The Passage through Negativity or From Self-Renunciation to Revolution? Kierkegaard and Žižek on the Politics of the Impassioned Individual

The Passage through Negativity

or From Self-Renunciation to Revolution? Kierkegaard and Žižek on the Politics of the Impassioned Individual

Sophie Wennerscheid

In my article I wish to point out how and why Kierkegaard’s thoughts have been made topical today by contemporary political theorists like Slavoj Žižek. In the following I argue that there is a clear connection between Kierkegaard’s concept of the leap of faith and Žižek’s concept of the political act, both performed by the single individual. This essay explores this connection by using a two-pronged approach: I will dis-cuss both the political impact of Kierkegaard’s religious thinking and what the link to Kierkegaard reveals about the religious dimension of Žižek’s political undertaking. My main point is that the affinity between Kierkegaard and Žižek is to be found in their belief in the power of the passionate single individual, who with undampened desire intervenes in the social or political order – and thereby provokes a far-reaching disruption.

For approximately the past fifteen years, the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek has dominated the field of political philosophy by arguing for an unconditioned political commitment and the necessity of rad-ical social and political change. In one of his earlier books, The Tick-lish Subject from 1999, Žižek describes his philosophical aim program-matically as “an engaged political intervention, addressing the burning question of how we are to reformulate a leftist, anti-capitalist political project in our era of global capitalism and its ideological supplement, liberal-democratic multi-culturalism.”1 Instead of promoting the idea

1 Slavoj Žižek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology, London: Verso, 2008, p. xxvii.

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142 Sophie Wennerscheid

of a democratic process of political change based on discursive nego-tiations, Žižek conceives of politics as a non-discursive act of funda-mental rupture leading to a radical revolutionary transformation of society. Yet the necessary condition for this radical change is not the revolutionary event as such, but the subject’s commitment and its fidelity to this event regardless of any consequences. One paradigm for such an act is Saul’s conversion to Paul, i.e., the passionate individual’s change from being a persecutor to being a follower of Jesus Christ.2 In his book Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism,3 Alain Badiou sees the political impact of Paul first in the apostle’s pre-rational belief in the resurrection of Christ as truth-event, and second in his claim that this truth is universally valid for everyone. For Badiou, Paul’s subjec-tive position is correlative to pure and ungrounded fidelity to an event relevant to the realm of politics, such as the French Revolution. In an interview, Badiou makes clear that he “read[s] Paul as a text about a new and provocative conception of truth and, more profoundly, about the general conditions for a new truth.”4 The general condition for truth is its independence of the crowd’s endorsement. As a radically individu-alistic figure, Saint Paul frees “truth from the communitarian grasp.”5 The point here – emphasized by Badiou, and adopted by Žižek – is in part the momentum of personal decision, that is, Paul’s radical nega-tion of his former existence. But it is also the result, the religious and political consequences, of this act: Christianity’s rupture with Judaism and the raise of “the new party called the Christian Community.”6

2 Whereas Paul’s own description of his conversion experience is very brief (cf. his First Epistle to the Corinthians (1 Corintheans 9:1 and 15:3–8) and his Epistle to the Galatians (Galatians 1:11–16), the event is discussed in much more detail in the Acts of the Apostles (compare. Acts 9:3–9).

3 Cf. Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003.

4 Adam S. Miller, “An Interview with Alain Badiou: Universal Truths & the Question of Religion,” Journal of Philosophy and Scripture, http://www.philoso-phyandscripture.org/Issue3-1/Badiou/Badiou.html.

5 Badiou, Saint Paul, p. 5.6 Slavoj Žižek, The Puppet and the Dwarf, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003,

p. 9.


The Passage through Negativity 143

It is by no means self-evident that Žižek, a declared atheist,7 should cherish Christianity as “a universal religion (religion of universality),”8 or make it into a core concept of his philosophy. That he nonethe-less presents himself as a defender of the Christian legacy is motivated by his critical attitude against all forms of postmodern ethical rela-tivism and “suspended belief” as he sees it, for example in the almost “hegemonic ethico-spiritual attitude of today’s intellectuals”9: decon-structionist-Levinasian Judaism. Žižek’s main critique of deconstruc-tionist philosophy targets its notion of otherness as unknowable alterity. He denounces it for negating all particular instances of the other, and thereby encouraging passivity in our encounters with him. The effect of such passivity, for Žižek, is political apathy and inaction.10 Another important point of critique is his portrait of the deconstruc-tionist understanding of truth as a category of permanent withdrawal. Against this Žižek highlights the liberating potential, and transforma-tive political power, of a confessional devotion to the so-called Truth-Event.

This is where Kierkegaard comes into play. As a religious thinker who promotes the single individual’s unconditioned and unquestioned relatedness to the one and only God, Kierkegaard becomes, for Žižek, a shining example of “authentic personal engagement” performed in “a fundamental practico-ethical decision about what kind of life one wants to commit oneself to.”11

The concern of the following inquiry is not yet to discuss whether or not Žižek does provide an appropriate interpretation of Kierkegaard.

7 In an interview Žižek declares: “I am a fighting atheist. … Churches should be turned into grain silos or palaces of culture.” Doug Henwood: “I’m a fighting atheist. Interview with Slavoj Žižek,” Bad subjects 59 (2002), available at http://bad.eserver.org/issues/2002/59/Žižek.html.

8 Žižek, The Puppet and the Dwarf, p. 10. In The Puppet and the Dwarf, Žižek continues his critical reflection on Christianity as previously done in The Fragile Absolute (2001) and On Belief (2001).

9 Žižek, The Puppet and the Dwarf, p. 8.10 Cf. Eric Dean Rasmussen: “What would Žižek do? Redeeming Christian-

ity’s Perverse Core,” available at http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/endconstruction/heretical/.

11 Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009, p. 86.



