Chapter 6: Searching for a Secular God
6
Searching for a Secular God
A Prolegomena to a Political Theory of Love
Justice is what love looks like in public.
—Cornel West
Introduction: Flirting with Kierkegaard
Political thinkers have long flirted with the thought of Søren Kierkegaard. From Georg Lukács to Theodor Adorno, and from Jean-Paul Sartre to Jacques Derrida, Kierkegaard has long proven a fascinating subject.284 Yet, while other unconventional thinkers, like Nietzsche and Freud, have been canonized in the field, Kierkegaard’s inclusion in the world of political thought has always been the exception rather than the rule. Reflecting this trend, Alain Badiou, Jürgen Habermas, and Slavoj Žižek, have all turned to Kierkegaard in recent years, albeit in a predictably limited way. Specifically, each fails to engage the substance of Kierkegaard’s Christianity. While this latest turn reflects an incipient awareness that Kierkegaard can help resolve some of the fundamental problems facing political thought, such as the difficulty of reconciling an identity politics of inclusion with a substantive conversation about human nature, their limited engagement prevents this possibility from coming to fruition. This engagement therefore reflects the long-standing and unwarranted suspicion of Kierkegaard’s thought born out of the difficulty that political thought has in engaging religious thought, and which tends to label Kierkegaard as either a political conservative or an apolitical ascetic. However, by exploring this recent turn toward Kierkegaard, the hidden political promise of Kierkegaard’s thought is revealed, as is a way forward in the potentially mutually enriching conversation between Kierkegaard scholars and political theorists. Specifically, by drawing Kierkegaard’s ethics into the social and political world, we will see that latent within them lies an ethical necessity to engage in political action. In this way, we will see that within Kierkegaard’s thought exists a prolegomena to a political theory of love.
Alain Badiou
In his recent work, Logics of Worlds, itself the follow-up to his earlier work Being and Event, Alain Badiou spends a chapter discussing Kierkegaard.285 Employing Kierkegaard in the most common way that political theorists do, that is, as a theorist of decisionism,286 Badiou argues that choice helps reveal the activity of choosing to the chooser.287 In choosing a world of meaning, or, what Badiou calls a topology, the chooser becomes aware of the fact that such worlds depend on their very own transcendental act of choice.288 In other words, in choosing the world of meaning that we inhabit, we demonstrate that we are not bound by it, but that we necessarily transcend it. Reciprocally, in making a choice and committing to a world, the chooser consecrates themselves in that world, thereby giving meaning to their own existence.289 In this way, Badiou draws upon Kierkegaard’s theory of stages and his idea of self-choice to legitimize positions that are more clearly his own.
While such decisionist readings of Kierkegaard are the most common political readings of Kierkegaard, dating to his German interwar reception, they take Kierkegaard in a direction he would have been loath to follow. In emptying the leap of faith of its substance, these readings borrow formal elements of Kierkegaard’s thought, but leave behind the content. For instance, without the substantive content of Martin Luther King’s Christianity, it becomes hard to distinguish his call to break the law from Carl Schmitt’s similar call, even though the former advanced the civil rights movement and the latter helped justify Nazism.290 Yet, Badiou nonetheless helps expose some of Kierkegaard’s enduring relevance to contemporary political thought. Specifically, Badiou’s interest lies in attempting to reconcile the problem of both needing to understand our particular sociopolitical reality, or world of meaning, while simultaneously recognizing that any such reality is necessarily exclusionary. That is, there are always positions outside of any world of meaning, and, from a political point of view, these positions are likely to be populated with the vulnerable and exploited.291 So, Badiou’s question, a question in which he is hardly alone, is to ask how we might theorize exclusion itself. Or, if this question is duly politicized, we might instead ask how we can imagine sociopolitical communities that are truly inclusive.
