Online research in philosophy

Repetition plays a significant, productive role in the work of both Derrida and Deleuze. But the difference between these two philosophers couldn''t be greater: it is the difference between negation and affirmation, between Yes and No. In Derrida, the productive energy of repetition derives from negation, from the necessary impossibility of supplementing an absence. Deleuze recognizes the kind of repetition which concerns Derrida, but insists that there is another, primary form of repetition which is fully positive and affirmative. I will argue that there is nothing in Derrida''s philosophy to match the affirmative, primary form of repetition articulated by Deleuze. Moreover, it is precisely this difference that accounts for the most exciting features of Deleuze''s work: the possibility of breaking through to the other side of representation, beyond authenticity and inauthenticity, becoming-becoming.

Focusing primarily on the writings of Kierkegaard and secondarily on those of Kant, St. Augustine and Schelling, this work offers a novel and challenging way of approaching the concepts of anxiety, repetition, freedom and contemporaneity. Pivotal to this project is a reinterpretation of Kierkegaard’s notion of ‘taking notice’ and its elevation to the status of a central principle which opens up new interpretive dimensions.

Despite Kierkegaard's continual awareness of the dangers of the imagination, he nevertheless redeems the imagination by placing it at the heart of the ethical and religious life. The aim of this paper is to focus on the shape of these positive ways of "being imaginative" in the ethical sphere--aspects which in large part continue in the higher religious stages. Judge William's somewhat obscure discussion of the "actual self" and "ideal self" in "Either/Or", Vol. II, is the clue to how a person's imaginative capacities are harnessed in subjectivity. To illuminate this, the paper examines the imagination's relation to choice, the manner in which the imagination opens the "inner infinity" of the ethical, the imagination's relation to kinesis, and its complex character as the expression for both possibility and the concrete in personality as unified in a dynamic ethical repetition which gives transparency and continuity to the self. Given these new roles for the imagination, Kierkegaard is able to transcend both Romantic and Idealist notions of the "individual," and importantly modifies Hegel's concept of the self, which outwardly appears so similar to Kierkegaard's. In effect, Kierkegaard redeems the imagination by the ethical, and redeems the ethical by means of the imagination. The imagination emerges as a complex and rich ethical concept, for the imagination is a medium of possibility, an activity of idealizing, a passion which contributes to resolution, an organ for the concrete, and a disposition. The paper concludes with a brief sketch of how, in Kierkegaard's understanding, the religious and especially Christian forms of existence continue, yet crucially alter, this imagination of repetition.

In an effort to bring this other, neglected half of Kierkegaard's authorship into focus, this volume of the Yearbook is dedicated specifically to the edifying ...

Review of Clare Carlisle's book covering Kierkegaard's three 1843 pseudonymous texts: "Either/Or," "Repetition," and "Fear and Trembling.".

This paper considers a series of Kierkegaard’s early “upbuilding discourses” in order to argue that Kierkegaard was never Hegelian. These discourses reveal a dialectical play of non-dialectical difference and tension rather than mediated resolution and progress.Thus Kierkegaard’s is not a logical dialectic of mediation but an existential dialectic of difference—of irremediable paradox. The divisions of existential dividedness do not resolve themselves because they cannot resolve at all; existential difference, as distinct from logical contradiction, is non-dialectical. Kierkegaard’s is a “one-way” dialectic that cannot resolve itself, for eternity, its only (in)conceivable resolution, is incommensurable with it. However, because eternity is not temporally before us as final cause but is rather within us and among us, the apparent simplicity of this one-way dialectic gives way, in the actuality of existence, to the desperate complexity of “redoubling repetition,” whereby the self comes to itself only in the halt of the lesson of death.

By way of an interaction with Kierkegaard’s Point of View, this paper attempts to show the extent to which Kierkegaard’s Repetition was a poetic repetition of his own life. By comparing several of his published texts with journal entries and letters to friends, this paper traces the extent and degree of Kierkegaard’s poetic reflection and corresponding lack of existential immediacy. At its most extreme, this paper argues that Kierkegaard did not really exist in the typical sense of the term; or, more precisely, that he only existed as a poetic repetition, an apotheosized ideal. Kierkegaard lived only insofar as he wrote himself into poetry.