Chapter 20: Kierkegaard’s Dagdriver
20
Kierkegaard’s Dagdriver
Loafing as a Means of Resistance to the Technological, Media, and Consumer System
Ah, where have they gone, the amblers of yesteryear? Where have they gone, those loafing heroes of folk song, those vagabonds who roam from one mill to another and bed down under the stars? Have they vanished along with footpaths, with grasslands and clearings, with nature?
—Milan Kundera, Slowness
His imagination was so creative that a little went a long way. Outside the one window in the living room grew approximately ten blades of grass. Here he sometimes discovered a little creature running among the stems. These stems became an enormous forest that still had the compactness and darkness the grass had. Instead of the filled space, he now had empty space; he stared again but saw nothing except the enormous expanse.
—Johannes Climacus
This is an essay about Kierkegaard’s Dagdriver which is the figure of the loafer that may well be one of the last means of resistance to the technological, media and consumer system which shapes the contemporary sociopolitical world. Over the last two decades there has been a surge in the number of articles and books linking Kierkegaard to the political.999 This is no surprise given that some of the more radical modern thinkers reflecting on and attempting to transform the political sphere have noted Kierkegaard as a vital inspiration and influence—ranging from extreme Right to Left which is most explicit in figures such as Carl Schmitt and Georg Lukács. The recent interest in linking Kierkegaard with the political also becomes easier to understand when, for example, one reads again his literary review of 18461000 where Kierkegaard brilliantly articulated aspects of what has now become an accepted contemporary global economic, sociopolitical and media landscape, or when one simply delves deeper into his labyrinthine authorship whose primary objective is to unsettle the reader and propel him or her into action.1001 But what has largely gone unnoticed is the motif of the Dagdriver or Lediggænger that is at the heart of Kierkegaard’s polemical and poetic thought. These somewhat archaic terms, translated into English as “loafer” and “idler,” offer a way to endure and observe critically the rapidly transforming technologies, the consumer system and vapid information overload of modern society. I will show where and what a loafer is in Kierkegaard’s authorship as well as being a motif for the imagination and opening a path to spiritual wisdom.
Elsewhere, I have explored what I called Kierkegaard’s “indirect politics.”1002 My argument was that indirect politics operated in a twofold way: first, Kierkegaard’s task is to unsettle the reader by providing various masks and perspectives and through the quasi-political prototypes of Socrates and Christ—whose engaged lives remain an offense to both ancient and contemporary societies; and, second, it is clear that Kierkegaard’s thought, styles and perspectives have been appropriated by twentieth-century radical political thinkers such as Lukács, Schmitt, Benjamin and Adorno. What manifested as explicit political theorizations in those thinkers was already latent in Kierkegaard, and their ideas and political critiques would not have manifested in quite the way they did had they not been exposed to his thought.
Edward Clarke has recently explored the ways in which the act of reading a poem is a return to slowness and indolence that actually increases application to a task by allowing for more imaginative possibilities and inventiveness. He accepts and celebrates this “industrious indolence and indolent industry” as oxymoronic because, at the same time, “slowness does not preclude work, but finds for us our work.”1003 Clarke explains: “Like a loafing figure by the roadside, a poem can waylay each of us on the road to business in town, it can take us out of our worldly concerns for a spell, in order to return us to our path, refreshed to notice new things, to deal differently with others in the world.”1004 Analogously, in this essay, I want to rediscover the loafing figure in philosophy which is central to understanding Kierkegaard’s polemics and sociopolitical gesture. Kierkegaard wrote that “life is like a poet and thus different from the contemplator, who always comes to a finish; the poet wrenches us out into the middle of life.”1005 Through Kierkegaard’s Dagdriver, the philosopher can again wrench us back out into the middle of life.
Where Is the Dagdriver?
Kierkegaard only explicitly uses the actual word Dagdriver twice in his entire authorship. The word first appeared when Johannes Climacus is describing Socrates in Concluding Unscientific Postscript:
As is known, Socrates was a loafer [Dagdriver] who cared for neither world history nor astronomy (he gave it up, according to Diogenes, and when he later stood still and gazed into space, I cannot simply assume, yet without otherwise deciding what he was doing, that he was stargazing).1006
And the second time is when Kierkegaard is looking back in his “report to history” (Point of View) in describing his pose and performance to the Copenhagen public:
I was a street-corner loafer [Dagdriver], an idler [Lediggænger], a flâneur, a frivolous bird, a good, perhaps even brilliant pate [Hoved], witty, etc.—but I completely lacked “seriousness” [Alvor]. I represented the worldly mentality’s irony, the enjoyment of life—the most sophisticated enjoyment of life—but of “seriousness and positivity” there was not a trace; I was, however, tremendously interesting and pungent.1007
Loafing as a verb (at dage) turns up in those crucial semi-autobiographical passages of Concluding Unscientific Postscript where the indolent Climacus has to loaf before discovering and laying down his manifesto of “making difficulties everywhere.”1008
I read a great deal, spent the rest of the day loafing and thinking, or thinking and loafing, but nothing came of it. The productive sprout in me went for everyday use and was consumed in its first greening. An inexplicable power of persuasion, both strong and cunning, continually constrained me, captivated by its persuasion. This power was my indolence.1009
What is essential here is the line that comes after the oft-quoted declaration of “making difficulties everywhere” in that he reveals: “It was especially striking to me that I might actually have my indolence [Indolents] to thank that this task became mine.”
