Chapter 14: Politicizing Kierkegaardian Repetition
14
Politicizing Kierkegaardian Repetition
On Schmitt and Kierkegaard
Everything changes. You can make a fresh start with your final breath.
—Bertolt Brecht
Introduction
Both Søren Kierkegaard and Carl Schmitt are concerned with what they understand as the progressing secularization of the world around them. Against this background, Kierkegaard defines the self, and Schmitt defines the sovereign, in terms of decision on the exception. While Kierkegaard’s definition is not explicitly political, Schmitt challenges us to think politically with Kierkegaard when he cites the Danish philosopher in his book Political Theology. How are we to think politically with Kierkegaard? The most obvious places to turn are to Kierkegaard’s writings on Abraham and Socrates. In Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard presents Abraham as someone who is making a sovereign decision to suspend ethics when he finds himself in an exceptional situation, and intends to sacrifice his son in order to pass a test of faith. Even though Kierkegaard’s reading of the biblical story of the Akedah is not explicitly political, we can easily see the political implications of the story if we understand politics as part of ethics, as Barry Stocker proposes.648 Abraham is a political exemplar because he is a sovereign self who becomes the father of a sovereign people. Kierkegaard also writes extensively about Socrates, whose trial is another significant theopolitical event. But Schmitt mentions neither Abraham nor Socrates in Political Theology. Rather, he quotes at length from a book that reads at first as a romance novel with no political implications at all: Repetition. In this essay, I explore Kierkegaard’s concept of repetition and its relevance to political theology. I read Schmitt’s sovereign “who decides on the exception” as parallel to Kierkegaard’s sovereign self, a self that is constituted as sovereign through repetition.649
For Kierkegaard, the ultimate meaning of repetition is religious, but in Repetition we are presented with a secularized repetition, through three analogies: one metaphysical, one psychological, and one ethical. Schmitt offers a fourth analogy, a political one, when he writes that “the exception in jurisprudence is analogous to the miracle in theology.”650 Would Kierkegaard agree? Kierkegaard opposed what he called “political movement” to what he called “religious movement.” Therefore, one might conclude that Kierkegaard would disagree with the parallel drawn by Schmitt between politics and theology, according to which our political concepts are no more than secularized theological concepts.651 Nevertheless, both thinkers argued that politics desperately needs religion, and I believe that unfolding the rich meaning of Kierkegaardian repetition will help us see what they both mean by this. Let us begin exploring this need by way of reading Schmitt’s Political Theology.
Repetition and the Political: Schmitt on Sovereignty
Carl Schmitt admired Kierkegaard. Jacob Taubes writes that for Schmitt “everything revolves around this Kierkegaard of the exception.”652 One finds in Schmitt’s library many of Kierkegaard’s books in the German translation, with Schmitt’s notes in the margins, as well as numerous references to Kierkegaard in Schmitt’s diaries. Ellen Kennedy writes that Schmitt was particularly interested in Kierkegaard’s critique of his generation’s “culture of the trivial, destructive of ‘geist’ and seriousness.”653 However, in what many consider his most important work, Political Theology, Schmitt quotes from Kierkegaard’s Repetition, rather than from the latter’s more explicitly political works, Fear and Trembling or The Present Age.
The reference to Repetition comes at the end of the first chapter of Political Theology. Schmitt writes that “in the exception the power of real life breaks through the crust of a mechanism that has become torpid by repetition.”654 Schmitt is glorifying the exception here, and criticizing repetition of the kind that Kierkegaard himself parodies in Repetition in the form of secularized analogies of true, religious repetition. True Kierkegaardian repetition is exactly “the power of real life” that Schmitt strives for. True Kierkegaardian repetition is “a religious movement by virtue of the absurd”655 and would come to mean “a task for freedom,”656 “atonement,”657 and “true happiness.”658 This repetition is indeed the exception. The two are not opposed to one another.
