Carlson, Marvin. Theories of the Theatre. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Crites, Stephen. New York: Harper and Row. De Sousa, Elisabete. Kearney, Richard. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Koldtoft, Lone. Kierkegaard in Golden Age Denmark. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Kirmmse, Bruce. Perkins, Law, David R. Mooney, Edward F. Aldershot: Ashgate. Pattison, George. Kierkegaard: The Aesthetic and the Religious. New York: St. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Puchner, Martin. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Stewart, Jon. Stock, Timothy. Berlin and Boston: Walter de Gruyter. Tammany, Jane Ellert. New York: Philosophical Library. Weber, Samuel. Theatricality as Medium. New York: Fordham University Press. Westfall, Joseph. His research interests lie at the intersection of phenomenology, performance theory and aesthetics, especially where relevant to questions of religion and ethics. He has special interest in the relationship between ethics, deception and humor.
If it achieves hallucinatory satisfaction, then there is another register here. Desire is satisfied in another fashion than in an effective satisfaction. It is the source, the fundamental means of introduction of a fantasy as such. Here there's another order, which doesn't achieve any objectivity, but which by itself defines the questions raised by the register of the imaginary II What exactly are the questions raised by the imaginary register?
As was explained in chapter three, the imaginary structuration of human psychic life — as Lacan interprets its precipitation in the mirror stage — sets up the dual structure of the human individual as divided between the subject and the ego as a product of identification. Further, the anticipation of unity, the gestalt of his or her own image, comes to structure the imaginary aspect of all objects perceived to have an identity outside of the subject, and thus the structuration of the ego is at the same time the structuration of the subject's world.
They will all have a fundamentally anthropomorphic character, even egomorphic we could say. In this imaginary register, there is no question of objectivity. The narcissistic relation which is established by the imaginary structuration has an impact on the way the subject perceives objects in relation to his or her ideals, and the attainment of the object, far from satisfying the desire for this ideal, is merely a stepping stone in relation to an ideal unity beyond any particular objective real satisfaction.
Thus desire — as opposed to need — can only be satisfied ineffectually. That is to say, along the path of repetition, through the insistence of the unconscious, by leaps and jumps. The ego can fantasize the realization of a desire it does not understand, but this involves the individual in a cycle of self-deception, that has no real satisfaction associated with it.
Inasmuch as this produces a tension in the subject, the efficacy of unconscious thought will see to it that the subject returns to the missed encounter with the Real again and again. Here Lacan explicitly evokes the young man of Repetition and emphasizes the way in which the imaginary aspect of the young man's love involves him in a transformation of the real into the self-involvement of an imaginary nostalgia: I would ask you to re-read Kierkegaard's essay on Repetition, so dazzling in its lightness and ironic play, so truly Mozartian in the way, so reminiscent of Don Giovanni, it abolishes the mirages of love.
With great acuteness, and in a quite unanswerable way, Kierkegaard stresses the feature that, in his love, the young man — whose portrait Kierkegaard paints for us with a mixture of emotion and derision — addresses only to himself through the medium of memory XI There is a sense in which the young man's love has elevated his consciousness to the wonder of the eternal, as it presents itself in harmony with a poetic consciousness that posits the possibility of a self-sufficient recollection, and this is what Lacan picks up on.
By virtue of a poetic consciousness, the young man can comprehend the eternal as a separate, higher realm divorced from actuality, and insofar as he is free to distance himself from actuality, this imaginative ascendancy to the eternal is enough to justify a whole lifetime of recollection. Yet as we have described the situation, the young man cannot be satisfied with the transcendent poetic consciousness to which he has ascended, insofar as he does not feel himself to be free in relation to the beloved.
In order to regain his innocence he must either become a husband or abandon the beloved forever. Constantius recommends that the young man make himself into a scoundrel so that the young woman will be forced to break with him, freeing him to the life of the mind.
The difficult alternative is to affect a returning movement, whereby he grasps the beloved even as he wills the downfall of his own self- love. The first movement of self-love implies the possibility of a second movement, and Constantius further describes the young man's predicament when he asserts that: This intensified recollecting is erotic love's eternal expression at the beginning, is the sign of genuine erotic love. But on the other hand it takes an ironic resiliency to be able to use it.
