Soren Kierkegaard

repetitions, and in a religious direction that links the proper sort of repeti-
tion to God.
The two different directions are represented b ytwo figures. The wrong
repetitions are represented b ya man who in fact has repetition inscribed
within his name, Constantin Constantius. He is not onl ythe book’s narra-
tor, he is also a character in his own tale, embarking, among man yother
things, on an expedition to Berlin in a rash attempt to ascertain the actual
extent of repetition. Existentiall yhe is mired in the aesthetic, but intellectu-
all yhe soars to the most rarified atmosphere and is responsible for the theo-
retical terminolog yfound in the book. The second figure is an unnamed
young man, who for want of anything better is simply called the Young
Man. He has been incautious enough to have fallen in love with a young
woman, and over the course of the book he attempts to shape himself into
a spouse and to come closer to the religious, which probabl ysucceeds (inci-
dentally, at the very point when everything looks most hopeless). He ap-
pears to recover himself, and to this extent he undergoes the good sort of
repetition.
“ ‘Repetition’ is a good Danish word, and I congratulate the Danish lan-
guage on a philosophical term,” Constantin Constantius writes at one point,
and although this sounds nice, it is, however, onl ya half-truth. For the word
“repetition” is not a philosophical term, a point thatRepetition—which is
not merel ya theme with variations, but has in fact made variation into its
theme—emphasizes with its rhetoric, which is so steeped in ironic and silly
posturing that the term never takes on its identit yas a technical term and
has to make do with fervent fantasies of being a weight yphilosophical cate-
gory. Thus if we attempt to approach theconceptof repetition b ygoing
behind therhetoricwe will probabl yseize hold of what is least important.
More than an yother work,Repetitionmust beread—again and again.
Nonetheless,Repetitionis not an unphilosophical piece of writing. Very
near the beginning we encounter Constantin Constantius, who is eagerly
preoccupied with some reflections about the possibilit yof motion: “As ev-
eryone knows, when the Eleatics denied motion, Diogenes stepped forth
as an opponent. He actuall ystepped forth, for he didn’t sa ya word, but
merel ywalked back and forth several times, and b yso doing he believed
that he had provided a sufficient rebuttal of their position.” Thus Diogenes
opposed theoretical skepticism with factual practice, and it is b ymeans of
this juxtaposition, this opposition, that he functions as an exemplar for Con-
stantin Constantius, who cherishes certain ambitions on behalf of repetition:
“Repetitionis a decisive expression for what ‘recollection’ was to the Greeks.
As the Greeks taught that all cognition is recollection, the new philosophy
will teach that all of life is a repetition....Repetition and recollection are