Rachel Bespaloff as a Reader of Kierkegaard

SKC Workshop Autumn 2026 with Simo Kusaibati, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne and Université Sorbonne Nouvelle.

I propose to examine Rachel Bespaloff’s reading of Kierkegaard, developed between 1934 and 1935 in “Notes sur La Répétition” and “En marge de Crainte et Tremblement,” within the intellectual, editorial, and philosophical conditions of Kierkegaard’s early reception in France. Through a close confrontation with the texts she reads, I will consider what her reception preserves, selects, displaces, and transforms.

Beginning with Repetition, I will follow Bespaloff’s passage from the Kierkegaardian problem of movement to that of power, and from there to the distinction between recollection and repetition and to the different regimes of the instant. I will then turn to Fear and Trembling and to her reconfiguration of the relations between resignation, faith, necessity, and possibility, paying particular attention to the status of Johannes de Silentio and to the hermeneutic consequences of partially identifying the pseudonym with Kierkegaard.

I will finally ask how these early readings bring into view a set of problems whose transformations can be followed as far as On the Iliad. Bespaloff’s encounter with Kierkegaard may thus be approached as a historically situated process of philosophical and literary appropriation in which reception itself becomes a form of conceptual production.

About the series

This workshop is part of the Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre's Autumn Workshops 2026: