It's springtime, which means that Princeton University Press is having its annual 50% off spring sale. From May 4th through June 9th, you can get 50% off nearly every single print, e-book, and audio book from Princeton University Press. Just go to press.prinston.edu to get 50% off incredible books like Disneyland and the Rise of Automation and Beyond Belief, how evidence shows what really works. There are so many fantastic books you can get an incredible deal on.
Go to press.prinston.edu and use the code spring50. That's sp, r-i-n-g-50 at press.prinston.edu. This sale only lasts for a month, so go and get some books. Welcome to the new books network.
Welcome to the new books network. I am your host, Stephen Doseman. In 1848, as political movements and events were sweeping Europe and Marx and Engels penned their famous communist manifesto, Kierkegaard wrote in a letter, No, politics is not for me. To follow politics, even if only domestic politics is nowadays an impossibility, for me at any rate.
I love to focus my attention on lesser things, in which one may sometimes encounter exactly the same. This negation of politics and its negation is the starting point for Bartholomew Ryan, with his book Kierkegaard's Indirect Politics, Interludes with Lukach, Schmidt, Benjamin, and Adorno, which looks at Kierkegaard's own thinking and its effect on several more explicitly political thinkers. Kierkegaard's own politics are somewhat ambivalent and one might struggle to fit them onto today's political landscape. But Ryan has a different project in mind.
Instead, Kierkegaard's elusiveness, ambiguity, and cultivation of the single individual, in all their inner psychological and spiritual richness, are shown to be inspiring for thinking, politics, and history in new ways. In the Four Figures, Ryan looks at Kierkegaard's presence in all their thinking, both explicit and implicit, emerging with a sophisticated form of inwardness capable of standing against despair, despotism, and reification. Bartholomew Ryan is a philosophy research fellow at the Nova Institute of Philosophy at the Nova University in Lisbon, where he works at the intersection of literature and philosophy. He is co-editor of several books, Fernando Passoa and Philosophy, Countless Lives and Habitas, Faces of the Self, Autobiography, Confession, Therapy, Nietzsche and Passoa, and Seos, and Nietzsche in the Problem of Subjectivity.
Bartholomew Ryan, welcome to the New Books Network. Thank you. Hello. Yeah, I always like to have guests introduce themselves at the beginning of episodes, so could you maybe tell listeners just about who you are and what your work and research interests tend to be?
As I said, my name is Bartholomew Ryan. I'm originally from Ireland, Dublin, but in the last 10 years, I've been based in Lisbon, working at the University of Legendova at the Lisbon University, the New University of Lisbon as a philosophy researcher. And I did my PhD in Denmark on a lot of the background of this book actually started and was working there in Denmark, so between in Irish University and then working at the Kierkegaard Centre in Copenhagen. After that, I was four years in Berlin, working at the Liberal Arts College, the European College of Liberal Arts.
At the time, it was called that now, I think it's called Bard College in Berlin, but I left just before that change and I went to Lisbon. And my main research, I guess, has always been, I guess you could call it interdisciplinary, mixing the political, philosophical, philosophical, with the poetic and so dealing comfortably with philosophers, critical theorists and writers like James Joyce or Fernando Bizoa in Portugal. And so, yeah, and I've written quite a lot on people like, mostly in the kind of the sphere of modernism. So from the end of the 19th century up until World War II, I guess.
So, yeah, people like Nietzsche and Kierkegaard and some of the extenciists and also all this literature that was coming out primarily in Europe. And recently, I've been working more on ecological thought, looking at ecological thought through the prism of both poets and philosophers. So I've always enjoyed that crossover, the poetic philosopher and the philosophical poet, probably touching these themes in this podcast. So thanks for having me on.
Yeah, very much looking forward to talking about this book with you. So throughout this book, we're going to be talking about, you're trying to develop an indirect politics, largely based off the work of Soren Kierkegaard, who most would likely think of as being largely apolitical. To do this, you have kind of two interval and threads. On the one hand, you work through the influence of Kierkegaard on some more explicitly political thinkers, Lukach Schmidt, Benjamin and Adorno.
And on the other hand, you develop Kierkegaardian ideas of inwardness or his unsettling of certain norms and institutions in a more explicitly political direction. Could you unpack these approaches and what you're overall hoping to accomplish with this book? Yeah, very well said. Yeah, it was a challenge.
I was retrying to forge this new concept in direct politics. And I guess the title of the book itself is already quite packed Kierkegaard's indirect politics and then interludes with Lukach Schmidt, Benjamin and Adorno. And that's really all that in the title is really what I was trying to unpack. And as you said, it's kind of a two pronged approach.
As you said, looking at Kierkegaard himself and his writings, especially the 1848, and we'll probably look at that in a moment as well, the productivity of that year and mirroring, of course, what was happening in Europe at the same time. And then looking at Kierkegaard's influence as in some of the most radical and pioneering political thinkers at the beginning of the 20th century, from both spectrums left and right and how this person shows up prominently and sometimes trying to hide the figure amidst their writings. And yet, as you say, Kierkegaard would be the first to declare that he is not political. And that's why I begin the book by saying I begin with a quote, the introduction by Kierkegaard himself saying, no, politics is not for me.
And that sentence really sums up a lot of direct politics as well, because he says, no politics is not for me to follow politics, even if only domestic politics is nowadays an impossibility for me. Politics is too much for me. I love to focus my attention on lesser things in which one may sometimes encounter exactly the same as a classic Kierkegaard statement showing that beginning with a complete negation and ending up saying, well, I'm actually doing that. Anyway, he reminds me of something that Bob Dylan said when he said, are you protesting?
And he said, no, all I do is protest. It's got the same idea that a writer for Kierkegaard is its essence, polemical, is going as the brain is critiquing society. So that's Kierkegaard once again being quite ironic and humorous and contradictory. And that's really part of what indirect politics is.
So the title indirect politics is the word interlude, so probably the two terms or concepts that are most important in the book that keep coming back again and again. Because of course, indirect is something that we think of when we hear the name Kierkegaard famously the indirect communication famously is philosopher who uses over a dozen pseudonyms to show different ways of existence. They have the ethical or religious spheres of existence and some of the best writings and most famous writings are written under very stylistic and rich sedonymous authors with so much to impact there. So indirect communication is something fundamental to cure for more strategy within philosophy.
Probably more time to talk with that as well, hopefully. So the indirect politics is something you might say, how will I put it? It's to keep that elusiveness because Kierkegaard is going around a bad way and his two prototypes, two figures that he always goes back to and never criticizes or Socrates and Christ, the Greek philosopher and the Messiah of Christianity. So they are for him symbolized also and are emblematic of indirect politics because if you think about them, both of them are not political figures per se, but they fit what indirect politics could be.
Because according to direct politics, a set of masks. So for one of you, look at these two figures, it's kind of political figures. Both of them are wearing masks per se. You have Socrates kind of walking around like a beggar pretending to not know anything saying he doesn't know anything yet seems the wisest man in Athens.
