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ABSTRACT
The aim of this essay is to reflect on the place and importance of the question of address and to show how it comes to the fore in Søren Kierkegaard’s writings. What shall be attempted, with regard to Kierkegaard’s already widely recognized renown as an existential thinker, is to catch a glimpse of issues that make up the larger background in which the question of address is embedded. In doing so, the essay explores several features of Kierkegaard’s inquiry into the question of existence in the Concluding Unscientific Postscript and connect them with the notion of the reader. This latter notion provides a way of understanding the singularity of voice, while offering an account of the testimony to existence. After a brief recapitulation, the essay identifies in conclusion unresolved issues relating to speech, silence, confidentiality, and listening.
KEYWORDS:
Notes
1 Blanchot, The one who was standing apart from me, 66.
2 Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 254–5; hereafter abbreviated as CUP; Afsluttende uvidenskabelig Efterskrift, 231; hereafter abbreviated as SKS 7.
3 See Nancy, Being Singular Plural, xvi.
4 This way of understanding the tradition, inspired by Heidegger, maintains that differences inherent to the tradition(s) of philosophical thinking are enacted as we think the tradition. Cf. Heidegger, Being and Time, 20.
5 Derrida, “Of an Apocalyptic Tone Recently Adopted in Philosophy”, 66.
6 For a discussion of indirection communication, see Grøn, Subjektivitet og negativitet, 249–252.
7 For a discussion of “double-reflection”, see Westphal, Becoming a Self, 63–64.
8 Nancy, The Discourse of the Syncope, 19. The following discussion of Kant is indebted to Nancy, The Discourse of the Syncope, 22–45.
9 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 103/A xvii-xviii; hereafter abbreviated as CPR.
10 This is not to dismiss the significance of Hegel and the Danish Hegelians but to simply introduce Kant’s notion of system. For a discussion of Hegel’s and the Hegelians’ influence, see Stewart, Kierkegaard’s Relation to Hegel Reconsidered. For a detailed analysis of the development of Kierkegaard’s writing as a contrastive genre to German idealism, see Stewart, “Kierkegaard’s Use of Genre in the Struggle with German Philosophy”, 81–95.
11 I have tried to describe a few traits of this thinking elsewhere, see Hansen, “Thinking of Existence”, 91–111.
12 In the Postscript, Kierkegaard determines mathematics as that which has “no relation whatever toward or from existence [Tilværelse]” (CUP 110; SKS 7, 107).
13 See Nancy, The Discourse of the Syncope, 39.
14 Grøn, “Time, Courage, Selfhood: Reflections on Kierkegaard’s Discourse ‘To Preserve One’s Soul in Patience’”, 160.
15 Heidegger, Being and Time, 407. Although Heidegger exempts Kierkegaard’s The Concept of Anxiety, he nonetheless maintains that Kierkegaard remains entangled in the assumptions of ancient ontology as handed down through Hegel.
16 It would take us too far out of our way to consider in detail how the question of Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous works and the discourses agree, and how they differ. It is worth noting, however, that like “the development of the pseudonymous authorship itself, the emergence of ‘Kierkegaard’ from amongst the multiple concealments and hints of both earlier and later pseudonyms is an internally differentiated event that we can only understand if we are willing to attend to the many ways in which ‘Kierkegaard,’ as it were, ‘speaks.’” (Pattison, “Pseudonyms? What Pseudonyms? There were no Pseudonyms … ”, 243–266; 266).
17 E.g. in the edifying discourses (1843–44) and in Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits (1847). The emphasis on listening becomes even clearer in Practice in Christianity (1850): “My listener, you to whom my discourse is addressed!” (Kierkegaard, Practice in Christianity, 156; hereafter abbreviated as PC; Indøvelse i Christendom, 159; hereafter abbreviated as SKS 12).
18 Kierkegaard, Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions, 5; hereafter abbreviated as TD; Tre Taler ved tænkte Leiligheder, 389; hereafter abbreviated as SKS 5. Thus, if we understand Kierkegaard’s edifying writings in terms of its genre, it is because it signals toward a genre beyond genre, as it were, a genre described in terms of singularity as each time its own.
