Chapter 11: Kierkegaard’s “Single Individual” and Hardt and Negri’s “Multitude”
11
Kierkegaard’s “Single Individual” and Hardt and Negri’s “Multitude”
Theological Resources for a Post-imperial Political Subjectivity
The status of political theology is a notoriously open question. It is not altogether clear what political theology is, much less what it is for, and whether all of this is good news for political subjects in these times of ideological struggle and global conflict. To hazard an answer, we start our exploration of important theoretical texts shaping political theology today, the first of the Hardt and Negri trilogy, Empire,525 and its 2004 sequel, Multitude.526 Our thesis is that Kierkegaard’s “single individual” has been incorrectly interpreted in an atomistic, personalistic way, as having to do with a single subject. We argue that it is more accurate to read Kierkegaard’s single individual as a style or “form of life” (Wittgenstein) that is as collective as it is individual, even though it is not, as we argue, a form of life that is limited to, only available to, the single hypostasis of an individual person. To help us clarify this further, we link Kierkegaard to Hardt and Negri’s theory of the multitude, explored first in Empire and then elsewhere in the trilogy. We will not attempt a theological reading of Hardt and Negri through Kierkegaard; rather, we will argue that it is possible to interpret Kierkegaard’s “single individual” as a multitudinal “form of life,” in a way that Kierkegaard might have not recognized, but that nevertheless allows us to creatively interpret him as a resource for a “multitudinal” political theology.
This links well with discussions of political subjectivity within some threads of political theology, mostly by philosophers and theorists on the left who are interested in the unique ways that Christian theology can be used to shape subjects in distinctly revolutionary ways. This debate has been given a distinctly theological reading by Joerg Rieger and Kwok Pui-lan in their Occupy Religion.527 Bringing Kierkegaard in at the most individual and most inward point in his authorship—the single individual—gives us a kind of “parallax view” on what political subjectivity is, what it has to do with authentic human existence, and its theological character. Put differently, Kierkegaard has something to tell us, not only about what political theology is, but also what it is for.
Any attempt to make sense of Kierkegaard’s contribution to contemporary political theology must come to terms with his theory of selfhood, or in other words, his theology of faith as the single individual standing in authentic immediacy before God. While this aspect of Kierkegaard’s philosophy has long been celebrated, both for its role in shaping existentialism and as exemplary of Kierkegaard’s theological voice and his Christian authorship, it has also been blamed for Kierkegaard’s antisocial indifference and as such, his unsuitability for contemporary political thought, preoccupied as it is with questions of social identity and belonging. It is clear that the “single individual” looms large in Kierkegaard’s apolitical legacy.
This chapter challenges this common narrative and its interpretation of the “single individual.” Our position is that Kierkegaard is neither antisocial nor apolitical. We go further in arguing that one need not abandon or overlook the “single individual” to make such an argument about Kierkegaard, but that plenty of evidence for Kierkegaard’s suitability as a resource for political thought lies within “the single individual.” The “single individual” is not simply an existential account of the human person, but an understanding of singularity in relationality akin to how theorists Hardt and Negri describe the “multitude” and its political activity amid Empire. We not only develop corollary themes that link the single individual to the multitude, but rather show how it is that Kierkegaard develops the mode of “single individual” as a form of life in ways that are very multitudinal. Again, the argument is not that Hardt and Negri are saying the same things about the multitude that Kierkegaard did about the single individual, but rather that the latter can—and should—be read as a multitudinal style of life, opening up new ways in which to think of Kierkegaard as a political theologian.
Subjectivity and Political Theology
One of the pressing political questions of our time is the making of the political subject: who will carry out political change? This question has an urgent importance for those who suffer and struggle against the current configuration of neoliberalism, postindustrial capitalism, and globalized finance networks. How do we generate the energy for change, and who will be the ones to carry out these changes, build the coalitions, and exert force? These questions have preoccupied critical and liberation theory over the last hundred years or so. Furthermore, they have been inherited by theologies eager to lend their hand to this work. In fact, subjectivity has been the topic du jour that has mostly contributed to the new rapprochement between religion and political thought that has been uneasily termed “political theology.” Both critical political thought and critical theology has found itself asking the same questions and turning to each other’s traditions for answers: what is the role of theology (or religion more broadly) in the formation of the emancipatory political subject?
One notable trend in recent critical theory is the turn to religion—and to Christian theology specifically—for resources to think through the process of remaking a world and forming political subjects. Part of this comes from the post-secular admission, however reluctant it may be, that religion, long expected to disappear as the specializing force of modern rationality took its hold on the social world, has not in fact receded but merely morphed to fit into the postmodern, immanent frame. The appeal, then, of religion is what Jürgen Habermas has called its “semantic value”: its ability to successfully bind actors and energies together around widely shared intuitions in ways that are currently unavailable to philosophy, aesthetics, or theory.
