Kierkegaard, Biopolitics and Critique in the Present Age
2013; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 18; Issue: 7 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/10848770.2013.839492
ISSN1470-1316
Autores Tópico(s)Kierkegaardian Philosophy and Influence
ResumoAbstractThis essay examines the relevance of Kierkegaard’s analysis of “the present age” for our own age, focusing specifically on the existential implications of neoliberalism and biopolitics. By examining the significance of Kierkegaard’s view of ethical and religious existence-stages, I argue that his concerns about leveling and despair bear directly upon pressing problems concerning sexuality, identity, and political exclusions. Kierkegaard becomes an ally of contemporary critical theory, and, in this alliance, Kierkegaard’s religious existentialism foregrounds the spiritual or religious dimensions of our present-day critical projects. Notes1. I would like to thank Emily Anne Parker and Tara Pedersen for helpful conversations about this essay. I presented an earlier version of this work at the “Kierkegaard: Love and the Passions” conference at the Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre of the University of Copenhagen in August 2012, and I thank the participants for insightful comments. I also thank the editors of this special issue for thoughtful and clarifying suggestions. Hannah Arendt, “Søren Kierkegaard,” trans. Robert Kimber and Rita Kimber, in Essays in Understanding, 1930–1954: Formation, Exile, and Totalitarianism, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1994), 47. Arendt’s essay was first published in German in 1932.2. Søren Kierkegaard, Two Ages: The Age of Revolution and the Present Age – A Literary Review, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978), 41. While I will be citing passages from this edition of Kierkegaard’s essay, which is titled Two Ages, I will refer to it as “A Literary Review,” hereafter citing page references in the text, following Joseph Westfall’s argument that it is the better title. Joseph Westfall, Kierkegaardian Author: Authorship and Performance in Kierkegaard’s Literary and Dramatic Criticism (Boston, MA: Walter de Gruyter, 2007), 175. Westfall makes the intriguing suggestion that literary reviews constitute a particular category in Kierkegaard’s authorship (174). Alastair Hannay’s translation of the work is titled A Literary Review (Toronto: Penguin Classics, 2001).3. Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers, vol. 3, L-R, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1975), 315.4. Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011).5. Elizabeth Povinelli, “Disturbing Sexuality,” in After Sex? On Writing since Queer Theory, ed. Janet Halley and Andrew Parker (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 266.6. Elizabeth Povinelli identifies the ramifications of such exclusions for critical theory itself: “critical theorists take responsibility for the variety of positive political positions they take to these spaces [of exclusion, of the part that has no part], including severe systematic oppression and ordinary callous disregard.” Elizabeth Povinelli, Economies of Abandonment: Social Belonging and Endurance in Late Liberalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 130.7. Judith Butler describes the paradox of assujetissement in terms of its denotation of “both the becoming of the subject and the process of subjection—one inhabits the figure of autonomy only by becoming subjected to a power, a subjection which implies a radical dependency.” Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), 83.8. Sandra Harding, “Foucault, Femininity, and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power,” in Feminism and Foucault: Reflections on Resistance, ed. Irene Diamond and Lee Quinby (Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press, 1988), 77.9. In his recent book on Kierkegaard, Kevin Newmark similarly identifies the critical import of Kierkegaard, especially in terms of Kierkegaard’s understanding of selfhood. See Kevin Newmark, Irony on Occasion: From Schlegel and Kierkegaard to Derrida and de Man (Bronx, NY: Fordham University Press, 2012), 76. My hope is that Newmark’s persuasive reading of Kierkegaard will lead to more of a Kierkegaardian presence in contemporary critical theory. For an argument that positions Kierkegaardian critical theory as a distinct and necessary approach, see Martin Beck Matuštík, “Towards an Integral Critical Theory of the Present Age,” Integral Review 5 (2007): 227–39.10. Lee Barrett puts it nicely: “the passion upon which a life-view can be based must be not only intensive but also extensive. The passionate inwardness must be so expansive that the relation to the beloved object comes to determine the subject’s relation to everything else,” especially in terms of anticipated loss and other conflicts with actuality. See Lee Barrett, “Kierkegaard’s Two Ages: An Immediate State on the Way to the Religious Life,” in International Kierkegaard Commentary: Two Ages, ed. Robert L. Perkins (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1984), 61. For an exploration of how this kind of existential judgment compares to a liberal approach to relativism, see Ada S. Jaarsma, “Habermas’s Kierkegaard and the Nature of the Secular,” Constellations: An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory 17.2 (2010): 271–92.11. As Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous author Johannes Climacus puts it, inquiry into the what of existence only begins to refer to an actual individual when we also attend to the how of that person’s existence: “in every case where the object of knowledge is the very inwardness of the subjectivity of the individual, it is necessary for the knower to be in a corresponding condition.” Concluding Unscientific Postscript, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 51. Climacus identifies here the certain relativism of existential critique, as the “what” of analysis hinges upon the particular “how” of embodied individuals. Climacus also raises the stakes for critical theory, suggesting that the critic’s own “how” of existence is inevitably implicated in the analysis of existence. In other words, one’s own affective desires and commitments are themselves open to self-reflexive critique, according to Kierkegaard’s existentialism. I examine the implications of this how/what relation for critical pedagogy more broadly in “Becoming Student: Reflections on the Post-Secular Classroom,” in Listening: Journal of Communication Ethics, Religion, and Culture 46.3 (2011): 218–40.12. This description, called “Religiousness A” by Johannes Climacus in his pseudonymous Concluding Unscientific Postscript, is a usefully “generic” formulation of religious existence, attainable by any individual through the inward deepening of subjectivity. Climacus explains, “Religiousness A can be present in paganism, and in Christianity it can be the religiousness of everyone who is not decisively Christian, whether baptized or not” (557). Exemplified by Socrates and not restricted to Christianity, religious existence takes subjective rather than objective concerns as most pressing. In the same text, Climacus explains, “all eternal decision is rooted specifically in subjectivity” (194); “the more objective reliability, the less inwardness (since inwardness is subjectivity); the less objective reliability, the deeper is the possible inwardness” (209). Below I describe the differing formulations of the religious put forward by Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms.13. Christine Battersby argues persuasively for Kierkegaard’s relevance to feminist thought, maintaining that his significance lies primarily in his aesthetic texts. Through close readings of Either/Or volume 1 and Stages on Life’s Way, Battersby identifies critical import in the model of selfhood dramatized by the various aesthetic voices in these texts: “Neither fully autonomous nor completely determined, the self is produced relationally: in the resonances between self and other; in a ‘present’ that is a generative caesura between future and past.” See Christine Battersby, The Phenomenal Woman: Feminist Metaphysics and the Patterns of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1998), 184. See also a more recent essay in which Battersby explains: “It’s the emphasis on relational, embodied identities, and ambiguous degrees of freedom that makes the ontology found in Kierkegaard’s ‘aesthetic’ works such a useful resource for ‘difference feminists.’” Christine Battersby, “Kierkegaard, the Phantom of the Public and the Sexual Politics of Crowds,” in Kierkegaard and the Political, ed. Alison Assiter and Margherita Tonon (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2012), 29.14. John W. Elrod points out that the translation of key terms into nineteenth-century liberalism prompts Kierkegaard’s diagnosis of the present age: “Terms like freedom, equality, justice, truth, and happiness became the coinage of Danish liberalism, thereby bestowing upon it the notion of virtue to which these terms had been related in ethical and religious discourse.” John W. Elrod, “Passion, Reflection, and Particularity in Two Ages,” in Perkins, International Kierkegaard Commentary, 5.15. As Matuštík describes the plight that Kierkegaard’s various religious pseudonyms diagnose, “there are no Christians in Christendom, though there are nationalist, herd-religious forms and Christians in despair” (“Towards an Integral Critical Theory of the Present Age,” 323).16. Daniel W. Conway, “Modest Expectations: Kierkegaard’s Reflections on the Present Age,” in Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1999), 22.17. I thank Steven Engler for his helpful description of this predicament, in which “inwardness” itself in the present age translates as privatized and individualistic preference. This insight has motivated much of the reflections in this essay.18. In contrast to this praise, in a review written seven years earlier, Kierkegaard chastises Hans Christian Andersen for lacking such a coherent life-view. My analysis here differs slightly from Joseph Westfall’s account in which “life-view” corresponds to Kierkegaard’s ethical stage of existence; on his view, since “the aesthetic, as despair, is the lack of a life-view” (195, note 40), there is an implied understanding that “life-stage” refers to the resolute ethical stage. I choose to interpret “life-view” as synonymous with “mode of existence” for two reasons. First, Kierkegaard seems to make this equation (15); and second, in what follows, I lay out the critical implications of the ethical as well as the religious life-stages. It seems helpful to leave room for the qualification of life-stage