Kierkegaard, Battersby and Feminism

Abstract

In her wonderful book The Phenomenal Woman (1998), Christine Battersby presents Kierkegaard as the philosopher ‘who captures the internal divisions and conflicting demands of the subject of modernity – (rather than) Adorno, who was profoundly influenced by Kierkegaard, but who also neutralises Kierkegaard’. Kierkegaard, for Battersby, is the philosopher who offers a model for ‘rethinking temporality’ and who is most helpful in terms of her overall project of modelling personal and individual identity ‘in terms of the female’. Battersby's project of valorizing Kierkegaard contrasts with that of Wanda Warren Berry, for whom Kierkegaard, or at least ‘A’, the pseudonymous author of Either/Or, fails to depict the point of view of women. In her article, Alison Assiter sets out to challenge Berry's reading through a discussion of several of Kierkegaard's female characters. She seeks to extend Battersby's view of Kierkegaard and concurs with Battersby that Kierkegaard's ontology is strongly at variance with the liberal Enlightenment model. But the author seeks to move beyond Battersby's work and suggests that the women who appear predominantly in the ‘aesthetic’ works of Kierkegaard function also as exemplary of his primarily ‘religious’ view of the person. Kierkegaard, it is suggested, offers an ontology of the self as a vulnerable subject as well as a critique of the Kantian ethical ideal. This Kantian ideal is implicit in Hegel and it also underlies the perspective outlined by Berry.

Keywords:

• vulnerability
• Kant
• Kierkegaard
• women
• infinite
• paradox
• passion

Notes

¹I do not call this his ‘later’ work since two of the religious ‘Upbuilding Discourses’ (of his ‘right hand’, written in his own name) were written in 1843.

²Kierkegaard wrote 18 works he called ‘Upbuilding Discourses’, which he published in his own name alongside the pseudonymous pieces. These appear to be religious works. Several ‘Upbuilding Discourses’ were published in 1843, the same year as the ‘aesthetic’ piece Either/Or.

³Earlier in the text of Either/Or, where ‘A’ extols the virtues of sound and of music, Mozart, and Don Giovanni particularly, is described as ‘supreme among all classic works’ (Kierkegaard 1987: 58).

⁴There is evidence, indeed, that Kierkegaard was influenced by Hume, particularly by his discussion of miracles. But he was no doubt affected by other aspects of Hume's writings (see Kivelä 1998).

⁵This subject, as characterized, for example, by Fineman, is embodied and, arising from this embodiment, it is likely to experience ‘the ever present possibility of harm, injury and misfortune from mildly adverse to catastrophically devastating events, whether accidental, devastating or otherwise’ (Fineman 2008: 9). For Fineman, and for Kierkegaard too, the vulnerable subject is a universal one that might replace the Kantian or the Cartesian autonomous rational being.

⁶In a recent unpublished paper, Battersby (2010) challenges the view that Kierkegaard did not know that she was a woman.

⁷Even if this is a famously ironic remark by Kierkegaard, he liked her work enough to write a very long review of it.

⁸It is interesting, even if it is accidental, that it is the man—Lusard—and not the woman who is described as the ‘object’ here.

⁹Even if one does not accept Kojève's (1980, 2000) reading of Hegel, where history effectively comes to an end with the French Revolution, there is no doubt that, for Hegel, the modern state is the ‘actuality’ of the ethical idea. Self-consciousness finds in the modern state ‘as its essence and end and product of its activity, its substantive freedom’ (Hegel 1942: 257). It is, moreover, the focus on the modern state as ‘the hieroglyph of reason’ (ibid.: 279) that Kierkegaard challenges.

¹⁰Simone de Beauvoir (1967) posed the difficulty this might represent in The Ethics of Ambiguity, when she wrote that oppression might permeate subjectivity to the point where the consciousness of the oppressed becomes indistinguishable from the oppressive situation.

¹¹As suggested, for example, by Critchley (2008).