"Repetition (In the Kierkegaardian Sense of the Term)"

Abstract

Kierkegaard published Repetition in 1843; his pseudonym this time was Constantin Constantius. The Danish title is Gjentagelsen, meaning literally taking back. It is not easy to decide what sort of text this is: a narration or a philosophical essay or perhaps an ironic mixture of both. Kierkegaard has Constantin make fun of this problematic in a sort of appendix, where he turns to real reader of this book, called Mr. X, Esq.1 This real and ideal reader is apparently not a critic or an ordinary reviewer, since such a specimen would have taken the opportunity to elucidate that it is not a comedy, tragedy, novel, epic, epigram, story and to find it inexcusable that one tries in vain to say 1.2.3. Its he will hardly understand since they are inverse; nor will the effort of the book appeal to him, for as arule reviewers explain existence in such a way that both the universal and the particular are annihilated [190/226]. This is said in the final pages, retrospectively, like a repetition to remind the reader-Mr. X-in what way and genre he has notread and, perhaps, to hint at a failed dialectic (tries in vain to say 1.2.3.). And that the ways of the text are inverse. Inverse?