The aim is, rather, to explain what makes Kierkegaard so attractive for Žižek, and what the link to Kierkegaard reveals about the religious (and the psychological) dimension of Žižek’s politico-philosophical undertaking. Despite their obvious differences concerning the nature of Christianity, I argue, Žižek regards Kierkegaard as a valuable ally who stands up for the idea of passionate subjectivity. For both Kier-kegaard and Žižek, passionate subjectivity – or, more concretely, the impassioned single individual – presupposes the readiness to put one’s own position on the line, or even to risk one’s own life. Much as, for Kierkegaard, the unconditioned abandonment of worldly benefit and social recognition is sufficient for the Christian believer, for Žižek the radical repudiation of the symbolic order is necessary for a break-through towards a new political reality. What Žižek ultimately seeks in Kierkegaard, therefore, is a stance that negates all finite and particular determinations and considerations in order to pass into a new and completely different world. This stance is to be understood as founded on a certain “power of negativity” that “undermines the fixity of every particular constellation.”12

The concern of Žižek, Badiou, and other leftist thinkers with reli-gion, or more precisely their transfer of a religious model into the sphere of politics, has frequently attracted the interest – and, at times, the harsh criticism – of researchers. Jürgen Habermas, for example, criticizes this mingling of religion and politics as a new kind of polit-ical theology that offers an illusionary antidote to the people’s disen-chantment with everyday politics, and reinforces “an already smold-ering skepticism with regard to an enlightened self-understanding of modernity.”13 Starting from the premise that normative values can and should be achieved only in the development of mutual understanding by free and equal persons, Habermas criticizes what he regards as a political philosophy based on an unexplainable and so ultimately groundless ground.

Against Habermas’s ethics of unbroken, self-transparent intersub-

12 Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, p. 91.13 Jürgen Habermas, “‘The Political’: The Rational Meaning of a Question-

able Inheritance of Political Theology,” in Eduardo Mendieta and Jonathan Van Antwerpen (eds.), The Power of Religion in the Public Space, Columbia, OH: Columbia University Press, 2011, pp. 15–33.



jective communication and rational will-formation, Žižek insists on the existence of an “impossible-real kernel,”14 that is, a dimension of radical negativity inside the subject that can neither be escaped from nor sublated, cultivated, or reconciled. Žižek vigorously emphasizes the danger in negating this dimension: “[T]he aspiration to abolish it is precisely the source of totalitarian temptation: the greatest mass mur-ders and holocausts have always been perpetrated in the name of man as harmonious being, of a New Man without antagonistic tension.”15

Žižek considers the dimension of negativity, in Freudian termi-nology the death drive, to be highly ambiguous. On the one hand, it is conceived as the traumatic kernel of the human being, and as such it is terrifying. On the other hand, it is la condition humaine that can and must not be negated, since any such negation leads to an ideological fantasy of wholeness. While the unconscious as such does not resist law, but on the contrary “is the privileged locus of compliance with it,”16 the death drive is “an impossible kernel which resists symboliza-tion, totalization, symbolic integration.”17 It thereby enables a break with the symbolic order, and provides an answer to the crucial ques-tion of how a single individual can be resistant to a system when it at the same time is determined by its immanent relations.18

As the death drive, the power of negativity always implies a strike against the self. By undermining the subject’s stable position, nega-tivity frees it from finite constraints, and sets free the revolutionary energy with which it can say no to the status quo. This is a genuinely Kierkegaardian thought that Žižek adopts and transforms into a pol-itics of the single individual. In order to discuss whether this kind of adaptation can be called “a Kierkegaardian conceptualization of rad-

14 Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, London, New York: Verso, 1989, p. 4.

15 Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, p. 5.16 Sarah Kay, Žižek: A Critical Introduction, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003, pp.

141–142.17 Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, p. 6.18 This question is also the main question discussed in Molly Anne Rothen-

berg, The Excessive Subject: A New Theory of Social Change, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010.



ical politics,”19 I will first examine Kierkegaard’s concept of the pas-sionate single individual. In the second part, I will consider how this concept may be compared with Žižek’s concept of the political subject.

I KIeRKeg AARd’s sIngle IndIvIduAl And the polItIcIAn’s dReAm of equAlIt y

When Kierkegaard theorizes the category of the existing concrete indi-vidual, he does not intend to provide a systematic account of the single individual. On the contrary, in Concluding Unscientific Postscript the voice of his pseudonymous author Johannes Climacus asserts, “A system of existence cannot be given … System and conclusiveness cor-respond to each other, but existence is the very opposite …. Existence is the spacing that holds apart; the systematic is the conclusiveness that combines.”20

Nevertheless, certain constitutive aspects of Kierkegaard’s under-standing of the single individual can be discerned. First, Kierkegaard characteristically affiliates the concept of the single individual with the movement towards the truth of God, that is, the movement of inward-ness. Second, inwardness is explained with reference to the individu-al’s passion, for only passion enables the individual to relate himself to God and to be answerable to this choice regardless of any bad conse-quences. To this extent, the single individual’s so-called “leap of faith” presupposes a high degree of emotional and psychic energy, inasmuch as it demands a nearly traumatic experience of being without offering any guarantees that this decision was the right one. Third, Kierkegaard always thinks the category of the single individual together with the category of becoming, which implies permanent uncertainty. Here a brief chronologically structured presentation of the central texts in which Kierkegaard reflects on the category of the single individual will make its religious and political impact evident.

Even if the stereotype of “Kierkegaard as the archetypical and apo-

19 Peter Yoonsuk Paik, “The Pessimist Rearmed: Žižek on Christianity and Revolution,” Theory & Event 8, no. 2 (2005), p. 3.

20 Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Frag-ments, vol. I, ed. and transl. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: University Press, 1992, p. 118.



litical individualist”21 must be contested as unfair, it is not completely baseless. As early as 1843, in his debut text Either/Or, Kierkegaard invented the figure of the editor “Victor Eremita,” the winner in lone-liness. And even if the winner in loneliness is here critically depicted as an aesthetic figure,22 it is obvious what makes him a paradigm for the religious single individual: he stands alone, and must act on his own.