The other word which is translated as loafer is the Lediggænger—another evocative word literally meaning “light walker.” Inserted in the preface to Philosophical Fragments, Climacus writes: “The accomplishment is, however, in proportion to my talents, for I do not, like that noble Roman, refrain from serving the system merito magis quam ignavia [from justifiable motifs rather than from indolence], but I am a loafer [Lediggænger] out of indolence ex animi sententia [by inclination] and for good reasons.”1010 Indolence (Magelighed in Danish above, but Climacus later uses the word Indolents), derived from the Latin, is freedom from pain (In-dolentia) and is a state of repose for many rambling poets. While Climacus declares himself to be indolent and Kierkegaard masks himself as a Dagdriver, they are both ceaselessly working. Their vocation fits well with Clarke’s oxymoronic state of “industrious indolence and indolent industry.”1011 Kierkegaard and his pseudonyms serve no system, or they serve it by being the indolent “gadfly” [Bremse]. As Climacus wickedly declared: “This power was my indolence [min Indolents].”1012
Kierkegaard’s art of loafing is in seeing the “insignificant” things or ruins of history, evoked by showing the parallel journeys of the poet and the naturalist in one of Kierkegaard’s more impenetrable texts “Guilty / Not Guilty” which lies deep inside Stages in Life’s Way, and where the narrator in question (Quidam) writes (also revealing the expansiveness of the imagination): “When I was a child, a little pond in a peat excavation was everything to me. The dark tree roots that poked out here and there in the murky darkness were vanished kingdoms and countries, each one a discovery as important to me as antediluvian discoveries to the natural scientist.”1013
And finally, we can find the call to slowness and the Dagdriver’s slow reading all over Kierkegaard’s authorship, especially made explicit in his prefaces to both the pseudonymous works and upbuilding discourses. One can find examples in many of his prefaces to his books in his approach to attunement [Stemning],1014 tuning up [at stemme], and hearing the voice [Stemme]: in the preface to a book called Prefaces, the author states, “The preface is a mood [Stemning]. Writing a preface is like sharpening a scythe, like tuning [at stemme] a guitar, like talking with a child, like spitting out of the window”; or in the note to the reader from any of the prefaces to the Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses. Here is one example: Kierkegaard imagines his discourses finding their way to that singular reader:
I saw how it wended its way down solitary paths or walked solitary on public roads. After a few mistakes, through being deceived by a fleeting resemblance, it finally met that single individual whom I with joy and gratitude call my reader, that single individual it is seeking, to whom, so to speak, it stretches out it arms, that single individual who is favourably enough disposed to receive it, whether at the time of the encounter it finds him cheerful and confident or “weary and pensive.” . . . It stood there like a humble little flower under the cover of the great forest.1015
These minor appearances, some of which are more explicit than others but which are all interrelated, are crucial in thinking about Kierkegaard’s indirect politics. They encompass this Dagdriver under three principal aspects: as polemical stargazer and saunterer; as philosopher of the interlude; and as a call of the incognito in figures such as Don Quixote, Socrates, Christ and “the real poets.”1016
The Polemical Stargazer, Saunterer and Flâneur
Kierkegaard’s Dagdriver as an indolent, polemical stargazer and saunterer is made quite clear when Climacus defines his hero Socrates as a loafer gazing into space, as well as being well known for walking around the city of Athens prodding its citizens out of their comfort zone. Later in Christian Discourses, published in the revolutionary year of 1848, Kierkegaard’s single individual, now matured into a Socratic-Christlike citizen, is presented as the apparently absentminded figure without a home who offers discourses to free the reader from the worries or cares [Bykymringer] of human existence for “tomorrow.” We find the polemical stargazer and saunterer most clearly in his little masterpiece on “The Lily in the Field and the Bird of the Air” published in 1849,1017 which emerges from Kierkegaard’s many walks, and which, to overcome the anxiety of temporality—that of the future and of the past, focuses on silence, obedience and joy to exist for today. This discourse brilliantly combines the loafer’s vocation which is an acute critique of society as well as offering profound help to living joyfully. As stargazer, Kierkegaard looks to the bird of the air; and as saunterer, he looks to the lily of the field. In a brilliant new introduction to the discourse, Bruce Kirmmse compares Kierkegaard with Henry David Thoreau in their love of walking, and quotes a passage from Thoreau on the etymology of the word sauntering.1018 Thoreau playfully imagines it as sans terre—without land or home, but at the same time it is the urge to be at home everywhere. This reminds us of Novalis’s description of philosophy as being at home everywhere.1019 This combination of stargazer and saunterer encapsulates the figure of the loafer in Socrates and Kierkegaard. It might be hard to believe now that once upon a time Lukács called Kierkegaard a troubadour,1020 but here he understood the loafing aspect of Kierkegaard—that of the restless, mischievous, absentminded poet but also the uncompromising critic of sociopolitical society. Though the journey requires patience, endurance and work, I consider texts such as Fear and Trembling, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, and Christian Discourses as part of Socrates’s stargazing and sauntering and giving the reader the polemical tools to prod both the individual and societies out of defeatist complacency.
Kierkegaard’s Dagdriver continues a tradition that questions a society whose values are skewed in a way that does not value slowness and nonlinear thinking. Of course, the long tradition of the loafer as stargazers, troubadours, and polemical gadflies is mostly evident in the poets and writers, and many of the characters created within texts. The obvious nineteenth-century authors are in the pose of the French urban flâneurs, exemplified most of all in Baudelaire. Here is a city traveler creating a new kind of literature in fusing the sacred and the profane in an interior journey alongside the vision and external presence of the festering rise of the bourgeoisie, metropolis, and modernism. Walter Benjamin’s dialectic of the flâneur can be ascribed to Kierkegaard, which is, “on the one side, the man who feels himself viewed by all and sundry as a true suspect and, on the other, the man who is utterly undiscoverable, the hidden man.”1021 Baudelaire brings all the monsters and demons down to the ground whether this be in the form of the albatross or Satan, mutating their cracked aspirations into the modern human condition. Baudelaire and Paris (the quintessential city of the flâneur)1022 become the center of Benjamin’s obsession in the last decade of his life, as he gathers quotations, sound-bites, images, architectural ideas, Marxist insights and theological fragments into his unfinished Arcades Project. After all, the flâneur is in the category of omniscient seeing, the observer of the marketplace, and Copenhagen, as “market harbor” [Køben-havn], is perfect for Kierkegaard’s Dagdriver. Baudelaire’s poetic experience and Benjamin’s projects are a prophetic rebellious act of combating our own contemporary society where everything is entering our own living rooms through the information age. In a memorable passage, Climacus reveals his early education in flâneuring and the flowering of the imagination and loafing. His old, strict father takes him on a tour of the city without them ever having to leave the room of the house. It was there where he learned his “father’s magic art.”1023 After the recollection of his travels with his father around the room, the author in question concludes that Climacus “did not require forests and travels for his adventures but merely what he had: a little room with one window.”1024 This is something that does not escape Benjamin who adds it to his section on the “Flâneur” in the sprawling Arcades Project.1025
Across the Atlantic, there are two powerful examples of a more bucolic and cosmic Dagdriver from the nineteenth century. As the industrial age takes off, two of America’s most celebrated loafers emerge out of the ultimate consumer society. They are Walt Whitman and Herman Melville. Whitman begins the first edition of Leaves of Grass (1855) in his opening poem “Song of Myself” with the words “I loafe and invite my soul, / I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass”;1026 and Melville starts Moby Dick with the enigmatic narrator as an idler wandering the streets that lead him to jump on the doomed boat the Pequod to begin the hunt for that elusive whale. Later, Melville creates a most unsettling and darkly comic loafer in Bartleby, the Scrivener. It is no accident that the literary figure of Bartleby has had an important role in shaping political theology today, most notably in the work of Agamben, Deleuze, Negri, Hardt, and Zižek.1027 Whitman and Melville, as contemporaries of Kierkegaard, are loafers on the epic scale who open up vistas for the wandering spirit, providing a riposte to the busyness of the age, and remind us of the portals of discovery that await us when we learn again to slow down. How far we have fallen in our advanced, sped-up age! The rampant consumerism that figures so prominently in our contemporary societies tends to give little space now to the formative poetic visions of such loafers as Melville or Whitman.
