Philosophy of Religion 29:113-122, 1991. �9 1991 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

Critical Review Essay

Kierkegaard and postmodernism*

SYLVIA WALSH Department of Philosophy, Stetson University, Deland, FL 32720

Postmodem writers have discovered that before Den'ida there was Kierkegaard. That postmodernism should turn ( o r is it "return"?) to Kierkegaard is entirely understandable, as his authorship offers a great wealth of conceptions, wit, irony, style, etc. with which to play their deconstructive games. But at first blush (why am I blushing?), it is not at

all clear (or decideable?) how such a marriage (or is it merely an engage- ment, or just a liaison, a rendezvous, perhaps even a one night stand?) can be conceivable and, if it is, whether it will ever bear fruit or end up having an abortion (that is, does its progeny have any "right to life"?). Kierkegaard has had his troubles being taken seriously as a philosopher - not that he ever asked to be granted that esteemed status anyway, but a few philosophy professors have sought, mostly futilely, to include him in the academy, at least as an honorary teacher or professor emeritus in the Socratic tradition, by virtue of his having been, they claim, the father of existentialism. Now at the behest of some postmodern philosophers he has been invited in, stylishly seduced (or is it he who has even more artfully seduced them?), and even given a chair (perhaps a writing desk too), in which, however, they will sit and do the writing, that is, rewrite his books to say what they want him to say and to establish that he did not mean what he previously (originally?) said or what we thought he said in his many ironic books (or "unbooks," as the case may be). But I ask you, is

* Sylviane Agacinski, Apart~: Conceptions and Deaths of SOren Kierkegaard, trans. Kevin Newmark. Tallahassee: Florida State University Press, 1988. xi and 266 pages. $25.50; John Vignaux Smyth, A Question of Eros: Irony in Sterne, Kierkegaard, & Barthes. Tallahassee: Florida State University Press, 1986. xvi and 415 pages. $31.50; and John D. Caputo, Radical Hermeneutics: Repetition, Deconstruction, and the Hermeneutic Project. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1987. ix and 319 pages. $17.50.

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this any way to gain acceptance in this austere and time honored associa- tion? Some people will do anything to get married. But unlike Socrates, Kierkegaard did not marry, and he desired no progeny but his writings. So how did this marriage take place? Is it the result of a natural attraction or was it a shotgun wedding? Even more crucially, can this marriage last? And if this is the only way into the academy for Kierkegaard, is it worth the price? Like a premonition, the motto from Philosophical Fragments keeps running through my mind: "Better well hanged than ill wed." Perhaps the whole matter is undecidable. Let us see.

Kierkegaard has been assimilated into postmodernism in two ways. First, a new cadre of Kierkegaard scholars together with some older, well- established ones recently influenced by Derrida and others in the French postmodernist camp have begun to subject his writings to deconstructive analysis and to construe his thought in terms of a philosophy of difference. Of the three authors to be considered in the present discussion, Sylviane Agacinski and John Smyth belong to this group, which also includes, among others, Louis Mackey and, to some extent, Mark C. Taylor. Second. Kierkegaard's thought and writings, at least selected features of them, have been probed and appropriated as a forerunner and point of departure for the deconstructive project itself, especially the overthrow of metaphysics and any form of foundationalism. In this group we find Derrida himself, Blanchot, Deleuze, Mark C. Taylor, and among others, John Caputo, the third author to be considered here. What is it these writers see in Kierkegaard that so attracts them to him? Fundamentally, I think, it is two elements, irony and the concept of repetition, both of which are central to Kierkegaard's early pseudonymous writings and perhaps to his authorship as a whole, though the term "repetition" virtually drops out of Kierkegaard's later works and irony becomes, at least as construed in Concluding Unscientific Postscript, a border category or "boundary zone" between the esthetic and the ethical stages of life and an incognito within the ethical.

