Søren Kierkegaard

Søren Kierkegaard appears not as a character in a narrated life but as a thinker whose ideas recur across the book’s arguments about ethical action, subjectivity, consciousness, and belief. His importance lies in a cluster of distinctions: between genius and apostle, between desire and its fulfillment, and between direct belief and the act of believing through a practice. These distinctions give the book a way to describe a subject who is not simply an individual with private qualities, but someone constituted through a relation to a truth or commitment that exceeds the self.

Genius, Apostle, and the Subject

The book draws on Kierkegaard’s short text On the Difference between Genius and Apostle to separate two kinds of authority. A genius articulates what is in the person beyond the person: a spiritual substance or capacity that can be expressed as an individual’s distinctive achievement. An apostle, by contrast, matters not because of personal gifts or inner characteristics, but because the apostle has been chosen to bear witness to an impersonal truth. The role is formal: the messenger’s private qualities are incidental to the message carried.

The distinction helps explain why the subject of the unconscious is presented as apostolic in structure. The book links Kierkegaard’s account to Jacques Lacan’s subject of the signifier: like a diplomat whose cough at a conference might be read as a message from the diplomat’s country, the subject functions as a bearer of meaning that cannot be reduced to personal intention. The subject does not own the truth as a private possession. Rather, the subject’s significance comes from occupying the position through which an impersonal truth is articulated.

This framework also clarifies the book’s account of hysteria. In hysterical conversion, physical symptoms make the body a medium on which unconscious truth is inscribed. The body is not treated as a transparent expression of individual choice; it is taken over as a surface that bears a truth not consciously mastered by the person. The book reads this as another version of the apostolic structure: the body’s immediate reality is suspended as the truth speaks through it.

The same account shapes the ethical subject. The transition from ego to subject is described as a relinquishing of the individual’s wealth of personal identity in favor of an empty, formal position from which truth can be served. Ethical life then consists not in expressing an authentic inner self, but in accepting the ongoing task of bearing witness. Kierkegaard’s example of Christ makes the point starkly: the difference between Christ and an ordinary theology student does not lie in the profundity of the statements alone, but in the position from which they are spoken. Authority depends on the relation to truth, not on a speaker’s personal distinction.

Ethical Choice and the Rejection of Desire’s Delay

Kierkegaard also supplies a frame for reading The Wings of the Dove. The book disputes the idea that ethical desire must preserve itself by endlessly postponing satisfaction. If desire is understood as wanting to remain desire, then continued deferral can appear virtuous; the alternative raised is whether an ethical act might instead require traversing the fantasy that sustains that deferral.

In this reading, Milly Theale’s sacrifice is not automatically vindicated as ethical simply because it takes the form of generosity. Merton Densher’s response is likewise placed under suspicion. He refuses Milly’s money and burns the letter containing her bequest, gestures that might look like moral growth. But the book reads them as false ethical gestures: Densher’s refusal can preserve the fantasy around Milly rather than break from it. Kate Croy recognizes the contradiction. Densher’s refusal of the money can itself attest his fidelity to the terms of Milly’s fantasy, even while appearing to reject them.

Kate’s departure from Densher is therefore identified as the novel’s genuinely ethical act, and as a Kierkegaardian moment in which the ethical itself becomes a temptation. She refuses to marry him under conditions shaped by his relationship to Milly’s gift and fantasy. The choice is not simply a rejection of money, nor a reward for self-denial. It breaks with the arrangement that would allow Densher to treat refusal as proof of moral purity. Kierkegaard’s relevance here is not a ready-made rule about what one must do, but a way of exposing how an apparently ethical choice can remain captive to the desire it claims to renounce.

Mind as an Event in Becoming

Kierkegaard’s language also informs the book’s discussion of consciousness. The question of whether another person is conscious cannot, the argument suggests, be settled by objective criteria that distinguish a human being from a perfectly behaving zombie. The emergence of thought is considered in Badiou’s terms as a possible Event: a break whose significance can be grasped only from within the standpoint of a conscious subject.

Kierkegaard’s idea of mind-in-becoming shifts attention away from a completed mind set against bodily reality. What matters is the process by which mind is for the body, including the break through which this relation emerges. Consciousness is thus not presented as an already finished object that an observer can inspect from outside. Its appearance has the structure of a transition, or vanishing mediator, rather than a stable thing available for neutral measurement.

That limit on knowledge is not merely a technical problem. If another person’s mind could be known completely and made transparent, that person would cease to appear as a subject and become, from the observer’s perspective, a machine. Opacity is therefore part of what it means to acknowledge another person as having a mind. The book uses Kierkegaard to emphasize becoming and the internal standpoint of thought, not to offer a test that could settle consciousness from the outside.

Belief, Practice, and the Other

A further use of Kierkegaard concerns the reflexive structure of belief. The book invokes his claim that people do not simply believe in Christ directly; they believe in believing. Faith is not depicted as a plain mental possession that a person either has or lacks. It involves a relation to belief itself, including the possibility of maintaining distance from what would otherwise be an oppressive immediacy.

Niels Bohr’s horseshoe provides a concrete illustration. A visitor expresses surprise at finding it on Bohr’s door despite Bohr’s lack of belief in the superstition. Bohr explains that he keeps it because he was told it works even for someone who does not believe. The exchange exposes belief as reflexive: the practice can be sustained through a belief attributed to another, even when the person performing it disavows belief personally.

The book develops the same paradox through ritual. Kneeling and praying can be understood not only as ways to acquire belief, but as actions that objectify it and transfer it onto an Other. Instead of bearing belief in an unmediated and burdensome form, the person performs a practice through which belief exists outside the self. Kierkegaard’s account helps make sense of this distance: faith is bound up with how belief is enacted and mediated, not just with an inward conviction stated as a fact.

The Neighbor and the Limits of Tolerance

Kierkegaard’s phrase about the good neighbor also appears in a discussion of how contemporary politics regulates enjoyment. The book considers a proposal in some United States circles to let people authorize the use of their bodies after death, by analogy with consent for organ donation. It treats the proposal as an extreme thought experiment about the ideal neighbor for a subject seeking to avoid harassment: the dead cannot make demands or return an unwanted response.

The example is used to expose a shared disciplinary structure beneath opposing political positions. Fundamentalist efforts to regulate women’s self-presentation and liberal efforts to regulate conduct so as to prevent harassment have different aims, but both organize behavior around the management of sexual provocation and enjoyment. The argument is not that these aims are identical; it is that both can become systems of detailed regulation. Kierkegaard’s dead-neighbor formulation sharpens the paradox of a tolerance that would eliminate the other’s capacity to disturb, respond, or enjoy. Across this discussion, as in the account of faith, his work helps the book identify the concealed structure beneath an apparently straightforward ethical or political position.