Chapter 2: Kierkegaard and the Critique of Political Theology
2
Kierkegaard and the Critique of Political Theology
Was Kierkegaard a “political theologian”?51 Or—perhaps a better question—what, if anything, is there of interest or value in Kierkegaard’s work for those who do think of themselves as practitioners of political theology? The answer will of course, depend on what is meant by “political theology”—a richly suggestive but ambiguous term. It seems to have two main kinds of meaning. First, it can refer to the enterprise of drawing political conclusions from theological premises—trying to work out what political actions are suggested or required by certain religious commitments. This is a project that has been pursued by religiously committed thinkers across the centuries and across the political spectrum, from Joseph de Maistre to Liberation Theology.
In the second sense, “political theology” has a less straightforward meaning; it refers to the project, undertaken by atheist thinkers, of taking theological ideas and turning them into political ones. Or, showing that what had been confusedly thought in theological terms can be better expressed in political terms. This should not be confused with the more straightforward secularism which takes theology to be simply mistaken and argues that we should turn away from it to unrelated but more useful topics such as politics. Atheist political theologians do think that something important will be lost if we simply ignore or dismiss the theological tradition(s), but they also suppose that this something needs to be de-theologized and made into politics. The pioneer of this project was of course Feuerbach, whose analysis was in large measure taken up—though also transformed—by Marx and his followers. As Habermas puts it: “Rather than save religion in thought, they want to realize its profanized contents in a political effort of solidarity praxis. This pathos of a desublimated earthly realization of the Kingdom of God is the driving force behind the critique of religion from Feuerbach and Marx to Bloch, Benjamin and Adorno.”52 And, perhaps a little surprisingly, this project is still continued in some ways by contemporary Marxist thinkers like Žižek and Badiou.
How is Kierkegaard relevant to all this? Some interpreters have found in him a positive political theology of the first sort.53 I do not think they are simply wrong to suppose that Kierkegaard’s religious views might have application to political life, though I do not think there is any such thing as a Kierkegaardian political program to be extracted from his writings. As for the second kind of project, a number of practitioners of atheist “political theology” were significantly influenced by Kierkegaard, and, among our contemporaries, Žižek and Badiou both engage critically, but quite sympathetically, with him.54 I think it is clear, nevertheless, that Kierkegaard would be deeply opposed to the whole project. That is not by itself a reason to reject it, but in this paper I will try to at least sketch a Kierkegaardian argument against “political theology” of this second kind. This will go roughly as follows: Some political thinkers try to take certain ideas from Kierkegaard while rejecting his metaphysical, theological, or substantive normative claims. The idea most often extracted in this way is that of radical choice, which stresses the autonomy of the self over against any framework of norms or principles that it might or might not choose. (This is often connected with the “teleological suspension of the ethical,” as discussed in Fear and Trembling—which has been taken by some thinkers as a model for the idea that ethical prohibitions on violence can be suspended for the sake of a political goal.)
Some other political thinkers have, on the contrary, looked to Kierkegaard primarily for an understanding of the self as fundamentally intersubjective, dependent on an other, and therefore limited in its autonomy. For Kierkegaard, these aspects of selfhood—its autonomy and dependence, or, as I shall say, its transcendence and immanence—can hold together only if the self as a whole is properly oriented to a transcendent Good (God). Without such an overriding teleological orientation, choice collapses into an arbitrary decisionism, and intersubjectivity into social conformism. I will argue that Kierkegaard is right about this; or, at the least, that there is good reason to take his concerns on this score very seriously. If I am right, the attempts to de-theologize Kierkegaard give us little that is either intellectually plausible or politically helpful; while the real Kierkegaard, with his substantive metaphysical commitments, has much more to offer us. I will conclude with some reflections on Fear and Trembling—the Kierkegaardian work most often invoked by “political theologians”—and the question of whether it suggests a justification for political violence, whether or not religiously motivated.
I.
