Comic Crowds: Kierkegaard’s Contribution to Democratic Theory

Lars Tønder, Department of Political Science, University of Copenhagen

DRAFT, October 2015

“…let us be human beings.”

-- Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1846) 1

March 1848 was an oddly eventful month in Danish politics. Inspired by other European

revolutions—and fueled by strong nationalist sentiments—the political tide turned

against the newly installed Frederik VII and the rule of absolute monarchy. The people

no longer saw the King as a capable ruler, and the political elites themselves began

contemplating the need for a change in government. All this culminated on March 21,

1848 when a crowd of more than ten thousand people assembled in Copenhagen to

support a petition demanding that the King absolve his government in order to allow for

a new, more “democratic” constitution. L. N. Hvidt, leader of the city council of

Copenhagen, delivered the petition to the King, who gave his consent after a brief

meeting. When the crowd heard about his decision, it proclaimed an emphatic “long live

the King!” Hvidt himself continued with his daily routine. He first visited the

Copenhagen stock exchange for about an hour, and then resumed his day job as

chairman of the Danish national bank.2 The fight was over and life would go on as

normal. Not a single shot was fired during Europe’s most peaceful revolution.

Kierkegaard, who had published Either/Or five years earlier, observed all of this

from behind the windows of his family home on Nytorv in downtown Copenhagen.

Contrary to those who celebrated the calm and deliberative character of the

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negotiations, Kierkegaard detested what he saw. The crowd, Kierkegaard points out in

his diary, was “power-hungry,” “inhumanely cowardly,” and deprived of any “personal

courage.”3 To show why, Kierkegaard introduces a polemical comparison between the

political events of his time and an imaginary crowd that assemblages in the streets to

witness a dogfight. Just like the imaginary one, the crowd that came together on March

21, 1848 was risking nothing in the fight for a new government; all it wanted,

Kierkegaard says, was to experience the joyful sensation of being present when

something exciting happens. This desire became even more pronounced when the

conflicting sides started accusing each other for having provoked the fight, creating a

shouting contest in which the crowd could rule without any sense of purpose or

determination. Kierkegaard refers to this as a “second degree war,” which may seem

mildly entertaining in the case of a dogfight.4 When applied to politics, however, the

upshot suggests a degree of comic nonsense: “Then flees the King – and then it is a

Republic. Nonsense.”5

What follows from this denunciation of Denmark’s transition to democracy and

constitutional monarchy? For many of Kierkegaard’s readers—both then and now—the

denunciation suggests a preference for absolute monarchy over liberal democracy,

something that also seems to correspond with his friendship with the King whom he

visited on several occasions in his summer residence north of Copenhagen. 6 But there

are other aspects to consider as well. What, for example, should we say about

Kierkegaard’s critique of the many theologians who changed their interpretation of

Christianity depending on the political situation?7 And what about his affirmation of

“comic power” as the very condition of thinking and acting—should this affirmation not

figure prominently in our interpretation of his politics? Kierkegaard himself seems to

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think that it should. As he puts it in Concluding Unscientific Postscript, published two

years before Denmark’s democratic revolution, the “comic is always the mark of

maturity,” which is why “it is unexceptionally the case that the more proficiently a

person exists, the more he will discover the comic.”8 My wager is that this statement

captures a different side of Kierkegaard, which in turn changes how we might position

his ideas and insights vis-à-vis the discussion of democracy in contemporary political

theory. Kierkegaard may not be democratic in the sense commonly used today, but this

should not deter us from appreciating how his philosophy can tell us something

significant about the very conditions under which democracy is possible. As we shall see,

this is particularly the case when it comes to what Claude Lefort calls the “empty space

of power,”9 which Kierkegaard envisions as an exhilarating dynamic that moves in

between the quest for singularity and the pressures of the crowd. Applied to the study of

politics, this changes the terms for how we might read Kierkegaard’s critique of

Denmark’s democratic revolution. Rather than accusing the Copenhagen crowd for

being too comical, Kierkegaard may in fact be criticizing it for failing to use this label as a

means to challenge the positions offered by the royalists and the liberals respectively.

