Kierkegaard on Consumerism. Review by Eric Ziolkowski (2017)



“Kierkegaard on Consumerism by Jasna Koteska”, review by Eric Ziolkowski, Helen H. P. Manson Professor of Bible and Co-Chair of the Medieval, Renaissance, and Early Modern Studies Program, Lafayette College, Easton, Pennsylvania.


Published in Toronto Journal of Theology, 33(1), 2017, pp. 149–150 here as "Kierkegaard on Consumerism by Jasna Koteska." 

Part of the review available on Project Muse








Jasna Koteska. Kierkegaard on Consumerism. Toronto and Ljubljana: Kierkegaard Circle and kud, Apokalipsa, 2016. Pp. 130. Paper, $15.00. 
isbn 978-1-988129-02-0.

A professor of literature, theoretical psychoanalysis, and gender studies at the University of Sts. Cyril and Methodius in Skopje, Jasna Koteska is a prolific Macedonian philosopher and writer with a special interest in nineteenth-century literature and philosophy. This latest of her monographs is an inaugural volume in the new series, Collection Aut, published by Apokalipsa (Ljubljana) and Kierkegaard Circle (Toronto). 

In her Introduction, Koteska asserts that this volume is meant to fill the gap resulting from the scarcity of books on Kierkegaard and economics, particularly his views regarding consumerism. She does not mention Eliseo Pérez-Álvarez's A Vexing Gadfly. However, aside from the [End Page 149] fact that Pérez-Álvarez's work is almost twice the length of Koteska's, the two books differ significantly in their approach. 

Arguing that Kierkegaard not only attended to economic matters, but did so in a way that can shed light on our current socioeconomic and political situation, Pérez-Álvarez limits his study to the ''second authorship'' of Kierkegaard, namely, his published writings from after Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1846) to his death (1855), and also his unpublished writings (most notably the journals and papers) from the same period. In contrast, Koteska concentrates mainly upon Repetition, though she also makes lesser use of a number of other writings from all periods of Kierkegaard's authorship: Either/Or (1843), Fear and Trembling (1843), Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Works of Love (1847), Christian Discourses (1848), as well as some of the late, signed polemics against ''Christendom'' (1854–1855).

Koteska's engaging book divides into three essays (''parts''), focusing respectively on the three existential stages whose psychological, emotional, and other dynamics and contours Kierkegaard's entire oeuvre charts: the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious. Drawing upon thinkers such as Hegel, Marx, Freud (above all), Agamben, and Žižek, as well as certain contemporary pop-culture figures (e.g., Marilyn Manson, on the power of television and religion [49]), Koteska approaches Kierkegaard as a witness to the dawn of modernity, who strongly ''oppose[d] the modern view that humans crave only agitation and desiring'' and contended with the question, ''How to resolve the paradox of accepting the world as changeable, yet avoiding the wrong choices which may amount to [the] piling up of the desire-based consumption, and vice versa, how to avoid the traps of automatization without freezing the world flux?'' (17). 

This book thus adds to what Koteska points out is a growing scholarship on Kierkegaard and capitalism, an area in which the Danish thinker's insights into the human psyche, religion, and individual choice are brought provocatively to bear. 

In challenging the old assumption that Kierkegaard's work has little to contribute to the discussion of capitalism, Koteska's work is comparable to a volume like Connell and Evan's Foundations of Kierkegaard's Vision of Community, which several decades ago countered the stereotyping of Kierkegaard as the epitomic proponent of irrationalism and individualism. My only quibble is with Koteska's tendency sometimes to take the perspective of Kierkegaard's pseudonym Constantin Constantius for that of Kierkegaard himself (e.g., 20, 51–52).


With Kierkegaard on Consumerism, the series Collection Aut is off to an auspicious start. However, for the series to realize its full potential and to do full justice to the contents, its future volumes should be more carefully copyedited and proofread. There are some unfortunate substantive errors: e.g., the mis-locating of Kierkegaard ''among the first thinkers, prior to … Hegel'' (25) or ''even before … Hegel'' (24; emphases mine); the allusions to Kierkegaard's polemical pamphlets of 1854–1855 against Christendom as a ''book'' (96, 97); and the puzzling rendering of the Latin term homo sacer as ''bare life'' (98), the phrase being presumably pulled from the subtitle of Agamben's Homo Sacer. There are also numerous misspellings and typos throughout Koteska's volume: e.g., ''hemegonyzation'' (54), ''an interesting phenomena'' and ''it's name'' (64); ''theologican'' (98); ''invisioned (99, twice); ''conlcude'' (112), to mention just a few. 

 

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