to remain a single individual. That the ethical way of life had
become a vanishing point in Kierkegaards late authorship has been
attributed to the fact that Kierkegaard became increasingly religious in the
later part of his life. But Kierkegaard later published Works of Love (1995)
which was an exercise in portraying what a second ethics would look
like in an ideal age. In this ideal state, a state of affairs with what one
might label a genuine politics (Kirmmse 1990, 272) the ethical once
more has a central role in uniting people in sociability, a task of paramount
importance if one wishes to escape the ails of the present age. Thus I have
argued against the reading that Kierkegaard came to neglect the ethical
way of life, insisting instead that the inability to remain in the ethical
sphere of life can in fact be seen as evidence that external institutions can
shape and hinder the existential spheres of existence.

Thomas Wolstenholme
77
That the existential aspects of the individual can be threatened by social

trends and government policies is another important consequence of this
reading of Two Ages.13 The various characteristics of the present age,
many of which are still incumbent in our own society, inadvertently favour
an aesthetic way of life whilst simultaneously working to render the two
alternative ways of life more difficult, or less useful.
I mentioned above that this infringes two fundamental maxims of a
modern liberal democracy: 1) the state ought to be neutral towards
individual attempts at the good life and 2) the state ought not to interfere
with the individuals freedom to pursue religious development. This
reading of Kierkegaard would appear to open up a modern, existential, as
well as liberal basis for criticising and evaluating certain policies. I think
this is a viable project and I am sympathetic to the idea that when policies
are mapped up, attention to how they might affect the existential
development of the person they are intended for ought at least to be taken
into consideration. A policy which in some way existentially impoverishes
the individual, where politics is supposed to be interested in bettering
people, may seem counter-productive. But the activity of evaluating and
perhaps rejecting policy decisions based on the harmful existential effects
they may incur is a task that I do not think Kierkegaard would have
endorsed.14
For one thing, it might be anachronistic to think that Kierkegaard might
have levelled a liberal attack of his age. Two Ages was written and
published prior to the 1848 revolution which changed Denmark from an
absolute monarchy to a democratic constitutional monarchy and which
expanded the right to vote on all political matters to universal (male)
suffrage (Kirmmse 1990, 67-68). What would have been considered
liberal in Denmark in the 19th century and under an absolute monarchy
might be vastly different from what we mean by the word liberal today.
But even after this period, the idea of what it was to be liberal was still
vastly different to the modern use of the word.15
Indeed, in 1848, Kierkegaard wrote to a friend expressing the opinion
that the political maelstrom the age found itself in can only be stopped by
a focus on that single individual. Any political action will only act to
further on the maelstroms movement, when what the politician and truly
religious person both agree on is that the turmoil must be stopped (see
Kirmmse 1995, 172, and Tilley 2009, 80-82).
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Chapter Four
All this is to say that a political theory based upon Kierkegaards insight
is certainly viable. But such a theory would perhaps more accurately be
best termed as Kierkegaardian if by Kierkegaardian we mean highly
inspired by the work and political insight of Kierkegaard. I am only
dubious as to whether we could call such an activity part of Kierkegaards
own political theory. As far as political insight goes, however,
automatically ignoring Kierkegaard as an apolitical thinker risks missing
a plethora of meaningful social and political insights into both
modernity and the present present age.

Thomas Wolstenholme
79
Notes
1. For a quick definition of these spheres, see Kierkegaards journal entry 5804
(1978a (V), 277-278) where he discusses the portrayal or the three ways of life in
an earlier pseudonymous work, Stages on Lifes Way (1988).
2. Or estheticsee note 7 below.
3. In fact, Kierkegaard even expresses such misgivings in one of his earliest works.
See his Early Polemical Writings (1990a, 61-65).
4. This notion [in Danish: Den Enkelte] appears in many places in Kierkegaards
authorship. In 1846, (i.e., at the beginning of the authorship, see note 9 below)
Kierkegaard dedicates his signed, religious work Upbuilding Discourses In
Various Spirits to that individual. At the end of his authorship when Kierkegaard
gives an explanation for his whole opus, he gives three successive chapters on the
termthe single individual alone, in which he also links the term to that
individual in the dedication of Upbuilding Discourses In Various Spirits (1998b,
109). The three chapters are named: The Single Individual: Two Notes
Concerning My Work as an Author (101-104); For the Dedication to That Single
Individual (105-112); and A Word on the Relation of My Work as an Author to
The Single Individual (113-123). Thus Kierkegaards authorship ends by
explaining that it was concerned with the single individual from the start.
5. Mooney thinks that there can be a test to show how the knight of faith might
be outwardly distinguishable (from any mere tax collector or/and, we may add,
aesthete). It is this: the knight of faith faithfully believes his that there will be an
elaborate dinner waiting for him at home, despite the fact that practical sensibility
would tell him that there is absolutely no reason to believe such a meal exists!
(Mooney 1996, 45). But we surely can imagine a person engaging in this
behaviour for (albeit peculiar) aesthetic fancy.
6. This builds from an earlier work of Pattisons where he had described
Kierkegaards experience of Established Christendom, as well as the entire age
itself as being aesthetic (Pattison 1992, 62).
7. It should be noted that, as far as I know, Kierkegaard never explicitly called his
age an aesthetic age in such terms. But he comes close to it. The closest, albeit
scattered, remarks can be found in The Point of View (1998b). Here Kierkegaard
says, for example, that: If in a word I were to express my judgement of the age, I
would say: It lacks religious upbringing. To become and be a Christian has become
a banality. The esthetic plainly has the upper hand (78); and The misfortune of
our age is precisely that it has become merely time by itself (104, original
emphasis). And in drafts of the work Kierkegaard lets on to more. Kierkegaard
imagines himself to have been in an age that has sunk to [depths] of
commonsensicality (218); an age that had gone astray and [was] bogged down in
the interesting...[requiring] an esthetic author (262) ; and an age of
disintegration, an esthetic, enervating disintegration (276).
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Chapter Four
8. Much of the literature on Kierkegaards political thought has emphasised the

ontologically necessary relation the individual has to the external world it finds
itself in, be those relations to external institutions or social relations. Mooney is a
good example of the former: The self is a relation related downward to itself, to
the power that grounds it, and outward to its sphere of interpersonal activity. We
make sense of a self (at any given stage of development) by specifying the
relational, reflexive field it constitutes. This means sketching its connections to
various persons, institutions and projects [...] (Mooney 1996, 95). Plekon also
gives a complimentary reading: the individual is always located or grounded
within the confines of an array of relationships, ranging from those of the
biological species to the social bonds of the family, church, and nation (Plekon
1982, 70; see also 71, 80). For the ontological necessity of other interrelational
activity for being an authentic individual, see for example: Elrod 1981, 74-75 and
188-189; Dunning 1985, 242; Crites 1992, 150, 155; Plekon 1992, 11; Hannay
2003, 68; Evans 2006, 268 and on.
9. The age of revolution is Kierkegaards term for the age which proceeds the
present age. See Two Ages (1978b, 61-67).
10. Kierkegaard, for example, still refers to flashes of enthusiasm occurring in
the present age. Other evidence that rationality has not completely ruled out
passion in the present age is given: That a person stands or falls on his action is
becoming obsolete (1978b, 73, my emphasis) and; actions, rash leaps, can still be
taken [in the present age] (71).
11. Kierkegaard discusses the fact that one of the characters of the original novel
under review, Dalund, had lived in both ages and thus allows for a comparison of
both ages. In the present age, Dalund is satirical of the present state of affairs, no
doubt nostalgic of the way things were before (1978b, 56). But satire, Kierkegaard
later tells us, must have an ethical basis (74). That is, Dalunds satire is in fact an
ethical criticism of some of the characteristics of the present age.
12. Kierkegaard scholars debate whether this work was authored by a pseudonym.
The original title page only mentions one S. Kjerkegaard as the editor [Udgiver]
which could, understandably, be an alternative spelling of the name Kierkegaard.
But surely this is irrelevant given that this Kjerkegaard only takes authorial
responsibility for the preface. The main body of ensuing text, we are told, is
written by some other unnamed person. The surreal opening of this work, with its
introduction of Kjerkegaard and this other nameless author, is reminiscent of a
strategy Kierkegaard goes on to employ in nearly all of his pseudonymous,
aesthetic works. Nevertheless, since Kierkegaard does not officially include this
work in his authorship (see for example: 1978a (VI) entry 6238, 47-48, entry 6770,
417-418; 1992, 625-630; 1997b, 165; 1998b, 5-6) and so does not give a detailed
account of the relation between the authors views and his own, I think that the
question of the status of this work (pseudonymous or anonymous) may never be
fully resolved.
Kierkegaards Aesthetic Age

Thomas Wolstenholme
81
13. Governmental policies which negatively affect the individuals development

could include establishmentarianism, which Kierkegaard explicitly came to attack.
See Kierkegaards The Moment (1998a, especially 75, 108, 121). Dalrymple
(2009) and Perkins (2009), both independently argue that the reason Kierkegaard
fought for disestablishment was precisely because it threatened the individuals
religious, existential development by illegitimately passing off aesthetic ways of
comfortable living as being religious.
14. For a work that challenges the idea that Kierkegaards theory could ever be
reconciled with the ontology of liberalism, see Assiter (2009).
15. The separation of church and state which was arguably Kierkegaards only
political contribution to the problems of his times was still seen by most of his
liberal contemporaries as radical (Kirmmse 1992, 175). So radical was
Kierkegaards proposal that Church and State be separated, coupled with his
Attacks against Christendom which railed against a condition which did not
separate the two, that one contemporary concluded that Kierkegaard must have
been secretly in league with the atheists (Malik 1997, 98 n.70; see also 126).
CHAPTER FIVE
SUFFERING FROM MODERNITY,
AN ASSESSMENT OF THE HEGELIAN CURE
MARGHERITA TONON
It is commonplace to argue that the answer to Kierkegaardian problems
is already to be found within the Hegelian system. More precisely, on the
Hegelian side many argue that Kierkegaard cannot disentangle his
philosophy from certain idiosyncratic aporias, which became the
trademark of his thought and determined his later success, because he is
unable to rise above his incomplete point of view. On the Kierkegaardian
side, opposed readings stress the fact that for Hegel the individual was
completely forgotten and annihilated in the great mechanism of society
and history, and Kierkegaard has the great merit of liberating the
individual from such a limiting and suffocating totality.1
Is it, on the one hand, true that in Hegel one can find a solution to all of
Kierkegaards so-called idiosyncratic problems? Or should we rather
argue, on the other hand, that Hegel has absolutely neglected the
individual, reducing it to an insignificant element within the larger rational
totality of the state. In order to respond to such questions it is interesting to
begin this analysis by looking at Axel Honneths book The Pathologies of
Individual Freedom (2010). Although from a Hegelian perspective,
Honneths approach is especially sensitive to Kierkegaardian concerns,
namely, the question of the suffering of the individual within modern
society and of its possible cure, when reading Hegels Elements of the
Philosophy of Right (1991). Such a reading thus emphasises the
individual-oriented aspects of Hegelian reflection, together with his
critical approach to modernity, showing that Hegel is not altogether
unaware of the trials and tribulations of the individual.
I submit that taking Honneths text as a starting point can put us on the
right track in order to ascertain whether Hegel has the answer to the
specific existential concerns that afflict the Kierkegaardian subject. The
initial aim of my paper is to assess the plausibility of applying Hegels
analysis of the ills that affect the modern subject to Kierkegaardian
individuality. The second aim will be to assess whether the cure that Hegel
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Chapter Five
proposes can be applied to and is acceptable for Kierkegaard. Lastly, I will

suggest that different categories than those emphasised by Honneths
reading of Hegel should be employed in order to both understand the
suffering of the modern self and provide its cure. Such new interpretative
categories are implicit in Kierkegaards analysis of modernity as put
forward especially in his Two Ages: A Literary Review (1978b).
Kierkegaard never explicitly acknowledged or employed these categories;
however, later interpreters such as Gyrgy Lukcs or Theodor Adorno saw
the relevance of such categories and applied them to the thought of the
Danish philosopher.
1. Hegels Diagnosis of Modernitys Malaise

As a first step, I will briefly outline Axel Honneths interpretation of
Hegels Elements of the Philosophy of Right in his book The Pathologies
of Individual Freedom (2010). As previously suggested, according to such
an interpretation Hegels Elements of the Philosophy of Right can be read
as an analysis of modernity and as a response to its malaise. This approach
is particularly interesting because, while never explicit in the text, one
could argue that Hegel is read starting from a somewhat Kierkegaardian
point of view: taking the standpoint of individuality and focussing on how
the contradictions of modernity affect subjectivity. This implicitly suggests
that Hegel and Kierkegaard begin from a similar standpoint the
connection between modernity and individual malaiseand allows us to
highlight the differences in the diagnosis and cure of this illness. Hence, in
Honneths interpretation, Hegel considers the pathologies of modernity by
which the individual is affected to be:
solitude, vacuity or burden, all of which can be reduced to the common
denominator of suffering from indeterminacy. (Honneth 2010, 23)
Hegel finds a cure to these pathologies in the system of Ethical Life.

