Repetition

When we begin here writing down, in some sense again, repeat, that this is a quote from Kierkegaard, it means, here, that this is a quote from Kierkegaard, signed Kierkegaard, rather than from one of his pseudonyms. Let us quote quickly from something he wrote some years later (1855), the actual quote here being from November of 1841. In 1855, in his Papers (XI B 122) he wrote: "One of my pseudonyms has written a little book called Repetition, in which he denies that there is repetition. Without being quite in disagreement with him in the deeper sense, I may well be of the opinion that there nevertheless is a repetition, yes, it is very fortunate that there is a repetition. . .." (translated by Howard and Edna Hong, in their Historial Introduction, p. xxxiv, to their translation of Kierkegaard's Writings, VI: combining the two works of ‘Fear And Trembling' and ‘Repetition', Princeton University Press, New Jersey 1983).

Our own quote, from 23rd of November 1841to give it Kierkegaard's own dating, comes from some notes he made to lectures given by Schelling, who was at that time teaching in Berlin, and Kierkegaard has traveled there from Copenhagen (translated again by the Hongs, this time from Volume II, 1989, p. 337). Quoting from the beginning it says: " It began with a repetition. One might ask: What is the immediate content of reason? Some have held it is God, that reason is Gott-Setzen. But God is surely something actual, but the first content of reason is not something actual; its content, that is, Seyn, is the opposite of actuality. ..." So at least for us sitting here in Seattle it seems that Kierkegaard could well be, first, referring to something he had heard Schelling say before, and then going into what this was that Schelling had raised before: ‘One might ask etc.' So what we thought was interesting here was that since almost all the well-known quotes on repetition comes from Constantin Constantius, who wrote the ‘little book called Repetition, in which he denied there is repetition' and likewise the quote which Deleuze will mention further below and which we will also take up again -- this quote (in the film) is then actually from Kierkegaard and not from Constantin Constantius. To some these differences might seem trifle, but to Kierkegaard it seemed important, and so we should at least try to respect that. The Hongs in their Introduction mentioned above have a good footnote in which Louis Mackey is quoted for the following: "A Kierkegaardian pseudonym is a persona, an imaginary person created for artistic purposes, not a nom de plume, a fictitious name used to protect his personal identity from the threats and embarrassments of publicity. When Kierkegaard signed his books with impossible names like Johannes de Silentio (John of Silence) and Virgilius Haufniensis (Watchman of Copenhagen), no one in the gossipy little world of Danish letters had any doubt about their origin. Nor did he mean they should; his purpose was not mystification but distance. By refusing to answer for his writing he detached them from his personality so as to let their form protect the freedom that was their theme." (Kierkegaard: A Kind of Poet, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1971, p. 247).

Next maybe we should try to establish the gist of what Constantin Constantius said, about repetition, if we also try to acknowledge that Kierkegaard and Constantius had a multiplicity of repetitions in mind, a multiplicity of meaning or categories, when it is stated, in the Papers, that repetition "is and remains a religious category". Or, if we go to one of the places that also relates to our Greek ancestry, the early pages of the book Repetition, p. 149, where Constantius says: "...When the Greeks said that all knowing is recollecting, they said that all existence, which is, has been; when one says that life is a repetition, one says: actuality, which has been, now comes into existence. If one does not have the category of recollection or of repetition, all life dissolves into an empty, meaningless noise. Recollection is the ethnical (ethniske) view of life, repetition the modern ..." And a little earlier, p. 131, the well known lines: "Repetition and recollection are the same movement, except in opposite directions, for what is recollected has been, is repeated backward, whereas genuine repetition is recollected forward." See also the Hongs, still in the Introduction, p. xx, when they write: "Now Constantius and the young man become parodies of each other: Constantius despairs of esthetic repetition because of the contingency of life, and the young man, despairing of personal repetition in relation to the ethical, obtains esthetic repetition by accident.")

