Observations on Marx in History: Das Thrace Marx (IV)

IV.

In speaking of possession, we must also mention Kierkegaard (not Proudhon, whose names were in the opposite order), who of course wrote many works while seemingly being another person. Now, this is passed off in part as an act of self-control, but the actual writing is instead a restraint of self-control in order to write against it, or certainly apart from it, so to say that Kierkegaard was exercising self-control by restraining self-control seems fairly absurd and would cancel - as dealing with a specific problem - so as to leave merely that Kierkegaard was nothing and the spirit writing it was in complete control. Now, obviously, this is mediated, and one particular character has a name which is a parody of Georg Wilhelm, or Hegel, whom he was polemicising against, although obviously he did not count on accessibility here because the other side is more Hegelian, perhaps suggesting either that Kierkegaard wrote like a Hegelian, or that this was discarded polemical material which was found to sit better on that side, where it could be developed. Their treatment of Mozart is not, however, aesthetic, but rather detached, relative to the aesthetic material, but they get away with this because they are still praising them, although this need not mean that they like him, nonetheless it is perhaps likely that the aesthetic side would only come across as an abstraction if they weren't discussing Mozart, which feels like it might be Kierkegaard making life too easy for himself, while assuming that people of that sort would like Mozart's art just because they like Mozart's life, or in brief that they are 'existentialists' like Kierkegaard.

But obviously this makes sense, as a coherent work begins with the author writing, and only then can they begin to distance the story from themselves, before again at the ending having to make an explicit intervention to (explain themselves to Regine Olsen, who looks like Emma Roberts on a bad hair day) give the works some coherence as part of an authorship, rather than an exercise in mechanical or automatic writing. However, Kierkegaard was always clear that he did not identify with the views which are actually in his earlier works, and preliminary research or follow-up would show that. We are hence to believe that his early works are popular either because people want to spite him but nonetheless feel obligated for whatever reason to say that they like some of Kierkegaard (which would make them Marx), or that after that he just disappeared and was never heard from again, and his legacy was never revived, but his earlier works always taken in terms of some abstract initial impact. But this is subject to the Orwellian clause, namely that he's relying on these two views to popularise his work. However, what actually occurs is that people like Kierkegaard's earlier work, or they view this as a mess unrelated to his real concerns, and prefer their later works - however, people generally avoid this choice, and merely moderate this by liking some of his later works, but then disliking the rest because they're polemical, which is a lie as Fear and Trembling for instance was a polemic against Christianity, and in brief equates to saying they dislike the others because they actually only like the earlier works, which is incoherent - but they do not view him as an authorship, with a progression, but rather just some isolated phrases and views spread through time, some of which they like.

Kierkegaard explicitly guards against this interpretation, by the concept of authorship and pseudonymy. While more valid, this is still a lie, as he is either a religious author or not, either a philosophical author or not, and instead wants to write in such modes in an irreligious form, basically just out of the spur of the moment and because of a lost engagement.

However, one may also ask whom Kierkegaard wrote for, and in this you would have to look briefly at his work. One frequent answer is Regine Olsen. This is fake, but as they use it often misdirected, misplaced and malign. Firstly, though, who is Regine Olsen? Regine Olsen is ultimately a bit like a ghost who is, certainly, watching his work, but not alone, and the whole turmoil begins because of what? - he hurt her feelings. You might usually expect such a case of a broken engagement to be a problem because of, for instance, unforeseen circumstances, or the need for support, but instead it becomes apparently a matter of feelings. Hence, unspecified others - but not Regine Olsen directly - continue to channel these hurt feelings to attack him, on behalf of Regine Olsen, and he apparently leaves that situation noticing that it's actually just this seeming mechanical progression of people. His further work hence involves constantly apologising for and dealing with these hurt feelings, repeating these feelings as if to give people ammunition, and as a result Regine Olsen is ever-present, but merely as an accuser who is constantly watching in accusation, while the actual point of his work is necessarily not to write to her, for as a reader she is merely suffering, and suffering because she was and is being insulted, but this is quite detached from the works themselves, which are for some unspecified other whom is also rejected by one Regine Olsen, which Regine Olsen, of course, could not have gone through, and as such which is not a basis for her. Obviously, the analogy excludes Regine Olsen, it does not allow her in unless she is rejected by Regine Olsen as if a completely different person, which she is not. Kierkegaard's audience is merely a projection of himself as a ghoul, who may or may not be, but is pre-supposed, and hence ultimately socially neutral or passive themselves, but is nonetheless necessarily distinct from Kierkegaard himself. They would hence speak about what people are, or their existential state, but in a way less likely to shake anyone's sense of propriety, and will instead be known for their marital adventures mostly and possibly bringing this to an end. Their face would be frozen into this one progression. However, that this was just Kierkegaard's functional object, and not necessarily their actual object or hoped reader, might also be clear, and as a personal hope would instead reduce to someone in the future, probably distinct from the audience posited in the works.