Let us take a closer look at the features of pathologies such as solitude
(Einsamkeit) (Hegel 1991, 164), vacuity (Eitelkeit) (ibid., 186) and burden
(Gedrcktheit) (ibid., 192), in Knoxs translation: depression (Hegel
1967, 107) by looking at the Hegelian text itself. Hegel mentions the
condition of solitude as an ailment of the individual in a section on
Suffering from Modernity

Margherita Tonon
85
Morality when he deals with the difficulty in actualising the good as

universal abstract essentiality, i.e. as duty (Hegel 1991, 161). The
individual conscience encounters such difficulty when it is the only one
who can inwardly judge what such a good may be. This is because, while
the good is characterised in terms of duty, no specific content is given to
such a duty, which remains abstract and universal. It is then up to the
subject to determine the content of each singular instantiation of duty. 2
Thus, being forced to stand alone in determining the good as the content of
duty, the individual conscience bears the full responsibility of its choices
and feels their weight, together with insurmountable solitude when faced
with the decision. Such overwhelming freedom in the face of choice is,
according to Hegel, a phenomenon typical of modernity and it is
associated with a sinking deeper into the inwardness of the self. 3 Premodern consciousness, bound, as it were, by external and given duties, did
not feel the same solitude before the moral decision.
Later on in Elements of the Philosophy of Right, Hegel, in describing
the transition from Morality to the Ethical Life, specifies that the good
cannot remain in its abstract quality but needs instead to be made
determinate. The same also holds true for conscience. If kept apart,
conscience and the good remain indeterminate (Hegel 1991, 185). That
conscience and the good are already integrated in the power of the
conscience to establish what duty is, is rendered concrete in the transition
from Morality to the Ethical Life. Here Hegel addresses the ailment of
vacuity as characterising subjectivity insofar as it sees itself as abstractly
separated from the good. This kind of subjectivity needs an objective
content in order to be substantial, and to stop itself from evaporating into
indeterminacy: such content is precisely given by the good and spelled out
by Hegel in the structures and institutions of Ethical Life.
Finally, Hegel addresses the ailment of burden,or in Knoxs English
translation, depressiona feeling that the subject stumbles into when, in
his/her moral reflections, he/she wagers obligation and desire, (Hegel
1991, 192) i.e. when faced with the task of making a moral decision in the
absence of any external point of reference. The cure to the vacillation in
the face of such a moral decision is found, for Hegel, in the binding
duty, (ibid., 107) which frees the self both from its dependence on nature
and from the arbitrariness of its moral decision.
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Chapter Five
2. Applying Hegels Diagnosis to Kierkegaard

From this initial survey of Hegels text, we can already see that the three
elements which distinguish the pathologies that affect the subject in
modernity are solitude, vacuity and burden (or depression). Let us now
turn to the question of how such a diagnosis can be applied to the
Kierkegaardian subject. In order to do so, I will specifically analyse
Kierkegaards aesthetic writings, because, to use Honneths language, the
aesthetic attitude is the condition that Kierkegaard considers pathological
in the first place, and to which he offers a cure in the ethical and religious
writings. We should recognise, however, that from a Hegelian perspective
one could still argue that even the selves described in Kierkegaards
ethical and religious stages are not free from the above-mentioned
pathologies.4
The aesthetic is, for Kierkegaard, the domain where the subject is most
dispersed and projected outside of itself. One could quote several
examples of solitude, vacuity and burden in the different aesthetic figures
that populate the first part of Either/Or (1987a). As an instantiation of
vacuity one could think for example of the aesthete who lacks a moral
compass and, guided by the principle of the interesting, 5 creates a situation
in which the only criterion is entertainment and the avoidance boredom.
The aesthetes self is hollow because it is only a reflection of the external,
and while for a certain period of time he can delude himself by living in
his imagination and following his desire, his mirror image is that of the
tyrant who is prey to boredom and melancholy and victim of his own
caprice. Kierkegaard develops this figure in the second part of Either-Or
through the pseudonym of Judge William: Emperor Nero is taken as his
model, he who is precisely a captive of his absolute freedom which can
bring him no joy but only further restlessness and disappointment
(Kierkegaard 1987b, 185-88). This figure can also be taken to represent a
case of burden or depression.
However, I submit that the three ailments of solitude, vacuity and
burden are best concentrated in what Kierkegaard, through the pseudonym
of A the aesthete, defines as the modern tragic. Hence, the figure that best
incarnates the pathological self that Honneth singles out is the character of
Antigone in the Either/Or essay The Tragic in Ancient Drama Reflected
in the Tragic in Modern Drama (Kierkegaard 1987a, 137-64). This essay

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is worthy of note for several reasons: 1) Antigone incarnates, in one single

figure, all the above-mentioned ills of modernity and, differently from
other aesthetic figures, is reflectively aware of it; 2) in exploring the
possibility of Tragedy in modernity, Kierkegaard explicitly accomplishes a
critique of Modernity in comparison to Antiquity, and renders thematic the
malaise of Modernity born out of the isolation of the individual; and 3) in
order to illustrate this Kierkegaard specifically adopts Hegelian language
and interpretative categories that are in line with the reading of the
Elements of the Philosophy of Right offered by Honneth. While my first
and second claim are easily acceptable for the reader acquainted with this
Kierkegaardian text, I will need to further substantiate my third claim in
order to make my case. I will argue, however, that the conclusions
Kierkegaard draws, despite the common diagnosis of modernitys malaise,
are radically different to those of Honneth, and decisively break with the
Hegelian framework. In addition, some of the potential implications of
such a diagnosis place Kierkegaard even further away from the Hegelian
framework than the author was himself aware.
At this point, it is useful to summarise the Kierkegaardian rewriting of
Sophocles tragedy as applied to the modern age. As a young girl,
Antigone comes to know the terrible secret of her father Oedipus, who has
murdered his father and married his mother. She cannot reveal it to
anyone: this would dishonour her father. Moreover, she does not know to
what extent Oedipus is conscious of his deed, and she dares not ask him
for fear of projecting upon him her same anxiety. As a consequence, she
buries this knowledge deep in her heart and with it she buries herself alive
as its custodian. Upon Oedipuss death, she loses the very possibility of
being freed from her secret, which is then sunk even deeper into her heart.
Kierkegaard describes this as an itinerary from outward action to inward
reflection, and he goes so far as to describe Antigones conditionheld
captive as she is by her terrible secretas a dwelling in a borderline
territory between the living (the familys and societys web of relations)
and the dead (her father, with whom the truthher liberationis buried).
From this brief excursus into Either-Or we can see how the three
ailments of solitude, vacuity and burden can be easily applied to the case
of the modern Antigone. Solitude because the terrible secret of Oedipuss
crime keeps her isolated from her people; vacuity because such isolation
deprives her of an external point of reference to orient her moral action
and she wavers between longing for disclosure and the need for
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hiddenness; burden because such a secret weighs heavily upon her

existence, literally burying her alive.
Moreover, it is essential to remark that Kierkegaard explicitly makes use
of the Hegelian categories found in the Elements of the Philosophy of
Right in order to outline the feature of modern tragedy. Namely, the
modern Antigone tells a story of the increasing isolation of the protagonist
from the web of relationssuch as her family and the stateto which she
belongs. Although a member of the family, she is expelled from all
immediate belonging to her kinship by a secret she cannot share. As a
citizen, she participates only in the exteriority of the ceremonies in honour
of her father, yet is far removed from the joy of her fellow citizens because
she knows of her fathers crime.6
The emphasis on such Hegelian categories plays a crucial role in
defining the notion of the tragic. As is well known, the significance of the
tragic lies in the tension between activity and passivity, being responsible
and undergoing an affection. But while the ancient tragic hero is
intrinsically determined by those relations to which it fundamentally
belongs,the family, the state or the lineage of generationsthe modern
tragic hero has lost his connection with the above elements, and is hence
understood as a figure of silence, isolation and solitude.
Kierkegaard affirms this in a crucial statement where, in appealing to
the ideal of substantial categories, he shows his indebtedness to the
Hegelian analysis:
Our age has lost all the substantial categories of family, state, kindred; it
must turn the individual over to himself completely, in such a way that,
strictly speaking, he becomes his own creator. (Kierkegaard 1987a, 149)
Kierkegaard (A) hence maintains that the present age, when compared to
antiquity, is affected by an excess of individualisation. The individual
posits itself as autonomous and self-determining, but in doing so the
subject itself is made insubstantial, and descends into the comic. 7 In this
respect, Kierkegaard writes:
Every individual, however original he is, is still a child of God, of his age,
of his nation, of his family, of his friends, and only in them does he have
his truth. If he wants to be the absolute in all this, his relativity, then he
becomes ludicrous. (ibid., 145)

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But is Kierkegaard fully convinced that these categories are still apt to
fully sustain the individual? The answer to this, anticipated in the essay on
tragedy, is fully spelled out, as we will see, a few years later in the literary
review Two Ages.
3. Hegels Cure
Yet, before answering this question, let us dwell further on the abovementioned notion of substantial categories. The emergence of the notion
of substantiality in Kierkegaards text offers us an entry point into
Honneths reading of Hegels cure to modernitys ills. According to
Honneth, Hegel analyses and identifies the roots of that individual
sicknesswhat Honneth calls suffering from indeterminacyin the fact
that the expression of individual freedom is limited to some incomplete
models, namely abstract right and morality. The two spheres are
necessary, but not sufficient, conditions for individual self-realisation
(Honneth 2010, 31), which can find its accomplishment only when our
inclinations and needs are directed at the universal. This can happen,
according to Hegel, only in the Ethical Life and more precisely in the
State, as the bringing together of the different spheres that foster individual
self-realisation (ibid., 27). Such spheres, as is well known, are the family,
civil society, and finally the state. By belonging to such spheres the
individual becomes determinate. That is to say, from empty and abstract it
becomes concrete, that is, it is embedded in those substantial categories
that constitute its content. As is well known, in Hegel the notion of
Substanz is central to his account of ethical and political life. Hegel does
not conceive of the state as an association of independent individuals
under a pact or contract that binds them together as an external fact; rather,
he understands it in terms of substantiality, as the ground through which
citizens are constituted and through which they receive their meaning,
binding them together.
Thus, Honneth maintains that the transition to Ethical Life constitutes a
moment of emancipation, or the liberation of the individual subject from
its suffering from indeterminacy. Hegel locates such a liberating power in
the notion of duty, as that which frees the individual, not only from his/her
instincts, but, more importantly, from the uncertainty and vacillation of
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moral deliberation, and ultimately from the indeterminacy that derives

from self-enclosedness and lack of action. In this respect, it is interesting
to cite at length 149 of the Elements of the Philosophy of Right.
A binding duty can appear as a limitation only in relation to indeterminate
subjectivity or abstract freedom, and to the drives of the natural will or of
the moral will which arbitrarily determines its own indeterminate good.
The individual, however, finds his liberation in duty. On the one hand, he
is liberated from his dependence on mere natural drives, and from the
burden he labours under as a particular subject in his moral reflections on
obligation and desire; and on the other hand, he is liberated from that
indeterminate subjectivity which does not attain existence [Dasein] or the
objective determinacy of action, but remains within itself and has no
actuality. In duty, the individual liberates himself so as to attain substantial
freedom. (Hegel 1991, 192)
Honneth (2010, 53) emphasises that such liberation is granted because

duty outlines certain intersubjective courses of action that correspond to
moral norms. Duty is then removed from the interiority of the self, as Kant
would have had it, and placed outside in recognisable intersubjective
practices that the individual fulfils, not perceiving them as duties but as
instances in which his/her freedom finds expression and realisation. In
short, Ethical Life, through its moments of Family, Civil Society, and
the State, provides the conditions for such a realisation. As Honneth puts
it:
the subject reaches the highest level of individuality by learning through
participation in the different spheres, to master, step by step, the cognitive
schemata and reasons that are situated, each in its turn, within the horizon
of feeling, instrumental rationality, and reason. (ibid., 62)
But how is the isolated and suffering individual able to make the transition
to a form of life where his/her freedom is finally realised? According to
Honneths interpretation, in Hegel this transition takes the shape of
Wittgensteinian therapy, where the dispelling of false conceptions is
central to the healing process. In fact, Honneth argues that, for Hegel:
the philosophically decisive step consists in the diagnosis tracing the
different phenomena of social suffering back to a conceptual confusion
that, so to speak, has to feature as the cause of the illness (ibid., 44) 8