So, in relation to these other stages or spheres or categories, the esthetic, the ethical, the ethnical, for Kierkegaard and Constantius repetition "is and remains a religious category." And Constantius says further that "I must constantly repeat that I say all this in connection with repetition. Repetition is the new category...." (Vol. VI, p.148), a sphere that he himself may not be able to fully accomplish, attain or realize. And here is what he says in the crucial passage which will be taken up again by Deleuze below: "...That repetition not only is for contemplation but that it is a task for freedom, that it signifies freedom itself, consciousness raised to the second power....that the true repetition is eternity..." (Papers IV B 120, 1843, cited Hong Vol. VI, p. 324).

So the film at this early point begins by situating itself, or perhaps begins to situate itself, between these different senses of repetition. To add to the spectrum of possibilities we should probably at this point also mention that for Kierkegaard the Danish word Gjentagelse means both ‘repetition' and a ‘re-taking' or a ‘taking back' also in the sense of taking something back again, being given something back again (like Abraham getting Isaac back after Abraham's obedience to God, God's voice, in acting to sacrifice his young son, in Fear And Trembling.)

This large field of meanings, then, from maybe the more everyday or general term used in the shorthand notes relating to Schelling's lecture, over the esthetic and ethical existence-spheres, the ethnic recollective ways of the old Greeks, the conformities of religiousness A, to the demands of religiousness B. Would it be possible, we could ask, to remain within all these, in their midst: in an in-between? In an approach, still existential, where this discursiveness would not pertain so sharply? Where the approach, still existential, would actually be working on easing the dichotomies of these divides, less entangled in the forward or the backward, the ethnic or otherwise? Posed maybe another way: would it be possible, today, to raise one's consciousness to ‘the second power', in that kind of open-ended intensity, through other ways (than deeply Christian)?

Returning repetition. Repetition and eternal return, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. "In all their work, movement is at issue," says Gilles Deleuze below. "They want to put metaphysics in motion, in action." And we will have the final lines under this Kierkegaard heading stretch out around this Deleuze quote, from his Difference & Repetition (translated by Paul Patton, New York 1994: Columbia University Press, p. 8): "When Kierkegaard speaks of repetition as the second power of consciousness, ‘second' means not a second time but the infinite which belongs to a single time, the eternity which belongs to an instant, the unconscious which belongs to consciousness, the ‘nth' power. And when Nietzsche presents the eternal return as the immediate expression of the will to power, will to power does not at all mean ‘to want power' but, on the contrary: whatever you will, carry it to the ‘nth' power – in other words, separate out the superior form by virtue of the selective operation of thought in the eternal return, by virtue of the singularity of repetition in the eternal return itself. Here, in the superior form of everything that is, we find the immediate identity of the eternal return and the Overman.

"We are not suggesting any resemblance whatsoever between Nietzsche's Dionysus and Kierkegaard's God. On the contrary, we believe that the difference is insurmountable. But this is all the more reason to ask why their coincidence concerning this fundamental objective, the theme of repetition, even though they understand this objective differently? Kierkegaard and Nietzsche are among those who bring to philosophy new means of expression.

In relation to them we speak readily of an overcoming of philosophy. Furthermore, in all their work, movement is at issue. Their objection to Hegel is that he does not go beyond false movement – in other words, the abstract logical movement of ‘mediation'. They want to put metaphysics in motion, in action. They want to make it act, and make it carry out immediate acts. It is not enough, therefore, for them to propose a new representation of movement; representation is already mediation. Rather, it is a question of producing within the work a movement capable of affecting the mind outside of all representation; it is a question of making movement itself a work, without interposition; of substituting direct signs for mediate representations; of inventing vibrations, rotations, whirlings, gravitations, dances or leaps which directly touch the mind. This is the idea of a man of the theatre, the idea of a director before his time. In this sense, something completely new begins with Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. They no longer reflect on the theatre in the Hegelian manner. Neither do they set up a philosophical theatre. They invent an incredible equivalent of theatre within philosophy, thereby founding simultaneously this theatre of the future and a new philosophy. It will be said that, at least from the point of view of theatre, there was no production: neither the profession of priest and Copenhagen around 1840, nor the break with Wagner and Bayreuth, was a favorable condition. One thing, however, is certain: when Kierkegaard speaks of ancient theatre and modern drama, the environment has already changed; we are no longer in the element of reflection."