aboutthe religious. The lines almost begin to hover above the page, as if
they had been written with a “winged pen”—indeed, perhaps with ten such
pens—that had become flighty and followed a “poetic passion. ”Yet this is
in fact not the case. On no fewer than two occasions the text heeds a “voice”
that chastens Kierkegaard and orders him—like some sort of schoolboy—
to hold the headstrong pen “properly ”and write each word “with care, ”
which he then does with his “slower pen. ”So “the voice ”defines Kierke-
gaard’s text, just as “Governance ”governs it. It is only when he (re)read
and (re)wrote his text through this lens that Kierkegaard was able to charac-
terize “the aesthetic productivity ”as “a necessary emptying out. ”And Kier-
kegaard then reported, in a fragment of dialogue, how “the religious toler-
ated this emptying out, but constantly pressed onward, as if it wanted to say,
‘Won’t you be finished with this soon?’ ”The text does not tell us when it
was that Kierkegaard answered this inquiry in the affirmative, but the ques-
tion was apparently put to him repeatedly, and Kierkegaard therefore finally
decided “to satisfy the religious by becoming a religious author.”
Kierkegaard’s confessional text is a tasty tidbit for every Freudian epicure,
and Kierkegaard serves up his own diagnosis very nicely by describing his
“relationship with God ”as the only happy “love story ”in his unhappy life.
In his attempt to mark off the domain of the religious from that of the
aesthetic, Kierkegaard had in fact aestheticized his relation to God, but what
is no less striking is that he effaced all the ordinary characteristics of the
artistic experience and made God into the “muse ”on whom he had to call
“every day in order to defend myself against the abundance of thoughts.”
Kierkegaard explained that “[I could] sit down and continue to write unin-
terruptedly day and night and yet another day and night, because there is
wealth enough. If I did it, I would snap. Oh, the least little dietary indiscre-
tion, and I am in mortal danger.”
It was like a fairy tale, this perseverance in writing for 1,001 nights. Prin-
cess Scheherazade put off her execution by telling fairy tales. Kierkegaard
put off his erotic desire by writing—and all the while, God, like (yet another)
father, kept watch over his son’s ungovernable desire for “emptying ”himself
and therefore had to request repeatedly that his son’s spermatically spouting
pen behave “properly. ”(In a footnote toThe Point of View, Kierkegaard
noted the necessity of reaching a “spermatic point ”outside “the System. ”)
“But Then, of Course, I Cannot Say ‘I’ ”
Kierkegaard had a terrifying experience while working onThe Point of View.
He came to realize that he was not the actual author of the writings, but
rather a coauthor or a sort of ghostwriter who was writing for someone else