In appropriating Kierkegaard, what therefore motivates Badiou is Kierkegaard’s ability to address questions of inclusion in an age wary of reason. If Hegel represents a highpoint for attempting to theorize a universally inclusive community from within the confines of a rational framework, and if the past two centuries of thought exhibit a fundamental suspicion of this possibility, Kierkegaard’s radical rebellion against Hegel is a natural place from which to draw. Moreover, his proximity to Hegel affords Kierkegaard the ability to appropriate some of the more promising elements of Hegel’s thought—such as Hegel’s dialectical understanding of subjectivity, and Hegel’s radical formulation of freedom—while drawing them out of the confines of Western rationality. However, for Badiou, these substantive insights are of little concern. What is of concern are purely the formal elements of Kierkegaard’s thought—what exclusion and exceptionality look like as abstract categories—rather than a deeper engagement with the substantive claims that Kierkegaard makes about human existence, and why human existence, in particular, defies confinement within a rational universal. For Kierkegaard, the exception might prove the rule—but it was a very specific exception that did so.
By emptying Kierkegaard of the substantive content by which he anchors his critique of Western thought, and which also serves as the ground for his own positive philosophical project, Badiou’s engagement with Kierkegaard remains both superficial and instrumental. For Kierkegaard, the exception is not an abstract concept demonstrating the limits of all worlds of meaning, the exception is something quite specific: it is God, as well as our own transcendental nature, that defies reason. Without this content, Badiou is essentially attempting to anchor normative judgment—he is attempting to critique forms of exclusion—in the formal description of Kierkegaard’s leap of faith, as have other decisionist thinkers, rather than anchoring them in the specific substantive position that Kierkegaard believes allows us to judge. Ironically, without that positive content, Badiou’s criticism remains a purely formal, or abstract, critique, and runs the risk of being exactly the type of philosophy that radical critics of Hegel, like Kierkegaard himself, forsook. Put differently, it runs the risk of being a philosophy that fails the test of being able to help change the world, or the individuals within it, because it gives us a purely abstract reason to do so.
Jürgen Habermas
In contrast to Badiou, Jürgen Habermas moves in the opposite direction in his approach to Kierkegaard. Rather than emptying Kierkegaard of his substantive content in favor of the formal elements of his thought, Habermas’s interest primarily lies with the content. Specifically, in his work The Future of Human Nature, Habermas offers Kierkegaard as an answer to questions that arise when our understanding of human nature is challenged by developments in biotechnology.292 Moreover, Habermas can offer Kierkegaard as an answer because he recognizes that Kierkegaard’s substantive claims are post-rational, and therefore not subject to the standard critiques of reason.293 In other words, Kierkegaard offers an answer that is both substantive and formal, giving content to our understanding of what it means to be human, while doing so in a way that allows for, what Habermas calls, “a multiplicity of worldviews,” or, what we might call, following the discussion of Badiou, the problem of exclusion.294 Therefore, in focusing on the substantive elements, i.e., questions of human nature, while acknowledging their formal elements, i.e., Kierkegaard’s post-rational philosophy, Habermas is much closer to recognizing the importance of Kierkegaard for contemporary political thought.
Habermas therefore contextualizes his discussion of Kierkegaard by situating it within contemporary pluralism, and the challenge that pluralism makes to earlier forms of political and ethical thought. For Habermas, grounding ethical and political thought in foundational claims regarding nature and history had previously offered philosophers the confidence to answer fundamental questions of the “good life.”295 However, Habermas mentions works like John Rawls’s Political Liberalism as having marked the end to this tradition, an end that occurred in response to the spread of individualism and a greater inclusion of a plurality of worldviews.296 As a result, the “ought” questions relating to the nature of the good life have become increasingly tied to identity, as these “ought’s” relate to an ought “for ‘me,’ or even, for ‘we,’ but . . . [they are] never fully universal, but always particular.”297
And so, Habermas recognizes that contemporary theories of justice tend to focus on formal rather than normative questions, leaving the larger questions to individuals.298 Therefore, politics has effectively become decoupled from ethics, leaving ethics to individuals, while the political question of justice is answered only formally.299 As Habermas aptly notes, the reconciliation of ethics and politics is precisely the question that a fuller engagement with Kierkegaard allows us to solve. Moreover, it is interesting to note that while Habermas points to Rawls as an example of formal theories of justice, Badiou’s use of Kierkegaard is not that far removed from Habermas’s point about Rawls. In using Kierkegaard to demonstrate a form of radical inclusion that is meant to orient our ethical and political lives, but doing so in a purely formal way, Badiou is also attempting to solve normative questions with formal answers.
