KIERKEGAARD'S EXPERIMENTAL THEATRE OF THE SELF (2017)

From Hamann to Kierkegaard 79 KIERKEGAARD’S EXPERIMENTAL THEATRE OF THE SELF Bartholomew Ryan Universidade Nova de Lisboa Abstract Kierkegaard is not a dramatist nor an academic; he calls himself “a kind of philosopher” and has been called “a kind of poet”, and he is a Christian who is at the same time one of Christendom’s most devastating critics. I read him as “a dramatic philosopher” analogous to Shakespeare’s dramatic poet, where his strategy and method in his philosophical journey to selfhood is a performance on the stage. However, this is no conventional stage but rather Kierkegaard creates a new landscape that allows himself and the reader to penetrate deeper into the plurality of the subject. His authorship is both experimental and dissident in that he defies the various genres and is located rather in the interlude of disciplines and activities. Kierkegaard fuses the combination of being an avid lover of theatre and fairytale, ancient and modern Western philosophy and German Romanticism, and having being brought up in a strict Christian background, into a rich retelling and unlocking of human existence. Central to my analysis is the short essay “The Crisis and a Crisis in the Life of an Actress” which contains the three aspects of Kierkegaard: the performance itself, the philosophical analysis of the performance and a philosophy of life worth living. I interpret the author of this text, called Inter et Inter, as creating a modification on the activity of faith, where transformation (through the analysis of the actress Johanne Luise Heiberg) takes priority as a way of overcoming the failures of repetition in time, the continuous impossibility of faith, and the modern “age of disintegration” in ideas and society. Of course, Inter et Inter is yet another masked signature, located at the interlude, and we are invited to endless re-readings in this pioneering philosophical and theatrical space that Kierkegaard – as dramatic philosopher – has created for exploring and unfolding the elusive self in modernity. Keywords Interlude, transformation, dramatic philosopher, disintegration, actress 80 Experimentation and Dissidence There is a probably no young person with any imagination who has not at some time been enthralled by the magic of the theatre and wished to be swept along into that artificial actuality in order like a double to see and hear himself and to split himself up into every possible variation of himself, and nevertheless in such a way that every variation is still himself. – Constantin Constantius, Repetition 1 Then he said to them, ‘Verily indeed you eat your food knowing this universal self as if it were many. He, however, who meditates on the universal self as of the measure of the span or as identical with the self, eats food in all worlds, in all beings, in all selves. – The Chandogya Upanishad 2 Introduction I set out to present Kierkegaard as a “dramatic philosopher”, whose authorship is both a theatrical performance in philosophy and an authorship which helps us, as readers, to prepare and flourish in our own performance, in the theatre of the self in life. As dramatic philosopher, this is both experimental and dissident as, first, Kierkegaard dissolves boundaries between disciplines; second, it allows him to assimilate his artistry or poetic impulse into his philosophy; third, this transforms philosophy into a form of praxis to be shared with a larger, democratic audience and public; fourth, it provokes theatre into giving space to philosophical perspectives and approaches on the stage; five, it allows Kierkegaard to showcase the philosopher of the “interlude”; six, it helps the reader and the author to understand and let unfold the plurality of the subject through various persons, masks, voices – or what I call the theatre of the self; and seven, it is a site for awakening to transformation and faith to combat what he calls “the age of disintegration [Tidens Opløsthed]” from an extraordinary journal entry from the revolutionary year of 1848.3 1 Kierkegaard 1983: 154 / SKS4, 30. 2 Radhakrishnan 1953: 440 [The Chandogya Upanishad, V.18.1]. On the journal entry on the “age of disintegration”, in which the term is mentioned seven times and as it he is giving an incendiary speech to the world from a pulpit, see Kierkegaard 1996: 350–351 [1848: IX B 63: 7]). He also uses this term at the beginning of the essay on “The Tragic in Ancient Drama” from Either/Or. Part I (Kierkegaard 1987a: 141 / SKS2, 141). In thinking of the background to “the age of disintegration”, George Pattison has provided a 3 From Hamann to Kierkegaard 81 I will try to shed light on these seven aspects in navigating through three sections. I. Kierkegaard’s Performance: Communication, Multiplicity and the Drama of Life; II. The Philosopher of the Interlude; and III. The Crisis of the Philosopher, the Actress and the Modern Age. All seven aspects are to be found in Kierkegaard’s short essay – “The Crisis and a Crisis in the Life of an Actress”. There has been a variety of work already published on Kierkegaard as “performative author”4 and on his essay on the actress, arguing for the importance of the essay for Kierkegaard’s overall authorship and for understanding the relation between performance, confession, authorship and what it is to be a human being.5 In this essay, I wish to continue and deepen this research by showing Kierkegaard as “dramatic philosopher” and “philosopher of the interlude” as a way and strategy of offering a theatre of the self. I focus on the importance of the essay on the actress as an example of the philosopher reflecting on the task of the great artist, and at the same time offering the possibility of a Kierkegaardian praxis via the interlude and the theatre of the self in the troubled “age of disintegration”. 