This he lacked; his soul was too compliant for that. It may be true that a person's life is over and done with in the first moment, but there must also be the vital force to slay this death and transform it into life. In the first dawning of erotic love, the present and the future contend with each other to find an eternal expression, and this recollecting is indeed eternity's flowing back into the present — that is, when this recollecting is sound R In contrast to the pursuit of an eternal expression through recollection, human existence comes up short at the outset, its temporary circumstances seem wholly eclipsed in the possibility of devoting oneself to the eternal by way of a poetic consciousness.
This is the notion that the young man compliantly accepts, that in comparison to a cultivated view of the eternal, actually loving someone is somehow an inferior project that is only valuable in its capacity to provide occasions for reflecting on eternity's perfection.
This is the marvelous possibility of repetition, of which I will have much more to say in the final chapter. In this position, the girl's actuality is behind him, as the motivating force that has brought him here, and he must, in some sense, turn back from this vista in order to actualize his love as erotic.
Willing this possibility is precisely the condition for willing repetition, and great earnestness is required. His erotic love was not to be, because the element of self-love in the young man's poetic awakening is the limit of his capability, and the young woman recedes into the background. Once again, the girl was not an actuality but a reflection of motions within him and an incitement of them. The girl has enormous importance, and he will never be able to forget her, but her importance lies not in herself but in her relation to him.
She is, so to speak, the border of his being, but such a relation is not erotic R Given a Lacanian reading, the young man's fascination with his beloved and her return of this love evinces the sense that in his exaltation he has seen a new possibility for himself, a new life and a new being. Yet this fascinating reflection and its captative effect on the young man in the first moment irresistibly hardens into the solidity of a self-enclosed ideal, which immediately separates itself from the condition of its possibility.
The young man sees the image of his love, not as a reflection of the real, but as a transformed reality in itself, and in this he suddenly confounds the image of his beloved with the elevation of his own consciousness. As this image solidifies with the strength of his fascination and becomes autonomous, the beloved is slipping away as a mere condition for the image's coming to be. Her actuality is lost through the looking glass, if I may put it that way. For the young man, the beloved has become the mirage, and it is precisely this fact that leads the young man away from her.
It is clear in this context why Lacan makes an example of the young man's love. The imaginary structuration of the human psyche makes it possible that the smoke and mirrors through which the beloved slips away and the lover is left by him- or herself are not taken up subjectively as illusions, but as a higher representation of reality in terms of which individuals seek to understand themselves on a higher level.
While this is only a schema, as it were, of the young man's poetic relation to the eternal, we can see how this first split between the actual and the ideal is brought about by an imaginary structuration and how the dialectic of desire is assumed as a perpetual conflict in human life. Haufniensis references Kant's aesthetics in this regard, but in this context, I find it more illuminating to make a reference to Kant's own critique of metaphysics. I believe that we can understand the notion that metaphysics has an interest in repetition insofar as it is a transcendent and moreover a religious category.
For as Kant says in the Critique of Pure Reason, there are three unavoidable problems for metaphysics: God, freedom and immortality Kant Metaphysicians hope to solve these problems by erecting vast edifices of metaphysical reasoning, and believing it to have the building power and apodicticity of mathematics, they direct the efficacy of pure reason mistakenly toward these questions in a dogmatic way, without checking its powers and foundations. The trouble with airless space, however, is that living things can't breathe in it, let alone fly.
In the abstraction of a hypothesis, the real requirements of existence are forgotten. The homogeneity of abstract reasoning can do many things, but it cannot tackle the sudden and at times unexpected contingencies of human life.
Kierkegaard takes an even more radical stance, and we can interpret his position as entailing that the questions of God, freedom and immortality are questions which are inappropriately framed within metaphysics as a disinterested, abstractly reasoning discipline. These questions may be the unavoidable interest of metaphysics, but when it comes down to why these questions are important — and indeed unavoidable — for human beings, the rarefied atmosphere of metaphysics is a suffocating, airless vacuum.
