SKC Workshop Autumn 2024

Tomer Raudanski

(Humbolt University, Germany)

Power to the Powerless: Why Kierkegaard’s Notion of Mercy is Highly Political

Kierkegaard’s attitudes toward politics continue to divide readers. Scholarly accounts have attributed to Kierkegaard a range of positions, from outright rejection of politics based on his eternity-orientated notion of neighborly love to more recent attempts to bridge Kierkegaard’s spiritual and religious objectives with the ethical realm. However, little attention has been given to the question of what, for Kierkegaard, politics is to begin with. My intervention will fill that lacuna by exploring French philosopher Jacques Rancière’s (1940– ) analyses of politics.

Drawing on Rancière’s investigations into the aesthetic features of politics, I propose that Kierkegaard’s notion of Christian love must be read as highly political. Focusing on Kierkegaard’s distinction between generosity [Gavmildhed] and mercifulness [Barmhjertighed] and their respective contrasting presuppositions of equality and inequality in his deliberation on mercifulness from Works of Love (1847), I argue that Kierkegaard is concerned with the (aesthetic) ways in which the public sphere is seen, heard, and apprehended. That is, Kierkegaard’s discourse draws our attention to the sensible conditions that allocate the privileges of freedom, merit, and independence to some (the wealthy and powerful), and dependency and ignorance to others (the poor and marginalized). Mercy, for Kierkegaard, is a performative act that reconfigures the presiding structures of sense: it asserts that the poor are not dependent, ignorant, or passive and hence excluded from the common bond, but instead that they ought to be seen as capable, independent, and self-sustaining individuals. Accordingly, mercy’s claim for the equality of everyone imparts power to the powerless.