1. Kierkegaard’s Performance: Communication, Multiplicity and the Drama of Life Kierkegaard is certainly trying to find a new mode to express subjective human existence or the modern self, to forge a new space, a way of “staging the self ”. After the obsession with the dominant, melancholic father and his former fiancé Regine Olsen, there are perhaps four great passions in his life, the first two of which have already been given great attention – Christianity, Philosophy, Fairytales6 and Theatre. The Portuguese poet, Fernando Pessoa, describes himself as being, like Shakespeare, “a dramatic poet” – having careful and helpful analysis of Kierkegaard and the crisis of culture in the nineteenth century (See: Pattison 2002); and Robert B. Pippin has written a substantial study on the disintegration of values, “culture of rupture” and problems of modernity in the twentieth century (See: Pippin 1999). 4 Westfall 2007: 1–18, 144–5. See, for example, Bukdahl 2001: 61; Crites 1967: 7–63; Pyper 2007: 299–320; Rose 1992: 19–20; Stock 2015: 367–380; Westfall 2007a: 223–228; Westfall 2007b; 321–344. 5 6 On Kierkegaard and the fairytale, see my article Ryan 2014. 82 Experimentation and Dissidence “the poet’s inner exaltation and the playwright’s depersonalisation”;7 with Kierkegaard we can add “philosophical passion” (a paradoxical formulation in itself – combining rationality and emotion, the secular and the religious) to the definition to forge the “dramatic philosopher”. As a student divided between his theology exams and his passion for reading philosophy, it is theatre that allows him to bridge them. It is theatre that gives him the space to unleash the poet and which allows him to breathe vivid life into philosophy. We could put it this way that Kierkegaard’s theatrical philosophy is a break from Hegel’s philosophical drama and that this perhaps sums up the basic distinction here between the two – in that Kierkegaard presents the extraordinary in the everyday and the micro; while Hegel presents the extraordinary in human world history and the macro. Kierkegaard will crucially state that “Life is like a poet and thus different from the contemplator, who always comes to a finish; the poet wrenches us out in the middle of life.”8 One of Kierkegaard’s first major international interpreters, Georg Lukács, famously wrote that Kierkegaard “makes a poem of his life”.9 Rather, I see Kierkegaard making a philosophical theatre of his life: dramatizing the self for philosophy, and publishing texts that are often like self-conscious stage directions with a variety of actors and prompters. This is most obvious in the explicitly philosophical-theatrical texts such as Either/Or, Fear and Trembling, Repetition, Stages on Life’s Way and Concluding Unscientific Postscript with the various entrances and exits, with scenes, acts and interludes, and a plurality of perspectives, voices and digressions. As Stephen Crites pointed out in his excellent essay on “The Crisis and A Crisis in the Life of an Actress” back in 1967, drama is the art in which Kierkegaard knew best.10 It is not merely the concepts and arguments that Kierkegaard brings to the philosophical table, but how and why he does it, and his locating of drama motifs and playwrights on an equal par with concepts and philosophers is experimental, dissident and pioneering. 7 Pessoa 2001: 246 [Letter to João Gaspar Simões, 11th Dec 1931]. 8 Kierkegaard 1993: 73 / SKS8, 180. 9 Lukács 1974: 30. Crites 1967: 19: “Drama was the art-form which he knew best and to which he felt most akin, but his observations were informed by a general theory of art which exhibits the intricate dialectical reflection he brought to all his work.” 10 From Hamann to Kierkegaard 83 Theatre is also the site where concealing and revealing go hand in hand and are manifested most brilliantly. As Johannes de silentio says: “Recognition and hiddenness are also an essential element of modern drama.”11 The theatre and theatrics of Kierkegaard’s authorship is one of the keys to the success of his strategy of indirect communication in his modern Socratic enterprise. On the actual stage, twelve years after Kierkegaard’s death, Ibsen’s Hamlet of the north, Peer Gynt, will sum up the vocation in a few words: “To speak, yet be silent? Confess, yet conceal – ?”;12 and as Kierkegaard’s precursor, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, says: “By indirections finde directions out.”13 However, Shakespeare/Hamlet and Ibsen/Peer Gynt are both characters and playwrights (perhaps the best); Kierkegaard is neither of these, but an experimental philosopher, a conflicted writer who does not know if he is a poet or an apostle in the face of a God, and in his quest for silence he keeps on speaking14 and writing, appropriating and twisting theatre into his texts. Thus, the many pseudonyms and masks are created. Still under the spell of Kierkegaard, Lukács writes in his first major work: “The mask represents the great, two-fold struggle of life: the struggle to be recognised and the struggle to remain disguised.”15 Kierkegaard’s philosophical theatre and poetic religiosity will ensure that he is trying to be honest before God and deceptive before humans. One of the fundamental questions for Kierkegaard – ‘what is the self?’ – famously begins The Sickness unto Death.16 Kierkegaard’s answer is the unending suffering and joyful endeavour of a passionate, questioning, critical life. In seeking to unify the self, in the attempt “to will one thing” – declared in Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits,17 Kierkegaard is creating at the 11 Kierkegaard 1983: 84 / SKS4, 174. 12 Ibsen 1994: 84 [Peer Gynt, Act 3 Scene 3]. 13 Shakespeare 1966: 1039 [Hamlet, Act 2, Scene 1, line 66]. See, for example, the crucial journal entry from Easter 1848: “My whole being has changed. My concealment and reserve are broken – I am free to speak” (Kierkegaard 1996: 295 [19th April 1848, VIII I A 640]). 