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Comic Crowds: Kierkegaard’s Contribution to Democratic Theory
Lars Tønder, Department of Political Science, University of Copenhagen
DRAFT, October 2015
“…let us be human beings.”
-- Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1846) 1
March 1848 was an oddly eventful month in Danish politics. Inspired by other European
revolutions—and fueled by strong nationalist sentiments—the political tide turned
against the newly installed Frederik VII and the rule of absolute monarchy. The people
no longer saw the King as a capable ruler, and the political elites themselves began
contemplating the need for a change in government. All this culminated on March 21,
1848 when a crowd of more than ten thousand people assembled in Copenhagen to
support a petition demanding that the King absolve his government in order to allow for
a new, more “democratic” constitution. L. N. Hvidt, leader of the city council of
Copenhagen, delivered the petition to the King, who gave his consent after a brief
meeting. When the crowd heard about his decision, it proclaimed an emphatic “long live
the King!” Hvidt himself continued with his daily routine. He first visited the
Copenhagen stock exchange for about an hour, and then resumed his day job as
chairman of the Danish national bank.2 The fight was over and life would go on as
normal. Not a single shot was fired during Europe’s most peaceful revolution.
Kierkegaard, who had published Either/Or five years earlier, observed all of this
from behind the windows of his family home on Nytorv in downtown Copenhagen.
Contrary to those who celebrated the calm and deliberative character of the
1
negotiations, Kierkegaard detested what he saw. The crowd, Kierkegaard points out in
his diary, was “power-hungry,” “inhumanely cowardly,” and deprived of any “personal
courage.”3 To show why, Kierkegaard introduces a polemical comparison between the
political events of his time and an imaginary crowd that assemblages in the streets to
witness a dogfight. Just like the imaginary one, the crowd that came together on March
21, 1848 was risking nothing in the fight for a new government; all it wanted,
Kierkegaard says, was to experience the joyful sensation of being present when
something exciting happens. This desire became even more pronounced when the
conflicting sides started accusing each other for having provoked the fight, creating a
shouting contest in which the crowd could rule without any sense of purpose or
determination. Kierkegaard refers to this as a “second degree war,” which may seem
mildly entertaining in the case of a dogfight.4 When applied to politics, however, the
upshot suggests a degree of comic nonsense: “Then flees the King – and then it is a
Republic. Nonsense.”5
What follows from this denunciation of Denmark’s transition to democracy and
constitutional monarchy? For many of Kierkegaard’s readers—both then and now—the
denunciation suggests a preference for absolute monarchy over liberal democracy,
something that also seems to correspond with his friendship with the King whom he
visited on several occasions in his summer residence north of Copenhagen. 6 But there
are other aspects to consider as well. What, for example, should we say about
Kierkegaard’s critique of the many theologians who changed their interpretation of
Christianity depending on the political situation?7 And what about his affirmation of
“comic power” as the very condition of thinking and acting—should this affirmation not
figure prominently in our interpretation of his politics? Kierkegaard himself seems to
2
think that it should. As he puts it in Concluding Unscientific Postscript, published two
years before Denmark’s democratic revolution, the “comic is always the mark of
maturity,” which is why “it is unexceptionally the case that the more proficiently a
person exists, the more he will discover the comic.”8 My wager is that this statement
captures a different side of Kierkegaard, which in turn changes how we might position
his ideas and insights vis-à-vis the discussion of democracy in contemporary political
theory. Kierkegaard may not be democratic in the sense commonly used today, but this
should not deter us from appreciating how his philosophy can tell us something
significant about the very conditions under which democracy is possible. As we shall see,
this is particularly the case when it comes to what Claude Lefort calls the “empty space
of power,”9 which Kierkegaard envisions as an exhilarating dynamic that moves in
between the quest for singularity and the pressures of the crowd. Applied to the study of
politics, this changes the terms for how we might read Kierkegaard’s critique of
Denmark’s democratic revolution. Rather than accusing the Copenhagen crowd for
being too comical, Kierkegaard may in fact be criticizing it for failing to use this label as a
means to challenge the positions offered by the royalists and the liberals respectively.
