"You Await a Tyrant whereas I Await a Martyr":

One Aporia and its Biographical Implications in

A Literary Review

By JOAKIM GARFF

Translated by STAGEY ELIZABETH AKE

Abstract

In this paper, I will first present a short synopsis of the main points of Kierkegaard's
critique of his own age; thereafter, I will describe that religious Utopia which is also to
be found in the text; then I will analyze the aporia to which the relationship between
the critique of his age and his conception of a religious Utopia gives rise; and finally - as
a more or less provocative point - I will claim that this aporia is biographically moti-
vated and thus has biographical implications. In conclusion, I will attempt to show that
Kierkegaard thinks a-politically, theatrically: that Kierkegaard, the man who so strongly
opposes the "play," actually views history as theatre and will himself end upon the
stage.

The Introduction

When Kierkegaard, in late March 1846, came out with A Literary Re-
view, his contemporaries were not only given the chance to read a
panegyrical discussion of Mme Gyllembourg's Two Ages with constant
reference to her A Story of Everyday Life, they also got an especially
rich opportunity to see what one of their own untimely contemporar-
ies thought about the age. And it was not the least bit flattering.
Besides being Kierkegaard's review of his own age, which was one
that shuffled uneasily between absolute monarchy and democracy, his
Review was supposed to be literary. Such literariness was due to the
subject of the review, Mme Gyllembourg's novel, yet the review is it-
self literary; opulent and audacious in its metaphors, impertinent in its
phenomenological descriptions, devilishly reckless in its stylistic aban-

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 One Aporia and its Biographical Implications 131

dont, and so distinctive in its opinions that certain sentences almost

seem to emancipate themselves from the context and stand apart as
brilliant bon mots. This, however, applies to various Kierkegaard texts
and is thus an almost tautological description, but a tautological de-
scription of the literary in the Review is justified. For the Review
spreads its literariness over Gyllembourg's novel in such a way that it
eventually encapsulates the novel in its own corpus. Even though
Kierkegaard assures us that he is not, in his interpretation of the
novel, "making more of it than it is,"1 it becomes obvious that he has,
as it says somewhere, an "entirely private \privatissime\...secret way of
reading"2 by which he covertly undergirds Mme Gyllembourg's text
and by which he inserts his own viewpoints into it. Such an impres-
sion is additionally intensified by the rather peculiar circumstance
that Kierkegaard consistently refers to the novel's author as if she
were a he, something which Mme Gyllembourg most certainly had
never been. In other words, Kierkegaard's Review relates itself de-
constructively to its subject: worming its way into the text like any
other parasite, feeding upon its significance, rearranging its signs, cov-
ertly embedding within it a secret reading mode, and destabilizing its
semantic codes. So much so that when Mme Gyllembourg showed
her appreciation for the copies she received of the, by all accounts,
overwhelming Review, she aptly observed that "when I compare my
novel with your book, so richly equipped with such profound, such
apt, and such witty observations, then my work appears to me a sim-
ple romance from which a poet has taken the subject and wrought a
drama."3 Apparently Mme Gyllembourg had a sneaking suspicion
that she was, in fact, being deconstructed.
Now, whether it is because, or in spite of the fact that Kierkegaard
published the Review in his own name, it is none the less a striking
feature that the "I" which articulates his critique of Mme Gyllem-
bourg's novel is not only a lot more personal in nature, it also ap-
pears significantly more frequently, than that "I" which criticizes his
age and his contemporaries. This latter "I" appears to be rather im-
personal, often a merely rhetorical figure, whose function is to pro-
mote and support the epic discourse. For this reason, Kierkegaard
seems, in spatial terms, to stand outside, and thus to be uninvolved in,

1
2
AW xiv, 58.
KWXIV.ll
3
KW XXV, 196.

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132 Joakim Garff

the levelling which he portrays and which therefore delicately corre-

sponds to his status as untimely.
The absence of an authoritative author-subject is, however, only ap-
parent, in that one of the text's empty places is obviously intended
for Kierkegaard himself. Whenever he proclaims that "for example, a
man who could be said to belong essentially in the Middle Ages or in
Greece could be living in our age,"4 then Kierkegaard has rather pre-
cisely indicated those sources from which he will be acquiring the
age-criticizing weapons which will be occupying his place in an other-
wise rather I-less text: Greece is obviously not a geographical index,
but rather a larger-than-life metaphor for Socrates, whose own philo-
sophical enterprise culminated in his death, while the Middle Ages
serves double duty as the epoch in which both monastic penitence
and courtly heroism reigned supreme. Thus, we see that, in essence,
Kierkegaard's analysis of the two ages which Mme Gyllembourg de-
scribed in her novel extends much further back in time and presup-
poses an existential typology wherein disintegration, a resistance to
cultural assimilation, and the will to powerlessness are the dominant
features.

//. The Critic

Kierkegaard's portrait of his epoch's absent originality - its affecta-

tion, pretence, and superficiality, its benumbing Bildung, spiritlessness,
and empty worship of form - came about in the last years of the
reign of Christian the Eighth, when the public and social life of Den-
mark was notorious for its extraordinary tedium. A time charac-
terized by its leading luminaries, like Heiberg, Holst, and Gold-
schmidt, in terms such as aesthetic, mechanical, unreal, apathetic,
dreamy, and in other more or less soporific metaphors. Kierkegaard's
characterizations point in the same general direction; indeed the age's
lack of passion is straightforwardly seen as a negative condition, thus
giving his Review its polemical pulse: "Generally speaking, compared
to a passionate age, a reflective age devoid of passion gains in exten-
sity what it loses in intensity "s It is this dynamic formula which
frames Kierkegaard's review of his age; it is this self-same formula

4
KWXIV,33.
5
KWXIV,91.

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 One Aporia and its Biographical Implications 133

which he wishes to set up for a reversal, so that the age can regain
what it has lost.
Thus, it is not surprising that it is the boorishly banal bourgeois
who, with more or less caricatured care, gets a real dressing down, if
only because it is he who, being neither hot nor cold but only luke-
warm, deftly avoids all decision-making by cultivating the life of leth-
argy upon his day-bed, all the while coming up with inexcusable
excuses, each of which exceeds its predecessor in imaginative unin-
ventiveness, for remaining prostrate: "Exhausted by chimerical exer-
tions, the present age then relaxes temporality in complete indolence.
Its condition is like that of the stay-abed in the morning who has big
dreams, then torpor, followed by a witty or ingenious inspiration to
excuse staying in bed."6
The self-satisfied citizen's extensive indolence is an image of verti-
cal collapse. Formerly solid structures, religious as well as political,
have imploded: the middle is everywhere. Society no longer consists
of individuals or groups classified into a social hierarchy, but is in-
stead an undifferentiated mass known as the "public" which Kierke-
gaard, with formidable foresight, called "the most dangerous of all
powers and the most meaningless."7 The public, as sovereign lord and
master of depersonalization, had radically altered the traditional
power structure by rendering power proportional to its anonymity.
Kierkegaard's analyses of the public in its avatar as the great lord
and "master of leveling"8 not only draw an eminent portrait of the
mechanisms of mass psychology, but furthermore reveal a phenome-
non which has, ever since Marx, occupied a fixed place in language:
namely, the phenomenon of alienation. For despite Kierkegaard's use
of a host of economic and material elements in his analyses, these
elements are never organized into a practical political agenda or
aimed at anything which could even be said to resemble social or eco-
nomic reforms. To become one's self is an individual project, not a
collective endeavour; therefore, its material conditions have no deci-
sive significance.
Stemming from the socio-psychological challenges which the tran-
sition from absolute monarchy to democracy produced, the earlier
fear of epic structures has been replaced by the fear of differentiating
oneself from the others, of exceeding the average. Previously, an indi-

6
KW XIV, 69.
7
KW XIV, 93.
8
KW XIV, 91.

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 134 Joakim Garff

vidual's identity depended to a large extent upon his position in the

social pyramid, whose dregs in the depths could look up through the
hefty hierarchical structure and see ever-higher ranks of authority fig-
ures culminating in an absolute monarch, the king, who was himself a
kind of earthly analogue of God Himself and was therefore, in fact,
King by the grace of God. But with the caving in of this pyramid,
people were cast adrift in a turbulent social vacuum in which they
began to resemble each other, and in which they needed to compete
with each other. Levelling, then, did not serve to make everyone
equal; rather, it drove them to be equally petty, until it was every man
fighting for himself and against all others: "[The] relationship itself
has become a problem in which the parties, like rivals in a game,
watch each other instead of relating to each other."9 In short, con-
formity had usurped the place of authority, respect had been replaced
by envy, and what had once been the pious fear of God became the
impious fear of men. In order to explain this process whereby human
passions are pathologically sublimated into bourgeois prudence, Kier-
kegaard offers the following formula: "Entrapped air always becomes
[poisonous], and the entrapment of reflection with no ventilating ac-
tion or event develops [into judgmental] envy."10
Kierkegaard's use of the image of the close and fouled air, which is
compressed until it becomes poison, is typical of his physical feeling
for society as a large-scale organism which is tainted, whenever it
seeks to avoid the eruptive outpouring of action. Repress its primi-
tive urges, and the organism known as society becomes sick, and then
its repressed desires are transposed into a host of cultural compensa-
tory mechanisms and strained social substitutes.

