Captivating Anxiety—Pages from a Seducer’s Textbook
While working on the draft ofThe Concept of Anxiety, Kierkegaard experi-
enced a thought-provoking hesitation, somewhere in the middle of the blue
notebook .“In a sense, I have always been struck by the fact that the story
of Eve runs directly counter to all subsequent analogy because it uses the
term ‘to seduce,’ with reference to her, while in every other case ordinary
linguistic usage has applied this term to the man.” Kierkegaard attempts to
explain the situation by pointing out that in Genesis there is “a third power
that seduces the woman,” namely the serpent, so it was more the serpent
than Eve who seduced Adam.
So far so good, but then Kierkegaard admits that we are “still left with
the serpent” and confesses openly that in fact he “cannot associate it with
any definite idea.” In a way he has merely displaced the problem backwards,
into a mythical animal whose power and significance he cannot elucidate.
In his manuscript Kierkegaard put a little cross at the point where he
reflects on the seductive Eve, and the cross indicates the following footnote:
“If a person has a psychological interest in observations regarding this, I
refer him to ‘The Seducer’s Diary’ inEither/Or .On closer inspection it can
be seen to be something quite other than a novel; it has quite different
categories up its sleeve, and if a person knows how to use it, it can serve as
an introduction to investigations that are very significant and not exactly
superficial .The seducer’s secret is precisely that he knows that the woman
has anxiety.”
Kierkegaard later omitted this reference .We can only speculate about
the reasons for his omission, but they cannot have been very good ones.
For “The Seducer’s Diary” can be read perfectly well “as an introduction”
toThe Concept of Anxiety, inasmuch as that diary isalsoa story of creation
and of the fall into sin: Johannes the Seducer shapes or forms Cordelia by
means of a sophisticated psychological experiment in which, via artifically
compressed stages, he has her pass through a rapid development from child
to adult, from innocence to the fall into sin, in a fraction of the time nature
itself would expend on it.
“The Seducer’s Diary” is thus no diary in the ordinary sense of the term.
Indeed, at times the tone is so technical and the gaze so clinical that the
diary, this supposedly personal journal, comes to resemble a scientific jour-
nal .Exactly how this report from the laboratory of desire has found its way
to the public remains obscure, which is right in keeping with the erotic
experimenter’s demonic character, but in the best fictional style the editor’s
preface (by an unnamed man who turns out to be an acquaintance of Johan-