What we need, Kierkegaard seems to be suggesting, is more—not less—comedy!
The aim of this paper is to make this wager more probable. Section 2 situates
Kierkegaard’s conception of the comic within his unique brand of philosophy—what I
call “sensorial materialism.” Section 3 develops the political implications of this
materialism by showing how the affirmation of comic power creates a different
conception of the crowd, one that sees it as a collective composed by multiple
individuals who share in their singularity. (This is what Kierkegaard, in this paper’s
epigraph, calls a community of “human beings.”) Section 4 links this collective to the
3
concept of the demos and discusses how Kierkegaard may be said to theorize its
rhetorical expression in a mediatized world like ours. I conclude with some more
general remarks on how Kierkegaard can inform discussions in contemporary
democratic theory that go beyond the scope of this paper.*
II. Kierkegaard’s sensorial materialism
To suggest that Kierkegaard is a “materialist” may be an improbable statement; but to
say that he is a sensorial materialist is surely flat out idiosyncratic! One would be hard
pressed not to concede that something like this is the first reaction that enters the mind
whenever Kierkegaard’s name appears in the discussion of democracy and crowd
politics. Many of Kierkegaard’s readers certainly see it that way.10 Be that as it may, it is
nonetheless important to acknowledge that a combination of sensorial attentiveness and
materialist orientation indeed is the best way of capturing the philosophy that
underpins Kierkegaard’s political outlook. According to Kierkegaard, comic power
embodies the very condition of thinking and acting because it springs from the many
contradictions inherent in lived experience, which not only undermine all claims to
* NOTE TO THE READER! This paper is very much a work-in-progress and apart from
missing references and citations it does not deliver on the full promise outlined in the
introduction you just read. Section 4 is completely missing and the conclusion is
nowhere near as refined and general as indicated in the above. Still, I hope the main idea
of the paper is sufficiently developed to generate a sufficiently detailed sense of what
they paper might look like once completed. In any case, I look forward to your
comments and suggestions.
4
stability but also lend themselves to a “new pathos” affirming the flow of becoming
while at the same time “car[ing ]” for what it “sets aside.”11 This characterization
suggests that the key question for comic power is not how to adjudicate political life
from an ideal, disembodied point of view, but rather how to conceptualize it from within
the feelings and perceptions it aims to inspire. An exploration of this latter question
takes us straight to issues of materialism and the sensorium.
Kierkegaard’s most extensive treatment of materialism and the sensorium appears
in the section of Either/Or (Part I) titled “The Immediate Erotic Stages Or the Musical-
Erotic,” which presents itself as an appraisal of Mozart’s Don Juan but in fact includes a
series of considerations on the role of the sensorial more generally. Kierkegaard’s
starting point for these considerations is the claim that the sensorial did not appear until
Christianity: “Christianity brought sensuality [Sandselighed] into the world.”12 By this
Kierkegaard does not mean that the sensorial begins with Christianity—Kierkegaard
mentions the ancient Greeks as a someone who also were interested in questions about
feeling and perception—but rather that the Christians were the first to define it in
opposition to Spirit, introducing a split between mind and body, turning the latter into a
“principle” and a “power” of its own.13 As a power that opposes Spirit, the sensorial
stands forth as a supplement that both conditions and undermines all ideational content.