It is Sylviane Agacinski's contention, however, that irony was Kierkegaard's element from the beginning to the end of his authorship, or at least that it is possible he was a thoroughgoing ironist, inasmuch as the possibility of writing is also the possibility of irony and the earnestness of a discourse can never be taken for granted (Agacinski, p. 78). Taking Kierkegaard's dissertation on the conept of irony as a case in point, Agacinski undertakes to show in the first part of her book that even though Kierkegaard appears to espouse a movement beyond irony in the final

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section of the thesis, this posture itself may be a guise intended to subvert and circumvent, through irony, the sublation or mastering of irony in Hegelian dialectic. By pretending to exclude and then to reinstate irony as a moment, (albeit a moment of individual consciousness and personal

development rather than one of absolute consciousness and the world- historical development of Absolute Spirit) Kierkegaard plays the game of sublation while secretly, deceptively, ironically, in a kind of "higher madness" or "master form of irony" that has the appearance of earnest- ness, making light of Hegel (and the rest of us) in a nondialectical, unapprehendible manner. For how are we to know that Kierkegaard meant what he said in The Concept of Irony? For that matter, how can we know that he didn't mean what he said? But that is precisely Agacinski's point, that it is ambiguous and undecidable. A good ironist, like the knight of faith, walks around incognito, and the better one is at concealing irony, or oneself in irony, the more successful the ironist is in pulling a fast one on everybody. In fact, Agacinski goes on to point out, there is no way of distinguishing between an ironist and the knight of faith, and insofar as faith, like irony, is a way of obliterating oneself, "[i]rony might thus represent the point of view nearest the religious point of view; it would be

the prelude, not so much to speculation, as to the religiousness. One more

step, and ironic scepticism opens into religious humor" (Agacinski, p. 71). Although Agacinski admits that we cannot know whether Kierkegaard ever took this step, she leads us to think, or indirectly suggests by positing the seed of suspicion, that he did not. But are we to take her seriously? After all, the possibility of writing is the possibility of irony for her as

much as it is for Kierkegaard. Perhaps the best way to respond to Agacinski, then, is to play her game with her, that is, not be taken in by refusing to take her insinuations seriously. Anyway, we would not gain

anything if we did take her seriously. For that would result in the trivializa- tion of Kierkegaard's authorship, and we already have more than enough games of trivial pursuits to play in our spare time.

Having perhaps hit below the belt in the previous round (after all, Caputo says that play must be fair play, not a free for all), let me come clean in the next one by merely noting an odd obsession with Kierkegaard himself throughout the book - whether he is an ironist, a knight of faith, a poet, a seducer (or at any rate a contemplated one), a martyr and auto- castrated sacrificial victim, a virile and macho male who renounces sex, a phantasmatic dreamer seeking rebirth as a child and son of his father

through writing, a comic genius deliberately exposing himself to ridicule,

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a spendthrift, a political reactionary, a protector o f the family secret (speculated on here as the rape of his mother by his father, perhaps also expressing in an Oedipal fashion the unspeakable desire of the son), and finally a woman hater and even a mother hater, explaining why - Agacinski claims - his own mother is never named or alluded to in the authorship (an erroneous claim, by the way) and why SCren hated his own first name, which was part of her maiden (virgin) name (SCrensdatter), and perhaps expressing also a repressed desire to be a woman. This preoccupa- tion with Soren Kierkegaard is peculiar and curious for a mode of reading, or rereading and rewriting, that presumably regards the text as cut off

loose from the author, on its own, open to any and every kind of interpreta- tion by the reader. For example, Agacinski makes much of the fact that Kierkegaard did not include in the published version of his thesis the certification of acceptance and fifteen theses which he defended publically for institutional approval and receipt of his degree. Without these, she claims, the text is set free, adrift from its historical or occasional context and destined to a possible nonearnestness and meaninglessness. That being

the case, it would seem that the text, not the author and his intentions, would be the subject of her readerly interest and writerly reinscription. Has Agacinski betrayed, then, a basic rule of the deconstructionist game?