Kierkegaard and Hamlet:

Hamlet also has a female who has little other point in the progression than to be a romantic character, he begins by being separated from her, implicitly however, although he himself says little about this relationship or why he was in it in the first place. In this sense, in romance, he is just your typical Romeo, with his 'family' separating him from Ophelia, him breaking this, and then being sent by a monarch, into exile, where he discovers this time that he is going to die, before returning and doing just that. We may here observe a Horatio/Mercutio - Claudius/Capulets/Gertrude/Montagues - Hamlet/(Ophelia)/Romeo/(Juliet) axis here, where the former dying means that the second live, and so on - and Mercutio's apparent death is a major cause of uproar in the play and its change of tone - such that Horatio's survival may apparently be correlated with Hamlet's end in that specific way, but was necessary in some form for the conclusion to occur, as for instance when Hamlet jumps into public contentions with Laertes, over Ophelia's dead body, and nonetheless can be seen as somewhat restrained and not abandoned because of Horatio being there as a bit of a silhouette rather than a completely-formed character, or as still, and hence Hamlet as a unit with them can always withdraw to the character who doesn't half sound like Polonius - and it must be noted how Mercutio's random decision to fight with Tybalt, which the play condemns, seemingly, but does not bother to engage with, with Mercutio not even being the passionate one, basically turns the direction of the play, in a way which is basically just random chance rather than resulting from anyone's action or anything else. This is then supposed to be taken as somehow inevitable, in the process pretending that the purpose of Mercutio's action can be summarised in terms of Romeo and Juliet's almost equally random relationship, when it is presumably not that simplistic.

Hamlet, like Kierkegaard, begins by speaking in things that can't be understood, which in this case are for both of them riddles, although Kierkegaard's are temporally mediated or clear to the audience, which might seem to undermine the point. While Hamlet references 1 Corinthians 7 in the statement that those unmarried shall stay as they are, Kierkegaard is also fond of such passages, especially later on. Both of them get into heated conflicts over splitting with Regine Olsen or Ophelia, coincidentally with their 'brother,' which become interminable. Kierkegaard signally failed to get his 'recruits' to follow along with him, and instead figured that they were conspiring against him, although to what cause he was unsure, not being certain if he was doing this in the name of true Christianity, his beliefs, his personal temperament, or what. Both Regine Olsen and Ophelia have no independent works, not only as not given a chance to speak back, but also as represented in the works, in addition to which while Ophelia is a strange character, almost Kierkegaardian in an inverted way, who Hamlet would in no wise wish to be around, as her general characterisation is of one whom is not only passive with regards to others, but absorbs what they say and merely may shriek this out at Hamlet as if deeply felt, one whom is not only influenced but possessed constantly, albeit by those around her instead of spooks, so in that sense more secularly than Kierkegaard, as indeed turns out to be the case, and likewise Regine Olsen's distress and hurt feelings amplify or otherwise merely on account of others' use, or are mostly then used by others repeatedly against Kierkegaard, making her hurt feelings merely a vessel for whatever calumny they may wish to unleash, at which point you might realise that Hamlet is faced likewise with Ophelia mostly simply following others' orders when it involves hurting or at least seeming to act against him, leaving Hamlet facing a court where almost nobody likes him, and people will spin things against him, although not accusatively so much as just speculatively or with a slightly negative twist, while any negative actions in that direction are taken explicitly, because Hamlet is still ultimately just acting upon various feelings within the context of this court as a setting. Kierkegaard and Hamlet both, of course, as they are from Denmark, also effectively reject someone whom they were engaged to in favour of other things. They do both tend to be found, when with Ophelia or everyone's favourite 'Mean Girl,' although oft confused, Regine Olsen, in intimate or symbolic situations, occasionally sending letters about things, which may occasionally address the female in mostly positive terms although we are given no real reason to like them, other than dubious victimhood, or alternatively alone and harsh towards them, or alone and observing them closely in a sort of painted scene, possibly offering something for some reason, without either really getting much further comment from them, other than perhaps apologetically.

