1 Vigilious Hafniensus is the pseudonymous author of The Concept of Anxiety; Heidegger’s anxious watch (or vigil) over being, as well as his notion of Augenblicken , are themes of this Kierkegaardian text. The Danish ‘Oieblikket ’ (eye-blink) can mean ‘moment of vision’ or ‘a receptive glance that transforms’; it is standardly rendered in English Kierkegaard translations as ‘The Moment’.

2 Herman Melville, Tales, Poems, and Other Writings, ed. with intro. John Bryant (New York: Modern Library, 2001), p. 44.

3 He says he, or better, Socrates, is ‘a solo dancer before God’ (Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding Scientific Postscript, trans. H. and E. Hong [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992], vol. 1, p. 89). The Climacus of Philosophical Crumbs dances with death (see Søren Kierkegaard, Repetition and Philosophical Crumbs, intro. Edward F. Mooney, trans. M. Piety [Oxford: Oxford University Press, World Classics series, 2009], p. 89 [Preface, last sentence]).

4 Climacus lets himself explain the authorship of which he is a member (as if Hamlet’s play, ‘The Mousetrap’, were to explain the play Hamlet, or perhaps, all of Shakespeare). The famous ‘first and last explanation’ found at the end of the Postscript should be counted as the fifth ‘explanation’ of the authorship; the earlier explanations were published in Copenhagen feuilletons, including ‘To Mr Orla Lehmann’, ‘Public Confession’, ‘A Little Explanation’ and ‘An Explanation and a Little More’; see Westfall [78 f.].

5 Is the writer of the Shakespearean sonnets the same writer as the writer of the comedies, or of the histories, or of the tragedies?

6 Derrida is interested in the performative aspects of writing. Austin and Searle, of saying, and Kierkegaard, in the performative aspects of authoring (146).

7 Melville, similarly, testifies that his identity is impermanent. Does his testimony make it so — make it true that who he is ever-shifts, that he is a changeling without end?

8 He judges Johannes de silentio in the section of Postscript called ‘A Contemporary Effort’.

9 I cannot help thinking that these questions of how ‘the ontological status’ of a Climacus or Judge Wilhelm emerges are analogous to the question of how ‘living speech’ emerges from the bare facts of ink on paper, how the exhortations and cajolings of the judge can begin to speak from the page, transfiguring factual ink marks into something quite different — certainly not into fictions: perhaps into the space of imagination, art, artistry or life.

10 Melville, Tales, Poems, and Other Writings, p. 44.

11 See my essay, ‘What Has Hegel to Do with Henry James? Acknowledgment, Dependence, and Having a Life of One’s Own’, Inquiry 45(3) (2002): 331—50. This essay appears as ch. 9, ‘Henry James: An Ethics of Intimate Conversation’, in my Lost Intimacy in American Thought: Recovering Personal Philosophy from Thoreau to Cavell (New York: Continuum, 2009).

12 The Crisis might be a repetition of the earlier From the Papers, and Practice in Christianity might be a repetition of themes from Fear and Trembling .

13 In addition, the work is posthumous in the sense that in the process of writing at his desk, SAK enters a nowhere apart from body, pen and desk, as if the writing were of one already dead. ‘A Posthumous Work’ is the subtitle to the first of Two Ethical Religious Essays, by H. H.; the subtitle has a second line that reads: ‘A Poetical Venture’; see Westfall, p. 51f.

14 On explanation, see note 4, above.

REVIEW ESSAY (Under consideration: Joseph Westfall’s The Kierkegaardian Author: Authorship and Performance in Kierkegaard’s Literary and Dramatic Criticism)

Abstract

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