You have Christ also, whose friends are beggars or fishermen, uneducated people, prostitutes and yes, he's the son of God. So they both also speak indirectly. You know, Christ speaks and parables to communicate. And some of his fundamental ideas and with Socrates is that my huge technique, trying to get the person in the dialogue to find himself or to uncover or unravel or unfold oneself.
This is the famous socratic dialogue, which is a psychotic method. So and they're also martyrs, you know, both of them died for the truth, the philosopher and the religious sphere. So Cucan is really that's kind of the individual, I guess the prototypes are the exemplars, but he's they're not alone. He also uses a lot of literary figures as well to put forward his kind of critical thinking and famously in fear and trembling.
One of his earliest second, I guess, second synonymous work. He quotes Richard III in a moment, the opening lines of Richard III from Shakespeare and then says there's more to learn from that than all the moral philosophies in the history of philosophy. So there you have again, it's different ways of trying to communicate and politics and the kind of to conclude, at least now, go back to this book again and again, the end of politics is kind of what you might say, it's displacing this disciplinary identity. I say it's the beginning of the book.
So it kind of shows that theology is masking politics or law is masking theology or political theory is masking philosophy or psychology is masking literary, critical approaches. So it's always kind of in between or among things and the refusal of a fixed disciplinary boundary and wants to dissolve boundaries. And this kind of hopefully lead on to political practice, which we see in the four thinkers that come after that. That's why the word interludes and not dialogues is used and not dialogue, but they're interludes and beautifully, it's their interwar thinkers, the fourth thinker, Schmidt, Lukach, Benjamin, and Adorno.
They're the interludes and I want to open up. So the second sphere of second kind of part of the book is to show these four different interludes from chapters three, four and five. Two, three, four and five going through each of them showing them as interludes. And so inter inter politics is an interlude or to gap.
The word in Danish is melon spiel, like between the play, which you know, you have this in musical musicals, the light entertainment in between the two serious parts of a musical production. Let's have the interlude, or you might have the interlude where famously, you might see Shakespeare's Hamlet, the two interludes where they put on the play or Hamlet was on the plate to show to his mother and the new king. But actually the play is a very serious moment where it's showing actually what Hamlet's thinking, this is the murder being acted to the play or later, of course, the graveyard scene when Hamlet meets the grave diggers. They could be seen as interludes, the two four years, probably the four years part of Hamlet is by the graveyard.
And yet it's it's probably the most existential moment of the of the play at the same time. So this is examples of what I'm trying to get at with indirect politics and the interludes with four of the thinkers. Yeah, moving into the book proper, you start with the year 1848, a year that will likely bring to mind marks and angles famous communist manifesto in the revolution spreading across Europe at the time before getting to Kierkegaard. Could you unpack what was going on in the background, particularly in Germany and Denmark, so as to set the stage for Kierkegaard's own intellectual development at this time?
Yeah, OK, well, yeah, I mean, 1848 is kind of it's both a symbol and a very concrete reality of history. So all over Europe. There was there was revolutions happening. I call that chapter actually in chapter one, I guess I think I remember revolution, 18 for a reaction and revolution.
So strong reactionary forces are re-emerging and emerging or being confronted and also many revolutionary forces as well. So how about this? Well, in 1848, it had almost 50 areas all over the country, many of them were just states. I mean, Germany didn't exist.
It didn't exist. They were various states, but there was the rise of really kind of a whole liberal movement, mostly bourgeois movement, but also working class as well, kind of the quest for getting rid of the structures of monarchy and the birth of nation states kind of coming from the movement of romanticism from the late 18th century. So suddenly there was this call for more political participation, the freedom of the press, economic rights for working class, of course, the rise of nationalism. And at the end of absolute monarchy, did come out in Denmark in 1848.
This was a massive thing, became a constitutional monarchy. So the national liberals and Denmark succeeded. Most of the revolutions, 1848 failed and famously the communist manifesto by Marx and Engels was published that year, the most famous of all communist texts and Marx's most famous Engels and Marx. That was published.
So there's a great hope, a kind of a call to the revolutions, not only for the bourgeoisie, but the working class. So in Germany, there was a revolution in the march and this kind of call for again, freedom of the press, freedom of the assembly, but the conservative aristocracy did defeat them. And most of the leaders of 1848, of course, from the Hasbro Empire and Romania, you sweeping all of course, your most went into exile or prison. Even in Ireland, where I come from, this was the age of the famine, the Irish famine from kind of 45, 46, 47.
And there were famines bought over Europe, not just Ireland, I guess Ireland was the most devastated because it almost crippled the country by at least a third. So huge numbers dying up the camera, tell up to a million and up to a million emigrating as well. So Marx and Engels were very aware of this and were writing about that as well. So a lot of this then, after 1848, there was a kind of return to reactionism and return to security of certain monarchies, but there have been a great shake up.
And it seemed very much as a great symbol for the world affairs. Of course, there's also just a kind of finish there. There's also kind of conflict between the German states and Denmark itself and the kind of the Schleschläg and the Hölsnän area where because of this new constitutional monarchy, Germany were trying to build their own German states and taking them away from Denmark. But Denmark beat them, there was a war going on, which Kirke was very aware of.
Of course, well, people were dying, it was very, it was a small town, you could see the effects of war, but the Danes won in 1848, even though the Germans had some, didn't have to align completely with the constitutional monarchy of Denmark. But then later on, like 1864, the Germans retook that area of South Denmark. And of course, and then a few years later became the Russian Empire, beginning of the Russian Empire. And Denmark suffered economically during this time, even though it was a pure victory, even though it had kind of secured that area, was economically in a very difficult state.
Saying that during Kirke's war time, it was also the golden age of Danish culture. It was where most of Danes, most famous writers were writing, Hans Christian Andersen was a contemporary of German war writing. And so even though the economy was really fragile, it was the end of a monarchy, the full power Danish culture was flourishing. And Kirke was part of that.
Yeah, I'll just add something you mentioned the name of the first chapter. It's actually crossroads of revolution and reaction. And that's very important as we work into discussing Kirkegaard. So on that note, you know that 1848 was a remarkably productive year for Kirkegaard himself, although it needs to be put into his own kind of personal context as well.
At this time, he is fresh off the infamous Coursera there. And also around this time, he had been considering ceasing to write and instead was considering pursuing a pastoral appointment with the church, although that obviously didn't pan out. Instead, he ended up hammering out numerous books under a variety of pseudonyms that year. And in your opinion, this year represents a major turning point in his own thinking.
Could you tell us a bit about what was going on at this time for him? Yes, 1848 was very important for Kirkegaard. For the years of course, the period of writing for 1842 to 46 was extraordinary as well. I mean, this is the famous from either or to fear and trembling repetition, but it's of fragments, concept of anxiety, the concluding on scientific postscript.
I mean, this was extraordinary cemented his reputation and his ideas for posterity. But what happens, funnily enough in 1846, and you can go back before the ages, the smaller the text was also very well known now didn't have an impact really then. Like many of us work, but it was in the 20th century where it did have an influence on some of the big thinkers of the 20th century. That's a literary review, known as Two Ages in 1846, which was just meant to be a review of a small book, but turns into the last kind of 20, 30 pages, talks about the revolutionary age and the present age.