As an intellectual—and activist—tradition of thinking, this critical-theoretical form of political theology places subjectivity at its center; that is, it is concerned with the subject of emancipation, the actors who may be called upon to carry out social transformation. Its central practical burden, then, is to generate and form the kind of agents that are needed, and this traditionally called for an alliance with the working class, seen by European leftists, so-called “third-world” theologians, and traditional Marxists alike as the principal hand of historical change. A historical point of origin for this work comes out of the confusion and disappointment of Western Marxists in the early decades of the twentieth century who were devastated by the failure of working class resistance and socialist movements in Europe. The formation of the Frankfurt School as a research program, for example, came as a result of German Marxist intellectuals who wanted to study the social psychology of working class Germans in order to better understand why they were not persuaded or otherwise activated en masse by the call of German working class parties to armed resistance and labor strikes in 1918 and 1919. The central question was how to address the motivational deficit that generated disengagement and indifference on the part of political subjects rather than rebellion and resistance in the face of structural alienation and exploitation.528 The guiding presumption, both then and now, was that ideology prevented the social agents from undergoing what later came to be called the process of conscientization or “critical consciousness” that enabled them to identify authoritative regimes or oppressive systems.529 It became a question of pedagogy, not in the sense of formal schooling, but of education nonetheless. Workers needed to become critics of their situation, they needed to become aware that what appeared to be natural, universal, and justified was in fact oppressive, exploitative, and alienating. This required a process of becoming subjects and so subjectification became the task of critical philosophy. It was not enough to simply theorize the subject, but rather philosophy had to work to bring about the conditions for its possibility and in order to do this, it had to reconfigure itself as a critical, and as such negative, project.
The advent of political and liberation theologies (particularly those coming from colonialized and subaltern contexts) in late modernity, many of whom were shaped, at least in part by the intellectual tradition of European left and Western Marxism, brought the political question of the subject to the center of religion as well, particularly as a result of the turn to the post-secular.530 There is a strong trend among theorists on the political-theological left to identify the unique forces within political theology that galvanize political subjects toward liberative and revolutionary forms of active resistance. This is not unique to the late modern turn (back) to religion within contemporary philosophy and was prefigured in large part by the first generation of critical theorists (to whom the predominance of the subject can be traced), a point which has been decisively made by Mendieta531 and Brittain532 and Boer,533 among others. Adorno and Horkheimer’s discussion of subjectivity and religion explores religion as an immanently negative force that can be particularly helpful in critiquing the alienating and dominative effects of reality that generates “damaged human life.”534 Religion is helpful, not because of its metaphysical truth, but because of the critical force of its hope and its ability to identify what is wrong with the present. The uncompromising nature of its eschatological vision of justice, when marshaled toward negative political objectives, can act as glimpses of light, rupturing the social order as it is, reminding subjects that what is need not always be.
As political and constructive theologians whose work is Kierkegaardian in spirit if not in method, we are interested in subjectivity because it is, after all, subjects that compose the sociopolitical body from which all theological belief and expression come. All hope in creating an alternative society, an altogether different future, lies in activating and generating forms of life that speak to and bring back to life the kind of subjectivity capable of resisting on the one hand, and creating on the other. As Hardt and Negri point out, this will not come naturally, as an inevitable consequence of reason and/or history, but rather through struggle and failure, insofar as the instability and anarchy of the multitude conspires toward a common social organization unknown to the globalized world of imperial force.
What does Kierkegaard—and more specifically, his theory of the “single individual”—have to contribute to political theology’s interest in subjectivity, particularly when subjectivity is understood as a decisively collective and resistant force of creativity and destruction? At first glance, Kierkegaard would seem to offer little more than the foil against this kind of theory, as an existential celebrant of singularity and withdrawal. We think this not only represents a misunderstanding of Kierkegaard and the politics of the single individual, but also of critical subjectivity. To make this case, we turn first to one of the most cited texts in the conversation about politics and subjectivity within political theology today: Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire and their subsequent Multitude, wherein they explore their theory of multitude and its importance for anti-imperial political theology today.
Hardt and Negri and the Multitudinal Force
The “multitude” is a central concept in Hardt and Negri’s political philosophy, specifically in their theory about the nature of the post-imperialist force of sovereignty amid globalization. In their early work, Empire, the world, they argue, is no longer organized around traditional forms of power associated with the nation-state or late advanced capitalist economies. The current political situation can be explained as a crisis of labor and production, whereby a world is no longer being made by subjects, but rather subjects are being made by a world that is itself an excessive surplus of creativity borne of exploitation and alienation. Channeling Foucault, productivity and labor are themselves generated by the disciplinary regimes. These forms of life do not come about by virtue of humanity’s natural creativity, but rather are energized by the constitutive ground of Empire: sovereignty.
