SKC Project Seminar: Emily Martone

Postponed - new date will be announced in 2022!

(Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, Italy)

A Kierkegaardian Political Reading of Heidegger's Entschlossenheit

The political dimension of Kierkegaard’s thought has often been overlooked or even criticized by many scholars. One reason for this rejection has been the juxtaposition of his thought to the Existenzphilosophie, and in particular to Heidegger’s work, which mediated Kierkegaard’s reception in the twentieth century. In his review of Jean Wahl’s Études kierkegaardiennes, Adorno reproaches, on the one hand, the association between Kierkegaard and Existentialism and, on the other, the distortion of his thought by Heidegger and Jaspers. In particular, their reading of Kierkegaard made him a staunch supporter of reactionary and conservative, anti-revolutionary and anti-progressive, even proto-Nazi (as Lukács had argued) positions. In this seminar I will focus on the critique of the formalism and abstraction of the Heideggerian category of Entschlossenheit (“resolve”). Its emptiness is responsible, on theone hand, for the disinterest and indifference to the ontic and concrete aspects of human existence, and on the other hand for a slippage of resolution into a voluntaristic and arbitrary decisionism (Entscheidung). Reading Kierkegaard through Heideggerian lenses thus lends Kierkegaardian choice to this dual outcome, as Schmitt's theory of exceptional decision has shown. However, new postmodern and deconstructionist readings of Heidegger's work have provided an alternative paradigm for interpreing his category of Entschlossenheit, namely the paradigm of inoperativity. If Entschlossenheit is approached as an inoperative and deactivating decision, Heidegger's and consequently Kierkegaard's philosophies open up to interesting impolitic implications that this seminar aims to highlight. In so doing, I will use the philosophies of the two authors as each other's corrective. Kierkegaard’s work helps to bring Heideggerian reflection back into an ethical horizon, while Heidegger’s analysis provides us with the conceptual tools for explicating the postmodern implications of Kierkegaard’s writings.