Fear and Trembling
“In general, if poetr ypaid attention to the religious or to the inwardness of
the individual, it would take on far more meaningful tasks than those with
which it occupies itself at present.” This programmatic declaration is in-
serted in a footnote a bit less than twent ypages from the end ofFear and
Trembling, but it could quite deftl yhave been inserted earlier in the book,
and in the main text. ForFear and Tremblingpossesses a markedl yaesthetic
consciousness of religion and of the inwardness of the individual. It is no
accident that the title page of the work is adorned with the complex genre
definition “Dialectical Lyric.”
If one makes a one-sided, prosaic attempt to extract the dialectical from
the lyrical or to coax the lyrical free of the dialectical, one infringes on the
integrit yof the work. In this respectFear and Tremblingclosel yresembles
Repetition. But there are even more similarities. For one thing, both works
are based on narratives from the Old Testament—the stories of Abraham
and Job, respectively—but both works are also driven by a powerful episte-
mological interest in the anatom yof the miraculous, and the yare constantl y
carrying out preparatory exercises for the leap, the paradox, for faith by
virtue of the absurd, which is situated beyond every sort of knowledge
and thought, ever ysort of rationalit y. UnlikeRepetition, however,Fear and
Tremblinghas a ver yfirm structure, which is to some extent attributable to
the fact that Johannes de silentio (as the pseudonym is called) is not person-
all yimplicated in his work to the same degree as was Constantin Con-
stantius. For the most part, Johannes de silentio roams freel yabout the outer
boundaries of his work, frequentl yuttering comments that proclaim his
personal limitations with respect to the Old Testament stor yhe is retelling.
He insists that he is onl ya “supplementar yclerk,” for whom writing is a
“luxur ythat is all the more pleasant and noticeable, the fewer there are who
bu yand read what he writes.”
The pseudonymous author has silence—the Latinsilentium—inscribed
into his ver yname. But his name is not so much the result of his rather co y
awareness of the fate that awaits his work in an age that has “crossed out
passion [Danish:Lidenskaben] in order to serve scholarship [Danish:Viden-
skaben]”; rather, the pseudonymous author’s name is to be explained by the
fact thatthe work itselfis obsessed with the impotence of language, with
nonverbal communication, with signals, and with the far-reaching signifi-
cance of the silent gesture. Thus, on entering the work one encounters a
motto b ythe German philosopher Johann Georg Hamann that concerns
itself precisel ywith the communicative capacit yof wordless signs: “What