Who is/are the multitude? Hardt and Negri turn to the “multitude” as the global human collection of actors and energies, forces, and acts that make up the collective resistance to Empire, conditioned by it and yet immanently negative; in short, the multitude is Hardt and Negri’s account of political subjects as unbound from sovereignty, and yet emerging from within the conflicting and agnostic forces of empire. It is natural, then, to think of the multitude as a collective, a diasporic gathering of political subjects united in their joint opposition to globalized empire. The intellectual left is littered with appeals to the collectives or coalitions necessary for large-scale, structural, and materialist change, particularly in relation to anti-capitalist struggle. These usually take the form of identity politics (the politics of grievance), working-class struggle (proletarian resistance against bourgeois ideology), the Party (economic interests of working classes linked to state mechanisms), the masses (the lumpenproletariat that Marx and Trotsky dismissed and Bakunin and Fanon revered), or “the People.” Hardt and Negri’s multitude concept is developed in direct contradistinction to these ideas about social subjectivity.
Hardt and Negri argue that the multitude is distinct from “the people,” which has always been a “unitary concept,” whereby the diversity within “the people” gets reduced to a central unity, a single identity.535 The problem with “the masses” is that of passivity and indifference, “the essence of the masses is indifference; all differences are submerged and drowned in the masses. All the colours of the people fade to grey.”536 The crowd, or masses “cannot act of their own accord.” “These social subjects are fundamentally passive in the sense that they cannot act by themselves but rather must be led.”537 Finally, the multitude is not reduced to simply the working class either, which has too often become an exclusive concept reserved for industrial workers, and so often leaves out those for whom employment and wage status is complicated: migrants, seasonal workers, unpaid domestic laborers, and those who do not receive a wage for labor. This exclusion makes less sense in a globalized economy whereby much of labor within capital is done by the alienating obfuscations of finance.
Finally, the multitude is not the crowd, “the they.” This is because of the way Hardt and Negri understand difference: “The different individuals or groups that make up the crowd are incoherent and recognise no common shared elements, their collection of differences remains inert and can easily appear as one indifferent aggregate.”538 The multitude, by contrast, is a political organization whereby “the internal differences of the multitude discover the common that allows them to communicate and act together.” One must not choose between multitudinality and singularity, for it is only in multitude that the assemblage of singularity becomes more than a “unified plurality.” The multitude is composed in such a way that the difference is enunciated rather than disavowed or sidelined in favor of commonality or generalized interests. Hardt and Negri put it this way: “A multitude is an irreducible multiplicity: the singular social differences that constitute the multitude must always be expressed and can never be flattened into sameness, unity, identity, or indifference.”539
But the question that most interests Hardt and Negri is not “what is the multitude?” but rather “what can the multitude become?”540 Their use of the multitude comes out of Hardt and Negri’s theoretical distinction between imperialism and the current postmodern Empire, which has “no territorial center of power and does not rely on fixed boundaries and barriers.” Rather than sustaining itself through traditional means (military force, policing of borders, economic manipulation, coalitions of power, deal-making), the Empire amid globalization is far more “biopolitical.” Borrowing from Foucault the idea that power of the state functions in such a way that it takes control over the body of human being, not just its social agency, Hardt and Negri position “sovereignty” not as a function of the modern nation-state, but as a diffuse mechanism aimed at extending state power through techniques of state discipline that are internalized by, rather that imposed upon, the subject. The subject does not experience these techniques or mechanisms as obligatory or coerced by the forces of empire. This is because they have become the stuff of life, the very structures through which human persons experience themselves as living. Foucault describes biopolitics this way: “the set of mechanisms through which the basic biological features of the human species became the object of a political strategy, of a general strategy of power.”541 This is how postmodern Empire functions, making it very difficult to oppose. It is not always easy to identify the biopolitical forces of empire which are vital to human existence: sex, security, organic food, rights, discipline, good schools, liberty, family, privacy, law, beauty—they all seem to be the same, that is how the empire works.