14 Lukács 1974: 92. As early as 1835 at the age of 21, Kierkegaard ponders in his famous Gilleleje journal entry from 1835 that he will “construct a world which, again, I myself did not inhabit but merely held up for others to see?” (1 August 1835, I A 75). 15 16 Kierkegaard 1980b: 14 / SKS11, 129. 17 Kierkegaard 1993: 24 / SKS8, 138. 84 Experimentation and Dissidence same time a multitude of selves. He is aware of this paradox, and it may be argued that in A Point of View, his supposedly spiritual autobiography, “the lady doth protest too much”18 in trying to set the record straight that he was always in control of his authorship. It seems to be the contrary, even in his strange report to history which has multiple entrances, false starts and endings, appendices and postscripts. Of course, we are still trying to understand our interpreter of ourselves, but whether Kierkegaard likes it or not, he has enriched our conception of selfhood by paradoxically opening up a plurality of the subject in seeking out the single individual, and this crisis of the self is a crisis and Zeitgeist of early twentieth century modernism, which Kierkegaard foresaw, and which led, for a time, to a flourishing of art and ideas. A clue to this chaos of multiplicity is in the lines by Hamann quoted by Constantin in Repetition and which was at one point to be used as the epigraph to the “Problemata” in Fear and Trembling: “I express myself in various tongues and speak the language of sophists, of puns, of Cretans and Arabians, of whites and Moors and Creoles, and babble a confusion of criticism, mythology, rebus, and axioms, and argue now in a human way and now in an extraordinary way.”19 Maybe the key to all of this “Babelian act of war”20 is given by the shadowy voice of Constantin, who, despite the plurality and polyphony of the self in this magic theatre, says that “every variation is still himself.”21 Theatre provides the stage for this emotion of multiplicity, and philosophy is the discipline for analysing and dissecting the multiplicity. Remember that the subtitle of Stages on Life’s Way is called “Studies by Various Persons”, and the massive collection (compiled by Hilarius Bookbinder) begins with the mischievous words: “Inasmuch as there ought to be honesty in everything, especially in the realm of truth and in the world of books”,22 which is then followed by a very big ‘nevertheless’. And Johannes de silentio explains that “if a person lacks this concentration, this focus [the power to concentrate the whole substance of life and the meaning of actuality into one single desire], 18 Shakespeare 1966: 1051 [Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 2, line 224]. 19 Kierkegaard 1983: 149 / SKS4, 26. This phrase is from Jacques Derrida in his second of two essays on James Joyce called “Two Words for Joyce” (Derrida 1984: 147). 20 21 Kierkegaard 1983: 154 / SKS4, 30. 22 Kierkegaard 1988: 3 / SKS6, 11. From Hamann to Kierkegaard 85 his soul is dissipated in multiplicity [det Mangfoldige] from the beginning.”23 Kierkegaard was already aware of this danger in his thesis The Concept of Irony, where the ironist becomes a multiplicity of selves through his moods: “He succumbs completely to mood. His life is nothing but moods [Hans Liv er lutter Stemninger] […] At times he is a god, at times a grain of sand. His moods are just as occasional as the incarnations of Brahma.”24 But the despair and liberation is such (and this is another reason for Kierkegaard being a modernist) that this journey is non-teleological, that each person must sew the thread him or herself, as Johannes de silentio puts it.25 We are often living in Nietzsche’s vision of a godless, rudderless and confused epoch of modernism where the value system has fragmented, and the individual has become at the same time autonomous and part of a mass (modern democratic society). Kierkegaard’s aesthete writes of the state of affairs: One wishes to be edified in the theatre, to be aesthetically stimulated in the church; one wishes to be converted by novels, to be entertained by devotional books; one wishes to have philosophy in the pulpit and a preacher on the lecture platform […] Our age has lost all the substantial categories of family, state, kindred; it must turn the single individual over to himself completely in such a way that, strictly speaking, he becomes his own creator.26 But where there is great crisis, there is the great opportunity for creativity and responsibility – in other words to becoming that Kierkegaardian self. Drama will respond to this “age of disintegration” after Kierkegaard via the explosive plays of disintegration and emancipation on the stage by Ibsen and Strindberg, and Pirandello and Beckett. Preceding this movement, we have Kierkegaard’s dramatic philosophy. Johannes de silentio writes: “Modern drama has abandoned destiny, has dramatically emancipated itself, is sighted, gazed inward into itself, absorbs destiny in its dramatic consciousness.”27 Now the danger is that the modern world and the individual’s inner life is, as Lukács pictures it, like Peer Gynt who “symbolizing the problem of 23 Kierkegaard 1983: 43 / SKS4, 137. 24 Kierkegaard 1989: 284 / SKS1, 320. 25 Kierkegaard 1983: 45 / SKS4, 140. 26 Kierkegaard 1987a: 149 / SKS2, 148. 27 Kierkegaard 1983: 84 / SKS4, 174. 86 Experimentation and Dissidence the essentiality, or lack of it, in his own life – peels an onion and finds no core, only peel.”28 It is fitting then that the quintessential play of modernity (Hamlet) begins with these first two words: “Who’s there?” Kierkegaard’s philosophical-theatrical texts are all circling around this haunting question. 