Like these American writers, Kierkegaard’s loafer is never at rest, observing society and the human self from various critical perspectives, unsettling the reader in startling books that defy fixed definition. The loafer is never bored; boredom comes from forgetting the power of the imagination. Finding relief from boredom is the great trick of advanced capitalism where we endure a putrid stream of messages demanding that we purchase entertainment.1028 Thus, loafing can be an affirmative defiance of the encroachments of the technological system and information age that convinces most of us to purchase things we do not need, and keeps us busy and distracted with the “demand of the times,”1029 and throwing us ready-made packages for our time off. Kierkegaard’s loafer is of course ironic, humorous and often masked—exemplified in Johannes Climacus. Leisure has fallen into an entertainment industry, and so Kierkegaard, long before Adorno, joins the entertainment industry in his own startling way in the wake of German Idealism and the birth of modern democracy to make difficulties everywhere, creating multiple perspectives, analyzing despair and anxiety as we march toward death, and, while always aiming to write beautiful works, never making life easy for the reader.
More than ever before, in a time where immediacy, connectivity, and all-consuming online communication is now society itself, the figure of the loafer, not unlike the work of Benjamin (most brilliantly depicted in One Way Street, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, and The Arcades Project) and Adorno (see especially Minima Moralia), looks to the ruins of history and “lesser things.”1030 This may provide a clue to why Kierkegaard refers to himself in his journals as being like a bad banknote, having been born in a bad fiscal year;1031 or that Johannes de Silentio begins and ends Fear and Trembling with reference to the state of the European economy and comparing it to the poor state of the world of ideas, before beginning on his “lesser” task of trying to understand the story of Abraham, faith, and a teleological suspension of the ethical. And later, when Kierkegaard writes a letter in 1848 that “politics is not for me,” he turns this statement around on its head in his trademark ironic and deceptive way by telling us in the same letter what two things do appeal to him that lead us to encounter the same thing—focusing on lesser things and walking: “Politics is too much for me. I love to focus my attention on lesser things, in which one may sometimes encounter exactly the same. . . . I who do not understand politics, do, on the other hand, understand all about walking.”1032 As a stargazer and a saunterer, the deceptive loafer does not forget Anti-Climacus’s key words that “the condition of man, regarded as ‘spirit’ . . . is always critical.”1033
Philosopher of the Interlude (Mellemspil)
Kierkegaard’s place in philosophy is as a philosopher of the interlude, or, as the word is called in Danish, the Mellemspil. What indeed is this Mellemspil? Another slippery term, it is, literally, the time and space between the play, that “light entertainment” between the serious stuff. This is the space (on a street corner) and time (slowness) for the Dagdriver to exist amid the world of busyness, politics and being encapsulated in a system that bombards us with how we should exist. Of course, this “light entertainment” is actually Kierkegaard’s indirect politics and assault on abstracting and alienating the individual from his or herself and the relationship with the world that he or she lives in. Kierkegaard uses a line from Shakespeare for the epigraph of The Point of View—“In everything the purpose must be placed on the scale with the folly”1034—to express the madness with the necessity of his task, in creating an authorship that is the refusal of fixed disciplinary boundaries. Perhaps the whole point of borrowing from various disciplines is not to maintain the integrity of each, but precisely to dissolve the boundaries, and to develop an entirely new framework within which to rethink the act of political praxis. Indirect politics is the interlude, as a set of masks that continually displaces disciplinary identity from one field to the next just as the moment seems clear: theology masks politics, law masks theology, political theory masks philosophy, and psychology masks literary critical approaches. Kierkegaard makes a radical step in confronting the sociopolitical and technological world, for even though the philosopher’s primary goal is to meditate on the question of truth, Kierkegaard makes this journey through lies and deception in his typical paradoxical fashion, with his famous pseudonyms or masks as the loafing, incognito philosopher. This is the modern human condition where the self becomes not only a construction but a plurality, and so, as societies are splintered, uniformed, multicultural, conflicting, diffuse; so is the person’s selfhood—if there is one to be found—plural, multiplied, dispersed.
