Soren Kierkegaard

to being rejected—were returned to Kierkegaard. On September 16, P. G.
Philipsens Press reported that the dissertation was finished at Bianco Luno’s
print shop. In the haste to get everything done, an unfortunate error had
arisen, and a Greek passage from Plato’sRepublic, which was to have
adorned the title page, had been dropped. In the half-darkness of the type-
setting room the printer had also had trouble with the Roman numerals, so
Sibbern’s Latin proclamation was followed by the date 1851, while the date
of the oral defense was set for 1861.
The typographical errors seem almost to be a material manifestation of the
unruliness with which the ironic spirit of the dissertation resisted academic
packaging, but on September 29, 1841, Kierkegaard was finally permitted
to defendOn the Concept of Irony, which interested parties could purchase
for one rixdollar and forty-eight shillings.