///. The Utopia

So far, just a few of the main points in Kierkegaard's critique of his

age with its extremely fatalistic cultural backdrop. Being a hermeneut
of suspicion, Kierkegaard does not allow himself even the least
naivete. Nor does he permit himself so much as a single tiny niche
from which renewal and change could sally forth. Instead, he recog-

9
KWXIV,19.
10
KW XIV, 82.

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 One Aporia and its Biographical Implications 135

nizes levelling as a fact and has no illusions about a restitution of the

pre-modern - about a "return of an earlier structure."11
Thus it is so much more surprising that he can, to a certain extent,
actually be said to extend a polite welcome to levelling. The dissolu-
tion of heretofore solid authorities and structures is definitely a ca-
tastrophe in and of itself, not simply due to the fact that their absence
springs the lid of society's Pandora's box, but also because their disso-
lution carries with it the possiblity that now the individual - liberated
from every possible institutional or, especially, ecclesiastical circum-
scription - can relate himself to God directly. For that matter, this
modern development indicates the "forward movement" whereby
"the individuals who are rescued gain the specific gravity of the relig-
ious life."«
Moreover, it is not simply in spite, but also in virtue, of the absence
of this institutional representation, this church, that the individual is
enabled to realize his religiosity authentically, given that he is now
obliged to live without that safety net which had previously been
stretched out beneath him by various institutions. In a typical zig-zag
between socio-psychological fatalism and religious vision, Kierke-
gaard says: "The abstraction of levelling, this spontaneous combus-
tion of the human race, produced by the friction that occurs when the
separateness of individual inwardness in the religious life is omitted,
will stay with us, as they say of a tradewind that consumes everything.
Yet by means of it every individual, each one separately, may in turn
be religiously educated, in the highest sense may be helped to ac-
quire the essentiality of the religious by means of the examen rigoro-
sum [rigorous examination] of levelling....No period, no age, and
therefore not the present one, either, can halt the scepticism of level-
ling....It can be halted only if the individual, in individual separate-
ness, gains the intrepidity of religiousness."13
It would not be unjustified to call this Kierkegaard's religious Uto-
pia. Yet what resembles a fantastic pipedream has, as its backdrop,
the completely forthright realism that history is irreversible. From the
perspective of his Utopia, Kierkegaard's paradoxical expectation is
that atomization and individuality can link themselves up just as ac-
curately as they are linked etymologically. The individual will not be
represented by new epic structures, but will instead represent himself,

11
KW XIV, 109.
12
KW XIV, 108.
13
KW XIV, 87f.

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 136 Joakim Garff

that is he will be himself. Alienation will take care of the individual's

extraction from the socio-cultural system and then entrust him in his
isolation to his own religious upbringing coram deo. Thus, the individ-
ual can no longer hide himself in religious insititutions or crawl com-
fortably under the cosy coverlet of culture. Thus, "levelling itself be-
comes the severe taskmaster who takes on the task of educating. And
the person who learns the most from the education and reaches the
top does not become the man of distinction, the outstanding hero -
this is forstalled by levelling, which is utterly consistent, and he pre-
vents it himself because he has grasped the meaning of levelling - no,
he only becomes an essentially human being in the full sense of
equality. This is the idea of religiousness."14
On the one hand, Kierkegaard takes the levelling of modernity ad
notam and has no illusions about the restitution of the pre-modern,
either socially, politically, culturally, or in the form of the return of the
hero: "It will no longer be as it once was, that individuals could look
to the nearest eminence for orientation when things got somewhat
hazy before their eyes. That time is now past. They must now either
be lost in the dizziness of abstract infinity or be saved infinitely in the
essentiality of the religious life. Many [many] may cry out in despair,
but it will not help, for now it is too late."15 On the other hand, it is
obvious that the Utopia puts its trust, so to speak, in levelling's inevi-
tability, and upon its continued undermining of both the socio-cul-
tural system and those of its institutions which had previously facili-
tated authentic relationships, thus stealing from primitive pathos its
originality. Were these facilitating structures to be discontinued, then
it should be possible to regain that primitive pathos which is the most
profound precondition for the God-relationship. Levelling supplies
the situation which for the particular single individual signifies that, //
he wishes to relate himself to God, then such a relationship must
take place in primitivity and without other human structures as mid-
dle terms. This then is the future prospect that is at one and the same
time Kierkegaard's nightmare and his paradoxical expectation.16

14
#WXIV,88.
15
KW XIV, 108.
16
Kresten Nordentoft Hvad siger Brand-Majoren?, Copenhagen 1973, p. 61.