Hardt and Negri focus so much on the multitude in their analysis because of its potential as a new political subject that benefits from their status as producers; they are the ones involved in social production, the material contributions to social life and attachment, and so are not only victims but powerful agents. In a section titled “The Wealth of the Poors,” Hardt and Negri addressed their productivity of their labor in this way:
It has never been true, of course, that the poor and the unemployed do nothing. The strategies of survival themselves often require extraordinary resourcefulness and creativity. Today, however, to the extent that social production is increasingly defined by immaterial labor such as cooperation or the construction of social relationships and networks of communication, the activity of all in society including the poor becomes more and more directly productive.542
In defense of their position that, “in many respects, the poor are actually extraordinarily wealthy and productive,” Hardt and Negri argue that the global poor, who are often members of indigenous populations often live in areas of the world with the most biodiversity and so “they know how to live with these plants and animal species, keeping them alive and profiting from their beneficial qualities.” They also argue that the migrant poor are “full of knowledges, languages, skills and creative capacities: each migrant brings with him or her an entire world.”543 These experiences energize “their desire for something more, their refusal to accept the ways things are.”544 But Hardt and Negri are steadfast in their position that as the multitude, “their poverty and their lack of material resources, food, housing, and so forth, the poor do have enormous wealth in their knowledges and powers of creation.”545 They make this point in order to underscore, that “the creativity and inventiveness of the poor, the unemployed, the partially employed, and the migrants are essential to social production,” and that “the struggles of the poor against their conditions of poverty are not only powerful protests but also affirmation of biopolitical power—the revelation of a common “being” that is more powerful than their miserable “having, or rather, “not-having.”546
This common “being” is central to the singularity of the multitude and is the source of their dissident power. Their membership is collective while also singular; they span cultural and social identities, class formations, and economic sectors. They are the “diverse figures of social production”; Hardt and Negri find in their agency potential for subversion and resistance against Empire. One key characteristic of multitudinal existence is how they organize and order themselves through the “creation of new circuits of cooperation and collaboration that stretch across nations and continents and allow an unlimited number of encounters”547 (communication as what binds singularity and commonality together). In this way, the multitude is a “network,” not the people, or an identity, and as such is organized as a relational pattern of communication that constructs a common language that does not reduce singularities but rather communicates them in ways that establish solidarity on the basis of difference.548 This is the making of multitude.
Formally speaking, we can reconstruct Hardt and Negri’s account of the multitude as a political form of existence in the following way: first, the multitude is organized around commonality that does not suppress or otherwise supersede singularity. Within the multitude, there are “innumerable internal differences that can never be reduced to a unity or single identity.” “The multitude is a multiplicity of all these singular differences.” Second, the point here is that the multitude is a way of political organization “that displaces authority in collaborative relationships” and instead positions itself as a “common labouring substance”549 “whose difference cannot be reduced to sameness, a difference that remains different.”550 The multitude is not just a discreet set of people, of agents (although it certainly is or can be); it is a strategy of living within empire that mobilizes the excesses, the remainders, and the underside of biopolitical power. Third, multitudinal existence is a position of resistance and opposition. It is a fundamentally antagonist relation that is also productive and is all about positioning human persons in a fecund relationship to being—to becoming.
This multitudinal form of life is not a brand new invention. We find an early-modern expression of it in Kierkegaard’s political theology. Some readers will be surprised by this, given that he is often known as an existentialist and is often incorrectly taken to be a proponent of a radical subjectivism or a solipsistic individualism. We argue that it is precisely in his view of the single individual that a productive connection can be made to this “multitudinal existence” as articulated by Hardt and Negri. Not only this, but we argue the theological character of the multitude—the ways in which religion and politics are strewn together throughout Hardt and Negri’s account of political subjectivity in the conditions of Empire—is made most clear by examining Kierkegaard’s single individual as a theoretical riff on multitudinality.
Kierkegaard and the “Single Individual”
The single individual is the category of spirit, of spiritual awakening, as diametrically opposite to politics as possible.
—Søren Kierkegaard551
Kierkegaard’s fixation on the “single individual” runs throughout his corpus, as he acknowledges in Point of View. In that self-reflective work, he offers two categories for the single individual: (1) the single individual as the remarkable person (defined aesthetically or ethically) and (2) the single individual as the category through which we ought to understand every person—and as the way every person ought to understand himself or herself. It is this latter category that most interests Kierkegaard—and us, too.
The pervasiveness and emphasis of the single individual in Kierkegaard has been often noted by scholars, many of whom have found in this concept the source of the flaw of Kierkegaard’s excessive individualism and seeming lack of concern for sociality or even recognition of the ways that sociality forms persons and shapes their identities. One energetic modern critic of Kierkegaard, Walter Kaufmann, derided him for his “central category of the individual—as a category that cracks all other categories.”552 For Kaufmann, Kierkegaard was a rampant individualist as well as an extreme authoritarian. He assessed Kierkegaard’s concept of inwardness as self-centered preoccupation: “Most religious people are less preoccupied with themselves and their own relationship to themselves; and we may therefore say in the first place that Kierkegaard’s religiosity is unusually self-centered.”553 Kaufmann goes so far as to say that Kierkegaard’s narcissistic religiosity and his individualistic preoccupations were his “most central faults.”554 Kaufmann’s diatribe against Kierkegaard exemplifies in a most visceral way the suspicion that many have held against him: can an individualist-minded theologian really offer something substantive to the problems of political and social life? As Kaufmann starkly puts it, Kierkegaard “is so concerned with his own plight that he is willing to forget that of others.”555 If Kaufmann’s Kierkegaard has a political theology, is it not the wrong kind?