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In sum, the misconceptions and prejudices that cause the suffering

originate from the incomplete pictures of human life and achievements
offered by Abstract Law and Morality, where the individual sees the
realisation of the good as a solitary undertaking, without realising that its
achievement is already supported and favoured by the structure and
institutions to which one essentially belongs.
Can such a cure be applied to the modern Antigone and to other
Kierkegaardian individualities? From what we learn from Kierkegaards
essay on tragedy one could easily argue, from an Hegelian perspective,
that Kierkegaardian subjectivity with its emphasis on inwardness remains
confined to the perspective of Morality, i.e. it detaches itself from social
life, unable to translate its good intentions into external deeds. From such
a perspective, Kierkegaardian subjectivity remains entangled in a web of
prejudices that confines it to an incomplete perspective, from which it is
extremely difficult to attain the universal. This interpretation strikes us as
especially appropriate if we consider Kierkegaards dismissal of all
intermediate categories between the individual and the universal: the
family in the modern Antigone is torn apart by dark secrets and
incommunicability, the institutions of the state are perceived as an
antagonistic force against which Antigone should protect her fathers
honour.
Yet, on what grounds should the way out offered by Hegels so-called
therapeutic undoing of misconceptions become apparent to the unhappy
and suffering individuality, and hence also to the Kierkegaardian subject?
The answer to this question lies at the core of Hegels project and
Kierkegaards departure from it. For Hegel, the disease of modernity is
caused by a denial of reason, which intrinsically permeates social reality.
Such a mistake makes itself known in the form of individual suffering. To
put it in Honneths own words:
here the central part is played by [Hegels] conviction that social reality
is always permeated by rational reasons to such an extent that a practical
infringement of them is bound to create dislocations in social life.
(2010, 24)
As stated above, when we take for certain forms of life that are only
relative, then we necessarily run into some form of social or individual
pathologies. According to Hegel, the realisation of a freedom that has in
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view the universal takes place only in relation to the human other, i.e. in
the moment of recognition. Ethical Life, as the sphere in which such
freedom is realised, needs to be able to guarantee this form of
intersubjective interaction. Or as Honneth puts it:
If freedom of the individual means first and foremost being with oneself
in the other, then the justice of modern societies is measured by their
ability to guarantee for all their members equally the conditions for such
communicative experience and thus enable them to participate in
conditions of undistorted interaction. (2010, 26)
Besides the specific content of the cure for indeterminacy (the

realisation in the state of a dimension of intersubjective communicative
interaction as the space where freedom is realised), what is most
fundamental is Hegels appeal to a reason that permeates social reality.
4. Two Ages: No Rationality in Modernity

Kierkegaard precisely calls into question such an underlying rationality.
Already in Either/Or, Kierkegaard, through the pseudonymous author A,
stresses the fact that the outward categories of the familial and political are
not binding enough to force Antigone towards disclosure and transparency.
They have been emptied of their substantiality and they have been reduced
to forms without content.9 In short, social and political categories can no
longer demand a more substantial participation from the modern subject, a
participation that goes beyond a mere formal belonging.
This position is fully developed in a subsequent text that Kierkegaard
signs as the author, that is, Two Ages: a Literary Review. In his review of
Thomasine Gyllembourgs novel A Story of Everyday Life, Kierkegaard
confronts two epochs, The Age of Revolution and The Present Age,
and of the individualities to which they give rise. The comparison with the
pastin this case not too remote, yet distant enough to mark a clear
difference from the presentoffers Kierkegaard the opportunity to
criticise his age, which appears to him as deprived of passion (Kierkegaard
1978b, 62). Passion, which distinguished the age of revolution, is what
relates individuals to the Idea. When passion is lacking, subjects gather
instead into a herd, like in the present age, with the potential of generating

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violence and anarchy. Nothing prevents singularity from being lost in the
crowd. For Kierkegaard, the consequence is the absence of meaningful
action, which is instead substituted by publicity: nothing happens but
still there is instant publicity (70). In such a way the most fateful
transformation takes place in the individual, which is transformed from
actor into spectator, or even worse into a crowd of spectators (73).
The most fateful consequence, according to Kierkegaard, is the process
of levelling that characterises the present age: such levelling is
abstractions victory over individuals (84). Such levelling happens
because, while the dialectic of antiquity had in view the outstanding
individual (such as the hero) as opposed to the many, the dialectic of the
present is centred on equality. Therefore, the category of generation rises
above the individual, and what matters is not excellence but rather number
(85). Hence, the individual achieves his/her significance only in the
crowd: belonging and being subordinated to an abstraction. Kierkegaard
accentuates the impersonal character of such levelling, an abstract but
indomitable force that sweeps over the age and allows no resistance,
preventing the individual from rising above the crowd by his/her own
efforts. Such a tendency can neither be halted collectively nor
individually: if a period or age were to attempt to counteract it, it would
only reinforce and reconfirm the levelling, while the individual is simply
insignificant in relation to it (87). The agent of the levelling is the
emerging phenomenonspecific to the nineteenth centuryof the public,
an impersonal congregation with no face or real unity, which is conjured
up by the press. Due to its lack of real presence and concreteness, the
public is for Kierkegaard nothing more than a corps, a surrogate for a
lack of real community and contemporaneity amongst individuals; in fact,
it is a merely alienating force (90-91).
What is striking in this review is Kierkegaards acute awareness of the
loss of any meaningful relationship of the individual with the whole,
which is expressed in the absence of any substantial mediating categories
between individual and totality. In the place of family and state
institutions, we have instead notions such as the crowd, the herd, the
generation, the number, and then again the spectator, the public, the press.
These are forces or congregations in which the individual finds
him/herself gathered, but they clearly lack the substantiality that would
allow the subject to free itself from its lack of determination, as Hegel had
suggested. Differently from the Hegelian structures of Ethical Life, the
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forces evoked by Kierkegaard in the Two Ages fail to offer a positive

instantiation of duty, in which the individual would find his/her
realisation in externality. In reality, when part of these formations, the
individual is as lonely and as empty as beforemerely finding
quantitative expression, and falling under the illusion of acquiring more
strength and influence in virtue of the number.
What is even more interesting, however, is the notion of levelling as an
impersonal force that takes hold of modernity and cannot be stopped,
either by individual or collective efforts. Such a force annihilates all
differences under an abstraction, which is that of a distorted notion of
equality where all that matters is precisely the number. The increasing
influence of large impersonal formation, such as the crowd and the public,
is the expression of such levelling.
From this reading one can derive that the forces and social formations
which distinguish the modern age are not institutions charged with content
such as the Hegelian State, where different interests are rationally
composed togetherbut fleeting and mutable gatherings, with no
intelligible purpose and direction. They determine the loss of any real
participation in a community, and the power of the levelling causes the
indifference and passivity of the individuals when faced with historical
change. From such a reading of the Two Ages, it appears evident that
Kierkegaard clearly denies that social reality is always permeated by
rational reasons (Honneth 2010, 24) as Honneths reading of Hegel would
have us believe.
5. Modernitys New Paradigm

The refusal to recognise an underlying rational structure that permeates
reality lies at the origin of Kierkegaards rejection of the Hegelian cure:
the individual can find neither realisation in external action, nor solidarity
and identity in groups, movements or institutions. This is because, for
Kierkegaard, beyond the individual self (and ones inner relationship with
God) there is only irrationality and falsehood. Put differently, by calling
into question the ground of rationality in the mid-nineteenth century
modern society, Kierkegaard is undermining the Hegelian cure. As
previously stated, in modern society as he experienced it, Kierkegaard no

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longer perceives rational structures but only a play of irrational forces,

above all, the forces of levelling. The latter is qualified by features such as
abstractness, anonymity, a quantitative approach, and fetishismfeatures
that prompt commentators like James L. Marsh (1984, 165-66) to make a
compelling case for the presence of a notion of alienation at work in
Kierkegaards own thought. The individual experiences exteriority as the
realm of alienation and coercion, where meaning remains far removed
from the subject. Such coercion is, for instance, incarnated by the
levelling of the age. That is to say, the free ethical life of the individual
is mutilated in the external world because it is subjected to the influence of
agents beyond ones control. In Two Ages Kierkegaard seems to come to
the conclusion that social externality offers no possibility of realising the
good in the form of duty.10 In fact, it is possible to argue that the
individual, on entering into such structures, undergoes a process whereby
he/she loses his/her own agency and acts as a cog in a machine. Marsh
correctly emphasises that Kierkegaard concentrates on the socio-cultural
aspects of such alienation over against the economical aspects, and this
marks an important difference from the Marxist idea of alienation;
according to his reading however, the two versions share a similar
structure.
In fact, a reading of Kierkegaards authorship in light of the notion of
alienation had already been put forward by Gyrgy Lukcs (1995) in his
essay Sren Kierkegaard and Regine Olsen, published in Soul and Form
in 1910. Lukcs sees Kierkegaard as the paradigm of the philosopher of
modernity, who has fully perceived the subjects alienation in modern
society, together with its separation from objectivity (1995, 11-25). 11 Yet it
is even more insightful to borrow another specifically Lukcsian category,
which is not yet operative in Soul and Form and only explicitly introduced
in the later History and Class Consciousness (1923), that is to say, the
category of reification. Such a category is effectively put to work by
Theodor W. Adorno in Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic.12
Introducing reification in the context of this discussion is also fitting
insofar as Honneth himself took up such a concept in his book Reification:
A New Look at an Old Idea (2008). Honneth re-interprets reification as the
forgetfulness of recognition. For the sake of the present analysis, I will
follow mainly the Lukcsian formulation of such a concept, as
objectification of human relations (i.e. the relations of class or production)
into invariable structures, which take on the quality of ineluctability
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(which is otherwise known as second nature). This is because, while

Honneths definition can certainly be applied to the present analysis, I
submit that his optimistic outlook on the positive use of the concept of
reification and the possibility of correction of such a phenomenon does not
fit with Kierkegaards critique of modernity.
Reification is thus especially helpful in understanding the
Kierkegaardian rejection of the Hegelian solution to the ailments of
modernity, insofar as it explains the nature of the impersonal forces such
as the levelling, and irrational gatherings, such as the public, or the
number that permeate objectivity. Despite the fact that the individual
brings about the existence of such formations, he/she nonetheless feels
powerless and insignificant in front of them, as though they had escaped
his/her control. This is essentially what happens in the process of
reification when human constructs and products, instead of being seen as
the projection of the self are instead perceived as distant and antagonistic
to it, and ultimately, as determining the subject itself. In such a way,
objectivity becomes foreign and inimical to the subject, rather than
promoting the realisations of its deeper needs (i.e. the realisation of the
good). In short, the notion of reification explains the fracture between
subjectivity and objectivity as it is experienced in an early capitalist
society. In this respect Adornos reading of Kierkegaards work, and its
account of Kierkegaards loss of the object, emerges precisely out of an
analysis of the reified reality as it is experienced by Kierkegaards
declining class (Adorno 1989, 48).
6. An Unsatisfying Cure?
Our inquiry set itself the task of examining whether the Hegelian cure
at least the way Honneth interprets itcould be seen as an answer to the
sufferance of Kierkegaardian subjectivity. The answer that emerges from
the reading of some topical texts by the Danish philosopher is a negative
one. Duty as embodied in the proper belonging to the family or to the
state, cannot be seen, from a Kierkegaardian perspective, as the cure to the
ailments of modernity. This is because Kierkegaard challenges the
Hegelian claim of an underlying rationality in objectivity, and for this
reason its institutions cannot be taken as the necessary externalisation of