In spite of (or perhaps because of) its aberrance in interpretation, Agacinski's book remains a fascinating, even brilliant, piece of work, a real tour de force, and the model of deconstructionist interpretations of Kierkegaard thus far. Her discussion of Kierkegaard's view of sexual difference is especially provocative, as it focuses mainly on some late journal entries to establish not only that Kierkegaard held a stereotyped view of woman and man in terms of their natural and spiritual capacities (woman's essence is devotedness, submissiveness, natural religiousness, sensuousness, immediacy, enjoyment, finitude, egoism; man is superior, virile, spiritual, singular, capable of the dialectical reduplication required by Christianity) but also that he sought to do away with femininity by rejecting sex and sexual difference, reverting to an originally and ex- clusively masculine state of sexual indifference. One cannot deny that Kierkegaard made the statements and at this point in his life held the views to which Agacinski refers, but she listens to only one of his voices in the authorship and from a period that does not reflect the most balanced state of mind. A careful reading of Either~Or, volume two, Works of Love, and The Sickness Unto Death, for example, reveals another view of sexual differences and otherness as being authentically preserved and affirmed

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within the context of a more basic affirmation of a common humanity and

a common structure of selfhood. But why does Agacinski take Kierkegaard seriously on this issue (or does she not?)? After all, isn't he supposed to be an ironist from first to last?

John Smyth follows in the footsteps of (repeats?) Sylviane Agacinski in portraying Kierkegaard as he thinks Kierkegaard saw himself, that is, as embodying a nineteenth century repetition of Socratic irony. But Smyth is more interested in exploring what he sees as an alternative model, or models, of philosophy's relation to the historical phenomenon of Socratic irony constructed in terms of erotic and religious metaphors instead of speculation. Smyth is especially interested in the "erotic economy" of The Concept of Irony, which he describes as neither work nor play but a combination of workplay that falls outside the opposition between work and play. In this economy irony is put to work in a Platonic fashion in

service of the Idea in two different ways. On Smyth's reading - one which, like Agacinski's, privileges part 1 of the dissertation over part 2 - the first is one which remains playfully ironic, that is, there is no Hegelian (or pseudo-Hegelian) mastery of irony in which Socratic irony becomes a mastered moment. The other way is one which seeks to restore the conception of irony to its natural setting in the ancient world, where

Socratic irony appears as something feminine that is mastered naturally in the moment of coitus between the masculine (concept) and the feminine (phenomenon). According to this viewpoint, only modem irony, i.e., romantic irony, which is an unjustified form of ironic sensuality, needs to be mastered historically, in a manner that mirrors the natural mastery of

the female by the male. (Smyth suggests, but does not develop, the possibility of a more sympathetic reading of Schlegel's Lucinde, pitting it also against part 2 of The Concept of Irony, inasmuch as the section entitled "Dithyrambic Fantasy of the Loveliest Situation" advocates coitus with the woman on top). In contrast to the natural mastery of irony in this way, Smyth sees Socratic irony in the first way as having an erotic structure that may be characterized as coitus interruptus - a movement of desire toward a moment of possession that never materializes. Instead, Socrates is a seducer who incites others to fall in love with him but constantly disappoints them in the reciprocation of love. As an erotic ironist he knows that eros, which functions here as a paradigm of the individual's relation to the Idea, is intellectually directed toward the Idea as that which cannot be penetrated or mastered. Thus he plays with a "potency and potential mastery in which he does not believe" (Smyth, p.

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222). In Smyth's judgment, Kierkegaard is ambivalent with respect to these two views of irony in the dissertation, so that his position remains undecidable. But I see no reason why one should privilege the first part of the dissertation over the conclusion, especially when viewed in the context of the rest of Kierkegaard's authorship. Within this perspective Kierkegaard's position clearly, it seems to me, is that both the Socratic and romantic forms of irony need to be mastered, although in a personal, religious manner rather than in a speculative way.

