Kierkegaard Project Seminar: Tomer Raudanski

Dying in Endless Repetition: Kierkegaard in Conversation with Heidegger and Levinas

This paper will deal with the problem of what it means to exist. Drawing mainly on Kierkegaard’s Works of Love, as well as on The Sickness unto Death, Postscript and At a Graveside, I approach this problem through the question of what it means to die. I will argue that reading Kierkegaard through the horizon of Levinas’ philosophy can highlight a dialogical element in the Dane that may be distinguished from Heidegger’s notion of authenticity. According to Heidegger, death, is the event that individualizes Dasein and separates the subject from the ‘they’ of the everydayness. In contrast to this view, I will argue that we ought to understand time in Kierkegaard not on the basis of death, but on the contrary—as Levinas put it in his later lecture courses delivered in 1975-76, his last year at the Sorbonne—death should be understood on the basis of time. Thus rather than regarding the fragile nature of human temporality primarily through Kierkegaard’s notions of despair or anxiety, I argue that the cause of anxiety is human unaware or unconscious loneliness, our need to love and be loved by others. That is, I shall explore temporality in Kierkegaard as the domain of care, love and duty to the neighbor, or absolute other.