Kierkegaard and the Staging of Desire: Rhetoric and Performance in a Theology of Eros

By Carl S. Hughes

Theology in the modern era often assumes that the consummate form of theological discourse is objective prose—ignoring or condemning apophatic traditions and the spiritual eros that drives them. For too long, Kierkegaard has been read along these lines as a progenitor of twentieth-century neo-orthodoxy and a stern critic of the erotic in all its forms. In contrast, Hughes argues that Kierkegaard envisions faith fundamentally as a form of infinite, insatiable eros. He depicts the essential purpose of Kierkegaard’s writing as to elicit ever-greater spiritual desire, not to provide the satisfactions of doctrine or knowledge.

Hughes’s argument revolves around close readings of provocative, disparate, and (in many cases) little-known Kierkegaardian texts. The thread connecting all of these texts is that they each conjure up some sort of performative “stage setting,” which they invite readers to enter. By analyzing the theological function of these texts, the book sheds new light on the role of the aesthetic in Kierkegaard’s authorship, his surprising affinity for liturgy and sacrament, and his overarching effort to conjoin eros for God with this-worldly love.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Release date: Jul 2, 2014
• ISBN: 9780823257270

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KIERKEGAARD AND THE STAGING OF DESIRE

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hughes, Carl S.

    Kierkegaard and the staging of desire : rhetoric and performance in a theology of eros / Carl S. Hughes. — First edition.

          pages cm

    Includes bibliographical references and index.

    ISBN 978-0-8232-5725-6 (cloth : alk. paper)

 1.  Kierkegaard, Søren, 1813–1855.   2.  Theology—History—19th century.   3.  Performance—Religious aspects—Christianity.   4.  Theater—Religious aspects—Christianity.   5.  Desire—Religious aspects—Christianity.   I.  Title.

 BX4827.K5H84 2014

 230'.044092—dc23

2013037287

Printed in the United States of America

16 15 14      5 4 3 2 1

First edition

For my parents—

fellow travelers

in the paths of longing

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Prologue: Theology and Fairy Tales

Introduction: Staging Desire, with Constant Reference to The Concept of Irony

1.   Desiring The One—in Vaudeville, Marriage, and Beyond

2.   Vor Frue Kirke as Stage: Aesthetics and Desire in Liturgy and Sacrament

3.   The Woman Who Was a Sinner: A New Statue in Vor Frue Kirke

4.   Theatrical and Eucharistic Transformations: From the Farce Theater to the Feet of Christ

5.   Sacramental Writing, Sacramental Living: Eros in Existence

Epilogue: Renewing Theology—Kierkegaard beyond Barth

Notes

Works Cited

Illustration Credits

Index

Illustrations

Scene at the Auction of Søren Kierkegaard’s Effects

Rinville Embracing Emmeline, a scene from The First Love

Vor Frue Kirke, Copenhagen

Thorvaldsen’s Christus and baptismal font

Titus’s Wig Torn Off, a scene from The Talisman

Drawing from an 1840 love letter to Regine Olsen

Acknowledgments

This book contains the echoes of many voices and is the work of many hands. The people listed below have made it immeasurably better. But my expressions of thanks here only begin to account for my debts.

I conducted much of the research for this book at the Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre in Copenhagen, Denmark, in 2009–10. It was a privilege to be a part of the international community of scholars there, and I thank the American-Scandinavian Foundation for the fellowship that supported my stay. Niels Jørgen Cappelørn was extraordinarily generous with the time and attention he showed my work—reading through early drafts of this project with a meticulous and constructive eye. Joakim Garff, Jon Stewart, Patrick Stokes, Adam Buben, and Andrew Henscheid were perceptive, generous, and thought-provoking conversation partners during my stay. Jeanette Bresson Ladegaard Knox—Sinead, as she is known to us Americans—taught me Danish in both Minnesota and Copenhagen and opened many new vistas to me. Thanks to Bjarne Still Laurberg for his helpfulness and support. Special thanks to Anders Stengaard and Jens and Kirsten Holmgaard of Sælling, Jutland, for welcoming me into their homes and introducing me to living history.