A still deeper treatment of the topic can be found in The Concept of Anxiety (1844). Here Kierkegaard for the first time opposes the indi-vidual to the crowd, which is understood as a kind of refuge for an individual who flees in cowardice “from being an individual.”23 The category of the single individual becomes even more important in the Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1846), where Kierkegaard, writing as Johannes Climacus, relates the category to truth and subjectivity. Climacus argues that the single individual does not become a subject unless he relates himself to the truth of God. The truth of God here is not yet to be understood in ontological terms, but as a relation-ship as such: it is the active relationship of the single individual to the unknowable God. In appropriating truth by risking the leap of faith, the subject gains subjectivity. Accordingly, truth is further defined as the subject’s inner transformation.

Because of this transformation taking place inside it, the Kier-kegaardian subject is never completely stable and self-assured. As Cli-macus puts it: “[T]he existing subject, that is: the existing infinite spirit

21 George Pattison and Steven Shakespeare, “Introduction: Kierkegaard, the Individual and Society,” in George Pattison and Steven Shakespeare (eds.), Kierkegaard: The Self in Society, London: Macmillan Press, 1998, pp. 1–23, here p. 1.

22 Kierkegaard distinguishes between his use of the category of the single individual in his pseudonymous books and his upbuilding books. In his pseud-onymous books, that is, in his works of aesthetics, “the single individual is pre-dominantly the single individual esthetically, defined in the eminent sense, the outstanding individual.” In his upbuilding books, by contrast, “the single indi-vidual is someone every human being is or can be.” Søren Kierkegaard, The Point of View, ed. and transl. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Uni-versity Press, 1998, p. 115.

23 Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety: A Simple Psychologically Ori-enting Deliberation on the Dogmatic Issue of Hereditary Sin, ed. and transl. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: University Press, 1981, p. 113.



is continually in the process of becoming.”24 But even though its being in the process of becoming implies that the subject is exposed to radical uncertainty, Kierkegaard evaluates this negatively determined concept of subjectivity as superior to a positively determined concept. In this context, he introduces the term “negative thinker,” as opposed to what he criticizes in Hegel’s philosophy as a positive thinker. According to Climacus’s reading of Hegel, positivity in the domain of thinking means sensate certainty and historical knowledge, which he exposes as illusive and self-deceptive. Inasmuch as the negative is always present in existence, the positive “fails to express the state of the knowing sub-ject in existence” and thus is fooled.25 The subjective existing thinker, on the other hand, has the advantage that he is “cognizant of the nega-tivity of the infinite in existence [Tilværelse]; he always keeps open the wound of negativity, which at times is a saving factor (the others let the wound close and become positive—deceived).”26

It cannot be established whether this process of becoming will ever come to an end, or whether Kierkegaard would even find that desir-able. While some of Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms do declare it necessary, and even possible, to become a self-identical subject, there are others who consider this kind of self-identity impossible. Judge William, for example, the defender of bourgeois social order, reclaims a Hegeli-an-like possibility of self-consciousness and dismisses every gap that separates the self from itself as “hysteria of the spirit.” He explains: “[S]pirit wants to gather itself in itself; the personality wants to become conscious in its eternal validity.”27 Similarly, Anti-Climacus in The Sickness unto Death reaches the following conclusion: “In relating itself to itself and in willing to be itself, the self rests transparently in the power that established it. This formula … is the definition of faith.”28 By contrast, Climacus seems to insist on the impossibility of the

24 Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, p. 38.25 Ibid., Concluding Unscientific Postscript, p. 81.26 Ibid., p. 85.27 Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or, Part II, ed. and transl. by Howard V. Hong

and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: University Press, 1987, p. 189.28 Søren Kierkegaard, Sickness unto Death: A Christian Psychological Exposi-

tion for Upbuilding and Awakening, ed. and transl. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: University Press, 1980, p. 131.



self’s complete self-transparency and self-closure. Contrasting objec-tive and subjective thinking he states: “[O]bjective thought translates everything into results, subjective thought puts everything into pro-cess and omits results—for an existing individual he is constantly in process of coming to be.”29

How vulnerable and unstable Kierkegaard’s own position as a single individual was became clear in the dramatic months of January and February 1846. After a dispute with the Danish author and caricaturist P.L. Møller, Kierkegaard was lampooned by caricatures that made fun of his appearance in the weekly satirical paper Corsaren (The Corsair), edited by Meïr Aaron Goldschmidt. This had the effect of strength-ening Kierkegaard’s public image as a strange and solitary egocen-tric individual. In his writings, Kierkegaard reinterpreted this view by regarding himself as a victim of the mass-media-controlled crowd that takes offense at the singularity of the single individual and tries to level its genius. Interestingly, his negative experiences with the power of the masses did not cause Kierkegaard to condemn group-based processes altogether. On the contrary, he established fine-grained differences between movements that originate in an unreflected mass mentality, in which the individual gets lost, and a movement that – though also sustained by a certain mass of people – worships the single individual as a particular being. Here everyone relates themselves individually to an idea and adopts it in the mode of personal decision.

The crucial text in which Kierkegaard elaborates these ideas is his Two Ages. The Age of Revolution and the Present Age. A Literary Review, published on 30 March 1846. This work is a review of the novel Two Ages by the Danish author Thomasine Gyllembourg, which was pub-lished anonymously in October 1845. Of special interest with regard to Kierkegaard’s socio-political thinking is Part III of the book, which distinguishes the mentality of the age of the French Revolution from the crowd-mentality of the subsequent epoch of Danish rationalism and liberalism. The central difference, for Kierkegaard, is that the “age of revolution is essentially passionate,” and is thus willing to make decisions. It is “externally oriented,” but is related to an idea and so is “essentially turned inward.”30 It takes things seriously without doing

