In the introduction to Prey into Hunter: The Politics of Religious Experience, Maurice Bloch makes some forthright admissions about the methodological and theoretical pitfalls threatening a project of the scope he undertakes in this slim, provocative volume. He acknowledges, for instance, the temptation, when arguing for what he describes as a “quasi-universal” religious structure, to present “a tendentious selection of examples, and make this structure appear to be present everywhere.”Footnote 1 In the face of this danger, independent readers, who “choose to continue the exercise by trying to see whether what is proposed here stands up to the test of the other cases they know” become the most important critical constraint.Footnote 2 In what follows I test Bloch's theory of rebounding violence against the thought of Søren Kierkegaard, the nineteenth-century Danish theologian.
This article does not simply apply Bloch's theory to a new case, however. Bloch is an anthropologist and builds his argument using ethnographic examples. Because anthropologists are trained in fieldwork—interview techniques, participant observation, etc.—they tend not to apply their theories about human beliefs and behaviors to texts. Despite widespread commitment to “the model of the text” in anthropological practice, anthropologists generally focus on ritual, kinship, and politics, not texts. Scholars of religion, on the other hand, have applied anthropological theory and other kinds of social scientific theory to the study of texts. It is not uncommon or surprising to see New Testament scholars, for example, using social scientific theory to elucidate Paul's letters. Students of modern Western texts, however, generally limit themselves to the hermeneutic task of understanding the text, and eschew explanatory theories, anthropological or otherwise. There is no principled reason for this reluctance: Modern Western texts, like all linguistic products, human behavior, cultural artifacts, and social practices, both require interpretation and invite social-scientific explanation.Footnote 3 Perhaps modern Western texts are too close to home, so to speak. As a result the theories are deprived of a field of application and assessment, and textual scholars are deprived of the deeper insight into the texts the theories might afford.
I offer what follows as one example of how anthropological theory might enrich the study of modern Western texts, and vice versa. On the one hand, Bloch's theory helps the Kierkegaard scholar make sense of some puzzling changes in Kierkegaard's views and brings some neglected aspects of Kierkegaard's thought into relief. On the other hand, the specifics of Kierkegaard's thought indicate that Bloch misconstrues the object of his theory. Discovering in Kierkegaard's authorship the dynamic that Bloch describes not only restores to Kierkegaard's sociopolitical concerns their proper significance, but also reveals that the phrase ‘rebounding consumption’ better captures the dynamic than does ‘rebounding violence’ and that the theory is better ranged alongside theories of the body and society than conceived as a theory of religion and violence. The singularity of Kierkegaard's project and the self-consciousness with which he composed his works, which are neither ritual nor myth nor a kinship system, restores to anthropological theory, moreover, an often-neglected emphasis on individual agency.
Bloch's Theory of Rebounding Violence
In Prey into Hunter, Maurice Bloch identifies what he describes as a “quasi-universal” minimal religious structure common to many religious phenomena. Bloch finds this structure in rituals of various sorts'sacrifice, initiation, marriage, spirit mediumship—but also sees it in myth, kinship systems, and millenarian cults. The startling quasi-universality of this minimal structure derives, he argues, from 1) a very basic understanding of the biological processes of life, an understanding present in all cultures, and 2) “problems intrinsic to the human condition.”Footnote 4 Armed with shared understandings and faced with the same problems, many cultures produce the same minimal religious structure, but they elaborate the structure in different ways, and employ different symbols and metaphors to articulate it. Bloch labels this minimal structure “rebounding violence.”
All humans, Bloch claims, have at some level a conception of life in which birth is the beginning of, or a milestone in, a process of growth culminating in reproduction, followed by a decline leading to death. This “transformative dialectic” is seen as involving all living things, “if only because one species provides food for another.”Footnote 5 Bloch speculates that this basic conception of biological life is partly innate and partly the product of our interactions with other species. Given this conception, however, a problem arises concerning human social existence. How can permanent, life-transcending politico-social structures be created out of these transient and discrete constituents? How, in other words, can humans establish an authority for social and political institutions that transcends “the fluidity of human life?”Footnote 6 The phenomenon of rebounding violence gives an answer to this problem.
Rebounding violence begins with an inversion or transformation of the basic conception of life's biological processes. Religion posits a life superior to ordinary mundane life, which pertains to a superior, transcendental element in persons. Unlike ordinary biological life, moreover, where birth and growth lead to flourishing, in relation to this extraordinary life, weakening and death lead to flourishing. The religious conception reverses the biological process, leading to a state beyond process. This reversal is represented in rituals as a violent conquest of an individual's vitality whereby the individual, now fully transcendental, becomes part of something beyond process. The Orokaiva of Papua, New Guinea, for example, conceive of people as part vital pig and part transcendental spirit. In their initiation ritual, elders representing the ancestral spirits symbolically hunt and kill the initiates in a pig hunt. The weakening and death of the pig aspect of the initiates transforms the initiates into transcendental spirits. This first violence, which is largely symbolic, signifies one's surrender to the transcendental. A prominent feature of this stage of rebounding violence is that one colludes in the vanquishing of one's vitality by the transcendental. (In the Orokaiva case it is the village adults who cooperate with the invading spirits.) One submits to conquest by the transcendental and thereby transcends biological life, with this conquest linking one to a unified entity beyond process that is the basis for social and political institutions. One abandons one's vitality in favor of permanent order. But this move to the transcendental has no social and political significance unless the transcendental can be rejoined to the world of process.
In the second, “rebounding,” violence the transcendental rejoins the world of process by conquering and consuming life, but at this stage the conquered vitality must be distinct from one's original or native vitality. It must be external vitality, to ensure that the revitalization does not negate the first violence. If the transcendental recovered the native vitality, it might look like vitality reconquering the transcendent. The rebounding violence is not a simple return to native vitality. Rather, the returning person “is a changed person, a permanently transcendental person who can therefore dominate the here and now of which he previously was a part.”Footnote 7 Rebounding violence is figured primarily through the consumption of animals “as food, often literally through the mouth,”Footnote 8 but also through the consumption of plants, the taking of women in marriage, or, in some circumstances, the subjugation of other peoples. This recovery of vitality must be violent to demonstrate the subordination of vitality to permanent order. The Orokaiva initiates, who formerly were hunted as pigs, dressed now as spirits return to the village from the initiation hut as hunters of pigs. Their first act upon reentering the village is to engage in an actual pig hunt.
The idiom of rebounding violence makes it possible to see humans as integrated with the transcendent basis for permanent institutions, but yet vital.
In ritual representations, native vitality is replaced by a conquered, external, consumed vitality. It is through this substitution that an image is created in which humans can leave this life and join the transcendental, yet still not be alienated from the here and now. They become part of permanent institutions, and as superior beings they can reincorporate the present life through the idiom of conquest or consumption.Footnote 9
Rebounding violence provides a scenario where humans can appear simultaneously beyond process yet endowed with life. It responds to the puzzle concerning the authority and permanency of politico-social structures.
Bloch argues further that rebounding violence includes “an experiential dichotemisation of the subjects into an over-vital side and a transcendental side.”Footnote 10 Where the idiom of rebounding violence is invoked, people come to experience themselves as composed of these two opposed elements in tension with one another. Corresponding to the external public drama in ritual, an internal experiential dynamic follows the same logic.
