The Concept of Reading: Kierkegaard, Irony, and Duality—A Response to Mark Cortes Favis

Abstract

In a recent article in The European Legacy, Mark Cortes Favis argued that the figure of Kierkegaard expressed a tension between two aspects of writing—the Socratic and the Platonic. While Favis is correct to see a duality in Kierkegaard's writing, his article does not fully answer the problem of how we can account for our interpretation of this tension. Given that the duality within Kierkegaard's writing transgresses the boundaries of author and reader, we cannot easily circumscribe any claims on his writing without considering its effect on our reading. Rather, the characteristic duality of his authority manifests itself in a number of ways in the task of identifying the philosophical meaning of his texts. Kierkegaard's relationship to Socrates is thus symptomatic of a number of figural dualities that pervade interpretations of his work. By surveying the ways in which these interpretations draw on the axiom of duality in order to ascribe an authority to Kierkegaard's texts, I suggest Favis's argument that Kierkegaard's writing expresses both Socratic and Platonic aspects should be placed within the wider duality at work in the interpretation of Kierkegaard's work.

Notes

1. Mark Cortes Favis, “The Concept of Writing, with Continual Reference to ‘Kierkegaard’,” The European Legacy 14.5 (2009): 561–72. Subsequent references to this work will be cited in the text.

2. We must, at this point, place the very idea of there being a Kierkegaardian “philosophy” in tentative quote marks here, as the central concern of this paper is the method of reading over and above what is being read. I am, however, reminded on this point of Jason Caro's wry comment on Nietzsche scholarship, which may well be applied in the case of Kierkegaard, too: that articles on the subject which begin with long preludes concerning the complexities of Nietzsche's writing and the impossibility of interpreting it nevertheless routinely present conclusions at the end of the paper doing precisely that.

3. The term maieutics is, of course, borrowed from Socrates’ life: it refers to the idea that, as a philosophical “midwife,” the truth within an interlocutor can be drawn out through questioning his or her beliefs and assumptions.

4. Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Irony with Continual Reference to Socrates, trans. and ed. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), 325.

5. Ronald Grimsley, Kierkegaard: A Biographical Introduction (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1973), 24.

6. Gregor Malantschuk, Kierkegaard's Thought, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971), 190.

7. Kierkegaard, The Concept of Irony, 198.

8. Ibid.

9. Søren Kierkegaard, Stages On Life's Way, trans. and ed. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988).

10. See, for example, Stephen Perkins, “Woman-Bashing in Kierkegaard's ‘In Vino Veritas’: A Reinscription of Plato's Symposium,” in Feminist Interpretations of Søren Kierkegaard, ed. Celine Léon and Sylvia Walsh (Philadelphia, PA: Pennsylvania University Press, 1997), 83–102; Christine Battersby, The Phenomenal Woman (New York: Routledge, 1998).

11. See Malantschuk, Kierkegaard's Thought, 171.

12. The ironies of The Concept of Irony are both contextual and literary. The text is full of various “in-jokes,” with scarcely concealed criticisms of the various judges of his dissertation. The title of the thesis is subversive in itself for judging a concept on the yardstick on an individual (Socrates). At the beginning of the text, Kierkegaard lists fifteen “theses.” But as Sarah Kofman notes, “written in Latin, in a supremely serious academic style, and presented at the beginning as if to guarantee the seriousness of what is to come, these fifteen theses in fact destroy the ‘thesis’. … (A thesis, by definition, must have only one thesis, one that can be clearly summarised and mastered, just as there must only be one concept of irony).” Sarah Kofman, Socrates: Fictions of a Philosopher, trans. Catherine Porter (London: The Athlone Press, 1998), 130.

13. I borrow the term guardrail here from Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatari Chakravorty Spivak (London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 158.

14. Søren Kierkegaard, The Point Of View For My Work As An Author, trans. and ed. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 58.

15. Alain Badiou, Saint Paul, The Foundation of Universalism, trans. Ray Brassier (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 17.