Therefore, for Habermas, the formalism within ethical and political thought has left an absence at its heart, which Kierkegaard fills with God.300 Turning to Kierkegaard’s work The Sickness Unto Death, Habermas argues that one of Kierkegaard’s important contemporary contributions is a recognition that we cannot overcome our state of sin on our own. In other words, we ourselves are not the ground for our freedom and its responsible use; what grounds our freedom is an Other.301 As Habermas tells it, for Kierkegaard, we overcome the despair of our sinful condition by recognizing that we owe everything to an Other, i.e., that our freedom is born in intersubjectivity.302 Yet, echoing his earlier criticisms of contemporary ethical and political thought, Habermas also claims that the “the linguistic turn” in philosophy has emptied the idea of the Other of its essential content.303 As a result, the deep existential and communal nature of truly relating to the Other, and recognizing one’s dependency on them, is transformed into something lacking the transformative power of Kierkegaard’s intersubjective philosophy. Therefore, by reinvesting the Other with rich substantive meaning, we might begin to answer some of our pressing ethical questions with more than formal answers, while simultaneously reinvesting politics with a rich ethical complement.
Last, Habermas concludes by arguing that this Other need not be understood in Kierkegaard’s theological terms, but that it can be rendered in secular terms.304 Only here does Habermas run into trouble. There is certainly an interesting and important conversation to be had about the possibility of interpreting Kierkegaard in an interdenominational fashion, or even, in a secular but spiritual vein, but in leaving behind Kierkegaard’s religiosity too quickly, Habermas runs the risk of losing the importance of thinking of the Other as divine. God might only ever be experienced in the Other, but it is precisely this divine nature that allows us to ground ethics and politics in claims that lie beyond convention. The social and political challenge, then, is not to leave this behind, but to account for it in a truly inclusive, and nondenominational, fashion.
Slavoj Žižek
Turning to Žižek, we find the most interesting and penetrating study of Kierkegaard. If Badiou represents an interest in the formal elements of Kierkegaard’s thought, and Habermas, a primary interest in Kierkegaard’s substantive claims, in Žižek we find an attempt to balance both. This is likely due to Žižek’s immersion in the world of Lacan, for Lacan’s psychoanalytic approach allows him to approach many of Kierkegaard’s religious insights, albeit from a psychoanalytic point of view. Interestingly, Žižek’s reading of Kierkegaard does not begin where most do, with Kierkegaard’s famous leap of faith, as it instead begins with the less discussed, but equally interesting, leap into sin. In the context of a long conversation about the dialectic of law and transgression, where Žižek argues that this dialectic characterizes a diverse array of modern thought, from Immanuel Kant through to the Marquis de Sade, and more recently, Georges Bataille, Žižek makes a parallel claim about Kierkegaard.305 Specifically, reading this dialectic via Lacan, Žižek argues that Kierkegaard realizes that it is through the creation of the symbolic medium of the law that a “primordial self-withdrawal” occurs, and that this incipient form of self-collection leads to the birth of agency.306 In other words, it is through the transgression that the law allows, that our subjectivity is born, as is the agency that flows from it.307 Even more simply put, until we are self-conscious, we cannot be free.
Žižek is astute in focusing on this dimension of Kierkegaard’s thought, as he finds it in The Concept of Anxiety. There, Kierkegaard makes the claim that it is through language that sin is born.308 For Kierkegaard, the childhood development of language reflects the development of our capacity for symbolic thought, and it is symbolic thought that allows us the possibility of exercising our will.309 And, as a result of this, sin is born. After all, it is not until we are capable of thinking about the world that the possibility of ethical choice emerges, so that, prior to the development of consciousness, we exist in an amoral or pre-moral state, just like Adam in Eden.310 However, once consciousness is born, and ethical choice becomes possible, we most commonly act according to either the conventional ethics of the society into which we are born, or else, out of selfish willfulness, that is, Kierkegaard’s ethical and aesthetic spheres. And these options, for Kierkegaard, are ethically irresponsible; or, in religious vernacular, they are sinful.
