The Universality of Language & The Absconded Subject: Fragments 431c, 432, & 433a

[i.] 431c

“…of course, one would argue – contrary to men like Nietzsche, those philosopher-poets strung upon their own lyres, their words the lyrics to an absurd bar-brawl’s tune – that this is not the case…Yet whatever one may think of Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms, one cannot merely write them off as ‘thought-experiments’ or some other equally trite and condescending, not to mention lazy, cliche. No. The pseudonyms present a complex dialectic within the author’s own mind. Kierkegaard’s use of pseudonymity, on this basis, is not ironic but utterly serious. Where then is irony? In the statements of those who re-present the author as merely aiming to deconstruct or pluralize what is often taken for granted. The irony lies in the fact that Kierkegaard’s multiplication of authors serves to underscore the unity of the author himself…”

[ii.] 432

“Then where is the unity of the author to be found? In the multiplication of authors who, via their interplay, reveal an absconded facilitator who, ultimately, decides and thinks and speaks – rather uniformly…Silentio’s statement regarding the universality of language has, ironically, been mistakingly understood to be an ironic indictment of language’s fragmentary nature, as well as its ineffectuality as a medium of communication. In “reality”, the universality of language points not to its denotative uniformity, but the very possibility of comprehensibility en general, irrespective of the diverse forms that it may, in the end, take…”

[iii.] 433a

“…Silentio posits the ‘leap of faith’, therefore, not as a ‘radical departure’ from the categorical realities the subject is facing, but as a temporary repositioning of the subject from the place of the collapse of one category – in Abraham’s case, the Ethical – upon itself, to a fleeting supracategory (i.e. the “religious”). The “Religious” is appropriated in the process of lingual appropriation, determining the subject’s relation to each categorical reality he faces, while never remaining tangible as its own problematic category. It is a supracategory, transcendent and yet immanent to the aesthetic and the ethical…”

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