This is the “asocial Kierkegaard” that we mentioned earlier; this Kierkegaard would indeed have nothing much to contribute constructively to political theology. If the asocial Kierkegaard were the “real Kierkegaard,” then the epigraph above could be taken very much at face value: The category of the “single individual” is “as diametrically opposite to politics as possible.”556
But to rest content with that interpretation would be to the detriment of a richer, more adequate reading of the single individual and its role in Kierkegaard’s thought; it would also miss the central contribution of Kierkegaard to political theologies of the emancipatory subject. In this vein, numerous Kierkegaard scholars have shown that Kierkegaard’s thought, even his focus on the single individual, is profoundly more social, more directly political, than even Kierkegaard himself might have acknowledged. The single individual does not lead into an asocial existence or a conservative authoritarianism; rather, the single individual served to counter what Kierkegaard took to be a great flaw of nineteenth-century Denmark: the leveling of distinctive subjectivities through the emergence of the “crowd,” or the “public.” This leveling was the situation of the passionless, nominalistic, materialistic (consumerist) Christendom against which Kierkegaard wielded his critique of the crowd or the public, via emphasis on the single individual. We argue that it is precisely by drawing attention to the ethico-religious responsibility of the single individual, that social change can be actually effected. Contrary to Kaufmann’s reading, Kierkegaard’s individual did not reflect a preoccupation with self at the expense of others; rather, by promoting the single individual Kierkegaard sought to challenge the passivity and triumphalism of unjust social and religious structures.
Kierkegaard’s “crowd,” or “public” (they are synonyms), expresses basically the same idea as Hart and Negri’s “the people,” or “the masses.” For Hardt and Negri, the Empire is largely succeeding, via the seemingly incontrovertible forces of global economics, capitalist consumerism, and expansive technologies, in creating a monochrome, homogenous abstraction to which the throngs of “the people” adhere without difficulty and without noticing. Similarly, the “public” in Kierkegaard’s analysis is a “monstrous abstraction,”557 which has been formed by cultural forces and enabled by “leveling,” the sanding down of distinct edges of individual subjectivity. This process is assisted, Kierkegaard emphasizes, with the help of the media (the “press”). The abstraction that is the public becomes the identity-shaper by which the individuals unwittingly define themselves. As a result of being subsumed into the public, individuals lose their will and their power to be and act as responsible selves. The public is not a concrete entity, not a group or collective or coalition, but is something that cannot issue forth in any action and that does not bear responsibility for anything or anyone:
Contemporaneity with actual persons, each of whom is someone, in the actuality of the moment and the actual situation gives support to the single individual. But the existence of a public creates no situation and no community.558
The public “annihilates all the relative concretions of individuality,” whereas the single individual in his relationship with God is able to “make up his own mind instead of agreeing with the public.”559 So, for Kierkegaard, the malaise endemic to (nineteenth-century Danish) society is diagnosed in the leveling process undertaken by the public (Hardt and Negri’s “the people,” as created and conditioned by Empire). The solution to the problem, then, is to be found in a rigorously religious orientation of the self. The sphere of religion, for Kierkegaard, as the culmination of the self’s becoming—the apex of subjectivity—offers the antidote to the leveling powers of the public. Only by defining oneself in relation to the eternal, to God, can the individual person regain the possibility and the will to stand apart from the crowd, from the public.
Kierkegaard’s singularity was therefore a forceful antidote to the economic, cultural, technological, political, and institutionally religious forces that lowered the bar of responsibility and diluted passion by squeezing all the energy out of what it means to be a human being. The category of Kierkegaard’s singularity was filled out via the priority of the religious in Kierkegaard’s anthropology: to be an individual in the responsible sense required that a person pursue the task of becoming subjective, a subjective self, which necessitated that God is the criterion for the self’s becoming. Through the turn to inwardness that subjectivity involves, the person becomes more than a vacuous, superficial person who is unequipped to live courageously in the world. Through the deepening of subjectivity and inwardness, a person acquires the restlessness of faith that leads to active works of love.