Historically, it does seem that Kierkegaard has been invoked politically primarily as a theorist of decisionism. This appropriation of him is based on the familiar existentialist picture of Kierkegaard as the advocate of a “leap of faith” which takes us beyond reason and may call on us to “suspend” our normal ethical codes and responsibilities. This popular, though simplistic, reading of Kierkegaard was given a political twist by Georg Lukacs who seems to have quite consciously opted to support Bolshevism and join the Hungarian Communist party in 1918 as a political equivalent of Kierkegaard’s leap of faith.55 He did so despite unresolved intellectual doubts about Marxist theory, and serious ethical concerns about the Bolsheviks’ use of terror. His willingness to not only condone the latter but, as a member of the short-lived Hungarian revolutionary government in 1919 to actively practice it,56 was seen by him as equivalent to Abraham’s “teleological suspension of the ethical.”57 There was no objectively valid philosophy of history that could demonstrate the necessity of such political terror for the creation of a just society; but one faced the existential choice between standing aloof, or being willing to dirty one’s hands in the hope—or faith—that good would come of such violence. But, of course, having committed himself not only to revolutionary Marxism in general, but to the Communist Party and the Soviet Union as its authoritative embodiments, Lukacs could not continue to admit—even, in the end, to himself—the Kierkegaardian nature of his commitment. Eventually he seems to have resolved this cognitive dissonance by persuading himself of the objective truth of Stalinist historical determinism.
Such political decisionist readings of Kierkegaard were not confined to the Left. Carl Schmitt in his Political Theology refers to Kierkegaard’s notion of “the exception” and uses it as a model for his theory that sovereignty is defined by the power to suspend the normal operations of the law.58 Such suspension needs to be a matter of personal will—if there had to be a law to determine when the law can be suspended we would get into an infinite regress. And, although such a decision to suspend need not be irrational—reasons can be given—only the will of the sovereign can determine whether these reasons are compelling enough: “The exception is more interesting than the rule. The rule proves nothing, the exception proves everything: it confirms not only the rule but also its existence, which derives only from the exception. In the exception, the power of real life breaks through the crust of a mechanism that has become torpid by repetition.”59 Schmitt went on to use this conception to justify the Nazis’ rule by emergency decree. For Schmitt, the Sovereign becomes like the God of Abraham, who is significant precisely because he does not, pace Kant and Hegel, vanish into the universal, the purely ethical, and thus become “an invisible vanishing point, an impotent thought.”60 God’s power to suspend the ethical demonstrates his superiority over it and thus becomes the model for the Sovereign’s power over the law. And so those who accept the Sovereign’s “exceptional” authority and do not require it to be backed up by law, would, it seems, become analogous to Abraham. This is really not so far from Lukacs, of course, for whom the God-like Sovereign is the Party, which demands the suspension of the ethical prohibition against murder; its loyal follower, who accepts that demand, is “Abraham—the Communist.”61
Versions of this supposedly Kierkegaard-derived decisionism are still in vogue. Alain Badiou has invoked Kierkegaard in the course of his discussion of “worlds,” “truths” and “points.” A “world” is defined as a structure of more or less settled meanings. “Truths” are “events” which challenge or disrupt these normally unquestioned assumptions. A “point” is the appearance to a subject of the choice between embracing a truth or turning away from it. One can certainly see some parallels with Kierkegaard’s account of the stages of life—which are normative frameworks—and the ways that one may choose to beak with them or move between them.62 And Badiou makes the parallels explicit, describing the point as “Kierkegaard’s ‘either/or,’ through which the confused totality of the elements of the world is re-evaluated.”63 However, Badiou goes on to claim that “Kierkegaard sees perfectly well that the theory of the point is a formal or transcendental theory. That is because the apparent content of the alternative is of little import, it is the capacity to treat the point that matters, what I have called the existence of an organ for the point.”64 Elaborating on this, Benjamin Noys comments, “The importance [sic] is not the content of choice but the fact of choice itself.”65 But here Badiou seems to be following Sartre, rather than Kierkegaard. For Sartre, choice reveals the existence of a subject who has the power to transcend the “world” of meanings it had inhabited and to negate it; but this subject has no content of its own and no criteria to justify its decisions to either negate or accept the existing order, or to try to replace it with one rather than another alternative. The ultra-Leftism of Sartre’s politics after the late 1940s thus rested on an arbitrary decision to take that side rather than another.66 It is not clear to me that Badiou’s own ultra-Leftism rests on anything more substantial or less arbitrary than this.67 (I am inclined to think that much the same could be said about Žižek, though I do not have the space to go into that here.)68