In the final chapter devoted to Kierkegaard in his book, Smyth explores some of the consequences of Kierkegaard's erotic conception of irony for aesthetics by examining the "erotic aesthetics" or central connection between eroticism and aesthetics in two sections of Either~Or: "The Immediate Stages of the Erotic" and "The Diary of the Seducer." The upshot of this analysis is that eros, in both its immediate and reflective forms, is determined aesthetically (e.g., in music and fiction) as something indeterminate, that is, as something which, like Socratic irony (identified here with the elusiveness of woman, beauty, and truth), cannot be actually determined, mastered, or possessed, with the result that aesthetic categories are shown to be arbitrary and duplicitous in nature, giving the illusion of determinacy to the indeterminate. In Smyth's view, it is the relation of determinacy and indeterminacy as manifested in irony, eros, and aesthetics that ties Kierkegaard to postmodemist and poststructuralist thought, e.g., Derrida, in whose writings indeterminacy is determined as absolute chance and erotic figures abound. But Smyth also sees echoes of the ethico-religious dimensions of Kierkegaard's thought in contemporary postmodern theorists, e.g., Paul de Man and Ren6 Girard, in their em- phasis on sacrifice or religious violence and victimage. Indeed, he thinks the ethico-religious dimension of Kierkegaard's thought may be reflected in postmodernism just as much as the erotic-esthetic dimension is and furthermore, that these two dimensions are intimately connected, though not in any way that would provide any "dogmatic exit from the 'ironic- erotic' indeterminacies" through the ethico-religious; rather, in Smyth's view they are systematically conjoined in a systematicity that has not been mastered and transcended by contemporary advances in postmodern thought and analysis but still persists in that thought in its crucial articula- tions (Smyth, pp. 372-373). But Smyth does not explore the ethico- religious dimensions of Kierkegaard's thought here in any depth, so that their connection with the erotic-ironic and their traces in postmodem thought remain speculative conclusions without sufficient textual and

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analytical support to sustain them. Since for Smyth the question of eros "may be defined as that of the relationship between the erotic and the religious" (Smyth, p. 357), one wonders why he did not include in his study of Kierkegaard a consideration of Works of Love, a text that is central to this question. One suspects, too, that if that text had been examined, the echo of the ethico-religious in postmodernism would appear more faint than Smyth detects, that is, more a surface similarity than one of substance.

Whereas Agacinski and Smyth make irony the focus of their deconstruc- tive analyses of Kierkegaard, John Caputo takes Kierkegaard's concept of repetition as the point of departure for the working out of a radical hermeneutics of flux. As Caputo sees it, "Kierkegaardian repetition is the first 'post-modern' attempt to come to grips with the flux, the first try not at denying or 'reconciling' it, in the manner of metaphysics, but of staying with it, of having the 'courage' for the flux" (Caputo, p. 12). Focusing primarily on Kierkegaard's early pseudonymous book Repetition, Caputo distinguishes repetition, which he understands as a forward movement that embraces the flux, from recollection, which moves backward in an attempt to still the flux. He further distinguishes between aesthetic, ethical, and religious forms of repetition in Kierkegaard's thought and rightly con- cludes, I think, that for Kierkegaard only religious repetition is true repetition. How odd, then, that most of his analysis of the concept is devoted to aesthetic and ethical repetition while very little is said about religious repetition, and nothing about Christian striving, which is the form religious repetition takes in Kierkegaard's later religious writings where the term "repetition" is dropped. There striving is understood as an inverted dialectical movement in which one "works against oneself" and every step forward toward the ideal is seen as a backward step in the increasing discovery of one's distance from it, thus necessitating a continual reliance on grace. Caputo's analysis terminates, therefore, just at the point where it should really begin in order to discern Kierkegaard's understanding of true repetition. Moreover, the conception of repetition that drives Caputo's project, it seems to me, is really a hollowed out form of ethical repetition, which is to say that it is actually aesthetic repetition, for the forward movement he espouses is devoid of the project of the self which gives content to ethical repetition. Instead of becoming a self or adopting a project of self-identity for ourselves, Caputo proposes that we think of our selves (sic) as "per-sona," ironically donning masks to preserve non-identity as we play various roles as actors on the stage of life

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(Caputo, pp. 289-290). But this sounds familiarly like the aestheticism of romantic irony which Kierkegaard, in agreement with Hegel's assessment, so roundly criticizes in The Concept of Irony. There the romantic ironists are also characterized as affirming the flux, seeing life as a process of becoming in which they merely play with the multiple possibilities of life like actors on a stage, becoming whatever character they arbitrarily choose to portray today and another tomorrow, or becoming nothing at all if they so choose. Like romantic aestheticism, Caputo's repetition lacks the kind of forward thrust that characterizes ethical repetition in the second volume of Either~Or, where it is understood as a movement in which one con- stantly repeats what one already possesses in the form of love, faithful- ness, patience, etc., and thereby gains content and continuity in the midst of the ongoing flux of life. Caputo is quite right in saying that Kierkegaard does not seek to arrest the flux through repetition, but he discounts in his own project essential elements by which Kierkegaard thinks meaning and qualitative content are given to it. While the concept of repetition serves as the point of departure for Caputo's project, therefore, it is not Kierkegaard's concept of repetition in any sense that he would have affirmed as a valid form.