What we need, Kierkegaard seems to be suggesting, is more—not less—comedy!

The aim of this paper is to make this wager more probable. Section 2 situates

Kierkegaard’s conception of the comic within his unique brand of philosophy—what I

call “sensorial materialism.” Section 3 develops the political implications of this

materialism by showing how the affirmation of comic power creates a different

conception of the crowd, one that sees it as a collective composed by multiple

individuals who share in their singularity. (This is what Kierkegaard, in this paper’s

epigraph, calls a community of “human beings.”) Section 4 links this collective to the

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concept of the demos and discusses how Kierkegaard may be said to theorize its

rhetorical expression in a mediatized world like ours. I conclude with some more

general remarks on how Kierkegaard can inform discussions in contemporary

democratic theory that go beyond the scope of this paper.*

II. Kierkegaard’s sensorial materialism

To suggest that Kierkegaard is a “materialist” may be an improbable statement; but to

say that he is a sensorial materialist is surely flat out idiosyncratic! One would be hard

pressed not to concede that something like this is the first reaction that enters the mind

whenever Kierkegaard’s name appears in the discussion of democracy and crowd

politics. Many of Kierkegaard’s readers certainly see it that way.10 Be that as it may, it is

nonetheless important to acknowledge that a combination of sensorial attentiveness and

materialist orientation indeed is the best way of capturing the philosophy that

underpins Kierkegaard’s political outlook. According to Kierkegaard, comic power

embodies the very condition of thinking and acting because it springs from the many

contradictions inherent in lived experience, which not only undermine all claims to

* NOTE TO THE READER! This paper is very much a work-in-progress and apart from

missing references and citations it does not deliver on the full promise outlined in the

introduction you just read. Section 4 is completely missing and the conclusion is

nowhere near as refined and general as indicated in the above. Still, I hope the main idea

of the paper is sufficiently developed to generate a sufficiently detailed sense of what

they paper might look like once completed. In any case, I look forward to your

comments and suggestions.

4

stability but also lend themselves to a “new pathos” affirming the flow of becoming

while at the same time “car[ing ]” for what it “sets aside.”11 This characterization

suggests that the key question for comic power is not how to adjudicate political life

from an ideal, disembodied point of view, but rather how to conceptualize it from within

the feelings and perceptions it aims to inspire. An exploration of this latter question

takes us straight to issues of materialism and the sensorium.

Kierkegaard’s most extensive treatment of materialism and the sensorium appears

in the section of Either/Or (Part I) titled “The Immediate Erotic Stages Or the Musical-

Erotic,” which presents itself as an appraisal of Mozart’s Don Juan but in fact includes a

series of considerations on the role of the sensorial more generally. Kierkegaard’s

starting point for these considerations is the claim that the sensorial did not appear until

Christianity: “Christianity brought sensuality [Sandselighed] into the world.”12 By this

Kierkegaard does not mean that the sensorial begins with Christianity—Kierkegaard

mentions the ancient Greeks as a someone who also were interested in questions about

feeling and perception—but rather that the Christians were the first to define it in

opposition to Spirit, introducing a split between mind and body, turning the latter into a

“principle” and a “power” of its own.13 As a power that opposes Spirit, the sensorial

stands forth as a supplement that both conditions and undermines all ideational content.

(In modern parlance, we might say that the sensorial is the “constitutive outside” of

Spirit.) Kierkegaard traces the movement of this relationship by linking the sensorial to

the three stages of the erotic.14 First, the erotic takes the form of a “dream” for someone

or something undetermined. Second, it becomes a “quest” that looks for what it can

desire without actually desiring it. Third and finally, it takes the form of desire itself—as

seduction (Forførelse). The latter is what we encounter in its classical form in Mozart’s