The idea that Kierkegaardian choice is absolute (in the sense of being guided by no criteria) and formal (in that anything—Bolshevism, Nazism, Maoism—could be the object of a Kierkegaardian choice) is widespread. Alasdair MacIntyre expounded this decisionist interpretation of Kierkegaard in his After Virtue, writing: “Suppose that someone confronts the choice between them [the aesthetic and the ethical] having as yet embraced neither. He can be offered no reason for preferring one to the other”69—because the choice he has yet to make is the choice of what will count for him as a reason for doing something. But this is not Kierkegaard’s claim. No one, for him, exists outside one or other of the spheres of existence. If you think you are an autonomous outsider in that way, you are thereby showing that you are in fact an aesthete of a particular kind. No existing individual can be an unsituated “pure thinker” contemplating the possibilities of existence from a neutral, detached distance.70 And yet, it can be said that someone who chooses to leave one sphere—or someone who chooses consciously to remain in one, while aware of doing so under conditions of “objective uncertainty”—is clearly recognizing that things could be otherwise, that I could choose otherwise; and is thus in a sense transcending that sphere. This is true, and this power of transcendence is indeed essential to who we are, according to Kierkegaard. In Sickness Unto Death, he explains selfhood as a “synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity.”71 Thus he sees a human person as existing in—or better, existing as—a tension between poles of transcendence and immanence; a tension that is ideally creative (though usually in fact destructive). But although our transcendence is essential to us, it is not that of the “pure thinker,” lacking the ballast of necessity, finitude and temporality, and nor is it that of the decisionist, choosing or even creating values from an initial point that stands outside of them.
I think we can best see Kierkegaard’s account of the progression from the aesthetic, through the ethical to the religious, not as a series of blind leaps, choices that might have had any content at all; but as a version of the Platonic Ascent.72 Our transcendence allows us to recognize that a particular world of meanings is not adequate; that a life spent in the pursuit of pleasure, or power, or wealth, or “the interesting”; even one spent deepening committed relationships, advancing the good of society, or struggling for justice, leave us unfulfilled. There are needs in us, which we may repress but cannot simply ignore, which keep us searching for a world of meaning which will wholly satisfy us; one that we cannot transcend. That we can transcend a world doesn’t mean that we have created it, or that it depends on us; but that its meaning is not full or rich enough to satisfy us. It is true, though, that for Kierkegaard our freedom does allow us to turn away even from what for him is the ultimate Good—God. But this is the despair of defiance; a kind of pathological self-hatred, dressing itself up as hubristic self-assertion. (And, indeed, even the “lower” forms of despair, which keep us from transcending the limited worlds of meaning which we should transcend, are really forms of defiance, of refusal to really attend to the limitations and defects of the world around us, because we don’t want to see them.) Kierkegaard’s view, of course, presupposes that there is an objective Good (God) that we are striving toward, and that human nature has a telos—to “rest transparently in the power that established it.”73 And this presupposes what can fairly be called an essentialist view of human nature—though a subtle one. (For Kierkegaard, our power of transcendence is part of our essence, though not—as it is for Sartre—the whole of it.) Kierkegaard is often seen (as by Habermas) as a “post-metaphysical” thinker.74 On some interpretations of that almost infinitely ambiguous word, “metaphysical,” no doubt he is. But this shouldn’t blind us to the fact that he is also in many ways a very traditional thinker.
II.
Decisionism is, I think, unacceptable, either in politics or outside it. And it remains unacceptable even when the political principles arrived at by acts of arbitrary choice are themselves more benign than Lukacs’s, Schmitt’s or Badiou’s. This is something Habermas worries about. He accepts the Rawlsian notion of a pluralistic society which is not regulated by any substantive notion of the good, but only by a “thin” procedural notion of justice, designed to give maximum freedom for individuals to work out their own richer notions of what makes for a well-lived life. But he is nevertheless uncomfortable about this, noting that “deontological theories after Kant may be very good at explaining how to ground and apply moral norms but they are still unable to answer the question of why we should be moral at all”75—even in a limited Rawlsian sense. Rawlsian liberalism thus hangs in the air—and this seems to force us back into decisionism. If we accept Rawlsian procedural justice, it is because we have made an ungrounded choice to do so.76 But there can be no more reason to make that choice than to make an opposite one. Furthermore, Habermas fears that, even if we can motivate people to be “moral” in the sense of obeying essentially negative, procedural rules of justice; still, such a purely Rawlsian society may be unable to inspire any sense of solidarity among its members, such that they will actively care about one another’s well-being.77 If such a solidarity does arise, it seems that either it would have to come from an arbitrary decisionist choice or from the residual influence of non-Rawlsian ways of thinking, ones that the Rawlsian state cannot promote or even recognize.