And the present age being the age which he's living through now, which was kind of a shock and away, because even though the world is at revolution, there was this was a time of marks and angles and a growing disenchantment and the birth of very lots of new ideas. And of course, Europe and Europe work both present age and the age without passion, the age of reflection, the age where superficiality is being kind of celebrated and level, level is everything that we leveled off in the mediocrity. So you see this kind of disdain for bourgeoisie, the middle class that are almost taking away the kind of grandeur or heroic element of of of existential being. And of course, that also ties in with his also his other talk on the church.
So the church being kind of just incorporated into the bourgeois existence, as he says, if you're if you're Danish, you're a Christian and vice versa, there's no battle at all there. So this is what he was thinking in 1846 and writing. At the same time, as you say, he thought that was it for him. He had done what he needed to do to the point where he thought he was meant to die in 1846, because he was seven children.
He was only two of them were left with that age. Him and his brother, who become a pastor was quite a well known pastor. So here was your car, thinking what will I do next? And so what happens is he does write a 448 formidable work called works of love, where you see this new very different kind of cure court emerging, which is a cure court community looking at love following neighbor and through various sections and meditating on sinkholes in the testament and also large work called up buildings and discourses for various spirits, both written under his own name.
But then in 48, while all this is happening in the background across Europe and Denmark, he writes Christian discourses, which is almost overlooked text again under his own name. Maybe the title puts philosophers off, but within that text, you have an extraordinary dense philosophical analysis of what it means literally to exist in the face of the various temptations of contemporary existence. And it goes into the carers of a common care, sort in German, which Heidegger takes on as an important theme in his being time later. In the 20th century, Heidegger was a very serious reader of the cure court or in the formation of a philosopher.
So we wouldn't very aware of Christian discourses. So this kind of very important text that comes out in 1848, but also he writes the point of view and looking at the report, the history is kind of a very strange autobiography. It's his H.J. Hömel, but he withholds most of the publication that but writes it and analyzes his own work and how what his pseudonymous works mean.
And then forms the kind of last-weight pseudonymous author, anti-climicus, who is the author of Sickness on the Death and Practicing Christianity. Again, two extremely polemical texts. The first might show you the sickness, the second one showing the cure. And this is where you see Socrates coming to the forefront of practical Christianity as a figure that's alongside Christ.
As he says, we don't need a new republic, we don't need this, we need what we need as a new Socrates. You've seen this single individual emerging in a more nuanced and more coherent form as someone that's engaged in society. So it's a paradox of contradiction happening here on one hand. He's now reaching out to the common man or to try to be the common man, but at the same time, using the single individual was quite an isolated, almost aristocratic, demanding figure.
So it reminds me of sometimes of the great 20th century writer James Joyce, who on the one hand wants to write books for everybody, you know, for the complete common man. And for the boys, well, man, you are an one in both use of the knick's way. And yet writing in the most difficult experimental language, which has been a good way to argue the most experimental audacious book in the English language. But yet about a very common, unerobic family.
Cureport is not going as far as Joyce, but the point is he's actually now trying to speak to the common man, but at the same time, the common man, high expectations and Cureport's audience, of course, are the boys. Was he? We can see this as defensive him later, if he's just seen as a boy, as well, deck is, but I think Cureport, he's trying to wake up the boys. But here, there is a target of attack.
They really are the one that he's targeting him, himself included, you know, as he says himself, I'm not a writer of my books. I'm a reader of my books. And so that's what's happening with him in 1848. And it's just a conclude there.
There is a very interesting interesting lady around Easter time, 1848, in his journal. He talks about how he must now speak. And first of all, it's about being silent. It's almost this kind of, I don't, a religiosity going through him at that period.
Maybe I need to remain, go silent and become that pastor. And there's a period over the Easter, Easter break where he becomes silent. But then he comes back out again and says, I must speak. And we can maybe have time or at least to think about for future readers of Cureport.
This word silence and speaking, which I kind of touch on at the end of the book, but to be silent is really to listen. It's not a silence and activity, just as much as prayer is an act of listening. And the text that he was writing in 1848 called the On the Lily in the Field and the Bird in the Air, a very small text, which is three discourses of joy. It's beginning with obedience.
Obedience is a silence, obedience and joy and they're interlinked. It's an interesting to read that text because there's no mention of any philosophers or at all. It's in the very simple form, but you have this. It's almost a call to living affirmatively.
But silence and joy, silence and obedience are very interconnected. So obedience, the etymology of obedience is to listen, the capacity to listen, to listen before the audio or better sayer. And you see that much easier in the Danish with the Ludhil is the word, Ludhil sound, Ludhil. So it's the sound is listening to the sound is actually of the form of obedience.
So there's a lot going on with Jove Ward in 1848 and very, very productive. Most of his, practically, he was also written that year, even though he published it in 1850. So there you go. Yeah, I'm sorry.
One last thing I would say that he published in, I think it was July 1848. He published another text on the actress that's called Crisis and the Crisis of Life and Actress. And it's kind of under another signal, which is important to this book called Inter-8, Inter-Literally Between and Between. And that was published alongside an article by someone else on the fate of the working classes right now in Denmark.
You have this in the magazine you have, the one out of the chair of course looking at an actress, a very real actress who admired dearly and the idea of transformation that she goes on to play Juliet for the second time and how she plays it better the second time in this kind of last great aesthetic essay by Kure Gueherr War under the name Inter-Inter published in 1848 as well. So it's important, which I use as a motto for the beginning of the book on restlessness and the infinity of restlessness. Yes, so jumping off of that and moving into the interludes, the first one you discuss is George Lukach. And in this chapter on him, you explore kind of a trajectory.
He goes along throughout his life. But I think it's worth starting with his early writings, like Soul and Form, Theory of the Novel, History and Class Consciousness. And here Lukach is very much in dialogue with Kure Gueherr on the value of inwardness, reflection and cultivation of the inner life in what they refer to as the Faustian Man. And at this point, Lukach argues this is all important for life of militant political engagement.
Could you speak to what he's drawing from Kure Gueherr here and how he sees inwardness as a foundation for political life? Yes, and the story of Björg Lukach is fascinating, at least in the 20th century story. But he is one of the first international writers to publish seriously on reflections on Kureg or in the Inselt and Form, which is published like the German version in 1911. He wrote in Hungarian and in German, and a small collection of essays where you see Lukach famously known as kind of the romantic anti-capitalist face.
So he comes from a very popular class background, Jewish-Hungarian, and he hasn't yet discovered Marx, but he is immersed in Ibsen and a Kureg war in Nietzsche and later Dostoevsky. And he talks about the foundry of form of life. He was very drawn to Kureg War in this early essay. Looking at, I don't think that ever leaves him actually, he sees Kureg War as trying to kind of combine, bringing it together about thought and action or the gesture and the form.