Thinking that he has established, however, that Kierkegaard is a proto- postmodernist whose project is the postmodern project of deconstructing metaphysics, ethics, and theology, Caputo moves through the thought of Husserl, Heidegger, and Derrida to the reaffirmation of hermeneutics in the form of what he calls a "cold hermeneutics," that is, one which does not allow one even to pause or rest in the flux, let alone terminate it, and which does not believe in truth. But again it is hard to recognize Kierkegaard in all of this. Would Kierkegaard ever say, except ironically, that there is no truth? Where is the Savior who says "come unto me and I will give you rest"? Where is the deep sense of grace that informs Kierkegaard's understanding of religious striving, a grace that repeatedly picks us up when we fall and fail? And where, for that matter, is the consciousness of sin? If there is no truth, there is no sin, and anything goes. Along with hermeneutics, Caputo attempts to reinstate ethics in a postmetaphysical form which he calls an "ethics of dissemination" based on compassion and fair play. But if there are no ultimate principles or rules or truths by which to determine what constitutes fair play, the rules of play become an arbitrary decision determined by whoever possesses the power to set the rules of the game. Play then becomes a power play, and there is no way to assure that the voices of "women, children, the mad, the

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ill, the poor, blacks, the religious and moral minorities" will be heard or heeded as Caputo would wish (Caputo, p. 264). Although Kierkegaard believed that ethics as well as metaphysics founders on repentance, he too would reinstate ethics after its fall, but the new ethic he would put in its place is the Christian ethic, which is firmly based on a transcendent and divine command. In the final chapter of his book Caputo sketches a very sensitive portrait of the face of suffering, with whose anguish the religious mode of radical hermeneutics, as he sees it, is sympathetic and protests against. Yet he is hesitant to affirm the religious over a Nietzschean view that affirms and embraces suffering in amor fati, opting instead to waver between them in indecision because of the epistemological undecidability of the truth of their views (Caputo, pp. 287-288). But it is precisely this indecision which, from a Kierkegaardian perspective, confirms the underlying aestheticism of his project. Finally in the flux of life we must choose a face, a name, a character, a lifeview, an ethic by which to identify ourselves and be identified by others. If we do not attempt to integrate ourselves in such a manner our very indecision will itself decide the matter and constitute a choice of the aesthetic.

What Caputo seems to miss, therefore, is the qualitative difference between Kierkegaard and postmodernism, the slippage between his view of repetition and truth and that of deconstruction and a cold hermeneutics. It is one thing to rewrite Kierkegaard, as Heidegger does the Greeks, for example, but it is quite another to claim that Kierkegaard's project is the postmodern project of deconstruction and a radical hermeneutics. Far from embracing deconstruction or irony except as a strategy for dismounting untruth in whatever form it may appear, Kierkegaard's thought constitutes an implied critique of postmodemism just as much as it was explicitly as well as implicitly critical of Hegelian idealism and German romanticism. From his standpoint, which is not the standpoint of irony but of striving in humility, love, faith, and hope to realize that which is existentially true and upbuilding in life, postmodemism would appear, I suspect, as another form or perhaps the culmination of romanticism, neither post-modem nor truly m o d e m i n its Nietzschean aestheticism.

To temper the somewhat heavy-handed seriousness of these conclu- sions, let me end in the postmodem spirit by returning to (that is, repeating "once more with feeling") the line of questioning with which I began: Can the marriage between Kierkegaard and postmodem philosophy be saved? It is apparent that this marriage was not made in heaven but rather is based on a superficial attraction consummated in a marital relation that is

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essentially a misrelation. The only salvation, therefore, is to be found in a mutual affirmation of their differences, in the rupture of identity in divorce. If such a separation is not forthcoming and no foolproof con- traception can be found, a new generation of Kierkegaardian misconcep- tions will surely proliferate, threatening to seduce the unwary.