It is for help with these problems that Habermas turns to Kierkegaard. This is very interesting, for Habermas is trying to use Kierkegaard, not to bolster decisionism, but to find a way out of it. He looks, not to Kierkegaard’s account of choice, but to his view of the subject as constituted by its relation to another: “The hopeless failure of . . . the stubborn wanting to be oneself entirely on the basis of ones’ own resources—pushes finite spirit to transcend itself and recognize its dependence on an Other as the ground of its own freedom.”78 However, Habermas’s “post-metaphysical” commitments lead him to reject Kierkegaard’s specifically theological conception of the self: “The power beyond us—on which we as subjects capable of speech and action depend in our concern not to fail to lead worthwhile lives—cannot be identified with ‘God in time.’”79 Rather, he gives “a deflationary interpretation of the ‘wholly Other’” in terms of human intersubjectivity—the “power” we depend on is the human linguistic community, which is the condition for the framing of the normative judgments in which we can express our freedom.80
So, just as Badiou tries to take Kierkegaard’s views about choice in a purely formal way, Habermas takes Kierkegaard’s insights into selfhood purely formally—to relate properly to ourselves, we must relate to (some) other, but this need not (or even cannot) be The Other (God). Again, Kierkegaard is taken to be making a general, formal point—this time about intersubjectivity; and so his own theological concerns are set aside. Now it is certainly true that Kierkegaard is concerned with our relations to specific human others in concrete social situations. But he is also convinced that it is only through wholeheartedly willing the transcendent Good (i.e., God) that we can distinguish between what is good and bad in such relationships. Habermas refers to the ways in which we are dependent for our development as autonomous reasoners on the linguistic communities in which we are raised; and this might serve as the basis for a local, communitarian social morality. Habermas himself thinks we can go beyond that to a universal “discourse ethics.” I am very skeptical about this proposal, as I am about related contractualist and constructivist moves in recent analytic moral philosophy.81 For Kierkegaard it is only if there is a source of values beyond the merely humanly intersubjective that we can gain the distance from particular social circumstances that we need to take up a properly critical stance to them (which does not, incidentally, mean an indiscriminately negative one). In other words, we need the religious, as transcending the ethical, to prevent the ethical from collapsing into uncritical social conformism.82 As Johannes de Silentio says in Fear and Trembling, the person of faith “determines his relation to the universal by his relation to the absolute, not his relation to the absolute by his relation to the universal.”83 But if there is no absolute, from what perspective are we to take a critical stance on the “universal”—i.e., Hegelian social morality, Sittlichkeit? Perhaps there can be a rational, nonreligious basis for a morality that will go beyond merely communal values, but I think we have good reason to doubt this—and, as I noted above, Habermas himself worries that secular deontological theories have failed to provide a rational answer to the question of why we should be moral at all. If they have failed to do that, and if there is no absolute to give the individual a higher perspective on the universal, then how can the individual mount a critique of social ethics that does not simply collapse back into an arbitrary decisionism? Without the religious, can we be left with anything more than a merely aesthetic critique of the ethical?
On Kierkegaard’s view, we can transcend—“teleologically suspend”—the (socially) ethical only if there is really is a telos beyond the (socially) ethical. And this is an important challenge—to put it a bit sloganistically, it is the claim that politics can only be properly critical if it is grounded in theology. As it stands, that is a bit too simple—I do not think Kierkegaard himself supposed that “the absolute” which gives us perspective on the universal need be the God described in specifically Christian theology.84 But he is committed to the view that we need to think of the Good as radically transcendent; not in any way a product of human intersubjectivity. He is, in short, a Platonic Realist about the Good, and it is this Platonic Realism that is the basic content of the generic “Religiousness A” discussed in the Postscript.85 That this Platonism will meet a lot of resistance in the contemporary intellectual and cultural milieu goes without saying, and this is not the place to attempt a detailed defense of it.86 But it is precisely because it goes against the grain of contemporary thought that it is important that this challenge be clearly heard and carefully responded to. And to reduce Kierkegaard’s theological or metaphysical claims to generic ethico-political ones, as Habermas does, is to occlude this challenge.
III.
