Abstract

This dissertation explores the interrelations between the concepts of language, subjectivity and possibility in the thought of Soren Kierkegaard and Jacques Lacan. The dissertation makes two major departures from common scholarly opinion: there is in Kierkegaard a conception of the anteriority of language over subjectivity instead of the reverse, and there is in Kierkegaard an important concept of "absolute possibility," which possibility is not at all the dialectical opposite of actuality. The dissertation is arranged in two parts, one devoted to each of these points. ;In the first part, the discussion of "The Anteriority of Language in Kierkegaard and Lacan," we explore the extent to which an encounter with an 'enigmatic word' is crucial in the constitution of the self in the thought of both Kierkegaard and Lacan; such an encounter indicates a fundamental, inescapable passivity as the essential character of the self. Key texts in this first part are Kierkegaard's The Concept of Anxiety and Lacan's "The Subversion of the Subject in the Dialectic of Desire." ;In the second part, the discussion of "Absolute Possibility in Kierkegaard and Lacan," we isolate, on the basis of a reading of Philosophical Fragments, two distinct senses of possibility in Kierkegaard's works: possibility as that which stands in a dialectical relation of mutual determination with actuality, and a non-dialectical notion of possibility, "absolute possibility." Reading The Sickness Unto Death, we find this absolute possibility to constitute Kierkegaard's "existential God-concept." On the basis of certain upbuilding discourses, we show that it is in prayer of thanksgiving and repentance that such absolute possibility, God, is discovered. Reading Climacan and Anti-Climacan works, we relate this absolute possibility of God to the "absolute actuality" of Christ. In a reading of Lacan's Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, we show how the Lacanian unconscious is best understood in terms of this Kierkegaardian absolute possibility. We then proceed to a reading of repetition in the thought of both Kierkegaard and Lacan, which reading brings to light the sense in which both thinkers try to meditate on the instance of what we call a "love beyond the Law."