Soren Kierkegaard

tempo as Cordelia’s genesis as a woman;psychologicalinsofar as Johannes,
according to his own repeated assurances, is primarily engaged in cultivating
and developing the latent libidinous capacities that are a part of Cordelia’s
nature: “I keep a strict and self-denying eye on myself, so that everything
within her, the entire divine wealth of her nature, is permitted to develop.”
It is less clear to what extent this invocation of natural necessity also permits
Johannes to hope that he himself will be subjected to a less stringentmoral
judgment, because he is and remains the paradigmatic example of how an
appreciation of beauty, of how rhetoric and insight into human nature,
oughtnotto be employed .His diary is—among other things—a demonic
bildungsroman.
If, despite all this, Johannes cannot simply be written off as a terrible and
admonitory example of vile behavior, it is because he has been assigned a
major role in a typology of the erotic .This can be best understood if we
backtrack from “The Seducer’s Diary” through the first volume ofEither/
Or, stopping at “The Immediate Stages of the Erotic, or the Musical
Erotic,” in which Aesthete A not only pays rapturous homage to Mozart,
with whom “he is in love like a young girl,” but also provides an original
interpretation of the desire that assumes form in the characters of the page
Cherubino, Papageno, and Don Giovanni in three Mozart operas,The Mar-
riage of Figaro,The Magic Flute, andDon Giovanni.
The most detailed treatment is of course reserved for Don Giovanni, who
is “absolutely defined as desire,” but whose musical personification is devoid
of speech, and therefore he is not a seducer in the more tactical sense: “He
desires .This desire, in turn, has a seductive effect .To that extent he se-
duces.” But still only “to that extent.” Nor, for the same reason, does he
understand that what drives him into all this hectic promiscuity is not unal-
loyed desire; rather, in the profoundest sense, it is anxiety that propels him:
“There is an anxiety in him, but this anxiety is his energy.” It is via this
energetic anxiety that he is connected to all the other characters in the
opera: “His passion sets in motion the passions of the others .His passion
resounds everywhere .It resounds in and lends support to the gravity of the
Commendatore, the rage of Elvira, the hatred of Anna, the pomposity of
Ottavio, the anxiety of Zerlina, the indignation of Masetto, the confusion
of Leporello.”
Among all these figures, however, there are two who are situated outside
Don Giovanni’s charmed circle and have been madeoutsidersby Don Gio-
vanni’s power .The one figure is the Commendatore, whom Don Giovanni
has killed and has thus transformed into “spirit”; the other figure is Elvira,
whom Don Giovanni has seduced, thereby providing her with a new self-