I am deeply indebted to Mark D. Jordan, Don E. Saliers, and Wendy Farley of the Graduate Division of Religion of Emory University for inspiring this project through their teaching and improving it with feedback over several years. I thank them for enduring my countless emails and anxieties and giving me the gift of convincing me that I had something worthwhile to say. Each of them is a role model for me—not only because of their creative and insightful scholarship but also, much more important, because of their uncommon kindness, humility, and grace. I am also thankful to Geoffrey Bennington, Jill Robbins, Ian A. McFarland, Jonathan Strom, and Pamela M. Hall for the many ways they supported my work at Emory. Chad Pevateaux and Adam Rosenthal read drafts of key parts of this project in various stages of completion; I am grateful to have these Derridean interlocutors as friends. During my time in Atlanta, I was blessed to be a part of St. John’s Lutheran Church on Ponce de Leon Avenue. Bradley Schmeling and the members of this community do not figure in my footnotes, but their prophetic witness to God’s love has been a source of much inspiration for me nonetheless.

I completed this book at the Hong Kierkegaard Library of St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota. As a St. Olaf College graduate, I was honored to spend another year on the hill a decade after I thought I had left for good. I thank the Kierkegaard House Foundation for the fellowship that made this stay possible. I read Kierkegaard for the first time many years ago with Gordon Marino, and I will be eternally grateful for the thousand kindnesses he has shown me since then as a mentor and friend. I am also grateful to Cynthia Lund for the quiet but heroic behind-the-scenes labors with which she has made my research and that of countless other Kierkegaard scholars possible. Many thanks to Erik Hong for his stewardship of the house on Lincoln Lane. Thanks also to L. DeAne Lagerquist and to the members of the St. Olaf religion and philosophy departments for the professional and personal kindnesses they showed me. I apologize to Charles Wilson for betraying what he taught me about Hegel so many years ago; the questions he asked in my very first religion class continue to drive me to this day. Thank you to Anthony Rudd and Jeanine Grenberg for lively philosophical conversations, generally over an expertly mixed cocktail or a very good bottle of wine.

The Danish Royal Library and the State Museums of Berlin kindly provided scans of the images reproduced throughout this book. Thank you to Helen Tartar and the staff of Fordham University Press for their patience, wisdom, and expertise. I also thank Lee Barrett and an anonymous reader for the constructive feedback they provided on this manuscript.

It is difficult to find the words to thank those who have helped me most. My brother, John Hughes, and my parents, Chuck and Bunny Hughes, have been sources of unflagging support and encouragement over the many years that I have labored on this project. It would not have been possible without them. My wife, Cayenne Claassen-Luttner, endured long winters in both Copenhagen and Minnesota for the sake of this book—a sign of true dedication. She is my first, last, and best reader, and she teaches me to love more with every passing day.

Northfield, Minnesota

May 2013

Prologue

Theology and Fairy Tales

Suppose there was a king who loved a lowly maiden. But the reader has probably already lost patience when he hears that the analogy is like a fairy tale and is in no way systematic. Well, the erudite Polus certainly found it tedious that Socrates constantly talked about food and drink and doctors and other such trivialities about which the erudite Polus did not talk at all (see Gorgias).…

So suppose there was a king who loved a lowly maiden.

—Johannes Climacus, Philosophical Fragments

The fairy tale that Kierkegaard’s pseudonym Johannes Climacus begins to tell above is meant to shed light on no less an elevated theological topos than the Incarnation.¹ It is the centerpiece of the second chapter of Philosophical Fragments, by any measure one of the weightiest and most central texts of Kierkegaard’s authorship. Throughout the book, Climacus studiously avoids mentioning Christ, Christianity, or the Incarnation by name—though few readers could avoid connecting his hypothetical thought-project and poetical venture to Christian theology. Instead of writing directly about the Incarnation, as most theologians would, Climacus stages another drama—one more accessible to the human mind: a hypothetical conjecture about a teacher who taught otherwise than Socrates. He asks readers to imagine how this teacher would teach a truly transcendent truth, one not already latent within human reason. But staging this anti-Socratic thought experiment turns out to require staging another drama: a fairy tale about a lowly maiden and a love-struck king. And the very site of these stagings—the text of Philosophical Fragments—is itself a kind of theater. Kierkegaard does not sign the book himself but assumes the voice of Johannes Climacus. In relation to him and the myriad other pseudonyms who populate Kierkegaard’s authorship, Kierkegaard insists (in the First and Last Explanation that he appends to Climacus’s Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments) that he is nothing more than a "souffleur," or stage prompter.²