[T]he person is represented as symbolically dual, with one side chaotic but vital and the other superior and transcendental. Then, the two parts are set in motion one against the other so that the one is, often literally, disappearing into the mouth of the other, thereby producing an image of a permanent order which nonetheless contains vitality. The consuming element was originally defined by opposition to the vital as the moral, superior aspect of the person. This is what remains beyond the processes inherent in any individual. It remains unchanged but it swallows up vitality. Thus the moral entity remains both a particular living unit and also an impersonal part of a transcendent order. In this way the central puzzle of the creation of the apparently permanent out of the transformative is phenomenologically achieved.Footnote 11
The congruence of the internal dynamic with the external drama lends emotional force to rebounding violence, which culminates in political significance.
To summarize, rebounding violence includes two stages of violence. In the first stage (dramatically enacted in ritual, and/or experienced within the self), something transcendental drives out native vitality. In the second stage, the transcendental recovers and masters (an external) vitality. This two stage structure grounds human political and social institutions in a world beyond process. In other words, rebounding violence works to reproduce and legitimate social and political structures in the face of the transiency of the individuals in a society.
Bloch argues, however, that depending upon a “people's evaluation of their politico-economic circumstances,” the logic of rebounding violence can lead to very different social and political outcomes than simply the reproduction of social and political structures.Footnote 12 When a people is strong relative to their neighbors, the rebounding violence of the second stage can extend beyond the ritual itself and lead to military aggression against outsiders. At certain points in Orokaiva history, for instance, the returning initiates' pig hunt served as a prelude to military campaigns against neighboring peoples. In these cases rebounding violence doesn't merely legitimate social and political institutions; it legitimates expansionism. In other circumstances, the idiom of rebounding violence in the hands of a ruling class can lead to aggression against its subjects. The rulers consume their subjects. In these cases rebounding violence legitimates social hierarchy. Finally, those who have lost any hope for the social and political institutions in which they live, can seek to delegitimize them altogether by interrupting the dynamic of rebounding violence.
In discussing these last cases Bloch attempts to elucidate the nature of millenarian movements. Using early Christianity and the 1863 rebellion of the Merina on Madagascar as his examples, he argues that millenarian movements employ the logic of rebounding violence to subversive ends. Millenarianism arises in the context of a group perceiving what it takes to be the “political and religious failure of [its] own leaders.”Footnote 13 More specifically, it appears where a group is “disillusioned with their politico-religious leadership, which they [feel has] abandoned them and their transcendental righteousness,” and when the group has “given up hope of a mundane solution to their ills.”Footnote 14 In such circumstances the group (often in defiance of established authorities) initiates the first violence and submits to conquest by the transcendental. Having become transcendental, they cease activities related to reproduction and biological process (e.g., sex, agriculture). Most importantly, a millenarian movement will refuse to carry out the rebounding violence. By giving the transcendental purchase in the mundane world, the rebounding violence serves to legitimate social and political institutions. When a group feels that existing institutions have forsaken the transcendental and they see no mundane hope of reforming the institutions, they will refrain from enacting the rebounding violence. They flee to the transcendental without the intention of returning, but thereby also undermine the legitimacy of existing social and political institutions. They seek to sever the bonds between transcendental authority and the existing religious and political structures. Eschewing all forms of reproduction, the millenarian movement interrupts the reproduction of religious and political institutions as well. The refusal to complete the cycle of rebounding violence is implicitly an attack on the established order.
Kierkegaard and the Double Movement
Søren Kierkegaard's authorship has been periodized in a variety of ways: primarily ethical vs. primarily Christian writings; the first pseudonymous authorship, culminating in Concluding Unscientific Postscript by Johannes Climacus vs. the second pseudonymous authorship in the voice of Anti-Climacus, etc. I believe the writings can be chronologically divided most profitably in terms of Kierkegaard's changing relationship to Christendom. In Kierkegaard's usage Christendom designates those regions (principally, in Kierkegaard's mind, nineteenth-century Denmark) where Christianity has been integrated into the prevailing social arrangements, political establishment, and culture. In Christendom one is Christian by birth and citizenship. In his retrospective The Point of View for My Work as an Author, Kierkegaard explains that his “whole authorship pertains” to the problem of Christianity and Christendom.Footnote 15 Throughout his corpus Kierkegaard criticizes Christendom because he believes it discourages the development of the highest possibilities of both individual selfhood and Christian commitment. Christendom makes faith too easy, makes becoming a Christian a matter of course. It portrays a mere semblance of true Christian faith as full Christian commitment and thereby obscures the passionate individuality of a truly Christian life lived at the extremity of existence. True Christianity presupposes the utmost subjective development. It demands passionate exertions that isolate one as “the single individual.” Training in Christianity produces free, passionate individuals. Kierkegaard argues, moreover, that genuine politics requires that free and passionate individuals come into association. The scaling down of true Christianity in Christendom, therefore, militates against true Christian faith, the development of free and passionate individuals, and the possibility of genuine politics.
Despite the overall continuity in this critique of Christendom, Kierkegaard's attitude toward Christendom hardened over time. In the earlier part of his career, Kierkegaard saw his task essentially as one of renewal. He wanted to write as a “corrective to the present age” and in his journals repeatedly characterizes his project as an “attempt again to introduce Christianity into Christendom.” The first pseudonymous authorship belongs entirely to this period. In the second, later stage of his career, Kierkegaard gave up on renewal. He declared Christendom an abomination, issued an ultimatum to the Primate of Denmark, then sought utterly to destroy Christendom. The pseudonymous author Anti-Climacus represents the transition to this latter period, which culminates in Kierkegaard's notorious “attacks upon Christendom.” To examine this change of attitude in light of Bloch's theory of rebounding violence reveals the connection between this change and other changes in Kierkegaard's conception of the religious life.
Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling represents an appropriate terminus a quo for this discussion for two reasons.Footnote 16 First, published in 1843, Fear and Trembling is one of Kierkegaard's earliest works, and his earliest to focus on religious existence. Second, the pseudonymous author of Fear and Trembling, Johannes di Silentio, reflects on Abraham's willingness to sacrifice Isaac, and regards this episode as the paradigm of religious faith. In Genesis, God demands that Abraham bind and sacrifice Isaac. Abraham consents, but at the last minute God provides a ram as a substitute offering. In recognition of Abraham's obedience, God promises Abraham that he will “make your descendants as many as the stars of heaven and the grains of the sea shore. Your descendants shall gain possession of the gates of their enemies” (Gen 22:18). Bloch adduces this very episode as an example of rebounding violence. Bloch points out that Abraham's willingness to sacrifice Isaac amounts to Abraham's submission to the transcendental which conquers Abraham's “vitality at its most intense and forward-looking.”Footnote 17 A second, rebounding stage of violence occurs with the substitution and sacrifice of the ram. The outcome of the story, moreover, is the promise of an enduring patrilineage and military conquest. Abraham's vitality is vanquished by the transcendental, but the transcendentalized Abraham conquers external vitality, leading to a permanent sociopolitical institution and the legitimation of violence against other groups.