Fear and Trembling does open a space for critical reflection on the socially established ethical world, but to many that space has seemed a strange and frightening one. For the book has often been read as endorsing, or at least opening up the possibility for, a religious justification for political terror. And, as we have seen, nonreligious “political theologians” have also taken inspiration from Fear and Trembling, and have found ways to take its “teleological suspension of the ethical” to justify or excuse the use of political violence in the service of secular ideologies. Nor is this clearly just a thing of the past. Žižek has invoked Kierkegaard in the course of what seem to be admiring comments about the terrorists of the German Red Army Faction87 and elsewhere he claims that “‘Left’ is defined by this readiness to suspend the abstract moral frame, or, to paraphrase Kierkegaard, to accomplish a political suspension of the Ethical.”88 It is, I think, important to see that the book has been badly misread by those who have seen in it a justification for political violence, whether religious or secular. In arguing this case, I will focus on two important notions from Fear and Trembling—those of tragic heroism and the distinction between the Knight of Faith and the Knight of Infinite Resignation.
In Johannes de Silentio’s examples of tragic heroism, fathers kill their children for ethical reasons. The clearest example for our purposes is Junius Brutus, who, in his position as consul of the Roman Republic ordered the execution of his sons for plotting to restore the monarchy.89 He sets aside what would normally be both his wish and his ethical duty—to protect and support his children—in obedience to his higher ethical duty to the state and the good of the people as a whole. However painful this is for him, we can perfectly well understand what he is doing and why he does it; he can give a public justification for his action and we can (so Johannes assumes) see that he is right to do what he does. Abraham, though, steps out of the sphere of ethics altogether and his action is incapable of being publically defended or justified. However, the “religiously motivated terrorist”—let us assume a member of Al Qaeda or ISIS—would rarely even reach the level of tragic heroism, let alone that of infinite resignation, let alone that of faith. Indeed, the “religiously motivated” label is a bit of a red herring in this context. Modern political terrorism, as it has existed since the late nineteenth century, was until recently an almost entirely secular matter, terror tactics being used to advance purely secular ideologies—anarchism, nationalism, communism, fascism. Al Qaeda’s or ISIS’s political ideologies are derived from their religious commitments—in that sense they are indeed “political theologies”—but in the structure of their self-justification these groups are indistinguishable from their secular equivalents. All these terrorists, secular or religious, consider their cause to be a just one and their killings in support of it to be justified killings. Their victims are either people who explicitly oppose their (supposedly just) cause; or people deemed by their ideology unfit to live in any case (whether racial inferiors, class enemies, apostates or infidels); or they are people who are admittedly innocent, but whose killing is justified on consequentialist grounds as necessary to put pressure on unjust governments, publicize the cause, etc. So far there is nothing in this that parallels anything in Johannes’s analysis of Abraham, even if the principles underlying the terrorists’ political ideology happen to be derived from theology rather than a secular philosophy.
Terrorists of this sort might get as far as being tragic heroes, if they hate what they are doing and do it only with deep reluctance, as required by the higher ethical demand they feel. Some of the pre-1917 Russian terrorists seem to have been of this sort—some deliberately allowed themselves to be arrested after their attacks and were willing to be executed to atone for the evil they had done, even while continuing to believe that evil to be justified as a tragic necessity. (These people fascinated Camus, who wrote about them in The Rebel and put them on stage in his play The Just.)90 But most terrorists are not, I suspect, like that. They either hate their victims or are callously indifferent to their fate. The tragic hero goes against his or her inclinations as well as “lower” ethical duties in order to obey a higher ethical demand; but most terrorists are acting in accord with their inclinations as well as what they believe to be just. Even if they are “religiously motivated,” they have nothing to do with the sort of case that concerned Kierkegaard. Furthermore, their supposed justification comes from a publically accessible tradition, from Scripture, from theology, not from the purely personal relationship to God that drove Abraham; and they act as members of a group, not as individuals. Even in the rare cases of a genuine tragic hero with such a public or collective religious motivation—a “church-related hero” as Johannes de Silentio calls him—Johannes is very clear that this case is radically different from that of a Knight of Faith.91