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 One Aporia and its Biographical Implications 137

IV.TheAporia

Between Kierkegaard's critique of his age and his conception of the

future, i.e., his Utopia, there is an aporia that has particular bearing
upon leveiling's anonymization of that power which earlier was dis-
tributed down through the hierarchical system in which every person
knew his place. The aporia: that in a modern epoch there is the prob-
lem that it is no longer possible for anyone to revolt against those
who work in the service of levelling without simultaneously revealing
his own power, and thus checking the progress of levelling as a condi-
tion for the individual's regaining an authentic relation to God: "The
unrecognizables recognize the servants of levelling but dare not use
power or authority against them, for then there would be a regres-
sion, because it would be instantly obvious to a third party that the
unrecognizable one was an authority, and then the third party would
be hindered from attaining the highest."17 Kierkegaard's paradoxical
expectation - the idea of a kind of democratized religiosity - must
thus presuppose that a difference is established within the undiffer-
entiated. Somebody must, so to speak, make the epoch aware of its
condition, and this can only happen by demonstrating exactly what it
is completely different from.
It is just such a differentiation from the epoch that finally comes to
expression in the Review when, verging on the cryptic, Kierkegaard
says: "Only through a suffering act[ion] will the unrecognizable one
dare contribute to levelling and by the same suffering act[ion] will
pass judgment on the instrument. He does not dare to defeat level-
ling outright - he would be dismissed for that, since it would be act-
ing with authority - but in suffering he will defeat it and thereby ex-
perience in turn the law of his existence, which is not to rule, to guide,
to lead, but in suffering to serve, to help indirectly."18
What, one may well ask, is such a "suffering action"? And how
could something so replete with contradictions as a suffering action
contribute to levelling and thereby pass judgment upon the self-same
instrument? This is not immediately evident, but if one gradually im-
merses oneself in the text's own priorities, they reveal a subtle sym-
metry: Where the hero was previously found but is no longer to be
found, - i.e., in the hero's non-place (ou topid) - Kierkegaard has in-
troduced a non-hero. And just as a hero pertains to a passionate age,

17
KW XIV, 109.
18
Ibid.

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 138 Joakim Garff

so this non-hero pertains to a non-passionate age. A non-hero is an-

other name for a martyr, and this "suffering action," which Kierke-
gaard cryptically mentioned as the epoch's saving reversal is a more
or less metaphorical rescripting of martyrdom. Whereas the hero dis-
tinguishes himself by his will to power, the martyr is known by his
will to powerlessness, which, please note, as will is no less heroic than
that of the hero. For this reason, such a will can also be said to con-
sist of what Kierkegaard calls "a power to catastrophe,"19 that kata-
strophe, that turn-about which would occur within the self-under-
standing of a society which suddenly has a martyr thrust before its
teeming masses. (As an historical curiosity, one ought here to remark
that it is a prophetically-ironical fact that this Review was published
several months before Kierkegaard's ill-fated locking of horns with
the Corsair, something which no doubt made him seriously feel as if
he were indeed a martyr. In an unguarded moment, one might read-
ily suspect Kierkegaard of using the Corsair as an occasion for mak-
ing his own prophecies come true.)
Meanwhile Kierkegaard, in his Review, did not want to connect
himself personally with his subject-matter, and he had barely put the
finishing touches on "suffering action" before, in a brand new para-
graph, he repeats his well-known, pseudonymous practice, gri-
macingly revealing that the whole enterprise had merely been "a
means of recreation," a childish amusement whose significance is
comparable to "bowling or tilting the barrel."20
None the less, this Review was more than a mere optional experi-
ment, and in 1849 Kierkegaard remarks with scintillating self-con-
sciousness: "It is really worth knowing that if one reads the descrip-
tion of the future found at the conclusion of 'a literary review of Two
Ages' he will realize how quickly and exactly it was fulfilled two
years later in 1848."21 Kierkegaard also notes something similar in
The Point of View,22 a touch more modestly, but even here it is also
the Review's concluding section that is referred to as the decisive
part. For it is here that one finds the observation about the necessity
of a "suffering action" as referring to the completely decisive.
Thus, one might ask, what really happened in 1848.

19
SV3 14,73.
20
KW XIV, 110.
21
JP 4167.
22
See SV3 18,67.

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 One Aporia and its Biographical Implications 139

