The Concept of Movement in Kierkegaard's Repetition (Conference Talk, September 2014)
Here is the talk delivered at the 2nd International Conference on Soren Kierkegaard How to Avoid the Totalitarianism of Consumerism, Ljubljana and Skocjan, Republic of Slovenia. September 23-26, 2014.
Kierkegaard
Year 2014. International
Workshop and 2nd International Conference. Central
European Research Institute Søren Kierkegaard, Ljubljana. Director: Dr. Primoz Repar
For the Conference Program and the Conference Address, please visit the following link.
For the Conference Program and the Conference Address, please visit the following link.
Jasna Koteska
The Concept of Movement in Kierkegaard’s Repetition
Introduction: Three Impossible
Choices
I. Movement
1. Kierkegaard: Ontology of Movement
2. Freud: Psychology of Movement
3. Marx: Economy of Movement
4. Kierkegaard: Culture of Movement (Travel, Legs…)
5. Kierkegaard: Publicity, Media and Movement
II. Farce
1. Dual Nature of the Social Order
2. To Walk versus To Come Walking (Beckmann
versus Chaplin)
3. Farce and the Consumer Art (Warhol’s Case)
III. Repetition
1. Gjentagelse and Comsumerism
2. Fort-Da
3. Unheimlich
4. Job (Old Testament)
Introduction:
Three Impossible Choices
The following article analyzes the Kierkegaard’s concept of
movement, central to both the construction of subjectivity and to the ideology
of choice, in Kierkegaard’s book Repetition (1843). Before
delving into the analysis of Repetition, we offer the following two
points about Kierkegaard’s general theory of choice.
According to Kierkegaard, humans are torn between two incongruent
and often contradictory paradigms: the aesthetical and the ethical one (two
ideological commands: pleasure or duty). The two
paradigm cannot coexist one next to another, both according to the social
standards, but also because of the general incongruity of pleasure and duty,
two things which contradict each other completely (“If I elect pleasure, I will
immediately negate duty, and vice versa”). Not only are the contradictory
commands imposed upon people by the ideological demands of the society, but
people have to make their choices based on what Kierkegaard called “the leap of
faith”, i.e. without a clear knowledge of the consequences of the choices made.
Yet, choices are not impossible, and for Kierkegaard, most of what is out
there are only some practical decisions about what kind of life one wants to
commit oneself to.[1]
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| Impossible Movements. Kierkegaard Ljubljana, September 26, 2014 |
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| From my talk at Cankarjev Dom, Ljubljana, September, 26, 2014 |
Either/Or introduced
the third, religious paradigm. Both choices: the aesthetical (“the life of a
poet”) and the ethical (“the life of a judge”), according to Kierkegaard are
incomplete, the only resolution of human’s destiny must come about in the form
of a religious choice. But, due to the radical antagonism of human situation,
the third choice (“the life of a priest”, or broadly: “the life of a
believer”), also possesses an imbedded paradox within itself. The paradox
consists of the fact that humans are incapable of bypassing the abyss between
the finite and the infinite, and the modern life in the mid-19 century only
fosters this impossibility. Kierkegaard left a testimony that a strange shift
happened to the concept of a belief. A human is already someone who is no
longer capable to simply and directly “believe”. If he/she believes it is only
with the help of rituals, always with doubt (that is with cynicism, as, for
example, in the dilemma: “But, what if Abraham’s choice to kill Issac was not a
religious call, but just his own private madness”?[2]),
and it is no longer is a belief in God, but only a belief in believing.
The analysis which follows offers the reading of these
dilemmas in Kierkegaard’s book Repetition (1843). Although a
small fraction in the big body of his thought, Repetition is a
magnificent door into Kierkegaard’s theory of choice, as in its core, it is
essentially a book about the problem of choice. The book was published in 1843,
Kierkegaard’s most prolific year, when he also published Either/Or and Philosophical
Crumbs. In his journals, Kierkegaard didn’t have a high opinion about Repetition,
as he considered it: “Insignificant, without any philosophical pretension, a
droll little book, dashed off as an oddity”.[3] Our
analysis will try to offer that it the book, on the opposite, is a kind of
Kierkegaard’s manifesto of choice; a complicated inquiry into three
concepts which gravitate around the problem of choice, and those are movement,
repetition, and farce.
As is the case with most of Kierkegaard’s books, Repetition is
a highly heterogeneous book: it opens as a philosophical tractate about the
differences between repetition and recollection, it continues as a theatrical
review of a farce, and it ends as an epistolary exchange of letters between the
narrator and the young unnamed man. The unnamed man is unhappily in love; the
narrator decides to mentor his love affair, although not in the most empathic
way. The narrator offers to help his epistolary friend, but more as a
psychological experiment, therefore the subtitle of the book: An Essay
in Experimental Psychology. The advice the narrator gives, can be summed up
as follows: 1) love is an impossible goal, 3) the young man needs to destroy
his connections to the loved girl, 3) he needs to search for a new love and 4)
only by means of repetition he can regain his happiness again.
The book was published by pseudonym Constantine
Constantius. Kierkegaard’s use of pseudonyms was less intended to provide
anonymity for the author (most of the people in Copenhagen knew who wrote them),[4] but
to serve his main thesis: Constantine Constantius translates as Constant
Constant, a name which suggests both the affirmation of repetition,
but at the same time the affirmation of the constancy of
repetition. The central questions for Kierkegaard in Repetition are:
Does movement exist at all? If it does exist, is it possible to achieve
constancy by stand stilling the motion? Is it possible to freeze the world
flux? Can the change (and by extend, the choice) be understood as a movement of
constancy? Can life be seen as a movement around one constant center, around
which, every new circulates, only in so far as to affirm the
impossibility of the new arriving? Can the repetition be seen
as a “the kind of change” in the direction of the constancy?[5] Or,
vice versa, is constancy impossible? Is repetition impossible? Are humans
doomed to seek the new, always the new? And if later is the case, is the
ideological landscape constructed in such a way that the tyranny of choice, the
tyranny of consumerism, and the circulation of goods, are deeply imbedded in
the tissue of the external reality? In the following pages we will seek answers
to these questions through several notions which Kierkegaard developed on the
pages of Repetition, regarding
the choice and consumerism: movement,
repetition and farce.
[…]
Skopje,
Ljubljana, Skocjan, September 2014.
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| Kierkegaard 2014 Ljubljana Conference Cankarjev Dom 26 September, 2014 |
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| Movement and the Circularity. Kierkegaard Conference Ljubljana, September 26, 2014 |
FOR THE FULL VERSION OF THIS TEXT GO HERE.
For more information on the 2nd International Kierkegaard
Conference, also visit the following websites:
2. V Iskanju Drugega v Skocjan. RadioStudent.si. (Dr.
Primoz Repar, AUDIO) here.
(in Slovenian)
3. Central European Research Institute of Soren Kierkegaard
(CERI - in Slovakian and English): here.
4. Filozofija na pohodu v Skocjanu, Sezani in Stanjelu,
Primorske.si here (in
Slovenian)
5. V Skocjanu se bodo zbrali filozofi... Ugledna mednarodna
imena na idilicnem Krasu. Delo, Ljubljana, October 2, 2014. here (in
Slovenian)
6. Pdf plakat: here.
7. Mednarodni festival "Revija v reviji"
2014 here.
(in Slovenian)
8. Kako se izgoniti totalitarizmu potrosnistva, Bojan Zalec
and Primoz Repar (AUDIO, 54 min.), RTV4 Slovenia: here (in
Slovenian)
9. The Hong Kierkegaard Library Minnesota FB page, here (in
English).
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