What happens with the gesture? And in this essay, he sees this kind of great honesty in Kureg War and existential honesty, how to live. And this is again very much pre-high digger, pre-sarced, where Lukach and Sodor form is very much carving out these existential themes in the very first decade of the 20th century, the A Kureg War, and that's where he was very drawn to him. And later in theory of the novel, which is kind of, it was written during World War I.
So dramatic things happening, especially where from where Lukach was, he was in Budapest, and World War I, and at the fore, the collapse of the Habsburg Empire, the Austria-Hungarian Empire was happening. So there was very much turmoil, both in the personal life and the life, political life around Lukach. And he was trying to write literally a text for the other, Kureg Guardian critique of Hegel and looking at the disintegration of forms and how Kureg War had somehow tapped into this fragmentation of modern society and leaving over an opening gap. But he started to move away from Kureg War as he got further into reading Hegel and looking at Dostoevsky, perhaps, to be able to do a better job than Kureg War.
And the theory of the novel famously ends with Dostoevsky and how he must leave the age of absolute sinfulness. The age of absolute sinfulness is actually a term by Victor, contemporary of Hegel. But Lukach spoke at the most leave now, the age of absolute sinfulness. And Dostoevsky, maybe the one who was putting more attracted to Dostoevsky, especially now, the Washington Revolution happened in 1917.
And Dostoevsky was somebody who would live through turmoil and the age revolution and somehow was seen as a profit figure for Lukach. So, and then of course famously Lukach then makes the leap into, into Bolshevism and joins the shock of all the friends. This is a person who studied with Giorgio Arbazimal and Max Weber. And for many of them, it was a shock that he had made this leap.
And there's a great, there's a beautiful essay by Hungarian writer Andre Najih, who writes a small, an essay called Abraham, a Communist. And that was very important for me for writing my own book here. And his idea or theory is that it was true, you know, Lukach is the Abraham, you know, it's true reading Kierkegaard, that he was able to make the leap of faith into Marxism and into a Bolshevik member to the rest of his life, you know, instead of by it to the end of his life. So, and that's again the contradictions of, of within Lukach.
And we say the Faustian phase, and you could also, looking back now at the book, and Hamlet is very present in the book, but there's two phases really, there's the Hamlet and the Faustian and the Faust is a decisionist moment, you know, that almost the binary is like the either more serving, you know, to have all the richness of the world, but yet give away your soul, and it's kind of this moment of decision, the Faustian moment, or Hamlet, the embodiment of ambiguity and procrastination and turmoil. So, you have that with Lukach and Kierkegaard. And Lukach talks about him kind of being, having two souls, you know, having this conflict within him at the beginning, the preface, the famous preface, the 1967 preface, that there's two amazing preface's both for the three of the novel and history and class consciousness where he's looking back at his work, and he says in the theory of the novel preface that Kierkegaard was present all the way through the theory of the novel. And he refers to him kind of going through that Faustian phase.
And the same with Kierkegaard, Kierkegaard, a young man before publishing his first major work, either or he wanted to write a book on Faust, but someone else got there before him, famously Martin's pastor, who was kind of his enemy throughout his life. So, Faust turns up scattered throughout either or in different ways, and through the fear and trembling and repetition. So, that's kind of the initial and formative phase of Lukach. So, moving along through Lukach's life and his work, he eventually has a substantial turn away from Kierkegaard.
So, where his early work celebrated ambiguity as a starting point for reflection that could lead to praxis, the later Lukach, particularly in the destruction of reasons, sees this existential ambiguity as a seed of fascism or totalitarianism. So, Nietzsche and Heidegger are the primary targets of that book, but Kierkegaard also gets roped in as well as a form of bourgeois intellectual decadence that harbors political dangers. Although you argue this both misread Kierkegaard and drops what was perhaps best in Lukach's early work. Could you speak to the shift?
Yeah, it's a complicated journey, but again, the giant book, the description of reason, which I think it finally sees the light of day and maybe the early 50s is quite, even though most of it was written in the late 30s and early 40s. So, of course, you have to think of the circumstances under which it was written as well. So, yes, you're dead right where the first part of the book shows the figures of bourgeois decadence and the prelude to explicit fascist thought. And those figures are Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche, or the three-twentieth century, kind of the rationalist thinkers.
And of course, Lukach, Lukach, by Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, was a very old man and moved away from them quite quickly. And then with Kierkegaard, it was a more gradual process. But it's the kind of the allure of subjectivity and this ambiguity that remains within Kierkegaard, that Lukach doesn't like. And of course, this again, closeness with sticking with the church and a Christian faith that he says still belongs to kind of bourgeois aestheticism that still exists.
That said, he still puts up that point where at least Kierkegaard was honest. So, he manages even in the destruction of reason, which is a text that literally goes 100% quite viciously at many thinkers. And Lukach is writing this through the years of purges. What was happening in Stalinist Russia, Lukach's life was in danger once again.
So, he's in a period where it's the peak of Nazism as well. So, he has kind of over his shoulder, Stalin's minions. And so, this book is now seems kind of a horrible book that compromised famously by Dorna talking later on that. It was almost a sacrifice of Lukach's intellect.
So, we can look at it from that product of that period. But there are elements of truth in a way, if you want to see how radical left thinkers were thinking about someone like Kierkegaard, that he was a bourgeois thinker. He was not really someone that was very vehemently against kind of mass movements, famously said that democracy or people's government was an idea of hell. So, like in short, we are in Nietzsche as well, very conservative.
But I always remember what Karl Marx said about Balzac, Balzac, the harmonica and very bourgeois, but also always a defender of conservative aristocratic ideals. And yet was the greatest writer on detailed life and existence of a bourgeois working class. And you could learn so much from reading someone like Balzac. In other words, dialectically, literary work is not the simple reproduction of certain ideologies, but a work can have other powers.
Kierkegaard has that same power that there is, of course, on the surface, as I say, in the beginning of the book, politics is not for me. But Kierkegaard, of course, on one level, it's very conservative. He likes the monarchy. He likes things the way they are.
But the work within Kierkegaard is extremely radical. And famously, he says the beginning of either war, through pseudonym, everyone wants freedom of speech. The problem is what happened to freedom of thought. So, Kierkegaard, we were losing the freedom of real thinking.
And if you look at things like reification in Lukach, one of the most famous and greatest moments in history and class consciousness, the idea of modifying things and it's an amazing reading of Lukach, of the commodity from capital, and looking at the A-Nation, it gives us. You could see that Kierkegaard, the element in that, with Kierkegaard, with his analysis of society through Christian discourses and six under death, and practicing Christianity. This reification, or later, the culture industry that was analyzed in the dialect of the Enlightenment by Adorno and Orkheimer, that within Kierkegaard's sufficiently conservative text is a very radical critique of society, which I would say that other thinkers like Adorno and Lukach miss in Kierkegaard. Remember, in the last year of Kierkegaard's life, he's out in the street literally selling his own paper at the moment.
