Kierkegaard and the Staging of Desire: Writing Word and Sacrament Öffentlichkeit
Hughes, Carl Stephen (2013)
Abstract
This dissertation analyzes the central (but often unacknowledged) place that Kierkegaard accords to desire for God in the Christian life. Drawing on Emmanuel Levinas's theme of infinite, ever increasing desire, and attending to the ways in which Kierkegaard's richly varied rhetoric seeks to incite an analogous eros, I compare Kierkegaard's early writings about the theater to his late meditations on the Eucharist. I argue that even Kierkegaard's most explicitly theological texts are marked by a kind of "theatricality," inasmuch as they adopt and transform the theater's aesthetic qualities in order to spark religious longing.
After establishing the context and key terms of my argument in my Introduction, I offer a close reading of the concept of desire in The Concept of Irony, suggesting that this early text can provide a paradigm for interpreting desire throughout Kierkegaard's subsequent writings. In Chapter One, I analyze desire's connection to theatricality in Either/Or, paying particular attention to the vaudeville play that the book presents as an exemplary means of soliciting eros. Chapters Two, Three, and Four then consider the themes of desire and theatricality within the starkly different context of Kierkegaard's Eucharistic Discourses. Even though these late texts initially seem entirely detached from Kierkegaard's early writings on theater, I argue that the two sets of texts use similar rhetorical strategies for the elicitation of longing. In Chapter Five, I consider how Kierkegaard's conception of faith as desire shapes his interpretation of Christian ethical life. In doing so, I respond to several prevalent interpretations of his work, which argue that it condemns eros in a fundamental way.
Table of Contents
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Prologue--Fairy Tales and Theology
1Introduction--Staging Desire (With Constant Reference to The Concept of Irony)
9 I. Aesthetic-Religious Equivocation 11II. Desire, Beyond "Eros" and "Agape"
19III. Staging Desire in The Concept of Irony
29 A. Which Socrates? 30 B. Irony under Religious "Control" 38 C. On, and beyond, the Romantic Stage 47Chapter One--Desiring "The One"--In Vaudeville, Marriage, and Beyond
54I. Why Vaudeville?
56II. The First Love
65III. Two Modes of Desire for First Love
69 A. A Parody of a Parody of a Parody... 70B. Living First Love Rather Than Staging It
74IV. Staging a Sermon, Infinitizing Desire
87V. Beyond Either/Or, Returning to "The First Love"
93Chapter Two--Vor Frue Kirke as Stage: Aesthetics and Desire in Liturgy and Sacrament
103I. The Eucharist, and Eucharistic Discourses, in Vor Frue Kirke
105 A. The Danish Friday Eucharist Service 105B. The Aesthetic Setting of Vor Frue Kirke
110II. Staging Communion
124 A. Longing and Intensified Longing 125B. Sorrowing over Sin, Sorrowing after God
133 C. "Where He is, There Is the Altar" 139Chapter Three--"The Woman Who Was a Sinner": A New Statue in Vor Frue Kirke
148I. Staging a Biblical Story
150II. Imaging Faith
154III. Theatrical and Eucharistic Transformations
162Chapter Four--Becoming Another: From the Farce Theater to the Feet of Christ
169I. Becoming Another in the Farce Theater
172 A. The Genre of German Farce 174 B. Der Talisman 182 C. Becoming Titus? 184II. Writing Repetition
190III. Christ's Substitution in Our Place
196IV. Becoming Christ
200 A. Christ as "Cover" 201 B. Inflaming Faith 206C. The Foot of the Altar as "Place of Rest"?
209Chapter Five--Sacramental Writing, Sacramental Living: Eros in Existence
213I. Hidden Love and Infinite Desire
220II. Love Redoubles: Love for God and Love for Neighbor
230III. Earthly Eros: A Controlled Element?
238IV. All the World's a Stage
247Epilogue--Renewing Theology: Kierkegaard Beyond Barth
255 Bibliography 262About this Dissertation
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