Decision and the Existential Turn by Primož Repar (review)

The director of the Central European Research Institute Søren Kierkegaard in Ljubljana, the Slovenian philosopher Dr. Primož Repar is author of well over twenty books in various languages and translator of Kierkegaard's writings into Slovenian. Together with Jasna Koteska's Kierkegaard on Consumerism (of which see my review in this journal, vol. 33, no. 1, 2017, 149–150), Repar's Decision and the Existential Turn is an inaugural volume in the series Collection Aut, published by Apokalipsa (Ljubljana) and Kierkegaard Circle (Toronto). Taking up the question of choice as a major existentialist concern from Kierkegaard through Sartre and the French phenomenologists, Repar is centrally interested in the condition and philosophy of the subjective thinker and seeks "new formations of identity, which should allow for an asymmetrical relation at the very heart of ethics" (175). Of special concern to Repar is the quest for meaning in life through the choices made by the individual. For Repar, in the navigation of the crises of our time by the individual, the "existential turn" in his or her views on life becomes crucial while the person experiences the internal strife between the illusion of omnipotence, together with belief in infinite possibilities, and the sense of uncertainty, incapacity, hopelessness, and loss of self.

This is a highly challenging work in and of itself, but will perhaps be even more daunting for many readers of this journal because the author routinely draws his primary subject, the philosophy of Kierkegaard (whom he credits as the inventor of "subjective choice" [98]), into engagement with the conceptual and philosophical frameworks of a host of mainly Eastern European thinkers—or thinkers from the eastern portion of "Central Europe"—who are not often invoked in mainstream Western European and North American discussions of Kierkegaard. To be sure, Repar engages a number of other figures whose philosophies or critical theories constitute standard fare in Western humanistic inquiry, from Augustine, Descartes, Hegel, and Nietzsche through Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Ricoeur, and Derrida. Also well known in the West, and routinely drawn upon by Repar, are the Czech phenomenologist Jan Patočka (1907–1977), Václav Havel, the late Czech writer and former president of both Czechoslovakia (1989–1992) and then—after that nation's split into the Czech Republic and Slovakia—the Czech Republic (1993–2003), and Slavoj Žižek, the Slovenian-born theorist and culture critic. Less familiar, however, may be quite a few other Central Europeans Repar cites with regularity, such as the Slovenian philosopher and ethicist Miklavž Ocepek (1963–2005) on totalitarianism as a hallmark of our times (87); the Slovenian poet Jure Detela (1951–92) on modern "emptiness" (147); Ocepek's and Detela's compatriot, the philosopher Mladen Dolar (b. 1951), who connects Kierkegaard, Freud, and Lacan through the notion of repetition (64–65n83); and the Czech political scientist Pavel Barša (b. 1960) on moral rationalism and "the Rule" (164), to mention but a few examples. For this reason, as background reading on the reception of Kierkegaard in the particular region of Europe from which Repar is writing, Western readers of his book would do well to consult Jon Stewart's (ed.) Kierkegaard's International Reception, Tome II: Southern, Central and Eastern Europe, Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, volume 8 (Farnham, England; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009).

Decision and the Existential Turn has obvious political motivations. In a sense, with its reverent allusions to "Charter 77" (78, 120, 139n202) and consecration of Patočka as a dissident "martyr" (139) of the Prague Spring, the book is an extended philosophical tribute to the revolutionary championing of human rights that came to a head in Czechoslovakia in 1968 and onward, up through the Velvet Revolution of 1989. Given its author's manifest disdain for materialist, technocratic culture, the book also has unacknowledged though detectible spiritual roots in the Paris...