The title of the present volume announces themes that may well seem odd or even heretical in a theological analysis of Kierkegaard’s authorship. Desire, for example: Kierkegaard is frequently interpreted as one of the sternest critics of eros in both its earthly and its heavenly orientations in the history of Christian theology. The commonly known facts about Kierkegaard certainly seem to support this view. Does his decision to sever his engagement to Regine Olsen not define the entire course of his life? Do texts such as Works of Love not drive a sharp wedge between earthly passion and Christian love? Does the history of theology not lump him together with Anders Nygren and Karl Barth—influential twentieth-century theologians for whom spiritual yearning is a veritable refusal of divine revelation and grace? Or consider the theme of performance—which I use in a dual sense in this book to refer to theatrical performance, on the one hand, and liturgical and sacramental performance, on the other. To be sure, the topic of theater is widespread in Kierkegaard’s work, especially his early pseudonymous writings. But many theologically minded readers would argue that Kierkegaard, like Saint Augustine, invokes the theater precisely in order to denounce its dangers—presenting it as a fleshpot to be escaped rather than as a prism through which to see the Christian life. As for the theme of religious performance: In this context, this may simply seem strange. By common consensus, Kierkegaard is one of the last authors to whom one would turn for elucidation in matters of liturgical and sacramental theology. Was he not a poet of inwardness—obsessed with the single individual and encumbered by his social misanthropy and his awkward body? Was he not one of history’s most bitter critics of the institutional church? What good could he possibly have to say about ritual performance?

Such concerns notwithstanding, I argue in this book that desire and the performative stage settings by which Kierkegaard seeks to elicit it are vital to his project as a Christian writer. From my perspective, these frequently occluded aspects of his work are precisely what make it most valuable as a resource for, and provocation to, theology today. In the introduction to follow, I have much more to say about these subjects, and I begin to address the questions and concerns noted above. For now, though, let us simply heed Johannes Climacus’s injunction to consider his fairy tale. Suppose there was a king who loved a lowly maiden. Trivial as it may seem, this fairy tale exemplifies what I mean by describing Kierkegaard’s writings as stagings of Christian desire.

Even if we are more patient with analogies than the Sophists Polus and Callicles in Plato’s Gorgias, we may still wonder why Climacus chooses this story as a way of speaking about the Incarnation. At first glance, it seems clichéd to the point of being hackneyed. A king falls in love with a humble maiden—so far, so familiar. The inequality in station between the two characters is a recipe for unhappy love—that cherished theme of Romantic literature and its many Young Werthers. In Climacus’s decidedly post-Romantic age, indulgence of wistful longing had bred contempt, or at least impatience. Yet Climacus meditates on this story of unhappy love for pages, weaving it together with his effort to imagine a teacher who transcended Socrates.

At first, the story hardly seems to offer much in the way of dramatic intrigue. What obstacle could really stand between a king and his longed-for maiden? The king is a king after all, and to have the peasant girl for his own, he probably only needs to snap his fingers. Climacus acknowledges as much: The king could have appeared before the lowly maiden in all his splendor, could have let the sun of his glory rise over her hut, shine on the spot where he appeared to her and let her forget herself in adoring admiration.³ Climacus never questions whether the peasant girl would be satisfied by such a scenario. Who wouldn’t want such a savior? He also insists that none of the usual fairy-tale obstacles—a previous marriage, warring families, a conniving stepmother—intervenes in the story to obstruct the king’s path. Yet he writes that the king’s desire is thwarted nonetheless—not by any external obstacle, but by the sheer extent of his longing. This king that Climacus imagines wants more than merely to have the maiden as his wife. He wants more than her undying gratitude and awe. He wants the maiden to love him as freely and passionately as he loves her. But he must soon acknowledge that she can only love him this way if she is his equal. Sadly, the king’s inequality with the maiden is the one thing that he, with all his power, cannot change. No matter how many velvet robes the king bestowed upon her, the maiden would always be peasant stock beneath them. Her identity as queen would always be merely a costume—her daily life the performance of a fictional role. No delusion can satisfy this king, Climacus explains, for what he longs for is not … his own glorification, but the girl’s.⁴ The king that Climacus imagines is controlled by his desire for an other. His desire is to be desired by an other in a free and genuine way. And it turns out that all the power in the world cannot assure the satisfaction of this longing.

