Soren Kierkegaard

Then Isaac trembled and cried out in his anguish: ‘God in heaven, have
merc yupon me. God of Abraham, have merc yupon me. If I have no father
upon earth, then be Thou m yfather!’ But Abraham said softl yto himself,
‘Lord in heaven, I thank Thee. It is better, after all, that he believe that I
am a monster than that he should lose faith in Thee.’”
What is significant is the repetition of Isaac’s failure to understand the
situation, which is reflected in the multitude of optical metaphors, in the
frequent mention of the eye. This empties the scene of words, as it were,
and fills it with silence. We do learn that Abraham speaks, but we do not
learnwhathe says—the text is like a screen or a scrim with pictures and no
sound—and if we cannot hear Abraham it is because what he might have
to sa ywould not make sense. In a sense Abraham does not speak at all: “If
I cannot make myself understood when I speak, then I am not speaking.”
The stor yhas thus been transformed into a dark and demonic parable,
but we are simultaneousl yled, line b yline, into a biographical rebus con-
taining signs with deep, symbolic meaning. Thus, in the margin of his first
sketch, Kierkegaard added: “One could also portra yAbraham’s previous
life as a life not devoid of guilt, and then let him ruminate quietl yupon the
thought that this was God’s punishment, perhaps even let him have the
melancholic thought that he must assist God b ymaking the punishment as
severe as possible.” The sketch of this character borrows easil yrecognizable
traits from the hosier named Kierkegaard, whose guilt-infested past not only
made him subject to the soul-searching chastisements of melancholia but
also, b ytransforming him into a demonic “monster,” directed his child’s
gaze upward, to another—heavenly—father.
This (so to speak)pious fraudis carried further in the first “b” section:
“When the child is to be weaned, the mother blackens her breast. It would
of course be a shame for the breast to look so inviting when the child must
not have it. So the child believes that the breast has changed. But the mother
is the same, her gaze is as loving and tender as ever. Luck ythe person who
has not had need of more terrible means to wean the child!” Among others,
Georg Brandes has argued that Abraham was not onl yKierkegaard’s father,
who offered his son as a sacrifice, but Abraham was also Kierkegaard himself,
who sacrificed Regine. But the allegorical elements are far more elegant
than that: The “b” sections in fact discuss Kierkegaard’s relationship with
Regine b yemplo ying portraits of a mother who must wean a child and
who, under the best of circumstances, does not have to resort to methods
as powerful as those Kierkegaard himself was compelled to emplo ywhen
he had to repel Regine. To deflect the biographer’s gaze from his text,
Kierkegaard has subjected himself to a grammatical sex change operation