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the individuals inner striving to do the good. We have seen that the failure
to acknowledge such rationality is not due to an incomplete or partial
perspective, but to a deeper insight into some of the characteristics of
modernity, which prevent the individual from properly feeling at home in
his/her surroundings. More specifically, Kierkegaard speaks of impersonal
forces, in which the individuality of the existing person is submerged and
annihilated.
That said, the nature of such impersonal forces needs to be further
investigated in order to fully explain the Kierkegaardian rejection of the
Hegelian cure. This can be done by reading Lukcs and Adornos works
on Kierkegaard, where his authorship is understood in terms of a response
to the experience of alienation and reification. Referring to these two
processesalienation and reificationis especially helpful in explaining
the impersonal and overwhelming nature of the phenomena of the modern
age, first and foremost, the so-called levelling. It is also helpful in
understanding the reasons behind Kierkegaards rejection of the Hegelian
cure: with the rise of the market economy, objective reality has taken a
turn towards an irrationality that cannot be simply amended by affirming
that subjective needs and desires require an externalisation in order to be
truly realised. It is rather a matter of analysing the forces at play in such
impersonal coercive processes and offering a critique that could, if not
revert them, at least raise an awareness of their workings.
Hence, I aver that the reason Hegels solution cannot be accepted is that
it is first necessary to engage with the more complex problems of
alienation and reification, before claiming the rationality of the real. That
is to say, it is only by exploiting the interpretative possibilities offered by
such notions that one can perhaps find a way out of the specific malaise
experienced by Kierkegaardian subjectivity.
It needs to be stated, however, that while Kierkegaard was acutely
aware of the destructive effects of the irrationality of the modern world on
the individual,13 his response did not move towards a critique of its
underlying processes. On the contrary, the Danish philosopher arguably
abandoned all social concerns and hope of rescuing objectivity from its
evils: the only antidote to the malaise of modernity that Kierkegaard puts
forward is to say no to it by way of a radical withdrawal from society.
Yet this turn towards interiority is precisely what is contested by Lukcs,
and especially by Adorno, as a loss of the object and, even more so, as
the impotent reaction of a member of a declining class to the changing
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conditions of production. James L. Marsh, who also reads Two Ages in

terms of a theory of alienation, offers instead a more positive and
somewhat balanced perspective; in Kierkegaard, as much as in Marx,
alienation is seen as an educative opportunity of emancipation: as workers
are aware of their bondage when faced with the consequences of the
expropriation of their labour, so too is the experience of the levelling of
modernity that can offer an opportunity for the religious conversion of the
individual (Marsh 1984, 170). In this respect, in Two Ages Kierkegaard
argues that it is possible to break the spell of the age by using its falsehood
as a stimulus to establish a proper relationship to ones own existence. 14
While this solution has the great merit of taking into account the objective
conditionsand of denouncing their inadequacy and irrationalityit does
not however, represent a clear step forward in comparison to the point of
view that Hegel describes in the section on Morality, where the subject
struggles in solitude to establish the good within itself. In retreating into
interiority and in placing the accent on the God-relationship Kierkegaard
leaves the bad actuality unchallenged. For this reason, the most
compelling question that remains open, and to which Kierkegaard gives no
satisfactory answer, is how the individual can be truly saved when the
world is abandoned to the forces of evil and irrationality.

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Notes
1. In this respect Kierkegaards incomplete point of view is often associated with
the moment of the unhappy consciousness in Hegels Phenomenology of Spirit
(1979), a form of consciousness that sees itself as divided and tied down to the
finite, while being separated from the divine to which it aspires. The most notable
scholar who suggested such an association was Jean Wahl in his Le malheur de la
conscience dans la philosophie de Hegel (Paris: Rieder, 1929) and subsequently in
Etudes Kierkegaardiennes (Paris: Vrin, 1938). Paradigmatically, however, he did
so with the intention of proposing a Kierkegaardian corrective to the Hegelian
systematic approach, i.e. of humanising the Hegelian dialectic in the direction of
an almost existential struggle; he emphasised the individual as a corrective to the
excessive focus on knowledge of the Hegelian system. It is interesting to remark
that, subsequently, attributing to Kierkegaardian individuality the characteristic of
the Hegelian unhappy consciousness became, from the part of the Hegelian reader,
one of the most common ways of dismissing its criticisms (Taylor 2000, 19). I
would like to propose here a different reading of the Hegel-Kierkegaard debate, not
taking into account the well-known figure of the Phenomenology of Spirit, but
rather engaging with the transition from Morality to Ethical Life in Hegels
later Elements of the Philosophy of Right (1991).
2. Hegel specifies as follows how burdensome such a condition of loneliness when
faced with the good is for subjectivity: One may speak of duty in a most sublime
manner, and such talk glorifies the human being and fills his heart with pride. But
if it leads to nothing determinate, it ultimately grows tedious, for the spirit requires
that particularity to which it is entitled. Conscience, on the other hand, is that
deeper inner solitude within oneself in which all externals and all limitation have
disappearedit is a total withdrawal into the self (Hegel 1991, 163-64).
3. Hegel writes: As conscience, the human being is no longer bound by the ends
of particularity, so that conscience represents an exalted point of view, a point of
view of the modern world, which has for the first time attained this consciousness,
this descent into the self (ibid.).
4. In particular, the religious stage is associated with the unhappy consciousness
in the Phenomenology of Spirit, a figure characterised by a divide between finite
and infinite which is reflected in a separation between interiority and exteriority
that Hegel aims to overcome. As mentioned above, duty is the way in which the
subject goes beyond such separation in the Elements of the Philosophy of Right.
5. The category of the interesting plays a very important role in Kierkegaards
aesthetic writings. An example of its use can be found in The Seducers Diary,
where Johannes writes: My Cordelia, You know that I very much like to talk with
myself. I have found in myself the most interesting person among my
acquaintances. At times, I have feared that I would come to lack material for these
conversations; now I have no fear, for now I have you. I shall talk with myself
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about you now and for all eternity, about the most interesting subject with the most
interesting personah, I am only an interesting person, you the most interesting
subject (Kierkegaard 1987a, 401). The dominance of the category of the
interesting indicates the aesthetes subjective detachment and lack of commitment
towards his/her existential situation.
6. Kierkegaard writes: In addition, she is continually in conflict with her
surrounding world. Oedipus lives in the memory of his people as a fortunate king,
honoured and extolled; Antigone herself has admired and also loved her father. She
takes part in every commemoration and celebration in him, she is more
enthusiastic about her father than any other maiden in the kingdom; her thoughts
continually go back to him, she is extolled in the land as a model of a loving
daughter, yet this enthusiasm is the only way in which she can give vent to her
sorrow. Her father is always in her thoughts, but howThat is her painful secret
(Kierkegaard 1987a, 161).
7. It is precisely in this respect that Kierkegaard, once again, agrees with Hegel,
suggesting that comedy is a genre much more suited to reflect the isolation of
modern individuality, while at the same time calling into question the notion of the
modern tragedy itself.
8. To support such a position, Honneth argues that the factual starting point of
the Philosophy of Right is not simply to design an alternative theory of justice but
the perception of a deficiency or suffering in the life-world of Hegels own time:
to describe this pre-philosophical suffering he uses, in the first two sections of the
Philosophy of Right, a multitude of quasi-psychological terms, all of which refer to
states of apathy or lack of fulfilment (Honneth 2010, 44).
9. In this respect Kierkegaard ironically points out that in the present age the form
of government is emptied of the notion of responsibility, because although
everyone wants to rule, no one wants to have responsibility (1987a, 142). The
rulers thus keep derogating their responsibility until only the street watchman is the
one held responsible.
10. It should be noted that this is the case despite Kierkegaards earlier attempt in
Either-Or, through the pseudonym of Judge William, to attribute to duty an
essential function in the shaping of an ethical self.
11. While this insight is a correct one, the conclusions that Kierkegaard reaches
that of a philosophical subjectivism which finds refuge in faithare, according to
Lukcs, the wrong ones, and go in the direction of even further alienation. Lukcs
attributes these to the melancholic character of the Danish philosopher. In a
nutshell, the break-down of relations in his contemporary society is exemplified,
according to Lukcs, in the seeking refuge of the individual in the gesture (for
example, Kierkegaards breaking of his engagement, upon which he built his entire
authorship) in order to establish a meaning that cannot find expression in an
externality which is increasingly removed from the needs of the subject. Lukcs,
however, also remarks that the failure of the gestureprecisely because no

Margherita Tonon
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transparent unambiguous meaning can be conveyed in the modern fragmented

human experience.
12. More recently, the notion of reification has been applied to Kierkegaards
authorship by Timothy Bewes in Reification or The Anxiety of Late Capitalism
(2002). Here the experience of reification manifests itself as a form of sociocultural anxiety, which affects in particular the personality of the aesthete. The
ethicalmarriage, according to Judge Williamis seen as a remedy to such
anxiety because it elevates the two participants above the finite, i.e. the mundane,
the space affected by reification, insofar as such a union is taken up in front of God
as its witness. Thanks to the presence of the divine, the institution of marriage does
not restrict or enslave (2002, 245) its participant but each of them retains its
individuality.
13. In this respect I agree with Timothy Bewes (2002, 264), that Adornos appraisal
of Kierkegaards notion of reification is a rather reductive reading. The notion of
reification is not merely silently at work in Kierkegaards texts unbeknownst to the
author, and in need of extraction by the critical reading of the social theorist. On
the contrary, Bewes maintains that a thorough reflection upon the experience of
reification motivates Kierkegaards embracement of Christianity. While I agree
that Kierkegaard had a reflective and profound understanding of the phenomenon
of reification, as well as of the alienating forces of modernity, I submit, against
Bewes and with Adorno, that he did not draw out the consequences of such an
understanding, putting forward a critique of objectivity that aims at its redemption.
14. With regard to the levelling power of the public, Kierkegaard writes that if an
individual is not annihilated by it, he/she can have the chance of finding himor
herself and God: if the individual is not destroyed in the process, he will be
educated by this very abstraction and this abstract discipline (insofar as he is not
already educated in his own inwardness) to be satisfied in the highest religious
sense with himself and his relationship to God, will be educated to make up his
own mind instead of agreeing with the public, which annihilates all the relative
concretions of individuality, to find rest within himself, at ease before God, instead
of in counting and counting (1978b, 88, 92).
CHAPTER SIX
A FRACTURED DIALECTIC: KIERKEGAARD
AND POLITICAL ONTOLOGY AFTER IEK
MICHAEL ONEILL BURNS
I.
In this essay I will present a reading of the work of Sren Kierkegaard
which considers his potential offerings to political ontology in light of
both 19th century German idealism and 21st century transcendental
materialism. In particular I will argue that, following the work of
philosopher and psychoanalyst Slavoj iek, Kierkegaards political
potential becomes most obvious when his work is considered as existing in
the tension between the twilight of German idealism and the dawn of
dialectical materialism. Along with this, I will claim that this political
potential does not reside in the overtly ethical or anthropological aspects
of Kierkegaards varied corpus, but rather this potential resides in the
implicit ontological project developed in his response to various currents
of idealism, both German and Danish.
I will begin by critically summarising ieks recent engagement with
Kierkegaard, paying specific attention to the ontological implications of
this reading. After this, I will look at The Concept of Anxiety (1980a),
which I believe is Kierkegaards most overtly ontological text, with
ieks reading held close in mind. The aim of this reading will be to point
out the ontological core of Kierkegaards project, particularly as it
emerges through his critical responses to the philosophical currents of 19 th
century idealism. After this I will move to a consideration of the political
implications of this ontological reading of Kierkegaard. It is my hope that
while Kierkegaard never developed any overt political theory, my
argument will show that to act as if this precludes the possibility of a
political reading is to miss the point entirely. While it would be pointless
to speak of such a thing as Kierkegaards political theory, it is time for
philosophers and political theorists to turn to Kierkegaards ontological
and social analysis to provide the tools for adequately thinking through the
philosophical and political problems of the 21st century.
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Chapter Six
Before beginning, however, I must make one prefatory remark on

