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Chapter 8. Kierkegaard's Posse
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8 Kierkegaard’s Posse T h e a t e r a n d theory share a common etymology and, as we have seen, a vexed history. At issue is the interpretation of thea, looking, of its site, theatron, of the onlooker or spectator, theoros, and, finally, of the spectacle itself. Ever since Plato and Aristotle, philosophy has sought to reduce the importance of the scenic, medial dimension by comprehending it primarily as tragedy.1 The year 1843, in which Kierkegaard’s essay Repetition was published, marks a decisive turning point in this history. It is as though a certain blockage of ‘‘traditional’’ philosophical paradigms—which Kierkegaard above all identified with the thought of Hegel—necessitated a rethinking of the relationship of theater not just to theory, but to a notion of movement that the hallowed philosophical opposition of theory and practice could no longer adequately articulate. The first paragraph of Gjentagelsen2 sets the scene: When the Eleatics denied motion, Diogenes, as everyone knows, stepped up [optraadte] as an opponent. He really stepped up, because he didn’t say a word but merely paced back and forth a few times, thereby assuming that he had sufficiently refuted them. When I was occupied for some time . . . with the question of repetition—whether or not it is possible, what importance it has, whether something gains or loses in being repeated —I suddenly had the thought: You can, after all, take a trip to Berlin; you have been there once before, and now you can prove to yourself whether a repetition is possible and what importance it has. At home I had been practically immobilized by this question. Say what you will, this question will play a very important role in modern philosophy, for repetition is a crucial expression for what ‘‘recollection’’ was to the Greeks. Just as PAGE 200 200 ................. 11043$ $CH8 11-04-04 08:11:54 PS K i e r k e g a a r d ’ s P o s s e they thought that all knowing is a recollecting, modern philosophy will teach that all life is a repetition. . . . Repetition and recollection are the same movement, except in opposite directions , for what is recollected has been, is repeated backward, whereas genuine repetition is recollected forward. Repetition, therefore, if it is possible, makes a person happy, whereas recollection makes him unhappy—assuming, of course, that he gives himself time to live and does not promptly at birth find an excuse to sneak out of life again, for example, [under the pretext] that he has forgotten something. (p. 131)3 This text stands almost alone in the nineteenth century for the prescience with which it announces a new kind of philosophy. Only Nietzsche, some forty years later, will have similar foresight in the opening pages of Beyond Good and Evil, which predict the coming of a ‘‘new species of philosophers,’’ no longer bound to the oppositional logic of traditional metaphysics, ‘‘philosophers of the dangerous ‘perhaps .’’’4 But the opening gambit in Gjentagelsen does not merely proclaim the need for a new philosophy of ‘‘repetition’’ to supplant and replace that of ‘‘recollection,’’ which has prevailed since the Greeks. By contrast to Nietzsche, Kierkegaard formulates this challenge in a style that is fundamentally alien to philosophical discourse, not so much because of the prominent role of first-person ‘‘narrative’’— which is to be found, for instance, in such inaugural texts as Descartes’ Meditations—but rather because of the abrupt shifting from one discursive mode to another: from third-person to first-person narrative, from autobiographical anecdote to historical reflection, from seriousness to the jocular, which is unusual if not unique in writing usually considered to be ‘‘philosophical.’’ And yet what is perhaps most unusual is the use of a ‘‘pseudonymic’’ narrator-author. This confuses the question of authorship and of authority. Who, after all, is really speaking here? ‘‘Constantin Constantius’’? What, then, about ‘‘Kierkegaard’’? This sort of confusion is generally associated with texts considered to be ‘‘literary.’’ It is precisely what philosophy, ever since its inception with Plato, has unequivocally condemned: ‘‘When the poet speaks in the person of another . . . he assimilates his style to that of the person who, as he informs you, is going to speak. . . . And this assimilation of himself to another, either by the use of voice or gesture, is the imitation of the person whose character he assumes. . . . PAGE 201 201 ................. 11043$ $CH8 11-04-04 08:11:54 PS [54.196.106.106] Project MUSE...