Now, the reason Žižek is astute in focusing on the leap to sin, is that this leap foreshadows the leap of faith, which thereby helps him understand the latter leap with greater sophistication than is typical of political thinkers. In focusing on the birth of will that occurs as a result of self-consciousness, Kierkegaard can refocus ethical conversation away from conversations about the substantive content of our ethical beliefs, and toward the question of the subject’s very relationship to her will. As a result, we can come to see the ethical ideas that we have as the instruments by which we learn to exercise our freedom, rather than debating the respective merits of these ideas, so that we can instead focus on the question of our will itself. In this context, we can better understand his leap of faith; rather than a decisionist will to power, whereby we arbitrarily leap beyond conventional ethics, it is instead constituted by a responsible appropriation of our will, in which we no longer need the crutch of conventional ethics.311
In focusing on the leap of sin, Žižek is the only one of these three to grasp the nature of Kierkegaard’s relevance to political thought, at a level that is more than skin deep. Rather than focusing on the formal elements, like Badiou, or the substantive relevance, like Habermas, Žižek offers an example of Kierkegaard in which the developmental nature of his thought is most evident. Kierkegaard’s leap of faith into a post-conventional ethics is not a decisionist leap whereby we simply realize the falsity or limitations of conventional ethics; rather, it reflects a process of self-development, whereby we discover a more ethical way of existing, and, as a consequence, we transcend the limitations of our previous ethics. That is, the formal dimensions of Kierkegaard’s thought reflect his insight into the substantive process of human self-development, so that his ethics are not tied to a particular objective doctrine, but to an understanding of the process of becoming an ethical individual.
This process, insofar as it speaks to the development of our capacity for a more authentic ethics, is inclusive in a new vein. Rather than defining what it means to be human, thereby offering a definition that will almost certainly exclude people, Kierkegaard’s sense of inclusion refers to our very ability to treat others inclusively. As a result, inclusion does not depend on an appropriately defined social or political constitution, but on the capacity of its constituent members to treat one another inclusively. Moreover, this capacity for inclusion—what we might also call neighborly love—is dialectically the very medium by which we achieve it. That is, it is in being loved that we become loving ourselves. For Kierkegaard, therefore, inclusive communities are not formed when we properly define their nature and the ethics by which they should live, but rather, they are formed when we ourselves become open and loving individuals. By definition, this precludes the problem of exclusion that preoccupies Badiou, just as it gives real substance to Habermas’s recognition that Kierkegaard’s ethics are post-conventional, and that we become free by way of an Other.
On a final note, Žižek hits upon a further point of importance for a political reading of Kierkegaard, and one that neither Badiou nor Habermas note, but which further reveals Kierkegaard’s importance for political thought. While all three share an appreciation for how Kierkegaard can help solve one of the most pressing problems facing contemporary political thought, i.e., that of inclusion, Žižek is the only one to note that he can also be of great help in solving the other great problem of political thought, that of inequality. Referring to Lacan’s insight that theologians are the only true materialists, Žižek is correct in noting that, while Kierkegaard himself never seemed much interested in such questions, the subjective end-position that Kierkegaard describes is the beginning for a materialist politics.312 Specifically, in overcoming the conventional ideas we have of one another—be they ideas about race, nationality, gender, sexual orientation, or even, the universal idea of bourgeois individuality—we find ourselves in a position to confront the material, rather than ideational, impediments to the manifestation of equality. That is, inequality is not perpetuated by way of ideas of the Other that we have, but as a result of practices in which we engage—Marx’s relations of production, for instance—so that seeing ourselves and others clearly can help us expose them.313 While Kierkegaard might not have been sympathetic to this politics—although even this is quite more complex and debatable than it might appear—Kierkegaard’s thought can help take us there.314