Fear and Trembling is undoubtedly one of Kierkegaard's most beautiful and memorable works, but in some respects is also one of his least successful because it invites serious misinterpretations. Kierkegaard's moving reflections on Abraham, and the contrast Kierkegaard draws between Abraham's obedience to God's horrific command on the one hand, and a Kantian ethical religion on the other, can lend the impression either that Kierkegaard implicitly justifies moral enormities in the name of faith, or that Kierkegaard intends to supplant Kantian ethics with a divine command ethic. It is true that Kierkegaard takes aim at Kant's account of the relationship between ethics and religion, but Kierkegaard never sanctions unethical behavior, nor does he ever repudiate a roughly Kantian account of the ethical.
In Religion within the Bounds of Mere Reason Kant argues that a human is most fully a person when he or she subordinates his or her sensuous inclinations to the moral law, a law which is dictated by pure reason and which is therefore universal and eternal. To exercise one's freedom to make respect for this universal, eternal law a sufficient incentive to determine one's will is to fulfill the human predisposition to “personality.” Kant also claims that ethics is the highest unconditioned end, which conditions one's relationship to God. The idea of God arises ineluctably out of the ethical life, but ethics as the highest unconditioned end serves as a check on superstition and enthusiasm in religion. In particular, ethics requires the repudiation of any religious ideas that compromise the imperative that one reform oneself by one's own exertions.
Like the romantics, Kierkegaard sees something perverse in the Kantian claim that the highest exercise of freedom and the most developed form of personhood consist in acting from impersonal, universal norms. In Fear and Trembling and elsewhere Kierkegaard sketches a form of freedom not subject to any law and a form of selfhood higher than Kantian personality. That higher form of selfhood, faith, is a passionate individuality that cannot take comfort in the universal. Faith, moreover, inverts the Kantian account: One's relationship to God is the highest unconditioned end, which conditions ethics. An unconditional submission to God is the precondition for ethics. Viewing Fear and Trembling in light of Kierkegaard's other works in the first pseudonymous authorship, especially Concluding Unscientific Postscript, provides guidance for grasping just what this inversion entails.
The major works of Kierkegaard's first pseudonymous authorship all emphasize the qualitative difference that the existential choice of ethical commitment makes in the life of an individual. Humans begin in a state of immediacy, a life immersed in and dedicated to finite, relative ends. Perversely, the immediate person is absolutely related to relative ends and relatively related to the absolute. He or she will only act in conformity with what the absolute ethical requirement demands to the extent that so doing accords with his or her interests and inclinations. In this way the life of immediacy subjects one to one's own transitory impulses and sensuous inclinations.Footnote 18 In acceding unconditionally to the absolute ethical demand, which devolves upon all alike, one takes an active stance with regard to oneself and one takes responsibility for oneself. It is only by mediating one's relationship to the finite with the universal (and in so doing, relativizing the finite to the absolute) that one achieves selfhood persisting through time. One only becomes an individual self by dedicating oneself to the universal.
Most of Kierkegaard's works from this period, moreover, raise the possibility of a form of selfhood even more developed than that of participation in the universal. In faith one becomes an individual self whose selfhood does not simply participate in the universal, and who stands in a renewed immediacy to the finite. Fear and Trembling distinguishes between ethical life and faith. Concluding Unscientific Postscript elaborates the distinctions; its pseudonymous author, Johannes Climacus, interposes what he calls “religiousness A” between ethical life and “religiousness B” or faith. Despite this variation in the distinctions between ethical life and higher, religious forms of selfhood, the ethical and religious are essentially related for Kierkegaard. The religious forms of selfhood presuppose the ethical choice to be oneself and arise out of ethical striving. Climacus insists that despite the distinctions between immediacy, ethical life, and religious existence, there is nevertheless one either/or, one choice.Footnote 19
In ethical life one relates to God through the self's ethical resolution. In Kantian fashion the idea of God arises in picturing ethical obligation to oneself. As Climacus puts it, “In fables and fairy tales there is a lamp called the wonderful lamp; when it is rubbed, the spirit appears. Jest! But Freedom, that is the wonderful lamp. When a person rubs it with ethical passion, God comes into existence for him.”Footnote 20 The self's ethical striving promotes a religious consciousness, but ethical life nevertheless reflects primarily on oneself and one's activity. It is characterized by active struggle and self-assertion. Ethics requires that one strive to reverse the perverse priorities of immediacy. One must relate oneself absolutely to the absolute ethical requirement and relate relatively to the relative. Ethical life demands that one resign one's finite hopes and loves so that one is capable of renouncing them should they conflict with the absolute ethical requirement. In other words, ethical life requires that one “die to immediacy.” This resignation involves painful suffering, but one can take consolation in the universal transparency of the absolute ethical requirement.
Religious existence, for Kierkegaard, as distinguished from ethical existence, consists in an intensification of ethical pathos. The more ethical one becomes, the less one believes oneself to have fulfilled the absolute ethical requirement. The most ethical individual is not the individual cavalierly satisfied with himself, but rather is the individual with the most misgivings about his motivations and disposition.Footnote 21 Developed ethical existence begets consciousness of ethical failure. The more ethical one becomes, the more one perceives one's inability to fulfill the ethical requirement. One comes to recognize one's alienation from the ethical. One comes to recognize one's need for a personal God-relationship if one is to have any hope of transforming oneself. Climacus articulates this standpoint by asserting that “an eternal happiness is specifically rooted in the subjective individual's diminishing self-esteem acquired through the utmost exertion.”Footnote 22 In passionate ethical striving one learns of one's ethical impotence and abases oneself before God. One's impotence with respect to the absolute ethical requirement leads one to acknowledge properly the absoluteness of God and one's nothingness by comparison. The religious individual seeks to express existentially that “he is capable of doing nothing himself but is nothing before God.” Climacus characterizes the “essential form” of religious life, therefore, as “self-annhihilation.”Footnote 23
The suffering present in ethical life is redoubled and becomes definitive of religious life. The pain of dying to immediacy is compounded by the chastening of one's confident self-sufficiency. Whereas the ethical standpoint glorifies self-assertion, the religious individual can only relate to self-transformation negatively. For the religious individual self-transformation becomes at best “a feigning of self-transformation,” because one is unable to transform oneself.Footnote 24 For this reason religious life is suffering in both senses of the term: One endures the painful process of coming to recognize the failure of an active relation to oneself, of coming to recognize that one must passively suffer God's activity.
Ethical life introduces an initial dialectical qualification to existence. It replaces an immediate existence with a dialectical existence because one's relationship to one's immediate impulses and inclinations is mediated by the universal law. As Climacus describes it, religious life represents yet another stage in the dialectic of subjective inward deepening. It dawns as ethical striving dialectically turns into its opposite. If ethical life reflects on oneself and one's own activity before God, religious life, which emerges from the intensification of ethical pathos, reflects on God and one's passivity before God's activity. One's relation to oneself is mediated by one's God-relationship. If in ethical life one relates to God through the self's ethical resolution, in religious life one relates to the self's ethical resolution through one's God-relationship.