And he hasn't lost any of the humor or which, but it's much more direct because he's literally giving away his own writings on the street, but it's directly attacking book, church, and state. And it shows it's got a one-man battle. It's not someone that's hiding away from society, which is the kind of picture you get from the readings by the later Adorno and Lukach. And that's where it's missed that part, that kind of community and glenical element from works of love right up until the moment until he collapses the way on the street.
So turning from Revolution to Reaction, you look at Carl Schmitt, who also deeply admired Kierkegaard, although Will on Pack that he had a somewhat selective reading of his work, as you argue. But to start Schmitt finds some inspiration in his concept of the exception, which can certainly be found in texts like Fear and Trembling. But you also find Schmitt quoting the much quieter and tamer repetition as a source here. Could you give us a sense of what Schmitt is getting out of Kierkegaard's early work here?
Yes, I mean, the famous, I look really at three texts by Schmitt in this book, the political romanticism, political theology, and the concept of the political, those three, really what under the radar in this book, with the concept of the political, which comes out in 1922, at the end of the first chapter, Kierkegaard was quoted along for repetition, and he doesn't mention Kierkegaard by name, he says a Protestant theologian. I'm just trying to remember now, the Protestant theologian who understood the exception with the most passionate intensity, and he goes on to quote the poet as the exception there, the poet is he who decides on the exception, of course, famously the text by Schmitt begins with the sovereigns he who decides on the exception. What Kierkegaard as Constantine Constansius, in repetition, is the poet who decides on the exception. So Schmitt loves that and Schmitt again is like other pre and bachelor thinkers of the early 20th century, and this is what really irks Lukas, because Lukas, it's only the early Lukas and the early, for example, Heidegger had the same taste, they were tapping into the same similar writers, like Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, or they were looking at being inspired, so Lukas really had the same with the dawn on how to turn away from these thinkers, because they've been aligned or kind of appropriated by the likes of Schmitt and Heidegger.
And remember that Schmitt was given a positive review, a concept of political, given a positive view in the late 20s by Lukas, this is joined the Weimar years, and of course, then, and by the time of the destruction of reason, Schmitt is an explicitly fascist thinker. But Schmitt was drawn to Kierkegaard, but this kind of element of decisionism, there's no doubt either or, either or decisionism, which is the first text of the first massive book of Kierkegaard, 800 pages, literally, the moment of decision, either or literally, you have, you can read Kierkegaard in this kind of almost, either war decision is the resolution, and Kierkegaard uses the word reckoning or the accounting, reading, and save, the time of reckoning has to come, the moment of decision, if you make the choice, that's what makes you a concrete human being. And this was very, very stimulating to two people like Carl Schmitt, who then turned into the political. So, and this idea of the friend enemy distinction, kind of, you can see this either or politics happening in the concept of the political, by defining your enemy, you understood your own politics, and also in the political romanticism text, you see also that this Schmitt's disdain for any form of democracy or parliamentary thinking or assembly goes in the eternal conversation and kind of hypocritical thinking, and you can find this kind of disdain and cure for the kind of finistine thinking, the hypocritical, dishonest, you use the word clobscape, which literally kind of, how would you, kind of, cleverness, kind of clever people, living the kind of calm life and thinking they're being doing something challenging.
And he was very much, and saw this as the enemy and wanted to show actually, no, for example, Christianity, it's crazy to be a Christian, it's so demanding, there's nothing, there's something of consolation to be a Christian, rather, for example, Abraham is either the father of faith or he's a madman or he's a murderer, you know, this is the father of the three major religions of the west, we have the Islam, Judeo, Christian, Judeo, and Christianity, Abraham told the murderous son of Montmoria, and that text by Kierkegaard is this exceptional moment where we don't know what's going through the mind of Abraham, but he has to take that decision. So when you say about repetition, repetition was published on the same day as as fear and trembling, the book about the same time is the other text is somebody who's trying to, trying to live through life forward, being transformed by that very complex, very strange text, probably his most literary text and dense and elusive, and it's this idea of overcoming recollection, the kind of Greek recollection, and is that repetition of the word he's very happy about in Danish is genteilse, which literally is taking again, curiously enough, in Danish exception is untailism, so literally taking out, but they could be, I was looking at the etymology of the word untailism because it could be, it's also grace in Danish, I'm trying to find a Danish friend who will tell me because I didn't talk about the etymology of the word exception, untailism, it has this kind of relation here to untailism and genteilse, so in repetition you have the untailism, it's easier to see in German, it's Ausnauma, so taking out the naming, it's an interesting name and take or come from the same route in the German language, and with Karl Schmitt later on, there's a small little, the appendix to the, the normals of the earth, he talks about naming and how naming leads to taking appropriation distribution and production, how you, this is how the world, political world works, so with being the exception, you can do the exception to the rule of course, but for course, someone like Kierkegaard, he's talking about poet and that poet within repetition fails in his endeavor, he doesn't actually achieve repetition, but yet the poet can see with passion and intensity, the danger is that Schmitt, they kind of politicises this aesthetic element, well with Kierkegaard, it remains in the aesthetic sphere and he keeps moving along, of course, he moves along to his writings, one level leaping to the ethical phase, but also there's an inter-penetration between the different spheres of existence as well, so I think Schmitt simplifies and which just takes what he wants to take from his writer, he calls him his brother of spirit in some of his diary entries, but he also says famously, and I can quote that in the book, he says famously to his friend Ernst Junger, the writer of Storm and Stonewall Stiold, the famous novel about World War I, he says such indirect influences which elude any documentation are the strongest and by far the most authentic, and I thought that was very revealing, using the word indirect influences are the ones that can be the most authentic or strongest presence in your work. Yeah, you've been kind of alluding to my next question on Schmitt, so you spend a lot of time in this chapter pointing out how Schmitt tries to take many of Kierkegaard's ideas further than they can actually go, which brings out something interesting about Kierkegaard that while he is interested in poking holes in certain norms and social structures and while this can be developed into a sort of political praxis, he's not quite as aristocratic as has often been assumed, so what Schmitt is interested in a political version of Abraham, who can make exceptional political decisions, Kierkegaard believes in a sort of inner democracy that's open to all, could you unpack this and speak to the gap here between the two or the problems that emerge from Schmitt's overextension of certain concepts? Well, as I said before, yeah, I mean Schmitt is a new set already that there's a selective reading of Schmitt, well and good what you can do with with fair and trembling, even with fair and trembling, I think it's wrong headed, but there's an overlook and the overlooking is also there with with other interludes, the figures of interludes in the book, is this kind of looking at humanity, which is what you ought to think about with Kierkegaard, who's considered the solitary isolated existentialist, but actually the works of love, Christian discourses, practicing Christianity, is looking at this human likeness, this element of community that we have, loving the stranger, we see this in some of the ethical thinkers of 20th century and Emmanuel Levinas and later in Derrida that within this later Kierkegaard, especially that period of 1847-48, is Kierkegaard trying to carve out a very serious ethical philosophy, looking at the kind of the Judeo element of the orphan, the widow and the stranger, loving your neighbor is this kind of great feat to be able to do, we can all love our family and love our loved ones, but to love the one we will not meet, this is the great feat and that's completely on Schmitt, you know, there's nothing and you might say this is outside the political, but again going back to Kierkegaard, yes, it's the meaning of very existence, because Kierkegaard is always engaged with his contemporary society, remember he might say he's not political, he's always writing it in the newspapers, always reacting to what's going on, and yet there's of course the separation of religious belief and living in the world, of course he wants to make that separation, but within his text that separation is always being dissolved, so that's the part where, and even with Abraham, you know, this is the problem, Abraham remains an elusive thinker, I mean he doesn't kill, he's done, but he's going to, he makes the decision to do this, but it's something that's outside a human system or outside teleology, and it kind of both disrupts Hegelian dialectics, but we can't really understand it, there's a rupture, and also it disrupts the coziness of Christian existence, that this is something that we should be very worried about, so Schmitt again doesn't see this humanity, this kind of, there is this kind of, there is this kind of, there you see the lawyer and the political figure that it's about how to organize the world, and using someone like Kierkegaard-K as decisions thinker, to get things going, to stamping out any form of kind of political nuance per se, and we see this within Schmitt's own writings later, which are phenomenal political works because they do expose the hypocrisy of liberal democracies, but they also show a very sinister element in the path he wants to take and takes people like you with him.