without presuming its ethical quality. Kierkegaard himself discusses both ethical and religious life-views in the essay.19. To parse this further, Kierkegaard’s texts distinguish between different gradations of religiousness, identified variously as Socratic religiousness or Religiousness A and Christian religiousness or Religiousness B. Merold Westphal argues for a third category, namely Religiousness C or Christian ethics, in “Kierkegaard’s Teleological Suspension of Religiousness B,” in Foundations of Kierkegaard’s Vision of Community: Religion, Ethics, and Politics in Kierkegaard, ed. George B. Connell and C. Stephen Evans (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1992), 110–29. According to Climacus, Religiousness B is the decisive expression of Christian existence and intensifies the subjective passion of Religiousness A. In the move from A to B, he explains, the uncertainties of subjectivity meet an all-important limit: acceptance of the Christian paradox, the impossible incarnation of the divine-made-human, occasions an existentially transformative awareness of sin (Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 583). This sin-consciousness fully qualifies the individual’s actions, relations, and ethical commitments. One debate that arises about the varying forms of religiousness concerns the question of how essentially “religious” or Christian is Kierkegaard’s Socrates. According to some readers, the resonances between Socratic and Christian religiousness suggest less of a strict taxonomical distinction between the two. In terms of disclosing my own sympathies, I am partial to interpretations that are open to the resemblance of Kierkegaard’s Socrates to Christian religiousness. For example, David D. Possen affirms the radical religiousness of Anti-Climacus’s Socrates in The Sickness Unto Death, particularly in terms of Socrates’ deft dismantling of hypocrisy. Those Christians who proclaim Christ and yet participate in what Anti-Climacus calls “meanness and sordidness” are in need of effective encounters with Socrates, according to Possen. See David D. Possen, “The Exemplarity of Socrates in The Sickness Unto Death,” in The Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2012), 377–89. For the purposes of this reflection on the significance of existence-spheres for how we embody ethical ideals, I look to the generically religious tensions with objective knowledge as significant for contemporary critical theory.20. Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), 52.21. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, 30.22. We can reflect further on the precise relations between Kierkegaard’s formal accounts of selfhood or despair and his own historical situatedness. As David James suggests, for example, “it is because the epoch in question was one in which the self was conceived, however implicitly, in terms similar to those found in German idealism, that Kierkegaard considered despair to be a prevalent feature of the epoch in which he himself lived.” See David James,“The ‘Self-Positing’ Self in Kierkegaard’s The Sickness Unto Death,” in The European Legacy 16.5 (2011): 588. In other words, how should the epistemological specifics of Kierkegaard’s own “present age” guide our reading? We can also cast this question in terms that foreground the modern context of Kierkegaard’s work. As Mark D. Jordan suggests, for example, “Place the tone of Kierkegaard’s writing nearer burlesque than austere irony. What happens then to his relation to modernity?” See Mark D. Jordan, “The Modernity of Christian Theology or Writing Kierkegaard Again for the First Time,” Modern Theology 27.3 (2011): 449.23. In the edition I am reading, the editors and translators Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong note that reflection is an ambiguous term in the text. They translate the Danish reflexion as reflex when the term refers to the reflected image of an age in private, domestic, and social-political life; they translate the same Danish word as reflection when the term refers to deliberation, noting that this term is also ambiguous in Two Ages, since it can refer to both prudent, careful thought and abstracted indecision (ix).24. Amy Allen, The Politics of Our Selves: Power, Autonomy and Gender in Contemporary Critical Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 12.25. Kierkegaard, “A Literary Review,” 8. In her preface to Two Ages, Thomasine Gyllembourg explains, “The question remains whether we are better than our forefathers, and it is not easy to answer that, for the different ages had diverging opinions in the judgment of the same actions” (153).26. The novel suggests that this predicament is especially relevant to young people. For example, in the conclusion of the novel Two Ages, Ferdinand, representative of the present age, declares, “I am glad to be alive in an age which, despite all its deficiencies, makes such tremendous progress in so many directions. I subscribe to the faith that the human race—oscillating, to be sure, but yet with steady progress—is approaching the goal of perfection that is conceivable for an earthly existence” (157).27. As Kierkegaard explains in “A Literary Review,” “abnormal common sense uses reflection in advance as a crutch and comes to its own aid afterwards with reinterpretive reflection—and why? Simply because it did not eventuate in action. Instead of bringing forth the child of a god, the silent, taciturn decision, the generation gives birth to a changeling of the understanding that has things at its fingertips” (68).28. Kierkegaard predicts that “what the individual fears more than death is reflection’s judgment upon him, reflection’s objection to venture something as an individual” (85). On the one hand, then, reflection nullifies “the principle of contradiction” (97) and annuls passionate distinctions, including the disjunction of hiddenness with revelation (102), subjectivity with objectivity, religiousness with glittering illusions. On the other hand, however, “considerable reflectiveness is the condition for a higher meaningfulness than that of immediate passion, is the condition for it—if enthusiasm intervenes and persuades the reflective powers to make a decision” (96).29. Allen, The Politics of Our Selves, 21.30. My analysis adheres closely to the argument put forward in “A Literary Review.” My specific rendering of Kierkegaard’s critical theory should not be taken as a broader explication of his critical import as a whole; if my analysis were to take into account the pseudonymous texts, in addition to “A Literary Review,” for example, the argument would shift considerably, given that the referents of “ethical” and “religious” are not, and should not, be taken to be the same across Kierkegaard’s works.31. For a recent interpretation of Kierkegaard that aligns his project with liberalism, see Allison Assiter, Kierkegaard, Metaphysics and Political Theory: Unfinished Selves (New York: Continuum Press, 2011). Along similar lines I explore Habermas’s “ethical” translation of Kierkegaard in “Habermas’s Kierkegaard and the Nature of the Secular.” The approach that I am taking in this essay, identifying the relativizing possibilities of Kierkegaard’s project, resonates, I think, with claims like that of Michael Plekon that Kierkegaard’s critical theory in A Literary Review should not be abstracted into one overarching Kierkegaardian position. Specific life-views are enacted by the texts across the authorship. Plekon points out that this essay is written at a particular turning point in Kierkegaard’s own thinking about social critique. See Michael Plekon, “Towards Apocalypse: Kierkegaard’s Two Ages in Golden Age Denmark,” in Perkins, International Kierkegaard Commentary, 19–52.32. I explore this point in my study on Habermas and also in “Rethinking the Secular in Feminist Marriage Debates,” Studies in Social Justice 14.1 (2010): 47–66.33. “In other words,” Kierkegaard explains, “if the ethical is not granted a decisive predominance over all the rashness of the demands of the times, then not only our age but every age is guilty of unjust, unbecoming, and nonsensical behavior toward all older authors” (Literary, 8). Similarly, Kierkegaard’s pseudonym Silentio writes, “Whatever one generation learns from another, no generation learns the essentially human from a previous one. In this respect, each generation begins primitively, has no task other than what each previous generation had, nor does it advance further” (Fear and Trembling, 121).34. The stakes are high here because, whereas community is a sum of ones and therefore a context for impassioned individuals, the public is a sum of negative ones (Journals and Papers, 318).35. Jasbir K. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 123. This is what Puar calls the “reification of privacy realms, now relegated to the conjugal bedroom of everlasting love, or serial monogamy” (142).36. Mark D. Jordan, “The Return of Religion during the Reign of Sexuality,” in Feminism, Sexuality, and the Return of Religion, ed. Linda Martin Alcoff and John D. Caputo (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2011), 40. Jordan is referring to Michel Foucault’s assessment of what Jordan identifies as the incestuous relationship between sexological discourse and Christianity. In The History of Sexuality Foucault explains that the modern ideals of sexual liberation are essentially related to Christian discourse: “The statement of oppression [we were repressed!] and the form of the sermon refer back to one another; they are mutually reinforcing.” Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1990), vol. 1, 8.37. Jordan, “The Return of Religion during the Reign of Sexuality,” 47.38. Kierkegaard himself, of course, is skeptical of such hope. In 1847, for example, he writes in his journal: “There never has been and there cannot be a Christian reformation which turns against authority as if all would then be well; that would be much too secular a movement. No, the essentially Christian reformation means to turn against the mass, for the essentially Christian reformation means that each person must be reformed, and only then is the most ungodly of all unchristian categories overthrown: the crowd, the public” (Journals and Papers, 307).39. Jordan, “The Return of Religion during the Reign of Sexuality,” 208. Jordan muses, “On the one hand, who cannot be astonished that less than fifty years after the most progressive church thinkers first urged decriminalizing adult homosexuality because it was a pathology, adolescents in church schools are being taught about its intrinsic goodness. On the other hand, what those adolescents are being taught remains, as in the 1950s, an imported product. The explanation of the basic characters for human