Soren Kierkegaard

manuscript was sent to the printer, and in a good many cases when the
printer was finished setting type, the manuscript disappeared into thin air
or into the nearest wastepaper basket.
Barfod, however, was particularly notorious for his cutting of the manu-
scripts and for his subsequent pasting, which resulted in a completely new
whole—deconstruction before its time. This was done with the best of
intentions. Barfod was not a vandal but a conscientious jurist with aesthetic
sensibilities. Thus, when he came across a manuscript with especially nice
calligraphy he might clip it out tastefully and paste it to a piece of thin
cardboard, whereupon he would have a postcard with which he could de-
light friends and acquaintances on special occasions! “The result,” Heiberg
and Kuhr wrote, “is that a quite significant portion of the manuscripts men-
tioned in Barfod’s list, from the earliest papers all the way up to 1847, is
missing from the collection at the University Library.”
Heiberg and Kuhr worked far more systematically and divided the mate-
rial into three principal groups. Group A gathered together what from a
traditional point of view might be called typical journal entries. Group B
included drafts of pseudonymous and nonpseudonymous writings, both
those Kierkegaard published in his lifetime and those he did not, as well as
manuscript materials omitted from the final versions of such works. And
grou pC was reserved for notes from Kierkegaard’s reading and other stud-
ies. This systematization, which was further divided into subgroups for aes-
thetic, philosophical, and theological materials, was laudable in principle
but is unfortunate in practice, because it obscures the range of Kierkegaard’s
journal entries and gives the reader a false notion of uniformity and consis-
tency in the profusion of texts. And when they were finished, the editors
repackaged the manuscripts in accordance with their own editorial princi-
ples, thus further disarranging the original archival units.
Thanks to these well-meaning men, who almost seem to have been imi-
tating the wiles of Kierkegaard’s own pseudonymous editors, the primary
source for Kierkegaard’s biography is no longer reliable. But we must also
bear in mind that the first editor of Kierkegaard’s papers was Kierkegaard
himself and that he always wrote with the awareness that future readers
were standing there, so to speak, and looking over his shoulder. Accordingly
we read “pages removed from the journal” where Kierkegaard intervened surgi-
cally in his journals and excised one or more pages, presumably because
they did not further Kierkegaardthe mythbut merely exhibitedthe manof
the same name. More straightforward methods of deletion such as lining
out or scratching out words and densely crosshatching entire pages also
reveal the meticulousness with which Kierkegaard planned his presentation
of himself to the future. “After my death,” he wrote in a famous journal