Soren Kierkegaard

When the inner “torment and misery” was exhibited “in print,” the repen-
tant “I” thus becameinteresting, which caused the religious once again to
be displaced by the aesthetic.
And indeed Kierkegaard viewedThe Point of Viewfrom this twofold point
of view. “The book itself is true, and in my opinion it is masterly,” he wrote
rather immodestly in a journal entry in which he had one eye on the reli-
gious aspect and the other on the aesthetic. And, without batting an eye,
he went on to write the following in this same journal entry: “If a little
more were added to emphasize the fact that I am a penitent and about my
sin and guilt, a little about my inner misery—then it would be true.”
The Point of Viewleft in its wake an extremely marginalized subject, who
was disappointed to see “the principal thing” disappear in the midst of the
text. A marginalization of this sort can be read—quite literally—in a long,
narrow marginal note found together with one of the two scraps of paper
on which Kierkegaard had written some notes for the discourse entitled
“From on High, He Will Draw All to Himself.” Under the heading “Con-
cerning the Completed Unpublished Work and Myself,” the following is
written along one edge of the scrap of paper: “The difficulty with publishing
the piece about my writings is and continues to be that I have actually been
used without really knowing it myself, or without knowing it fully. And
now, for the first time, I understand and can see the whole of it—but then,
of course, I cannot say ‘I.’ ”
Here Governance is not included in the process. Kierkegaard had been
used and had been so completely written into “the process of the productiv-
ity” that when he looked back he was unable to say “I.” When he looked
back on his life, what he saw was, in fact, not a life; he saw writing, moun-
tains of writing. And with a paradoxical logic that demonstrates how the
absence of authority forced the production of fiction, this same Kierkegaard
(who in other circumstances had been unwilling to risk a “bewildering
poetic confusion”) considered publishingThe Point of Viewunder the name
Johannes de silentio! He realized very quickly, however, that “then it would
no longer be that book at all, because the point of the book was precisely
that it was my personal statement.” But even though there are certain con-
siderations that make it preferable to publish an autobiography under an
author’s own name, the idea of pseudonymous publication put in yet an-
other appearance. Kierkegaard thus composed a preface toThe Point of View,
signed by a certain “A-O,” who concluded his venture in this fragmentary
endeavor with the following statement: “I now dare to make this poetic
venture. The author himself speaks in the first person, but bear in mind that
this author is not Mag. K. but my poetic creation.—I must certainly beg
the pardon of Mr. Mag. for venturing right under his nose, so to speak, to