recent attempts to consider Kierkegaards relationship with the idealist
tradition, in particular as inspired by Jon Stewarts monumental work
Kierkegaards Relations to Hegel Reconsidered (2007). While Jon
Stewarts prodigious scholarship has forever altered the landscape of the
historical interpretation of Kierkegaard, his work often begs the temptation
to draw a distinct line of demarcation between Kierkegaards religious
critique of Danish thought and the philosophical project of German
idealism. Those who give in to this temptation run the risk of completely
disregarding Kierkegaards engagement with the actual texts and figures
of German idealism as well as his contribution to genuine philosophical
thought in favour of a reading that reduces Kierkegaard to being little
more than a religious critic of the Danish appropriation of German
thought. This reading is deeply flawed in a number of ways but two in
particular stand out. First, the temptation to argue that Kierkegaard wasnt
really talking about Hegel and thus his critique of the real Hegel is
moot misses the fact that Kierkegaard was deeply aware of Hegels actual
texts and was deeply influenced by the structure of Hegels philosophy. 1
Second, this reading misses the fact that even if we assume that
Kierkegaards primary inspiration was the work of Danish philosophers
and theologians, the structural aspects of his thought can still bear much
fruit when read in contrast to the systematic philosophies of the German
idealists. One scholar who is well attuned to the subtle nature of the
Kierkegaard-Idealism relation is David Kangas, who has argued (2007, 1)
that to read Kierkegaard must always be to read the texts of idealism
and,
to read these texts [the works of Fichte, Schelling and Hegel] seriously
alongside Kierkegaard is to see the inadequacy of interpreting him merely
as an external critic of idealism. (ibid.)
Following Kangas, I would be willing to contend that any philosopher or

theologian willing to claim that Kierkegaard was in fact not responding to
and interacting with the German idealist tradition simply has not read the
texts of this tradition, or even worse, has failed to adequately understand
them.
A Fractured Dialectic: Kierkegaard and Political Ontology after iek

105
II.
In his introduction to the English translation of Sren Kierkegaards
The Concept of Anxiety (1980a, xi), Reider Thomte notes that
however else Kierkegaard may be classified in the history of thought, he
stands in direct opposition to the philosophical idealism of his day.
This comment is far from the exception in Kierkegaard scholarship, in

which Kierkegaard is often read as absolutely contra the German idealist
tradition, and in particular, the work of Hegel. This has led to the
contemporary appropriation of Kierkegaard by a host of thinkers (Edward
F. Mooney, Mark C. Taylor, C. Stephen Evans) concerned with what his
thought has to offer discourses focussed on anti-metaphysical ethical
theories, phenomenological accounts of otherness, and dogmatic
theological accounts of belief and religious practice. While the past decade
has seen a small number of voices (most notably Binetti, Kangas, Stewart,
all 2007) arguing against this traditional reading of Kierkegaard and
considering him as a figure deeply intertwined with the questions and
legacy of German idealism, the most powerful voice in this reconsideration of Kierkegaard as a philosophical figure is that of Slavoj
iek.
While iek is best known for his engagements with Lacan, Marx, and
the German Idealists, the figure of Kierkegaard has been appearing more
and more frequently in his recent works. In The Parallax View (2006),
which is arguably ieks most systematically coherent and important
theoretical work, an entire chapter is dedicated to an engagement with
Kierkegaard. Most important for the argument I wish to present in this
paper is ieks insistence on the unexpected continuity between German
Idealism and Kierkegaard, (2006, 75) and the way in which this
unexpected continuity allows us to develop an overtly ontological
reading of Kierkegaard which paves the way for a subsequent political
interpretation of his work.2
It might be surprising to some that in The Parallax View, directly after
the chapter containing the most formal exposition of his core ontological
project, iek moves on to a chapter in which he engages primarily with
Kierkegaard entitled Building Blocks for a Materialist Theology. The
second section of this chapter begins under the heading, Kierkegaard as a
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Hegelian, and starts by interrogating the possibility of thinking of God as

the name for the gesture of purely meaningless sacrifice, a logic he sees
Kierkegaard articulating in his notion of infinite resignation. From here
iek goes on to make one of his boldest, and most interesting, claims
about Kierkegaard:
no wonder only a thin, almost imperceptible line separates Kierkegaard
from dialectical materialism proper. (iek 2006, 75)
iek goes on to reconsider Kierkegaards relationship to Hegel in

light of his own controversial reading of Hegel, and specifically of Hegels
theory of Aufhebung. For iek, rather than signalling the closure of logic
and history, the flight of the Owl of Minerva actually opens up the space
of active (and subjective) intervention (ibid., 77). Whether or not there is
scholarly credence to ieks unique re-opening of Hegels dialectic is
beyond the scope of the present discussion, but it does allow iek to
consider Kierkegaard in a very Hegelian light.3 As iek reads him:
the main thrust of Kierkegaards anti-Hegelianism reside[s] precisely in his
effort to break this Hegelian closed circle, and open up the space for
contingent cuts, jumps, intrusions, which undermine the field of what
appears to be possible. (ibid.)
While I think iek is correct in his assessment of the root of

Kierkegaards reaction against Hegelianism, iek goes on to ask if much
of this reaction does not stem from a fundamental misunderstanding of
Hegels dialectics on the part of Kierkegaard. According to iek the
closure of history does not signify the inauguration of the point of view of
finality, but rather:
its wager isprecisely, to reintroduce the openness of the future into the
past, to grasp that-which-was in its process of becoming, to see the
contingent process which generated existing necessity. (ibid., 78)
Rather than viewing the dialectical movement of history as the process

by which possibility becomes actuality, iek instead wants to read Hegel
as arguing that the dialectical process enables us to restore the dimension
of potentiality back into mere actuality (ibid.). iek then contrasts this to
what he sees as being the key formula of Kierkegaards religious ontology.

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Kierkegaards God is strictly correlative to the ontological openness of

reality, to our relating to reality as unfinished, in becoming. God is the
name for the Absolute Other against which we can measure the thorough
contingency of realityas such, it cannot be conceived as any kind of
Substance, as the Supreme thing. (ibid., 79)
Thus for iek, and for Kierkegaard, God himself is always the how
rather than the what; the how of relating as opposed to the what of being or
substance. This interpretation allows us to read Kierkegaards conception
of God in a properly ontological light as signifying the primacy of
contingency in any attempt to articulate a picture of metaphysical totality.
This ontological openness not only sets the stage for Kierkegaards theory
of subjectivity, but provides the ontological conditions by which subjects
are able to think of the possibility of socio-political novelty. This political
aspect of Kierkegaards ontology will be discussed later in this essay.
Later in the same chapter iek goes on to further flesh out the
implications of Kierkegaards ontology, once again with reference to
Hegel. iek notes that in regards to the triad of the Aesthetic, the Ethical,
and the Religious, that the fundamental choice (or either/or) is not open to
each possibility, but is rather a choice between the ethical or its religious
suspension. iek emphasises that there is absolutely no mediation
between the Ethical and the Religious, and that in light of this:
The Religious is by no means the mediating synthesis of the two
[aesthetic and ethical], but, on the contrary, the radical assertion of the
parallax gap (the paradox, the lack of common measure, the
insurmountable abyss between the Finite and the Infinite). (iek 2006,
105)
This is crucial for iek as he notes that the subject wants to live a
consistent mode of ethical existence, and attempts to disavow the radical
antagonism, or contingency, of the human situation to accomplish this;
this would be Kierkegaards ethical stage. But because reality is in-itself
inconsistent at the ontological level,4 there can be no such thing as a
consistent mode of existence, and this is what the leap of faith is, an
acknowledgement that there is no guarantee of a consistent existence in
which things will always make sense. So, in ieks terminology, the
religious is precisely the real, and the religious leap of faith is the
traumatic and anxiety laden encounter with this real of existence. Whereas
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both the Aesthetic and Ethical make some claim to consistency which
denies the fundamental nature of reality, the religious gesture is precisely
the acknowledgement of this fundamentally inconsistent, or fractured,
reality. Ontologically speaking, this is one of the most important things
that iek finds in Kierkegaard, his insistence that the real is precisely the
inconsistent core of reality, and that it can only be encountered in a
moment of subjective anxiety.5
This then leads to ieks insistence on the ontological importance of
infinite resignation. For iek, this act of resignation is the subjective
acknowledgement (and acceptance) of this terrifying and inconsistent real,
and this act is meaningless precisely because it is the sacrifice of any claim
to absolute meaning, and a subsequent fidelity to this recognition that, in
ieks Lacanian parlance, there is no big other.
Because iek is ultimately concerned with the way in which the
ontology of the non-all6 can allow us to re-think subjectivity in light of the
political, he does not conclude his engagement with Kierkegaard before at
least intimating the political stakes of this reading. While it is often
remarked that Kierkegaard ultimately provides no social or political theory
because in the end he is concerned with absolute subjective inwardness,
iek affirms the insistence on inwardness while pointing out its political
potential:
The Kierkegaardian believer is alone not in the sense of an individuals
isolation, but alone in his total exposure to the traumatic impact of the
divine Thing. This is why, in his polemic against Christendom, [Practice
in Christianity] Kierkegaard was attacking not only the Church as a state
institution, but also its inherent counterpart, inner belief. (iek 2006,
117)
What iek sees in Kierkegaard, and what I think is commonly

misunderstood about his thought, is that the move inward does not entail a
retreat from the socio-political elements of reality; rather, the move inward
is the pre-political moment par excellence. Kierkegaard should thus be
read as arguing that inwardness is not a call to do nothing, but the
preparatory act of doing anything. We see this in the critique of
Christendom in Practice in Christianity, in which the Church
Triumphant is criticised precisely because the individuals in this system
believe in a consistent view of reality in which their Church is in

109
possession of the absolute truth (or, logic) of the situation. Because of this,
they do not have to do anything. The Church Militant on the other hand,
is in the act of constant becoming. This is not because they have avoided
the leap inward, but precisely because in this leap inward they have
encountered the traumatic and inconsistent real, and thus, they have the
anxiety of free subjectivity and must constantly leap inward to gain the
motivation and perspective to do anything outward. I will return to this
example in the final section of this essay after I first examine in more
detail the ontological conditions which lead Kierkegaard to develop this
social distinction.
III.
Now that I have explicated ieks reading of Kierkegaard and have
shown why his ontologisation of Kierkegaards project opens up a path for
thinking about the political potential emerging from what Paul Ricoeur has
referred to as Kierkegaards fractured dialectic, 7 I will take a step back
and re-interrogate the project of Kierkegaards The Concept of Anxiety
with this ontological project in mind. While this detour will be ontological
and systematic in nature, I find it necessary to properly reckon with
Kierkegaards ontological core before moving on to analysing its political
potential.
Kierkegaard begins the introduction to The Concept of Anxiety with an
explanation of the place of (philosophical) science in modern thought as
that which commits the man of science to the service of totality
(1980a, 9). Here, parodying a certain brand of Hegelian thought,
Kierkegaard aims to problematise speculative science (philosophy) not
because of a bad employment of logic, but rather for what he sees as the
problematic conflation of logic with actuality in this sort of thought.
Kierkegaard explains this:
Thus when an author entitles the last section of the logic Actuality, he
thereby gains the advantage of making it appear that in logic the highest
has already been achieved, or if one prefers, the lowest, for neither logic
nor actuality is served by placing actuality in the Logic. (ibid., 4)
It is important to note here, following Jon Stewart (2007), that
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Kierkegaard is not referring to Hegels The Science of Logic (2010), in

which actuality serves as a moment in the middle of the logical movement
which takes place in the text, but rather to the work of Adler, who ends his
own work on Hegelian logic with a section on actuality. Along with
making this point Stewart also brings light to the divergence in meaning
between Kierkegaard and the idealists notion of the term actuality:
Hegel understands actuality as one of the abstract categories of modality in
line with the German philosophical tradition. By contrast, Kierkegaard
interprets it as part of the immediately experienced existential sphere.
(Stewart 2007, 385)
Thus what for Hegel and the idealists is a technical term signifying the
sphere of reality that is rationally justified, for Kierkegaard is a term which
signifies the contingency and particularity of lived existence.
Keeping this divergence in terms in mind, we see that Kierkegaard is
here beginning to point out the irony inherent in the notion that logic, a
completely ideal mode of speculative thought, could adequately grasp the
lived experience of actuality. He goes on:
Actuality is not served thereby, for contingency, which is an essential part
of the actual, cannot be admitted within the realm of logic. (Kierkegaard
1980a, 10)
And:
for if logic has thought actuality, it has included something that it cannot
assimilate, it has appropriated at the beginning what it should only
[presuppose]. (ibid.)
While much of the force of this critique seems to be deflated in light of

