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Divine Suspense
On Kierkegaard's "Frygt og Baeven" and the Aesthetics of Suspense
By: Andreas Seland
Series: Kierkegaard Studies
300 Pages
- Hardcover
- ISBN: 9783110562651
- Published By: Walter de Gruyter GmbH
- Published: July 2018
$114.99
Andreas Seland’s Divine Suspense: On Kierkegaard's "Frygt og Bæven" and the Aesthetics of Suspense is a clear and engaging rhetorical analysis of Søren Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling. Written in 1843 under the pseudonym Johannes de Silentio, Fear and Trembling is a an examination of faith through the retelling of the biblical story of Abraham’s near sacrifice of his son, Isaac. Seland sets out to be unconventional in his mix of Anglo-American and Continental approaches, and he skillfully succeeds. Furthermore, Seland is to be applauded for his extended focus almost solely on Fear and Trembling without trying to place the work biographically in Kierkegaard’s wider authorship, pseudonymous or signed.
In the first chapter, Seland argues convincingly that suspense is conceptually and rhetorically central to Silentio's elucidation of faith in Fear and Trembling. According to the imminence theory of suspense in Seland’s analysis, faith is a suspenseful activity insofar as it unfolds over a duration of time. This time-based framework situates Seland’s argument as distinct from other analyses which foreground uncertainty as a central category of suspense. However, Seland does not reject uncertainty’s importance; he notes that it is ancillary to imminent suspense. If you already know the events of Genesis 22 quite well, how can you still be in suspense in your (or Silentio’s) reading of it? (31-32). Seland’s argument is not that the reader doesn’t know or doesn’t remember what will happen, which would mean the reader is uncertain. Rather, he contends that suspense is imminent in narrative by virtue of knowing that something is “about to happen” (author’s emphasis; 46).
Seland’s second chapter, the longest and most critically argued of his study, develops Abraham’s heroism via Silentio as constituted through narrative development. By comparing Abraham to Agamemnon, Silentio shows how the biblical patriarch breaks categorically with the ethical (and thus the universal). By breaking with ethics, universality, and therefore language, Abraham and faith are ineffable and incommunicable. In the absence of comprehensibility, what Seland terms “the problem of communicability,” Silentio seeks not to describe faith to the reader, but to mediate the reader’s aesthetic relation to faith (80).
Seland’s third chapter considers Bakhtinian dialogic imagination, a theory which emphasizes narratives’ many voices speaking to one another, through characters and through the author’s implicit dialogue with the reader (152). If faith is a narrative concept, what kind of a narrative must it be? Bakhtin’s differentiation between epic hero and novelistic hero provides Seland with the framework to describe faith in terms of first-person perspective and “pure passion” (148). According to Bakhtin, an epic hero’s action is finalized, and can therefore be understood and judged (160). Seland associates such epic heroism with Silentio’s knight of resignation. The novelistic hero, on the other hand, is “open toward future events,” which allows for suspense and a close association with Silentio’s knight of faith (160). This comparison between the knights of resignation and faith further allows Seland to clearly demonstrate the chronological and imminent dimensions of Silentio’s definition of Abraham’s faith as a “double-movement” (Seland, 52). Having established that faith is best understood as a narrative concept, Bakhtin provides a framework for Seland’s conception of “apartness” through first-person pure passion in faith.
Seland initially claims that his analysis primarily engages with Anglo-American reception of Kierkegaard’s work, yet he also explicitly departs from his Anglo-American intended context. To Seland, “Anglo-American discussion has predominantly treated [Fear and Trembling] as a philosophical work in a logocentric sense, as a work geared towards the communication of a propositional thought or logos” (4). Yet this reviewer questions Seland’s characterization of Anglo-American discussion, in addition to how far from Anglo-American philosophy Seland truly is, especially in terms of, for example, speech-act theory and performative language. Yet this reviewer questions Seland’s characterization of Anglo-American philosophy as logocentric. Seland’s own use of speech-act theory and performative language shows that Silentio’s rhetoric goes beyond the word on the page. Silentio’s indecision and uncertainty implicitly evoke the same feelings in the reader. In chapter 4, which develops the concept of the symmetry of suspense, Seland acknowledges performative indecision in Silentio’s leaving each Problema open-ended (192). A significant portion of Fear and Trembling is comprised of three Problemata, in which Silentio poses a question about the ethical or religious nature of Abraham’s action, but the question remains unanswered. Yet even beyond tacit structural elements, Silentio’s explicitly stated inability to understand Abraham is performative. As Seland writes, “Suspense comes from incompleteness” (42). Such incompleteness is further evident in Seland’s extended and convincing verdict that questions about whether or not Silentio is reliable as a narrator are largely beside the point. In terms of philosophical context, Seland’s critiques of Daniel Conway and John J. Lippitt are strengths of Divine Suspense, and his argument would be even more convincing with closer balance between wider philosophical context, immediate secondary criticism, and primary engagement with Silentio’s rhetoric.
In the book’s conclusion, Seland points to four concepts central to his analysis: imminence, apartness, pure passion, and symmetry of suspense. Judging by these four criteria, Seland succeeds in his goal of placing his analysis of faith and suspense within the fields of philosophical aesthetics and philosophy of religion. Seland’s use of Kierkegaardian quotations in the original Danish (with Seland’s own footnoted translations) is a welcome practice. This allows for original conceptual engagement, rather than mere etymological analysis.
Much like his reading of Silentio in Fear and Trembling, Seland’s Divine Suspense succeeds on both conceptual and rhetorical levels. The author’s concise argument and clearly defined structure leave no doubt in this reader’s mind as to his trajectory and progress, yet insights and imminent suspense abound. The delight in reading this book is not in uncertainty as to what Seland will argue in coming pages, but in knowing that his next insight is about to happen.
David Greder is assistant professor of religion and philosophy at Waldorf University.
David GrederDate Of Review:April 11, 2022
Andreas Seland, Oslo, Norway