29 Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, p. 279.30 Søren Kierkegaard, Two Ages. The Age of Revolution and the Present Age. A



so en masse, but individually. This means that each person is individ-ually related to an idea, and so the individuals in question are “united on the basis of an ideal distance.”31 The relatedness to an idea is, how-ever, much more than an unspecified relatedness. It is rather a whole-hearted commitment to an idea that implicates “the capacity to will and the passion to act.”32 Kierkegaard explains:

The age of revolution is essentially passionate; therefore it has not nullified the principle of contradiction and can become either good or evil, and whichever way is chosen, the impetus of passion is such that the trace of an action marking its progress or its taking a wrong direction must be percep-tible. It is obliged to make a decision, but this again is the saving factor, for decision is the little magic word that exis-tence respects. If, however, the individual refuses to act, exis-tence cannot help.33

For Kierkegaard, what makes the subject a subject in the strict sense is the capability and the vital will for decision-making. Kierkegaard elab-orates on this, highlighting the individual’s “impassioned desire” to act decisively as a constitutive element of subjectivity. Without the “essen-tial enthusiasm in his passion,” Kierkegaard writes, the subject does not experience the either/or of existence34 and remains in the realm of weak unmanliness.35

However, a clear change in Kierkegaard’s view of revolution ary processes took place in 1848, the year of revolution characterized by demands throughout Europe for more participation and democracy, the collapse of traditional authority, and the definitive end of abso-lute monarchy in Denmark. How sensitively Kierkegaard reacted to

Literary Review, ed. and transl. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Prince ton: University Press, 1978, p. 62.

31 Ibid., pp. 61–62.32 Ibid., p. 67.33 Ibid., p. 66.34 Ibid., p. 67.35 Cf. Søren Kierkegaard, Papers and Journals: A Selection, ed. and transl. by

Alastair Hannay, London: Penguin Books, 1996, p. 350.



these events is obvious in his various rewritings of his little text “The single Individual: Two Notes Concerning My Work as an Author” – a text offering the most extensive reflections on the topic of the single individual. The work was originally meant to accompany the dedica-tion to “that individual,” addressed in Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits from 1847,36 but was heavily revised afterwards. After the rev-olutionary events of 1848, Kierkegaard added a brief postscript with footnotes, and wrote a second postscript in 1855. Nevertheless, none of these texts were published during Kierkegaard’s lifetime; they appeared posthumously in 1859, as a supplement to The Point of View for my Work as an Author.37

Characteristic of these texts is the vehemence with which Kier-kegaard here emphasizes that “not personally but as a thinker, this matter of the single individual is the most decisive.”38 Here the cate-gory of the single individual is opposed, as a core concept of his phi-losophy, to Kierkegaard’s understanding of the crowd. The main cri-tique of the phenomenon called “the crowd” or “the public” aims at the crowd’s self-understanding as a numerical authority. According to Kierkegaard, the crowd is convinced that its numerical superiority enables it to decide what constitutes the truth. The crowd therefore degrades truth to a quantifiable entity. Kierkegaard, by contrast, is convinced that truth cannot be expressed by a crowd but only occurs where the single individual relates to God. Truth must be understood as a category of subjectivity.

Starting from this premise, Kierkegaard expresses strong scepticism about any process that threatens to question his subjective notion of truth. Interpreting the political events of 1848 as just such a challenge to his truth-concept, Kierkegaard opens his little text “The Single Indi-vidual” by sharply contrasting the sphere of the political and the sphere of the religious. He writes:

36 Søren Kierkegaard, Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits, transl. and ed. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: University Press, 2009.

37 Søren Kierkegaard, The Point of View for my Work as an Author: A Report to History, transl. and ed. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: University Press, 1998.

38 Kierkegaard, Point of View, p. 114.



In these times everything is politics. The view point of the reli-gious is worlds (toto caelo) apart from this, just as the starting point and ultimate goal are also worlds (toto caelo) apart, since the political begins on earth in order to remain on earth, while the religious, taking its beginning from above, wants to trans-figure and then to lift the earthly to heaven.39

Despite the sharp line Kierkegaard draws between the single indi-vidual as a category of spirit, on the one hand, and politics as a cate-gory of immanent worldliness, on the other, he nonetheless highlights an interesting affinity between the religious and the political con-cept of human equality. Religion’s core concept is the idea of human-equality and human-likeness, or Menneske-Lighed in Danish. And this concept, interestingly enough, is correlative to a politician’s dream of equality. Due to the particularity of every single individual, however, the politician’s dream cannot be fulfilled in the realm of politics; this equality is only possible in the realm of religion and the divine. On the basis of this distinction between religion and politics, Kierkegaard describes it as a serious problem that politics insists on the equality of all people. To him this signals the primacy and the authority of num-bers to the detriment of the single individual and the subjective notion of truth. Against the “tyranny of the majority,” Kierkegaard argues: “[F]rom the ethical-religious point of view the crowd is untruth if it is supposed to be valid as the authority for what truth is.”40 For Kier-kegaard, all “finite matters are suitable for voting”41 – but the infinite cannot be decided by a numeric majority.

But Kierkegaard is sceptical not only about the crowd’s influence on infinite matters, but also about its supposed power to change the political and social situation in Denmark. In a brief sketch, not pub-lished during his own lifetime, Kierkegaard contemplates the dev-astating consequences of a revolution that would lead the so-called fourth estate to power. This draft, dated October 1848, was planned as a preface to a series of shorter essays to be published under the title A

39 Ibid., p. 103.40 Ibid., p. 106.41 Søren Kierkegaard, Søren Kierekgaard’s Journals and Papers, vol. 4. Bloom-

ington and London: Indiana University Press, 1975, p. 178.



