: Gene Fendt
: Works of Love?- Reflections on Works of Love
: Digitalia
: 9780916379704
: 1
: CHF 52.00
:
: Kunst, Literatur
: English
: 86
: DRM
: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet
: PDF

In writing on Kierkegaard an author should consider-as Kierkegaard did, not only his purpose in writing, but the purposes of writing-which may contradict him. Gene Fendt offers a polyvocalic reading of Works of Love, grounded in a post-structuralist theory of signs, leading-as a matter of literary and psychological, if not ontological, course-to Fear and Trembling.
One: Is Works of Love a Work of Love? (p. 9)

It is my unalterable will that my writings, after my death, be dedicated to her and to my late father. She must belong to history (#6537) The orthodox interpretation of Soeren Aabye Kierkegaard`s life and authorship, and so of Works of Love, follows the path set down in his confession. I should say"one of his confessions," for there are several in the writing that goes under the name of Kierkegaard.

According to that final confession, The Point of View, the shattered dissembling artifice that would be called by his name was"from first to last a religious authorship" and the break from Regina which was its initiation was a sacrifice to the religious. (Though perhaps, as someone notes in his diary, it was a sacrifice made from a lapse of faith and if he had had more faith he would have married her.)

It might be helpful here to recover the original of the literary convention I am invoking in Kierkegaard`s name: St. Augustine confesses that for a long time he was an outsider to his own life. From that outside view his life is a shambles of accidents and rootless wanderings.

But one of the changes that follows upon his conversion is an understanding that the shattered story of his times has a beginning and an end in eternity, a beginning and end that make it a narrative whole in which the incidentalia of his temporizing are given the significance of Eternity seeking him out.

Understanding and confession first become possible, according to Augustine, after conversion. They first become possible together: to understand is also to confess. That the first"confession" of world literature came into existence after Christianity appeared could be taken as proof that at least some new thing became possible because of its appearance. Such an argument would, however, be a logical fallacy.

Should we believe such confessions, such ex post facto explanations, especially in the case of our present author? Among the things Kierkegaard confesses to are that some of his writings are meant to entrap readers, to seduce them. He admits further that they were successful.

Too successful, for the readers of his day would not accept with their right hands what he gave with his right hand, but took with their right hands what he offered in the left. Most of his later interpreters have been more generous: they have graciously accepted in their right hands the religious works that S. Kierkegaard confesses to be humbly offering in his right hand.-`- Armed with his confession that the writer was first and always a religious author, they have made him into a pre-eminent religious writer, perhaps the pre-eminent religious writer of the age.

Perhaps this is all a seduction. It is certainly comfortable. Scholarship has shown how each brick of the work fits into the cozy system of existence (det hyggelige vaertshus) that S. Kierkegaard confesses he discovered (very nearly ex post facto) that he was living in.

I have been taken with a different idea, a somewhat heretical point of view. The work is from first to last a work of seduction.
Table of Contents8
Pedantic Prologue16
One: Is Works of Love a Work of Love?24
Two: The Unity of the Theological Virtues or, Dancing with the Three Graces
Three: The Aesthetic Possibilities of Prayer44
Four: The Practical Proof for the Existence of God in Works of Love48
Five: Lying with Love58
Extratextual Epilogue: Whose Fear and Trembling?68