Climacus employs various metaphors to describe the annihilated individual. The religious person is “consumed,” held “captive,” and made “ill” by the absolute conception of God.Footnote 25 As a finite being, however, he must not only relate absolutely to the absolute, but must also relate relatively to the relative. The annihilated individual—consumed, captivated by the absolute conception of God—can only with pain join that conception together with the thought of engaging in some relative endeavor. The combination of this absolute conception of God “with an incidental finitude such as going out to the amusement park” is “the very basis and meaning of [religious] suffering.”Footnote 26 Although this religious suffering never ceases (unless one reverts to a lower form of existence), the annihilated individual draws comfort from his God-relationship and learns to relate to the relative on the basis of this relationship. The annihilated individual comes existentially to realize the converse corollary to the annihilating recognition that one is capable of nothing without God: With God everything is possible. Climacus labels the simultaneous absolute relation to the absolute and relative relation to the relative a “double movement.”Footnote 27 The double movement rightly relates one to the finite. Having resigned the finite, one's relation to the finite is now predicated on God, that with God everything is possible. Having made the double movement one enjoys a “new immediacy.” This is not a simple immediacy, but a relationship to the relative made possible by the absolute God-relationship.
To all external appearances the new immediacy is indiscernible from an initial immediacy. For this reason Climacus describes the advanced forms of religious existence as a hidden inwardness. Climacus insists that the individual who has made the double movement is indistinguishable from “all other human beings.”Footnote 28 Despite this categorical claim, Climacus does contrast hidden inwardness to medieval monasticism, which he argues failed to achieve an absolute relation to the absolute because it tried to express this relation outwardly. Outwardly recognizable expressions of the absolute relation indicate, first, that one is not annihilated.Footnote 29 They indicate that one believes one is capable of something. With respect to physical mortifications, for instance, Climacus argues that “the self-tormentor by no means expresses that he is capable of nothing before God, because he indeed considers self-torment to be indeed something.”Footnote 30 Second, outwardly recognizable expressions of the absolute relation indicate that one is not in fact absolutely related to the absolute. One has not fully resigned the finite. To find a time and place in one's life for the absolute relation—even something so consuming as entering a monastery—relativizes the relation to one's other ends and in relation to other possible ends. By contrast, the individual absolutely related to the absolute “is a stranger in the world of finitude, but he does not define his difference from worldliness by foreign dress (this is a contradiction, since with that he defines himself in a worldly way).”Footnote 31 The attempt to express the absolute relation through the relative differences of finitude reveals that the relation is not, in fact, absolute. Both in evincing that one is not annihilated, and in revealing that one's relation to the absolute is not in fact absolute, attempts to express the absolute relation outwardly indicate that one has not pursued ethical life to its limits.
Despite cutting one's roots in the finite, the achieved absolute relation does not alienate one from the finite. One's God-relationship instead enables one to participate fully in the life of finitude (because with God everything is possible). Climacus makes an analogy: “An adult may very well join in children's play with total interest, may be the one who really makes the game lively, but he still does not play as a child. The person who understands it as his task to practice the absolute distinction relates himself to the finite in the same way.”Footnote 32 Like the adult who “joins in children's play with total interest,” the individual absolutely related to God lives harmoniously in finitude and savors his finite hopes and joys. The religious basis for this immediacy, however, is hidden. To lack hidden inwardness and betray an incongruity with finitude, conversely, reveals that one hasn't come to realize that one is capable of nothing before God, and so hasn't come to realize that with God everything is possible. Additionally, it reveals that despite one's efforts, one is not absolutely related to the absolute.
These relationships between ethical life and religious life that Kierkegaard describes in the later works of his first pseudonymous authorship clarify his project in Fear and Trembling. Kierkegaard uses the Abraham story to highlight the contrast between Kantian ethical religion on the one hand, and religious existence grounded in an absolute relation to God on the other. To make the contrast stark, Kierkegaard allows that Abraham has in general fulfilled the infinite ethical requirement and portrays God's command to sacrifice Isaac as conflicting with this ethical requirement. God commands a “righteous” man to murder his son.Footnote 33 This depiction vividly renders Kierkegaard's point: For the faithful, individual ethics is conditional upon one's relationship to God. Abraham's ethical duty to his son is (in Kierkegaard's famous phrase) teleologically suspended in relation to a higher duty to God. God inflicts a spiritual trial on Abraham. For Abraham the ethical requirement is a temptation, a temptation to neglect his God-relationship.
Kierkegaard's description of faith as “the teleological suspension of the ethical,” should not be interpreted, however, to mean that faith requires behavior that ethics would censure, or even that duties to God can collide with ethical duty. The Abraham story is profoundly misleading in this respect. Kierkegaard does not use the story to suggest that by analogy with Abraham's situation, God makes demands at odds with what ethics requires. Kierkegaard insists that “any analogy with Abraham will only surface after the individual has become capable of accomplishing the universal.”Footnote 34 But, as Kierkegaard makes clear throughout his corpus, “accomplishing the universal” is precisely what the faithful individual comes to realize is conditional on a God-relationship. The teleological suspension of the ethical is intended to convey that the faithful individual has come to realize that a proper God-relationship is the very condition for an ethical life (i.e., the condition of its very possibility). Faith suspends the Kantian ethical imperative to reform oneself by one's own exertions.
In Concluding Unscientific Postscript Johannes Climacus explains that without an unconditional, absolute relationship to the absolute (God), one is suspended from the ethical. One is in sin and incapable of actualizing the ethical. One is suspended from the ethical (which nevertheless devolves upon one “with the claim of the infinite”) in the sense that one is “heterogeneous” with the ethical. This terrible “exemption” from the ethical can only be overcome through a proper God-relationship.Footnote 35 Climacus pinpoints the crucial disanalogy that distinguishes Abraham's case. “In temptation … Abraham was not heterogeneous with the ethical. He was well able to fulfill it but was prevented from it by something higher, which by absolutely accentuating itself transformed the voice of duty into a temptation.”Footnote 36 For other suspended persons the voice of duty is not the source of temptation, but the source of dreadful anxiety.
In Fear and Trembling Silentio argues similarly that sin raises the individual higher than the ethical standpoint “because it is a contradiction on the part of the universal to want to impose itself on someone who lacks the condition sine qua non [the necessary condition].”Footnote 37 One becomes an exception to the universal. If sin-consciousness discloses one's ethical impotence (and in that sense “suspends” the ethical), faith teleologically suspends the ethical in the sense that from a higher standpoint it revokes the ethical standpoint's insistence on self-sufficiency. The spiritual trial is the temptation to recoil from religious suffering and slip back into the universal and the belief in one's self-sufficiency with respect to the ethical requirement. In Fear and Trembling Kierkegaard does not intend to undermine ethical striving, nor does he intend to supplant Kantian metaethics with divine command metaethics. Rather, for Kierkegaard ethical striving is the precondition for a proper God-relationship, and in turn a proper God-relationship is the precondition for ethical transformation.
Kierkegaard also exploits the Abraham story to introduce an invidious contrast between the existential stance of ethical religion and the existential stance of faith. He describes the former in the person of the knight of infinite resignation. Ethical religion requires resignation. In dedicating oneself to the universal and eternal, one makes the move to infinity and must be ready to renounce the object of one's immediate, finite hopes and loves when the eternal requires it. In his ethical striving the knight of infinite resignation makes the move to the infinite on his own strength and rests in himself. His “gliding, bold” gait reflects his confidence in his ethical self-sufficiency and his self-possession. Hence, his bearing is “readily recognizable.”Footnote 38 Having resigned finitude, furthermore, the knight of infinite resignation moves in finitude awkwardly. He is alienated from finitude. The knight of infinite resignation has not annihilated himself, has not realized he is capable of nothing, and so he does not realize that with God everything possible. He does not make the double movement, does not enjoy a new immediacy, and is not hidden.