In the Point of View, Kierkegaard writes, “The single individual is the category through which, in a religious sense, the age, history, the human race must go.”560 The single individual, for Kierkegaard, is a person who has inwardly appropriated the essentially Christian, and has thereby shifted from a merely aesthetic or ethical orientation into the deeper life defined by the religious sphere So to be a single individual is to be an ethically and religiously responsible self: one for whom God and Christ—and the life called for by the New Testament—are the determining factors of one’s existence. Conversely, though, to be religious one must be a single individual: as he notes, the “first condition of all religiousness” is “to be an individual human being.”561
In Two Ages, Kierkegaard suggests that an “optimal and normative” situation is “when individuals (each one individually) are essentially and passionately related to an idea and together are essentially related to the same idea.” So, while they share the same conviction, religious doctrine, or ideology, they are also distinguished from each other at the same time by “essential inwardness.” This inwardness, which is to say a deep religious orientation of each self before God as their ultimate criterion for subjectivity, is what, for Kierkegaard, keeps the individuals distinct and yet sharing their “unanimity to the idea.” They are united and yet as individuals they “never come too close to each other in the herd sense.” The “herd sense” is yet another expression for the “crowd,” or the “public.” Individuals, as single individuals, can share in the same idea and be unified without collapsing distinctions and being subsumed by the abstract public. For Kierkegaard, what is required is inwardness, or the religious orientation of the self as a responsible self before God and the world. He goes on to say that
the unanimity of separation is indeed fully orchestrated music. On the other hand, if individuals relate to an idea merely en masse (consequently without the individual separation of inwardness), we get violence, anarchy, riotousness, but if there is no idea for the individuals en masse and no individually separating essential inwardness, either, then we have crudeness. The harmony of the spheres is the unity of each planet relating to itself and to the whole. Take away the relations, and there will be chaos.562
Kierkegaard’s single individual is not a solitary loner who is unconcerned with sociality. Rather, he or she is someone who is related to others through agreement or disagreement. Indeed, single individuals might even collectively be unified in agreement with an idea—while still retaining inward distinctiveness and the particularly of subjectivity.
This point underscores why Kierkegaard’s theory of the single individual, far from being apolitical, is actually profoundly constructive for a political theology concerned with the question of political subjectivity. Put differently: contrary to conventional readings of Kierkegaard which contend that his personalistic existentialism troubles any attempts to think of his theology as political, he specifically theorizes existence as a relational dynamism that cannot be overcome by the self; the very excess of the self is that the self-relation is never restricted or contained by the self’s inwardness, but also constitutively grounded by that which transcends or even transgresses the self, which is precisely what makes the self so unreliable, so treacherous as a site for truth, for universality—even for ethics. And so, the religious self is precisely that modality of existence whereby the self recognizes that it must recognize itself as that which is always already “before God”; this cannot be thought of as a leap into metaphysical transcendence, for the “absolute relation to the absolute” is indeed an immanent relation to that which is always the self, but always infinitely other than self. This paradox is precisely the incarnational dynamic that is irrationally confounding and as such, absurd. In this way, the singular individuality of the self is always a multitudinal relation to the other that extends beyond the coordinates of reason or history.
As such, “single individual” presents a significant contribution to questions concerning the role of religion in the formation of revolutionary political subjects, particularly when read in conjunction with Hardt and Negri’s understanding of the multitude (as we have done here). Religion is a resource for taking on the pervasive forces of empire today precisely because it introduces a post-imperial way of “thinking otherwise,” a point that Hardt and Negri circle around, but never really comment on in an extended way. Not just any kind of religion will do (i.e., institutional religions); it is rather “the religious,” as in the orientation of the self as a self before God, as an individual who stands before the eternal and recognizes his or her responsibilities and possibilities, as well as the empowerment to turn critically and prophetically against “the crowd”: Heidegger’s “they,” Kierkegaard’s “the public,” or Hardt and Negri’s “the people” of empire.
Admittedly, it is a thin reading to merely suggest that Hardt and Negri’s “multitude” (or Kierkegaard’s “single individual” for that matter) is marked primarily by its critical and negative posture toward the crowd, the Empire’s public. Indeed, our argument here has been that it is wrong to think of Kierkegaard’s single individual as adding to the perception of Kierkegaard as having little interest in the political, precisely because it becomes necessary in our view to interpret the “single individual” as a “multitudinal perspective.” This means that singularity and multitude are separated by only a “parallax” gap, that position of minimal difference that allows the object of consideration—in this case, the conditions of possibility for the revolutionary political subject—to be indirectly apprehended only by way of a triangulation based on the incommensurability of the positions and the unrepresentable character of the object. By naming—and so thinking and rethinking—political subjectivity in and as this fundamental parallax gap, we are able to perpetuate fundamental tensions and incommensurabilities within our social order, rather than tempering or sublimating them. We have made it clear that the multitude is the subjectivity most capable of thinking and acting from a parallax position, but how about Kierkegaard’s “single individual”?
A Political Theology of the Neighbor: The Single Individual in Multitudinal Perspective
Kierkegaard’s “single individual” speaks of a responsible and responsive agent but cannot be reduced to a discrete person that envisions herself as a self apart from others, and as such, can only became that single individual when withdrawn from social relationships and political obligations. Quite the contrary: Kierkegaard suggested that his Works of Love was his effort to apply the concept of subjectivity and the single individual to the social sphere.563 Many critics of Kierkegaard’s perceived isolationism and self-centeredness have not attended to Works of Love sufficiently or have avoided it altogether. In this work, Kierkegaard articulates a theology of subjectivity as underlined by the duty to love the neighbor as oneself. The centrality of duty toward one’s neighbor, not the beloved whom one prefers to love, but the anonymous, little-known, or unloved person whom one must nonetheless love anyway, because God commands it, shows that Kierkegaard’s political theology has little interest in celebrating the solitary, apolitical individual. He is in fact eager to dispense with it as a symbolic expression of poetic, aesthetic, and preferential love and supplant it with the dutiful, non-preferential, and offensive character of Christian love.
