Repetition

A narrator tests whether anything in life can happen twice, and a young lover looks for the answer in Job.

Danish, the original language

Original title: Gjentagelsen
First published: 1843(aged 30)
Original language: Danish

Overview

The manuscript already had an ending when, in July 1843, Søren Kierkegaard learned that Regine Olsen was engaged to Johan Frederik Schlegel. He had broken off his own engagement to her in 1841. In the version he had drafted in Berlin that May, the book's young man, who has also walked away from an engagement, kills himself. Kierkegaard cut the pages, toned down the narrator's harshest remarks about women, and wrote a new close in which the young man hears that the girl has married someone else and feels himself given back to himself. The narrator is Constantin Constantius, and his question is whether anything can happen twice. The Greeks, he says, taught that learning is recollection, a return to what the soul already knew; he offers repetition as its modern counterpart, a return that moves forward. Then he tests it. He travels back to Berlin to relive an earlier visit, with the same lodgings and the same farce at the same theatre, and finds that nothing comes again. The young man, meanwhile, has been recollecting his love almost from its first days, even with his beloved beside him; he takes refuge in the Book of Job. The book appeared on 16 October 1843, the same day as Fear and Trembling. J. L. Heiberg, the critic who had brushed off Either/Or, gave it five pages in his yearbook Urania and complained that Constantin had not told repetition in nature apart from repetition in the life of the spirit. Kierkegaard drafted a reply in Constantin's name and never sent it to print.

Key concepts

Who are Constantin Constantius and the young man?

Two invented figures in a book that is Kierkegaard's. Constantin, the narrator, is a detached observer who proposes repetition and tests it on a trip to Berlin. The young man is his confidant, who has walked away from an engagement and writes to him from his flight. The book is built as a short fiction around the two of them.

What does repetition mean as Constantin uses the word?

A return that moves forward: receiving again what one has had, so that it comes back new rather than as a copy. Constantin sets it against the Greek teaching that learning is recollection, a return to what the soul already knew. Recollection looks backward; repetition, if it exists, would make it possible to go on living a life rather than only remembering one.

Why does the Book of Job matter in Repetition?

Because it is where the young man takes refuge. Job loses everything, rejects the comforters who explain his suffering as deserved, and holds out to be answered; at the end he receives double what he lost. For the young man, Job is the one figure who suggests a person can be given back what seemed finished.

What is a venture in experimenting psychology?

The book's subtitle, and a key to its form. The psychology is experimenting because Constantin does not report cases but constructs one and watches it, as an observer sets up a trial: he stages his own return to Berlin and studies the young man as a subject. The subtitle marks the book as a fiction built to test an idea, not a treatise arguing for one.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

Can Anything Happen Twice?

The Greeks taught that learning is recollection, a return to what the soul already knew. Constantin Constantius proposes repetition as its modern counterpart, a return that moves forward, and then sets out to test it.

His test is almost comic. He travels back to Berlin to relive an earlier visit, with the same lodgings and the same farce at the same theatre, and finds that nothing comes again. The experiment fails because it treats repetition as something to be arranged from outside, the way a traveller arranges a trip, by a man who watches life rather than stakes himself in it. Whatever repetition turns out to be, it cannot be produced by a spectator. J. L. Heiberg's complaint that Constantin never separates repetition in nature from repetition in the life of the spirit points at the same gap.

repetition
memory
temporality
comedy
theater
observation
experience
imagination
irony
aesthetics
aesthetic experience

Enter a dialogue

A Love Recollected Before It Was Lived

A young man is recollecting his love almost from its first days, with his beloved beside him. Once he has walked away from the engagement, where does someone in that position look for the self he has lost?

The young man, Constantin's confidant, had turned his beloved into a memory while she was still present, and so could not stay. He takes refuge in the Book of Job, whose sufferer rejects the comforters' explanations and holds out to be answered. In the version Kierkegaard drafted in Berlin, the young man kills himself. After learning in July 1843 that Regine Olsen was engaged to Johan Frederik Schlegel, he cut those pages and wrote a new close: the young man hears that the girl has married someone else and feels himself given back to himself, which may be the only repetition the book achieves.

love
romantic love
romantic relationships
grief
guilt
melancholy
poetry
suffering
religion
faith
selfhood
freedom
deception
trust
individuality
emotion

Enter a dialogue

Within this work

passages held: 199
distinct concepts: 287
by passages held, corpus-wide: #351

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “memory” and “repetition”.

Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 18 pairings. 93 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
Concept	Paired concept	Shared passages
memory	repetition	10
love	religion	6
comedy	imagination	4
memory	romantic love	4
love	memory	3
love	repetition	3
love	suffering	3
imagination	love	2
religion	repetition	2
repetition	romantic love	2
comedy	romantic love	1
imagination	memory	1
imagination	repetition	1
imagination	suffering	1
memory	suffering	1
religion	romantic love	1
religion	suffering	1
romantic love	suffering	1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

1841 The Concept of Irony (Om Begrebet Ironi)
Defended in September 1841 — after he had returned Regine Olsen's engagement ring, before the final break with her — this academic dissertation is the last book he signed himself before the pseudonymous books began with Either/Or.
DA
1843 Either/Or (Enten – Eller)
The first of the pseudonymous books: an invented editor presenting two invented authors, whose argument Stages on Life's Way would reopen two years later.
DA
1843 Fear and Trembling (Frygt og Bæven)
Twin of Repetition, published the same October day: both books take up a man who must give up what he loves, one through Abraham and Isaac, the other through an engagement broken off.
DA
1843 Repetition (Gjentagelsen) you are here DA
1844 Philosophical Fragments (Philosophiske Smuler)
Johannes Climacus signs his first book here and returns in the far longer Postscript; in its author's lifetime this short thought experiment was little read outside Denmark.
DA
1844 The Concept of Anxiety (Begrebet Angest)
Philosophical Fragments had appeared four days earlier under another pseudonym; this is its companion, and it takes a point of church doctrine, inherited sin, and treats it as a problem in psychology.
DA
1845 Stages on Life's Way (Stadier paa Livets Vei)
Characters from Either/Or and Repetition return here, and the argument moves past the ethical into the religious.
DA
1846 Concluding Unscientific Postscript to "Philosophical Fragments" (Afsluttende uvidenskabelig Efterskrift)
He meant it to close his authorship and later called it the authorship's turning point; after it, the openly religious writing takes over.
DA
1846 Two Ages: The Age of Revolution and the Present Age. A Literary Review (En literair Anmeldelse)
After the Postscript's farewell, the first book he published was, in form, a review of a contemporary novel, and he signed it with his own name.
DA
1847 Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits (Opbyggelige Taler i forskjellig Aand)
Begun in the spring of 1846, while the satirical weekly The Corsair was still caricaturing him, it opens the run of signed religious books that fills the years after the Postscript.
DA
1847 Works of Love (Kjerlighedens Gjerninger)
Two series of deliberations, a form he set apart from the discourse because it is meant to unsettle a reader rather than console one, published six months after the Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits.
DA
1848 Christian Discourses (Christelige Taler)
The first book of 1848, the year he later called the richest of his authorship and the year he wrote The Sickness unto Death.
DA
1849 The Sickness unto Death (Sygdommen til Døden)
The first of two books signed by Anti-Climacus, with Practice in Christianity following in 1850; Kierkegaard later ranked the pair among the most important things he wrote.
DA
1849 Two Ethical-Religious Essays (Tvende ethisk-religieuse Smaa-Afhandlinger)
A slim pamphlet, the only book under the initials H.H., salvaged from a planned cycle of ethical-religious essays that he gave up in the spring of 1849.
DA
1850 Practice in Christianity (Indøvelse i Christendom)
Kierkegaard judged it the truest of all his books; with The Sickness unto Death it makes up the pair signed by Anti-Climacus.
DA
1851 For Self-Examination (Til Selvprøvelse, Samtiden anbefalet)
The last new title he published before three years of public silence, and the book whose planned second series became Judge for Yourselves!
DA
1855 The Moment (Øieblikket Nr. 1–10)
The open, signed form of the criticism that Practice in Christianity had made under a pseudonym, carried in a periodical of his own through the last months of his life.
DA
1876 Judge for Yourselves! (Dømmer selv! Til Selvprøvelse Samtiden anbefalet)
Of the books on this shelf, the only one he finished and then chose not to publish; it stands between the signed discourses of 1851 and the open attack on the church of 1854–55.
DA

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