Soren Kierkegaard

is not true, namely that he and the pseudonyms were roughly simultaneous,
because he came afterwards, and that is very decisive.”
Despite all the stylistic differences between the two, there was a very
specific rhetorical figure for which both had a remarkable penchant, in Ad-
ler’s case sometimes bordering on the pathological. And this rhetorical fig-
ure wasrepetition. Kierkegaard noticed this phenomenon in Adler very early;
he added up Adler’s repetitions and proposed his own firm definition of
what he considered to be an allowable frequency of repetition for a writer.
“With unusual indulgence” one may permit a writer “to repeat his own
words two, at most three, times in one and the same book.” Kierkegaard’s
own repetitions demonstrate beyond doubt that he was being too restric-
tive. The fact that hereworkedhis material and thus came torepeatthe manu-
script of the book on Adler is ironic in itself, but in that selfsame manuscript
he also repeated himself, not only in the first two chapters in which he
devoted lengthy passages to recycling the problems dealt with inFear and
Trembling, theFragments, and thePostscript, but also—with an odd paradoxi-
cal logic—in the very chapter in which he criticized Adler forhisrepetitions.
Thus on page 105 he repeatedword for wordno fewer than five lines of
Adler’s “first reply,” which are repeated in slightly abbreviated form on
page 112. He undertook this same reduplication on page 117 in connection
with Adler’s “second reply” from which seven lines are cited, and five of
these lines are in turn repeated, word for word, on page 118. The word
“confused” appears sixteen times, “confusion” appears nineteen times, and
various forms of “jumbled” seventeen times. Similarly, Kierkegaard fre-
quently repeats his own metaphors. Thus he uses “polestar” twice, only six
pages apart, as a metaphor for the immovability of the paradox, just as a
specific figure of speech involving an “inkwell” occurs twice in less than
two pages. In his review ofStages on Life’s Way, P. L. Møller had also singled
out precisely “repetitions” and “self-excavations” as the dominant stylistic
features of Kierkegaard’s writing, while in his review of thePostscript, Møller
asserted that the work was so poorly “worked through organically” that
even in the best of circumstances it would only “find its place under the
rubric of ‘chaotic literature.’ ” This was more or less the same as calling
Kierkegaard what he again and again called Adler: “confused”!
The desire to write was closely connected with this repetition and was
perhaps its cause. In Adler’s case this desire was so powerful that it bordered
on being acompulsionto write. Adler wrote down everything that occurred
to him, and even theactof writing put him in a sort of exalted state of
mind that at root had an almost erotic rhythm; the pen became an organ
that drained the person writing with it. Nor would this have seemed
strange to Kierkegaard, for indeed he himself often mentioned his irresist-