The interest of metaphysics as an abstract intellectual discipline pales in comparison to the interest of an existential subject in questions that have to do with some aspect of his or her actual circumstances in relation to something that transcends them, especially if something is perceived to be at stake in the subject's interest.
Thus repetition, as a transcendent category, is too transcendent for Constantius, who as a disinterested observer approaches his subject with only esthetic and psychological interest, not the infinite interest required to will the movement of repetition.
Haufniensis poses the problem thus: In the realm of spirit, the task is [ At this point the finite spirit despairs. This is something Constantin has suggested by stepping aside himself and by allowing repetition to break forth in the young man by virtue of the religious CA 18fn. The concept of inwardness in Kierkegaard is relatively straightforward in this context, denoting the same critique of objectivity from another angle. When one seeks to hold a view or decide on an important existential question on the basis of something external to one's own existential situation, that is to say, the particularity of one's own experience, one lacks the earnestness required to understand what is genuinely at stake in the question.
Here he reminds us that the issue of Christianity is not an issue with regard to truth, but with regard to the individual's relationship to it. The young man is in a similarly ambiguous position. He wishes for a resolution of his problem, and yet addresses himself to that interest in a poetic way, according to his newly acquired poetic consciousness. This happening would only gain its religious significance if the young man himself were religious, and were prepared to relate himself to his repetition religiously.
As it stands, he is a poet, and so his repetition frees him to the life of an aesthete, even as he keeps the religious resonance of his experience as a secret he cannot explain.
If repetition is a religious category, too transcendent for the dispassionate observer, then it becomes clear to what extent the young man's interest leads him to wish for a repetition. The crisis of his circumstance rests in the fact that the young man has experienced his poetic awakening as the ascent to a new perspective, a new ideal to which he has become passionately attached.
If the harmonious perspective has been left behind, what is there to be sought for in this second movement? In this discussion a sense of determination will present itself as a condition for a human individual in this modern perspective. In this vein, it is striking that both thinkers have identified the submission of the human individual to the limit of an ambiguous law, in relation to which human life comes to acquire a sense of tremulousness and tension which both Kierkegaard and Lacan describe as the anxiety of a freedom negatively defined.
The Crisis of Reflection: Anxiety, Longing and Nostalgia As may well be imagined, the notion of sin runs through the considerable depth and breadth of the Kierkegaardian corpus, and a full treatment would warrant a study of several volumes. First is the issue as to how the individual's untruth is made manifest in relation to a law he or she cannot understand, as typified by Adam's ambiguous relation to God's prohibition in the garden.
Second are the consequences of propagation, insofar as a derived being is predisposed to sin, which we will have provisionally defined — with Climacus — as the polemical stance of the individual as untruth over and against the transcendent truth of God. Before entering into this treatment, let us remember our framework. If we orient the discussion around the difficulties of the young man in Repetition, the issue of innocence or guilt in relation to the beloved is an element of the crisis to which he is submitted.
At first, it is only a longing for the beloved. When he finds that she returns his love and his poetic consciousness is awakened, it is a longing to be released from the ambiguous sense of guilt he feels in relation to her actual person, from whom his new consciousness has alienated him. The pseudonym Virgilius Haufniensis' articulation of anxiety in terms of the insufficiency of longing gives us a clue to the young man's predicament.
As he says: One often fails to see that expressions and concepts such as longing, eager longing, expectation, etc. A person is not in this state of expectation by accident etc. The expression for such a longing is anxiety, for the state out of which he longs to be proclaims itself in anxiety, and it proclaims itself because the longing alone is not sufficient to save him CA How do human beings find themselves longing for a preceding state, in contrast to which the present state of expectation manifests itself in anxiety?
This is a difficult question that has its answer at the very heart of our current project, and has to do with the nature of human reflection. We have noted how for Johannes Climacus in particular, human reason and reflection have the tendency to reach toward their own limit, but insofar as it is disinterested, the absolute paradox of faith is the border of its efficacy and understanding comes to a standstill. If the individual, faced with the paradox, has an infinite interest in going beyond the limit of the understanding, he or she must will the downfall of his or her understanding in order to come to a mutual understanding with the paradox.