Is it possible that, in restraining his self-control in the pseudonymous works, he was not merely subjecting these each to their own author as if possessed or negated, but in fact that the consistent carrying out of this in an authorship was also subjected to such a possession by something else entirely? Spooky, but kind of cool.

Observations on Marx in History: Das Thrace Marx (I)

I.

Marx and Engels early wrote the famed 'Manifesto of the Communist Party.' This begun its main sections in a somewhat inaccessible, idiosyncratic manner by instead focussing on the development of capitalist society, and its nature, from a mostly positive point of view, before unveiling - the reader perhaps not drawn in at this point by the excitement of capitalism portrayed in its own terms - its difficulties, and finally a movement against it. This somewhat strange mode of beginning, which goes on for some time, is found again famously in Kierkegaard's pseudonymous works, incorporating the ideologies of 'the aesthetic,' or ordered fornication, and 'the ethical,' or reactive or reactionary marriage, which he associates with Hegelian Christians and Judaism, before undermining both critically from the perspective of faith, which they were merely attempting to reach while violating it inherently and standing against it. In this, he is still, like Hegel before him - and that his 'pseudonymous' form is merely a vulgarisation of Hegel's categories is fairly obvious despite his polemic, and he is generally as you might expect better off philosophically when writing down his own thoughts rather than someone else's while in the guise of another, which a less respectable person might call stealing - overly positive about what he criticises via a pseudo-personal identification, while obviously in his recollections of Regine Olsen she fails to take on any clear symbolic purpose other than that of a character, and likewise neither 'the aesthetic' or 'the ethical' come to mean anything, again hoping that Hegel's categories will somehow anchor this by giving it sense, but one quite different and more detached.

In all of this, he falls into the trap that we may call 'GWF' Hegel, the one and only, just as Hegel perhaps subscribed overtly to Hellenicism and so on. He is unable to escape the lure of the Hegelian categories, like that of Regine Olsen before or rather after them. We shall hold off comparing them, but the Hegelian categories seemingly would compare favourably, and clearly can have more lasting impact. His later work, in journals and articles, is generally more direct, but also more extreme, generally, in the questions with which Kierkegaard was concerned. It is also worth noting that Kierkegaard and Marx begin from similar stand-points of looking at concrete human activity and the human individual, which is perhaps a half-excuse for Marx in this form if not for Kierkegaard making up abstactions whose unique human activity could be summarised as other people's, except that Kierkegaard nonetheless focusses on the human individual at least in the religious realm, responding to issues apparently raised in Denmark at the time (after divorcing from an engagement, perhaps out of basic common sense or if for whatever reason necessary nationalism, with a nominal doppelganger for 'Ophelia'), while Marx effaces this, but through this can consider the hypothetical relation of the human individual to society, and hence discuss the faults of the social system at the time, which of course did not change until that was abolished. Nonetheless, Kierkegaard's literature is as a result more living in itself, although this is confined by its focus on the religious to the poetic sphere mostly or to an inauthentic reproduction of philosophy, although some of his later polemic within a delimited region could be a highlight of the genre, and also, because of his regard for the circumstances and the opponent he was attacking, and his personal stand against this on behalf of Christianity but on their own, came across as significantly more necessary than many of Marx's attacks on other socialists, which tended to be quite minor and a implied no real nor living opposition, although there was some cynicism to this which was obscure, but promising and anticipative.