Climacus describes the king’s yearning as a source of great anguish for the king. Of course, a king is not supposed to be subject to heart-rending sorrow—just as he is not supposed to be governed by all-consuming desire. Yet Climacus exclaims, "What a depth of sorrow slumbers in this unhappy romantic love [Elskov]!"⁵ He writes that even the greatest Romantic novel would not be able to do this passion justice: Just as that royal sorrow is found only in a royal soul and most human languages do not name it at all, likewise all human language is so self-loving that it has no intimation of such a sorrow.⁶ The assumption that kings are beyond all-consuming passion is analogous to the traditional ascription of metaphysical impassivity to God. By suggesting that even God might long for what omnipotence cannot furnish, Climacus anticipates the process theology developed more than a century after Kierkegaard’s time: The human mind so often aspires to might and power, and in its constant preoccupation with this thought, as if achieving it would transfigure everything, it does not suspect that there is not only joy in heaven but sorrow also.⁷ Climacus argues that the king’s sorrowful longing would push him to do something at once unthinkable and oddly familiar—something that resonates with the central Christian story about God. He argues that, out of overpowering love for the maiden, the king would renounce his might and majesty and strive to become her equal in lowliness.

The resemblance between this plot line and the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation is obvious. In order that the maiden might truly love him, the king forsakes the accoutrements of his kingliness and appears to her in the humblest possible form. As Climacus is quick to point out, doing so is a genuine risk for the king. The more successful the king is in achieving his transformation, the less likely the maiden is to be attracted to him. Whether she will respond to his passion with reciprocal desire is necessarily unpredictable. If the king really becomes unrecognizable as king, then the maiden may well ignore him, or even scorn him, because of his lowliness. What wonderful self-denial to ask … the lowliest of persons: Do you really love me? Climacus marvels.⁸ Out of love for the maiden, the king risks making himself unlovely—in the hope that she will love him with the same incomprehensible passion with which he loves her.

Palpable as the analogy to Christ is here, Climacus warns that his fairy tale ultimately fails to convey the infinite love that he is trying to express. In fact, he cautions as much before he even launches into the story. This is how he prefaces it: No human situation can provide a valid analogy, even though we shall suggest one here in order to awaken the mind to understanding the divine.⁹ According to Climacus, the purpose of this story is not to communicate knowledge but to affect readers viscerally, to awaken. After bringing his tale to a close, Climacus underscores its inadequacy as a representation of infinite love by pinpointing where the analogy breaks down. No human king, he insists, could ever really make himself the equal of a peasant girl. Fundamentally, he would always be a king beneath his rags. In the same way that the peasant girl could never really do more than play at being queen, so too the king’s descent into lowliness would always be merely a costumed deceit. The king’s plebian cloak … just by flapping open would betray the king, Climacus writes.¹⁰ He insists that a genuinely infinite love would go further than this fairy-tale king ever could: Such a passion would inspire a transformation beyond all cloaks and pretending. This is the boundlessness of love, Climacus writes: not in jest but in earnestness and truth to will to be the beloved’s equal.¹¹ Yet Climacus insists that, try as we might to imagine such a love, it is forever beyond our representational capacities. Climacus can identify the failures of his fairy tale, but he still cannot depict divine love directly—not in another fairy tale, not in the most eloquent novel or play, and not in the most rarefied theological discourse. The best that all these forms can do is to show where they break down, in order to awaken a desire for that which they can never contain.

Throughout his authorship, Kierkegaard constructs a seemingly endless series of thought experiments and fairy tales, of which this story is only one example. He does so both when he writes under pseudonyms such as Johannes Climacus and when he writes under his own name. Although all of his stories, images, and personas seek to stage divine love, none of them claims to be able to grasp, contain, or directly express it. Rather, as Climacus’s fairy tale illustrates, these stagings succeed precisely when they fail: when they push us beyond themselves and stir us to respond to infinite eros in kind.