Yet it is the distance created by thought, reflection, reason and understanding that implies a preceeding state, wherein the subject imagines that once he or she did not come upon the paradoxical, but rather rested transparently in the truth. This problematic stance toward a prior, pristine and harmonious state is precisely that nostalgia that Kierkegaard, Freud and Lacan have all pointed to as the object of repetition, however differently they define its role in the pursuit of it.
This will have definite consequences for our discussion of sin below, but there is a very interesting discussion of reflection and the coming to be of human consciousness that I would like to highlight. As soon as there is not one possibility which is not possibility at all, rather it is actuality but two or more possibilities, reflection emerges.
When these multiple possibilities stand in a relation of contradiction, consciousness relates itself to the possibilities and finds itself in an anxious relationship between them interesse. In immediacy there is no relation to possibility, only the innocence of a spontaneous and unreflective amorality cf.
Watkin Once consciousness is posited, immediacy is lost. It thus appears that it is our freedom, given to us in the possibility of reflection, that we should like to give up, returning to the innocence of one who is no longer forced to reflect, to will and to choose. Yet here is the contradiction: We cannot have both a self and innocence at the same time. Consciousness cannot be where the contradiction is not. When all is one, I am not. How has all of this come to be? Language Speaks: Freedom and The Prohibition The Concept of Anxiety proposes a concept of anxiety in terms of the aetiology of human freedom.
What we can note with regard to the overall stance of the work is best put by Reidar Thomte in a historical introduction to the Hong edition. This assessment allows us to reconnect with the overall theme of our discussion, namely that human beings are in a relation of discordance with their own truth, insofar as a component of that truth is eternal and transcends them. Insofar as this is the case, the process of realizing one's untruth in relation to the law is a transition toward an awareness of the limits of human understanding, and it is at the moment when human understanding is brought to its utmost — over and against the paradox — that the undirected tremulousness of anxiety becomes manifest.
As Haufniensis interprets the genesis story, freedom came into the garden of Eden with God's prohibition, but because Adam was in a state of innocence, he could not understand God's promise that he would die if he ate the forbidden fruit, only that it was terrifying CA Human freedom — as the possibility to go against the law — acquires its tremulousness through the prohibition, in the innocence that cannot comprehend what the result of a transgression will be, and so trembles at the possibility of its freedom.
In a state of ignorance, the difference between innocence and guilt is thoroughly ambiguous, and the individual's relation to his or her possibilities becomes manifest as anxiety: Because Adam has not understood what was spoken, there is nothing but the ambiguity of anxiety. In this way, innocence is brought to its uttermost.
In anxiety it is related to the forbidden and to the punishment. Innocence is not guilty, yet there is anxiety as though it were lost CA Further, inasmuch as Haufniensis notes the peculiarity of the fact that the prohibition came from without in words Adam did not understand, I would assert that Kierkegaard had an intimation of a relation between sinfulness and language, an intimation important for Lacan's reading.
In a footnote to this statement, he says further that if it becomes a matter of answering the question as to how the first man learned to speak, Haufniensis is not prepared to tackle the question in the present work. Language, in the form of the prohibition, comes from without, and in the individual's confrontation with the strangeness of the possibility presented by language he or she is given over to freedom, whereas in their previous state, there was only the one course of action within which all else was combined: to love and be loved by God.
Rudi Visker gives a beautiful interpretation of this moment in his book The Inhuman Condition, and I include it here as an illuminating description of all the elements I am attempting to bring out, as well as a look forward to what I will make of Lacan's interpretation: The prohibition seems to want something from Adam, but it is not clear what.
It is not nothing and yet it is neither something he can stand back from. He cannot stand back from it precisely because it is too undetermined.
For a thing to appear it needs to appear it needs to have contours, a more or less determinate shape which distinguishes it from other things etc. The prohibition is not such a 'thing', it lacks all of that, and precisely therefore may be sensed by Adam as 'something' coming too close, laying siege 'before' him. I can imagine him becoming so obsessed by these words that he does what they forbid not because he is eager to understand the difference between good and evil but because transgressing the prohibition is the only way of putting a distance between him and it — the distance of a bitten apple, of a tree, of an act Visker Visker's description highlights the multivalence of the ambiguity in this moment.