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Don Juan: “…det Sandselige bruse i hele sin utaalmodige Lidenskab…[Don Juan] attraaer,

denne Attraa virker Forførende; forsaavidt forfører han. Han nyder Attraaens

Tilfredsstillelse; saasnart han har nydt den, da søger han en ny Gjenstand og saaledes i

det Uendelige.”15

The parallels between comic power and this way of conceptualizing the sensorial

abound in Kierkegaard’s writings. Most obvious might be how comic power and the

sensorial share the same kind of impassionate desire for the future. Just like the

sensorial that reaches the third stage of the erotic, comic power never stops as it looks

to expand and perpetuate its present shape. Such a project may be said to embody a

comical element, which surfaces once we interpret the sensorial from the side of the

ideational (and the Spirit more generally) where lived experiences are made

comprehendible though individualization and quantification. Consider for example the

difficulties we have in comprehending Don Juan’s never-ending number of romantic

relationships: “Tænker jeg mig et enkelt Individ, seer jeg ham [Don Juan] eller hører jeg

ham tale, saa bliver det comisk, at han har forført 1003.”16 According to Kierkegaard, this

reaction underscores the close relationship between comic power and the sensorial. If

we laugh when someone tries to quantify the number of women Don Juan has

conquered, it is because such quantification pales in comparison with the desire to see

and experience more, reminding us how rich and complex the sensorial world is beneath

our finite categories of mind and body. Another way of saying this is that comic power

embodies the sensorial to such an extent that they become indistinguishable. It is for

this reason that Kierkegaard elsewhere can say that comic power “is something I regard

as an indispensable legitimation for anyone who is to be regarded today as authorized in

the world of the spirit.”17 Without comic power—that is, without the elusive yet

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sensorially inflected desire for the future—it would not be possible to think, let alone

act.

One way to highlight the implications of this reading is to compare it with another

“materialist” reading, which emphasizes the transcendental rather than the sensorial

dimension of Kierkegaard’s existentialist philosophy. According to Michael O’Neill

Burns, Kierkegaard’s “transcendental materialism” emerges from an engagement with

German Idealists such as Fichte and Schelling, which gave Kierkegaard the impetus to

reframe the dialectical system in such a manner that “fracture, rather than unity [would

be] the starting point of both thought and existence.” According to Burns, this reframing

leads Kierkegaard to conceptualize reality as “non-all” in which “the more-than-material

process of human thought is a product of the contradiction contained in matter itself.” 18

This argument is particularly interesting for our purposes because it, too, emphasizes

the importance of comic power for Kierkegaard’s thought. But it does so with a different

aim in mind. Developed by theorists such as Slavoj Žižek and Alenka Zupančič, a

transcendental materialist reading of Kierkegaard interprets comic power as an

irreducible incongruity—what Žižek calls the “splitting of the split”—and it then goes on

to suggest that we approach this split as a dialectical force that negates rather than

affirms the gaps and incongruities subsisting within all modes of lived experience. 19 The

result is a non-substantive conception of comic power, which in turn revolves around

two claims: first, that “negativity…is the only true remaining universal force”; and

second, that the most effective way to think and to act is to relieve all modes of lived

experience from their “self-identity or coincidence with themselves.” The latter is what

Zupančič calls “disidentification.”20

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If I want to resist this reading of Kierkegaard, it is not because the reading depicts

Kierkegaard’s conception of reality as fractured and contradictory. This, in fact, seems

largely correct to me, in particular given Kierkegaard’s own depiction of human life as a

struggle between two powers—mind and body, spirit and sensorium—each of which

exceeds the other such that any quest for identity and stability becomes an impossible

endeavor. What is troubling, however, are the conclusions that the transcendental

materialist reading wants to derive from this conception of reality. The point

Kierkegaard wants to make is not that the encounter with a fractured and contradictory

reality justifies a rejection of lived experience (which is what I take Zupančič’s notion of

“disidentification” to mean), but rather that it invites for an acceleration of divergent

modes of feeling and perception. When Kierkegaard turns to Mozart’s Don Juan, it is this

kind of lived experience he wants to articulate: an affirmation of the sensuous as that,

which “does not love One, but Everyone.”21 This affirmation may put Kierkegaard closer

to Spinoza than to Hegel (and later Lacan), but this should not surprise, since Spinoza

too was an important source of inspiration for German Idealists like Schelling and

Fichte, a point that remains largely overlooked in the transcendental materialist

reading.22 Like Spinoza before him, Kierkegaard sees comic power as both the cause and

the effect of the affirmative potentialities that subsist within the sensorium. That is, at

the same time as both Spinoza and Kierkegaard envision comic power as a way to

disclose and mobilize the desire to experience the world in more than one way, they also

posit it as the feeling of augmentation and joy that follows from pursuing this desire

unreservedly. According to both Spinoza and Kierkegaard, this circularity does not

preclude particular modes of lived experience from being incomplete and insufficient.