2. The Philosopher of the Interlude In tune with Kierkegaard’s experimental theatre, his entire philosophical thought and project is located in the interlude (taking its cue from drama or musical piece – called the Mellemspil in Danish)29 within the drama of philosophy. The philosopher of the interlude is interested in border-concepts such as anxiety or even the idea of the self; the interlude represents that space between waking and sleeping, an idle insomnia for creativity (seen so often in many of Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms); and is situated as a philosophical ruin – crack, fragment or interruption; as well as being the performer or joker at the interlude of the play or musical – the word derives from the Latin “inter” signifying “between”, and “ludus” – signifying “play”. Thus, this interlude is explicitly referring to music and theatre, where in the chapter called “Interlude” [Mellemspil] in Philosophical Fragments, Johannes Climacus writes: “Also in a comedy there may be an interval of several years between two acts. To suggest this passage of time, the orchestra sometimes plays a symphony or something similar in order to shorten the time by filling it up. In a similar manner, I, too, have thought to fill the intervening time by pondering the question set forth.”30 And what happens then? The idle philosophical author, Johannes Climacus, then proceeds to give a concise and condensed historical analysis of metaphysical change, essence, being and finally belief through Plato, Aristotle, Sextus Empiricus, Diogenes Laertius, Leibniz, Schelling and Hegel. This is a key moment of Kierkegaard as the 28 Lukács 1980: 502. There is a wonderful tradition of the mischievous and sometimes infuriating interlude and extended digressions in classic eccentric literature such as along the margins of Swift’s Tale of a Tub, the second preface to Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Héloise, and the whole of Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy and Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. 29 30 Kierkegaard 1985: 72 / SKS4, 272. From Hamann to Kierkegaard 87 ironic Extra-Skriver 31 [supplementary writer], whose “interlude” is the serious digression to distract the attention of the philosopher and the reader, to give material for the academic classroom, and it is interludes like these that anchor the whole performative enterprise or “fragment of philosophy” – which is the subtitle to Philosophical Fragments. It is also, crucially, in this interlude that Kierkegaard is revealing the limits of philosophy; and rather than do away with philosophy of which he is a lover of in both the Greek sense (of wisdom) and the Modern sense (of doubt), he is going to inject it with elusive yet concrete philosophers who don’t write (Socrates), suffering religious figures (Abraham and Job), fairytales and fables (Icelandic sagas, Irish fairytales, Aesop’s fables and tales from the Brothers Grimm), and playwrights (for example, Shakespeare obviously, and Denmark’s golden age dramatists such as Oehlenschläger, Holberg and Heiberg). Kierkegaard’s dramatic philosophy invites performance as praxis in the face of totalising philosophy and closed political theologies, and which also allows for a hall of mirrors and set of masks that continually displaces disciplinary identity from one field to the next just as the moment seems clear. Theology masks politics; law masks theology; political theory masks philosophy; and psychology masks literary critical approaches. This thematic deferral of overarching traditional disciplinary codes is precisely Kierkegaard’s interdisciplinarity, which is a refusal of fixed disciplinary boundaries. He is a Christian who is at the same time one of Christendom’s most devastating critics, he sees himself as a poet against aesthetics and who never wrote poetry and a philosopher against philosophy and the philosophical system,32 31 Kierkegaard 1983: 7 / SKS4, 103. He calls himself “a kind of philosopher” and has been called “a kind of poet” (Mackey 1971). Kierkegaard confides in his journals: “For between God and man there is a struggle and it’s a matter of life and death – wasn’t the God-man put to death? …about these things alone whole volumes could be written, even just by me, a kind of philosopher” (Kierkegaard, 1996: 353 [IX B 63:13 1848]). Examples of claiming and denying being a philosopher or poet are abundant in Fear and Trembling: “The present author is by no means a philosopher” (Kierkegaard 1983: 7 / SKS4, 103); “I am not a poet, and I go at things only dialectically” (Kierkegaard 1983: 90 / SKS4, 180) (This is the faltering, or negative, dialectics – preempting Adorno’s project – pitting a non-totalizing Hegel against Hegel [“the whole is the false” versus “the whole is the true”]). Sometimes, has to be a poet (to find the Stemning) but speak dialectically. The reader needs to be engaged in both the poetic mood and dialectic argumentation and structures, and become like a child to grow into the religious mindset capable of understanding mythology 32 88 Experimentation and Dissidence a bachelor who writes some of the greatest defences of marriage, living like a celibate monk who writes supreme diaries for seduction, and the lover and great master of the Danish language against the Golden Age of Danish Culture. Defying the various genres is both a blessing and a curse for him. Kierkegaard is mostly read by philosophers and philosophy departments who are not so sensitive to poetry and the dramatic arts – only teasing and seeking out the philosophical concepts and arguments; and then judged by literature departments who see him as too philosophical and religious; while theological departments often view him as too religiously provocative and radical or alternatively only wish to read him as a purely Christian author for Christians. Thus, he often remains a footnote to each discipline. These