Cycle of Ethical-Religious Essays.42 Here Kierkegaard worries that, after the radical political change of 1848, chaos and anarchy will reign. For him there is only one chance to compel the crowd to obedience again and to reinstall the destroyed order: by the sacrifice of a martyr. Kier-kegaard explains:

[F]rom the time the fourth estate is established … it will become manifest that only martyrs are able to rule the world at the cru-cial moment. That is, no human being will any longer be able to rule the generation at such a moment; only the divine can do, assisted by those unconditionally obedient to him, those who are also willing to suffer, but they are indeed the martyrs. … As soon as the fourth estate is established, governing can be done only divinely, religiously. But religiously to rule, religiously to be the ruler, is to be the suffering one.43

Even if it is obviously a nightmarish prospect, to Kierkegaard, that society will “disintegrate into a world of atoms,” there is nonetheless a silver lining here: God will be able once again to relate to each indi-vidual directly, and not through political representatives. Interestingly enough, Kierkegaard compares the state of disintegration described above with a denomination of the Moravian Brethren who had set-tled in the small Danish town Christiansfeldt, founding a community characterized by the maxim of equality for all members of society. This kind of equality, however, can be interpreted from a secular point of view as well as from a religious one, namely, as an ideal communist or an ideal pietistic society. With a pointed pen Kierkegaard sketches what communism would say: “This way it is secularly right; there must be no distinction whatever between persons; … all people should be alike as workers in a factory, … dressed alike, eating the same food

42 See Kierkegaard’s explanation in Without Authority, p. 216. Only two parts of “A Cycle” were published at the time: Two Ethical-Religious Essays by H. H., May 1849, that is, “Does a Human Being Have the Right to Let Himself Be Put to Death for the Truth?” and “The Difference between a Genius and an Apostle.” See Without Authority, Historical Introduction, pp. ix–xix, p. x.

43 Søren Kierkegaard, Supplement to “Two Ethical-Religious Essays,” in Without Authority, Princeton: University Press, 1997, pp. 214–215.



(made in one enormous pot) at the same stroke of the clock, in the same measure etc.” And pietism would say: “This is Christianly right; there must be no distinction between persons; we should be brothers and sisters, have everything in common … etc. etc.”44 Kierkegaard’s vision of the complete loss of individuality explains his profound aver-sion to the idea of democracy. He cannot understand worldly equality except as a negation of the passionate individual who stands alone and involves him- or herself with God.

The passionate individual means the same, for Kierkegaard, as the individual in inwardness. The category of the single individual, he explains in an unpublished note in his Journals, is “always related to inwardizing.”45 This applies irrespective of whether the social-histor-ical situation is one of peace and complacency, or one of agitation and rebellion. Kierkegaard elaborates:

In time of peace its role will be, without altering anything exter-nally, to awaken inwardness to a heightened life in the estab-lished; in time of rebellion its role will be savingly to draw atten-tion away from the external, to guide the individual towards an indifference to external change and to strengthen the individual in inwardness.46

The paradigm for the single individual in inwardness is the martyr, or, more specifically, Christ himself. Hent De Vries correctly depicts “mar-tyrdom as the emblematic figure for the drama of witnessing and of existential authenticity as such.”47 Even if Kierkegaard had always con-sidered it his task to become a single individual himself and to change the crowd into single individuals, it was not until the last years of his life that he could be seen as a martyr whose “death wounds in the right place, wounds the survivors.”48

This last change concerning the role of the single individual in

44 Kierkegaard, Without Authority, pp. 215–216.45 Kierkegaard, Papers and Journals, p. 351.46 Ibid.47 Hent De Vries, Religion and Violence: Philosophical Perspectives from Kant

to Derrida, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002, p. 164.48 Kierkegaard, Papers and Journals, p. 351.



society occurred in 1854, one year before Kierkegaard’s death. It was then that he decided to give up his critical, but nonetheless highly respectful, former attitude towards the Danish church and its rep-resentatives, and to replace it with a sharp attack on it. When on 18 December 1854 Kierkegaard finally launched his attack on the Church in general and Bishop Mynster in particular, blaming him for being a false martyr, he first had to overcome his own anti-rebellious conserv-atism. Kierkegaard explains:

For many different reasons, and prompted by many different fac-tors, I had the idea of defending the established Church. [Divine] Guidance has surely had the idea that I was precisely the person who was to be used to overturn the Establishment. But in order to prevent such an undertaking from being the impatient, perhaps arrogant, daring of a young man, I first had to come to understand my task as being just the opposite – and now, in what, inwardly understood, has been great torment, to be developed to take up the task when the moment came.

Kierkegaard’s focus on the moment when the single individual can do nothing but act is central for Žižek’s interest in Kierkegaard. It sup-ports Žižek’s idea of a radical break and redefinition of the established order.

2 “ when the moment comES” – the wound of neg AtIvIt y As pReRequIsIte f oR polItIc Al Agency

Although Žižek declares himself to be an atheist, there is one thing that makes him enthusiastic about Christianity: its potential to communi-cate the idea of a completely new order, of rebirth. As he explained in an interview from 2002:

Against the pagan notion of destiny, Christianity offered the pos-sibility of a radical opening, that we can find a zero point and clear the table. It introduced a new kind of ethics: not that each of us should do our duty according to our place in society—a good King should be a good King, a good servant a good servant—but



instead that irrespective of who I am, I have direct access to uni-versality. This is explosive.49

The quotation is very interesting because it reveals two crucial points in Žižek’s philosophy that are connected with Kierkegaard. First, it reinforces what we already know: Žižek’s passion for a radical change. Second, it gives us an idea of what the criterion for the target change is: the introduction of an ethics of equality, or as Žižek terms it, uni-versality. To discuss how far the ethics of universality is influenced by Kierkegaard’s reflections on negativity and subjectivity is the aim of the following section. It starts with a brief presentation of how Judith Butler, as a poststructuralist thinker, construes the Kierkegaardian subject as a “stranger in the world,” because she relates negativity to passion and thereby helps to understand Žižek’s particular interest in Kierkegaard’s concept of the passionate individual.