sexuality—their very naming—has passed from church discourse into the hands of external experts. The characters have no intrinsic connection to Christian scripture, reflection, or worship. Christian discourses at every level appropriate scientific theories that circulate in the culture.” See Mark D. Jordan, Recruiting Young Love: How Christians Talk about Homosexuality (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 2011), 208.40. He continues: “‘The times’ is too abstract a category to be able as claimant to demand the decisive religious categories that belong specifically to individuality and particularity; loud, collective demands en masse for what can be shared only by the single individual in particularity, in solitariness, in silence, cannot be made” (21). On Jordan’s account, Christian discourse combines rhetorical uses of scripture with the uncritical deployment of scientific discourse: “So much of the Bible’s felt authority is the acoustic illusion of immutability. ..sThe juxtaposition of scientific counterargument, patriotic alarm, and the intuitive application of ancestral verses will characterize the ‘biblical’ response to sexological research down to our present” (Recruiting Young Love, 35).41. It is worth rehearsing some of these points here. Jordan declares, “Repetitive controversy prevents texts from being reconsidered while keeping them in plain sight. Who wants to think again about Genesis 19, Leviticus 18, Romans 1? We have heard it all before. Cycling controversy also leads reformers to cede the Bible to their entrenched opponents. The Bible becomes identified only with condemnations of homosexuality; arguments for its moral goodness are typed as nonbiblical” (“The Modernity of Christian Theology,” 194). Jordan sets out a genealogy of the discursive terms employed by the religious right to approach problems of sexuality. Rather than creating religiously coherent frameworks for sexuality, evangelical Christianity in North America inherits “outdated juridico-medical theories of sex” (“The Return of Religion during the Reign of Sexuality,” 41). Jordan explains, “Across the half century of debates, churches learned how to speak about same-sex desire, but only by negotiating and renegotiating their relation to new rhetorics of sex and gender that they did not launch” (Recruiting Young Love, xii).42. “But silence, the brackets he puts around his own personality, is precisely the condition for gaining ideality” (98).43. Janet E. Halley, Split Decisions: How and Why to Take a Break from Feminism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), Dean Spade, Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of Law (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2011).44. Povinelli, Economies of Abandonment, 118. Povinelli demonstrates how “espionage” and “camouflage” are concomitant operations to recognition within neoliberal societies. These hidden or secret positions are evidence of the violence of liberalism, occupied by individuals who will not or cannot be recognized by the prevailing order. The religious life-view, likewise, is incommensurable to language and the law.45. Arendt, “Søren Kierkegaard,” 41.46. Povinelli, Economies of Abandonment, 33.47. Craig Calhoun puts it this way: “This policy [of privatizing risk] makes individuals bear the brunt of hardships that are predictable in the statistical aggregate without creating effective mechanisms to share the burden, let alone reduce the risk.” See Craig Calhoun,“The Privatization of Risk,” Public Culture 18.2 (2006): 257. For a close look at Kierkegaard and “risk,” see Michael P. Levine, “Kierkegaard: What Does the Subjective Individual Risk?” International Journal of Philosophy 13 (1982): 13–22.48. Povinelli describes this in Economies of Abandonment (157–58). See also S. Lochlann Jain, “Be Prepared,” Against Health: How Health Became the New Morality, ed. Jonathan M. Metzl and Anna Kirkland (New York: New York University Press, 2010), 171–82.49. Mark D. Jordan, Telling Truths in Church: Scandal, Flesh, and Christian Speech (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2003), 47. In “A Literary Review” Kierkegaard anticipates the phenomenon of sex experts and overly commodified approaches to relationships: “In Germany there are even handbooks for lovers; so it probably will end with lovers being able to sit and speak anonymously to each other. There are handbooks on everything, and generally speaking education soon will consist of knowing letter-perfect a larger or smaller compendium of observations from such handbooks, and one will excel in proportion to his skill in pulling out the particular one, just as the typesetter picks out letters” (104).50. Sarah Schulman, The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2012), 14. “Increasingly,” Schulman explains, “only the gentrified get their stories told in mass ways. They look in the mirror and think it’s a window, believing that corporate support for and inflation of their story is in fact a neutral and accurate picture of the world” (28).51. Schulman writes, “The gentrification mentality is rooted in the belief that obedience to consumer identity over recognition of lived experience is actually normal, neutral, and value free” (51).52. Schulman, The Gentrification of the Mind, 17.53. Povinelli, Economies of Abandonment, 84.
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