The single individual is thus a political self—not in the strict sense of “politics” as reductively about government, statecraft, or the professional political vocation (what Kierkegaard probably had in view with his aforementioned quip that the single individual is “diametrically opposed to politics”).564 Rather, Kierkegaard’s single individual is political in that it is not so much about the individuality or the singularity, but rather about the relation of the subject to God, self, and the world. The individual is a responsible and responding self—with selfhood being defined in relation to others. Single individuals, gathered together around a shared idea or goal and related to a community of others, and motivated by the demands of the eternal as criteria, represent the attainment of a political subjectivity that cannot be but social, and is generated at least in part by what Kierkegaard refers to repeatedly as “being before God,” a theological turn of phrase that is not without its own irritating little ironies.
With God, or one’s responsibility to eternity, as the “middle term,” one relates to the other—to the neighbor—as if one were relating to oneself or to the beloved. There is no room here for self-centered, narcissistic piety; rather, the subjectivity demanded by Works of Love is outward (if empowered inwardly), concrete, social, and political. For Kierkegaard, the love of neighbor is empowered by and motivated by the divine command—this cannot be denied. This is also what makes Kierkegaard’s political subjectivity theo-logical but is also what links singularity with the multitudinal subjectivity of Hardt and Negri: the energetic force of immanent difference that functions in and through singular subjects rather than originating with them. The anti-imperial force of the multitude originates in their “innumerable internal differences” and it is for this reason that it is opposed to both identity politics (i.e., a politics of difference [Iris Marion Young] or recognition [Charles Taylor])565 and nationalism. This is very important in our global political climate in which tribal populism—whether it be in the form of Brexit, the Dutch Partij voor de Vrijheid (PVV, “Party for Freedom”), the Flemish Interest (VB, Vlaams Belang)566 on the far right or homo-nationalism and grievance politics on the left—over determine our political options on an international scale.
In this we agree with Stephen Backhouse, who argues that Kierkegaard’s concept of the neighbor constitutes a basis for a political theology that subverts the ideology and idolatry of nationalism:
Kierkegaard’s neighbour is the kind of person who lives in the multivalent, ever-shifting world envisioned by the loosened, established order. . . . Paradoxically the neighbour is a way to articulate undefined “others” insofar as Kierkegaard’s “neighbour” is a cipher for “the individual”: the “I” who is not oneself. Thus one discusses persons in a way that preserves individuality and avoids collapsing groups of individuals into a gormless herd. As individuals, neighbours are real (not abstract) but their reality includes the fact that their personhood cannot be defined solely by recourse to an exhaustive inventory of cultural influences. They are in this this sense objectively indefinable precisely because they are complex subjects—not simplified units defined primarily by their membership to certain groups such as nations. Works of Love demonstrates clearly how neighbour talk can subvert and supplant nation talk.567
Our argument builds on Backhouse here in that while he argues that Kierkegaard sets forth a critique of nationalism, we add that his theory of the single individual—insofar as it is read as a political theology—displays a multitudinal character that, when modulated by Hardt and Negri, generates an explicitly post-imperial (rather than simply anti-nationalist) position that helps political theology continue to think through how best to contribute to the formation of emancipatory subjects in the post-secular age.
Conclusion
Our goal in this chapter has been not simply to contend against the asocial interpretation of Kierkegaard’s “single individual” that appears to render him unimportant (or worst, not interesting) for the political-theological interest in subjectivity. As we stated earlier, political theology is concerned with the subject primarily due to its early reception of critical theory which, as a form of social philosophy, took its cue from the historical failure of Western Marxism to generate the kind of consciousness required to enact systemic levels of social and political change necessary to free human beings from oppressive and dominative conditions, conditions that not only restrain human creativity, but also their freedom.
It was the freedom of the single individual that motivated Kierkegaard’s theory of subjectivity; the freedom to appropriate, to query, to choose, indeed, even to act, without the constrains of a particular form of rationality, of history, of cultured churches, or of the nation-state. Of course, the forces that oppress and dominate human beings only get more sophisticated with time and capital, and as the nineteenth century gave way to the twentieth and into the twenty-first, the challenge facing human freedom was less overtly political and dissipated into the ephemeral symbolics of Empire. Hardt and Negri imagined, in this context, what kind of subject would be necessary to build a post-imperial social world from these forces, and the “multitude” emerged. We have argued that these are not two strains of political thought in the continental tradition—existentialism and Marxist—but rather that they both offer a distinctive contribution to the way political theology is currently working through the subject of subjectivity in the post-secular age: they offer a dialectical way of thinking self and other, multitude and singularity, universality and particularity together in ways that preserve the political energy of resistance produced by conflict and difference, rather than sublimating it in favor of the “common good” or generalized interests.