When I assert throughout this book that Kierkegaard’s writings function as stagings of desire, I am drawing on a number of interrelated senses of the English word stage. In the context of Kierkegaard scholarship, perhaps the most frequent use of the word is in reference to Kierkegaard’s famous theory of the stages—that is, his use of the categories of the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious to name different modalities of subjective existence. I explore the relationship between these categories throughout this book—calling into question whether they ever exist in isolation from one another or ever make up a linear progression. A second common use of the word stage in Kierkegaard scholarship is in reference to the theater—one of the most recurring themes of his writing and an obsession of his age in general. I take Kierkegaard’s relationship to the theater as a guiding thread in this book. I not only consider two of his extended meditations on plays from his era but also argue that even when his writings do not refer directly to the theater, their rhetoric can be described as theatrical. I argue that even Kierkegaard’s most explicitly religious writings employ the techniques of the theater in order to produce what Kierkegaard sees as theater’s signature effect: the elicitation of desire.

The third, and most important, sense in which I use the word stage emerges from the context of theater but extends beyond it. The verbs stage and staging can be used in English to refer to an action that anticipates or is preparatory to a second, greater action after or beyond it. Since theatrical staging is by definition an effort to represent a fictional drama, it is necessarily conscious of itself as artifice. The theatrical stage is constituted by a real world that is always offstage, which can never be made directly manifest. In this sense, Kierkegaard’s writings can be read as stagings of what is forever beyond their representational capacities—something that is, indeed, foreign to all objective representation. To use language that Climacus develops elsewhere in Philosophical Fragments, they are about a moment in relation to which they themselves can never be more than occasions. Such a moment can take many forms in Kierkegaard’s work: for example, the leap of faith (in Fragments), the reduplication of the content of Christianity in one’s life (in Works of Love), or the experience of being directly addressed by Christ when receiving the Eucharist (in the third of Kierkegaard’s Discourses at the Eucharist on Fridays). Such extratextual moments are at once central to Kierkegaard’s writings and ineluctably exterior to them.

This book is an effort to explore through close readings of relatively narrow slices of Kierkegaard’s authorship how his writings function as stagings of infinite, ever-increasing desire. The diversity of registers, themes, and voices in these Kierkegaardian texts, which are only a thin sampling of his corpus overall, can be astounding. The texts that I analyze range from reviews of vaudeville and farce to the paternalistic moralizing of a Judge; from celebrations of artistic kitsch to meditations on the marble sculptures in Copenhagen’s most important church; from sermons meant to be preached just before the Eucharist to vividly imagistic reflections on love. These texts veer well beyond the boundaries of academic theological discourse today, as they did in Kierkegaard’s own time. Nonetheless, the texts that I consider also invoke a wide range of traditional theological themes: the Incarnation, the relationship between law and gospel, the atonement, the nature of Eucharistic presence, and Christian ethics, to name only some of the most prominent in the pages to follow. From the most gleefully aesthetic to the most obviously Christian, all of these texts are, in their own ways, theaters—which seek to arrest and implicate their readers, while at the same time calling attention to their own provisionality. All of them seek to stoke a desire that propels readers beyond their stages, to ever new performances fueled by ever more passionate desire.

Scene at the Auction of Søren Kierkegaard’s Effects

Folkets Nisse, May 24, 1856

Introduction

Staging Desire, with Constant Reference to The Concept of Irony

Who dares deny that Kierkegaard’s relationship to the theater is lifelong, personal, passionate, existential? He spent most of his life’s evenings in the Royal Theater, and he was more frequently in the theater than in the church.…

Sadly enough, Kierkegaard’s public was quite limited in the years 1843–1845, when he gave that series of performances which is unique in world literature. He did not act for mighty Europe itself but for that little, choice inner circle of the Heibergians, of whose theatrical passion he himself was an all too willing sacrifice. When he did not feel satisfied with the applause he got for his performances up to and including the Postscript, he changed to other and somewhat more elderly roles—the Socratic peripatetic who instructed his sole disciple in the wisdom of life, the reverent author of edifying tracts, the preacher who seldom appeared in his pulpit, the favorite victim of the Corsair, the genius who was not understood and who chose not to cast his pearls before swine, the sinner doing atonement, the pious hermit—and many other roles, all of which are both true and acted.