(In modern parlance, we might say that the sensorial is the “constitutive outside” of
Spirit.) Kierkegaard traces the movement of this relationship by linking the sensorial to
the three stages of the erotic.14 First, the erotic takes the form of a “dream” for someone
or something undetermined. Second, it becomes a “quest” that looks for what it can
desire without actually desiring it. Third and finally, it takes the form of desire itself—as
seduction (Forførelse). The latter is what we encounter in its classical form in Mozart’s
5
Don Juan: “…det Sandselige bruse i hele sin utaalmodige Lidenskab…[Don Juan] attraaer,
denne Attraa virker Forførende; forsaavidt forfører han. Han nyder Attraaens
Tilfredsstillelse; saasnart han har nydt den, da søger han en ny Gjenstand og saaledes i
det Uendelige.”15
The parallels between comic power and this way of conceptualizing the sensorial
abound in Kierkegaard’s writings. Most obvious might be how comic power and the
sensorial share the same kind of impassionate desire for the future. Just like the
sensorial that reaches the third stage of the erotic, comic power never stops as it looks
to expand and perpetuate its present shape. Such a project may be said to embody a
comical element, which surfaces once we interpret the sensorial from the side of the
ideational (and the Spirit more generally) where lived experiences are made
comprehendible though individualization and quantification. Consider for example the
difficulties we have in comprehending Don Juan’s never-ending number of romantic
relationships: “Tænker jeg mig et enkelt Individ, seer jeg ham [Don Juan] eller hører jeg
ham tale, saa bliver det comisk, at han har forført 1003.”16 According to Kierkegaard, this
reaction underscores the close relationship between comic power and the sensorial. If
we laugh when someone tries to quantify the number of women Don Juan has
conquered, it is because such quantification pales in comparison with the desire to see
and experience more, reminding us how rich and complex the sensorial world is beneath
our finite categories of mind and body. Another way of saying this is that comic power
embodies the sensorial to such an extent that they become indistinguishable. It is for
this reason that Kierkegaard elsewhere can say that comic power “is something I regard
as an indispensable legitimation for anyone who is to be regarded today as authorized in
the world of the spirit.”17 Without comic power—that is, without the elusive yet
6
sensorially inflected desire for the future—it would not be possible to think, let alone
act.
One way to highlight the implications of this reading is to compare it with another
“materialist” reading, which emphasizes the transcendental rather than the sensorial
dimension of Kierkegaard’s existentialist philosophy. According to Michael O’Neill
Burns, Kierkegaard’s “transcendental materialism” emerges from an engagement with
German Idealists such as Fichte and Schelling, which gave Kierkegaard the impetus to
reframe the dialectical system in such a manner that “fracture, rather than unity [would
be] the starting point of both thought and existence.” According to Burns, this reframing
leads Kierkegaard to conceptualize reality as “non-all” in which “the more-than-material
process of human thought is a product of the contradiction contained in matter itself.” 18
This argument is particularly interesting for our purposes because it, too, emphasizes
the importance of comic power for Kierkegaard’s thought. But it does so with a different
aim in mind. Developed by theorists such as Slavoj Žižek and Alenka Zupančič, a
transcendental materialist reading of Kierkegaard interprets comic power as an
irreducible incongruity—what Žižek calls the “splitting of the split”—and it then goes on
to suggest that we approach this split as a dialectical force that negates rather than
affirms the gaps and incongruities subsisting within all modes of lived experience. 19 The
result is a non-substantive conception of comic power, which in turn revolves around
two claims: first, that “negativity…is the only true remaining universal force”; and
second, that the most effective way to think and to act is to relieve all modes of lived
experience from their “self-identity or coincidence with themselves.” The latter is what
Zupančič calls “disidentification.”20
7
If I want to resist this reading of Kierkegaard, it is not because the reading depicts
Kierkegaard’s conception of reality as fractured and contradictory. This, in fact, seems
largely correct to me, in particular given Kierkegaard’s own depiction of human life as a
struggle between two powers—mind and body, spirit and sensorium—each of which
exceeds the other such that any quest for identity and stability becomes an impossible
endeavor. What is troubling, however, are the conclusions that the transcendental
materialist reading wants to derive from this conception of reality. The point
Kierkegaard wants to make is not that the encounter with a fractured and contradictory
reality justifies a rejection of lived experience (which is what I take Zupančič’s notion of
“disidentification” to mean), but rather that it invites for an acceleration of divergent
modes of feeling and perception. When Kierkegaard turns to Mozart’s Don Juan, it is this
kind of lived experience he wants to articulate: an affirmation of the sensuous as that,
which “does not love One, but Everyone.”21 This affirmation may put Kierkegaard closer
to Spinoza than to Hegel (and later Lacan), but this should not surprise, since Spinoza
too was an important source of inspiration for German Idealists like Schelling and
Fichte, a point that remains largely overlooked in the transcendental materialist
reading.22 Like Spinoza before him, Kierkegaard sees comic power as both the cause and
the effect of the affirmative potentialities that subsist within the sensorium. That is, at
the same time as both Spinoza and Kierkegaard envision comic power as a way to
disclose and mobilize the desire to experience the world in more than one way, they also
posit it as the feeling of augmentation and joy that follows from pursuing this desire
unreservedly. According to both Spinoza and Kierkegaard, this circularity does not
preclude particular modes of lived experience from being incomplete and insufficient.