V. The Drama

"-Act I- Two dogs have started fighting. This event causes an enor-
mous sensation. An unbelievable number of heads appear at windows
to watch. While it last, all works stops. Everything is abandoned. -Act
II- From the doors of the two houses closest to the battle emerge
two housewives, each from her own. One maintains that the other's
dog started the fight. The women become so angry over this that they
start fighting. -I observed no more than this, but it could easily be
continued. -So, Act III- Two men arrive, the husbands of the respec-
tive women. One of them maintains that the other's wife started it.
The two husbands become so angry that they start fighting. Where-
upon it may be assumed that other husbands and wives join in-and
this is now a European war. The occasion is the question of who
started it. In this you will perceive the formula for war in the second
degree. War in the first degree is war; in the second degree it is a war
occasioned by the question of who started the first war."23
This little play in three acts reached J.L.A. Kolderup-Rosenvinge, a
big stick conservative Danish State Councillor and Kierkegaard's
walking companion, on one of the first days of August, 1848. This
dogfight, no doubt personally experienced by the playwright, is, in a
double sense, a punchy picture of Kierkegaard's head-shaking pos-
ture towards the political unrest then afflicting Europe. It is a facili-
tating fact that his arrogance is sprinkled with humor and that, in the
very same letter, he acknowledges his ignorance of Realpolitik: "No,
politics is not for me. To follow politics, even if only domestic politics,
is nowadays an impossibility, for me, at any rate."24 About this, Kier-
kegaard is absolutely right, because his sense of the will of the world-
historical could at times make him out to be a screaming ninny. For
example, this occurred in the case where, at the beginning of Febru-
ary 1848, he sagely scrawled: "The whole scare about Germany is a
fantasy, a game, simply a new attempt to flatter national-vanity"25 -
but what were these big words in February when, one-and-a-half
months later, war was a reality! Correspondingly doubtful are his
prophetic qualifications, considering that in the Review he had
claimed with much ado that the possibility for "insurrection in this

XXV, 254.
24
KW XXV, 253.
25
JP 6010.

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 140 Joakim Garff

day and age" would be "utterly unimaginable"26 - whereupon "this

day and age" replied by protesting loudly with nothing less than
three revolutions in 1848!
Yet, from another angle, the dogfight also exemplifies how very
dramatically Kierkegaard considers history; indeed, that he plainly
considers history in dramaturgical terms is obvious. Perhaps for this
very reason he is one of the first to diagnose modernity as an exten-
sive theater, in which everything is transformed into a stage, a back-
drop, a play. By contrast to the age of revolution, in which one openly
threatened and consciously opposed apparent authority, the age of
bourgeois prudence is characterized by a gradual hollowing out of
the justification for its institutions and the substance of its symbols:
"We do not want to abolish the monarchy, by no means, but if little
by little we could get it transformed into make-believe, we would
gladly shout 'Hurrah for the King!' We do not want to topple emi-
nence, by no means, but if simultaneously we could spread the notion
that it is all make-believe, we would approve and admire. In the same
way we are willing to keep Christian terminology but privately know
that nothing decisive is supposed to be meant by it."27
In his diagnosis of the epoch, Kierkegaard seems to have been a
post-modern long before it was trendy to be one, since he already
recognized that the age had lost contact with a transcendental signi-
fie\ God, the self, and history had imploded into a nothingness which
subsequently set free a rootless social mobility, a grandiose masquer-
ade, in which the bemasked had forgotten that they were in fact
wearing masks. And whereas the theatre has traditionally simulated
actuality, modern times have theatralized it, making a god out of
simulacrum and artifice, so that everything has gradually become
"chimeric,"28 turning into "spellbinding mirages."29 Because the pre-
sent age had theatricalized those structures that had previously de-
manded respect and had given existence its weight and direction,
more and more moderns were suffering from "representation's sick-
ness,"30 so that "finally the whole generation [had become] a repre-
sentation - which represents...well, there is no saying whom."31

27
xiv, TO.
K W XIV, 80-81.
28
See SV3 14,59, cf. KW XIV, 69; 93.
29
See AW XIV, 69; cf. 89; 93.
30
SV314,34.
31
KW XIV, 78-79.

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 One Aporia and its Biographical Implications 141

How, in such an age, the heroic loses it representative character,

Kierkegaard illustrates in a diptych-image which shows the same
scene in the respective epochs of passion and bourgeois prudence. A
treasure which "everyone covets" was to be found far out on a lake
with ice so thin that to gain it would be a life-threatening task, but
the hero rushes out on the ice, attended from the bank by one
breathless crowd, upon whose reaction Kierkegaard straightaway
comments, as it mirrors the exploit's meaning: "They would shudder
for him and with him in his perilous decision, would grieve for him if
he meets his death, and would idealize him if he gets the treasure."32
The other leaf of the diptych shows, the same scene, but with the
breathless crowd degenerated into a spiritless bourgeois public, which
prudently decides whether such a venture would really be worth the
effort: "They would go out and, from their safe vantage point, ap-
praise with the air of connoisseurs the expert skater who can skate
almost to the very edge...and then turn back. One of the skaters
would be exceptionally skilled, and he would even be able to perform
the stunt of making one seemingly hazardous swoop right at the very
edge, causing the spectators to shout: 'Ye gods, he is crazy, he is risk-
ing his life.' But you see, he is so exceptionally skillful that he can
make a sharp turn precisely at the extreme edge - that is, where the
ice is still completely safe and still short of being dangerous. Just as at
the theatre, the crowd would shout 'Bravo!' and acclaim him and
then carry their heroic performer home on their shoulders and honor
him with a sumptuous banquet. [Bourgeois prudence] would become
so predominant that it would change the task itself into an unreal
stunt and actuality into a theat."33
If it is a point, in the aesthetics of the sublime, that it is not serious
about the risk because reason, despite everything, manages to retain
its primacy, then Kierkegaard's skating scene is a piece of sublime
anti-aesthetics which tries to take danger seriously: Whereas the pas-
sionate hero was given great honor because he and he alone braved
what none of the others even dared, the common-sense hero, "the he-
roic performer," was paid homage simply because he understood that
by dramatizing the heroic and simulating the seriousness of the dan-
ger "an inspired venture would be transformed into a [theater
piece]."34 That such a counterfeit could be deemed acceptable is due,