The Dagdriver’s Mellemspil turns up in many key places in Kierkegaard’s authorship, most obviously in the prefaces, epigraphs, interrupting quasi-autobiographical stories within the larger works, and the chapter itself called Mellemspil between the ultimate and penultimate chapter of Philosophical Fragments. I will start with Fear and Trembling as an interlude to the system and exercise in street-corner loafing and slowness. One need not go very far at all to see the Dagdriver’s Mellemspil at work. The book’s title is a riddle, paradox, and perfect example of the interlude as a refusal of fixed disciplinary boundaries. It is called Fear and Trembling—indicating a religiosity in quoting St. Paul’s Letter to the Philippians; its subtitle is Dialectical Lyric—expressing both philosophy and poetry; and its author is Johannes de Silentio—indicating secret, mask, other voice, silence. With the book’s epigraph, it begins like a fairytale,1035 offering a secret, a message within a message, an incognito, and, of course, the famous indirect communication. The epigraph is borrowed from Johan Georg Hamann, called “the Magus of the North” in his day, who was a minor philosopher of the interlude, whose equally minor text Socratic Memorabilia (1759) caused only a tiny ripple in German philosophy, and whose linguistic play, use of the fragment, proponent of Socrates and Shakespeare over German philosophy, and advocate of radical Christian existence was an inspiration to Kierkegaard. Then we enter Fear and Trembling’s Preface, where the author in question describes himself as the Extra-Skriver—literally “extra-writer” (translated as “supplementary clerk” [Hong] and “freelancer” [Hannay])—who “neither writes the system nor gives promises of the system”1036 and whose first sentence of both the preface and epilogue of the book allude to the business world and economics, a world of speed, capital and consumerism. While everyone it seems is encouraging us “to go further”—from philosopher to business man, Johannes de Silentio is calling the reader to slow down for a moment, to meditate, in this particular book, on the madness and impossibility of understanding faith. Christian existence and belief has always been something of a struggle, of difficulty and slowness for Kierkegaard, whether he says it through de Silentio (“Faith was then a task for a whole lifetime”)1037 or Climacus: “To pray is just as difficult as to play the role of Hamlet; of which the greatest actor is supposed to have said that only once had he been close to playing it well; nevertheless he would devote all his ability and his entire life to the continued study of this role.”1038
A disruptive strategy of Kierkegaard in the face of political and philosophical expression comes also in the form of his storytelling interludes. The reader experiences this throughout Fear and Trembling, beginning with the four different readings of the story of Abraham which begins again with a fairytale opening of “Once upon a time” [Der var engang]. It is up to the reader as much as it is to the author which reading may be best, the section is after all called a Stemning, an attunement. Johannes de Silentio never really gets started as he keeps faltering before the problem of faith, and, like Beckett after him, would rather “fail again, fail better.”1039 The third and final “Problemata” of the book becomes the most complex as the enigmatic author weaves in different stories and subtexts, with the indirect politics rearing its head now and then with incursions such as one startling declaration made that the opening lines from a particular history play from Shakespeare has “more value than all the systems of morality.”1040
The incendiary and symbolic year of 1848 transformed the political landscape forever in Europe. This was the famous year that Marx’s Communist Manifesto was published and where bourgeois and working-class uprisings occurred all over Europe. It is also the year that Kierkegaard quietly published Christian Discourses under his own name, and completed, if not most of each text, The Point of View, Armed Neutrality, The Sickness Unto Death, Practice in Christianity, Two Ethical-Religious Essays, and parts of The Book of Adler. It was also the year of his most jubilant shorter pieces, in which he published the essay “The Crisis and a Crisis in the Life of an Actress” and began the first draft of “The Lily in the Field and the Bird of the Air” discourse. These latter two pieces are good examples of the Mellemspil and exercises in slowness and indirect politics in the face of political chatter, mass movements, busyness and the anxiety of the modern human condition. Central to the discourse on the lily and the bird is the emphasis on joy [Glæde] and being “present to oneself”1041—the emphasis on being rather than doing and on now, today rather than tomorrow or yesterday—difficult tasks indeed for the industrious loafer; while in the essay on the actress, the emphasis is on transformative process as the key to the success of the artist. The author of the essay on the actress is the last of Kierkegaard’s more aesthetic pseudonyms in the strict sense and is even called “Inter et Inter”—literally “between and between,” representing the Mellemspil between the publication of Christian Discourses and “The Lily in the Field and the Bird of the Air” discourse, and which begins with a critical remark on the demand of the crowd in the “newspaper critics” that “is dreadfully shabby”1042 and “half-witted reviewers.”1043 As an explicit interlude, the author follows a certain actress providing an exception to the rule, embodying the beautiful outsider who rises to the top of Danish cultural life, the woman whose name changes, continuing to be a master of her craft, and who conquers time in playing Shakespeare’s Juliet a second time in her thirties with greater power, through the transformative process and through repetition (unlike the failed ventures of Constantin Constantius and his more dubious political followers such as Carl Schmitt).1044
Concluding Unscientific Postscript is the great philosophical text of loafing: dealing with “lesser things,” digressions, daydreaming walks in the graveyard, with sharp philosophical acumen and sometimes very self-conscious poetic writing. It is a six-hundred-page “postscript” (Efterskrift) to a one-hundred-page thought piece called literally “Philosophical Crumbs” (Smuler), a book that rambles on and on as an act of rebellion against academic and conceited philosophy. It is ironic, humorous and passionate, and deceptive and full of masks, and is summed up as “superfluous”1045 long after the declared task in the first half of the book had been to “make difficulties everywhere.” And just when the reader thinks that Climacus is getting down to the actual business of philosophy in the well-known section on “Truth Is Subjectivity,” he follows it with a great perplexing interlude called “A Glance at a Contemporary Effort in Danish Literature” where he proceeds to analyze and critique all of Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous works published up to that point. Critique, however, is not abandonment; rather critique is the possibility of continuing philosophy.1046 Kierkegaard’s appendix of sorts which repeats the question throughout the chapter—“What happens?”—is a serious joke indeed, but essential as yet another way to combating and dodging the nets of the all-pervasive political and economic society we live in today by getting in there before the “half-witted reviewers,” and opening up the horizon for future philosophers of suspicion such as Nietzsche, Lukács, Adorno, and Derrida. It is a process of self-critique, self-overcoming, and “emptying out” [at udtømme],1047 to use Kierkegaard’s expression. For Derrida, Concluding Unscientific Postscript is a text that is a marvelous performance that literally postfaces, postscripts, or concludes (or all three) a fragment (Philosophical Fragments). In this crucial passage by Derrida which attempts to explain dissemination and describing Concluding Unscientific Postscript, which is inserted, significantly, as a footnote, Derrida writes: “One is also in fact starting over again, adding an extra text, complicating the scene, opening up within the labyrinth a supplementary digression, which is also a false mirror that pushes the labyrinth’s infinity back forever in mimed—that is, endless—speculation.”1048 Even in the later, more concise text The Sickness Unto Death, Anti-Climacus immediately places it at the Mellemspil in the opening sentence, refusing to be caught in the nets of clear definitions and boundaries: “Many may find the form of this ‘exposition’ strange; it may seem to them too rigorous to be upbuilding and too upbuilding to be rigorously scholarly.”1049 Kierkegaard’s indirect politics and Dagdriver creates a Mellemspil within the political sphere that the ruling powers have trouble pinning down or controlling because it is brought forward by the Dagdriver who, like de Silentio’s Abraham, is an “emigrant from the sphere of the universal,”1050 and remains a thorn to the establishment.