However, rather than seeing this as a reason for “disidentification,” they see it as an
8
impetus for a new and expansive relationship with the world writ large. What matters,
you might say, is less the fractured and contradictory nature of reality than what follows
from this conceptualization in terms of exploring and affirming new ways of feeling and
seeing.
A sensorial materialist account of Kierkegaard’s philosophy captures this approach
to lived experience better than most other accounts. By positing the sensorial as a force
of its own—and by suggesting that this force is intimately (if not subversively) tied to
the structure of intellectual life (Spirit)—Kierkegaard is in effect asking us to reconsider
any account of his philosophy that does not see comic power as the most potent way of
living in a world characterized by fissures and contradictions. Comic power may be
rhetorically akin to irony (another of Kierkegaard’s interests), but this does not imply
the same conception of negation, especially since comic power, unlike irony, assumes an
affirmative stance vis-à-vis the incongruous contradictions inherent in lived experience.
To experience life fully is to affirm these contradictions in the very act of seeing and
feeling.
III. “Let us be humans”: Toward a comic conception of the crowd
I dwell on these aspects of Kierkegaard’s work because they bring into view how his
critique of the crowd is neither wholly undemocratic nor “socially weightless” in the
manner, which Lois McNay has suggested that we read much of contemporary
democratic theory.23 Kierkegaard was indeed acutely aware of the suffering and
domination that the 1848 Copenhagen crowd was inflicting upon itself. Kierkegaard not
only reminds us of the crowd’s own desire for an authoritarian mode of government,
9
one that merely substitutes one “tyrant” for another; in addition, and perhaps more
importantly, Kierkegaard also points out how this desire was framed and mobilized by
an elite group of “liberals” who used “patriotism,” “war,” and “national-feeling (National-
Følelsen)" as a cover-up for their own lack of “character.”24 In these circumstances, the
crowd became a puppet that mistook its own power for the one of the puppeteer. One
may readily grant that such an incongruous confusion has comical effects. From a
Kierkegaardian perspective, however, the effects are predominantly superficial because
they emerge from a frivolous negation that never cares for what it sets aside. As we
already have seen, this negation and lack of care does not capture everything
Kierkegaard says about the comic, and thus it would be erroneous to equate his critique
of the 1848 Copenhagen crowd with something purely or truly comical. Indeed, from
Kierkegaard’s perspective the opposite seems more likely: the real failure of the crowd
was to disavow its own incongruous contradictions, which in turn deterred it from
recognizing and then affirming the power embedded in a more profoundly comical
orientation to lived experience.
