to creating a pseudonymous counterpart to the Hegelian system he so fre-
quently denounces.
Yet right here in thePostscriptthere was also “A First and Final Explana-
tion” signed by S. Kierkegaard, who acknowledged his pseudonymous pro-
ductions. In his acknowledgment, however, he pointed out that the use of
“pseudonymity or polynymity has not had anaccidentalbasis in myperson
... , but wasessentiallygrounded in the productivity itself. For the sake
of dialogue lines and for the sake of depicting the psychologically varied
differences among the individuals, the productions had a poetic need for
uninhibited expressions of good and evil, brokenheartedness and exultation,
despair and overconfidence, suffering and jubilation, et cetera, limited only
by the psychological consistency of the idea [being depicted]—something
that no factual and actual person, living within the moral boundaries of
actuality dares to, or could wish to, permit himself. What has been written,
then, is certainly my own, but only insofar as I have made lines audible by
putting into the mouth of the poetically actual individual who is producing
them, the words that express his life view. Because my situation is even
more remote than that of a poet, whopoeticall ycreatescharacters and yet in
the preface ishimselftheauthor. Impersonally—or personally, in the third
person—I am in fact a theatrical prompter who has poetically produced
authorswhoseprefaces, indeed whosenames, are in turn their own produc-
tions. Thus in the pseudonymous books there is not one single word by
me. I have no opinion about them except as a third party, no knowledge
of what they mean except as a reader....Mywish, my prayer is therefore
that if it should occur to anyone to want to cite a particular passage from
the books, he would do me the favor of citing the name of the respective
pseudonymous author, not mine—that is, that he would sort things out
between us in such a manner that the utterance, in feminine fashion, belongs
to the pseudonym, and the responsibility, legally, to me.” Thus there is
practically no connection between the various pseudonymous authors and
Kierkegaard himself, “while, on the other hand, I am quite definitely and
straightforwardly the author of the edifying discourses, for example, and of
every word they contain.”
To read these lines—which thus bring his authorial activity to an end—
is to feel oneself transported back to the prologues with which Victor Ere-
mita or Hilarius Bookbinder (or whoever) introduced their fictional narra-
tives. And, indeed, the thoroughness with which Kierkegaard carries
through his renunciation engenders suspicion regarding the trustworthiness
of his statements and lends support to the conjecture that precisely by having
published his writingspseudonymouslyKierkegaard was able to allow himself
to write about what was extraordinarilyprivate. What we are denied access