Anxiety lingua repetition (Kierkegaard retrieves of Plato)

Langoisse de lire: cest que tout texte, si important, si plaisant et si intressant quil soit (et plus il donne limpression dtre), est vide - il nexiste pas dans le fond; il faut franchir un abme, et si lon ne saut pas, on ne comprend pas. M. Blanchot, Lcriture du dsastre, 23 I too, when I think back, feel a great anxiety [phobeisthai] as to how at my age am I to make my way across such a formidable sea of words. Plato, Parmenides, 137a Juva: Beleave filmly, beleave! J. Joyce, Finnegans Wake

Kierkegaards book on Repetition (1843), published pseudonymously under the persona of Constantin Constantius, can be characterized as a texture of hints towards repetition as something which is in a way intractable or untreatable, not-analyzable, and as such indestructible: repetition is an indestructible garment (R 132). The linguistic gesture of the text anticipates, from the very beginning, the fact that what Kierkegaard calls repetition does not let itself be approached otherwise than in an indirect manner, each time, by means of an anxious turn. The rhythm of the text is indeed marked by a series of anxious turnabouts and detours that revolve around the enigma of repetition. Within its pauses and suspensions, its moving and halting by means of abrupt oscillations, the text speaks in tongues mit mancherlei Zungen, says Hamann cited by Constantin Constantius. The narrative is then intermittently interfered by incidental philosophical considerations that speak another language, in an apparently direct manner. From Part One (containing the Report by Constantin Constantinus on his trip to Berlin: to proof whether a repetition is possible and what importance it has), to Part Two (which, apart from C.C.s Incidental Observations, is mostly constituted by epistolary texts: the letters of the Young Man to My Silent Confidant, as well as the letters from C.C. to his readers and to Mr. X., including the page of its Closed Envelope), all the fragments that compose Repetition are taint with the mood of anxiety. It is all about the tension between repetition and anxiety. This, since anxiety is the mood that brings before the possibility of repetition. It is namely anxiety about the future, repetition of what has never been. And in this sense, the counter-movement of Platonic anamnesis: if there, eternity enters backwards, in Kierkegaards repetition eternity enters forwards.

.. for repetition is a crucial expression for what recollection was to the Greeks. Just as they taught that all knowing is recollection, modern philosophy will teach that all life is a repetition. The only philosopher who had an intimation of this is Leibniz. Repetition and recollection are the same movement, except in opposite directions, for what is recollected has been, in repeated backwards, whereas genuine repetition is recollected forward. (R. 132) says Constantius at the opening page (R 131). This assertion in stylo philosophico, gives a preliminary indication on the historical significance of repetition. Constantius characterizes repetition which may orient towards language, an anxious turn. its anxious language. Anxiety is the mood that disposes in relation towards nothing. In The Concept of Anxiety, signed by Vigilius Haufniensis, whose language

Before coming back to the paradoxical approached to the problem of repetition and to the gesture of language implied by the anxious turns of the nouvelle that ports this title, Before coming back to the problem language Kierkegaards

The historical wager raised by the concept of repetition if it is one can be approached by means of a turn. This can be characterized as the turn of anxiety.

anxiety as the mood that brings before the possibility of repetition. Intro: anxiety as the mood that brings before the possibility of repetition. RetrievingPlato: a historical repetition, in which nothing less than historicity and temporality (possibility of historical time) is at stake. Procedure: hermeneutic as paradigmatic circle; paradigm as singularity and figure (persona): Adam, Socrates, Christ).

Anything that remains to be said again, allover anew about repetition would be unworthy without exposing in its attempt to say it (its dictum) the mood in which it can first be thought again, allover anew. If in fact something like repetition ever lets itself be bought to thinking, if one can ever be sure that repetition as such lets itself be said, directly, without the detour that compromises from its very departure the felicity of its act (or at least the exposibility of of saying it), of meaning what is said, of ever reaching what the magic finger of language (in any language) pursues to indicate. At least for an instant a fraction or a second.

Anxiety as the mood or the disposition that brings towards the possibility of repetition more precisely, towards the possibility of choosing repetition which is, it may be said, an impossible and unavoidable election, since repetition is nothing but a name for the nameless the event of being , a name for what gathers together being in its temporality, for an original (impossible) experience of time and being. .

The turn from which Kierkegaard speaks is at once historical, and it concerns historicity or the possibility of history as such.