32
KWXIV,12.
33
Ibid.
34
Ibid.

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 142 Joakim Garff

in the first place, to the fact that it is easier to endure a collective

self-deception than the envy aroused by the single individual; and, in
the second, to the fact that levelling has taken over the repre-
sentative function formerly occupied by the hero, by whom, in an age
of passion, "the admirer is inspired by the thought of being a man."35
The consequences of such lost representation were developed in
Aesthete As treatise "The Tragic in Ancient Drama Reflected in the
Tragic in Modern Drama." Our age "has lost all the substantial catego-
ries of family, state, kindred; it must leave the individual entirely to
himself, so that, strictly speaking, he becomes his own creator."36 In
this intimate dovetailing of diagnosis and prophecy, Aesthete A indi-
cates the twin themes which Kierkegaard repeats in his Review, whose
religious Utopia reflects the relationship between the hero and his ac-
tion, much as A develops it with constant reference to the difference
between ancient tragedy and the modern version. Let me, then, quote
a longer, somewhat tighter, but entirely central passage from As trea-
tise: "In ancient tragedy, the action itself has an epic element; it is just
as much event as action. This, of course, is because the ancient world
did not have subjectivity reflected in itself. Even if the individual
moved freely, he nevertheless rested in substantial determinants in the
state, the family, in fate. This substantial determinant is the essential
fateful factor in Greek tragedy and is its essential characteristic. The
hero's downfall, therefore, is not a result solely of his action but is also
a suffering, whereas in modern tragedy the hero's downfall is not re-
ally suffering but is a deed. Thus, in the modern period situation and
character are in fact predominant. The tragic hero is subjectively re-
flected in himself, and this reflection has not only reflected him out of
every immediate relation to state, kindred, and fate but often has even
reflected him out of his own past life. What concerns us is a specific
element of his life as his own deed. For this reason, the tragic can be
exhausted in situation and lines because no immediacy is left. There-
fore, modern tragedy has no epic foreground, no epic remainder. The
hero stands and falls entirely on his own deeds."37
That action in the ancient tragedies had an epic moment in itself
was due to the fact that the hero was written into a broad, stable con-
text which to some degree determined those movements which he
himself would describe. Socrates had still not appeared on the stage

35
Ibid.
36
KW III, 149.
37
KW III, 143-144.

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 One Aporia and its Biographical Implications 143

of world history. The subject rested unreflected in the substantial.

Thus, its actions had, for the same reason, more the character of oc-
currence and event than of something personally and consciously set
in motion. If one takes a hero like Oedipus, it is obvious that the
tragic here consists in the suffering which, by an unkind fate, is awak-
ened in and, through his actions, and because no matter how dra-
matic such stories may be, they are never completely the hero's own.
Precisely the opposite is to be found in modern tragedies, in which
the specific connection between the situation and the character has
replaced the substantial and the already given in the classical trag-
edy's course of events. The modern tragic hero is without his stable
context; he has been emancipated from his socio-cultural system and
its normative structures and has thereby not only lost his continuity
within the larger universal story, but also within his own particular
one. Everything is concentrated into one particularly defined action,
consciously and tactically disposed, purified of all contingent and het-
eronomous entanglements and kept free of all epically disturbing
comings and goings. The suddenly dramatic, with its catastrophic con-
sequences, is the way whereby action works, and it works by letting
the hero triumph or be ground to dust.
In this light, it is hardly intrepid to refer to that Kierkegaard, who
reviewed his passionless age and who barely a decade later would at-
tack the Establishment, as a modern tragic hero; that one who would
reverse the hero's power into the martyr's powerlessness through
"suffering action" and thus, as is mentioned in the review, lets loose
"a power to catastrophe."38 For while the "hero stands [or] falls en-
tirely on his own deeds,"39 it is especially by the power of his fall that
the martyr triumphs and comes down through history as the one who
managed to manifest his singular position amidst the masses.40

VI. The Actor

In his Review, Kierkegaard sets the "theater" of his time up for harsh
criticism, but it remains an open question whether he himself man-
ages to stay out of its play. Especially since his alternative is com-
pletely impractical, and because he himself navigates over 70,000