The Incognito: Don Quixote, Socrates, Christ, and “the Real Poets”
Climacus provocatively states in Concluding Unscientific Postscript: “Between poetry and religiousness, worldly wisdom about life performs its vaudeville. Every individual who does not live either poetically or religiously is obtuse [Dum].” He continues by explaining that those in the “vaudeville” have “lost the poetic illusion” and do not have enough “imagination-passion.” I see the prevailing indolent prototypes for Kierkegaard in four disparate figures: Don Quixote, Socrates, Christ, and Shakespeare. As deranged knight, philosopher, messiah, and poet, respectively, they are all united in having not only the poetic illusion and imagination-passion but revel in the mask, concealment, and the incognito, and disturb the political, social, and economic order of things. As Adorno and Horkheimer’s culture industry is “enlightenment as mass deception,”1051 Kierkegaard combats this deception by making space for the Dagdriver in his unrecognizables, his incognitos, his spies. Anti-Climacus defines this unrecognizability as “not to be in the character of what one essentially is—for example, when a policeman is in plain clothes.”1052 This unrecognizability is “an omnipotently maintained incognito.”1053
Starting with the fictional figure of Don Quixote: the world’s most famous knight errant was not really a knight errant at all but rather a Hidalgo whose name was actually Alonso Quixano, an avid reader of books of chivalry and man of mad faith who believed in the impossible, and who quickly was out of sync with his times. Cervantes diagnoses Quixote as “a streaky madness, filled with lucid intervals [lúcidos intervalos].”1054 This is a reference to the medieval expression the lucida intervalla, which are periods of temporary sanity amid bouts of insanity. Note then that by putting his philosophy at the interlude, the ironic Kierkegaard is mocking thought outside the interlude, and it is not a coincidence that he calls his journal his lucida intervalla.1055 It is no wonder that Miguel de Unamuno, greatly inspired by Kierkegaard, uses Don Quixote as the prototype for his tragic philosophy. So enthralled with the character and the story, Kierkegaard even suggested a corrective to Cervantes’s masterpiece, revealing also the eternal movement and unfinished wanderings at the heart of Quixote’s and Kierkegaard’s mad quest:
It is a sad mistake by Cervantes to make Don Quixote sensible and then to let him die. Cervantes, who himself had the superb idea of having him become a shepherd! It ought to have ended there. That is, Don Quixote should not come to an end; he ought to be presented as going full speed, so that he opens vistas upon an infinite series of new fixed ideas. Don Quixote is endlessly perfectible in madness, but the one thing he cannot become (for otherwise he could become everything and anything) is sensible. Cervantes seems not to have been dialectical enough to bring it to this romantic conclusion (that there is no conclusion).1056
There is something inconclusive about Kierkegaard’s own quixotic quests of Concluding Unscientific Postscript and Fear and Trembling, in that when it comes to faith, one is never in fact finished, and these books that tackle the elusive issue of faith are forever faltering in the ceaseless, existential journey. It also makes sense that Lukács, soon to make a Kierkegaardian leap into Bolshevism,1057 read Quixote in the following way, while still under the spell of Kierkegaard: “Don Quixote is the first great battle of interiority [Innerlichkeit] against the prosaic vulgarity of outward life, and the only battle in which interiority succeeded.”1058 Kierkegaard’s inwardness would soon become Lukács’s expression for revolutionary praxis.
Kierkegaard, as the masked Dagdriver, is also forever caught in a Mellemspil—in conflict between aesthetic and religious pursuits. Halfway through The Sickness Unto Death, there appears a Mellemspil in the tightly focused text where Anti-Climacus seems to be exposing Kierkegaard’s predicament as the religious poet:
His conflict is this: has he been called? Does his thorn in the flesh signify that he is to be used for the extraordinary? Before God, is it entirely in order to be the extraordinary he has become? Or is the thorn in the flesh that under which he must humble himself in order to attain the universally human?—But enough of this. With the accent of truth I may ask: to whom am I speaking?1059
Here we have the issue of “the call,” which only the artists and the religious figures seem to hear. But they come in disguise, “deceiving one to the truth.” The “real poets” may be Byron, Shelley, or Shakespeare1060—three Englishmen whom Vigilius Haufniensis names and whose work is haunted by the demonic (and hence their inclusion in The Concept of Anxiety); or, as Anti-Climacus later puts it, “the poets, the real ones, who always lend ‘demonic’ ideality—using the word in its purely Greek sense—to their creations.”1061 These poets are potential Dagdrivers, living and creating the space and time of slowness. But Shakespeare is constant throughout Kierkegaard’s authorship, as the ultimate poet. We can apply Shakespeare’s expression “God’s spies” to the Dagdriver. This passage, very close to Kierkegaard’s heart, is taken from Lear’s famous final speech to his daughter Cordelia, and which Kierkegaard famously inserts in his journal under the heading “Twenty-Five Years Old.” Strangely, the lines with “God’s spies” are omitted, perhaps he wanted to keep them just to himself. The passage captures the vocation of the loafer in the call to live, pray, sing, tell old tales, and laugh1062 in the face of the “age of disintegration”1063 of political busyness, philosophical and religious mediocrity, and crowd lunacy. Kierkegaard concludes his 1848 journal entry on the “age of disintegration” by saying that he is “hiding for the time being in the cautious incognito of a flâneur.”1064 As flâneur, incognito, and “God’s spy,” and calling his authorship a “godly satire,”1065 the religious and the poetic existence (Whitman, Melville, Baudelaire, Christ) coexist. We may add here a certain kind of philosopher, such as Diogenes, Socrates, and Kierkegaard and his various pseudonyms performing the “godly satire.” There is a return to the state of indolent repose in the celebration of joy in the discourse on the lily and the bird as a response to the political upheaval of 1848, but this is only a brief interlude among the striving that is demanded upon the industrious indolent Dagdriver, who wanders incognito and whose job it is to unsettle everyone. In the twentieth-century novel The Razor’s Edge, Somerset Maugham knew well the difficult task, the “joy in suffering” ahead for the supposed street-corner loafer: “D’you remember his saying that he was just going to loaf? If what he tells you is true his loafing seems to involve some very strenuous work.”1066
In forging a Socratic-Christlike citizenship,1067 Kierkegaard presents his two prototypes Socrates and Christ as incognito, communicating indirectly or parabolically, and as such living as loafers. But hiding behind this mask of a bum or loafer is the wisest man in Athens and the Messiah for Christianity. Anti-Climacus’s two published texts, The Sickness Unto Death and Practice in Christianity, are polemical works imbued with sociopolitical ideas that combat “the present age.” His small, substantial essay A Literary Review is full of descriptions of “leveling,” “the public,” “superficiality,” and “formlessness,” and the triumphant society of chatter and obtuseness and the “demand of the times,” anticipating Lukács and Adorno’s Kierkegaardian-Marxist diagnosis of reification. In The Sickness Unto Death, the author in question calls out for a new Socrates1068 rather than what the times demand—which is a new republic. As the follow-up, Practice in Christianity, presents us with “the God-man”—that other prototype and loafer in Christ who, in his various guises, Anti-Climacus is at pains to remind his reader, is a “lowly, destitute man,”1069 who “has no doctrine, no system,”1070 and whose companions are “idle and unemployed people, street loafers [Gadestrygere] and tramps [Landløbere].”1071 These are the incognitos and unrecognizables that deceive the reader into the truth, the truth being the quest for subjectivity or the expression of inwardness, which leads us back to the beginning to the young Kierkegaard’s reflection up in Gilleleje where the truth is that which is the truth for you—a passionate, paradoxical quest to be honest.