Moreover, the Knight of Faith needs to be distinguished not only from the Tragic Hero, but also from the Knight of Resignation. For what makes Abraham a Knight of Faith is not just his willingness to “resign” Isaac—and, with him, all that makes his own life meaningful—to God. Abraham’s faith consists in his confidence that he will “get Isaac back,” that Isaac will not be demanded of him, or will, even if killed, be returned to life. “He climbed the mountain, and even in the moment when the knife gleamed, he had faith—that God would not require Isaac.”92 Abraham is willing to carry out God’s command, not because he is simply terrified of God (that would not be faith) nor because he thinks that God arbitrarily determines standards of right and wrong by sheer fiat; but because he trusts God. Since God has commanded this, it must be good—not because God decides what counts as “good” but because he believes that God will only command what is in fact good. This is not even the consequentialist reasoning sometimes used by terrorists—that most people will benefit in the long run. (Kierkegaard himself certainly distained that sort of utilitarianism.) Rather, Abraham’s faith is that somehow this will conduce to the good of those concerned—Abraham himself, and Isaac, and Sarah, too. And will do so in this world—not only in the hereafter. This is on the face of it “absurd”—but it is the willingness to trust, even when all the circumstances seem to ensure that what is trusted in is impossible, that constitutes faith for Johannes.93 It seems hard to imagine any kind of political terrorism that could offer a parallel. A terrorist who goes off to kill, but has faith that his victims will not in fact die? Someone may hope desperately, and even believe, that the government will make concessions, so that planting the bomb will not be necessary; but to believe this, not as a rational calculation of probabilities, nor as a pathetic self-delusion, but knowingly, trustingly, despite all the evidence, on “the strength of the absurd”? Abraham trusts in God to ensure that “all will be well.” But without a God to trust in, it seems that such an attitude would be, not the “absurdity” of faith, but just plain craziness.
So is a nonreligious analogue of Kierkegaardian faith wholly impossible? Perhaps there could be a real analogy as far as the element of personal trust goes: the absolute trust of one human individual in another, based on personal love, maintained even when all the objective evidence seems to show that the beloved has been unfaithful, or is guilty of some terrible crime. One might consider whether this could be transposed onto the political sphere; for instance, the belief that, contrary to all the evidence, Comrade Stalin is really acting for the best. But such “believers” are not acting on the basis of any personal, individual relation to the Leader; and there is no “getting back” either—the children they offer up really are slaughtered.94 It does seem that the stance of faith as described in Fear and Trembling can only be a religious one—and if Lukacs or Schmitt thought that they were in some way following in the footsteps of Abraham, they were deeply mistaken. And so I will conclude, first, that the “faith” considered in Fear and Trembling is an essentially religious concept, not a generic one that might have secular as well as religious instances; and second, that, although Fear and Trembling does not rule out an Abraham-like case, its twin requirements of an absolutely personal, incommunicable relationship to God and a faith in “getting Isaac back” mean that it offers no justification for religiously inspired political terror.
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51. I should say that this paper developed out of my responses to the papers by Vincent Lloyd, Silas Morgan, Jamie Aroosi, and Tom Miles at the session on “Kierkegaard and Political Theology” at the American Philosophical Association (Pacific Division) meeting on April 2, 2015. I am very grateful to all the speakers at the session—and to our chair, Roberto Sirvent—for stimulating me to think more about these issues.
52. Habermas, Future of Human Nature, 112.
53. See Kirmmse, Kierkegaard in Golden Age Denmark, and Westphal, Kierkegaard’s Critique.
54. Badiou’s only significant discussion of Kierkegaard is in his Logics of Worlds, 425–35. Žižek discusses Kierkegaard in various writings; see, e.g., Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom!, 78–86, 92–96; Žižek, Parallax View, 75–80, 85–90, 104–5.
55. Kadarkay, Georg Lukacs, 193–206; Nagy, “Abraham, the Communist,” 206–7.
56. Kadarkay, Georg Lukacs, 213–14, 222–24.
57. Nagy, “Abraham, the Communist,” 207–8.
58. Schmitt, Political Theology, chs. 1 and 2.
59. Schmitt, Political Theology, 15.
60. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, 68. Schmitt’s only explicit reference to Kierkegaard in Political Theology is, however, to Repetition, not to Fear and Trembling (Schmitt, Political Theology, 15). For more on Kierkegaard and Schmitt, see Dana Lloyd’s essay in this volume.
61. Nagy, “Abraham, the Communist,” 207–8. For further discussion of Kierkegaard’s relations to Lukacs and Schmitt, see Ryan, Kierkegaard’s Indirect Politics, chs. 2 and 3.