Kierkegaard labels the faithful individual the knight of faith. The knight of faith has annihilated himself, realizes he is capable of nothing, and recognizes that with God everything is possible. With this recognition the knight of faith makes the double movement, enjoys a new immediacy, and is hidden. Kierkegaard presents Abraham as the exemplar of faith. In consenting to sacrifice Isaac, Abraham resigned himself with respect to Isaac. He resigned his finite hopes and loves. Abraham, however, recognized that with God everything is possible and absurdly had faith that he would receive Isaac back. Because of this absurd faith, moreover, when he did receive Isaac back, Abraham displayed no discomfort or awkwardness. He took up with Isaac as if nothing had happened. Having made the move of resignation, having renounced the finite, Abraham nevertheless remained completely at ease in the finite. Abraham made the double movement and to the external observer his behavior is indistinguishable from someone who has not even made the movement to the ethical (in this peculiar case a madman or a murderer). If the ethical life alienates one from finitude, higher forms of religious existence maintain the ethical emphasis—though the Abraham story unfortunately obscures this aspect of religious existence—while restoring one to an immediate, harmonious relationship with finitude, but a relationship properly grounded in God.
In addition to Abraham, Silentio describes one other knight of faith. This second knight of faith, a contemporary Dane, confounds any interpretation of Fear and Trembling that suggests that faith requires a collision with accepted ethical standards. Silentio's description also nicely highlights the lineaments of Kierkegaard's views in this period about religious existence. For these reasons I will quote liberally from the passage:
He is solid through and through. His stance? Vigorous, it belongs altogether to finitude, no smartly turned-out townsman taking a stroll out to Fresberg on a Sunday afternoon treads the ground with surer foot; he belongs altogether to the world, no petit bourgeois belongs to it more. One detects nothing of the strangeness and superiority that mark the knight of the infinite. This man takes pleasure, takes part, in everything, and whenever one catches him occupied with something his engagement has the persistence of the worldly person whose soul is wrapped up in such things. He minds his affairs. To see him at them you would think he was some pen-pusher who had lost his soul to Italian book-keeping, so attentive to detail is he. He takes a holiday on Sundays… . He goes to church… . [H]is hearty, lusty psalm-singing proves that he has a good set of lungs. In the afternoon he takes a walk in the woods. He delights in everything he sees, in the thronging humanity, the new omnibuses, the Sound—to run across him on Strandveien you would think he was a shopkeeper having his fling, such is his way of taking pleasure… . Towards evening he goes home, his step tireless as a postman's. On the way it occurs to him that his wife will surely have some special little warm dish for his return, for example roast head of lamb with vegetables. If he were to meet a kindred spirit, he would continue as far as Osterport so as to converse with him about this dish with a passion befitting a restaurateur… . [T]o see him eat it would be a sight for superior people to envy and for plain folk to be inspired by, for his appetite is greater than Esau's…. On the road he passes a building-site and meets another man. They talk together for a moment, he has a building raised in a jiffy, having all that's needed for that. The stranger leaves him thinking: “That must have been a capitalist,” while my admirable knight thinks: “Yes, if it came to that I could surely manage it.” He takes his ease at an open window and looks down on the square where he lives, at everything that goes on—a rat slipping under a board over the gutter, the children at play—with the composure befitting a sixteen-year-old girl… . He smokes a pipe in the evening: to see him you would swear it was the cheesemonger opposite vegetating in the dusk. Carefree as a devil-may-care-good-for-nothing, he hasn't a worry in the world, and yet he purchases every moment that he lives, “redeeming the seasonable time” at the dearest price… . He drains in infinite resignation the deep sorrow of existence, he knows the bliss of infinity, he has felt the pain of renouncing everything, whatever is most precious in the world, and yet to him finitude tastes just as good as to one who has never known anything higher, for his remaining in the finite bore no trace of a stunted, anxious training, and still he has this sense of being secure to take pleasure in it, as though it were the most certain thing of all…. He resigned everything infinitely, and then took everything back…. He is continually making the movement of infinity, but he makes it with such accuracy and poise that he is continually getting finitude out of it, and not for a second would one suspect anything else.Footnote 39
This extraordinary passage illustrates in lyrical prose and homey detail that the religious individual is completely at ease in finitude. While the ethical life leaves one at odds with finitude, religious life involves a double movement that brings a new immediacy. On the basis of his God-relationship, the faithful individual lives in harmony with finitude. His “opposition to existence expresses itself every instant as the most beautiful and safest harmony.”Footnote 40 Kierkegaard emphasizes the “pleasure” of this new immediacy (despite the inward suffering definitive of the religious life) and portrays the knight of faith as a consumer of finitude, enjoying its “taste.” His existence is indistinguishable from the individual who never left the first immediacy. He resembles the “wordly person,” the person “who has never known anything higher” than finitude. His hidden inwardness prevents, furthermore, any sort of dramatic external conflict with the established social, ecclesiastical and political order. This knight of faith participates in the life of his church and could be a capitalist, “if it came to that.”
Kierkegaard and the Double Danger
In the second period of his authorship, Kierkegaard paints a very different picture of developed religious existence. Anti-Climacus, the pseudonymous author of Practice in Christianity (1848) disparages the idea of hidden inwardness. He charges that this ideal of indistinguishability between immediacy and Christian faith encourages self-deception about having made the double movement when in fact one has made neither movement. He insists that Christianity requires both renunciation of the finite and persecution or martyrdom for one's commitment. Anti-Climacus replaces the pleasure of the new immediacy with the suffering of martyrdom. “There stands Christianity with its requirements for self-denial: Deny yourself—and then suffer because you deny yourself.”Footnote 41 Whereas for Climacus and Silentio religious suffering is an entirely inward matter arising out of one's relationship to oneself and to God, Anti-Climacus supplements this purely inward suffering with suffering that stems from one's outward relationship to the established order. These two sources of suffering constitute a “double danger” afflicting the Christian.
Hidden inwardness eliminates the possibility of the dramatic conflict with the established order. It safeguards one against the danger of persecution. “The next danger, which appears through denying oneself and renouncing the things of this world in earnest, according to Christianity's requirement, people have also wanted to abolish by wanting to shift the Christian life into hidden inwardness, so that concealed there, it would not be discernible in life.”Footnote 42 Christian commitment cannot remain hidden because “truly to be a Christian is to mean, in the world, to human eyes, to be the abased one. … [I]t is to mean suffering every possible evil, every mockery and insult, and finally to be punished as a criminal!”Footnote 43 The whole of a human life on earth, Anti-Climacus claims, amounts to a “test” of one's commitment to the absolute. The willingness to sacrifice one's whole life expresses one's dedication to the absolute. Anti-Climacus's view of the Christian's bearing in finitude more resembles the “stunted anxious training” that Silentio contrasts to the new immediacy than it does the bearing of the knight of faith.
Anti-Climacus only relents from this uncompromisingly dour picture of Christianity in a section entitled “The Moral” which appears at the end of the first part of Practice in Christianity. Here he acknowledges a less demanding, but nevertheless legitimate, relationship to Christianity. If the individual will but concede the pertinence of the Christian ideal and honestly admit to God his failure with respect to that ideal, he can worthily accept God's grace. Having humbled himself before God, the individual can enjoy the delights of finitude.
