SKC Project Seminar: Ville Hämäläinen

(Tampere University, Finland)

Kierkegaard’s Pseudonymous Poetics: Seeking the Truth with(out) Literature

Søren Kierkegaard considered himself a poet or religious writer. Still, Kierkegaard is mostly studied in philosophy or theology and less so in literary studies. In this paper, I will revalue Kierkegaard’s philosophy by approaching his poetics. By poetics, I mean the literariness of Kierkegaard, including his way of using literary devices and his awareness of the history of literature as well as his engagement with literary publicity of his time.

As a thread linking the different aspects and the works of Kierkegaard, I will use Kierkegaard’s concept of life-view (Livs-Anskuelse). In the literary debut by Kierkegaard, From the Papers of One Still Living, life-view refers to a task that every author should have and present in one’s writings. In other parts of his oeuvre, Kierkegaard uses the concept of life-view in a wider sense as a truth-seeking.

Pseudonymity combines truth-seeking and literariness in Kierkegaard. I propose that each pseudonym should be considered as presenting a truth to live for. Here, I will treat pseudonymity as polyphony in the light of Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory: each pseudonym represents an idea, or more specifically, merges an embodiment of the idea.

Finally, I will take a closer look at Kierkegaard’s posthumous The Point of View for My Work as an Author (1859). Here, Kierkegaard turns the truth-seeking upside down stating that one cannot find the truth utilizing pseudonyms. Rather, he is using indirect communication (indirekte Meddelelse) to deceive readers to seek the truth from outside the hundreds of pages of aesthetic writings.

As a result, I will show how Kierkegaard challenges the common notions of truth, literature, and philosophy—and the relationships between them.