A Prolegomena to a Political Theory of Love
While Žižek hits closer to the mark, insofar as he focuses on the developmental element in Kierkegaard’s thought, his study of Kierkegaard also suffers from a major problem. Like many of his predecessors in the world of political thought, dating back to some of Kierkegaard’s earliest political appropriators, such as Georg Lukács and Theodor Adorno, Žižek cannot free himself from seeing Kierkegaard’s Christianity as fundamentally ascetic.315 So, whereas he spends a great deal of time exploring Kierkegaard’s thought, and whereas the surrounding sections of Žižek’s work clearly owe a tremendous debt to Kierkegaard—one that is sometimes acknowledged but at other times is not—Žižek nonetheless manages to label Kierkegaard’s Christianity an ultimate renunciation of the human world, rather than seeing Kierkegaard’s Christianity as a fundamental embrace of it. Specifically, in writing of Kierkegaard’s Christianity, Žižek reads Christ’s sacrifice as exactly the type of self-constituting ascetic act that Nietzsche calls the “will to nothingness.”316 That is, in this act of sacrifice, Žižek reads a radical renunciation of the world, and, along with it, a renunciation of every last bit of humanity it is possible to renounce.317 Therefore, as a consequence of this renunciation stands revealed the inalienable core of humanity, i.e., that which we cannot renounce, which is then reified in the transcendent image of Jesus Christ.318 As a result, Žižek argues that Kierkegaard’s Christian insight needs to be overcome in favor of Nietzsche’s “human, all too human.”319 Ironically, then, for Žižek, we need to abandon our Nietzschean reading of Kierkegaard in favor of Nietzsche himself.
For scholars of Kierkegaard, it is hard to see much merit in Žižek’s condemnation, as a careful reading of Fear and Trembling clearly argues against an ascetic reading.320 Yet, this has not stopped this misreading from persisting, beginning with Kierkegaard’s earliest intellectual reception in interwar Germany and carrying on into the present day. In part, this trend reflects a pervasive mistrust of religion that exists in the world of political thought, and which is only compounded by a tendency to read religion through a Nietzschean lens. However, this was also reinforced by the theological reception of Kierkegaard in interwar Germany, some of whose proponents were explicitly fascist in their politics, while others were quietist.321 So, when Adorno first made his own “ascetic” critique of Kierkegaard in 1933, it was lodged in an intellectual atmosphere in which many prominent advocates of Kierkegaard were avowed Nazis, while others had insufficiently opposed them.322
While contemporary scholarship has laid to rest any connection between Kierkegaard’s thought and fascist politics, notably, by offering less superficial readings of Fear and Trembling, the charges of quietism are harder to dismiss, and Kierkegaard scholars would do well to take them seriously. In fact, this is the charge that truly lies at the core of Adorno’s attack, insofar as Adorno thought that Kierkegaard’s overwhelming concern for the individual came at the expense of a concern for the world.323 For instance, in the context of Nazi Germany, an ethics that focuses solely on our treatment of those around us—our neighbors—but that fails to engage the broader political forces at play, leaves itself open to serious critique. Specifically, while it would be easy to argue that a Kierkegaardian ethic might compel individuals to provide sanctuary for their Jewish neighbors—certainly a brave and admirable task—these ethics says less about the possibility that a fuller ethical response might require organized political opposition to Nazism. More broadly, we might begin to explore the way in which ethical acts centered on the individual are suspect when confronting social or political injustices that require a collective response. For political thinkers, despite Kierkegaard’s tremendous promise as a potential anchor for normativity—the intimations of which are what fascinate Badiou, Habermas, and Žižek—it is upon this question that their embrace falters. For them Kierkegaard is inextricably a political quietist.
