Kierkegaard and the Self before God: Anatomy of the Abyss

Notes

recto runningfoot 193 preface 1. Barth, “Kierkegaard and the Theologians,” 64. 2. P. T. Forsyth, preface to The Work of Christ, xxxii. The first part of Forsyth’s description forms the title for H. V. Martin’s Kierkegaard: The Melancholy Dane. 3. Cf. Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell, ca. 1790–1793. 4. “. . . separating us in such a way that the passage femininely belongs to the pseudonymous author, the responsibility civilly to me” (“A First and Last Explanation ,” CUP, 627). And: “I am impersonally or personally in the third person a souffleur [prompter] who has poetically produced the authors, whose prefaces in turn are their productions, as their names are also. Thus in the pseudonymous books there is not a single word by me. I have no opinion about them except as third party, no knowledge of their meaning except as a reader, not the remotest private relation to them, since it is impossible to have that to a doubly reflected communication” (“A First and Last Explanation,” CUP, 625–626). At this point, in February 1846, it appears that Kierkegaard intends to “take leave of the pseudonymous authors with doubtful good wishes for their future fate” (“A First and Last Explanation,” CUP, 629). However , this came to mark the end of the so-called “first authorship.” After becoming embroiled in a literary dispute with the satirical paper The Corsair between 1845 and 1846, Kierkegaard began to reawaken as an author. Between 1846 and 1848, he published short discourses and Works of Love without the aid of pseudonyms. Following Kierkegaard’s personal spiritual awakening in 1848, the so-called “second authorship” was initiated. During this period of prodigious productivity (1848–1851), Kierkegaard employed new pseudonyms predominantly as a means of effacing his own authority with regards to the ideal of authentic Christianity. 5. Roger Poole’s Kierkegaard: The Indirect Communication is perhaps the most notable monographic reading along these lines. In riposte to what he sees as the mainline trajectory of univocal readings of Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous works from the 1840s, Poole seeks to elicit “some openness to reading Kierkegaard as a philosopher who uses all the major tools of deconstructive theory long before they were given a local habitation and a name by Derrida” (p. 7). 6. See Hinkson, “Luther and Kierkegaard: Theologians of the Cross,” 28. 7. Dooley, The Politics of Exodus: Søren Kierkegaard’s Ethics of Responsibility, xv. notes 194 kierkegaard and the self before god 8. Ferreira, Love’s Grateful Striving: A Commentary on Kierkegaard’s Works of Love, 11. 9. I have explored this relation further elsewhere, particularly as it pertains to the notion of Anfechtung, in Podmore, “The Lightning and the Earthquake: Kierkegaard on the Anfechtung of Luther.” 10. Anfægtelse is a Danish cognate for the German Anfechtung, both of which center etymologically around the notion of “fight” (Dn. fægte / Gn. fecht): as in to be fought against by, and to fight back against, God. As such, I would prefer to translate these words as something like “spiritual struggle” rather than the conventional “spiritual trial” implemented by the Hong and Hong translations of Kierkegaard’s works. However, for consistency I have chosen to follow the Hongs’ convention of rendering Anfægtelse as “spiritual trial,” periodically retaining Kierkegaard’s original Danish or Luther’s German in parentheses, as a reminder. Nonetheless, Anfægtelse and Anfechtung are difficult to translate into English and, as a result, this important but underexamined category often passes unrecognized for what it is. “Spiritual trial” rightly evokes the tension of “spirit” that is inherent to Kierkegaard’s notion of Anfægtelse, but the crucial etymological root of “fight” is lost in the phrase. A more expansive definition of these terms will emerge over the course of this work, but for now the following must suffice: as Niels Thulstrup warns, the “different meanings in which SK uses the word trial [Anfægtelse] show the difficulties of formulating a definition in which due concern can be paid to both the contents of the term and its range” (“Trial, Test, Tribulation, Temptation,” 116. See this work for a concise exploration of the uses of the term in Kierkegaard’s corpus.) Specifically, it is Kierkegaard’s fertile use of the word as appropriate to the God-relationship that is of most concern for us: “trial as a threat against Christian faith . . . often close to: offence” (ibid., 115). These understandings “point in one specific direction, namely towards the original, etymological, and figurative sense...