Kierkegaard's edifying or upbuilding writings are often treated as if they belonged to a world apart from the poetically and philosophically genial works of the pseudonymous authorship. They might seem especially remote from the kind of aesthetic and cultural debates that have been reflected in the previous chapters. And, of course, there are real differences. Nevertheless (and very much in keeping with the essential ambiguity of the ‘moment’ vis-à-vis the simultaneity of the sublime and the ephemeral) there are also important points of thematic contact. It is precisely such points of contact that enable Kierkegaard, through the discourses, to develop a strategy of resistance, a counter-movement, to the onward march of the levelling values of ‘the public’. In this chapter, then, I shall explore one such point of contact, namely, the question of time itself and the particular experience of time in the cultural milieu of Kierkegaard's age.

In their espousal of the values of modernity, the radicals of Kierkegaard's generation – no less than the promoters of fashionable entertainments like Tivoli – made ample and effective use of the rhetoric of novelty. Like later artistic modernists and their distant post-modern relatives, the exponents of the emerging culture of mid-nineteenth-century modernity understood themselves to be the bearers of ‘Newness’. The vocal spokesmen of the rising generation sought to administer the ‘shock of the new’ to a complacent, ‘mummified’ Establishment in order to awaken it to the reality of the modern world.