62. Although one substantial difference is that, for Badiou, “the subject is always a formal body, or a collection of individuals . . . one cannot be a subject until that moment at which they join the collective body” (O’Neill Burns, “Alain Badiou,” 48). This seems obviously paradoxical. (Who was it then who made the decision to join the body?) A partial parallel is offered by Kierkegaard’s Judge William, who says that the ethical self “has not existed before because it came into existence through the choice.” But the Judge is careful to immediately qualify the claim: “and yet it has existed, for it was indeed ‘himself.’” Kierkegaard, Either/Or II, 215.
63. Badiou, Logics of Worlds, 406.
64. Ibid., 432–33.
65. Noys, “Either/Or: Badiou/Kierkegaard,” 6.
66. Though, like Lukacs, Sartre did eventually come to accept Marxism as objective doctrine—at least to the point where he could claim that, for now, Marxism had become “the horizon for all culture” and that there was no “going beyond” it until the historical moment it represented had passed (see Sartre, Search for a Method, 7). This surrender to the alleged requirements of the zeitgeist is a paradigm example of what Sartre would once have considered “Bad Faith.”
67. According to O’Neill Burns, on Badiou’s account, “an individual (or more often a group of individuals) experience an event . . . they subsequently make a wager on the truth contained within this event; there is never a guarantee, and so the subject must make a leap of faith.” O’Neill Burns, “Alain Badiou,” 42.
68. I have been encouraged in this supposition by the accounts of Žižek in the papers by Jamie Aroosi and Vincent Lloyd to which I responded at the APA session mentioned earlier, although they were both much more sympathetic to Žižek than I am.
69. MacIntyre, After Virtue, 40. It should be said that MacIntyre firmly rejects the decisionism he ascribes to Kierkegaard. He is wrong in the ascription, but right in the rejection.
70. For a number of critiques of MacIntyre’s interpretation of Kierkegaard as a decisionist and irrationalist, see Davenport and Rudd, Kierkegaard After MacIntyre.
71. Kierkegaard, Sickness Unto Death, 13.
72. This is classically articulated in the speech of Diotima in Plato’s Symposium and also in the Myth of the Cave in the Republic.
73. Kierkegaard, Sickness Unto Death, 14.
74. Habermas, Future of Human Nature, 5–6.
75. Ibid., 4.
76. Or it is because we have just gone along with what is, as a matter of contingent fact, the established form of our societies without caring about their lack of ultimate justification for their principles. Rorty, for one, has argued that we should not be bothered by this: see Rorty, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, ch. 3. Kierkegaard would see decisionism as over-stressing our transcendence, Rortian conformism as overstressing our immanence.
77. Habermas, Future of Human Nature, 4.
78. Ibid., 9.
79. Ibid., 10.
80. Ibid.
81. See, e.g., Korsgaard, Sources of Normativity; Scanlon, What We Owe.
82. Note by the way that the group to which we uncritically conform may be a marginalized and oppressed one. Uncritical social conformism may as easily be revolutionary as conservative.
83. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, 70.
84. His enthusiasm for Socrates makes that clear.
85. See Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 387–555. I am not suggesting that the distinctive features of Christianity are unimportant to Kierkegaard. Christianity for him is what offers us salvation when the generic ethico-religious consciousness has suffered “shipwreck” on the fact of our sinfulness, our (culpable) inability to do as we should. But it presupposes and in a sense, rescues the generic religious consciousness, rather than negating it. It is important to notice that even in some of his signed works, Kierkegaard restricts himself to the level of generic, Platonic religiousness—the long discourse usually known as “Purity of Heart” in Kierkegaard, Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits, is a good example.
86. I have tried to do so elsewhere; see my Self, Value and Narrative.
87. Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom!, 77–78.
88. Žižek, Universal Exception, 177, italics original. As my comments on Schmitt above will have suggested, I think this willingness to take the political as trumping the ethical is as characteristic of the radical right as of the radical left (Žižek’s attempts to differentiate between them are notably feeble). It is, indeed, characteristic of Machiavellian realpolitik through the ages.
89. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, 58.
90. See Camus, The Rebel, 164–73, and Camus, The Just.
91. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, 74.
92. Ibid., 65.
93. Davenport, “Faith as Eschatological Trust,” 229–31.
94. Nagy, “Abraham the Communist,” 208–9.