However, rather than seeing this as a reason for “disidentification,” they see it as an

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impetus for a new and expansive relationship with the world writ large. What matters,

you might say, is less the fractured and contradictory nature of reality than what follows

from this conceptualization in terms of exploring and affirming new ways of feeling and

seeing.

A sensorial materialist account of Kierkegaard’s philosophy captures this approach

to lived experience better than most other accounts. By positing the sensorial as a force

of its own—and by suggesting that this force is intimately (if not subversively) tied to

the structure of intellectual life (Spirit)—Kierkegaard is in effect asking us to reconsider

any account of his philosophy that does not see comic power as the most potent way of

living in a world characterized by fissures and contradictions. Comic power may be

rhetorically akin to irony (another of Kierkegaard’s interests), but this does not imply

the same conception of negation, especially since comic power, unlike irony, assumes an

affirmative stance vis-à-vis the incongruous contradictions inherent in lived experience.

To experience life fully is to affirm these contradictions in the very act of seeing and

feeling.

III. “Let us be humans”: Toward a comic conception of the crowd

I dwell on these aspects of Kierkegaard’s work because they bring into view how his

critique of the crowd is neither wholly undemocratic nor “socially weightless” in the

manner, which Lois McNay has suggested that we read much of contemporary

democratic theory.23 Kierkegaard was indeed acutely aware of the suffering and

domination that the 1848 Copenhagen crowd was inflicting upon itself. Kierkegaard not

only reminds us of the crowd’s own desire for an authoritarian mode of government,

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one that merely substitutes one “tyrant” for another; in addition, and perhaps more

importantly, Kierkegaard also points out how this desire was framed and mobilized by

an elite group of “liberals” who used “patriotism,” “war,” and “national-feeling (National-

Følelsen)" as a cover-up for their own lack of “character.”24 In these circumstances, the

crowd became a puppet that mistook its own power for the one of the puppeteer. One

may readily grant that such an incongruous confusion has comical effects. From a

Kierkegaardian perspective, however, the effects are predominantly superficial because

they emerge from a frivolous negation that never cares for what it sets aside. As we

already have seen, this negation and lack of care does not capture everything

Kierkegaard says about the comic, and thus it would be erroneous to equate his critique

of the 1848 Copenhagen crowd with something purely or truly comical. Indeed, from

Kierkegaard’s perspective the opposite seems more likely: the real failure of the crowd

was to disavow its own incongruous contradictions, which in turn deterred it from

recognizing and then affirming the power embedded in a more profoundly comical

orientation to lived experience.

One way to elaborate on this argument goes through Claude Lefort’s theory of

politics and democracy, which Lefort develops most succinctly in his 1981 essay “The

Permanence of the Theological-Political?” Articulated in conjunction with a reflection on

the relationship between religion and politics—and situated in the context of French

revolutionary history as interpreted by the nineteenth century French historian Jules

Michelet—Lefort argues that modern democracy entails a “highly specific shaping of

society” to which its representation of “the place of power” bears witness.25 More

specifically, Lefort encourages us to focus on what he calls the “internal-external

articulation” through which power institutes a common space, which in turn enables

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society to represent itself in a manner recognizable to its different members.26 Whereas

previous regimes of government relied on an articulation that referenced either an

“outside” assigned to the gods or an “inside” assigned to the substance of the

community, Lefort shows how modern democracy can appeal to neither because it then

would absolve democracy’s own image of the demos as self-constituting.27 Debilitating in

the sense that it precludes society from having a fixed point to which it can attach claims

about authority and sovereignty, Lefort nonetheless sees this as the main achievement

of modern democracy, in part because we now can say that democracy embodies a

uniquely dynamic structure that links its political action to a fundamental incongruity

between the symbolic and the real—the representation of society and that which eludes

this representation. As Lefort suggests in one of the most important passages of his

essay:

“….of all the regimes of which we know, it [modern democracy] is the only one to

have represented power in such a way as to show that power is an empty place and

to have thereby maintained a gap between the symbolic and the real. It does so by

virtue of a discourse which reveals that power belongs to no one; that those who

exercise power do not process it; that they do not, indeed, embody it; that the

exercise of power requires a periodic and repeated contest; that the authority of

those vested with power is created and re-created as a result of the manifestation

of the will of the people.”28

Nowhere in this or other texts does Lefort anticipate more recent attempts at

linking this conceptualization of modern democracy to classical genres of lived

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experience. One reason for this might be Lefort’s wish to distinguish modern democracy

from its ancient precursors. Still, if one were to fill this lacuna, speculating on the nature

of the link between classical genres and Lefort’s own conceptualization of modern

democracy, it would seem that comedy—not tragedy—would be the most obvious

candidate for us to consider. Why comedy? First, because modern democracy stipulates

a paradoxical structure that never stops perpetuating its own transformation. Second,

because the principal idea of modern democracy is to question all claims to authority

and sovereignty. Third, because modern democracy embodies the desire to experience

the world in more than one way. All of these characteristics resonate with Kierkegaard’s

conception of the comic, allowing us to suggest that combined efforts of Lefort and

Kierkegaard amount to the idea that modern democracy is best seen as comic in both

form and structure. Such a conclusion may seem to contradict much of contemporary

political theory, which commonly links modern democracy to tragedy and in so doing

predisposes us to a political agenda based on either decisionism or mourning.29 For

Lefort and Kierkegaard, however, the opposite is the case: modern democracy is neither

a call for self-contained sovereignty nor a cause for lamentation; rather, modern

democracy expresses the desire to explore and to affirm new ways of feeling and seeing.

If modern democracy fails, it is because those who participate in it do not acknowledge

and practice this desire.

Kierkegaard’s distinct contribution to this conceptualization of “democracy as

comic” concerns the question of subjectivity, which in Kierkegaard’s terms emerges

from within the interplay between, on the one hand, the drive for singularity—that is,

the drive for a radically new mode of lived experience untainted by pre-established

categories of universality—and, on other hand, the way in which this drive is always-

12

already situated within a context of intersubjective relations. The first aspect of this

interplay relates to Kierkegaard’s motto—“let us be human beings (lad us være

mennesker)”—which Kierkegaard recites on numerous occasions, including his

philosophical magnum opus Concluding Unscientific Postscript published in 1846.30 In

this text, Kierkegaard makes his plea for “us…human beings” in relation to a critique of

the Hegelian system, which he criticizes for assuming an abstract totality in which no

new beginning is possible.31 What the “Hegelian logicians” fail to see, Kierkegaard

argues, is that such a beginning only is possible if we avoid abstractions such as

“humanity” or “Spirit,” and instead attempt to leap forward (Springe) by both distancing

from and immersing ourselves into the midst of concrete life.32 The latter is obviously a

paradoxical practice though-and-though. Indeed, at the same time as the drive for

singularity defines itself in contrast to the crowd, we may also say that this very same

crowd is what conditions it. The upshot is a non-dialectical interplay between the

subject and the crowd, one in which both come to inhabit the gap between the symbolic

and the real, defining themselves as comedians who constantly contradict and

transgress their own self-understanding. Such a self-understanding leaves no guarantee

in terms of outcome or consequence, but it may nonetheless be normatively desirable

because it instigates a desire for future ways of seeing and feeling. When this desire

takes priority, the subject and crowd come together in chiasmatic symbiosis that, as we

saw in the previous section of this paper, affirms the sensuous as that which “does not

love One, but Everyone.”33

The absence of this comic crowd-subjectivity is what underpins Kierkegaard’s

critique of the 1848 events, and what more generally defines his life-long crusade

against Danish culture, in particular as it was represented and embodied by his main

13

rival during Denmark’s democratic transition: the pastor-turned-politician N. F. S.