In Repetition, Kierkegaard does not directly define repetition; instead, he asks whether repetition is possible. This question is significant because, in some sense, our world gains meaning and sense through consistency and predictability. Language would not have been the same had we not repeatedly used the same words to refer to the same objects; science would not have been what it is had experiments and their results not been repeatable. Things gain sense through repetition (or the possibility of repetition). Law has a similar structure: if it is not repeatedly followed, it loses its grounds. In a way, the sovereign’s power to suspend law renders law pointless, because if it can be suspended then how can we see it as law? Similarly, atonement—which is the ultimate meaning of repetition, according to Kierkegaard—suspends law (at least moral law, but in the form of pardon it suspends positive law as well), thereby, ostensibly, rendering it pointless. Counterintuitively, both Kierkegaard and Schmitt tell us that it is the exception that makes the general meaningful. How could it be? Does it not render the general meaningless? To understand this statement, let us look more closely into Schmitt’s theory of the exception and then return to Kierkegaardian repetition itself.
Schmitt refers to Kierkegaard as a “Protestant theologian who demonstrated the vital intensity possible in theological reflection in the nineteenth century.”659 He quotes (and paraphrases) from Repetition:
The exception explains the general and itself. And if one wants to study the general correctly, one only needs to look around for a true exception. It reveals everything more clearly than does the general. Endless talk about the general becomes boring; there are exceptions. If they cannot be explained, then the general also cannot be explained. The difficulty is usually not noticed because the general is not thought about with passion but with a comfortable superficiality. The exception, on the other hand, thinks the general with intense passion.660
Passion is exactly what is needed in politics, what is absent from the repetition of mere law-following. It drives decision-making, both in Kierkegaard’s “authentic” self and in Schmitt’s sovereign “who decides on the exception.”661 Let me proceed by way of introducing Schmitt’s political theology before returning to Kierkegaardian repetition and showing how Schmitt can help us to politicize Kierkegaard in general and repetition in particular.
“All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts,” writes Schmitt.662 In other words, we can understand modern politics only by means of theological structures. The statement is sweeping but in Political Theology Schmitt actually focuses on one application only—the question of sovereignty. Sovereignty, according to him, is a borderline concept, and therefore it cannot be associated with routine; it belongs in extreme cases. Schmitt’s Political Theology is a polemic with legal formalists, such as Max Weber and Hans Kelsen, who argue that we can understand law only in legal terms (an argument similar to the Hegelian notion that Kierkegaard criticized in Fear and Trembling, that the ethical is the universal and can only be understood from the point of view of the universal).663 We do not understand law in political, economic, or religious terms. Law is autonomous, not affected by politics. This is not necessary but a result of secularization. This notion of law assumes that legal action has force by virtue of the authority of law and not of politics (“the rule of law” rather than “the rule of man”). But this view of law as a closed system with its own logic is illusory, according to Schmitt. When we think seriously about the relation between law and politics we discover that “sovereign is he who decides on the exception.”664 The moment of decision is manifest in the state of emergency, but it is, nevertheless, the organizing principal of law as such. Schmitt’s point when analyzing the state of emergency is that we cannot deny the moment of decision. If we examine the state of emergency from a simple legal point of view—this is the point of view of the exception. Ordinary law is suspended in favor of emergency powers. Can we understand emergency from the point of view of the rule of law? The legal formalists’ answer is positive. Moreover, according to them, we cannot understand the state of emergency from a non-legal point of view. The rule of law is preserved even in the state of emergency (Kierkegaard’s Abraham, similarly, would be dismissed by the Hegelian ethical-universal as a sinner, not affecting the universality of ethics through his actions).
Schmitt disagrees. Emergency law does not really subordinate the state of emergency to the rule of law. There is always room for action; there is always freedom to decide. Someone—the sovereign—will be able to declare the state of emergency and decide how to act in this situation. The sovereign is not limited by the rule of law, just as Abraham was not limited by the ethical when he decided to obey God’s command and sacrifice his son. The legal sphere is always open, enabling political decision. From a political point of view, the sovereign cannot be subordinate to law in the same way that God—from a theological point of view—cannot be subordinate to the law of nature. Politics, from the point of view of the rule of law, has no force, no libido, no vitality. The freedom to decide is the key to allowing politics to be born anew, just as faith is born from the ethical with Abraham’s actions.
Why did Schmitt need Kierkegaardian repetition to tell us all that? Scholars tend to focus on the relationship between repetition and the exception when they try to answer this question.665 I argue that Schmitt’s reference to repetition points to an even stronger connection between his theory of the sovereign and Kierkegaard’s theory of the self. Schmitt’s sovereign state, that is constituted through the exception, is modeled on Kierkegaard’s sovereign self, who is constituted through repetition. Let us, then, turn to Kierkegaardian repetition.