It is certainly not Judge William’s or Anti-Climacus’s self-confident position, but Climacus’s focus on the neverending process of becoming, and his related concept of negativity, what make Kierkegaard attrac-tive to poststructuralist thinkers. They share with him the conviction that human subjectivity bears a gap within itself, a wound that cannot be healed. As is the case with Žižek, Judith Butler also became inter-ested in Kierkegaard’s understanding of negativity in the context of her Hegel studies.50 While the Hegelian subject is characterized, according to Butler, by its ability to appropriate the world by thinking it, the Kier-kegaardian subject is characterized by its inability to reconcile with the world. Instead of becoming one with the world, Kierkegaard’s subject remains a stranger to it as it is to itself. Butler explains this with refer-ence to Kierkegaard’s notion of despair: “Insofar as despair character-izes the failure of a self fully to know or to become itself, a failure to become self-identical, an interrupted relation, then despair is precisely that which thwarts the possibility of a fully mediated subject in Hegel’s sense.”51 According to Butler, the reason for the subject’s despair is to

49 Doug Henwood, “I’m a Fighting Atheist. Interview with Slavoj Žižek,” Bad Subjects 59 (2002), available at http://bad.eserver.org/issues/2002/59/Žižek.html.

50 Judith Butler, Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France, New York: Columbia University Press, 1999.

51 Judith Butler, “Kierkegaard’s Speculative Despair,” in R. C. Solomon (ed.),



be found in its passion. As passionate, the subject strives to overcome immanence and finitude; it thus prevents itself from belonging com-pletely to the world to which it nevertheless is bound. The existing subject is thus always paradoxical, finite and infinite at the same time.

Instead of eliminating this paradox, Butler, like Žižek, insists on its importance for the self. The paradox is a guarantee for the self’s non-closure, and offers insight into its illusion of self-mastery. The Christian subject, which believes in the mastery of God instead of its own mastery, “affirms the paradox, taking responsibility for oneself at the same time affirming that one is not the origin of one’s existence.”52 Thus, although the subject must be responsible, it has to accept simul-taneously that it can never entirely give an account of itself. Butler does not expand on the political impact of Kierkegaard’s concept of despair, but she does pave the way for an understanding of the pas-sionate subject as set free from a symbolic order because of its involve-ment with the infinite. Similarly, we will see, the moment of negativity proves to be a crucial feature in Žižek’s philosophy of subjectivity, as well as relevant for his concept of the political act.

To grasp Žižek’s theoretical system in its main features, it is best to start with his new reading of Hegelian dialectics on the basis of Laca-nian psychoanalysis. Against the pervasive understanding of Hegel as sublating all contradictions, tensions, and antagonisms in a harmo-nious unity, namely, absolute and self-transparent knowledge, Žižek defends Hegel as the first post-Marxist who does not strive to abolish social antagonism but strongly affirms difference and contingency and thereby resists the totalitarian temptation. This reading of Hegel is decisive for Žižek’s political theory, which is grounded in the idea that reality is always open to unexpected events. Only if everything is not always already fixed, and the historical process not “a self-enclosed circle in which things actualize their potential,”53 is there open space for active interventions and unforeseen changes.

With regard to Kierkegaard, the interesting point here is that Žižek

The Age of German Idealism, London and New York: Routledge, 1992, pp. 363–395, here p. 364.

52 Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself: A Critique of Ethical Violence, New York: Fordham University Press, 2005.

53 Žižek, The Parallax View, p. 77.



sees in Hegel precisely what Kierkegaard denounces him for lacking, namely, insight into the openness of reality and to the particular role the single individual plays within it. Žižek goes so far as to read the Hegelian concept of progress together with Walter Benjamin’s notion of revolution, that is to say, as the repetition of the unfulfilled revolu-tionary moment of the past. Žižek claims that Hegel wants “to reintro-duce the openness of the future into the past, to grasp that-which-was in its process of becoming.”54 Yet even though Žižek breaks Hegel free from his closed-circle philosophy, he nevertheless needs Kierkegaard’s concept of the impassioned individual in order to promote the idea of a revolutionary and emancipative break as an act that is emergent in subjective agency. For Hegel, as Dominik Finkelde has shown, the inner space of individual inwardness is always “pre-invaded by cus-toms and practices,”55 and is thereby determined by the symbolic order. Kierkegaard, on the other hand, understands the single indi-vidual as an individual detached from this order, able to undermine and redefine the field of what appears to be irrevocable by performing an act of non-discursive and passionate negativity.

Since the concept of the act is of particular importance in nearly all of Žižek’s books, it not surprisingly appears in various forms over the course of his work. In his earlier writings, Žižek conceives of the act as almost identical with Lacan’s passage à l’acte: a psychotic action in which the subject suspends the symbolic order and its stable posi-tion in it. The subject performing the act strikes a blow against itself, and sacrifices what it holds dearest. A prominent example is Abraham’s readiness to kill his beloved son Isaac. In other texts, the traumatic dimension of the act as an act of self-renunciation becomes less cen-tral. What is crucial is the idea of an act that restructures the symbolic order intentionally. Sarah Kay emphasizes: “Talk is no longer about renunciation or suicide, but terror.”56 Although the concept of act in Žižek’s work undergoes various changes, it is always a concept highly charged with political resonance.

With regard to Kierkegaard, the most interesting aspects of Žižek’s concept of the political act go hand in hand with Žižek’s references

54 Ibid., p. 78.55 Cf. Dominik Finkelde, “Excessive subjectivity,” in this volume p. ???56 Kay, A Critical Introduction, p. 153.



to Lacan, who, due to his concept of renunciation can be character-ized as a “good Lutheran ‘theologian of the cross.’”57 Already in Enjoy Your Symptom!, first published in 1992,58 Žižek dwells on Lacan’s con-cept of the “second choice, or the “choice of neurosis,” as an act of self-renunciation that separates the subject from the symbolic com-munity. Seventeen years later, in The Parallax View, Žižek comments once more on the Lacanian act and identifies it with Kierkegaard’s term “infinite resignation” – namely, the resignation undertaken by Abraham, in his obedient willingness to sacrifice, that is, murder, his son. Žižek explains: “This Kierkegaardian ‘infinite resignation’ displays the structure of what, following Freud, Lacan calls Versagung: the rad-ical (self-relating) loss/renunciation of the very fantasmatic core of her being: first, I sacrifice all I have for the Cause-Thing which is for me more than my life; what I then get in exchange for this sacrifice is the loss of the Cause-Thing itself.”59

The crucial intricacy is that there is no particular reason that explains the subject’s readiness to sacrifice the thing that really matters and thereby to shatter its own identity. Žižek quotes from Kierkegaard’s Training in Christianity in order to emphasize the purposelessness of the act: “The contradiction which arrests [the understanding] is that a man is required to make the greatest possible sacrifice, to dedicate his whole life as a sacrifice—and wherefore? There is indeed no where-fore.”60 Everything must be ventured, without the expectation – much less the guarantee – that the sacrifice will be rewarded.