While the stark example of Nazi Germany helps reveal this problem, it only becomes more complex if we think about it within the context of contemporary politics. It would be easy to argue that Kierkegaard’s ethics require that we respect others regardless of categories like race, gender, or class.324 However, it is harder to determine what his ethics might say about societies that are systematically organized according to these categories. For instance, in the context of a society that distributes different criminal justice experiences according to race, that pays women a percentage less for their work when compared to men, and that allows tremendous wealth to coexist alongside tremendous poverty, the limitations of Kierkegaard’s ethics begin to emerge. Neighbor love might help humanize those around us, but it does not help us identify the systematic forms of dehumanization to which they might be subject, and which become even harder to identify the less dramatic are the examples. That is, the starkness of the example of Nazi Germany makes it easier to argue that Kierkegaard’s ethics might lead to an anti-fascist politics like those of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, but the inherent difficulty in identifying the social and political mechanics involved in more subtle forms of racism, sexism, and exploitation, make it harder to make the claim that a Kierkegaardian ethics has anything to say. Moreover, Kierkegaard’s polemics against politics often serve to prevent the extension of Kierkegaard’s ethics into the world of politics, because Kierkegaard himself seemed to think that many of the social and political ills of his day were best left unaddressed—at least in their political, rather than personal, incarnation.325
Interestingly, this problem does not hinge on an ethical argument, but on a methodological one. Specifically, the ease of drawing Kierkegaard’s ethics into an opposition with Nazism, and the relative difficulty of doing so when it comes to combatting contemporary forms of injustice, does not speak to any innate quality within Kierkegaard’s ethical position. Instead, it speaks to our ability to identify dehumanization as a political problem. For instance, if our “neighbor” is unjustly arrested and subjected to particularly harsh treatment by the criminal justice system, our ethics might require that we aid them. However, if that unjust treatment is disproportionately distributed to certain groups within our society, and not to others, our ethics might then require that we engage this larger problem. However, our ability to recognize that our neighbor’s treatment is symptomatic of larger problems does not depend on our ethical relationship to them, it depends on our ability to situate their particular experience within a broader political whole. And this depends on exactly the type of analysis that Kierkegaard often decried, as it depends on an objective analysis of our social and political reality. That is, it depends on political thought.
The intention of this analysis is not to make an argument against the validity of Kierkegaard’s ethics, but to suggest that there is an ethical necessity to engage in politics. Problematically, unlike the immediacy with which an ethics of love might compel us, a recognition of the ethical necessity of political engagement depends on our willingness to critically engage the mediated realms of social and political life, because without this willingness, we remain blind to situations that ought to compel us. Fortunately, there is a tradition of religiously inspired politics that is a natural match for Kierkegaard’s religious ethics, and which is built upon precisely such an ethical necessity. Populated by those like Reinhold Niebuhr, Martin Luther King Jr., and more recently, Cornel West (who has been a vocal proponent of both Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter), it is unfortunate that this tradition is not brought to mind when political theorists think of Kierkegaard. If it were, Kierkegaard might find his home within the world of political thought, as both an explanation and a proponent for what has been one of the most transformative political movements of the twentieth century. In this way, he could urge political thinkers to remain as attentive to questions of subjectivity as they are to the objective world, while also provoking Kierkegaard scholars into further developing the critical tools by which to recognize social and political situations to which Kierkegaard’s ethics should lead.
Conclusion: God and Politics
As Kierkegaard well knew, philosophers argue about the essence of things, and not their existence;326 or, put differently, we debate about the nature of signifiers, and not the existence of the signified, and there is perhaps no more hotly contested signifier than that of God. For those in the world of political thought, God is often seen as exactly the type of rationalization that Kierkegaard spent his life attempting to undermine. Therefore, when it comes to political life, rather than seeing God’s presence in the Civil Rights movement, they see it in radical branches of evangelicalism. Yet, ironically, one of the tools Kierkegaard used to undermine such conceptions of God—his indirect style of writing—makes it difficult to correct these mistakes, as these corrections require a substantive conversation about Kierkegaard’s thought, and one to which his indirect writing does not immediately lend itself. However, as many commentators have noted, one of the essential qualities of Kierkegaard’s conception of God—if not the essential quality—is love.327 And love carries with it far less intellectual and political baggage than does God.
This is not to suggest that a conversation with the world of political thought requires a radical revision of Kierkegaard’s work, but only that a more substantive approach to his work—and one that borrows his own existential methodology—might lead to a more fruitful conversation with the world of political thought. If we were to do so, we might find that even within so-called secular or non-Christian forms of political thought, there are important similarities, and that they are similarities upon which a mutually enriching conversation can occur between Kierkegaard scholars and political thinkers.328 In this way, we might also find that the important and productive questions to ask do not pertain to God’s existence (a question with which Kierkegaard himself seemed little concerned), but that they instead pertain to the nature of love.
