1. Existentialism Revisited

In this chapter we will begin to draw together a number of the themes and threads of earlier chapters, while preparing the way for our discussion of the political implications of the paradoxical process of making sense. In particular, our attention here will be on the de/differentiating tendencies of making sense, and on how these tendencies come to bear on the problem of making sense of one’s life, a problem that has a pronounced resonance within the existential tradition. With Kierkegaard, especially, one cannot overstate the relevance of paradox to his understanding of the nature of human existence, though Sartre and Camus, as we will see, each in their own way continue to press important aspects of Kierkegaard’s thought. We will then extend Kierkegaard’s project, bringing in the work of Erving Goffman as well as Harold Garfinkel’s ethnomethodological studies, in order to argue for a symptomatological approach to discerning and resisting the tendencies to rely on solutions without a problem. This the approach I have been calling critical existentialism, which we will develop further in the context of Adorno’s critique of Heidegger’s understanding of authenticity. Bringing the paradoxical de/differentiating tendencies of making sense into conversation with the existential focus on an authentic, meaningful life, and with an emphasis on Kierkegaard’s arguments, we will be able to address Adorno’s criticisms and show how we can, in new and important ways, answer Hume’s call to pursue a philosophy that has ‘a direct reference to action and society’ (Hume 1999, 1.6).

a) Kierkegaard and infinite difference

In The Sickness unto Death (1849), Søren Kierkegaard identifies the sickness of the title as despair, and more precisely the despair that death does not bring about the end of what one is – namely, spirit. In a body that is sick and suffering, the sickness that ends with death also ends this person’s suffering, and thus death will be, in this sense, a blessing. For Kierkegaard, however, there is a ‘sickness of the soul [that] does not consume [the soul] as the sickness of the body consumes the body’ (Kierkegaard 1980b, 20).