19 Here I play on the two possible resources of the Danish word “Tilegnelsen”: as dedication and as appropriation.
20 Grøn, “Time, Courage, Selfhood”, 160.
21 Kierkegaard, Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks, 53, translation modified; Journalerne NB, NB2, NB3, NB4, NB5, 54. If one acknowledges the uncertainty as to whether or not the reader exists, then one may say that there is no longer any exchange between writer and reader. However, this raises the question as to whether there is a gift that remains in the disappearance of the exchange—for instance, when Kierkegaard in the preface to the Two Upbuilding Discourses (1844) speaks of the reader “who with the right hand accepts [modtager]” without knowing, one might add, “what is offered with the right hand.” (Kierkegaard, Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses, 179; abbreviated hereafter as EUD; Opbyggelige taler, 1843-1844, 183; hereafter abbreviated as SKS 5).
22 Derrida, Sovereignties in Question, 42. Anonymity is in this sense the weight carried by every reader who must bear witness to who she is in bearing witness to her own existence. (More on this later.)
23 For a discussion, see Pattison, “A Dialogical Approach to Kierkegaard's Upbuilding Discourses”, 185–202, 141–168.
24 This notion alludes to Nancy, “Sharing Voices”, 211–259.
25 Nancy, “Responding for Sense”, 143.
26 Pattison, “‘Who’ is the Discourse?”, 28–45, 36. I am thinking here of Derrida’s “destinerrancy”. See, for instance, Bennington and Derrida, Circumfession, 313–314.
27 As Peggy Kamuf argues in Book of Addresses, “the addressee constitutes the sender, who constitutes the addressee, the address of the addressee.” (Kamuf, Book of Addresses, 285). My treatment here owes much to Kamuf's insightful work on addresses.
28 Nancy, The Inoperative Community, 76.
29 Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, 258.
30 Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, 259.
31 Nancy, “Responding for Sense”, 144.
32 Kierkegaard, Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits, 28; hereafter abbreviated as UD; Opbyggelige Taler i forskjellig Aand, 142; hereafter abbreviated as SKS 8.
33 This notion of communication has been theorized by Nancy, The Inoperative Community, 64.
34 Derrida, Sovereignties in Question, 68.
35 Blanchot, “Kierkegaard’s Journals”, 17–22. See Greenspan, “Maurice Blanchot”, 63–81.
36 Nancy, Multiple Arts, 29.
37 This idea of faith is indebted to Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge”, 58. Derrida finds in Kierkegaard a “great example of some paradoxical way of contesting religious discourse in the name of a faith that cannot be simply mastered or domesticated or taught or logically understood, a faith that is paradoxical” (Derrida, “The Villanova Roundtable”, 21–22).
38 Kierkegaard, Works of Love, 151; hereafter abbreviated as WL; Kjerlighedens Gjerninger, 152–153; hereafter abbreviated as SKS 9.
39 Augustine, Confessions, 120; Book III, vi. My understanding here is indebted to Nancy, Adoration, 75.
40 Kierkegaard, Christian Discourses, 236; Christelige Taler, 243. I shall not enter into the question of what conscience is, let alone reflect upon the obvious yet striking Heideggerian parallels. See Heidegger, Being and Time, 260–288. For a discussion of the idea of conscience in Kierkegaard’s work, see Welz, “Keeping the Secret of Subjectivity”, 155–170.
41 Kierkegaard, The Lily in the Field and the Bird of the Air, 17; hereafter abbreviated as WA; Lilien paa Marken og Fuglen under Himlen, 22; hereafter abbreviated as SKS 11.
42 Heidegger, Plato’s Sophist, 64.
43 See Heidegger, Being and Time, 273.
44 Which nevertheless abandons us to the “right to have rights”, as Arendt has noted, leaving open who an existing human being may be—that is, to put it in Hamacher’s words, “the possibility offered to the existence of each and every one whoever or whatever he, she or it may be” (Hamacher, “The Right to Have Rights (Four-and-a-Half Remarks)”, 353).