dislocations are perhaps what Kierkegaard would have wanted anyway, being the Extra-Skriver. Taking just Fear and Trembling as an example, Kierkegaard’s pseudonym – Johannes de silentio, who is the self-proclaimed Extra-Skriver, claims that he is poet and a philosopher at different moments, and also denies at different sections of the book that he is either. The title of the quintessential paradoxical text already captures the essence of Kierkegaard’s theatrical interval: “Fear and Trembling: a dialectical lyric by Johannes de silentio”. We are between theology (“Fear and Trembling” as a reference to Philippians 2:12 of the New Testament), philosophy (“dialectical”), poetry (“lyric”), and drama (in the creation of the pseudonym, mask, actor and art of deception to communicate the truth in Johannes de silentio). Or take Concluding Unscientific Postscript as another example, which is a text that is a marvelous performance that literally postfaces, postscripts or concludes (or all three) a fragment or book of crumbs (Philosophical Fragments) – which is probably his most focused, precise pseudonymous text.33 As the philosophical conand the Genesis account, as well as adept with philosophical precision and linguistic exactness. Thus, there is forming here a balance or navigation between mythos and logos, neither of which we should lose in our pursuit of wisdom, knowledge and living “the good life”. In many ways, Kierkegaard’s philosophy of the interlude is continued in Derrida’s performative philosophy – in both his framing and structuring of the texts and the content. Most obvious examples are Dissemination, Glas and The Postcard. This passage is a good indicator of the aspirations of Derrida and the author who writes along the frontiers and gaps between literature, philosophy, psychology and theology: “The god of writing is thus at once his father, his son, and himself. He cannot be assigned a fixed spot in the play of differences. Sly, slippery, and masked, an intriguer and a card, like Hermes, he is neither king nor jack, but rather 33 From Hamann to Kierkegaard 89 cept of Derrida’s “deconstruction” long postdates Kierkegaard, I would call Kierkegaard’s philosophy a “dialectic of disintegration”, because it does not integrate the self first and foremost, but dis-integrates the self and disperses and dissolves it into his theatrical philosophy which opens up human existence rather than closes it before any condition of faith or decision. 3. The Crisis of the Philosopher, the Actress and the Modern Age In this final section, I will say a few words about Kierkegaard’s essay “The Crisis and a Crisis in the Life of an Actress”,34 because, as stated already in the first paragraph, all seven aspects of the dramatic philosopher – as experimental and dissident – are present. Also, this essay reveals Kierkegaard as the dramatic philosopher both reflecting on the subject – the particular artist in question; and being the subject itself under scrutiny by the pseudonym Inter et Inter, the philosopher of the interlude. There is the general crisis of the author (‘the crisis’) caught between the aesthetic and the religious and his writing caught between confession and deception. This is the grand philosophical theatre of the self at work, in the conflicting endeavour of unifying and multiplying the self. I cite here a passage from Inter et Inter which is also quoted in full by Gillian Rose in her own analysis of the essay in her brilliant book The Broken Middle: a sort of joker, a floating signifier, a wild card, one who puts play into play” (Derrida 1993: 93). In perhaps his most crucial passage (which is significantly inserted as a footnote) in explaining his terms “dissemination” and “outwork” in his book Dissemination, Derrida refers to Concluding Unscientific Postscript as one of the key examples of a paradoxical text or paratext that neither really begins or ends as “highly differentiated in its structure [...] to all possible treatises [...] on the post-scriptum” (Derrida 1993: 27). In this same passage, reflecting on the great texts of the interlude or interval and digression, Derrida writes: “[...] one is also in fact starting over again, adding an extra text, complicating the scene, opening up within the labyrinth a supplementary digression, which is also a false mirror that pushes the labyrinth’s infinity back forever in mimed – that is, endless – speculation” (ibid. 27). There was also a plan to have this essay included in a volume called The Writings of a Young Man, where in the preface Kierkegaard would appear as a young author publishing his first book, and he would be called Felix de St. Vincent. The contents were to include: 1. The Crisis in the Life of an Actress 2. A Eulogy on Autumn 3. Rosenkilde as Hummer 4.Writing Sample (See Kierkegaard 1997: xv [Pap. VIII I A 339]). 34 90 Experimentation and Dissidence Just for that reason, all truly unworthy [unyttige], that is, unselfish [uegennyttige] servants of the truth, whose life is sheer struggle with the sophisms of existence, whose concern is not how one can best come out of it oneself but how one can most truly serve the truth and in truth benefit people – they have known how to use [benytte] illusions: in order to test people.35 The question is – when does one take off the mask or cease to deceive? And what is taking off the mask? We return again to the problem of Peer Gynt of confessing and concealing. While each one of us is enthralled by the possibility of the plurality of the subject at the theatre that Constantin Constantius so evocatively describes, the Judge of Either/Or: Part II also beautifully describes the imminent day in standing naked before oneself and the audience: Are you not aware that there comes a midnight hour when everyone must unmask; do you believe that life will always allow itself to be trifled with; do you believe that one can sneak away just before midnight in order to avoid it? Or are you not dismayed by it? I have seen people in life who have deceived others for such a long time that eventually they are unable to show their true nature. I have seen people who have played hide-and-seek so long that at last in a kind of lunacy they force their secret thoughts on others just as loathsomely as they proudly had concealed them from them earlier. Or can you think of anything more appalling then having it all end with the disintegration of your essence into a multiplicity, so that you actually became several, just as that unhappy demoniac became a legion, and thus you would have lost what is the most inward and holy in a human being, the binding power of the personality?36 Perhaps though, in being and becoming a human being, the cycle of masking and unmasking never ends, and as a Hollywood executive says in Woody Allen’s meta-film, a film in which film itself becomes the subject of the movie: “The real ones want their lives fictional, and the fictional ones want their lives real.”37 Analogous to Allen’s meta-film, Kierkegaard can be viewed as a meta-author – an author in which authorship itself becomes the subject of the author. All acting is communication – revealing and concealing, and 35 Kierkegaard 1997: 315 / SKS14, 101. See also Rose 1992: 20. 36 Kierkegaard 1987b: 160 / SKS3, 357. 37 Allen 1985. From Hamann to Kierkegaard 91 Kierkegaard’s analysis of the actress is a mirroring of his authorship. This essay becomes a moment where Kierkegaard is able to look at his own work and the challenge of being an artist, while also providing more gravitas in confronting temporality and the “age of disintegration”, and triumphing as a human being in repetition through transformation or metamorphosis. In modernism and the landscape of the modern self, masks are everywhere, acting as projections, distortions and moments of great clarity. Finally, Kierkegaard anticipates existential ethics of the twentieth century philosopher and successful dramatist Jean-Paul Sartre, when Climacus states that “the subjective thinker is not a scientist-scholar [Videnskabsmand]; he is an artist. To exist is an art.”38 As Crites points out, Kierkegaard’s last “aesthetic” pseudonym – Inter et Inter – “suggests the intermission at the theatre” and “an interlude between the religious works which now comprise Kierkegaard’s main task”.39 But perhaps the irony here is on Kierkegaard, who may see this essay as far less significant to the main act which is meant to be his formidable religious works, as akin to the way he ironically presented Fear and Trembling and Either/Or as “insignificant” to the main act of philosophy which are supposed to be Hegel’s large tomes of the philosophy of Geist, Sittlichkeit, logic, history and religion. To great philosophical systems, Either/Or was a mere “fragment of life”, Fear and Trembling was written by an Extra-Skriver, Johannes Climacus’ great philosophical work was a mere “postscript”, and Repetition was only an “experimental venture”. Perhaps then, Inter et Inter and his essay, which are located on the margins of Kierkegaard’s marginal philosophy, can actually hold centre stage as a grand interlude. Working as critic, performer, philosopher and spectator, the author analyses Johanne Luise Heiberg, the famous actress in Copenhagen and the wife of Denmark’s leading man of letters, Johan Ludvig Heiberg. The text is written sometime in 1847 and published, after much procrastination, in the revolutionary year of 1848 (24–27 July) between two works written under Kierkegaard 1992: 351 / SKS7, 320. For an example of Sartre’s fusing of becoming a moral self and the artist, see, for example his lecture “Existentialism and Humanism” from 1945 (Sartre 1994: 48–50): “Rather let us say that the moral choice is comparable to the construction of a work of art […] There is this in common between art and morality, that in both we have to do with creation and invention […] Man makes himself; he is not found ready-made.” 38 39 Crites 1967: 129. 92 Experimentation and Dissidence his own name – Christian Discourses and the three religious discourses under the title “The Lilies of the Field and Birds of the Air”, and a few months before his diary entry on “the age of disintegration”. The essay is published in four instalments in a supplement to the newspaper The Fatherland, the first instalment appearing directly below an article on the same page on the plight of the working class in Denmark. This may appear as a stark contrast but on deeper inspection it provides a poignant reminder of the tensions, relation and dichotomy between the crowd and the individual, where the individual drama and the mass historical drama are unfolding. An example such as this particular page of the newspaper is setting Kierkegaard and Marx side by side amidst the revolutionary politics of 1848 and the beginning of real power on the political stage for the people – whether that be as a crowd or as an individual. Thus, Inter et Inter analyses the relation between the faceless public and the vulnerable individual, the audience and the performer, and the borderconcept of anxiety (which is that state between freedom and necessity, desire and fear, time and eternity)40 made concrete in the challenges of being a performer offstage and onstage. The dramatic artist is always anxious offstage where the audience is awaiting and ready to judge; but onstage she is always calm.41 The dramatic artist changes this anxiety, which is a burden, into lightness in action onstage: “[...] the weight of the burden continually transforms itself into lightness.” Inter et Inter explains that it is not “casting off burdens”, but that “one soars high and free by means of – a pressure”.42 He treats the reading public as the theatrical audience (which the author, like the actress, has to deal with) and begins with a critical remark on the demand of the crowd in the “newspaper critics” that “is dreadfully shabby”43 See the complex thesis on the border-concept of anxiety by Kierkegaard’s pseudonym Vigilius Haufnienis in The Concept of Anxiety: “Anxiety is a sympathetic antipathy and an antipathetic sympathy” (Kierkegaard 1980a: 42 / SKS4, 348); “Anxiety is neither a category of necessity nor a category of freedom; it is entangled freedom, where freedom is not free in itself but entangled, not by necessity, but in itself” (ibid. 49 / 354); The moment is that ambiguity [Tvetydige] in which time and eternity touch each other” (ibid. 89 / 392 ). 