Stewarts reading, Kierkegaards comments still carry ontological force
insomuch as his point is to remind idealist thought that existence, and not
logic, always serves as the foundational moment absolutely preceding all
reflection and activity.
The crucial aspect of this passage for my reading is Kierkegaards
claim that logic oversteps its bounds precisely at the moment at which it
includes that which it cannot assimilate, or in other words, takes as its
starting point that which it cannot adequately account for in its own terms.
This is why he says that it has appropriated that which it should only

111
presuppose, meaning that existence is the starting point for all

philosophical thought. This point is as logical as it is ontological for
Kierkegaard, as he is accusing (speculative) logic of claiming to be in
possession of its own foundational moment (or grounds) rather than
acknowledging the necessity of pre-supposing a primary ontological event
which remains forever beyond the recuperative activity of logical
reflection.8
Because Kierkegaards critique is not aimed primarily at the level of
the purely ontological (or, metaphysical), but rather with the properly
lived ethico-religious experience of the ontological, Haufniensis goes on
to analyse how this philosophical problem comes to bear on religious
dogmatics. This concern with dogmatics leads Kierkegaard to explore
the ethical implications of the logical conception of immediacy, or the
immediate. This misplaced notion of beginning seeps into dogmatics by
affecting its understanding of faith. According to Kierkegaard:
Faith loses by being regarded as the immediate, since it has been deprived
of what lawfully belongs to it, namely, its historical presupposition.
Dogmatics loses thereby, because it does not begin where it properly
should begin, namely, within the scope of an earlier beginning.
(Kierkegaard 1980a, 10)
Whereas Kierkegaard previously critiqued logic for assuming itself

capable of accounting for its own beginning within its own circle of
logical reflection, he now exemplifies what this looks like in the context of
ethico-religious existence. In regards to faith, this conception of
immediacy leads to the assumption that faith can adequately account for
its own starting point, or in other words, that the starting point of faith is
immanent to the activity of faith itself. In opposition to this, Kierkegaard
wants to argue that ethical-religious existence and faith can be grounded
within the scope of an earlier beginning which lies outside the bounds of
reflection. This means that faith when properly considered should reflect
the sort of un-grounded ontological starting point previously discussed, as
rather than being capable of accounting for its own beginning, faith is the
acknowledgement of being grounded in something that is infinitely prior
to its own beginning, and forever outside faiths own circle of reflection.
My discussion of the introduction to The Concept of Anxiety is
important as without it, this text could easily be read as simply concerned
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with the psychological and theological aspects of the human self and her
experience of anxiety. It is telling, however, that Kierkegaard begins the
text with this introduction as it is almost explicitly philosophical in its
critical considerations of idealist conceptions of logic and immediacy.
This is crucial as the five main sections of the work switch to a
predominately mythological tone and structure. My contention will
remain, however, that when reading this work in the context of the critique
of idealism outlined in the introduction, the mythological examples and
discussions can be seen as exemplifications of the problems which emerge
when various forms of philosophical idealism fail to account for the fact
that reflection is always preceded by the experience of existence. Along
with this, I aim to flesh out my claim that the critique levelled in the
introduction has just as much to do with the ontological as it does the
logical, and that one of the primary stakes of this work is whether or not
philosophy can claim to ever grasp any immediate notion of beginning at
the heart of its ontological claims.
One of the primary problems that Kierkegaard attempts to reckon with
in The Concept of Anxiety is the problem of beginning previously
discussed, and particularly what he sees as the lack of an account of
beginning in the thought of Kant and the post-Kantian idealist. In his
recent book Kierkegaards Instant David Kangas frames the project of
The Concept of Anxiety in relation to Kant and Fichte, for whom
the originary conditions of knowledgelie in an irreducible unity of selfconsciousness, its presence to itself. (Kangas 2007, 163)
In light of this, Kangas sees Kierkegaard as taking a step further back than
either Kant or Fichte willed to venture by asking how self-consciousness
comes to posit itself in the first place. When Kierkegaard takes this step
beneath the first principle of Fichte, he discovers anxiety, which is the
primary (non-dialectical) relation to nothing, or non-being, which opens
up the very possibility of self-positing.
In The Concept of Anxiety, Kierkegaard outlines what could be called
an ontology of the self in response to both the Fichtean I as well as
what he saw as a problematic account of actuality as it is presented in the
work of Danish philosopher Adlers account of Logic in his work on
Hegel (Stewart 2007, 379). This account of the self is one that is made
possible by the un-ground of anxiety which allows for the original act of

113
self-positing, which Kierkegaard calls sin, and the subsequent freedom

which comes through the selfs awareness that it has no corresponding
object, or more precisely, the self experiences this anxiety in the
awareness that the something it corresponds to is precisely nothing. This
originary act of self takes place in what Kierkegaard refers to as the
moment or instant (ieblikket), a concept he explicates in The Concept of
Anxiety. According to Kierkegaard (1980a, 81), in the individual life,
anxiety is the instant [moment]. This originary anxiety is thus the event
through which the self breaks with any former innocence (or, immediacy)
and finds itself un-grounded in its experience of radical freedom and
possibility.
Before I continue, I must first explain what Kierkegaard means by sin,
and in particular I will attempt to disassociate this concept from its
traditional theological and moral implications. When Kierkegaard
discusses sin in The Concept of Anxiety, he is not intending to initiate a
pious discourse on Christian morality. Instead, sin is a psychological, and I
would argue ontological, category in the work of Kierkegaard.
To begin to understand the place of sin for Kierkegaard, we must first
consider the concept of innocence. Kierkegaards use of innocence is his
ethical match for Hegels notion of immediacy, which for Kierkegaard can
belong only to Logic (ibid., 35). According to Kierkegaard:
in innocence, man is not qualified a spirit but in psychically qualified in
immediate unity with his natural condition. (ibid., 41)
This picture of man is prior to both sin and the instant of self-positing.
Kangas (2007, 165) describes this innocence as a state that hovers
between being and non-beinga pre-differentiated, virtual, or dreamlike
state. Kierkegaard goes on to state:
dreamily the spirit projects its own actuality, but this actuality is nothing,
and innocence always sees this nothing outside itself. (Kierkegaard 1980a,
41)
This state of innocence is, according to Kierkegaard, ignorance; not

ignorance of something, but rather an ignorance of the self as such.
Kierkegaards point here is to articulate the state of the self prior to its
self-positing, which is innocence. In this state there is no awareness of
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freedom or possibility, and the model of the innocent self could rightly be
called non-dialectical.
Kierkegaard next reveals the profound secret of innocence; that it is
at the same time anxiety. But if innocence is not yet the fully realised self,
what sort of anxiety is experienced in innocence? According to
Kierkegaard:
the actuality of the spirit constantly shows itself as a form that tempts its
possibility but disappears as soon as it seeks to grasps for it, and it is a
nothing that can only bring anxiety. (ibid., 42)
Kierkegaard notes that in innocence, spirit relates to itself as the pure

possibility of possibility, and as Kangas points out (2007, 166), this
innocence is groundless and whyless. Kierkegaard then goes on to note
the importance of this initial appearance of anxiety in innocence.
That anxiety makes its appearance is the pivot upon which everything
turns. Man is a synthesis of the psychical and the physical; however, a
synthesis is unthinkable if the two are not united in a third. This third is
spirit. (Kierkegaard 1980a, 43)
This is a crucial moment not only for Kierkegaards account of the

development of anxiety, but also for the underlying ontology of the self
which emerges in this work. As Kierkegaard develops it, man is made up
of both a physical and psychical aspect which are both united in relation to
spirit. In innocence spirit is not fully actualised, but present as
immediate or dreaming (Kierkegaard 1980a, 43). In this state
innocence is anxiety, because it is ignorance about nothing. Kierkegaard
goes on to state that innocence still is, but only a word is required and
then ignorance is concentrated (ibid., 44). What does Kierkegaard mean
here when he says that only a word is required? To understand this it is
necessary that we follow Kierkegaard and recall the biblical account of the
first sin of Adam.
In his original state, before his encounter with Eve and the serpent in
the garden, Adam was in a state of innocence. He existed in a dreamlike
state wherein the only possibility he was aware of was a sheer possibility
of possibility itself. He was ignorant about nothing, ignorant about his own
possibility as a self. But then came the word, meaning the word of
prohibition, the enigmatic word, according to Kierkegaard (ibid.). This

115
is the word of God, which said that Adam could eat from any tree in the
garden, except from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. This word,
the word of prohibition, is the word which awoke ignorance. Whereas
before the emergence of this word innocence was ignorant of itself, now it
is aware that it can do something, because it was prohibited from doing
this very thing. Prohibition has thus awoken desire. According to
Kierkegaard, the prohibition induces in him anxiety, for the prohibition
awakes in him freedoms possibility (ibid.). At this point innocence is
reaching its limit, as Kierkegaard states:
The infinite possibility of being able that was awakened by the prohibition
now draws closer, because this possibility points to a possibility as its
sequence. (ibid., 45)
This awoken possibility thus leads to the act of Adams sin. We know
that according to the biblical narrative, Adam and Eve (after being
persuaded by the serpent) ate from the tree of knowledge of good and evil,
and immediately afterwards they covered their naked flesh in shame, this
is said to be the first sin. But beyond the religious and mythical meaning
behind this act, what is Kierkegaards philosophical motive in utilising this
notion of sin? By sin Kierkegaard is describing the act by which the self
initially posits itself as its own ground. This is clearly articulated by
Kangas:
At the outermost point, facing the Afgrund of whylessnessof not having
any determinate reason to be, or groundthe self posits itself by making
itself into its own groundIn this instant it wills its sovereignty over the
Afgrund by reducing the possibility of possibility to possibility-for-x, some
calculable possibility. (Kangas 2007, 167)
In this act, the self posits itself as its own ground. This self-positing is
similar to the previously discussed account of the Fichtean ego, but for
Kierkegaard this act of self-positing is not the consummate act of selfrealisation. At this stage the self encounters the terrifying abyss of
freedom, and experiences anxiety at this encounter, but subsequently
retreats further into itself and attempts to become its own ground.
Kierkegaard describes this feeling of anxiety in a passage worth quoting at
length:
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Chapter Six
Anxiety may be compared with dizziness. He whose eye happens to look

down into the yawning abyss becomes dizzy. But what is the reason for
this? It is just as much in his own eye as in the abyss, for supposed he had
not looked down. Hence anxiety is the dizziness of freedom, which
emerges when the spirit wants to posit the synthesis and freedom looks
down into its own possibility, laying hold of finiteness to support itself.
(Kierkegaard 1980a, 61)
At this point the self acts in one of two ways. In the first, which we
have previously discussed, the self retreats from the abyss and attempts to
posit itself as its own ground. The second option, and the one Kierkegaard
associates with a true freedom and positive anxiety, is the refusal of selfpositing and an affirmation of the abyssal nature of freedom. Kierkegaard
describes this process as an absolute sinking:
He sank absolutely, but then in turn he emerged from the depth of the
abyss lighter than all the troublesome and terrible things in life. (ibid., 158)
In this absolute sinking, the self affirms its inability to remain identical
to itself, and in this instant an irrevocable parting of the self from itself
takes place. Kierkegaard exemplifies this in the text:
Thus when Ingeborg looks out over the sea after Frithiof, this is a picture
of what is expressed in the figurative word. An outburst of her emotion, a
sigh or a word, already has as a sound more of the determination of time
and is more present as something that is vanishing and does not have in it
so much of the presence of the eternal. For this reason a sigh, a word, etc.
have power to relieve the soul of the burdensome weight, precisely because
the burden, when merely expressed, already beings to become something
of the past. (Kierkegaard 1980a, 87)
Kangas offers an explanation of the significance of this passage:

