Soren Kierkegaard

If his writings had not been reviewed, Kierkegaard to some extent had
himself to thank for that. In May 1845, when he negotiated with the book
dealer P. G. Philipsen about the remaining copies of the eighteen edifying
discourses, he made the nonnegotiable demand that Philipsen must not
“make available any free copies to editors or in any way cause the discourses
to become the object of critical review or discussion in the newspapers.”
This sort of stipulation does not exactly promote ordinary marketing, but
it was actually not necessary. In reality, the great silence with which—ac-
cording to Kierkegaard—his writings were greeted, was broken quite nois-
ily by the historical facts: In the year 1846 alone, the year Kierkegaard began
his complaining, he was reviewed in the daily press and in periodicals no
fewer than five times, and he was also made the object of detailed examina-
tion in anentire bookthat unambiguously took his sideagainsta talent such
as Martensen.
The amount of attention he had managed to attract is made clear by a
piece fittingly titled “S. Kjerkegaard and his Reviewers,” which appeared
on Tuesday, May 19, 1846, in Claudius Rosenhoff’s journalDen Frisindede.
“There are scarcely any authors in recent years,” it was stated with respect
to Kierkegaard, “who have been judged more wrongly, more one-sidedly,
and in a more immature fashion than precisely this writer. Even though it
would certainly be difficult to point out any really thorough or even moder-
ately detailed study of his writings, there has not been any shortage of at-
tempts.” The author of the piece, who signed himself “... h,” was indig-
nant at the superficiality which the daily press, in particular, had displayed
in its pandering to the general public, which merely gaped and grinned,
while none of these “noisemakers really know what it is all about”—indeed,
“the whole crowd lives in the most perfect ignorance about what it is that
Kierkegaard wants.”
Editor Rosenhoff attempted to mollify... h’s indignation in a construc-
tive fashion. He, too, had found the situation outrageous, but on the other
hand he could readily understand it: In reality, Kierkegaard’s writingscannot
in fact be reviewed at all. “The peculiar nature of those writings,” he ex-
plained, “renders any ‘thorough’ judgment impossible. To use the contribu-
tor’s own expression (though in another sense) the author is himself a liter-
ary ‘noisemaker,’ and we believe that the one person who could write any
‘thorough’ evaluation of his writings would have to be himself—if only he
weren’t so ‘thorough.’ ”
This little—perhaps fictional—dialogue makes it clear that even in his
own times Kierkegaard had established himself as a literature that contained
a certain will to ambiguity within its very materials. Rosenhoff continued:
“It does seem to us, however, that he sometimes makes himself sufficiently