Soren Kierkegaard

February. In a journal entry, undated but presumably from March or April
1846, he wrote: “I do not readThe Corsair. I would not even order my
servant to read it, because I do not believe that a master has the authority
to order his servant to go to a place of ill repute.”
If all three of them nevertheless continued their guerilla war of attrition,
it was because a crafty and perfidious logic was at work behind their backs.
The logic went something like this: If one admires something, one naturally
seeks to resemble it. But if one is unable to resemble it, a double reversal
comes into play. The admiration is transformed into envy, while the original
desire for resemblance is transformed into a desire to caricature. It goes with-
out saying that this presumes both a certain likeness and a certain difference
between the persons who participate in the game. Naturally, an absolute
resemblance would abolish admiration, just as absolute difference would of
course render impossible an identification with the object of admiration.
The triangle was characterized by the presence of precisely this relative
likeness and relative difference: Kierkegaard was the eccentric and the ge-
nius who admired and envied Møller for his erotic audacity; Møller was
the eroticist and child of the proletariat who admired and envied Kierke-
gaard for his genius and his financial independence; Goldschmidt was the
ambitious Jew who also admired and envied Kierkegaard, but who hated
his arrogance and his patronizing manner. Goldschmidt and Møller were
allies for a time, but of course they also had their own mutual rivalry, and
each had to go his own way. It is certainly true that people say that you
should stick with your own kind, but when your “own kind” are just as
ambitious as you are, the rule does not work at all.
The rivalry between Møller and Kierkegaard is easiest to discern. First,
Møller tried to rewrite “The Seducer’s Diary” but failed. Then he managed,
with more success, to produce a pastiche based on “ ‘Guilty?’/’Not
Guilty?’ ” And finally he caricatured thePostscript. Møller’s three attempts
succeeded only in being poor or twisted copies of the original, but
Klæstrup’s caricatures had copied the original—Kierkegaard—perfectly.
There was a vicious symmetry in this: Just as Kierkegaard, for his part, had
succeeded in identifying Møller withThe Corsair, Møller had now suc-
ceeded in identifying Kierkegaard with a caricature inThe Corsair.
And this identification had consequences. In no time at all Kierkegaard,
who had previously been a natural part of the urban scene, became a walk-
ing caricature in the city. Now he was no longer seen as the thinker whose
very eccentricity managed to compel the respect of the multitude, but on
the contrary, he became a ludicrous advertisement forThe Corsair, a mad
icon. People who had once looked up to him, perhaps without really under-
standing what it was they were looking up to, now spent lots of time look-