Grundtvig.34 As already indicated, Kierkegaard saw both Grundtvig and Danish culture as

lacking in their affirmation of comic power, something that diminished their authority

and ability to exist proficiently: “…it is unexceptionally the case that the more

proficiently a person exists, the more he will discover the comic.”35 The flipside of this

assessment is Kierkegaard’s admiration for historical personae such as Socrates and

Don Juan. According to Kierkegaard, these personae stand out as singular individuals by

virtue of affirming the comic and the power associated with this mode of lived

experience.36 In Kierkegaard’s view, however, it would be a mistake to see either one of

them as completely separate or detached from the societies in which they are said to

have made their mark on Western culture. The most explicit argument for why this is

not the case might be Kierkegaard’s discussion of Ancient Greece’s Aristophanic culture,

which Kierkegaard sees as situating the drive for singularity within a broader context of

culture and society.37 This perception of Greek comedy may indeed be the alternative to

the 1848 crowd with which Kierkegaard never reconciled: a mode of frank speech

(parrhesia) that reorganizes the relations within the crowd by subverting historically

situated claims to sovereign power. As the culture surrounding Greek comedy teaches

us, such reorganization may sometimes require the crowd to literally leave the city in

order to develop a sense of community outside the existing rules and laws.38 But the

crowd always returns. And when it does, it brings new energy into the existing

negotiations of the gap between the symbolic realm of representation and the absence of

any anchor with which to tie this realm of representation to something fixed and stable.

The aim of this section has been to show how Kierkegaard’s account of the comic

resonates with (and even reinforces) the conception of democracy that Lefort proposes

14

in his discussion of the empty place of power as a uniquely democratic staging of society.

Kierkegaard and Lefort are obviously not identical when it comes to conceptualizing the

different aspects of this staging. Whereas Lefort outlines the general form of a society

defined by an irreconcilable gap between the symbolic and the real, Kierkegaard shows

us how this gap can become the impetus for a lived experience in which the desire for

future modes of feeling and seeing takes priority. In both cases, however, it is the turn to

the comic that proffers the insights needed to allow each augment and amplify insights

embedded in the other. By embracing the turn to the comic, the textual resonances

between Kierkegaard and Lefort thus direct us down a new path toward a democratic

crowd-politics defined by singularity and pluralization.

IV. Comic Power in a Mediatized World

[This section still needs to be written.]

V. Concluding Remarks

[This section is still very incomplete and in need of revision.]

More often than not, Kierkegaard is depicted in one of two ways: either as an apologist

for the old monarchy or as a radical thinker opposing all known modes of government.

In both cases, the upshot is an account of Kierkegaard as anti-democracy. Parts of this

account are understandable given the positions available to Kierkegaard in his own

time. If the choice is between, on the one hand, a monarchy based distinction and

15

character and, on the other hand, a democracy underpinned and controlled by a

manipulative elite, then Kierkegaard has no doubt: the former will always win over the

latter, if for no other reason than because it represents the lesser of two evils.39

However, as I have shown in this paper, the claim that Kierkegaard is an anti-democrat

is just as much a symptom of our own prejudices about democracy as it is about

Kierkegaard’s philosophy itself. Kierkegaard’s philosophy may not identify with the

quest for everything democratic, but its consequences resonate nonetheless with the

idea of democracy as embodying “the empty place of power.” As we have seen, the

upshot is significant for our understanding of both Kierkegaard and democratic politics

more generally. On the one hand, we can now say that Kierkegaard’s critique of the 1848

events was not a defense of monarchy per se, but rather a refusal of the underlying

terms of the debate, a refusal that in turn would enable Kierkegaard to simultaneously

disclose and mobilize a third option based on an affirmation of comic power. On the

other hand, we can also say that an affirmation of this kind speaks more generally to

concerns about the crowd in democratic theory. By showing us how the crowd can

become the embodiment of comic power, Kierkegaard also shows us how collective

action based on difference rather than identity is possible: to become comic,

Kierkegaard tells us, is to become part of a collective in which a multiplicity of

individuals share in their singularity, resisting the demands for homogeneity, aiming

instead to direct their divergent desires for fulfilment toward future modes of feeling

and seeing.

