A’ Socio-reading’ of the Kierkegaardian Self: Or, The Space of Lowliness in the Time of the Disciple

Abstract

In his last piece of writing before dying, Søren Kierkegaard offers two gestures which provide the pretext for my own focus here. Writing initially in the liberal daily, The Fatherland, and after 26 May 1855 in his own publication, The Moment, Kierkegaard escalated and finally concretized his attack on Christendom with a call for an individual boycott of the Established Church and for a legal separation of Church and State. In the final issue of The Moment, prepared for press just prior to his death, Kierkegaard sums up his response to the ‘coming of age’ of the Danish ‘peasant mass’ (described by Bruce Kirmmse as a ‘long-term project of economic self-improvement, acquisition of literacy’, and quest for religio-cultural and political ‘adulthood’)¹ by writing,

You common man! The Christianity of the New Testament is something infinitely high, though not high in such a way that it addresses itself to the differences between people with respect to talent and the like. No, it is for all … You common man! I have lived on the streets, am known by everyone, am possessed of no class egoism, so, if I belong to anyone, I must belong to you, you common man…²

In the same breath, in this same writing, Kierkegaard also predicted his own posthumous fate: ‘My dear reader, you can see that this does not lead straight to profit. This will only happen after my death, when the oath-bound professionals will take my life, too, as an addition to their salt-barrels.’³ And indeed, he proved prescient. While his public burial was honoured by the refusal of lay participants to adhere to official strictures not to speak, followed by their protest and arrest, Kierkegaard’s ‘place’ today is perhaps more dangerously signified by the inclusion of his bronze statue (as of 1974) in the company of his populist, conservative and liberal rivals, Grundtvig, Mynster and Martensen, surrounding the famous ‘Marble Church’.