“And what does all this mean?” It means that each individual in quiet inwardness before God is to humble himself under what it means in the strictest sense to be a Christian, is to confess honestly before God where he is so that he still might worthily accept the grace that is offered to every imperfect person—that is, to everyone. And then nothing further; then, as for the rest, let him do his work and rejoice in it, love his wife and rejoice in her, joyfully bring up his children, love his fellow beings, rejoice in life.Footnote 44
Anti-Climacus tempers his severe account of Christian commitment by allowing for an accommodation achieved through a humble confession of inadequacy. Although the emphases of Practice in Christianity are very different from those of Fear and Trembling, in this passage one finds a distinct echo of the new immediacy. The individual must abandon prideful self-sufficiency, humbly submit to God, and passively defer to God's action (grace). Then, and only then, can the individual rightly enjoy the fruits of finitude. A preface preceding each of the three sections of Practice in Christianity, signed by Kierkegaard, concurs on the importance of the ideal Christian requirement, confession, and grace.
In his autobiographical On My Work as an Author, Kierkegaard asserts that he intended Practice in Christianity “as an attempt to find, ideally, a basis for an established order.”Footnote 45 In this context the “established order” means Christendom for Kierkegaard. In a later essay composed to coincide with the publication of Practice in Christianity's second edition (1855), Kierkegaard elaborates on his original intentions.
My earlier thought was: if the established order can be defended, this is the only way to do it: by poetically (therefore by a pseudonym) passing judgment on it, by then drawing on grace in the second power, Christianity would become not only finding forgiveness for the past by grace, but by grace a kind of indulgence from the actual imitation of Christ and the actual strenuousness of being Christian. In this way truth still manages to come into the established order; it defends itself by judging itself…. In my opinion this was the only way Christianly to defend the established order.Footnote 46
By honestly facing up to its hypocrisy and self-deception concerning Christianity, the established order could acquire legitimacy through God's grace. In the same way that an individual can humbly confess his or her inadequacy with respect to the ideal Christian requirement, Kierkegaard hoped Bishop Mynster, Primate of Denmark, would make the admission on behalf of Christendom. Ultimately, Mynster disappointed Kierkegaard.
If there was power in him [“the old bishop”], he would have to do one of two things: either decisively declare himself for the book, venture to go along with it, let it be the defense that wards off what the book poetically contains, the charge against the whole official Christianity that it is an optical illusion “not worth a pickled herring,” or as decisively as possible throw himself against it, stamp it as a blasphemous and profane attempt, and declare the official Christianity to be the true Christianity. He did neither of the two, he did nothing; he only wounded himself on the book; and to me it became clear that he was powerless.Footnote 47
In Kierkegaard's eyes Mynster proved incapable of either making the humble admission and legitimating the established order through God's grace, or challenging Kierkegaard's conception of the ideal Christian requirement. By 1854 Kierkegaard began publicly derogating the now deceased bishop's character as weak and worldly.
When Kierkegaard published the second edition of Practice in Christianity in 1855, he decided to revoke the more lenient version of Christianity. Likewise, he foreclosed the possibility of legitimacy for the established order. Although he republished Practice in Christianity in the same form as the first edition, he announced that if he were at that time publishing it for the first time, he would publish it under his own name and without the mitigating “The Moral” and prefaces. “Now, however, I have completely made up my mind on two things: both that the established order is Christianly indefensible, that every day it lasts it is Christianly a crime; and that in this way one does not have the right to draw on grace.” Having removed the prefaces and “The Moral,” “Practice in Christianity is, Christianly, an attack upon the established order.”Footnote 48 Reconceiving Practice in Christianity, he enlisted it in what by now had become an unrestrained war with Christendom. At this late moment in Kierkegaard's life, he urged a boycott of the established church and worked for its dissolution. By removing the prefaces and “The Moral,” moreover, all traces of the new immediacy disappear from Kierkegaard's conception of Christianity.Footnote 49 Christianity becomes unremitting heterogeneity with finitude.
Kierkegaard, Rebounding Violence, and Theories of the Body and Society
Bloch's theory clarifies the relationship between Kierkegaard's attacks on the established order and the eclipse of the new immediacy in his later work. While it is no doubt true that the change in Kierkegaard's attitude with respect to Christendom would naturally lead one to expect that he would come to believe that the religious individual could not live harmoniously in the established order, Bloch's theory creates a frame that marshals the details of Kierkegaard's views in an illuminating way.
Throughout his authorship Kierkegaard questioned the legitimacy of the established order. The discounting of Christianity in Christendom threatened, to his mind, the very basis for the established order. In the first period of his authorship, Kierkegaard attempted renewal of the established order. As late as 1850, he writes retrospectively in On My Work as an Author that,
With regard to an ‘established order,’ I have consistently…always done the very opposite of attacking. I have never been or been along with the “opposition” that wants to do away with “government” but have always provided what is called a corrective, which for God's sake wishes that there might be governing by those who are officially appointed and called, that fearing God they might stand firm, willing only one thing—the good.Footnote 50
This passage continues with his claim I cited previously that Practice in Christianity is “an attempt to find, ideally, a basis for an established order.” The established order requires a legitimating “corrective,” Kierkegaard explains, because it has forsaken “the unconditional” in favor of “secular sagacity.” In a passage deleted from the final draft, Kierkegaard elaborates:
What it means to govern, to rule, to be a teacher in obedience to God, in fear and trembling before the responsibility of eternity, is more or less forgotten, and instead governing is done more or less in the fear of people and with secular sagacity…. It is more or less forgotten that all governing, especially in the ecclesiastical sphere, is from God, that to govern is to be obedient to God, and not a matter of summarily identifying with being a public official, and perhaps, as such immediately tyrannizing if one sees one's chance, or, if the wind turns, haggling and bargaining and pretending to be sagacious—this is more or less forgotten, and therefore we more and more miss out on what is still the greatest blessing for us human beings: a God-fearing government that by fearing God is sufficiently strong and powerful not to fear people.Footnote 51
To govern without relating oneself to that which stands unconditionally firm is like sailing without ballast or sewing without fastening the end of one's thread. Kierkegaard's “corrective” consists in the reminder that each and every individual “must personally relate himself to the unconditional,” or, in other words, the reintroduction of Christianity into Christendom.Footnote 52
In his own terms, Kierkegaard sought in this first period to reintroduce Christianity into Christendom. In Bloch's terms, he sought to relegitimate existing social and political institutions through the idiom of rebounding violence. If the mechanism of rebounding violence serves to legitimate the sociopolitical order, the failure of Christendom to require even the first violence imperils the legitimacy of the established order. The glib, ersatz Christianity of Christendom obviates submission to the transcendental, thereby thwarting rebounding violence before it even begins. The established order loses its grounding in something that transcends “the haggling and bargaining and pretending to be sagacious” of transient mortals. Kierkegaard's works in this earlier period aim to renovate the foundation of rebounding violence that grounds the established order.