This refers to the moment in Frithiofs Saga where Ingeborg watches her
lover disappear over the horizona parting that turns out to be irrevocable.
Vigilius could hardly have selected a better image to capture the ambiguity
of the instant: time and eternity part, like two lovers, whose only
connection then becomes that of desire. The desire, inseparable from a
burdensome weight, arises in the partingdesire as a relation without
relation, a synthesis that does not syn-thesizeFrithiofs glance becomes
commensurate with the eternal only in the irreparable loss of its object:

117
irreparability is the eternal cut into the present, the fateful conflict. (Kangas
2007, 185-6)
This passage is crucial as it highlights the manner in which the

affirmation of freedom signifies an irreparable cut with not only the
present structure of temporal representation (ibid., 186), but a break
between the self and its foundation which can never be repaired. Rather
than rely on itself for a sense of ground, Kierkegaard wants to affirm the
absolute loss of ground that comes through an affirmation of freedoms
anxiety. This fracture is characteristic of the brand of ontology that
Kierkegaard implicitly develops throughout this text, a fractured dialectic
of the sort that I have already shown iek to outline in his own reading of
Kierkegaard.9
Following this, it is worth briefly remarking on the place of
Kierkegaards notion of the instant (or moment), specifically as it
functions within The Concept of Anxiety. The concept has both ontological
and historical-temporal importance throughout this work, and much of
Kierkegaards corpus. Kangas gets at the heart of the ontological meaning
of the instant when he says:
The instant, in other words, is not allowed to be reduced to mere
evanescence or illusion; rather, it is precisely the real. The event is not a
passage to reality, but reality itselfThis essential gap, the excessive
futurity of the eternal, awakens precisely anxiety. And anxiety imposes the
most strenuous demand upon the subject. (Kangas 2007, 189)
It is important to note, first of all, that this notion of the instant as event
is one of the crucial moments in which any philosophical reading of
Kierkegaard breaks from traditional (i.e., metaphysically totalising)
Hegelianism, as for Kierkegaard the instant always falls outside of all
dialectical recuperation.10 Not only is the self originally given to itself in
the instant, but all future possibility and novelty are made possible through
the recurrence of the instant. One of the crucial aspects of this concept is
that the instant is not a moment in which one escapes reality, or gets a
glimpse of some transcendent plane of other-ness, but is rather the real
itself. This is why Kierkegaard associates both terror and anxiety with the
instant. This also relates to the opening problem of the book, the problem
of the origin, or beginning, of self-consciousness. Rather than attempting
to rationally explain this, Kierkegaard uses this notion of the instant to
118
Chapter Six
point out this primordial event of self which comes before all other finite
beginnings.
Another crucial distinction that emerges in The Concept of Anxiety is
the one drawn between the good and the demonic, or evil. This distinction
begins to open the way to consider the socio-political implications of the
ontology developed in this work. Kierkegaard gives the most explicit
definition of freedom in a footnote to the opening pages of section IV of
the book:
The good cannot be defined at all. The good is freedom. The difference
between good and evil is only for freedom and in freedom, and this
difference is never in abstracto but only in concreto. (Kierkegaard 1980a,
111n)
And in the main text of the next page Kierkegaard adds that
Freedom is infinite and arises out of nothing. (ibid., 112)
The important distinction that Kierkegaard makes after introducing

these two terms is between anxiety about evil, and anxiety about the good
(the demonic). To begin with, Kierkegaard tells us that to have anxiety
about evil is itself the good (ibid., 119) 11, or put different, is freedom.
While it may seem that any sort of anxiety for Kierkegaard remains
outside the good, Kangas notes that
anxiety over a further ascent into evil, which is at bottom anxiety over the
future, is a position that, in its totality, stands within the good. (Kangas
2007, 178)
This relates to Kierkegaards insistence on the fundamental openness,

or contingency, of the future; a position previously highlighted in the work
of iek. Because the truly free self has already ventured to the bottom of
the abyss and abandoned any pretence to self possession or identity, she
lives in the affirmation that there is no grounds to her being, and no
totalised reality in which the set of future possibilities can be contained. In
light of this, Kierkegaard (1980a, 115) notes, anxiety is at this point
always present as the possibility of the new state. This means that the one
in anxiety about evil is always open to pure possibility or contingency, and
this infinite openness creates a sense of terror in the instability of any

119
present state. One can here see a clear connection between the notion of
anxiety about evil in The Concept of Anxiety, and Kierkegaards notion of
the militant Church in Practice in Christianity (1991). Because truth is
always an infinite and open process without the possibility of a finite
completion, Kierkegaard argues that the true Church, the one properly
related to the truth of Christianity, is the militant Church. This church
never makes a claim to absolute or objective understanding, and is
constantly aware of the contingency of the future. Because of this, they
must always be open to reform and change. Kierkegaard develops this in
opposition to the Church triumphant, for whom truth is already settled, and
there is no necessity to be open to the contingency of the future, because
reality is already closed off into a finite set of possibilities. We could
rightly say that the Church triumphant serves as a social exemplification of
the sort of closed Hegelianism which claims to possess knowledge of
some sort of metaphysical totality; the brand of Hegelianism that
Kierkegaard was overtly against.
This example, of the Church triumphant, exemplifies Kierkegaards
notion of anxiety about the good, which is the demonic. This is the anxiety
experienced by the one who was not able to make the final leap into the
abyss, and is still attempting to posit some finite means as their ground.
According to Kierkegaard (1980a, 123), the demonic is thus unfreedom
that wants to close itself off. Rather than acknowledge the infinite
openness of the future, the self whom is anxious about the good (which is
freedom) is avoiding the good at all cost, as the good signifies the
restoration of freedom, (ibid., 119) and this restoration would bring with
it the acknowledgement of the contingency of the future and the lack of
any stable ground for the self. In Kangas analysis (2007, 179), anxiety
about the good, which is evil, signifies a closure to the other. He goes on
to argue that the demonic wills separation and self-enclosure in the face
of the other (ibid.). Because the good carries with it Kierkegaards notion
of the instant (or moment), this opens the possibility for radical
interruption or novelty, and this sort of novelty would be the ultimate
threat to the self attempting to close itself off from all otherness or
interruption. We see this exemplified collectively in Kierkegaards notion
of the Church triumphant, as this is a social body that is attempting to
ground itself with a possession to an absolute truth, and which is
subsequently closed to any and all otherness or contingency. On this point
we can see why Kierkegaard fears that a philosophical system working in
120
Chapter Six
the service of totality, as a system that begins from a position of logical

totality and then attempts to describe actuality as a moment in the
development of this totality in the same terms, could have no way of
thinking about the freedom and contingency contained in the future.12
To put this in more blunt terms, Kierkegaards ontology, which Paul
Ricoeur brilliantly referred to as a fractured dialectic, leads directly into
a socio-political theory in which the ontological openness of reality creates
a situation in which it is up to subjectivity to navigate reality in the
freedom of this contingency. Because there is no such thing as the
possibility of accessing some absolute metaphysical totality, or in other
terms, because this dialectic never reaches a point of absolute mediation, a
new state is always possible.13
This fractured dialectic thus engenders a socio-political situation in
which subjective intervention is absolutely necessary to work out any
truth in a fashion similar to the way in which Kierkegaard describes the
structure of the Church militant, for whom truth itself is a process of
subjective becoming rather than a stable and objective institution. This
thus breaks the circle of reflection Kierkegaard locates in his critique of
idealist metaphysics and necessitates that reflection end for the sake of
passionate activity.14 It is then not surprising that as iek notes,
Kierkegaard can be understood as occupying a space between the grand
metaphysical ambitions of German idealism and then praxis oriented
outcomes of Marxist dialectical materialism. Thus, a proper political
reading of Kierkegaard needs to strategically forget the 20 th century
(which focussed on an existential and ethical interpretation of his work)
and re-commence by placing his ontology in a properly 19 th century
context. Through this re-consideration, Kierkegaard suddenly emerges as a
thinker with much to add to contemporary debates on the relationship
between ontology, subjectivity and the political.
IV.
This essay has attempted to lay the groundwork for an explicitly
political reading of Sren Kierkegaard which begins from the claim that
his work contains an ontological core that is implicitly developed through
his response to the philosophical questions of German idealism. I began by

121
showing how the work of Slavoj iek opens up the potential to read
Kierkegaard as a thinker surprisingly close to the key conceptual
developments of both German idealism and dialectical materialism
through an ontological re-interrogation of his project. After analysing
ieks interpretation of Kierkegaard I moved on to explicate the
ontological core of Kierkegaards The Concept of Anxiety, paying specific
attention to the manner in which Kierkegaard seems to respond, whether
directly or indirectly, to many of the key philosophical problems of
German idealism. After this I used the distinction Kierkegaard draws
between the Church Militant and Church Triumphant in Practice in
Christianity to exemplify the socio-political implications of Kierkegaards
fractured dialectic, showing specifically how Kierkegaards implicit
ontology of contingency (or, his fractured dialectic) creates the conditions
for rigorously thinking through the possibility of socio-political novelty
and intervention. Along with this, I have attempted to argue that if one
wants to arrive at a properly political interpretation of Kierkegaard, they
must strategically avoid relying on his overtly ethical and anthropological
texts and instead study his most systematic and ontological works.
Through locating this ontological core to Kierkegaards work, one can
then properly theorise the sort of socio-political conditions which would
result from this ontological situation.
122
Chapter Six
Notes
1. For a wonderful example of this see Maria J. Binetti, Kierkegaards Ethical
Stage in Hegels Logical Categories: Actual Possibility, Reality and Necessity
(2007).
2. It is worth noting here that when iek speaks of the unexpected continuity
between Kierkegaard and German idealism, he is not implying that Kierkegaards
work takes its shape through an explicit engagement with the specific texts and
figures associated with German idealism. As the work of Jon Stewart has shown,
much of the material Kierkegaard was explicitly responding to comes from a
particular brand of Danish Hegelianism. ieks point, which I follow here, is that
when read in a philosophical manner, Kierkegaards work follows, both
conceptually and thematically, many of the main philosophical ideas found in the
works of the German idealists, in particular Schelling and Hegel. Along these lines
I am also claiming that the work of Stewart does not preclude the possibility of an
explicitly philosophical reading of Kierkegaard which places his thought in the
context of German idealism.
3. While controversial to some, ieks reading of Hegel is supported to varying
degrees by the recent work of Jean-Luc Nancy (2002), Catherine Malabou (200 4),
Stephen Houlgate (2006), and Fredric Jameson (2010).
4. According to ieks reading, the transition from Kant to Hegel is one in which
the gap, or inconsistency, between the noumenal and phenomenal is absolutised.
Thus, it is not the case that the limitations of our phenomenal subjectivity keep us
from accessing reality as it is in-itself, rather, the seeming inconsistencies and
contradictions inherent in our experience of reality accurately depict how things
really are. Thus, we have no way of accessing a totalising metaphysical account of
reality because this totality simply does not exist.
5. On this point iek is in agreement with more traditional Kierkegaard scholar
David Kangas 2007 work, Kierkegaards Instant.
6. ieks materialist ontology posits that reality is precisely non-all, meaning that
there is no such thing as a totalising metaphysical structure that accounts for
everything. Rather, there is always a blind-spot, or gap, at the heart of reality. In a
sense that meshes well with Kierkegaard we could say that for iek reality is
always in the process of becoming, and thus can never be accounted for in any sort
of totalising or stagnant discourse. For ieks development of this theory see The
Parallax View (chapters 1-2, 15-123).
7. In his essay Philosophy after Kierkegaard (1998) Ricoeur uses the term
fractured dialectic to refer to the way in which Kierkegaards response to a
Hegelian account of mediation rests upon the absolute contradiction between
concepts such as finite/infinite, possible/actual, etc. In Ricoeurs account, this
fractured dialectic places Kierkegaard even closer to the actual thought of Hegel.
Along with iek, Ricoeur argues that considering Kierkegaards relation to the