One way to elaborate on this argument goes through Claude Lefort’s theory of
politics and democracy, which Lefort develops most succinctly in his 1981 essay “The
Permanence of the Theological-Political?” Articulated in conjunction with a reflection on
the relationship between religion and politics—and situated in the context of French
revolutionary history as interpreted by the nineteenth century French historian Jules
Michelet—Lefort argues that modern democracy entails a “highly specific shaping of
society” to which its representation of “the place of power” bears witness.25 More
specifically, Lefort encourages us to focus on what he calls the “internal-external
articulation” through which power institutes a common space, which in turn enables
10
society to represent itself in a manner recognizable to its different members.26 Whereas
previous regimes of government relied on an articulation that referenced either an
“outside” assigned to the gods or an “inside” assigned to the substance of the
community, Lefort shows how modern democracy can appeal to neither because it then
would absolve democracy’s own image of the demos as self-constituting.27 Debilitating in
the sense that it precludes society from having a fixed point to which it can attach claims
about authority and sovereignty, Lefort nonetheless sees this as the main achievement
of modern democracy, in part because we now can say that democracy embodies a
uniquely dynamic structure that links its political action to a fundamental incongruity
between the symbolic and the real—the representation of society and that which eludes
this representation. As Lefort suggests in one of the most important passages of his
essay:
“….of all the regimes of which we know, it [modern democracy] is the only one to
have represented power in such a way as to show that power is an empty place and
to have thereby maintained a gap between the symbolic and the real. It does so by
virtue of a discourse which reveals that power belongs to no one; that those who
exercise power do not process it; that they do not, indeed, embody it; that the
exercise of power requires a periodic and repeated contest; that the authority of
those vested with power is created and re-created as a result of the manifestation
of the will of the people.”28
Nowhere in this or other texts does Lefort anticipate more recent attempts at
linking this conceptualization of modern democracy to classical genres of lived
11
experience. One reason for this might be Lefort’s wish to distinguish modern democracy
from its ancient precursors. Still, if one were to fill this lacuna, speculating on the nature
of the link between classical genres and Lefort’s own conceptualization of modern
democracy, it would seem that comedy—not tragedy—would be the most obvious
candidate for us to consider. Why comedy? First, because modern democracy stipulates
a paradoxical structure that never stops perpetuating its own transformation. Second,
because the principal idea of modern democracy is to question all claims to authority
and sovereignty. Third, because modern democracy embodies the desire to experience
the world in more than one way. All of these characteristics resonate with Kierkegaard’s
conception of the comic, allowing us to suggest that combined efforts of Lefort and
Kierkegaard amount to the idea that modern democracy is best seen as comic in both
form and structure. Such a conclusion may seem to contradict much of contemporary
political theory, which commonly links modern democracy to tragedy and in so doing
predisposes us to a political agenda based on either decisionism or mourning.29 For
Lefort and Kierkegaard, however, the opposite is the case: modern democracy is neither
a call for self-contained sovereignty nor a cause for lamentation; rather, modern
democracy expresses the desire to explore and to affirm new ways of feeling and seeing.
If modern democracy fails, it is because those who participate in it do not acknowledge
and practice this desire.
Kierkegaard’s distinct contribution to this conceptualization of “democracy as
comic” concerns the question of subjectivity, which in Kierkegaard’s terms emerges
from within the interplay between, on the one hand, the drive for singularity—that is,
the drive for a radically new mode of lived experience untainted by pre-established
categories of universality—and, on other hand, the way in which this drive is always-
12
already situated within a context of intersubjective relations. The first aspect of this
interplay relates to Kierkegaard’s motto—“let us be human beings (lad us være
mennesker)”—which Kierkegaard recites on numerous occasions, including his
philosophical magnum opus Concluding Unscientific Postscript published in 1846.30 In
this text, Kierkegaard makes his plea for “us…human beings” in relation to a critique of
the Hegelian system, which he criticizes for assuming an abstract totality in which no
new beginning is possible.31 What the “Hegelian logicians” fail to see, Kierkegaard
argues, is that such a beginning only is possible if we avoid abstractions such as
“humanity” or “Spirit,” and instead attempt to leap forward (Springe) by both distancing
from and immersing ourselves into the midst of concrete life.32 The latter is obviously a
paradoxical practice though-and-though. Indeed, at the same time as the drive for
singularity defines itself in contrast to the crowd, we may also say that this very same
crowd is what conditions it. The upshot is a non-dialectical interplay between the
subject and the crowd, one in which both come to inhabit the gap between the symbolic
and the real, defining themselves as comedians who constantly contradict and
transgress their own self-understanding. Such a self-understanding leaves no guarantee
in terms of outcome or consequence, but it may nonetheless be normatively desirable
because it instigates a desire for future ways of seeing and feeling. When this desire
takes priority, the subject and crowd come together in chiasmatic symbiosis that, as we
saw in the previous section of this paper, affirms the sensuous as that which “does not
love One, but Everyone.”33
The absence of this comic crowd-subjectivity is what underpins Kierkegaard’s
critique of the 1848 events, and what more generally defines his life-long crusade
against Danish culture, in particular as it was represented and embodied by his main
13
rival during Denmark’s democratic transition: the pastor-turned-politician N. F. S.
