Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic (Theory & History of Literature) [Paperback]

To anyone fascinated by the genius of Adorno there is perhaps no other book more exemplary than his study of Kierkegaard. One will find all the strains of his later thought permeating this polemic against existential subjectivity. Yet dispite the relentlessness of his attack, Adorno seems to be writing a eulogy for Kierkegaard's misdirected melancholy. Articulating the beauty of an aesthetically pure Christianity, exposing its essential mythology as rooted in despair, Adorno acheived a work of genius that compels me to wonder why it has seemingly been ignored. Robert Hullot-Kentor should be credited with a good translation and the motivation to bring a delightfully obscure work to the English speaking world.

This seems like a perfect day for reviewing Theodor W. Adorno's book, KIERKEGAARD CONSTRUCTION OF THE AESTHETIC, for geopolitical reasons. Blackwater is on the cover of the October 15, 2007, issue of "The Nation," and Erik Prinze, founder of Blackwater, will appear before a House panel investigating what is going on in Iraq. I have not had direct contact with Iraq, but an article in the same issue, "Specialist Town Takes His Case to Washington," about some of 22,500 soldiers who have been discharged with personality disorder in the past six years. In 1989, a Vet Center examined me to determine my reactions to "What are you so uptight about?" after I served as a draftee in Nam in 1969-1970, and the counselor with a PhD in Psychology wanted to know what diagnosis I had received from a shrink I was sent to at Golden Valley Health Center. The health care diagnosis was "schizoid personality disorder," but an examination of Kierkegaard's work by a philosopher like Adorno is likely to think in terms of equivocations, inwardness, paradoxies of the aesthetic, existence, system, overlapping spheres, transcendences, mythical sacrifice, melancholy, and longing. Usually the army treats this kind of thing as the chief of the Fort Carson's Behavioral Health unit instructed his doctors in a memo about troubled soldiers on his office's bulletin board, "Get rid of dead wood."

As the unpublished author of MY VIETNAM WAR JOKE BOOK, I was most interested in how Adorno was able to find an analysis of humor by Kierkegaard in a constellation of spheres, in which "subjectivity exalts itself as its own judge." (p. 91). I was certainly experiencing that kind of reaction regarding American society in 1989, when it had become painfully obvious that I was extralimital to the presses' goals. Soldiers who had been discharged like Spc. Jon Town who won a Purple Heart for being knocked unconscious by a 107-millimeter rocket could hardly believe that the Army would treat him like someone who "cannot collect disability pay or receive medical care." It is worse than observing "The Kantian formula of the starry heavens above and the moral law within" (p. 91) without being able to apply it in any way, shape, or form, to what is happening. The POSTSCRIPT is not exactly expecting laughter in its statement: "If ever the position of the stars in the firmament has signified something fearful, then the position of the categories in this situation signifies something other than laughter and jesting." (p. 91). According to Adorno:

Every one of Kierkegaard's "spheres," however, expresses fright. It clings to the magnitude of its universal-conceptual scope. In its emptiness as in the minutest detail, in the blind this-there of existence, the essence of the mythical shows through. The constellations of the spheres are in every case conjuring signs, collectively allegorical. Hence the constant invocation "of" the aesthetic, ethical, and religious, whose objectified character never really corresponds to the demand of the "subjective thinker"; hence such absurd phraseology as: "To stick to my subject, the religious." (p. 91).

A section on Humor, Accident, and "Motivation" (pp. 93-95) clearly charges subjectivity with determining "meaning." (p. 93). "Kierkegaard's analysis of humor . . . is founded on the radical contingency of the external world, and humor is precisely not adequately defined on this basis:
When a humorist says, for example: `If only . . .' " (pp. 93-94).

Whatever that joke was, "Everyone who understands repartee understands at once when he hears such a speech, that the speaker has annulled the distinction between fortune and misfortune in a higher madness--because all are sufferers." (p. 94).

We are getting a clearer picture of how politics has become so controlled by people with large fortunes that whatever happens to anyone who does not have such a fortune is considered insignificant, rather like F. Scott Fitzgerald's description of certain rich people in THE GREAT GATSBY, and millions of people who served in the armed forces were merely going to be treated like a pool of recruits for people who could do even more secret activities, or reach the upper level of Blackwater, or control the kind of events that took place simultaneously on September 11, 2001, April 19, 1995, April 19, 1993, August 4-6, 1964, and in November, 1963.

Adorno is not afraid to be critical:
What escapes Kierkegaard in the reply of the "humorist" at least touches his aesthetic definition of the "occasion" as the single point of communication between objectless inwardness and the contingent world of things: "The occasion is at one and the same time the most significant and the most insignificant, the most exalted and the most humble, the most important and the most unimportant. Without occasion, precisely nothing at all happens, and yet the occasion has no part at all in what does happen. The occasion is the last category, the essential transitional category between the sphere of the idea and actuality. . . ." The irony of the passage, which was perhaps planned by Kierkegaard as a poor aesthetic distortion of the theological paradoxy, cannot be ignored. (p. 94).

We rarely study such things, which "remain ironic as long as the severed external world remains dark and deprived of any truth. But the flash of light that is reflected back on the world, as soon as the dialectic is referred to truth by way of the `occasion,' suffices to reestablish to a certain degree the legitimacy of the collapsed external world. Thus the abstract distinctions between the spheres are ambivalent: they are at the same time determinations of that realism from which Kierkegaard cannot withhold all content by means of inwardness. For the `occasion' itself is a category of the logic of the spheres; it is the boundary of the structure of the spheres with the external world." (p. 95).

Most of the notes on pages 145-158 merely locate Kierkegaard citations. The index indicates that Walter Benjamin is mentioned less frequently than Hegel but more than Mozart. I doubt that the index is complete, or that anyone else gets mentioned more than Kant. Nietzsche is barely mentioned on `the "image of eternity modeled on endless repetition," which Bloch has shown Nietzsche's eternal return to be, is also the image of what is eternal in the person around which the concepts of Kierkegaard's doctrine of existence collect themselves in vain.' (p. 82). That idea is part of a transition from Existence Mythical to Objective Despair in the topics considered in this book. In our society, that kind of person would probably get a personality disorder discharge faster if he was disabled than if he never got hurt. I was only treated for jungle rot when I was in the army and malaria after I returned to school, so I don't worry about being denied any further treatment.