40 41 Kierkegaard 1997: 313 / SKS14, 99. 42 ibid. 312 / SKS14, 99. 43 ibid. 303 / SKS14, 93. From Hamann to Kierkegaard 93 and “half-witted reviewers”,44 and on the fickleness of the public in its impatient boredom through the “habit of admiration”45 and its thirst for the immediate. Kierkegaard has a long troubled relationship with journalism firing off tirades to this new, expanding and influential media. But he responds to what he sees is and will be “the age of disintegration” – he engages with it, knowing that the tyranny and half-truths of mass media is the future, where often it is not the truth that matters but who gets the news out first and what will sell more. Thus, rather than turning his back on the demon of journalism, he confronts and enters it, and becomes a public figure himself in his last act, when he causes small ripples in the media world of Copenhagen in distributing copies of his pamphlet The Moment [Øieblikket]. There is the second crisis in the essay – that particular crisis (“a crisis”) of the actress, where temporality can be less kind to physical, carefree beauty, as she transforms into a greater artist. The public or audience wants to keep Johanne Luise Heiberg as this same beautiful young girl as object of desire even when she comes to play Juliet fourteen years later in her thirties. Yet, the esteemed actress’s performance on stage turns her inwardness into a more graceful and greater performance than the first time, achieving youth a second time. More convincing than his earlier attempts at repetition, Kierkegaard succeeds in facing and living with repetition through metamorphosis for the artist and for himself as dramatic philosopher. Inter et Inter introduces a new form of metamorphosis that he detects in the actress in confronting “the age of disintegration” – of levelling, admiration, envy and immediacy. Of course, physically the actress is transformed so it is at the second time in playing Juliet that she must mature as an actress, regain youth a second time, and rather than simply being youthfulness personified. She is now performing that youthfulness from a distance, or, in other words, is capturing that youthfulness by her skills, experience, transformation and belief in her capacities as an actress and as a human being. Her crisis and the author’s crisis is an opportunity for transformative repetition to actually happen alongside Kierkegaard’s earlier writings circling around faith or that “inner certainty that anticipates infinity”.46 If we take the essay of Inter 44 ibid. 305 / SKS14, 94. 45 ibid. 318 / SKS14, 103. 46 Kierkegaard 1980: 156. 94 Experimentation and Dissidence et Inter seriously, then Kierkegaard has made an adjustment and corrective to Johannes de silentio’s impossible faith in leaping over the confinium47 and “boundary of the unknown territory”48 and Constantin’s “border of the marvellous”,49 with the inclusion of transformation or metamorphosis. The poet David Whyte memorably explains that there is [….] an extraordinary key to transformation. […] You only have to know the frontiers, where simply by being at that frontier, you come alive. […] Youth, in a sense, is fated to grow older in the world. It’s fated to come to understand its imperfections. And I think one of the great triumphs of human existence and one of the tasks of adulthood is actually to grow younger again, to find that youthfulness at each stage of our existence. There is a radical edge that is available to us no matter whether we’re 20, 30, 40, 50 or 60. It just looks different at each stage.50 This metamorphosis and transformative repetition gives the dramatic philosopher and the actress the tools to flourish and communicate the evolving and repetitive theatre of the self in the “age of disintegration” – which is a third “crisis”. This third crisis is a crisis of the world – a crisis of belief and philosophical ideas, culture, the spreading of information and mass media, and the socio-political and economic society, where Kierkegaard writes in his journal: “That it was the age of disintegration – an age of crisis, that history was about to take a turn.”51 Conclusion From his central performance in his earlier pseudonymous authorship to the final dramatic provocation and praxis in presenting himself on the Copenhagen streets waving his series The Moment, Kierkegaard’s theatre of the self – combining the philosophical, artistic, critical and performative – is experimental and dissident to the end, and brings us to the frontiers of 47 Kierkegaard 1983: 83 / SKS4, 173. 48 ibid. 112 / 200. 49 ibid. 185 / 55. 50 Whyte 2003: Disc 2, track 16 and 29. 