El propósito de este estudio consiste en mostrar la crítica de Kierkegaard a la metafísica de la lectura a través de su problematización de la noción de autor y su revisión de la noción de público en su obraDos épocas. Una recensión literaria. Para ello, se rechazará la interpretación habitual de esta obra, basada en la distinción público/privado, y se valorará la propuesta de Kierkegaard mediante las nociones de cuerpo e intimidad. Ello implicará una redefinición del lenguaje desde el secreto (...) y el silencio, y apuntará hacia una relación compleja entre la literatura, el cuerpo, la subjetividad y la religión. (shrink)

The central idea of this paper is that Michel Foucault and Søren Kierkegaard are unexpected allies in the investigation into the relation between madness and reason. These thinkers criticize reason’s presumption of purity and call into question reason’s isolation from madness. Strategies of indirect communication and regard for paradox from Kierkegaard’s nineteenth-century works find new ground in Foucault’s twentieth-century archaeological undertaking as Foucault illuminates “both-and” moments in the history of madness, uncovering points where rationalism paradoxically conceives of madness or where (...) madness is not unreasonable. Furthermore, for both thinkers, form and content meet, as Kierkegaard and Foucault’s occasionally “delirious lyricism” (in the phrase of Dominick LaCapra) exemplifies the intertwining of logical and illogical forces. (shrink)

It is by way of the call that one is enabled to wake up to responsibility. What is the illocutionary mood of the ‘call’ of conscience, though? Is this transcendental enabler of responsibility an imposing demand or an invitational question? Both Levinas and Heidegger emphasize the impositional character of the call in conscience. The call seems to be the very essence of imperatives. I develop an apology for questioning by way of appeal to crumbs scattered throughout Jewish traditions as well (...) as throughout the works of Levinas and Heidegger. Perhaps we are invited to be rather than told to be. (shrink)

I argue that Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks deserve to be read as works of philosophy and not just used as supplements to bring order and respectability to Kierkegaard’s other writings. There are at least three specific philosophical values in Kierkegaard’s journals – three ways in which the journals create philosophy within their own pages and therefore deserve to be read as independent works of philosophy and not just as supplements to Kierkegaard’s other writing: (1) The journals demonstrate what a true (...) work of existential philosophy looks like. (2) The journals contribute to Kierkegaard’s theory of indirect communication. (3) The journals create new philosophical concepts. All three of these are best understood as philosophical performances or a kind of philosophical theatre. The idea that philosophy can be a kind of theatre is inspired by the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, particularly their book What is Philosophy? I draw from Deleuze and Guattari especially in section (3) to argue that Kierkegaard’s Journals create new philosophical concepts. (shrink)

I argue for an approach to Philosophical Fragments that allows it to be philosophical and fragmentary, and that pays particular attention to the fragments, or crumbs, that seem least important. One such overlooked crumb is the theory of merely human education in the book—education that does not enlist God as the teacher, where humans simply try to teach and learn from each other. I argue that Philosophical Fragments defends this theory of education with several reductio ad absurdum proofs that are (...) especially useful because they clarify why merely human education so often fails. Finally I apply the theory of merely human education in Philosophical Fragments to Kierkegaard’s authorship as a whole and argue that it gives us a paradigm for understanding all of Kierkegaard’s texts that is more fundamental than the distinction between direct and indirect communication. (shrink)

This article demonstrates a novel conceptualization of sublimity: the sublime in the pedestrian. This pedestrian mode of sublimity is exemplified by the Biblical Abraham, the central figure of Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous Fear and Trembling. It is rooted in the analysis of one of the foundational stories of the three monotheistic religions: Abraham’s averted sacrifice of his son Isaac. The defining feature of this new, pedestrian mode of sublimity is that is remains hidden behind what I call a total incognito. It is (...) similar to the classical ‘elevated mode of sublimity’ as developed by Burke, Kant, and Schiller insofar as it denotes two contrasting feelings at once: repulsion and attraction. It is different insofar as Kierkegaard’s pedestrian mode of sublimity remains hidden from view and can only be shown indirectly. This article expounds the new, pedestrian mode of sublimity by investigating the relation between the incognito and the sublime in Fear and Trembling. It achieves that goal by engaging three perspectives: (1) the sublime failure that comes to the fore in the incognitos of an imaginary Abraham; (2) the ‘fear without being afraid’ that is invoked by God’s incognitos; (3) the total incognito of the pedestrian which conceals Abraham’s sublimity. (shrink)

In § 35 of Sein und Zeit Heidegger’s denunciation of Gerede, idle talk, is confident and scathing. It sounds so sinister and threatening. What could Heidegger be talking about? One could cite numerous fictional characters (e.g., Pecksniff, Mrs. Gamp, Skimpole, Podsnap – all in Dickens), characters whose speech is very nearly an idiolect of bad faith. And yet there is something so fascinating and creative in their speech, an exuberance in their dissimulation, that one wouldn’t want to miss them. Could (...) idle talk in Heidegger’s sense contribute to the theoretization of Bakhtin's idea of the dialogic and heteroglossia and to the notion of discours as it has been developed by Benveniste, Barthes, and Genette? In prose fiction language is valorized (often implicitly) in terms of meaning/nonsense, serious/non-serious, full/empty. When in fiction language that is deemed low, formulaic, or “empty”-- gossip, chatter, prattle, idiotismes – comes to the fore the narrative elements falters, “nothing much” is said. But a kind of speech as act and process is foregrounded. It is this kind of inadvertence in language, its “idling” state, that Gerede points to. (shrink)

I want to know whether Chan masters and students depicted in classical Chan transmission literature can be interpreted as asking open (or what I will call “genuine”) questions. My task is significant because asking genuine questions appears to be a decisive factor in ascertaining whether these figures represent models for dialogue—the kind of dialogue championed in democratic society and valued by promoters of interreligious exchange. My study also contributes to a more comprehensive understanding of early Chan not only by detailing (...) contrasts between contemporary interests and classical Chan, but more importantly by paying greater attention to the role language and rhetoric play in classical Chan. What roles do questions play in Chan encounter dialogues, and are any of the questions genuine? Is there anything about the conventions of the genre that keeps readers from interpreting some questions in this way? To address these topics, I will proceed as follows. First, on a global level and for critical-historical context, I survey Chan transmission literature of the Song dynasty in which encounter dialogues appear, and their role in developments of Chan/Zen traditions. Second, I zoom in on structural elements of encounter dialogues in particular as a genre. Third, aligning with the trajectory of performative analyses of Chan literature called for by Sharf and Faure, I turn to develop and criticize a performative model of questions from resources in recent analytic and continental philosophy of language and I apply that model to some questions in encounter dialogue literature. (shrink)