But this is a book about Kierkegaard and political theology. We have argued that Kierkegaard’s single individual is a political theology that is grounded in a deep intersubjectivity that affirms both the importance of the individual as distinctive person, but also as a self in constitutive relation to other selves and to alterity as such. Because the single individual is not defined exclusively by association with a group or collective (such as a nation or an institutional religion), and because the single individual is not defined exclusively by association to an idea (such as a political, economic, or religious ideology), the single individual as individual self before God retains the capacity to move in and out of such boundaries and to level criticisms, prophetic analyses, and creative solutions, even while remaining linked within such associations. The single individual is multitudinal in that it is both grounded and fluid, responsible and responsive, socially related and yet distinct in personhood, recognizing both the reality of boundaries and their permeability. And the single individual is both individual and the multitude, just as the multitude is both personalist and plural.
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525. Hardt and Negri, Empire.
526. Hardt and Negri, Multitude.
527. Rieger and Pui-lan, Occupy Religion.
528. For the decisive account of this history, see Jay, Dialectical Imagination.
529. Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 48–86.
530. The vast literature on this so-called “post-secular” turn is too complicated to list and organize appropriately here. The most central texts for this conversation are Taylor, Secular Age; Habermas, “Religion in the Public Sphere,” 114–48, Asad, Formation of the Secular, and Mahmood, Religious Difference in a Post-Secular Age.
531. Mendieta, introduction to Frankfurt School on Religion, 8–16.
532. Brittain, Adorno and Theology.
533. Boer, Criticism of Religion.
534. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 30; Also, see Adorno, Problems in Moral Philosophy, 158. The facticity of “damaged human life” limits human ability and capacity to discern the good life, to figure out how best to act in a social world that is thoroughly permuted by the reifying effects of capitalist economy on social and political systems. This is discerned in Adorno’s thesis that “wronged life cannot be lived rightly” and it is related to the oft-repeated idea that “there is no good life in false life” or, put differently, “there is no way of living a false life correctly.” In a false world, there is no way of doing (or even recognizing or knowing) the morally or politically right thing; it also means that there is no real living in a false life. There is only survival and persistence; this is inhumane in that it does violence to the natural freedom and happiness of the human being.
535. Hardt and Negri, Multitude, xiv.
536. Ibid.
537. Ibid., 100.
538. Ibid., 108.
539. Ibid., 105.
540. Ibid.
541. Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 1.
542. Hardt and Negri, Multitude, 131.
543. Ibid., 133.
544. For those who might object to Hardt and Negri on the grounds that they romanticize poverty, they clarify their position this way: “We do not mean to suggest that the poor or migrants are better off . . . we will present grievances against the enormous and growing forms of poverty and inequality in the global system. These should be combatted in every way possible.” Ibid., 134.
545. Ibid.
546. Ibid., 135.
547. Ibid., xiii.
548. Ibid., 57.
549. Ibid., 125.
550. Ibid., 99.
551. Kierkegaard, Point of View, 121.
552. Kaufmann, From Shakespeare to Existentialism, 199–200.
553. Ibid., 183.
554. Ibid.
555. Ibid., 193.
556. Kierkegaard, Point of View, 121.
557. Kierkegaard, Two Ages, 90.
558. Ibid., 91.
559. Ibid., 92.
560. Kierkegaard, Point of View, 118.
561. Ibid., 116–17.
562. Kierkegaard, Two Ages, 62–63.
563. In a 1847 journal entry, Kierkegaard had this to say about his plan to publish a book with explicitly social application, called Works of Love: “Despite everything people ought to have learned about my maieutic carefulness, by proceeding slowly and continually letting it seem as if I knew nothing more, not the next thing—now on the occasion of my new upbuilding discourses they will probably bawl out that I do not know what comes next, that I know nothing about sociality. . . . Now I have the theme of the next book. It will be called: Works of Love.” Kierkegaard, Journals and Papers, 5:5972 (VIII A 4 5–4 6).
564. Stephen Backhouse draws a distinction between a “strong” and a “weak” meaning of political, the former having to do with “party politics, democratic movements and the machinations of government,” and the latter having to do more broadly with “inter-human relationships and organizations.” Kierkegaard, in his view, has the strong meaning in mind when he refers to politics. Backhouse, Kierkegaard’s Critique of Christian Nationalism, 177.
565. Taylor, “Politics of Recognition,” 25–74.
566. Wit, “Politics without Dénouement,” 130–32.
567. Backhouse, Kierkegaard’s Critique of Christian Nationalism, 208. For Backhouse, “the neighbour of WL stands as an ethically and socially viable alternative to the person primarily defined as the ‘co-national.’”