Yeah, moving along to Walter Benjamin, he shares a lot with Kierkegaard, particularly his skepticism of historical progress and interested in the fragmentary in the marginal, but a good place to start I think would be with their overlap with their walks through the city, so Kierkegaard famously wandered around Copenhagen, spent a lot of time talking with local residents, while Benjamin's largest work, the Unfinished Arcades Project, is an attempt to document and understand the sort of consciousness or subjectivity that a massive city such as Paris might engender, so could you speak to this mutual interest in wandering the city and what they get out of it philosophically? Yes, Walter Benjamin is almost like the odd man, Andrew III, in a way, of course he's very much connected with with all of them, a friend of Adorno, new well of Schmidt and Lukacs' works and refers to them, but yet he is the, he fits in with the elements in Kierkegaard, which was very important to me as well, is that almost flanair idea of the wanderer in the city, of course, Benjamin is inspired by from these through his writings and readings of Baudelaire and is a great reader of the French Baudelaire, but yes, this idea of and the word of course in Danish is Dowd Reaver, it's a beautiful word, literally day drifter, or there's another word which could be used for this type of urban wanderer, loafer is leddie ganger, which literally means light, light doe, or light walker, and you have these two lovely words in the Danish language leddie ganger and Dowd Reaver, which how to Dowd Reaver is translated as flanair or loafer, either at different parts of Kierkegaard's corpus, which is not used that much, but Kierkegaard refers to Socrates as a Dowd Reaver and he refers to himself as a Dowd Reaver in the point of view, and this is of course a great example of the of modernism, of a kind of modernist thinker in the kind of urban environment Kierkegaard, spending a lot of time, as you say walking the streets of Copenhagen, small little towns, nothing like Paris or London, but enough for such a vivid and fertile imagination as Kierkegaard to turn into a metropolis, you know, and it's significantly Copenhagen means literally given how the harbor of the market, so if you think of the commodity fetishism and the new the market you have him going through the city and he was fascinated by people and talking to all kinds of people and seeing the world as the observer and being the flanair for someone like Benjamin or Kierkegaard is also someone that's the unrecognizable or the incognito, the ironic you know, pretending to be doing nothing, and pretending to be just to kind of lay about it, but actually observing the poet is this kind of urban wanderer seeing from the various multiple perspectives and kind of going back to write about it and it goes back to the opening quote from the this the introduction to spoke about politics being not for me but looking at insignificant discoveries, it's insignificant where we can see things and for someone like Benjamin it's in the ruins in the ruins of history and in the small forgotten stories of history where we actually can go in and find real kind of insights into into the history and so with Kierkegaard again he's also doing that even in the book philosophical fragments, it's more book, it's actually literally it's philosophical crumbs because the English word is smoother, which means literally would be a translation, philosophical crumbs, the crumbs of thinking and it's in that book where there is actual chapter called interlude and it's almost the most almost dense chapters that Kierkegaard ever wrote, so just like an interlude, oh a moment of over spite in this very difficult text that he's writing, but in that interlude he goes through almost the history of of time of looking at time through the Greeks onto the Christian conception of time and it's Kierkegaard showing his deep philosophical acumen there, it's an interlude, so yes they have this idea mixing the interior with the exterior as Goliath's going from the interiors and you have lots of examples of this in either or descriptions of of places, the names of streets all over, you could learn all about Copenhagen by by reading either or and the description of places, people, how they are and and and Benjamin you know you fast forward to Benjamin's monumental unfinished work, the arcades project collecting and collecting and collecting, that's very modern of course, you see this with the great 20th century modern writers back again Joyce or of course you have even Dostoevsky in the 90s, St Petersburg, there's a affinity between a city and a writer that's very powerful even in Portugal here with Fernando Bessoa, if you want to read about Lisbon, you read Bessoa wandering the streets and it's a very powerful thing to capture the naming of streets and the naming of small places kind of over the canvas of a modern world. Moving along with Benjamin, another point of overlap you find between these two is there's skepticism of historical progress, so both are skeptical of grand narratives that claim we are now in an enlightened age and are concerned for what this might cover up and close us off from. In Kierkegaard's case, he's concerned that modernity may be drowning out the individual, in Benjamin's case, modernity may be covering up the barbarism inherent to civilization, so what do they see here and what are they trying to salvage from this seemingly unstoppable stream of history?
