ality into philosophical reflection. Once again, by chance or by design,
Møller has struck Kierkegaard at the point where the thorn in the flesh was
perhaps most deeply embedded.
There can thus be scarcely any doubt that Kierkegaard hated Møller be-
cause he, Møller, had precisely the body that Kierkegaard lacked. But why
did Møller hate Kierkegaard? Because Kierkegaard had precisely the writing
that Møller lacked! Ironically enough, Kierkegaard’s sublimation, which
Møller was so quick to ridicule, in fact made possible the enormous produc-
tivity—including “The Seducer’s Diary”—that left Møller utterly breath-
less, literally and literarily reducing Møller’s erotic praxis to a bit of banal
biology. While Møller had wasted his substance on the many bedsheets of
Copenhagen, Kierkegaard gathered his own into his trusty silver pen, which
released its contents with bold virtuosity onto sheets of paper that will sur-
vive even the forgetfulness of history.
Møller’s papers from the period make it clear how very humiliating he
found the spectacular success of Kierkegaard’s “Seducer’s Diary.” Among
his papers is a piece dated March 1843, just a month after the publication
of “The Seducer’s Diary,” that includes a number of sketches for “From
(another) Courtier’s Diary” in which he attempts with bitter sarcasm to
rewrite Kierkegaard’s diary, only to end up with an embarrassing literary
pastiche. Nonetheless—or perhaps for this very reason—Møller could also
maintain that “The Seducer’s Diary” was Kierkegaard’s “greatest achieve-
ment.” Indeed, Møller claimed that “The Seducer’s Diary” was “central to
the entire canon”—which Kierkegaard mentioned angrily in a final foot-
note inThe Point of View for My Work as an Author, where he assaulted
Møller and defended his religious writings. InThe Point of View, Kierkegaard
ascribed a theological function to his diary (and textbook) of seduction—but
surely Kierkegaard had also wanted to teach Møller and the other bungling
dilettante lovers of the day a thing or two about how a genuine seducer, a
lover of strategy, could transform sexuality into sublime aesthetics?
“A Visit to Sorø”
That Møller wanted to write as Kierkegaard wrote and that Kierkegaard
wanted to seduce as Møller seduced is perhaps a rather oversimplified way
to formulate the conflict, but we may reasonably assume that the conflict
involved, respectively, unrealized desires that were textual for the one and
sexual for the other. And this assumption is strengthened when we peruse
Gæa, an aesthetic yearbook that Møller published on December 22, 1845,
contributing an eighty-eight-page “principal article” titled “A Visit to