Kierkegaard conceived of persons as, in Bloch's language, “dichotemised” between a superior transcendental “moral” element and a “chaotic” mundane, temporal element. A self, Kierkegaard explains, consists of the eternal and the finite in tension with one another. He terms human existence a “prodigious contradiction.”Footnote 53 A self must synthesize these opposed elements by enacting eternal ethical values in temporal existence. It must bring order to transitory impulses and inclinations by subordinating them to the eternal law. Throughout his corpus Kierkegaard figures the process of forging a self in terms appropriate to the first stage of rebounding violence. Bloch points out that rebounding violence begins with an inversion of the basic conception of life's biological processes: Weakening and death leads to successful existence. This successful existence, moreover, consists in joining something permanent, something life-transcending. In the first stage of rebounding violence one willingly surrenders one's vitality to conquest by the transcendental. Exemplifying the pattern, Kierkegaard describes successful existence as requiring a voluntary death. To achieve genuine selfhood one must die to immediacy and resign oneself to the finite. Ultimately, this project requires “self-annihilation.” Kierkegaard describes the annihilated self in terms that suggest conquest by the transcendental. He employs the language of spirit possession: The absolute “consumes” the individual; it holds the individual “captive;” it makes the individual “ill.” The consequence of annihilation, moreover, is the achievement of a kind of life-transcending permanence: eternal life.
Bloch argues, of course, that a second stage of rebounding violence is necessary if the first violence is to have any significance for legitimating sociopolitical life. The transcendentalized must appropriate new vitality. Bloch generally emphasizes the language, symbolism, and actuality of violent conquest, but, as he makes clear, the consumption of animals and the taking of women in marriage can also figure the second, rebounding movement. In fact, the symbolism of incorporation, “often literally through the mouth,” is most essential to convey the appropriation of new vitality.Footnote 54 The transcendentalized person feeds on vitality, but, crucially, does not revert to his or her erstwhile chaotic condition. He or she masters the temporal. This description applies remarkably well to Silentio's description of the contemporary knight of faith. The knight of faith has annihilated himself and has been “consumed” by the absolute. With respect to existence in finitude, however, this knight of faith is, in Bloch's words, “a changed person, a permanently transcendental person who can therefore dominate the here and now.”Footnote 55 The knight of faith enacts a form of rebounding violence, or, more precisely perhaps (because unlike Abraham he is not especially violent), he enacts a rebounding consumption. He consumes finitude and savors its “taste.” He takes “pleasure” in existence and with hearty appetite relishes his roast head of lamb. His stance is “vigorous” and his existence in finitude displays no awkwardness. Elsewhere (and in his own life) Kierkegaard associates marriage with faith.Footnote 56
The new immediacy that Kierkegaard describes in this period serves as an instance of rebounding violence. In the first violence the absolute conquers an individual. In the new immediacy the conquered individual dominates finitude. This double movement serves as Kierkegaard's call for a sociopolitical order grounded in eternal authority, which transcends temporal relativities. In this first period of his authorship, Kierkegaard exploits the idiom of rebounding violence in his campaign to relegitimize the established order.
Because Christendom doesn't require true submission to God, Kierkegaard emphasizes the extraordinary demands Christianity makes on the individual. As his frustration with the established order intensifies, suffering comes to figure more and more prominently in his discussions of Christianity. In Concluding Unscientific Postscript, he insists that suffering is definitive of religious existence. His emphasis on suffering and the extraordinary demands of Christianity become even more extreme in the first edition of Practice in Christianity. Conversely, only a faint echo of the new immediacy appears in the first edition of Practice in Christianity, as Kierkegaard relegates it to a few marginal mentions. Over time the emphasis in Kierkegaard's writings on the first violence grows at the expense of the rebounding violence.
Kierkegaard's journals reveal that the tumultuous events of 1848 mark a decisive turning point in his attitude toward Christendom. The comportment of the authorities throughout Europe during these upheavals and the ridicule Kierkegaard personally endured for his authorship convinced Kierkegaard he could no longer work to renew the established order.
Then I was horrified to see what was understood by a Christian state (this I saw especially in 1848); I saw how the ones who were supposed to rule, both in Church and state, hid themselves like cowards while barbarism boldly and brazenly raged; and I experienced how a truly unselfish and God-fearing endeavor (and my endeavor as an author was that) is rewarded in the Christian state.Footnote 57… But if what one sees all over Europe is Christendom, a Christian state, then I propose to start here in Denmark to list the price for being a Christian in such a way that the whole concept—state Church, official appointments, livelihood—bursts open.Footnote 58
If 1848 represents the turning point in Kierkegaard's thought, the transition took years to complete. Despite this resolution to explode the ecclesiastical established order, Kierkegaard continued (in the equivocal guise of a defense of the established order) to solicit Bishop Mynster's humble confession of the established church's failure to live up to the requirements of ideality. Only after Mynster's death in 1854 did Kierkegaard begin his unrestrained attacks upon Christendom.
In the first period of Kierkegaard's authorship, the new immediacy represents a form of rebounding violence that invests the established order with transcendent authority. As Kierkegaard came to want to withhold transcendent authority from an established order he now viewed as unredeemable, as he came to want to destroy rather than relegitimize the established order, the new immediacy drops out of Kierkegaard's thought altogether. In this later period Kierkegaard's thought structurally resembles millenarianism as Bloch analyzes it. Like a millenarian, Kierkegaard became disillusioned with the political and religious leadership, which he felt abandoned the transcendental righteousness in the service of which he wrote. In Kierkegaard's eyes, not only did the political leaders in 1848 fear people and not God, Bishop Mynster continually failed to ground the church in the unconditional. As Kierkegaard saw it, Mynster's accommodating cultural Christianity “distilled Christianity out of the country.”Footnote 59 Despite personal affection for him and respect for him as his father's pastor, Kierkegaard viewed the bishop's official conduct as craven and pandering. Mynster, he concluded, was “a false bill of exchange,” whose “proclamation of Christianity and Church leadership … were high treason against Christianity.”Footnote 60 At this point when Kierkegaard had come to see Christendom as Christianly a crime, he refuses to sanction even the most attenuated echo of the new immediacy, and the final vestiges of rebounding violence disappear from Kierkegaard's thought. Christianity becomes essentially otherworldly; it becomes flight to the transcendental with no intended reimmersion in the rhythms of the world.
The eclipse of the new immediacy in Kierkegaard's later thought represents a constituent part of his attack on the established order. At the end of his life, Kierkegaard, in Bruce Kirmmse's words:
called for nothing less than the total dismantling of the traditional aristocratic-conservative synthesis known as “Christendom” or “Christian culture,” which was the time-honored and comfortable marriage of the horizontal element of traditional society and the “vertical” element of religious transcendence, a synthesis in which religion had served as the guarantor of social stability, “moral values,” and personal significance.Footnote 61
In this last period Kierkegaard exploited the idiom of rebounding violence to divest the “horizontal element” of its “vertical” guarantor. According to the logic of rebounding violence, for the transcendentalized to refuse vitality and the domination of finitude represents a protest against social and political institutions, a subversive denial of their legitimacy. By eliminating the new immediacy and portraying true Christianity as heterogeneity with finitude, Kierkegaard works to subvert the established order. He seeks to sever the perceived bonds between transcendental authority and the existing social and political structures. Applying Bloch's thesis to Kierkegaard's corpus highlights how the eclipse of the new immediacy in Kierkegaard's later writings—the double danger coming to replace the double movement, so to speak—is not incidental, but integral to the evolution of Kierkegaard's sociopolitical polemic.