The danger here is that there is madness in this kind of truth: the lunacy of Don Quixote and Socrates in the worldly sense, the madness of the poets, and the mad paradox of faith in following Christ and the actions of Abraham. Climacus states in Concluding Unscientific Postscript that “in a solely subjective definition of truth, lunacy and truth are ultimately indistinguishable, because they may both have inwardness.”1072 But of course the playful Climacus puts in a footnote that even this really is not true because this madness lacks the “inwardness of infinity.” We find ourselves again in the Mellemspil which Anti-Climacus shows in navigating between losing oneself to infinity (mysticism, intoxicated religiosity) and losing oneself to finitude (reductionist materialism).1073
It can be a disaster to bring Kierkegaard’s thought directly into political thinking, and while we can argue that the author cannot be blamed for a future reader’s actions, we can at least accept that Kierkegaard’s thought contains a dynamic indirect call for sociopolitical action. Climacus repeats the task of the religious discourse to “venture everything,”1074 while always at pains to remain free of being pinned down. Kierkegaard’s Climacus is not a religious believer and illustrates why we should always make the distinction between the religious and political discourse. Yet staying true to “making difficulties everywhere,” the incendiary essay on the present age is published under his own name in the same year as Concluding Unscientific Postscript, showing Kierkegaard, the Extra-Skriver, to always be moving between writing as a journalist, aesthete, philosopher, moralist, and as one writing in the face of God. We can see him anticipating and navigating routes that we can reconstruct now as we look for ways to withstand the clutches of Adorno’s “culture industry”1075 and today’s information age, ways of life and thought performed in the guise of the ever mischievous, multilayered Dagdriver.
Conclusion
As the industrious idler, Kierkegaard sparked revolutionary praxis in Lukács, inspired the theory of the exception in Schmitt, shed light on the repressed aspects and ruins of human history that were later evoked in the life and work of Benjamin, and laid some of the foundations for Adorno’s negative dialectic. By the time Lukács finds his system in Bolshevism and Schmitt commits to Nazism, there is no longer any space for “indirect politics” and the Dagdriver. In his last years, Kierkegaard may have discarded some of his ambiguity and pseudonyms, yet there remains an abundance of wit, sarcasm, and innuendo within the installments of The Moment to disrupt any political theology, and the writings of the loafers in the pseudonymous works and religious discourses continue to haunt the theological, political, and philosophical landscape. Like the increasingly dispersed thought of Benjamin, Adorno and others surviving at the edge of the system, Kierkegaard’s authorship is a continuous unpeeling of the self, much like a Peer Gynt who “confesses and yet conceals” [skrifte, og dog dølge], thus revealing the infinite enigma of the imaginative self, rather than a finished picture of who Kierkegaard and the plural self is. The Dagdrivers are like the real poets who are “idlers, and it is to the principle of idleness that astronomy owed its origin, that is to say, when man, freed from the necessity of earning his bread, turned his eyes upwards and questioned the enigma of the skies.”1076 But Kierkegaard, like any self-respecting hardworking Dagdriver, never forgets to look down either, exemplified in the 1848 discourse where the call is both to look up at the bird of the air and down to the earth to find the lily hidden amid the long blades of grass.
Bibliography
Adorno, Theodor, and Max Horkheimer. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Translated by Edmund Jephcott. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002.
Agamben, Giorgio. “Bartleby, or On Contingency.” In Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, edited and translated by Daniel Heller-Roazeen, 243–71. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999.
———. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998.
Assiter, Alison. Kierkegaard, Metaphysics and Political Theory. London: Continuum, 2011.
Avanessian, Armen, and Sophie Wennersheid, eds. Kierkegaard and Political Theory: Religion, Aesthetics, Politics, and the Intervention of the Single Individual. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2014.
Backhouse, Stephen. Kierkegaard’s Critique of Christian Nationalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.
Beckett, Samuel. Nohow On: Company, Ill Seen Ill Said, Worstward Ho. New York: Grove, 1996.
Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge: Belknap, of Harvard University Press, 2004.
Boer, Roland. “A Totality of Ruins: Adorno on Kierkegaard.” Cultural Critique 83 (2013) 1–30.
Cervantes, Miguel de. Don Quixote. Translated by Edith Grossman. New York: Vintage, 2007.
Clarke, Edward. The Vagabond Spirit of Poetry. Winchester: iff, 2014.
Deleuze, Gilles. “Bartleby; Or, the Formula.” In Essays Critical and Clinical, translated by Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco, 68–90. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997.
Derrida, Jacques. Dissemination. Translated by Barbara Johnson. London: Athlone, 1993.
Dooley, Mark. Politics of Exodus: Søren Kierkegaard’s Ethics of Responsibility. New York: Fordham University Press, 2001.
Fernie, Ewan. The Demonic: Literature and Experience. London: Routledge, 2013.
Hardt, Michael, and Antoni Negri. Empire. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000.
Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Translated by John MacQuarrie and Edward Robinson. New York: Harper & Row, 1962.
Kierkegaard, Søren. Christian Discourses / The Crisis and a Crisis in the Life of an Actress. Translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997.
———. The Concept of Anxiety. Translated by Reidar Tomte. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980.
———. Concluding Unscientific Postscript to the Philosophical Fragments. Translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992.
———. Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses. Translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990.
———. Fear and Trembling / Repetition. Translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983.
———. Journals and Papers. 7 vols. Edited and translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967–78.
———. Letters and Documents. Translated by Henrik Rosenmeier. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978.