From an external point of view, this readiness to risk everything cannot but appear as an act of madness. Žižek gives two examples, first the popular example of Antigone’s self-destructive “No” to Kreon, and second the example of Gudrun Ensslin, leader of the RAF, who vio-lently questioned capitalist Western society and suicidally spurned the “social pact.” Both women are interpreted as representatives for the

57 Adam Kotsko, Žižek and Theology, London: Clark, 2008, p. 81.58 In the following quoted from Slavoj Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom!, third edi-

tion, New York and London: Routledge, 2008.59 Žižek, The Parallax View, p. 80.60 Søren Kierkegaard, Training in Christianity, Princeton: Princeton Univer-

sity Press, 1972, p. 121. Quoted by Žižek, in The Parallax View, p. 80.



conviction that one has “to suspend one’s attachment to ‘this’ life”61 in order to open up a “gap that momentarily suspends the Order of Being.”62 Taking for granted that the subject’s detachment is neces-sary for something new to emerge, Žižek, like other leftist intellectuals before him, is also fascinated by Herman Melville’s literary figure of Bartleby the Scrivener, who drives his boss crazy by declaring continu-ally “I would prefer not to,” and thereby vehemently disturbing the oth-erwise smooth and trouble-free working process.63 Žižek appreciates Bartleby’s “pure withdrawal”64 that finally leads to his death, because he thereby brings about the collapse of the whole working system and opens up the space where radical social change can take place.

At this point it becomes clear that negativity is of supreme relevance in Žižek’s theory of radical subjective politics. Inasmuch as it hinders the subject from being a fully determinate subject, and forecloses its full inscription in the order of being, negativity bears crucial revolu-tionary potential. The prerequisite for political agency thus seems to be found – formulating it with Kierkegaard – in the subject’s wound of negativity. Given this interdependency of the concept of wound and the concept of the political act, Peter Paik seems to be correct in his critical observation that it is solely “the catastrophic potential of this inward disposition”65 that triggers militant political subjectivity. However, this argument fails to recognize the third concept crucial for Žižek’s political philosophy: the concept of a universally valid truth.

The political dimension of this truth concept is evident in the light

61 Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, p. 168.62 Kotsko, Žižek and Theology, p. 82.63 Herman Melville, Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street, 1853. Other

political theorists who offered a politicized reading of Bartleby are Gilles Deleuze, Hardt and Negri, and Agamben. Cf. Giorgio Agamben, “Bartleby, or On Contin-gency,” in Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, Stanford: Stanford Uni-versity Press, 1999, 243–271. A critical approach to Agamben’s political ontology of potentiality is offered by Katja Diefenbach, “To Bring about the Real State of Exception: The Power of Exception in Agamben, the Power of Potentiality in Negri,” available at http://translate.eipcp.net/strands/02/diefenbach-strand-s01er#edir

64 Žižek, The Parallax View, p. 381.65 Paik, Pessimist Rearmed, p. 4.



of Alain Badiou’s concept of the so-called truth-event and the subject’s fidelity to it. In his early main work, Being and Event (1988), Badiou differentiates between knowledge and the positive order of being, on the one hand, and the unknowable event, understood as a rupture of being, on the other.66 In The Ticklish Subject, Žižek offers a convincing analysis of Badiou’s account of the event, reading it as something that occurs from the inherent inconsistency of a given situation that now, by the means of the event, has become visible. The situation’s incon-sistency, or that of society, implies the existence of a moment, called “the void in the midst of being,” out of which the event emerges. With reference to the French Revolution, his most popular example of an event, Žižek explains: “The Event is the Truth of the situation that makes visible/legible what the ‘official’ situation had to ‘repress.’ … The French Revolution, for example, is the Event which makes visible/leg-ible the excesses and inconsistencies, the ‘lie’ of the ancien régime.”67 In this view, the truth-event functions as a crucial moment of enlight-enment. It reveals the structure of injustice, unfolding it not merely as a malfunction along the margins, but as a constitutive element of society.

This only works, however, when the signs of truth that the event discloses are recognized and adopted by the single individual. In her recent book The Excessive Subject, Molly Anne Rothenburg examines the subject’s important role in the truth-process, and stresses that the act is not the event as such, but our understanding of the event as something that changes our lives.68 Žižek draws a similar distinction between choice and act, declaring that “choice becomes an act when its effectuation changes the value of its terms.”69 It is thus the subject’s deci-sion that transforms the field of choice and the value of its terms, and afterwards brings the hidden emancipative dimension of a situation to light.

By doing so, the subject becomes a subject in the strong sense, that is, in the meaning of the “universal singular.” Žižek emphasizes that

66 “Being is defined as the positive ontological order accessible to Knowl-edge.” Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, p. 147.

67 Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, pp. 148–149.68 Rothenberg, The Excessive Subject, p. 157.69 Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom!, p. 121.



the truth “interpellates individuals into subjects universally, irrespec-tively of their race, sex, social class.”70 The aspect of universality is here obviously crucial for Žižek, as it is for Kierkegaard. Žižek understands the truth-event as an event that transcends particularities and estab-lishes the idea of sameness. For his part, Kierkegaard depicts the sub-ject’s relationship, its complete and impassioned involvement with God, as the necessary condition for becoming a single individual who does not compromise its religious desire, who suspends the normative moral consensus, and who thereby sets free the revolutionary spirit striving for human equality.