It is not only Adam's desire that is ambiguous, but God's too. Perhaps the greatest question at the heart of all of this is why had God to put the forbidden fruit in the garden in the first place?
Why then call Adam's attention to it with the prohibition? These questions, of course, I cannot answer here. My concern is rather for the consequences. Temporality gains a significance it didn't have before sin was posited. Anxiety is thus the psychological result of a separation made manifest in freedom by virtue of which the subject becomes aware of his or her own insufficient finitude. The purely schematic understanding of sin as ignorance, however, is insufficient when it comes to the actuality of sin, inasmuch as to understand that one is not only ignorant, but willfully ignorant, is another matter entirely.
The further movement of sin takes this openness of ignorance that cannot account for the consequences of an action and uses it as an opportunity to transgress the law. This is the position in which the untruth is not only outside the truth, but polemical against the truth, as Climacus says.
By virtue of this radical particularity, the Socratic teacher who has only the capability to teach of one's ignorance cannot impart a personal consciousness of sin. The consciousness of sin, which he could no more teach to any other person than any other person could teach it to him.
The immense difficulty of this position rests in the fact that individuals cannot free themselves, but must be given the condition for the possibility of their freedom by the god-teacher as savior.
Here again we see how the consciousness of sin makes the divisions of time into past, present and future important for the subject, insofar as once individuals are aware that they have positioned themselves in a polemical relationship to the truth, they repent the past and look forward to the future as a task: Inasmuch as [the learner] was in untruth through his own fault, this conversion cannot take place without its being assimilated into his consciousness or without his becoming aware that it was through his own fault, and with this consciousness he takes leave of his former state.
But how does one take leave without feeling sorrowful? Yet this sorrow is, of course, over his having been so long in the former state. Let us call such sorrow repentance, for what else is repentance, which does indeed look back, but nevertheless in such a way that precisely thereby it quickens its pace toward what lies ahead!
PF For Kierkegaard, this is the earnestness of existence in relation to the truth of Christianity, to develop one's consciousness of one's own sin, even as this consciousness entails the sorrow of repentance. Here we see a connection between Haufniensis' diagnosis of our modern situation and that of Lacan's psychoanalysis. If the aim of psychoanalytic technique is to recognize the unconscious desire of the subject in its paradoxical and painful presentation, the insistence of the unconscious as the compulsion to repeat has a maladaptive futural orientation that is very like what Haufniensis describes in the following formulation: The past about which I am supposed to be anxious must stand in a relation of possibility to me.
If I am anxious about a past misfortune, then this is not because it is in the past but because it may be repeated, i. If I am anxious because of a past offense, it is because I have not placed it in an essential relation to myself as past and have in some deceitful way or another prevented it from being past CA 91 — 2.
Perhaps Kierkegaard could not have anticipated the Freudian discovery of the unconscious, and yet here we have a formulation that profoundly echoes Lacan's description of unconscious insistence. Because a large part of our history is excised into the unconscious by the symbolic structuration of human experience, our history can no longer be thought of as something we possess in its entirety.
Plato uses recollection to get beyond this problematical hurdle. This theory is also pursued in the Meno and the Philebus. He is perfectly right in that, of course, provided one recollects that initially it makes a person unhappy. Repetition's love is in truth the only happy love. Constantius wonders about the young man's mental state in relation to motion and reflection.
In Two Ages Kierkegaard criticizes his age for reflection without passion. Mere reflection is dull thought without passion and without commitment. Ethical repetition brings about motion and passionate commitment to the beloved.
Though barely touched upon in this work, the religious stage is reached by the qualitative leap of faith, where one finds rest motionless in God. Does he actually love the girl, or is she not once again simply the occasion that sets him in motion? The split in him caused by his contact with her would be reconciled by his actually having returned to her. So once again the girl was not an actuality but a reflection of motions within him and an incitement of them p.
Recollection is confined to motionlessness and to the past. Loved each and every part of this book. I will definitely recommend this book to philosophy, religion lovers. Your Rating:. Your Comment:.
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