UC Berkeley

“Kierkegaard and the Aesthetics of the Book” considers aesthetics in the broad, classical meaning of the word, i.e., as the study of the sensory. Rather than offering a full-blown descriptive bibliography of Kierkegaard’s books, this dissertation presents three models for the phenomenology of reading: the disappearing book, the Heibergian book, and the ironic book. Each of these hypothesizes a different relationship between the book’s temporal and spatial modalities, or between the verbal text and the physical thing made up of paper, leather, and ink. First identified by Friedrich Kittler in his Aufschreibesysteme (Discourse Networks), the disappearing book cancels the book-object’s materiality via the transcendent author’s imagined voice. Chapter 1 draws on cultural, material, and intellectual history, ca. 1750–1850, to explain the rise of the disappearing book, not only in Kittler’s German states, but in Denmark, as well. The coupling of what Rolf Engelsing calls the “Leserevolution” (reading revolution) with an industrial revolution of the book led to an upsurge in printed matter during the period. With the individual copy downgraded and the ethereal text privileged, the book itself vanished (so to speak). In the philosophy of language of Herder and Anders Gamborg, the poetry of Goethe and Adam Oehlenschläger, and the aesthetics of Hegel and the youngish Johan Ludvig Heiberg, one finds additional impulses for the disappearing book. The Heibergian book, on the other hand, is derived from the highly original theory of reading articulated in the mature J. L. Heiberg’s “Bidrag til det Synliges Philosophie” (Contribution to the philosophy of the visible) (1843). Here Heiberg posits that the simulated orality of the text is a sublated moment within the visual image of the page, thus opposing the phonocentrism of the disappearing book. This aesthetic framework served as a clever justification for Heiberg’s Nytaarsgaver (New Year’s gifts), which were lavishly ornamented literary collections sold in publisher’s bindings for the holiday season. Although the Heibergian book (as Klaus Müller-Wille has noted) employs the Hegelian device of Aufhebung (sublation), Heiberg is nonetheless contradicting Hegel’s posthumously published Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik (Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art) (1835) and his own “Om Malerkunsten i dens Forhold til de andre skjønne Kunster” (On painting in its relation to the other fine arts) (1838), both of which—true to the disappearing book—had denied print’s aesthetic validity. It is unclear whether Kierkegaard was aware of the “Bidrag” treatise, but he nonetheless confronts its aesthetic system by reading Heiberg’s Nytaarsgaver through the lens of the disappearing book, reducing them to mere trinkets. As I go on to argue in chapter 2, Kierkegaard then attacks gift-books tout court, using them as a metonym for the widespread loss of inwardness in Golden Age Copenhagen.

Yet Kierkegaard did not, as one might expect, create disappearing books, but what I call ironic books. Like the fragments and nested novels of the German Romantics, Kierkegaard’s ironic book oscillates between spatiality and temporality, or from the concrete tome to the ideal text. While the Heibergian book is both visual and aural, the ironic book is either visual or aural, i.e., at any given moment. Such unresolved vacillations between a dialectical term and its antithesis have been noted throughout Kierkegaard’s authorship, as either a “fractured dialectic” (Paul Ricoeur) or an “ironic dialectic” (Fred Rush), and hence the term the ironic book. As I claim in chapter 3, Kierkegaard’s ironic book is distinct from those of Friedrich Schlegel and the other Romantics, both German and Danish. While all ironic books manifest an unending flux between the outer and the inner, this so-called aesthetics of fracture corresponds to a Socratic epistemology only in the ironic book of Kierkegaard. Just as Socrates offered no positive answers and abandoned his interlocutors to discover the truth for themselves, Kierkegaard absents himself through Romantic literary techniques like frame narratives and pseudonymity, leaving his readers alone with the book, which then hints to them that they can obtain evermore exact approximations of inner truths already in their possession if they read and reread again.

With the disappearing book, one finds oneself overawed by the presence of the author, and his numinous voice renders the bibliographical artifact (more or less) imperceptible. Likewise, the aufgehoben (sublated) voice of the Heibergian book does not belong to the reader, but to the transcendent author. In contrast, readers of Kierkegaard’s ironic book are incited to recitation, and their actual voices are substituted for the virtual voice of Kierkegaard himself, who remains a silent cipher. The achieved aesthetic effect thus complements Kierkegaard’s Socratic maieutic, as readers hear themselves echoing truths that they then recognize as their own. As his unique take on the ironic book reveals, Kierkegaard was conscious of the fact that the sensorium mediates all ethical-religious communication between human beings, even if such exchanges can only ever be indirect.