Autopsies of Faith in Kierkegaard's Philosophiske Smuler

Abstract

can put my own life on line, I can in all seriousness jest [i alAlvor spoge] with my own life-not with another's.'' Thus Johannes Climacus closes the Preface to Philosophiske Smuler and cuts off all communication with his fellow human beings: jest and seriousness become the modes of being through which he, in his isolation, relates to his own life, and this self-relation is determined in language as the interrogative mood. He has put his life into question. On the title page, just below his name, as an addendum to and perhaps as a clarification of its strange formality, Climacus poses to himself a set of questions, whose final member-can an eternal happiness be built on historical knowledge? (173)-demands an answer that will not fall prey to jest and that therefore does not need a mark of seriousness. He cannot even hope to deliver an answer to this question as long as his language is determined by the play of jest interspersed with marks of seriousness, and until Climacus can learn a language that does without jest and that does not therefore need to mark the onset of seriousness, his relation to his own life will always be in question. To jest in all seriousness is to question the jest (at spbrge spbgen); to question the conception of language as jest (sprog som speg), and indeed the conception that jest is endemic to language; to question whether word play-