—Henning Fenger, Kierkegaard, the Myths and Their Origins: Studies in the Kierkegaardian Papers and Letters

With his 1976 book Kierkegaard, the Myths and Their Origins, the Danish literary scholar Henning Fenger established himself as the bête noire of a generation of Kierkegaard scholarship. Fenger’s book calls into question the pieties that were dominant in the field when it was first published—tendencies that remain widespread, if less engrained, today. I do not begin by citing this text because I see it as perfect or even exemplary. It is now dated, and, as will soon become clear, I disagree fundamentally with the opposition it draws between literary and theological approaches to Kierkegaard’s writings. Nonetheless, I think that the book remains a salutary provocation—especially for theologically oriented readers, who are the primary targets of its critiques. Fenger is right to challenge the assumption that Kierkegaard’s writings can be reduced to a set of straightforward theses, whether theological or existentialist or otherwise. He casts new light on the aestheticism and irony in Kierkegaard’s work—the ever-shifting play of voices and metaphors and parables that make Kierkegaard himself virtually impossible to pin down. For my purposes, Fenger is especially valuable because he highlights the signal place of the theater in Kierkegaard’s aesthetic world. As he argues in the passages above, theater is not merely one of the most common subjects of Kierkegaard’s writings: Kierkegaard’s writings are theatrical through and through. Kierkegaard’s entire authorship is a series of performances—a succession of assumed personas on a series of constructed stages. Kings and maidens, seducers and judges—these are just the beginning of the cast. As Fenger argues, even Kierkegaard himself, writing in his own name, becomes a stage persona—merely a more elderly one than those preceding it. Indeed, Kierkegaard fractures into a series of masks, ranging from the itinerant Socratic, to the proud martyr, to the humble penitent. Kierkegaard does not just construct theaters, as a stage director does; he pours himself into them—obliterating the distinction between the true Kierkegaard and the acted one.

If these basic points are true—that Kierkegaard’s voice is enigmatic through and through, that his texts refuse to boil down to a set of propositions, that they summon readers into one half-lit theater after another—then can Kierkegaard’s authorship really be Christian communication? Perhaps the one significant point of agreement between Fenger and his many critics is that the answer to this question must be No. Fenger’s book ends with a Concluding Nontheological Postscript, and many have judged this to be the only conceivable conclusion to his aesthetically oriented approach.¹ Either Kierkegaard’s authorship is ironic through and through, or his Christian commitments must circumscribe its irony. Either his writing is a series of theatrical performances, or it eventually leaves the theater behind in order to proclaim Christian doctrine. Either his texts undermine all final conclusions, or they point ineluctably to religious ones. In my view, both sides in this debate miss what makes Kierkegaard’s work most distinctive and worthwhile—not only from a literary point of view but also (more importantly for me) from a theological one. Kierkegaard’s writings are irreducibly aesthetic and irreducibly Christian, at once theatrical and theological. This duality challenges many commonly held views about them—and some of our most engrained assumptions about what theological writing should be.

Throughout this book, I take theater as a concrete metaphor for the aesthetic orientation that pervades Kierkegaard’s writings overall.² The most general way of defining what Kierkegaard means by the aesthetic sphere is the life of immediacy—our unreflective, spontaneous, and passional way of inhabiting the world. The category of the aesthetic incorporates our instinctive attraction to beauty and pleasure and our natural quests to find happiness and love. Theater crystallizes Kierkegaard’s attitude toward this sphere of existence in an illuminating way. It was his favorite aesthetic medium, and it provides a prism through which he approaches core philosophical and theological themes. When I describe Kierkegaard’s work as theatrical, I, like Fenger, am using the term to evoke the multiplicity of voices, characters, and scenes in his texts—the features that make their meaning impossible to reduce to a set of propositions. I am also highlighting the manner in which Kierkegaard’s writings privilege the experience of losing oneself in a play or text over the possibility of mastering it conceptually. Further, since a key effect of good theater in Kierkegaard’s analysis is to elicit mimetic desire, I am arguing that his writings set out to elicit eros—a spiritual desire that is oriented, admittedly, to a very different set of objects than most plays.

Theater is not merely a metaphor in this book, however. Kierkegaard’s writings abound with references to specific plays, performances, actors, and dramaturgical theories. Fenger’s assertion that Kierkegaard attended the theater more frequently than he attended church is an exaggeration, but there is no question that he was a theater fanatic and that this passion left indelible marks on his writings. In this book, I have chosen to focus on two specific treatments of the theater from Kierkegaard’s authorship: Either/Or’s disparate interpretations of the French vaudeville The First Love (in chapter 1) and Repetition’s response to the German farce The Talisman (in chapter 4). When Kierkegaard was writing, these were both well-known plays, which his readers would have instantly recognized. However, these lowbrow comedies in now-forgotten genres are as foreign to us today as they would have been familiar to his original readers.

When I