Kierkegaard’s Concept of Repetition
Let me briefly present here the narrative of Repetition. Constantin Constantius, the pseudonymous author of the book, tells us about a young poet who fell in love with a girl but his love was an unhappy love. He was unable to commit to marrying her but neither could he bring himself to break up with her, and so he eventually fled to Stockholm. In his letters from Stockholm, he tells Constantin that he found comfort in the story of Job, inspired by Job’s refusal to believe that he suffered because of his sins.666 His correspondent’s account of the failed love affair makes Constantin wonder whether or not repetition is possible, so he takes a trip to Berlin, a city he has visited before, in order to find out if he can relive the pleasures of his previous trip. Alas, the trip is a series of “disasters,” such as a disappointing visit to the theatre, proving to Constantin that repetition is impossible. But this search for repetition via tourism is just as superficial as the poet’s reading of the book of Job.
To understand the deep meaning of Kierkegaardian repetition, we have to wander through the concept’s secularized analogies (from the realms of metaphysics, psychology, and ethics) before we can discover religious repetition. Then we will consider the fourth possible analogy, in the realm of the political. In Repetition, Kierkegaard congratulates the Danish language on a philosophical term. The Danish word he uses is gjentagelsen, which commonly means repetition, but which carries another meaning, of returning to an original position (redintegratio in statum pristinum).667 These two meanings seem to contradict each other, and this is exactly why Kierkegaard thinks repetition is “a good Danish word.”668 The two meanings are ostensibly contradictory because when we think of repetition we think of sameness and immutability, while return to an original position assumes that the thing that returned has changed and moved away from its original position (otherwise there would have been nowhere to return to). If the first meaning is related to sameness, the second is related to change. The two meanings are in tension, tells us Kierkegaard, and the Danish term holds both meanings without resolving the tension, thereby explaining the relation between the Eleatics and Heraclitus.669
The opening lines of Repetition hint to the idea that it is existence itself that proves that metaphysical inquiry is futile (explaining the relation between the Eleatics and Heraclitus): “When the Eleatics denied motion, Diogenes, as everyone knows, came forward as an opponent. He literally did come forward, because he did not say a word but merely paced back and forth a few times, thereby assuming that he had sufficiently refuted them.”670 These two sentences say a lot about the relation between language, metaphysics and existence. The story wants to convince us that action has more force than any philosophical debate, that it can make a difference and express ideas that words cannot. For this reason, Constantin decides to look for repetition in Berlin (through action) rather than in words (through philosophical musings).
Nevertheless, Kierkegaard goes on to tell us that the Danish language actually does have a word that is philosophical and that can resolve the fundamental problem of metaphysics: “repetition is the interest of metaphysics and the interest upon which metaphysics comes to grief.”671 In other words, repetition expresses both the fundamental problem of metaphysics (the possibility of motion) and the problem’s solution—which puts an end to all metaphysical inquiry. Repetition is what gives things their meaning. Therefore, if repetition is impossible, “all life dissolves into an empty, meaningless noise.”672 If repetition only means sameness, then there is no motion. If the world is a flux, then repetition is impossible. But searching for continuity in a Heraclitic constantly-changing world provides a solution to the problem of repetition, a solution that is itself somewhat of an oxymoron: discovering that life is a repetition, within a Heraclitic worldview, means that what is continuous in life is change and renewal. Thus, gjentagelsen—because of its double meaning—provides us with a solution for the problem of continuity within the Heraclitic worldview—it resolves the debate between the Eleatics and Heraclitus, and metaphysics founders: the metaphysical problem of motion is solved, and what remains is an ethical problem.
The opening lines of repetition hinted in this direction when they suggested that action is stronger than words. In Gilles Deleuze’s words, Kierkegaardian repetition wants to “put metaphysics in motion, in action.”673 But once metaphysics is put in action, it becomes ethics. To use Schmittian terminology, while the Eleatics denied motion (just as legal formalists describe the sphere of law as closed and unchangeable), Diogenes made a sovereign decision on the exception and came forward, thus refuting them. His action takes us from the sphere of metaphysics to that of ethics, and later on, to that of politics. As we learn from Kierkegaard, repetition is “the watchword in every ethical view”674—it will become the interest of ethics, and the interest upon which ethics comes to grief.