———. Papers and Journals: A Selection. Translated by Alastair Hannay. London: Penguin Classics, 1996.
———. Philosophical Fragments / Johannes Climacus. Edited and translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985.
———. The Point of View. Translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998.
———. Practice in Christianity. Translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991.
———. The Sickness Unto Death. Translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980.
———. Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter [SKS]. 28 text vols. and 28 commentary vols. Edited by Niels Jørgen Cappelørn et al. Copenhagen: Gad, 1997–2013.
———. Stages on Life’s Way. Translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988.
———. Two Ages: The Age of Revolution and the Present Age; A Literary Review. Edited and translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978.
———. Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits. Edited and translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005.
———. Without Authority. Translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1997.
Kirmmse, Bruce H. “Introduction: Letting Nature Point beyond Nature.” In The Lily of the Field and the Bird of the Air, translated by Bruce H. Kirmmse, vii–xxxv. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016.
Kundera, Milan. Slowness. Translated by Linda Asher. London: Faber & Faber, 1997.
Lukács, Georg. Soul and Form. Translated by Anna Bostock. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1974.
———. The Theory of the Novel. Translated by Anna Bostock. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1971.
Maugham, Somerset. The Razor’s Edge. London: Vintage, 2000.
Nagy, András. “Abraham the Communist.” In Kierkegaard: The Self in Society, edited by George Pattison and Steven Shakespeare, 196–220. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 1998.
Nin, Anaïs. The Journals of Anaïs Nin. Vol. 1, 1931–1934. London: Quartet, 1979.
Novalis. Philosophical Writings. Translated and edited by Margaret Mahony Stoljar. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997.
O’Neill Burns, Michael. Kierkegaard and the Matter of Philosophy: A Fractured Dialectic. London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015.
Perkins, Robert L. “Kierkegaard’s Anti-Climacus in His Social and Political Environment.” In International Kierkegaard Commentary to Practice in Christianity, edited by Robert L. Perkins, 274–302. Macon, GA: Mercer University, 2004.
Ryan, Bartholomew. “Kierkegaard’s Fairytale.” Milan: Rivista di Filosofia Neo-Scolastica 3–4 (2014) 945–61.
———. Kierkegaard’s Indirect Politics: Interludes with Lukács, Schmitt, Benjamin and Adorno. New York: Rodopi, 2014.
Schmitt, Carl. Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty. Translated by George Schwab. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.
Shakespeare, William. The Complete Works. Edited by Peter Alexander. London: Collins, 1966.
Smith, Graham M. Friendship and the Political: Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Schmitt. Charlottesville: Imprint Academic, 2011.
Stocker, Barry. Kierkegaard On Politics. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.
Unamuno, Miguel de. Our Lord Quixote. Translated by Anthony Kerrigan. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967.
Villa, Dana. Socratic Citizenship. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001.
Whitman, Walt. Complete Poetry and Collected Prose. New York: Library of America, 1982.
Ziolkowski, Eric. “Kierkegaard’s Subterranean Fluvial Pseudonymity.” In Kierkegaard’s Literary Figures and Motifs, vol. 1, Agamemnon to Guadalquivir, edited by Katalin Nun and Jon Stewart, 279–95. Kierkegaard Research 16. Surrey, UK: Ashgate, 2014.
———. The Literary Kierkegaard. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2011.
Žižek, Slavoj. The Parallax View. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006.
999. See O’Neill Burns, Kierkegaard and the Matter of Philosophy; Wennerscheid and Avanessian, ed. Kierkegaard and Political Theory; Ryan, Kierkegaard’s Indirect Politics; Stocker, Kierkegaard on Politics; Boer, “Totality of Ruins,” 1–30; Smith, Friendship and the Political; Backhouse, Kierkegaard’s Critique of Christian Nationalism; Assiter, Kierkegaard, Metaphysics and Political Theory; Perkins, “Kierkegaard’s Anti-Climacus,” 274–302; Dooley, Politics of Exodus; Nagy, “Abraham the Communist,” 196–220.
1000. Kierkegaard, Two Ages.
1001. Halfway through Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Kierkegaard’s Johannes Climacus states that “the most one person can do for another is to unsettle him.” See Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 387 / SKS7, 352. SKS refers to the Danish edition of the collected works of Kierkegaard (Søren Kierkegaard Skrifter, vols. 1–28).
1002. See my book Kierkegaard’s Indirect Politics.
1003. Clarke, Vagabond Spirit of Poetry, 12.
1004. Ibid., 11.
1005. Kierkegaard, Upbuilding Discourses, 73 / SKS8, 180.
1006. Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 83 / SKS7, 81.
1007. Kierkegaard, Point of View, 61 / SKS16, 42.
1008. Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 188 / SKS7, 172.
1009. Ibid., 187 / SKS7, 172.
1010. Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments, 5 / SKS4, 215.
1011. Clarke, Vagabond Spirit of Poetry, 12.
1012. Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 186 / SKS7, 171.
1013. Kierkegaard, Stages on Life’s Way, 363 / SKC6, 338.
1014. Stemning is a word which would later be made famous in philosophy through Heidegger in the German Stimmung, in Being and Time in his long journey in slow thinking. See Heidegger, Being and Time, 172–79 [H. 134–39]; 388–96 [H. 339–46].
1015. Kierkegaard, Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses, 5 / SKS5, 13.
1016. On this term “the real poet,” see Kierkegaard, Sickness Unto Death, 72 / SKS11, 186.
1017. This discourse is to be found in Kierkegaard’s volume Without Authority.
1018. Kirmmse, “Introduction,” xvi.
1019. “Philosophie ist eigentlich Heimweh-Trieb überall zu Hause zu sein [Philosophy is really homesickness, an urge to be at home everywhere].” See Novalis, Philosophical Writings, 135.
1020. Lukács, Soul and Form, 35.
1021. Benjamin, Arcades Project, 420 [M2, 8].
1022. Ibid., 417 [M1, 4].
1023. Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments, 120 / SKS15, 19.
1024. Ibid., 124 / SKS15, 22.
1025. Benjamin, Arcades Project, 421 [M2a, 2].
1026. Whitman, Complete Poetry, 188.
1027. See, e.g., Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, 48; Agamben, “Bartleby, or On Contingency,” 243–71; Gilles Deleuze, “Bartleby; Or, the Formula,” 68–90; Hardt and Negri, Empire, 203–4; and Žižek, The Parallax View, 381–85.
