4 - Kierkegaard's “Gjentagelse”
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 December 2009
Summary
The text
Kierkegaard published Repetition in 1843; his pseudonym this time was Constantin Constantius. The Danish title is Gjentagelsen, meaning literally “the taking back.” It is not easy–it is never easy with Kierkegaard – to decide what sort of text this is: a narration or a philosophical essay or perhaps an ironic mixture of both. Kierkegaard has Constantin make fun of this problematic in a sort of appendix, where he turns to “the real reader of this book,” called “Mr X, Esq.” This real and ideal reader is apparently not a critic or an “ordinary reviewer,” since such a specimen would have taken the opportunity to:
elucidate that it is not a comedy, tragedy, novel, epic, epigram, story and to find it inexcusable that one tries in vain to say 1.2.3. Its ways he will hardly understand since they are inverse: nor will the effort of the book appeal to him, for as a rule reviewers explain existence in such a way that both the universal and the particular are annihilated. (190/226)
This is said in the final pages, retrospectively, like a “repetition” to remind the reader – “Mr X” – in what manner and genre he has not read and, perhaps, to hint at a failed dialectic (“tries in vain to say 1.2.3.”); and that the “ways” of the text are “inverse.”
“Inverse”?
This odd statement at the end of the text may persuade reader X to “repeat” the very beginning of the text, or to read backwards to where Constantin discusses “movement” in relation to the concepts of “repetition” and “recollection” and comes up with this first definition:
Repetition and recollection are the same movement, only in opposite directions, for what is recollected has been, is repeated backward; whereas the real repetition is recollected forward. (115/131)
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Theories of Mimesis , pp. 130 - 189Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1995