Beskrivelse
On his way to Mount Moriah, Søren Kierkegaard writes in Fear and Trembling, Abraham rode “with sorrow before him”. Summoned to sacrifice his only son on the mountain, Abraham experiences a kind of future-directed sorrow which Kierkegaard also refers to as looking “the horrible” in the eye and as “grieving beforehand”. In this presentation, I home in on this affective temporality of ending which I suggest calling “prophetic noir”. At stake is the sombre mood that is evoked when the shadow of future disaster falls upon the present, as it does in the prophetic books of the Hebrew Bible. According to this catastrophic future perfect, a still living son is experienced as a son who will have been. To exist, in the emphatic sense Kierkegaard gave to that word, is to endure: to live a meaningful human life even if things are darkened by the future disaster. I claim that the presence of this understudied configuration of affective temporalities of ending in Kierkegaard’s early works contributes to making his existential thinking urgently relevant today. In a world threatened by rapidly evolving climate catastrophes, we, just like Abraham, are trying to continue living with sorrow before us. (This presentation builds on my recent book publication, Kierkegaard and Climate Catastrophe: Learning to Live on a Damaged Planet.)| Periode | 24 maj 2023 |
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| Begivenhedstitel | Not this time: Temporalities of ending, editing, and enduring |
| Begivenhedstype | Konference |
| Placering | København, Danmark |
| Grad af anerkendelse | International |