16. Both David Swenson and Walter Lowrie, the translators responsible for bringing Kierkegaard's works to the attention of the English speaking world, are the chief exponents of using “S.K.” in their editorial introductions, and the trend still continues: while Ronald Hall's book refers to “Kierkegaard” in the main body of his text, he uses the abbreviation S.K. to support introductory quotations. In some cases, the substitution of S.K. for Kierkegaard is freely, and seemingly indeterminately, applied. See, for example, George E. Arbaugh and George B. Arbaugh, Kierkegaard's Authorship (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1968). Such a substitution is, nonetheless, noticeable enough to be significant. To this end, the abbreviation “K” has a similar operative effect as “S.K.”

17. Derrida discusses the instabilities of merging biography and philosophical explanation—a kind of “bio-logic” in that sense—in The Ear of the Other, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1988), 4–6.

18. In George Steiner's work, for example, “S.K.” is iterated almost as the embodiment of the act of (Kierkegaard) writing: “Sharp-edged as are the assumed guises of S.K., they also achieve effects of dispersal, of dissemination. … Kierkegaard purposes to remain elusive also to himself.” George Steiner, “The Wound of Negativity: Two Kierkegaard Texts,” in Kierkegaard: A Critical Reader, ed. Jonathan Rée and Jane Chamberlain (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 103. That is to say, while Steiner makes the philosophical point that Kierkegaard's authorship is itself a space of dispersal, in order to make that very argument he nevertheless relies upon a determinate authorial figure, the one who writes. See also, Arbaugh and Arbaugh, Kierkegaard's Authorship, 43; Ronald L. Hall, Word and Spirit: A Kierkegaardian Critique of the Modern Age (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1993), 5.

19. I once again borrow this term from Derrida, this time through his account of how philosophy negotiates “tradition” in “An Idea of Flaubert: ‘Plato's Letter’.” See Jacques Derrida, Psyche: Inventions of the Other, trans. Peter Starr, ed. Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007), 300–301.

20. See Walter Lowrie, Kierkegaard (London: Oxford University Press, 1938).

21. James Collins, The Mind of Kierkegaard (Chicago, IL: H. Regnery Co., 1953), 36; see also Lowrie, Kierkegaard.

22. Julia Watkin, “The Logic of Søren Kierkegaard's Misogyny, 1854–1855,” in Léon and Walsh, Feminist Interpretations of Søren Kierkegaard, 70.

23. For a more detailed discussion on the relationship between Regina Olsen and Kierkegaard's irony, see Kofman, Socrates: Fictions of a Philosopher, 140; Sylviane Agacinski, Aparte: Conceptions and Deaths of Søren Kierkegaard, trans. Kevin Newmark (Gainesville, FL: University Presses of Florida, 1988), 137.

24. The “secret” is not always tied to Regina, of course. Other commentators, most prominently Christine Battersby in The Phenomenal Woman : Metaphysics and the Patterns of Identity ([London: Polity Press, 1998], 153), have suggested that the “secret” Kierkegaard often refers to in his journals, but does not write about directly, is related to the estrangement of his father. Battersby's evidence, however, is less than convincing.

25. In making this point, I have drawn on a hybrid set of evidence which blurs the distinction between the text's interpretative discourse—the range of different readings a text inspires—and the text itself. It could well be raised that only the latter is a reliable source, as the former is too vast and unwieldy to constitute serious evidence. Not every reader invokes an “S.K.,” just as not every reader aligns Kierkegaard unproblematically with Socrates. Nevertheless, I would argue that any reading of Kierkegaard must face this uncanny element which his writing “without authority” produces.

26. Peter Fenves, “Chatter”: Language and History in Kierkegaard (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993).

27. Søren Kierkegaard, Prefaces /Writing Sampler, trans. and ed. Todd W. Nichol (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997).

28. Pat Bigelow, Kierkegaard and the Problem of Writing (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1987), 110.