Yeah, but in the case of Kierkegaard you have of course it was most of the established velocity there was, hey, in philosophy even though it kind of was come later to Denmark, so I always think of Kierkegaard was not per se so vehemently against Hegel as more vehemently against the Hegelian, so the Danish Hegelian said he says himself, he discovered Schopenhauer in the millions last year and a half his life, well Schopenhauer has to deal with wind blowers of calls and the Hegelian wind blowers I have to deal with wind suckers, the ones that are sucking in the Hegelian air into Denmark and so what Kierkegaard's great fear was that these kind of abstract philosophies that the genius of Hegel he says even in a note in the diary, if Hegel had written the science of logic and said this was just an experiment, he would have been the greatest thinker of all time but he didn't and as was all these comical, so it's this kind of Hoover's that he's worried about and that the loss of in this case the single individual the ink-kelt is the Danish word, a specific individual has been lost in abstract not only in philosophy but of course it's also happening for Kierkegaard in mass movements, this is the force the industrial revolutions happening, this is the really where things is the birth of mass journalism happening which Kierkegaard was involved and fell victim to at the same time where it's very easy suddenly to find yourself in a very superficial place with ideas and with socio-political activity and even the economy, at the beginning of an end of fear and trembling it relates both to the economy and ideas he says even in the world of ideas like in the world of the economics there has been a veritable sale of everything so everything has gone down and he talked about the age of disintegration in 1848 that this is the age of disintegration where everything is collapsing but at the same time these other forces are coming in to try to control this quest for a form of totality which for Benjamin again Benjamin is a person that his whole writing is unfinished texts or rejections or looking at the barbers of history and how it has been swallowed up by this kind of motor of history or and in the force of Benjamin's case it was very very pertinent as a German Jew for him Berlin in the 1920s and 30s and having of course to die prematurely so this was the so Kierkegaard is Hegelian and anti-Hegating at the same time he's definitely a child of Hegel he's using a lot of the tropes of Hegel and he loves doing dialectics but his dialectics and so does Benjamin the dialectics is always thought of faltering it doesn't come to a whole the truth is not the whole per se as Hegel expressed once upon a time and there's always this kind of collapse and that's happening at the same time so dialectics is there but this is inter-penetration of dialectics and you're kind of left in this fragmented element and that's where the single individual comes in with Kierkegaard and it's a single individual that has to express or make that leap famously with Kierkegaard or to make that decision but it's philosophy is not going to help you at the end of the day it's the active individual that will that makes any sense yeah and that brings us to the fourth and final interlude you have turning finally to Adorno we see a critique of Kierkegaard reminiscent of some of Lucatch's later work Adorno finds Kierkegaard guilty of an inwardness that pulls one into a sort of inescapable labyrinth of self-reflection that is incapable of developing into a substantial political praxis or as Adorno quoting Benjamin calls it a petrified primordial landscape so this is similar to Lucatch and we've already talked a bit about this but what does Adorno spin on this you argue that he misses something in Kierkegaard could you speak to that again Adorno is another very for my reading of Adorno back then and he has an ambiguous relationship with Kierkegaard and from my interpretation in the book at least he is very Kierkegaardian in many of the ways he thinks throughout his his his adult life he publishes his book on Kierkegaard a monograph or the construction of the aesthetic in 1933 imagine just when Hitler is coming to power and again you have to take this in context also a lot of the attack on Kierkegaard it's almost an indirect attack on Heidegger I mean this is 1933 Heidegger is now a card-carrying member of the Nazi party has become the rectum Freiburg and here's Adorno also German but Jewish again and on the other end of the political spectrum Kierkegaard again same reason and Adorno was always a great admirer of Lucatch to the end let me say but he was disturbed and perturbed by by Lucatch's destruction of reason and the Lucatch's kind of journey into realism and looking for kind of a narrow views of the world after his initial early period writing that both Benjamin and Adorno were very much influenced attracted by but with with Kierkegaard yes it's it's the problem of he thinks that you're stuck in this almost become paralyzed isn't it Kierkegaard never leaves the aesthetic realm in a way for Adorno there it's almost a fetishization of inwardness or innerly kite in German that you never really get out of and this again is again Adorno's joined through the eyes of the Frankfurt School of or critical theory that this is remaining you remain apolitical your main ambiguous you remain cut off your main fundamentally bourgeois and without responsibility so that's more or less than the problem that that Adorno has with Kierkegaard but later Kierkegaard turns up very positive in snippets in Adorno's work and he goes back to it to Kierkegaard later looking at works of love another text so even though Adorno is very much turned with and goes with Marx and Hegel Kierkegaard still present in especially in minimamaralia one of probably Adorno's most beautiful text written during the war reflections on a damaged life minimamaralia where you when you seek your work in that text you see a different Kierkegaard than the one that's under critique and in very Kierkegaardian fashion by running a whole monograph on Kierkegaard it's it's a love letter in a way it's a it's a farewell to Kierkegaard so it's dense with it's a loving critique of Kierkegaard what I will say is that yes I'm repeating myself just that Adorno doesn't see the the practice that Kierkegaard actually does engage with and of course it's a very lonely practice that he makes but the 1845, there's no mention of Christian discourses in Adorno's critique and there's very little mention of works of love in the construction of the aesthetic so it's very some very superficial parts to the reading what access he had to Kierkegaard at that time and was not somewhat quite limited remember Kierkegaard's also greatest editor in German at the time was called Emmanuel Hirsch who was part of that generation of Schmitt and Heidegger very much aligned with the Nazis a great Kierkegaard scholar but editing in a way that he's presenting Kierkegaard as a very hard-nailed philosopher of decisionism which inspired this generation of of thinkers in radical theology and philosophy, phenomenology in Germany which Adorno did not like so he's kind of going through these these these texts of of here so that's what Kierkegaard, Adorno misses and I tried to show almost turning back on Adorno actually Adorno is completing what Kierkegaard was trying to do a century earlier in the secular world in a world post-Christian world with Adorno very much involved and showing that through two different texts like you'll see in his aesthetic theory and his kind of people like Samuel Beggitt or with Kafka or Trackel these favorite writers of Adorno which are showing the powerless of existence but he hates philosophers that try to be artists at the same time like so he really goes after someone like Sartre that are doing but Kierkegaard isn't a big use one because he's not really doing either philosophy sometimes or writing literary texts again we're back to that interlude or indirect politics that's happening and that's something that would attract Adorno. Adorno like these kind of difficult things are hard to classify that I think still remains with Kierkegaard or after all the critique that Adorno does and in his last two works aesthetic theory and negative dialectics I find Kierkegaard still very much present there. Hegel, Kierkegaard and Marx are somehow being interwoven in Adorno's final works. Yeah bringing this part of the conversation to a close and picking up something you were rooting to tying things off with Adorno and Kierkegaard you bring forward the question of who who am I speaking to who is the writer here who is the reader Kierkegaard opens up via his pseudonym's a sort of ground-less ground of identities but it also opens up possibilities for reading and writing as a form of resistance to reification something Adorno does pick up on could you explain what's going on for both thinkers here?
