SKC Project Seminar: William Toke Mathorne

(Aarhus University, Denmark)

Demonic Ambiguities: A Diagnosis of Modern Subjectivity in Kierkegaard

The figure of the demonic surfaces in several of Kierkegaard’s major works. As a concept, however, it evades a univocal definition. Kierkegaard himself uses it indiscriminately in a range of different contexts, from literary criticism to psychological deliberations. This prompts the question of this paper: Why did Kierkegaard insist on this particular figure in his analyses of anxiety, despair and repentance? And what does the concept reveal as a diagnosis and indictment of his present age? I aim to examine these questions through the guiding lens of ambiguity which is at the heart of the demonic both as an ancient and modern topos. More specifically, the paper will compare the different usages of the concept of the demonic in order to relate it to Kierkegaard’s diagnosis of the problem of truthful or univocal communication in modern subjectivity. The demonic, I propose, shows itself inherently related to a condition where communication suffers under ambiguity, encapsulated and performed in the phenomena of misinterpretation, misidentification and misdirection. In Kierkegaard’s hands, the demonic equally reveals itself as a condition and as a useful diagnostic tool for exposing his age. Thus, Kierkegaard’s ethico-religious assessment of the demonic turns out to be much more ambivalent than often noted in the secondary literature and calls for a reconsideration of the edifying aspects of the concept.