51 Kierkegaard 1996: 350 [1848: IX B 63: 7]. From Hamann to Kierkegaard 95 life and disciplines. And by being in the presence and working along these frontiers, his authorship as dramatic philosophy allows for a richer, more nuanced understanding and unfolding of the elusive human self. I will end this essay with the description by Inter et Inter of the actress’s restlessness which reveals the combination of transformation and faith in the artist, the style of the dramatic philosopher, and finally the theatre of the self that we all find ourselves in and which Kierkegaard has invited us to observe, recognise, enter and exit: Restlessness [Uro], in the sense of the hubbub of finitude, soon palls; but restlessness in the pregnant sense, the restlessness of infinity, the joyous, robust originality that, rejuvenating, invigorating, healing, stirs the water is a great rarity, and it is in this sense that she is restlessness. Yet in turn this restlessness signifies something, and something very great; it signifies the first fieriness of an essential genius. And this restlessness does not signify anything accidental; it does not mean that she cannot stand still; on the contrary, it signifies that even when she is standing still one has an intimation of this inner restlessness, but, note well, in repose. It does not mean that she comes running onto the stage; on the contrary, it means that when she is merely moving one has an intimation of the impetus of infinity. It does not mean that she talks so fast that one cannot follow her; on the contrary, it means that when she speaks very slowly one senses the animation and inspiration. This restlessness does not mean that she must very soon become tired; just the opposite, it discloses an elementary indefatigableness, like that of the wind, of the sounds of nature; it discloses that her roguishness is inexhaustibly rich, so that it continually only betrays that she possesses ever so much more; it discloses that her coquetry (and a character such as this utterly without coquetry is unthinkable) is nothing else than a happy, innocent mind’s joyful, triumphant awareness of its indescribable good fortune.52 Bibliographical References ALLEN, Woody (1985), The Purple Rose of Cairo. Written and directed by Woody Allen, produced by Robert Greenhut, Los Angeles: Orion Pictures. BUKDAHL, Jørgen (2001), Søren Kierkegaard and the Common Man. Translated by Bruce H. Kirmmse, Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co. 52 Kierkegaard 1997: 309 / SKS14, 97. 96 Experimentation and Dissidence CRITES, Stephen (1967), Introduction to Crisis in the Life of an Actress and Other Essays on Drama, New York and Evanston: Harper & Row. DERRIDA, Jacques (1993) Dissemination. Translated by Barbara Johnson, London: the Athlone Press. ——— (1982) “Two words for Joyce” in Post-structuralist Joyce: Essays from the French. Edited by Derek Attridge and Daniel Ferrer, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. IBSEN, Henrik (1994), Peer Gynt / The Pretenders. Translated by Michael Meyer, London: Methuen. KIERKEGAARD, Søren (1997–2013), Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter [SKS]. 28 text volumes and 28 commentary volumes, edited by Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, Joakim Garff, Jette Knuden, Johnny Kondrup, and Alastair McKinnon. Copenhagen: Gad Publishers. ——— (1980a), The Concept of Anxiety. Translated by Reidar Tomte, Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press. ——— (1989), The Concept of Irony. 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Hong, Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press. From Hamann to Kierkegaard 97 ——— (1980b), The Sickness unto Death. Translated by H. and E. Hong, Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press. ——— (1988), Stages on Life’s Way. Translated by H. and E. Hong, Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press. ——— (1993), Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits. Translated by H. and E. Hong, Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press. LUKÁCS, Georg (1974), Soul and Form. Translated by Anna Bostock, Cambridge: The MIT Press. ———(1980), The Destruction of Reason. Translated by Peter Palmer, London: The Merlin Press. MACKEY, Louis (1971), Kierkegaard: A Kind of Poet, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. PATTISON, George (2002), Kierkegaard, Religion and the Nineteenth-Century Crisis of Culture. Cambridge: University of Cambridge. PESSOA, Fernando (2001), The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa. Edited and translated by Richard Zenith, New York: Grove Press. PIPPIN, Robert B (1999), Modernism as a Philosophical Problem. Second Edition, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. PYPER, Hugh (2007), “The Stage and Stages in a Christian Authorship” in International Kierkegaard Commentary, Vol. 17: Christian Discourses and The Crisis and a Crisis in the Life of an Actress, edited by Robert L. Perkins, 299–319. Macon: Mercer University Press. RADHAKRISHNAN, S. (1953) The Principal Upanishads. Edited and translated by S. Radhakrishnan, New Delhi: Harper Collins. ROSE, Gillian (1992), The Broken Middle. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. RYAN, Bartholomew (2014), “Kierkegaard’s Fairytale”. Milan: Rivista di Filosofia Neo-Scolastica, 3–4. SARTRE, Jean-Paul (1994), Existentialism and Humanism. Translated by Philip Mairet, London: Methuen. SHAKESPEARE, William (1966), The Complete Works of Shakespeare. Edited by Peter Alexander, London and Glasgow: Collins. STOCK, Timothy (2015), “Kierkegaard’s Theatrical Aesthetic from Repetition to Imitation” in A Companion to Kierkegaard (edited by Jon Stewart). Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. 98 Experimentation and Dissidence WESTFALL, Joseph (2007), “The Actress and the Actress in the Life of a Critic: Higher Criticism in “the Crisis” in International Kierkegaard Commentary, Vol. 17: Christian Discourses and The Crisis and a Crisis in the Life of an Actress, edited by Robert L. Perkins, 299–319. Macon: Mercer University Press. ——— (2007), The Kierkegaardian Author: Authorship and Performance in Kierkegaard’s Literary and Dramatic Criticism, Berlin: De Gruyter. WHYTE, David (2003), Midlife and the Great Unknown: Finding Courage and Clarity through Poetry. Audiobook. Boulder: Sounds True.