Letters to Power: Public Advocacy Without Public Intellectuals

Chapter 5 Hidden Behind the Dash: Techniques of Unrecognizability

I regard this as precisely my task, always to be capable of what the vanity and secular-mindedness of the world hanker after as supreme. —søren kierkegaard A Defense Turned Crisis Like most oral defenses in Golden Age Denmark, that of Søren Kierkegaard’s 1841 dissertation “On the Concept of Irony” was performed in Latin. Unlike other mid-nineteenth-century defenses, however, it attracted a remarkably large and hostile audience. In addition to two official opponents, a handful of educated elites came forward to challenge the young Kierkegaard. Among them were two of Denmark’s leading Hegelians: Andreas Frederik Beck and Johan Ludvig Heiberg. Kierkegaard parried their critiques with ease. But Beck refused to accept defeat. Soon after the defense, his side of their argument appeared in The Fatherland, a liberal Copenhagen newspaper. It was the language of Kierkegaard’s dissertation that bothered Beck. Although happily stripped of “narrow-minded scholastic terminology,” it too closely resembled “an informal chat,” sounding more like “a conversation while walking in the street” than something fit for “the printed page.”1 Kierkegaard bit back with a response so ironic in tone that his dissertation immediately dropped from public discussion. Prudently, Heiberg let his end of the argument slide. But Kierkegaard never forgot the initial attack of this “half-educated Hegelian robber.”2 5 hidden behind the dash: techniques of unrecognizability McCormick_05.indd 109 9/21/11 3:32 PM Seven years after his widely discussed oral defense, Kierkegaard published his own critical essay in The Fatherland. A brief article with a wordy title, “The Crisis and a Crisis in the Life of an Actress” appeared in the summer of 1848 as an encomium to Denmark’s leading actress, Johanne Luise Heiberg, who just so happened to be married to Johan Ludvig Heiberg. Although “The Crisis” appeared under the pseudonym “Inter et Inter” and nowhere mentions the name of its “admired artist,” readers were quick to identify Kierkegaard as its author, Fru Heiberg as its subject, and themselves as its addressees. Many read this feuilleton article as a celebration of her recent portrayal of Shakespeare ’s Juliet, a role to which she had returned after eighteen years, and with noticeably less applause from Danish audiences. But praising Luise Heiberg was not the only reason Kierkegaard published “The Crisis.” When situated in his broader philosophical project and the historical circumstances to which its publication was a response, this “little esthetic essay” can be shown to function as a highly wrought political critique of her husband, J. L. Heiberg.3 By celebrating Luise Heiberg, who was still enormously popular among Danish citizens, and simultaneously attacking her husband, who was then notorious for his intellectual and cultural elitism, Kierkegaard hoped to appeal to middle- and lower-middle-class readers, at once distinguishing himself from previous generations of educated elites and identifying himself (and his work) with the populist, egalitarian ideals of an emerging democratic public culture. In this sense, the addressee of his article was neither a crowned prince nor a cultured elite, but instead a mass society. And the rhetoric with which he engaged its constituents was not simply one of praise and blame. Nor was it in service to a politics of representation, in which Kierkegaard purported to speak for them. On the contrary, his was a rhetoric of courtship. As we shall see, “The Crisis” was among the first—and certainly among the most cunning—subversions of the modern system of power that continues to position educated elites as spokespersons for “the people.” That this subversion also took place in a public culture defined by its anti-intellectualism makes it even more interesting—and even more worthy of our careful consideration. The Public and Its Problems, 1830–1849 The first edition of The Fatherland appeared in 1834—the same year in which Denmark held its first democratic elections. Its mission was singularly political: “responsible representative government with popular control in particular over financial matters.”4 And its first major victory came in 1837, 110 letters to power McCormick_05.indd 110 9/21/11 3:32 PM when King Frederick VI allowed his royal subjects to elect town councils. A second came in 1841, when the range of representative government was extended to include counties and parishes. From the urban middle classes to the smallest agrarian communities, political consciousness was everywhere on the rise. A more fully “national” Denmark was visibly emerging...