From a psychological point of view, this systematic distancing of himself
from his own story might seem like an act of repression, but it was the
opposite, it was the dispelling of the trauma, a way of “getting rid” of it.
“The demonic is the self-enclosed,” we read inThe Concept of Anxiety,
where Vigilius Haufniensis lays out the guidelines for the therapeutic activ-
ity Kierkegaard practiced with his writing: “The demonic does not enclose
itself with something, but it encloses itself within itself....Ineveryday
speech there is a very apt expression. It is said of a person that ‘He won’t
come out with it.’ The self-enclosed person is precisely the mute person:
Language, the word, is precisely what saves; it is what saves from the empty
abstraction of self-enclosure.”
Thus transposed into language, in “‘Guilty?’/‘Not Guilty?’ ” the con-
flicts gradually became superseded stages on Kierkegaard’s way to himself,
re-presented indeed in all their pain, though with the pathos of distance
that liberates the trauma from the merely private sphere and lets it be reborn
as art.
Writing Samples
Even thoughStages on Life’s Wayhad been written with equal portions of
blood and ink, the book was nonetheless consigned to the ordinary mecha-
nisms of the marketplace, and consequently something had to be done to
direct attention to its existence. This took the form of a little announcement
on April 30, 1845, in issue number 99 ofInformation from Copenhagen’s Only
Royally Licensed Advertising Office(which, thank goodness, was known in
everyday speech simply asAdresseavisen). In Kierkegaard’s day this was the
city’s most widely read newspaper for advertisements—the press run was a
bit over seven thousand—and the paper came out six days a week with
announcements of every sort: the departure and arrival times of ships, me-
morial poems, and sometimes news articles, literary pieces, political articles,
obituaries, and so on. A couple of years previously, on April 10, 1843,
Kierkegaard had been studying the notices inAdresseavisenand had suddenly
come upon this: “Because of a change in plans, ten and one-half yards of
bombazine cloth is for sale.” “God knows,” he asked in himself in his jour-
nal, “what the first plan was,” after which he noted that it could be a “good
bit of dialogue” for a young woman who “had been deceived during the
crucial days prior to a wedding, to place an advertisement to the effect that
ten and one-half yards of bombazine cloth, et cetera, that had been intended
for a bridal gown.” This bit of dialogue was never placed in a woman’s
mouth, but shortly thereafter it snuck intoRepetition, where it was embed-