Kirmmse's Kierkegaard in Golden Age Denmark has done much to dispel the received image of Kierkegaard as an apolitical thinker. By contrast Richard Rorty's repeated offhand juxtaposition of Kierkegaard, whom he views as an apostle of private inwardness and self-perfection, with thinkers like Mill or Rawls, who advance public projects, perpetuates the image.Footnote 62 While Kierkegaard did, of course, promote inwardness and self-perfection, he consistently viewed these pursuits as foundational for public affairs. The theory of rebounding violence helps to reveal the extent to which and the mechanisms by which Kierkegaard's call for personal edification underwrote a public project. By identifying some of the less obvious relationships between religious and political authority, relationships present in theology as well as in ritual, Bloch's theory demonstrates its usefulness in the study of modern texts, like those of Kierkegaard.
If the application of Bloch's theory to Kierkegaard's corpus highlights significant but easily overlooked themes in Kierkegaard's thought, it also, conversely, challenges Bloch's rendering of his own theory. Bloch positions his theory as an alternative to those of Girard and Burkert, both of whom develop theories of religion and violence. Bloch's choice of the appellation “rebounding violence” is not adventitious. He believes that violence is intrinsic to the process he has identified, especially to the second, rebounding moment. The reason he provides to explain why violence is necessary to the rebounding moment is not, however, something on which he elaborates, nor is it, on the face of it, terribly convincing. He argues only that the rebounding moment “needs to be violent, otherwise the subordination of vitality would not be demonstrated.”Footnote 63 On the strength of this dubious claim, Bloch believes that violence against external vitality is inherent to the process, and therefore that the potential for military aggression is implicit in the ritual symbolism, and that only a people's perception of their tactical weakness vis-à-vis their neighbors prevents the development of the symbolism in a way that legitimates militarism. Because Bloch believes the potential for militarism is intrinsic to the process by which humans legitimize their social and political orders, he ends Prey into Hunter on a distinctively troubled, albeit hopeful, note. Bloch hopes we can critique ourselves and devise an alternative solution to the human politico-social predicament, a solution that does not intrinsically offer “a toe-hold to the legitimation of domination and violence.”Footnote 64 We must forestall the despairing conclusion that violence is inescapable.
Despite Bloch's characterization of his theory as a theory of religion and violence, it's not clear from Bloch's own presentation that violence, rather than consumption, is the crucial notion at work. Bloch uses the idioms of violence, conquest, and consumption alternatively throughout Prey into Hunter. By applying Bloch's theory to Kierkegaard's thought, it becomes clear that the theory is best conceived, Bloch's protestations notwithstanding, as a theory of rebounding consumption, not primarily or in the first instance as a theory of rebounding violence. Kierkegaard's bourgeois knight of faith is a consumer of finitude, but is not in any obvious or direct way violent. Attending to the bourgeois knight of faith removes the ambiguity in Bloch's account and attests that the theory's central motif is the consumption of vitality, not violence. Bloch's emphasis on the universal awareness of the biological “transformative dialectic” affirms that the operative concepts are vitality and consumption. Human cognizance of the pattern of growth and death, he claims, is predicated on the knowledge that “one species provides food for another.”Footnote 65
The biological connection, furthermore, between consumption and vitality makes consumption a more plausible source of quasi-universal meanings than violence, which lies in the eye of the beholder and which carries different meanings in different cultures. Insofar as killing is the frequent or usual concommitant of the consumption of vitality (i.e., the hunting or slaughter of animals), violence can become a secondary association of the process, but consumption is primary. Consumption need not necessarily be violent, and even when it involves killing, it need not signify violence. Even sacrifice, which might seem inherently concerned with violence, bears out this observation. That sacrifice entails the killing and dismembering of an animal prior to its consumption does not necessarily mean either that sacrifice signifies violence for those participating in it, or that it is best theorized employing violence as a second order explanatory concept.Footnote 66 Whether rebounding consumption evokes militarism and violence as secondary associations in a given context will depend on how militaristic the culture is, whether in that culture there are inferential links between vitality and violence or aggression, and so on. To recognize that consumption, and not violence, is the key to Bloch's theory, alleviates the melancholy shrouding the text because it disrupts the purported intrinsic relationship between politico-social legitimation and the potential for militarism. Rebounding consumption does not intrinsically offer a toe-hold to the legitimation of domination and violence.
To see Bloch's theory exemplified in Kierkegaard's bourgeois consumer invites a comparison of Bloch's theory with Thorstein Veblen's famous theory of the leisure class.Footnote 67 Veblen works within the same constellation of concepts as Bloch. Not unlike Bloch, who puts ritual and conquest in a causal relationship, Veblen explains “devout observances” in terms of what he calls a predatory habit of mind. Veblen's claim, moreover, that success in “exploit” serves as a sign of prepotence bears a casual resemblance to Bloch's ideas about conquest and vitality. Most evocatively, Veblen ultimately traces bourgeois consumption to the “predatory habit of life.” These similarities are admittedly superficial (and so do not necessitate extensive exposition of Veblen's ideas), but invoking Veblen's theory in this context is useful if only because of the significant difference in the conceptions of consumption at work in the two theories. The divergence from Veblen's idea of consumption accents the conception of consumption operative in Bloch's theory and suggests a frame of reference that relates the theory to a rich vein of anthropological theory. Veblen's is an economic notion of consumption far removed from its root metaphor of incorporation. By contrast, the emphasis on consumption as vivification in Bloch's theory cleaves closely to the root idea of the incorporation of food. The ingestion of comestibles keeps the body alive. The more literal conception of consumption reveals that Bloch's theory is best classed with those other theories that posit a relationship between the physical body and the social body, and that purport to show how body work does politico-social work. Bloch's theory may prove instructive about violence in some cultural circumstances, but its more fundamental contribution lies in its exploration of the ways that an ideology of the body can legitimize institutional arrangements.
Studies of this latter sort, however, often bear the legacy of functionalism and have a tendency to overlook the extent to which individuals or factions within a social group strategically deploy an ideology of the body. These studies sometimes portray the production of such an ideology as a faceless social process operating entirely behind the backs of the individual agents involved. To apply a theory like the theory of rebounding consumption to the texts of a specific modern figure from a literate culture can help correct these distortions. In Kierkegaard's case the theorist is observing neither a public ritual, nor a large-scale politico-social protest movement. Additionally, the theorist has access to a wealth of literary source material, including Kierkegaard's own journals and testimonies from his contemporaries, both of which evidence his alienation from the environing politico-social institutions and the idiosyncratic quality of his protest. With this material it is impossible to overlook the particularity of Kierkegaard's attitudes. These sources, moreover, amply display the self-consciousness with which Kierkegaard deploys an ideology of rebounding consumption in the service of a politico-social polemic. The fact that nearly ubiquitous religious conceptions (i.e., belief in some species of anthropomorphized being superintending human affairs), in conjunction with virtually unavoidable beliefs about human life, produce a “quasi-universal” ideological pattern should not blinker us to the self-conscious deployment of the ideology by individuals and groups. It is fitting that Kierkegaard, the indefatigable proponent of “the single individual,” should safeguard the importance of individual agency in social theory. Kierkegaard's exploitation of the logic of rebounding consumption should remind us that the first recourse in explaining ideology should be the agendas, beliefs, and strategies of individuals.