Grundtvig.34 As already indicated, Kierkegaard saw both Grundtvig and Danish culture as
lacking in their affirmation of comic power, something that diminished their authority
and ability to exist proficiently: “…it is unexceptionally the case that the more
proficiently a person exists, the more he will discover the comic.”35 The flipside of this
assessment is Kierkegaard’s admiration for historical personae such as Socrates and
Don Juan. According to Kierkegaard, these personae stand out as singular individuals by
virtue of affirming the comic and the power associated with this mode of lived
experience.36 In Kierkegaard’s view, however, it would be a mistake to see either one of
them as completely separate or detached from the societies in which they are said to
have made their mark on Western culture. The most explicit argument for why this is
not the case might be Kierkegaard’s discussion of Ancient Greece’s Aristophanic culture,
which Kierkegaard sees as situating the drive for singularity within a broader context of
culture and society.37 This perception of Greek comedy may indeed be the alternative to
the 1848 crowd with which Kierkegaard never reconciled: a mode of frank speech
(parrhesia) that reorganizes the relations within the crowd by subverting historically
situated claims to sovereign power. As the culture surrounding Greek comedy teaches
us, such reorganization may sometimes require the crowd to literally leave the city in
order to develop a sense of community outside the existing rules and laws.38 But the
crowd always returns. And when it does, it brings new energy into the existing
negotiations of the gap between the symbolic realm of representation and the absence of
any anchor with which to tie this realm of representation to something fixed and stable.
The aim of this section has been to show how Kierkegaard’s account of the comic
resonates with (and even reinforces) the conception of democracy that Lefort proposes
14
in his discussion of the empty place of power as a uniquely democratic staging of society.
Kierkegaard and Lefort are obviously not identical when it comes to conceptualizing the
different aspects of this staging. Whereas Lefort outlines the general form of a society
defined by an irreconcilable gap between the symbolic and the real, Kierkegaard shows
us how this gap can become the impetus for a lived experience in which the desire for
future modes of feeling and seeing takes priority. In both cases, however, it is the turn to
the comic that proffers the insights needed to allow each augment and amplify insights
embedded in the other. By embracing the turn to the comic, the textual resonances
between Kierkegaard and Lefort thus direct us down a new path toward a democratic
crowd-politics defined by singularity and pluralization.
IV. Comic Power in a Mediatized World
[This section still needs to be written.]
V. Concluding Remarks
[This section is still very incomplete and in need of revision.]
More often than not, Kierkegaard is depicted in one of two ways: either as an apologist
for the old monarchy or as a radical thinker opposing all known modes of government.
In both cases, the upshot is an account of Kierkegaard as anti-democracy. Parts of this
account are understandable given the positions available to Kierkegaard in his own
time. If the choice is between, on the one hand, a monarchy based distinction and
15
character and, on the other hand, a democracy underpinned and controlled by a
manipulative elite, then Kierkegaard has no doubt: the former will always win over the
latter, if for no other reason than because it represents the lesser of two evils.39
However, as I have shown in this paper, the claim that Kierkegaard is an anti-democrat
is just as much a symptom of our own prejudices about democracy as it is about
Kierkegaard’s philosophy itself. Kierkegaard’s philosophy may not identify with the
quest for everything democratic, but its consequences resonate nonetheless with the
idea of democracy as embodying “the empty place of power.” As we have seen, the
upshot is significant for our understanding of both Kierkegaard and democratic politics
more generally. On the one hand, we can now say that Kierkegaard’s critique of the 1848
events was not a defense of monarchy per se, but rather a refusal of the underlying
terms of the debate, a refusal that in turn would enable Kierkegaard to simultaneously
disclose and mobilize a third option based on an affirmation of comic power. On the
other hand, we can also say that an affirmation of this kind speaks more generally to
concerns about the crowd in democratic theory. By showing us how the crowd can
become the embodiment of comic power, Kierkegaard also shows us how collective
action based on difference rather than identity is possible: to become comic,
Kierkegaard tells us, is to become part of a collective in which a multiplicity of
individuals share in their singularity, resisting the demands for homogeneity, aiming
instead to direct their divergent desires for fulfilment toward future modes of feeling
and seeing.