In contrast to the early Kierkegaard, however, the late Žižek renders it possible and necessary to struggle actively for a politics of equality. He does not restrict the ideal of “Menneske-Lighed,” that is, the equality of man on the one side and humanity on the other side, to the realm of a transcendent world, but instead employs universality as “an indispen-sable political instrument, providing a concept of common humanity that enables us to delineate and protest specific injustices and acts of oppression.”71

Following Žižek, one thus can argue that it is not necessary to identify, as Kierkegaard did, the genuine Christian idea of all people’s equality before God – that is, the idea that gender, class, and race do not count – with the levelling of all individual differences and par-ticularities. On the contrary, one should comprehend it as an eman-cipative and, as Žižek indicates, explosive idea that can be used as a political instrument – as an instrument that questions the social hierarchy, that holds the single individual politically responsible, and that does not allow the individual to delegate his or her own interest completely to a political representative. Kierkegaard’s apprehension that the empowerment of the fourth estate automatically implies revolutionary political change, or even anarchy, must thus be taken seriously – though not as a threat, but as an opportunity.

The same is true for Kierkegaard’s reservations and fears about the power of mass media. In our digital age, on the one hand, with such new phenomena as cyberbullying or shitstorm reactions

70 Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, p. 164.71 Geoffrey Galt Harpham, “Doing the Impossible: Slavoj Žižek and the End

of Knowledge,” Critical Inquiry 29, no. 3 (Spring 2003), pp. 453–485, here p. 474.



emerging, Kierkegaard’s warning about mass media as an instru-ment of tyranny and defamation seems more relevant than ever before. On the other hand, today’s mass and social media offer new channels of communication and opportunities for each member of a society to participate individually in the development of new ideas. Understanding democracy as a process of active participation and decision-making, that is, as open, liquid, radical, and plural, means that today’s hegemonic opinions are never unchangeable but are always under attack. The political process of becoming does not come to an end, but remains open to all kinds of re-articula-tions. And even if Kierkegaard believes that this is “what a politi-cian … has thought in his most blissful moment,”72 but cannot be realized under worldly conditions, it nevertheless bears an emanci-pative potential that can ultimately be realized by the impassioned single individual –when the moment comes.

RefeRences

Badiou, Alain. Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003.

Butler, Judith. “Kierkegaard’s Speculative Despair.” In R. C. Solomon (ed.), The Age of German Idealism. London and New York: Routledge, 1992, pp. 363–395.

Butler, Judith. Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999.

Butler, Judith. Giving an Account of Oneself: A Critique of Ethical Violence. New York: Fordham University Press, 2005.

Habermas, Jürgen. “‘The Political’: The Rational Meaning of a Questionable Inheritance of Political Theology.” In The Power of Religion in the Public Space. Edited by Eduardo Mendieta and Jonathan Van Antwerpen. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011, pp. 15–33.

Harpham, Geoffrey Galt. “Doing the Impossible: Slavoj Žižek and the End of Knowledge.” Critical Inquiry 29, no. 3 (Spring 2003), pp. 453–485.

Henwood, Doug. “I’m a Fighting Atheist. Interview with Slavoj Žižek.” Bad Subjects 59 (2002), http://bad.eserver.org/issues/2002/59/Žižek.html.

Kay, Sarah. Žižek: A Critical Introduction. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003.

72 Kierkegaard, Point of View, p. 103.



Kierkegaard, Søren. Training in Christianity. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972.

Kierkegaard, Søren. Søren Kierekgaard’s Journals and Papers, vol. 4. Bloom-ington and London: Indiana University Press, 1975.

Kierkegaard, Søren Two Ages. The Age of Revolution and the Present Age. A Literary Review. Edited and translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: University Press, 1978.

Kierkegaard, Søren. Sickness unto Death: A Christian Psychological Exposition for Upbuilding and Awakening. Edited and translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: University Press, 1980.

Kierkegaard, Søren. The Concept of Anxiety: A Simple Psychologically Ori-enting Deliberation on the Dogmatic Issue of Hereditary Sin. Translated and edited by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Univer-sity Press, 1981.

Kierkegaard, Søren. Either/Or II. Translated and edited by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987.

Kierkegaard, Søren. The Point of View for My Work as an Author: A Report to History. Translated and edited by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998.

Kierkegaard, Søren. Concluding Unscientific Postscript. Translated and edited by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992.

Kierkegaard, Søren. Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits. Translated and edited by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: University Press, 2009.

Kierkegaard, Søren. Papers and Journals: A Selection. Edited and translated by Kotsko, Adam. Žižek and Theology. London: Clark, 2008.Miller, Adam S. “An Interview with Alain Badiou: Universal Truths & the

Question of Religion.” Journal of Philosophy and Scripture, http://www.philosophyandscripture.org/Issue3-1/Badiou/Badiou.html.

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Pattison, George and Steven Shakespeare. “Introduction: Kierkegaard, the Individual and Society.” In Kierkegaard. The Self in Society. Edited by George Pattison and Steven Shakespeare. London: Macmillan Press, 1998, pp. 1–23.

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Molly Anne Rothenberg, Molly Anne. The Excessive Subject: A New Theory of Social Change. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010.

Vries, Hent De. Religion and Violence: Philosophical Perspectives from Kant to Derrida. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002.

Žižek, Slavoj. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London, New York: Verso, 1989.Žižek, Slavoj. The Puppet and the Dwarf. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003.Žižek, Slavoj. The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology.

London: Verso, 2008.Žižek, Slavoj. Enjoy Your Symptom! Third edition. New York and London:

Routledge, 2008.Žižek, Slavoj. The Parallax View. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009.


Documents

The Passage through Negativity or From Self-Renunciation to Revolution? Kierkegaard and Žižek on the Politics of the Impassioned Individual