The Interest of Ethics
The ethical problem is also a psychological one, as Repetition’s subtitle—A Venture in Experimenting Psychology—suggests.675 The question of repetition becomes a question of personal identity rather than a metaphysical problem: “The most interior problem of the possibility of repetition is expressed externally, as if repetition, if it were possible, were to be found outside the individual when in fact it must be found within the individual.”676 Catherine Pickstock stresses this point. For her, the question of repetition is a question of identity: “While the individual cannot be identically repeated, and if it appears to be so, as in the case of urban modernity, is alienated from herself, nevertheless, like any other res, the individual must be repeated in order to be identified as an individual.”677 Clare Carlisle adds that repetition as creation or declaration of identity is “an inward movement. This means that it is a movement of intensification, of deepening, within the ‘heart’ or the ‘soul’ of the individual.”678
The problem is that, since we did not choose to be born, how can we see ourselves as having any agency? Repetition’s nameless poet expresses such a worry in one of his letters to Constantin:
Who tricked me into this whole thing and leaves me standing here? Who am I? How did I get into the world? Why was I not asked about it, why was I not informed of the rules and regulations but just thrust into the ranks . . . ? How did I get involved in this big enterprise called actuality? Why should I be involved? Isn’t it a matter of choice? And if I am compelled to be involved, where is the manager—I have something to say about this.679
For life to become “a matter of choice” we need repetition, and indeed, Kierkegaard writes in his journal that repetition is possible because in some situations it is extremely needed.680 We often hear statements such as, “If I had known then what I know now, I would have acted differently.” We long for a return to a past situation and for the opportunity to act differently than we actually have. It is not longing to relive the past exactly as it has been, but to change the past, to get a chance to correct it, “to make a fresh start,” in Brecht’s words. We all know the child’s frustration when the child is told “you will understand when you are older.” Well, sometimes we do understand when we are older, and then we wish we could go back to childhood and do something with this understanding. Kierkegaard himself knows this frustration very well, and he expresses it in his journal: “Philosophy is perfectly right in saying that life must be understood backwards. But then one forgets the other clause—that it must be lived forwards.”681
Repetition—if it is possible—solves this ethical-psychological problem. We understand repetition as return to the origin, to the moment of becoming, or as rebirth. If Repetition’s poet can return to the moment of his own constitution, he can become a subject through his own sovereign decision; he can constitute a life of agency—indeed, he can become the manager that he is looking for. Nevertheless, repetition in this sense seems impossible, as Constantin discovers in his failed experiment in Berlin.
One can only do something for the first time once. To do it again may repeat the externals of the act, but its newness cannot be repeated. Doing the same thing for the second time is, paradoxically, its own first time and so on, ad infinitum. In this sense there is no repetition.682
But in this sense exactly there is repetition. Constantin’s failure to recreate his previous trip to Berlin is actually a glorified failure. Because the second trip is not identical to the first one, we can see it as a first trip. The reduplication of the Berlin trip brings about renewal and change, and thus repetition manages to hold two contradictory meanings at once. In repetition we both create something new and recreate something old. The thing that repeats itself is, paradoxically, the uniqueness of the experience. What we can learn from the failed Berlin experiment is that the meaningful aspect of an experience is the subjective one. Berlin itself has not changed between Constantin’s two trips. The hotel, café, and theater that Constantin has visited are still there. What changed is Constantin’s subjective position, and this change creates a totally new experience. Since his point of view is so significant, he can actually reconstitute his life and self, return to the past and change it for the future, become an agent albeit the forced first coming to existence.
When repetition as agency turns out to be possible, another ethical problem is revealed: if we can constitute a life of free choice, see ourselves as agents, and if, as Milan Kundera notes, “there is no means of testing which decision is better, because there is no basis for comparison,”683 then the ethical burden we carry becomes unbearable. Repetition’s young poet finds comfort in the figure of Job for this reason: “What really appeals to him in Job is that Job was right. Now everything revolves around that. Fate has played a trick on him and let him become guilty. If that is the way it is, then he can no longer take himself back again.”684 Kierkegaard describes the paradox of the ethical in various ways. In The Concept of Anxiety, he writes:
Ethics proposes to bring ideality into actuality. On the other hand, it is not the nature of its movement to raise actuality up into ideality. Ethics points to ideality as a task and assumes that every man possesses the requisite conditions. Thus ethics develops a contradiction, inasmuch as it makes clear both the difficulty and the impossibility.685
Ethics posits ideals, which man, due to his finite nature, cannot realize. Ethics cannot lower ideality into actuality and cannot raise actuality up to ideality, and so ideality and actuality can never meet. This means that we can never fulfill the ethical ideal, and therefore we (as ethical creatures) always feel guilty. Therefore, we need forgiveness, but the ethical cannot provide it. As Kierkegaard puts it in the context of Abraham, “if it was a sin . . . he could not understand that it could be forgiven”686—either Abraham is not a sinner or his sin cannot be forgiven. Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice Isaac is a sin from the point of view of the ethical, and the ethical cannot offer Abraham forgiveness. The problem is that it is the sinner who needs forgiveness, and it is the sinner who cannot be forgiven. The ethical ideal can never be realized, and therefore, she who strives to lead an ethical life is always frustrated. She longs for absolute forgiveness, and the ethical only has relative sources for forgiveness: “The forgiveness we need cannot be required of any friend or acquaintance or moral judge; hence ethics cannot secure it for us.”687 Therefore, this ethical paradox must lead us to a leap of faith, to repetition by virtue of the absurd, to God, who can offer absolute forgiveness.
If repetition is not posited, ethics becomes a binding power. No doubt it is for this reason that the author [Constantin] stated that repetition is the solution in every ethical view. If repetition is not posited, dogmatics cannot exist at all, for repetition begins in faith, and faith is the organ for issues of dogma.688
Repetition becomes religious (“the ondition sine qua non for every issue of dogmatics”)689 when it “come[s] to mean atonement,”690 when God forgives Abraham’s unforgivable sin and returns Isaac, when the whirlwind restores Job’s world, and when Socrates is born anew through Plato’s writings. Religious repetition can be thought of as the exception—Abraham, Job, and Socrates become exceptional through forgiveness or atonement. Translating the problem of repetition into political terminology, we could say that the problem is that of the possibility of sovereignty. This is why Schmitt is so interested in Kierkegaardian repetition. Through it, the self becomes sovereign. She can make decisions and become the manager of her own life. But this cannot happen without God, who enables repetition “on the border of the marvelous.”691 For Deleuze, this is the point where Kierkegaardian repetition fails. The same repetition that so successfully provided an alternative to moral law and to the law of nature, to generality itself, now discovers God and the self “once and for all,”692 foreclosing any possibility for future development. The “fundamental category of the philosophy of the future”693 comes to a halt with faith. For Schmitt, on the other hand, it is precisely this point where politics can come in.
Epilogue: Kierkegaard on Politics
Kierkegaard, like Schmitt, thought that politics needs religion. But, as Gould points out, while “Schmitt absorbs religion into politics, Kierkegaard absorbs politics into religion.”694 Though he was ambivalent about politics and often confessed his ignorance about it, as J. Michael Tilley notes, one can find sophisticated analyses of political events in Kierkegaard’s published works, as well as in his journals and letters.695 Let us look at his scarce comments about politics and connect them to his theory of repetition. We have seen that the question of repetition is the question of motion. In 1848, in a letter to a Danish law professor, Kierkegaard distinguished between religious movement and political movement, using this distinction to comment on the unstable political situation in Europe and particularly on the French Revolution.
Most people believe that so long as one has a fixed point to which one wants to get, then motion is no vortex. But this is a misunderstanding. It all depends on having a fixed point from which to set out. Stopping is not possible at a point ahead, but at a point behind. . . . And this is the difference between a political and a religious movement. Any purely political movement, which accordingly lacks the religious element or is forsaken by God, is a vortex, cannot be stopped, and is a prey to the illusion of wanting a fixed point ahead, which is wanting to stop by means of a gadfly [Bremsen]; for the fixed point, the only fixed point, lies behind.696
Secular politics, in Kierkegaard’s reading, is unstable because it has no room for a meaningful (sovereign) decision to be made. It needs religion to give it stability. The need for repetition is a need for decision. To use Schmittian terminology, Kierkegaard tells us that we are mistaken to think that the rule of law can bring stability, that it is actually a sovereign decision that is needed. Secular politics looks for a fixed point ahead, as if it can regulate the future, but it is religion that understands that such a point is not to be found. And Kierkegaard’s opinion of the unstable political situation in Europe, therefore, is that “it cannot be stopped except by religion, and I am convinced that . . . the movement of our time, which appears to be purely political, will turn out suddenly to be religious or the need for religion.697
Religion teaches us that the only stability is to be found in the moment of decision (when to depart, much like Abraham who starts his three-day journey to Mount Moriah, thereby proving his faith in God, not knowing how the journey is going to end, not having a fixed point ahead). Kierkegaard uses Socrates to illustrate this point:
Socrates had his fixed point behind. His point of departure lay in himself and in the god. That is to say, he knew himself, he possessed himself. By this means he stopped Sophistry, which, like politics, always asks whither one should go instead of asking whence one should depart.698
Secular politics looks for a fixed point ahead, which it cannot find because fixed points always lie behind (because life “must be lived forward”).699 Religion, on the other hand, looks for a point of departure, letting the future be determined in the future. And so religion can bring freedom back to politics. It brings decision back to politics because the only decision we can make in the present is “when to depart.” Socrates, like Abraham and like Schmitt’s sovereign, is exceptional because he can make a decision, thereby stopping the flux of Sophistry.