16

Notes

17

1 Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to the Philosophical Crumps, trans.

Alastair Hannay (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 97.

2 SAK, p. 433.

3 Dagbøger, kopi fra byvandring…

4 SAK, p. 432.

5 SAK, p. 434.

6 In recent years, the view of Kierkegaard as a conservative royalist has been aided by Carl

Schmitt who approvingly cites Kierkegaard at the conclusion of Chapter 1 of Political Theology

as support for his own account of law and sovereignty. See Carl Schmitt, Political Theology:

Four Chapters on Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago

Press, 2005), p. 15. For a historical account of Kierkegaard’s friendship with Frederik VII, see

Joakim Garff, SAK: Søren Aabye Kierkegaard, En Biografi (København: Gads Forlag, 2000), p.

423.

7 For an account of Kierkegaard’s many critiques of prominent Danish theologians such as H.

L. Martensen and J. P. Mynster, both of whom influenced Danish politics both before and after

the March 1848 events, embodying the kind of political savviness that Kierkegaard detested,

see Stephen Backhouse, Kierkegaard’s Critique of Christian Nationalism (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 2011), esp. Chapter 2.

8 Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, pp. 235, 387–388 (translation modified).

9 See Claude Lefort, “The Permanence of the Theological-Political?” reprinted in Hent de Vries

and Lawrence E. Sullivan, Political Theologies: Public Religions in a Post-Secular World (New

York: Fordham University Press, 2006), p. 160.

10 In addition to the works by Burns, Žižek, and Zupančič cited below, see also REFERENCES!

11 Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, pp. 235, 236 (translation modified).

12 Kierkegaard, Enten/Eller, p. 68.

13 Ibid.

14 Ibid., p. 86.

15 Ibid., p. 102.

16 Ibid., p. 97. See also p. 93.

17 Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, p. 235.

18 Michael O’Neill Burns, Kierkegaard and the Matter of Philosophy: A Fractured Dialectic

(Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015), pp. xvi, xvii (emphases in original).

19 Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2006), p. 107.

20 Alenka Zupančič, The Odd One In: On Comedy (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press,

2008), pp. 34, 32. See also my discussion in “Comic Rules: Kierkegaard, The Idiots, and the

Politics of Dogma 95,” Theory & Event, vol. 18, no. 2 (2015). What follows is an elaboration of

some of the points I make in that essay.

21 Kierkegaard, Enten/Eller, p. 98.

22 For a recent study of Spinoza’s influence on German Idealism, see the contributions to

Spinoza and German Idealism, edited by Eckart Förster and Yitzhak Y. Melamed (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 2015). The connections traced and discussed by these

contributions remain largely untouched by Burns in his discussion of Kierkegaard and

thinkers such as Schelling and Fichte. The upshot is a rather ahistorical account of

Kierkegaard’s intellectual heritage and his own ideas about the philosophical tradition.

23 INSERT REFERENCE!

24 INSERT REFERENCE, Egelund Møller, pp. 128ff.

25 Lefort, ”The Permanence of the Theological-Political?” p. 159.

26 Ibid.

27 Ibid., p. 160.

28 Ibid., p. 159.

29 INSERT REFERENCES!

30 Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, p. 97.

31 Ibid. INSERT: discussion and reference back to the limited reading of Žižek and Zupančič.

32 Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to the Philosophical Crumps, p. 98.

33 Kierkegaard, Enten/Eller, p. 98.

34 For a discussion of Kierkegaard’s critique of Grundtvig, see also my essay ”Comic Rules.”

35 Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, p. 388.

36 REFERENCE TO KIERKEGAARD’S IRONY BOOK!

37 REFERENCE TO KIERKEGAARD’S IRONY BOOK!

38 REFERECE TO GREEK LAUGHTER BOOK!

39 REFERENCE TO KIERKEGAARD’S DISCUSSION OF TYRANNI (AND ITS RELATION TO

DEMOCRACY…).