Soren Kierkegaard

and was therefore unable to speak authoritatively concerning their inner-
most meaning. Unable to make sense of his own experience, it didnotoccur
to him that this sort of co-writing might stem from language itself, which
of course always extends beyond the person who writes in it, and which—
simply by means of its grammatical rules—can keep a writer within certain
channels and perhaps even point him in a quite specific direction.Nordid it
occur to Kierkegaard that the writing process itself can activate unconscious
forces in the person doing the writing, who can be surprised to see himself
treating subjects that are normally kept out of sight by effective repression.
Kierkegaard imposed a religious interpretation on his experience and la-
beled the alien portion of his authorship “the role of Governance. ”But
even this explanation did not exhaust the matter: “For if I were simply to
say that I had had an overview of the dialectical structure of the whole of
my work as an author from the very beginning,... that would be denial
and dishonesty with respect to God. ”And, we might also add, with respect
to the reader. Kierkegaard continued: “No. I must truly say that I cannot
understand the entire affair, precisely because I can understand the entire
affair down to the most insignificant little detail—but what I cannot under-
stand is that I can understand it now, though I most definitely do not dare
to say that I understood it so clearly in the beginning. And yet I was of
course the person who did it, reflecting every step along the way.”
The idea of “the role of Governance in the works ”might at first look
like rampant megalomania, but on further inspection and reflection we can
see it was close to the opposite of that—it was the experience that one’s
autonomy was limited. Kierkegaard was not only the person who did the
writing; he was also the person who—and it was precisely here that he
could not hit upon the words he needed—was written. For, when he was
writing and in what he wrote, he was in fact also writing himself: His writ-
ings constitute one, enormous sweeping novel of development, a bildungs-
roman, in whichthe writingitself stands in a relationship of deliverance, a
maieutic relationship, to its writer.
Kierkegaard’s experience was difficult to express in language—precisely
because it concerned the very conditions of language itself. He therefore
turned to a moralistic term, namely “upbringing, ”which in its passive form,
“to be brought up, ”takes on a physical or tangible character not too unlike
the words “to be written. ”“[It is] as categorically definite as can be, ”Kier-
kegaard wrote, “that it is Governance that has brought me up, and this
upbringing is reflected in the process of the literary productivity. To this
extent, then, what has been said earlier to the effect that the whole of the
aesthetic productivity was a deception is in one sense not entirely true,
because to call it that is to concede a bit too much to consciousness. On