Kierkegore
Easter Day refractions.
Note: (Deepcut Kierkegaard nerds will get the pronunciation joke in the title of this piece.) Sickman has been listening to a lot of grindcore and death metal of late. He’s loved it since his teens, but hadn’t delved into it for a while. Maybe this music’s aesthetic bleeds into his ruminations. As when he wrote the following in his journal (which he calls ‘My Anti-Suicide Letter’, 46 entries so far). It’s actually the material from which he formed the previous Substack entry (Chews Life: A Decomposition). I share this underlayer as perhaps a slightly(!) more straightforward iteration of his position.
39.
It seems to me that ‘deconstructing’ one’s religious background is an added, unfair, and often undoable task imposed by that very background. I’m not sure how capable I am of engaging, much less ‘completing’ (or robustly progressing in), that task. Some of us have to bumble around like brokencrowns, spilling unreconstructed brainmatter here and there. Full stop. That’s as far as we go. If we’re lucky, we stumble back across some bit of wrinkled greystuff still sitting on the path—sundried, weatherworn, half nibbled away (as those kin who chew it do not like the taste and withdraw again)—and re-collect the scrap in a haze of déjà vu and, muttering, begin to polish and massage it into some odd shape. Maybe it’ll never fit in our skull again but perhaps we can wear it on a string around our neck (with other such meatscraps), continuing to finger it into some better, doable iteration.
40.
‘A person’s total ideality lies first and last in resolution. Any other ideality is a trifle.’ (Kierkegaard)1
But resolution is not always possible. And what? Are we—the unresolved—left to be ontological refuse, ideated trifles littered about the expensively shod feet of all you shining resolvers, positive or negative?
‘A negative resolution does not hold him; he must hold it, however long it takes.’ (ibid.)2
To the degree that we can, it is just there that many of us live. Not being held by, but holding, one’s resolve against (refusal of, rejection of, decline of) any institutional eudaemonia rotting with holes and dangling flesh. I subsist inside those putrefactions, slipping from rot to rot.
So. Let rot do its fructifying work. We are, with any luck, the monsters emerging from it (or falling out of its cyclopean cheesecloth face, clawing at some mouldy handhold). ‘Monsters in the best sense.’ Thank you, Donna.3 Though I’ll have to settle for ‘monsters in a better sense’, since I must continue on broken, enfeebled, but still by goddam raging and loving and becoming.
‘Through his negative resolution he now actually exists hypothetically or subjunctively’. (ibid.)
Yup. My whole ontology is downright iffy. Fuck you for thinking you’re better. Specifically, fuck this:
Whereas the positive resolution cheerfully refreshes itself with rest, cheerfully rises up with the sun, cheerfully begins where it left off, cheerfully surveys everything thriving around it, and, as does the married man, cheerfully sees with each new day a new demonstration (for the positive is not a hypothesis that must be demonstrated), the person who has chosen the negative resolution sleeps uneasily at night, expects the nightmare that he chose wrongly will suddenly come upon him, wakes up exhausted to see the barren heath around him, and is never restored because he is continually in suspense. (109)
I most certainly want a measure of that cheerful and nondemonstrative existence, but my nightmares and ‘barren heath’ and perpetual suspense are not to be allayed by some ‘positive resolution’ over against a negative one. Some of us are transfixed by conditions, circumstances, longterm structural warpings. Not by our alleged indecision or wrong decision. For these arise precisely from the conditions.
Kierkegaard’s ‘leap of faith’ (which all his works plumb the complexities of) is very dramatically exciting, especially as a metaphysics of subjectivity. It seems to speak to something about the real. But Kierkegaard’s hard binaries are, of course, something he himself cannot sustain, in his works or his life. He bursts into multiplicity on a dime, again and again, perpetually. That’s how his beautiful, monstrous, vari-narrative (the combined life-and-writings) ‘ends’. That’s the story. A wild figure twisting and tossing at the edge of the leap—or, at best, leaping gorgeous and agonistic across an abyss toward an occluded further precipice. So much for transcending the subjunctive and receiving all the world back in the leap, Soren. Yours is a wild ride. I love it. And I also hate it. I’m learning from it and also defying it.4
I don’t know what I’m trying to say today. So often I feel I have not expressed my heart here. Yet I often look back at those same passages I doubted and feel their (murky) elucidation and even get glimpses of heartfelt honesty coming through. (Pellucidation?)
What can I do but write?
More reports to follow.
Stages On Life’s Way (108).
Kierkegaard’s character Judge Billy is here referring to a negative resolution toward the institution of marriage. Sickman considers this institution (as patriarchally instantiated) a central beam in what he called ‘cap-het hedonics’ in the previous post.
See Donna Haraway, Staying With the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (2016), p. 2 and passim.
Fear and Trembling (1843), of course, is Kierkegaard’s breakout work on the leap of faith. While I find it fairly thrilling, the work I’ve read so far that most rigorously mines the metaphysical depths of this idea is his Philosophical Fragments: A Fragment of Philosophy (1844).