16
Notes
17
1 Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to the Philosophical Crumps, trans.
Alastair Hannay (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 97.
2 SAK, p. 433.
3 Dagbøger, kopi fra byvandring…
4 SAK, p. 432.
5 SAK, p. 434.
6 In recent years, the view of Kierkegaard as a conservative royalist has been aided by Carl
Schmitt who approvingly cites Kierkegaard at the conclusion of Chapter 1 of Political Theology
as support for his own account of law and sovereignty. See Carl Schmitt, Political Theology:
Four Chapters on Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2005), p. 15. For a historical account of Kierkegaard’s friendship with Frederik VII, see
Joakim Garff, SAK: Søren Aabye Kierkegaard, En Biografi (København: Gads Forlag, 2000), p.
423.
7 For an account of Kierkegaard’s many critiques of prominent Danish theologians such as H.
L. Martensen and J. P. Mynster, both of whom influenced Danish politics both before and after
the March 1848 events, embodying the kind of political savviness that Kierkegaard detested,
see Stephen Backhouse, Kierkegaard’s Critique of Christian Nationalism (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2011), esp. Chapter 2.
8 Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, pp. 235, 387–388 (translation modified).
9 See Claude Lefort, “The Permanence of the Theological-Political?” reprinted in Hent de Vries
and Lawrence E. Sullivan, Political Theologies: Public Religions in a Post-Secular World (New
York: Fordham University Press, 2006), p. 160.
10 In addition to the works by Burns, Žižek, and Zupančič cited below, see also REFERENCES!
11 Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, pp. 235, 236 (translation modified).
12 Kierkegaard, Enten/Eller, p. 68.
13 Ibid.
14 Ibid., p. 86.
15 Ibid., p. 102.
16 Ibid., p. 97. See also p. 93.
17 Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, p. 235.
18 Michael O’Neill Burns, Kierkegaard and the Matter of Philosophy: A Fractured Dialectic
(Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015), pp. xvi, xvii (emphases in original).
19 Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2006), p. 107.
20 Alenka Zupančič, The Odd One In: On Comedy (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press,
2008), pp. 34, 32. See also my discussion in “Comic Rules: Kierkegaard, The Idiots, and the
Politics of Dogma 95,” Theory & Event, vol. 18, no. 2 (2015). What follows is an elaboration of
some of the points I make in that essay.
21 Kierkegaard, Enten/Eller, p. 98.
22 For a recent study of Spinoza’s influence on German Idealism, see the contributions to
Spinoza and German Idealism, edited by Eckart Förster and Yitzhak Y. Melamed (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2015). The connections traced and discussed by these
contributions remain largely untouched by Burns in his discussion of Kierkegaard and
thinkers such as Schelling and Fichte. The upshot is a rather ahistorical account of
Kierkegaard’s intellectual heritage and his own ideas about the philosophical tradition.
23 INSERT REFERENCE!
24 INSERT REFERENCE, Egelund Møller, pp. 128ff.
25 Lefort, ”The Permanence of the Theological-Political?” p. 159.
26 Ibid.
27 Ibid., p. 160.
28 Ibid., p. 159.
29 INSERT REFERENCES!
30 Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, p. 97.
31 Ibid. INSERT: discussion and reference back to the limited reading of Žižek and Zupančič.
32 Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to the Philosophical Crumps, p. 98.
33 Kierkegaard, Enten/Eller, p. 98.
34 For a discussion of Kierkegaard’s critique of Grundtvig, see also my essay ”Comic Rules.”
35 Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, p. 388.
36 REFERENCE TO KIERKEGAARD’S IRONY BOOK!
37 REFERENCE TO KIERKEGAARD’S IRONY BOOK!
38 REFERECE TO GREEK LAUGHTER BOOK!
39 REFERENCE TO KIERKEGAARD’S DISCUSSION OF TYRANNI (AND ITS RELATION TO
DEMOCRACY…).
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