Date: May 1, 2024 at 10:00-11:00 am CDT (Minnesota) on Zoom
Speaker: Joakim Garff, Professor of Philosophy at Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre, University of Copenhagen
Title: The Kierkegaardian Text
Abstract:
Kierkegaard is a theologian, a philosopher, a psychologist, a poet, and so much more; but
he is first and foremost a writer who combines these various activities within the
Kierkegaardian text. This specific type of text exhibits an enormous diversity and
manifests itself in Kierkegaard’s extensive use of pseudonymous authors, his fearless
mixing of genres, his persistent use of imagery, condensed inter-textuality, poly-phonic
forms of discourse, and in his reflections on the incommensurability of inwardness. Hardly
any other philosophical authorship has, like Kierkegaard’s, made its own medium the
object of experimentation, problematization, and theologically motivated critique. To work
with Kierkegaard’s texts is to explore the materiality of his authorship, the very
preconditions for his production of meaning. But it also involves reflections on the
connection between rhetoric and epistemology, between image and concept, between
reading and interpretation, and between Kierkegaard the writer and the Kierkegaardian
text. It is thus no coincidence Constantin Constantius at the end of Repetition boldly asks:
“Who in our day thinks of wasting any time on the curious idea that it is an art to be a good
reader, not to mention spending time to become that?”