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284. Lukács, “Foundering of Form,” 13; cf. also Sartre, “Kierkegaard”; Sartre, Search for a Method; Adorno, Kierkegaard; Derrida, Gift of Death.
285. Badiou, Logics of Worlds, 425–36.
286. This tradition dates back to the political decisionism of Carl Schmitt, and an infamous reference that Schmitt makes to that “nineteenth century” “Protestant theologian”—to Søren Kierkegaard. See Schmitt, Political Theology, 15.
287. Badiou, Logics of Worlds, 432.
288. Ibid.
289. Ibid., 433.
290. Despite the ease of orchestrating a substantive conversation between King and Kierkegaard, it is actually Schmitt who explicitly draws on Kierkegaard. See King, “Letter from Birmingham Jail”; Schmitt, Political Theology, 13.
291. For perhaps the best recent example of this problem, see Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?”
292. Habermas, Future of Human Nature, 5.
293. Ibid.
294. Ibid., 6.
295. Ibid., 2.
296. Ibid.
297. Ibid., 3.
298. Ibid.
299. Ibid., 4.
300. Ibid., 7.
301. Ibid., 9.
302. Ibid., 9–11.
303. Ibid., 10.
304. Ibid., 9.
305. Žižek, Parallax View, 93–96.
306. Ibid., 89.
307. Ibid., 90.
308. Kierkegaard, Concept of Anxiety, 47.
309. Ibid., 45–47.
310. Ibid., 37.
311. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, 60, 115.
312. Žižek, Parallax View, 103.
313. For more on Marx’s relations of production, see Marx, “Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy,” 263.
314. For instance, based on an expansive survey of Kierkegaard’s later writing, Eliseo Perez-Alvarez makes a convincing case that inequality, and the Danish Church’s role in legitimizing it, were of prime concern to Kierkegaard. See Perez-Alvarez, Vexing Gadfly.
315. See, for instance, Adorno, Kierkegaard; Lukács, “Foundering of Form against Life.”
316. Žižek, Parallax View, 83; Nietzsche, “On the Genealogy of Morals,” 599.
317. Žižek, Parallax View, 110.
318. Ibid., 103, 111.
319. Ibid., 103.
320. For instance, Žižek’s reading pays no heed to Fear and Trembling’s eponym, which warns against a literal reading of the text; it ignores the pseudonymous nature of the work and it ignores passages in which Kierkegaard argues that through “sacrifice” Abraham “receives” Isaac—and not an Isaac purified of all but his essential qualities, but Isaac as he is, in all of his unique complexity.
321. For instance, see Schulz, “Germany and Austria,” 334–47.
322. For a brief look at this, see Morgan, “Adorno’s Reception of Kierkegaard.”
323. For instance, when Adorno criticizes Kierkegaard’s philosophy for being bourgeois, he has in mind Kierkegaard’s focus on the individual to the detriment of an interest in the world. See Hullot-Kentor, “Critique of the Organic,” 84–85.
324. For instance, see Evans, Kierkegaard’s Ethic of Love, 318–24.
325. For a work detailing the classical conception of Kierkegaard’s relation to politics, see Kirmmse, “Kierkegaard and 1848.” However, for a refutation of this position, see Aroosi, “Causes of Bourgeois Culture.”
326. Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments, 41–42.
327. For instance, see Evans, Kierkegaard’s Ethic of Love, 145–49.
328. It is important to note that C. Stephen Evans has taken important steps in this direction, using the categories of “special” and “general” revelation to argue that many of Kierkegaard’s ethical insights are available to those who do not fall within the Christian fold. See ibid., 156–64, 318–24. Furthermore, Evans also notes that Kierkegaard’s ethics of love are essentially at odds with inequality, and with forms of exclusion, such as sexism and racism. See ibid., 301–2. However, this important study of Kierkegaard’s ethics takes place within the framework of arguing that Kierkegaard is a divine-command theorist, and therefore threatens to alienate many political readers before they even begin. This is hardly a fault of Evans’s scholarship, as his interest lies in meta-ethical debates, but it does help reveal the foundations for a future debate with the world of politics.