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648. Stocker, Kierkegaard on Politics, 11.
649. On the conceptual parallel between the sovereign state and the sovereign self, see Elshtain, Sovereignty.
650. Schmitt, Political Theology, 36.
651. Ibid.
652. Taubes, Political Theology of Paul, 66.
653. Kennedy, Constitutional Failure, 205; see also Ryan, Kierkegaard’s Indirect Politics, 90–91.
654. Schmitt, Political Theology, 15.
655. Kierkegaard, Repetition, 324 [Pap. IV B 120].
656. Ibid.
657. Ibid.
658. Ibid., 330 [Pap. IV B 122].
659. Schmitt, Political Theology, 15. Schmitt mentions Kierkegaard in other writings, as well. In Political Romanticism, Kierkegaard is “the only great figure among the romantics,” and in Roman Catholicism and Political Form, he is “the most inward of all Christians.” (See Ryan, Kierkegaard’s Indirect Politics, 102; Ryan, “Carl Schmitt,” 186.)
660. Schmitt, Political Theology, 15.
661. Ibid., 5.
662. Ibid., 36.
663. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, 54.
664. Schmitt, Political Theology, 5.
665. Little has been written on Kierkegaard and Schmitt. In English, see, e.g., Conrad, “Kierkegaard’s Moment”; Gould, “Laws, Exceptions, Norms”; Ryan, Kierkegaard’s Indirect Politics; Ryan, “Carl Schmitt”; and Smith, Friendship and the Political.
666. Kierkegaard, Repetition, 207.
667. Croxall, Kierkegaard Commentary, 128.
668. Kierkegaard, Repetition, 149.
669. Ibid.
670. Ibid., 131.
671. Ibid., 149.
672. Ibid.
673. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 8.
674. Ibid., 149.
675. The relationship between Constantin and the poet resembles that between a therapist and a patient in many ways. Exploring this relationship is beyond the scope of this essay. For an analysis of Repetition as a critique of nineteenth-century experimental psychology, see Tang, “Repetition and Nineteenth-Century Experimental Psychology.”
676. Kierkegaard, Repetition, 304 [Pap. IV B 117, 283].
677. Pickstock, Repetition and Identity, 92.
678. Carlisle, Kierkegaard’s Philosophy of Becoming, 76.
679. Kierkegaard, Repetition, 200.
680. Ibid. [Pap. XI3 B 122].
681. Kierkegaard, Journals and Papers, 1:1030.
682. McCarthy, “Repetition’s Repetitions,” 271n12.
683. Kundera, Unbearable Lightness of Being, 8.
684. Kierkegaard, Repetition, 304 [Papirer IV B 117, 284].
685. Kierkegaard, Concept of Anxiety, 16.
686. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, 13.
687. Mooney, “Repetition,” 297.
688. Kierkegaard, Concept of Anxiety, 18n.
689. Kierkegaard, Repetition, 149.
690. Ibid. [Pap. IV B 120, 309].
691. Ibid.
692. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 95.
693. Ibid., 5.
694. Gould, “Laws, Exceptions, Norms,” 12.
695. Tilley, “J. L. A. Kolderup-Rosenvinge,” 77.
696. Kierkegaard, Letters and Documents, 262.
697. Ibid.
698. Ibid., 263.
699. Kierkegaard, Journals and Papers, 1030.