38
SV314,73.
39
KW III, 144.
40
Nordentoft, op. cit., pp. 65-66.

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 144 Joakim Garff

fathoms with no Realpolitik compass in hand, and thus runs the risk
of conceiving history as mere theater. One could suspect him of being
deeply involved in the very vice that he wants to give up, even
though his involvement is of another and a higher order.
That this suspicion is not altogether groundless is supported by the
letters Kierkegaard exchanged with the aforementioned Kolderup-
Rosenvinge. These are hallmarked by a distinctive aristocratic
cliquishness, a cacophony of classical quotations, and overflowing
with phrases of friendly familiarity. There is a wealth to be mined in
this blue-blood vein and, if anyone is wanting a highspeed course in
Kierkegaard's idiosyncracies, here is a good place to begin. Despite
all this, however, the letters are interesting because in them Kierke-
gaard straightforwardly summarizes his views concerning the Febru-
ary, March, and June revolutions, and in that regard develops a kind
of "whirlwind theory." Or, as he says in August, 1848, "I am sure you
will agree that I am right in considering the whole development in
Europe as an enormous skepticism or as a [whirlwind]. What does a
[whirlwind] seek? - A fixed point where it can stop. (Therefore, you
see, I seek - said in parenthesi - 'that single individual/)"41
Kierkegaard's presentation of recent events is striking in that it
does not relate itself to the factual, political circumstances at hand.
Instead, he takes direct aim at "that single individual" as the figure
by whom the whirlwind of the age would be halted. And this could
only come about by introducing an a-political point outside the
movement itself. "And therefore my opinion about the whole Euro-
pean confusion is that it cannot be stopped except by religion, and I
am convinced that - as so strangely happened once with the Refor-
mation, which appeared to be a religious movement but turned out
to be a political one - in the same way, the movement of our time,
which appears to be purely political, will turn out suddenly to be re-
ligious or the need for religion."42
It is strange that Kierkegaard should set forth such a viewpoint
right in the middle of a letter which is otherwise marked by informal
intellectual twaddle, and Kolderup-Rosenvinge seems to take the
swirling, whirling wind theory as an elaborate joke. But such was cer-
tainly not Kierkegaard's intent, which is borne out in both contempo-
rary as well as in later variations upon the same theme.43 Kierke-

41
K W XXV, 260-261.
42
KW XXV, 262.
43
See Pap. X 5 B 107; SV3 18,77.

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 One Aporia and its Biographical Implications 145

gaard hints that a turnabout, a reversal, will make it obvious that an

apparently political movement was, when seen at its deepest level, ac-
tually a repressed desire for religiosity. The reversal's more or less
unspoken condition is again the presence of an acting figure, and
Kierkegaard mentions Socrates in that regard, as someone who, al-
though he certainly did not halt a political whirlwind, did halt some-
thing similar: namely, a "sophistical whirlwind." Inevitably, this halting
cost him his life, but then his death was the most important element
for the plan's success: "The dead Socrates stopped the [whirlwind],
something the living Socrates was unable to do. But the living Socra-
tes understood intellectually that only a dead man could conquer, as
a sacrifice - and he understood ethically how to direct his whole life
to becoming just that."44
Kierkegaard seems to have understood something similar. He also
means that only a dead man could be victorious, something which, by
this means, he has also - albeit indirectly - communicated to his wily
walking companion, who had apparently not yet seen the point. In his
next letter, Kierkegaard articulates himself with far fewer circumlocu-
tions. To Kolderup-Rosenvinge, whose confidence in Cavaignac was
considerable, he writes: "You await a tyrant whereas I await a mar-
tyr."45 It could not have been put much more directly than this - any-
thing more and Kierkegaard would have had to add that, were the
truth to be told, he himself was the martyr he awaited.
Upon this subject, he once again speaks quite lucidly in The Point
of View for My Activity as an Author, which was taking shape while
Kierkegaard strolled around Copenhagen with Kolderup-Rosenvinge.
Here he accounts for the way in which he will arrange an inverse cor-
respondence between his existential actions and his textual produc-
tion in the period after the collision with the Corsair, by claiming that
the "daily drenchings of rabble-barbarism"46 ought to bring about the
effect that "the religious communication would not become much too
direct."47 Such concern was grounded in the logic of reversal, in that
a "triumphant religious author who is in vogue is eo ipso not a relig-
ious author"48 because an "essentially religious author is always po-
lemical and in addition suffers under the opposition or endures the

