Religious Wiederholung: Søren Kierkegaard and Giorgio Agamben

Article

Abstract

[In English]

The purpose of this article is to reveal the nihilistic sense of an experiential structure, which has been distinctively rooted in Western philosophical tradition. On the one hand, this hermeneutical analysis will be based on a certain conception of nihilism providing two theoretical models of nihilism – nihilism, which refers to the theory of Überwindung, and nihilism, associated to the idea of différance. On the other hand, it will be built on a certain (the so-called “onto-theological”) pretext, which might be used for recognition of the structure of repetition in Western tradition of thinking, – i. e. a text fragment from St. Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians Eph. I, 10 – the paradigmatic passage proposing this universal structure of repetition. Focused both on philosophy of Kierkegaard and Agamben, hermeneutical analysis will aim to disclose the separate invariants of such repetition as cases of explosion of the mentioned text fragment. De question is raised – what is it – the repetition? Where does its negativity lie? How does its nihilistic sense appear? How does the difference mediate in this process of revealing of negativity and nihilism? The article argues that difference, as a motion of negation representing nihilistic logic, can be treated both in formal and in realistic way. The treating of difference as real denying in Kierkegaard’s and Agamben’s thinking corresponds to the ontological rootedness of a same structure of the experience – the repetition.