Yeah I mean this is the the who am I speaking you see this this question turning off in a few moments in Kierkegaard's work in in in sickest of death there's a moment where he almost gives a very intense definition of what the religious kind of paradox we didn't talk about paradox almost in this book as a paradox being fundamental to to Kierkegaard's writings the paradox I think it without paradox is like the lover without passion famously Joanna Sclimico says but to whom am I speaking and it's when he's like who am I speaking who is the reader or am I speaking before a god before an entity or before posterity and again I bring in Hamlet here the very first two words of Hamlet who's there and not only that so that's the first two the question that begins Hamlet who's there nay speak and stand forth so this kind of so yeah if you read the read I said and beginning of Hamlet who's there nay the negation and speak and stand on her folder self this really for me is very if you read it through Kierkegaard you know it's going to be a sum up of much of what Kierkegaard's trying to do and which eludes any form of capture so and when I say eluding any form of capture because that's the whole point of Kierkegaard's thought through titles of his books and through the use of of different synonyms and through the kind of inter interpenetration of different disciplines within the text themselves and that's really important this idea of self and again another paradox which you're born it's all about becoming the self isn't it where you'll say the purity of the purity to will one thing to try to have that selfhood but at the same time by doing that he's creating a kind of plurality of subjects or plurality of selfhood you know it's almost the exact opposite of what he wants to do but who's there that listener and again you have these kind of silent elements which we've talked about already you know fate or tasci ternus is one of the pseudonyms the silent brother who is listening to Quedam this is in Stages on Life's Way which takes off the guilty knock guilty that part takes up an early two-thirds of the book and Quedam which literally the whatness character is talking to try to overcome another fairies looking at being a poet and as a silent brother that responds and he'll say at the end of that book after going through and throwing through not many people read the whole that book because it's extremely dense it's very allegorical it's full of various literary motifs and at the end of the book Fray to tasci ternus literally says who am I speaking to who was left and maybe there's nobody left at all and at that moment you have two or three pages of the finest Danish prose you're going to find and if you forget that you could always work the greatest writers in the Danish language where he talks about what is and what is this language and he goes through it in very different forms almost playing the end because he thinks there's nobody left there and Quedam returning to his beloved Danish language to close the book and so I thought that was your question so directly here what's this idea of of the the single individual is that one that one reader that stranger that is himself as well and opening up to this kind of illusionist this almost this negation that that alludes I quote from Qredebor at the end of the book opening the wound of negativity that somehow there's always this kind of negation that's happening are elusive and that's why I used the motto as well for Moby Dick at the very beginning of the book and true places and it wasn't on any map true places and never are the quote if I remember but yet it wasn't on any map true places never are it's not an accident then there's someone like Duluth's and Gatorie in their book of thousands that it was called Moby Dick the great the great masterpiece of the coming and becoming or void in the Danish is a crucial subject our term in Qredebor at the coming of oneself but that who's there which he refers to also it comes back to Haman and Herder and these kind of German thinkers that were going against Kant at the time and we're kind of seen as the irrationalists of the time and remained close to Qredebor especially Haman this kind of despite everything what's absent is is still is what we must kind of enter you know and now I'm jumping even further another famous reader of Qredebor is Vickenstein so you who who says of course famously that which we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence and you could read that through a Qredebor guardian light as well and that that to who's who's there that's that the hidden reader the hidden speaker even is is what's left like the come up like Hegel or a system cannot capture cannot capture what is happening with Abraham and Isaac as the optimist Maria for example or what is happening with Hamlet as he's just before he makes the decision so this is the element of who's there yeah bringing this all to a close so we're currently living in an age of increasing political polarization economic inequality and incoming environmental catastrophe and in a time like that stepping aside to take some time to read Kierkegaard or a host of related writers can at times seem like a sort of privileged form of bourgeois decadence given everything we've put on the table what does this attitude miss about the relationship between inwardness and political commitment we're not reading Marx or Lenin or going to protest how would you encourage people especially young people who are finding themselves compelled to get involved politically how would you encourage them to also think critically about that inner life and the relationship that might have to political engagement well yeah that's a big question and I can see that and like always actually it's not just now but coming to Kierkegaard there will be kind of blocks there you're kind of the go Christian thinker and 19th century white side bother existentialism come on you know let's move on so in a superficial approach you still have these these I guess blocks that turn up with approaches of one like your war but what of course like everything when you when you dig deeper what's what could be useful or and I hate the word useful but what could in some way wake us up or be a kind of a kickstart to some kind of engagement would be the end of the pure war force is that again that the freedom to think I think that's very hard and that when he says that we have freedom of speech everywhere but we don't have the freedom of thought and we're losing that that the talent or freedom for really and thinking critically and thinking in freedom which I think many young people can feel that we're all everyone speaking but who is actually really thinking and that's one element and the nuance the nuance that's in Kierkegaard and that you can see through the various different writings that I think when we're living in these kind of very quite binary times or times where it's people are afraid to even speak with these divisions everywhere I think Kierkegaard might help us to to see with more complexity more than once and how to live as human beings and thirdly what's important well I think the element of of this dowdreaver is is crucial this kind of as a kind of an act of resistance against the age of information the age of of this kind of leveling and the attack by just the disaster porn media or the very serious questions of kind of apocalyptic feeling of of climate change and all these things that this idea of being able to slow down which is for Kierkegaard is taking very seriously this kind of taking with a kind of a pathos of distance to go to go to go to Nietzsche but actually but still being in in society talking engaging and not being swept away by the speed of things that's why I like the painting for the book that I was allowed to use along with a blank book the man white which is by fending a German-American artist early 20th century who lived in Germany and Berlin through those chaotic times of the 20s and 30s and finally fled 1936 because this painting and these art was considered decadent art by the Nazis but there's that's the flan air going through and you can see a shadow in black almost between his legs as well and the skyscrapers now look at other new churches so this is the modern world that we're living in early modernism I don't think I think we can learn a lot from modernism in the 21st century we're not out of it actually when you parallel the 1920s to 1930s to now the 2020s to 2030s it's very sad that that could go this way as well despite all our technology and information and very different world we're living in we are also living in an age of hysteria and age of of growing tensions various forms of nationalisms as well and we could go down that way and we're seeing it also in in politics from United States to Brazil to Britain to Hungary and of extreme kind of populist movements taking over and people that are feeling completely detached disillusioned or remaining ignorant but millions voting for quite monstrous are very irresponsible or clownish leaders someone like Kierkegaard might engage you almost chiseling away your thought but those kind of the the socratic thinking and the the the quite like figure of society and through through working not being caught in these in these in these kind of frameworks going against the tide and managing to speak nuances as well but of course you have to be in a privileged position to be able to get there at the same time but that's been there that's the paradoxically it was like that with Kierkegaard very well even worse of course now supposedly we have a far more democratic society but we're not using these tools or we don't want to access these tools and it takes effort to read so like your course today which as we know our minds have been kind of are being are being changed for good or for bad we have a different way of using our attention but Kierkegaard is all about it's a very close attentive reading with Kierkegaard as well and it helps you I think when you it helps to see even going through someone like you know blue catch or a door nor a Benjamin reading them anew as well it's really important as a reader as Kierkegaard himself and quotes German writer when a monkey looks in no apostle looks out so it's the reader brings alive or brings to death the author and and that's really important with someone like you reward yeah so that brings us to the end of the book so as a final question I always like to ask what if anything are you working on now or what can we look forward to from you in the future near and far well I'm actually have two small two book projects actually which are quite different than Kierkegaard's indirect politics but actually one is a book on on Joyce and which won't be out for a while because I'm just starting it James Joyce and looking at kind of the philosophy of James Joyce and looking at how we can view Joyce and his works philosophically and of course it was great reader of philosophy but how we actually philosophize and looking at the idea of the art of flourishing and decay in Joyce and that'll be coming out with Oxford University Press hopefully in the sometime of the future and I'll be writing a small book on Fernando for a critical live series they're the two books I'm working on so yeah that'll keep you busy for the next little while yeah you'll have to come back and discuss them when they're ready so in the meantime Bartholomew Ryan thank you so much for being with us and Stephen thank you so much for having me it was been a pleasure to be able to talk about these things again