44
KW XXV, 262-263.
45
See KW XXV, 271.
46
KW XXII, 67.
47
Ibid.
48
Ibid.

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 146 Joakim Garff

opposition that corresponds to what in his time must be regarded as

the specific evil."49 And this evil was, in Kierkegaard's time, "the bes-
tial grin,"50 which he would have eo ipso understood how to exploit.
He clarifies this in the following passage, which not only thumbs its
nose at all of the specially stated warnings against the religious
author's triumph, but also, and thereby accurately, inserts that self-
same author into the flashpoint of world historical events:
In a grinning age...the religious author must for heaven's sake see to it that he more
than anyone else becomes laughed to scorn....If the crowd is evil, if it is chaos that
threatens, there is rescue in one thing only, in becoming the single individual, in the
rescuing thought: the single individual....A world-historical crisis such as [this], which
ranks so high that not even the disintegration of the ancient world was so imposing, is
the absolute tentamen rigorosum [rigorous examination] for anyone who was an
author.51
"Veni, vidiy vici" is the formula for the chain of events which Kierke-
gaard re-lives from the not ungenerous perspective of recollection.
He not only saw it happen, he also saw it before it happened, which
makes it possible to write historiography about the past and hagiog-
raphy about oneself at the same time. Kierkegaard sees the inverse
correspondence between his life and his text being brought about by
his age, which not in spite, but rather in virtue, of its own tumultuous
events has grounded the category of singularity. The elemental fury of
existence, "war," serves as a megaphone through which all that Kier-
kegaard's tender voice had been saying for years was raised to such
an ear-splitting volume that his words were obeyed with a kind of
world-historical necessity. And what in his Review he called the age's
"examen rigorosum [rigorous examination] of levelling" has now be-
come his own "absolute tentamen rigorosum [rigorous examination]."
It goes almost without saying that whenever Kierkegaard is able to
describe such events as "the world-historical catastrophe, where the
catastrophic demonstrates and makes fast the gulping difference be-
tween a negative and a positive [accounting of the age],"52 it is be-
cause he is in a position to transform the catastrophe into his own
self-understanding.53 None the less, one might wonder whether he
sees, especially in war something more like the apotheosis of the

49
KW XXII, 67.
50
SV3 16,117.
51
KW XXII, 68-69.
52
Pap. IX B 13.
53
See Nordentoft, op. cit., p. 113.

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 One Aporia and its Biographical Implications 147

masses, rather than the fact that his discovery of singularity's odd
category has been patented through all eternity, simply because there
was something which has now gone, and thus it must have been ipso
facto that category. This is something which Kierkegaard, to a certain
extent, is clear about, but the point here is a bio-graphical one: that
the category of "that individual" does not, first and foremost, consist
of an abstract existential principle zum Gebrauch für Jedermann who
merely has the desire to realize himself. When the category of "that
individual" suddenly becomes the pregnant point in the middle of the
catastrophic, historical whirlwind, it is because it is only in virtue of
the category's inventor that the whirlwind can be stopped. This looks
quite a bit like a circular conclusion, but none the less it is the way in
which Kierkegaard concludes - and by thus concluding, includes him-
self in the world-historical circle.
In other words, it is anything but an academic interest which lies
behind these lines of Kierkegaard on the inevitability of martyrdom,
despite its being spoken of in its deepest sense as bloody seriousness.
Martyrdom is that "suffering action" which gives any Utopia its actu-
alizing force. In October 1848, Kierkegaard prepared this foreword to
the never-completed publication of A Cycle of Ethico-Religious Trea-
tises: "The catastrophe...will also help me to be understood better
than before, or to be more passionately misunderstood....Governance
has lost patience, and will not tolerate this any longer....And there-
fore this itself is the catastrophe....The problem is a religious, a
Christian problem....The age would...in many ways recall Socrates'
age; but there will be nothing which recalls Socrates."54
If this passage is prophetic, then its fulfilment rests almost entirely
with the prophet himself, for just like Governance, Kierkegaard him-
self has also finally lost patience. He has finally realized that a new
accounting of the age can only have its beginning when someone un-
dertakes the task of re-introducing eternity into time. And such a re-
introduction will not happen gently: "In order to receive eternity
once again, blood will be required, but blood of a different sort, not
that of thousands of sacrificial victims who have been put to death,
no, it is more expensive blood than that, that of the single individuals
- the martyrs, these mighty dead, who will achieve what no one living,
whom human beings by the thousands have cut down, achieve, what
these mighty dead could, not even as living beings, achieve, but only

54
Pap. IX B 10, pp. 308-11.

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 148 Joakim Garff

as the dead achieve: to force the raging masses into obedience, simply
because these raging masses were allowed, in disobedience, to put a
martyr to death."55
"The problem is a religious, a Christian problem." That is the cen-
tral feature of Kierkegaard's diagnosis of his age. That this re/view re-
flects nothing more untimely than Kierkegaard's own desire for a
new accounting of that age, is certainly true, but it must be added
that it is also a desire for something as untimely as martyrdom as
well. The one is no less anachronistic than the other, and both corre-
spond almost perfectly to the notion that someone must needs soon
begin to rechristianize heathen Christendom.
And this is precisely what the rest of Kierkegaard's authorship is
about.

55
Pap. IX B 20, p. 317.

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