123
thought of German idealism is the key to re-considering his relationship to

systematic philosophy.
8. At this one can draw a strong similarity between this notion of a presupposed
beginning and Schellings notion of un-pre-thinkable being as it is developed in
his late philosophy of mythology (see Schelling 2008).
9. For iek, infinite resignation is the giving up of any idea of a big other in the
Lacanian sense. One could rightly read the gap between the ethical and the
religious spheres of existence as containing this same affirmation of contingency.
10. By metaphysically totalising Hegelianism I am referring to any account of
Hegels philosophy which holds that the dialectic reaches any sort of final
moment in which spirit fully comprehends itself. This is the reading of Hegel that
iek is arguing against when he speaks of the contradiction and negativity at the
heart of the dialectic.
11. Viewed from a higher standpoint, this formation is in the good, and for this
reason it is in anxiety about the evil (Kierkegaard 1980a, 119, italics mine).
12. Here it is important to keep in mind the previously discussed distinction
between the abstract and existential understandings of Actuality used by the
idealists and Kierkegaard respectively.
13. On this point it is not a stretch to say that a Kierkegaard inspired political
ontology shares much in common with the materialist dialectics of French
philosopher Alain Badiou. See in particular his Logics of Worlds (2009).
14. For more on this see Kierkegaards Two Ages: The Age of Revolution and The
Present Age: A Literary Review (1978b).
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CONTRIBUTORS
Alison Assiter is Professor of Feminist Theory at the University of the
West of England. She has published a number of books and articles,
including Althusser and Feminism (1990), Enlightened Women,
Modernist Feminism in a Post-modern Age (1996), Revisiting
Universalism (2003) and Kierkegaard, Metaphysics and Political
Theory (2009). More recently she has been working on Kierkegaard,
Kant and feminism and she has a piece forthcoming in Acta
Kierkegaardiana, on Kierkegaard and the Ground of Morality.
Christine Battersby is Reader Emerita in the Department of Philosophy
and an Associate Fellow of the Centre for Research in Philosophy and
Literature at the University of Warwick. She is the author of Gender
and Genius: Towards a Feminist Aesthetics (1989, 1994); The
Phenomenal Woman: Feminist Metaphysics and the Patterns of
Identity (1998) and The Sublime, Terror and Human Difference (2007),
plus numerous articles on feminist aesthetics, feminist metaphysics and
the history of philosophy and culture. Recent publications include
Singularity and the Female Self: Encountering the Other, Women: A
Cultural Review, (2011, vol. 22, 23) and Behold the Buffoon:
Dada, Nietzsches Ecce Homo and the Sublime, Tate Papers (2010,
issue 13).
Michael ONeill Burns is completing a doctoral dissertation on
Kierkegaards relation to idealism and politics. He has published
articles on Kierkegaard, French philosophy and contemporary
materialism. He currently lives and teaches in Baltimore.
Margherita Tonon is a doctoral student and academic assistant at the
Institute of Philosophy, University of Leuven. Her current research
interests lie in the area of existentialism, German idealism and critical
theory, with specific reference to Hegel, Kierkegaard and Adorno. Her
doctoral dissertation is entitled For the Sake of the Possible
Negative Dialectics in Kierkegaard and Adorno.
Thomas Wolstenholme is completing his PhD thesis Kierkegaards
Existential Politics at Lancaster University, under the direction of
Graham Smith and Alison Stone. His other works on aesthetics include
136
Contributors
The Problem of the Fictive Stance, Postgraduate Journal of

Aesthetics (2008, vol. 5, no. 1).
David Wood is W. Alton Jones Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt
University, where he teaches Continental and Environmental
Philosophy, and an Honorary Professor at the University of Warwick.
His books include Thinking After Heidegger, The Step Back: Ethics
and Politics After Deconstruction, and Time After Time, as well as
some 12 other edited volumes. He is a practising Earth Artist: his latest
series is IntraTerrestrials: Landing Sites.
INDEX
Abraham and Isaac, 1213, 19, 48,

60
Absolute, the, 49
Adam and Eve, 11415
Adler, Adolph Peter, 110, 112
Adorno, Theodor, 4950, 95, 97,
101n13
aesthetic age, 6469, 79n7. See also
modernity; present age, the
aesthetic vs. religious works, 44n1
aesthetic vs. the ethical, 4950, 51,
54, 63, 64, 73, 86, 107
alienation, 9798
Antigone, 87, 91, 100n6
anxiety, 1314, 4952, 11214,
11718. See also despair
Arendt, Hannah, 42
Assiter, Alison, 2n1, 5, 9, 10, 44n3,
44n7, 47, 52; Kierkegaard,
Metaphysics and Political
Theory, 25n9, 59, 81n14
atheism, 17, 20, 59, 81n15
Battersby, Christine, 910; The
Phenomenal Woman, 28
Beauvoir, Simone de, 31
Bewes, Timothy, 101n12, 101n13
biopolitics, 2223
Butler, Judith, 61n5
choice, 57, 74
Christianity: attack on
Christendom, 15, 81n13, 108;
the Church Militant, 109, 119
120; and intolerance, 78;
second ethics, 72, 76
Concept of Anxiety, The, 4, 52, 53,
55, 57, 103, 105, 109, 11216,
11718
Concluding Unscientific Postscript,

3
Conway, Daniel, 64, 75
Corsair affair, 27
Critchley, Simon, 4647, 54, 61n4
crowd, the, 30, 31, 3637, 38, 51,
75, 9293; which spits at Jesus,
40
Crutzen, Paul, 25n14
Derrida, Jacques, 1920; The Gift of
Death, 19
despair, 50, 51, 53; two forms of,
12. See also anxiety
Don Juan, 4950
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 7
Either/Or, 3, 1112, 49, 8687, 92
ethical, the, 5256, 89
Evans, Stephen, 5758, 105
evil, 53, 62n9, 11819
faith, 111; leap of faith, 1078
Fear and Trembling, 3, 22, 48, 55,
60
feminism, 910, 28, 42, 44n3;
equality vs. difference, 2829
Flaubert, Gustave, 30
Flew, Antony, 7, 24n1
For the Dedication to That Single
Individual, 36
Foucault, Michel: on Iranian
revolution, 4546, 61n4
freedom, 51, 54, 60, 61n3, 113,
11617, 11819; and
determinism, 48
gender: different from sex, 31, 44n5
God, human relation to, 13, 24n9,
98
Grant, Iain, 47
Gyllembourg, Thomasine, 3237,
44n7, 68, 92
138
Hegel, G. W. F., 51, 8384, 8492,

104; Elements of the Philosophy
of Right, 83, 8485, 90; on duty,
90, 96, 99n2; master/slave
relation, 12, 29, 41;
Phenomenology of Spirit, 99n1,
99n4
Heiberg, Johan Ludvig, 3233
Heidegger, Martin, 89
hero, the, 71, 88, 93
Honneth, Axel, 83, 84, 87, 8990,
92, 95, 100n8
Huyssen, Andreas, 2932, 37
idealism, 1034, 105, 112, 120
individual, the, 3739, 51, 52, 65,
74, 79n4, 83, 8485, 88; and the
established order, 39; relation to
God, 13, 24n9, 98
instant, the, 11718
inwardness, 1, 15, 36, 39, 66, 67, 75
Iranian revolution, 5, 4546, 61n1
Irigaray, Luce, 910, 1719
Israel, 59
Jegstrup, Elsebet, 9, 10
Kangas, David, 112, 11518
Kant, Immanuel: on Abraham and
Isaac, 1213; Critique of
Judgement, 48; Critique of
Practical Reason, 52, 54; on the
moral law, 13, 52, 54, 59; on
religion, 1213
Kearney, Richard, 20
Kierkegaard, Sren Aabye: A
(pseud.), 88, 92; Anti-Climacus
(pseud.), 53; Constantin
Constantius (pseud.), 3738;
Johannes de Silentio (pseud.),
48, 5556; Judge William
(pseud.), 76, 86, 100n12; Victor
Eremita (pseud.), 41; Vigilius
Haufniensis (pseud.), 53, 55,
111, 116
Kierkegaard Vivant (UNESCO
conference), 1617. See also
Sartre, The Singular Universal
Index
Kirmmse, Bruce, 3235, 76, 77,

81n15
Kosch, Michelle, 47, 50, 52, 53
Lacan, Jacques-Marie-mile, 46
47, 59
Lon, Cline, 9
Levinas, Emmanuel, 18
levelling, 3, 27, 72, 74, 9394,
9596, 97, 101n14
liberal democracy, 68, 77
logic, 10911
love: agape, 5657, 58; erotic, 18;
for ones neighbour, 4647, 56,
5760, 72; for self and others,
5760
Lukcs, Gyrgy, 9596, 97, 100n11
Mandela, Nelson, 59
majority vote, 71
Malik, Habib, 81n15
mass media, 27, 93
marriage, 40
materialism, dialectical, 106, 120
materialism, transcendental, 103
modernity, 27, 30, 5052, 6475,
79n7, 8485, 87, 91, 9296, 97.
See also aesthetic age; present
age, the
Mooney, Edward, 79n5, 80n8
naturalism: as nightmare, 22
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 10, 14, 24n8
numerical, the, 7172, 93, 96
Only a Fiddler (review), 76, 80n12
Palestine, 59
patriarchy, 16
Pattison, George, 61n7, 67, 79n6
Perkins, Robert L., 66, 73, 81n13
Plekon, Michael, 80n8
Plutarch, 36
Point of View, The: On My Work as
an Author, 27, 36, 3940, 79n7
possibility, 21, 118
postmodernism, 11, 28
Present Age, The. See Two Ages:
The Age of Revolution and The
Present Age; A Literary Review
Practice in Christianity, 119

present age, the, 50, 6869, 70
75, 80n10, 88. See also aesthetic
age; modernity
public, the, 93; monstrous
abstraction, 3435. See also
crowd, the
reification, 9596, 97, 101n12,
101n13
religion: and anxiety, 14; as defining
issue of our age, 9;
fundamentalism, 24n2; human
relation to God, 11, 15, 24n9,
40; and intolerance, 78;
reclaiming the sacred, 21; and
social policy, 14
Repetition, 3738
revolution, 52, 70, 80n9, 92
Ricoeur, Paul, 109, 120, 122n7
rights, human, 20
Sartre, Jean-Paul, 1617; The
Family Idiot, 31; The Singular
Universal, 9, 1617, 31, 37
Schelling, F. W. J. von, 47
seducer, the, 29, 41
Seducers Diary, The, 4, 99n5
self, the, 58, 11219; emergence of,
4647; relational self, 11, 28,
41, 53, 80n8
sexual difference, 1718, 31; as
defining issue of our age, 910
139
Sickness Unto Death, The, 11, 12,

53
sin, 11315
South Africa, Truth and
Reconciliation Commission, 59
Stewart, Jon, 104, 110
sublime, the, 48, 61n7
substantial categories, 89
Tragic in Ancient Drama Reflected
in the Tragic in Modern Drama,
The, 34, 8687
Two Ages: The Age of Revolution
and The Present Age; A Literary
Review, 3, 4, 5, 2728, 3233,
3439, 44n1, 50, 67, 68, 77,
80n11, 84, 9295, 98
Upbuilding Discourses, 56
violence, 60
Wahl, Jean, 99n1
Walsh, Sylvia, 9
wind, as metaphor, 38, 39
Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 11, 90
women, Kierkegaards views on,
4041
Works of Love, 4, 56, 76
Young, Iris Marion, 4142
iek, Slavoj, 7, 4648, 103, 105
109, 122n2, 122n4; on Iranian
revolution, 4546; on loving
ones neighbour, 4647; The
Parallax View, 47, 105109,
122n6

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