1028. On analyzing advanced capitalism, consumerism, purchasing entertainment, and what Adorno calls “the culture industry,” see, e.g., some formative works such as Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class (1899); Simmel’s Philosophy of Money (1900); and Adorno’s chapter “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception,” in Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944).
1029. This is a sarcastic expression used by Johannes Climacus frequently throughout Concluding Unscientific Postscript.
1030. For further study linking Kierkegaard and Adorno via the “ruin,” see Roland Boer’s “A Totality of Ruins: Adorno on Kierkegaard,” 1–30.
1031. Kierkegaard, Journals and Papers, 6:5725 (V A 3 n.d. 1844).
1032. Kierkegaard, Letters and Documents, 253–55 / SKS28, 392.
1033. Kierkegaard, Sickness Unto Death, 25 / SKS11, 141.
1034. Kierkegaard, Point of View, 22 / SKS16, 8.
1035. I have developed elsewhere the presence of the fairytale in Kierkegaard’s writings: see Ryan, “Kierkegaard’s Fairytale,” 3–4.
1036. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, 7 / SKS4, 103.
1037. Ibid. / SKS4, 102.
1038. Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 163 / SKS7, 151.
1039. Beckett, Nohow On, 89.
1040. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, 105 / SKS4, 194.
1041. Kierkegaard, Without Authority, 39 / SKS11, 43: “What is joy, or what is it to be joyful? It is truly to be present to oneself, but truly to be present to oneself is this today, this to be today, truly to be today.”
1042. Kierkegaard, Christian Discourses, 303 / SKS14, 93.
1043. Ibid., 305 / SKS14, 94.
1044. See the concluding paragraph of the first chapter Carl Schmitt’s Political Theology where he quotes from the end of Repetition. Without mentioning the writer by name, Schmitt refers to Kierkegaard as “a Protestant theologian who demonstrated the vital intensity possible in theological reflection in the nineteenth century.” Schmitt, Political Theology, 15.
1045. Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 618 / SKS7, 561.
1046. This is something that Adorno and Horkheimer make clear in the preface to the 1969 edition to Dialectic of Enlightenment: “As a critique of philosophy it does not seek to abandon philosophy itself.” Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, xii.
1047. Kierkegaard, Point of View, 86 / SKS16, 65.
1048. Derrida, Dissemination, 27.
1049. Kierkegaard, Sickness Unto Death, 5 / SKS11, 117.
1050. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, 115 / SKS4, 204.
1051. Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 95–136.
1052. Kierkegaard, Practice in Christianity, 127 / SKS12, 132.
1053. Ibid., 132 / SKS12, 142.
1054. Cervantes, Don Quixote, second part, ch. 18, 571. For more on the lucida intervalla in Kierkegaard and Cervantes, see also Ziolkowski, Literary Kierkegaard, 143–45, and Ziolkowski, “Kierkegaard’s Subterranean Fluvial Pseudonymity,” 288.
1055. My thanks to Eric Ziolkowski on notifying me of the medieval usage of this term. For more on reading Kierkegaard’s journals as lucida intervalla, see Pap. 39 II A 576 / SKS18, 63.
1056. Kierkegaard, Pap. VIII I A 59, 1847.
1057. There is the excellent essay on the Lukács-Kierkegaard relationship by András Nagy called “Abraham the Communist.” See Nagy, “Abraham the Communist,” 196–220.
1058. Reflecting on his last great work before the turn to Marxism-Leninism, Lukács wrote in the preface (written over forty years after the first publication of The Theory of the Novel): “Kierkegaard always played an important role for the author of The Theory of the Novel, who, long before Kierkegaard had become fashionable, wrote an essay on the relationship between his life and thought.” See Lukács, Theory of the Novel, 18–19.
1059. Kierkegaard, Sickness Unto Death, 78 / SKS11, 192.
1060. Kierkegaard, Concept of Anxiety, 131 / SKS4, 147.
1061. Kierkegaard, Sickness Unto Death, 72 / SKS11, 186. There is a passage by Anaïs Nin which describes well the madness and plurality of the real poet: “I have always been tormented by the image of multiplicity of selves. Some days I call it richness, and other days I see it as a disease, a proliferation as dangerous as cancer. My first concept about people around me was that all of them were coordinated as a whole, whereas I was made up of a multitude of selves, of fragments. I know that I was upset as a child to discover that we only had one life. It seems to me that I wanted to compensate for this by multiplying experience. Or perhaps it always seems like this when you follow all your impulses and they take you in different directions. In any case, when I was happy, always at the beginning of a love, euphoric, I felt I was gifted for living many lives fully. . . . It was only when I was in trouble, lost in a maze, stifled by complications and paradoxes that I was haunted or that I spoke of my ‘madness,’ but I mean the madness of the poets.” Nin, Journals, 1:54. Also, there is an excellent book on the demonic which includes chapters on Kierkegaard and Shakespeare. See Fernie, The Demonic.
1062. Here is the passage from King Lear in full: “So we’ll live, / And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh / At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues / Talk of court news, and we’ll talk with them too— / Who loses and who wins, who’s in, who’s out— / And take upon ’s the mystery of things / As if we were God’s spies. And we’ll wear out / In a walled prison packs and sects of great ones / That ebb and flow by the moon.” See Shakespeare, King Lear, act 5, scene 3, in Complete Works, 1108–9.
1063. “The age of disintegration” is how Kierkegaard describes Europe in 1848. See Papers and Journals, 351 [48 IX B 63: 7].
1064. Kierkegaard, Papers and Journals, 351 [48 IX B 63: 7].
1065. Kierkegaard, Point of View, 17 / SKS13, 24.
1066. Maugham, Razor’s Edge, 94.
1067. I am following in the tradition here of Dana Villa’s Socratic Citizenship by including the religious-poetic element of the Dagdriver (via prototypes such as Christ and Shakespeare).
1068. Kierkegaard, Sickness Unto Death, 92 / SKS11, 205.
1069. Kierkegaard, Practice in Christianity, 37 / SKS12, 51.
1070. Ibid., 48 / SKS12, 61.
1071. Ibid., 50 / SKS12, 63.
1072. Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 194 / SKS7, 142.
1073. Kierkegaard, Sickness Unto Death, 30–35 / SKS11, 146–51.
1074. Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 427 / SKS7, 389.
1075. Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 94–136.
1076. Unamuno, Our Lord Don Quixote, xviii.