Journal of the American Academy of Religion LX1I/2

Possibility and Passivity in Kierkegaard

The Anxieties of Don Giovanni and Abraham
Thomas A. Carlson
. . . for the disciple of possibility received infinity, and the soul of the other expired in the finite. -S.K.

1 HE FOLLOWING ESSAY will examine the dynamics of desire and anxiety in the figures of Don Giovanni and Abraham as they are sketched in Kierkegaard's pseudonymous writings, Either/Or and Fear and Trembling. Rather than envision Don Giovanni and Abraham as opposite extremes in a spectrum of personality types that is, the aesthetic and the religious, respectivelythe essay will focus on their central common trait: both stand in a relation of incommensurability to the universal realm of the ethical. Using insights from The Concept of Anxiety, we will elucidate the roles of desire and anxiety in such relations of incommensurability. As stylized by the pens of Victor Eremita and Johannes de Silentio, Don Giovanni and Abraham will be seen to embody desires and anxieties that occur through differing configurations of place and time. In our comparative analysis of such configurations, we will show that topicality and temporality themselves are determined through their relations to language and its limits. Such relations both condition and are conditioned by the passions of desire and anxiety. In Either/Or and Fear and Trembling, we encounter a peculiar brilliance of Kierkegaard's pseudonymous authorship, which demands that Don Giovanni and Abraham differ most there where
Thomas A. Carlson is a Ph.D. candidate in Theology at the University of Chicago, The Divinity School, 1025 E. 58th Street, Chicago, IL 60637.

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their similarities prove greatest. These points of differing-similarity center precisely around the dynamics of desire and anxiety. Thus, our distinctions between these figures of the aesthetic and the religious will be only as strong as, on the one hand, our demarcation of their similarities and, on the other hand, our analyses of desire and anxiety. In this essay, we seek to draw out those similarities in order to free the play of such difference and, thereby, to define more clearly the multiple roles of desire and anxiety in spiritual existence. As their names suggest, Eremita and de Silentio meditate upon the desolate, the solitary, the secret, and the silent. In fascination and horror, each is transfixed before a figure who eludes the mediation of language, who defies the ethical demand for disclosure of the inward, and who resists translation of the individual into the universal. While Don Giovanni and Abraham equally defy the reflective realm of the ethical, they do so along two different angles. Nevertheless, these different relations of incommensurability occur in conjunction with a common anxiety: Don Giovanni and Abraham alike suffer the infinity of freedom's possibility, the anxiety of being able. In our analysis, such possibility will be seen as radical: its essence is not to exhaust itself in the passage to actuality, but rather to remain ever possible. This redoubled possibilitythe possibility of possibility itselfinsinuates the "object" of anxiety. The object of anxiety, as opposed to that of fear, cannot be fixed or defined. Strictly speaking, it remains infinite; it marks a "nothing" that by definition cannot be secured or tied down. At the same time, the object of anxiety is integral to spiritual existence as such, and it signals the irreducible restlessness thereof. Undoing ties of security, such a nothing creates a double-bind: it hollows the space of desire within which one cannot restfully dwell and out of which one cannot fully pass. The desires of Don Giovanni and of Abraham are passionate: they engender suffering and attest a fundamental passivity that indwells every power. The finite object of Don Giovanni's desire the seduction of womendemands infinite repetition. Infinitely multiplying the objects of his desire, Don Giovanni finally attests his fundamental failure to secure those objects. Don Giovanni's desire is disordered to the extent that he infinitely desires the finite. By contrast, Abraham finitely desires the infinite. His desire issues in the concrete relation of himself, a finite individual, to the

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infinite or the absolute. Within a timeless temporality of abstract freedom, Don Giovanni desires infinitely; within the concrete time of historical freedom, Abraham desires the infinite. Don Giovanni loses the present by grasping frantically ad infinitum; Abraham gains die infinite by sacrificing it in die present. Through Eremita, the aesdiete presents Don Giovanni as the force or principle of the sensuous, while de Silentio sees Abraham as a concrete individual in the most extreme of spiritual relationships. Nevertheless, the observers of these figures stand in a similar relation to their respective subjectsnamely, at a distance. Each merely oudines diat which he cannot approach direcdy. Eremita finds himself at a double remove from Don Giovanni in that he merely edits die papers of the aesdiete, who himself can only approach, but not enter into, die incomprehensible, immediate musical-erotic power of Don Giovanni. The aesdiete's relation to Don Giovanni is a borderline case. "The kingdom diat I know," he writes, "to whose outermost boundary I shall go to discover music, is language" (EO:66). At die tension-charged border between music and language, the aesthete comes up against a limit at which the linguistic capacity for reflection fails. This failure marks the excessive dynamic of musical-erotic power: die power of immediacy is constituted only in and through its exclusion from the articulated structure of language. The aesthete's diought is lyrical diought, "which is so ecstatic that it goes beyond thought" (EO:59). Borderline case that it is, the aesthete's fascination with Mozart's Don Giovanni drives the aesthete to the brink of madness: Immortal Mozart! You to whom I owe everythingto whom I owe that I lost my mind, that my soul was astounded, diat I was terrified at the core of my beingyou to whom I owe that I did not go through life without encountering something that could shake me, you whom I thank because I did not die without having loved, even though my love was unhappy. (EO:49; my stress) The aesdiete is captivated by that which horrifies him. The object of his obsession is die power of Don Giovannithe "somediing" that shakes him. His relation to this "somediing" evokes the curious "nothing" of anxiety. That relation carries him to the dangerous border, between "somediing" and "nothing," where anxiety issues: "Indeed, if [Don Giovanni] were taken away, if his name were blotted out, that would demolish the one pillar that until now has prevented everything from collapsing for me into a boundless

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chaos, a dreadful nothing" (EO:49; my stress). The anxiety that underlies the aesthete's lyrical thought springs from his relation to that power which is excluded from the field of language, or from the realm of mediation. Precisely because anxiety issues in a relation of exclusion, the "object" of anxiety is impossible to locate. The horror, fascination and anxiety engendered in Johannes de Silentio's relation to Abraham are no less gripping. Significantly, de Silentio approaches this singular individual, whose very existence shatters systematic thought, via a "Dialectical Lyric" the subtitle of Fear and Trembling. Luce "The Immediate Erotic Stages" in Either/Or, Fear and Trembling stages an impossible relation between language and the lyrical; die lyrical eludes language and devastates dialectical reflection. This relation, in turn, enraptures the observer and leaves him to shudder. The one who hears the story of Abraham and who craves to accompany him en route to Moriah is absorbed with "the shudder of die idea" (FT:9). As in the aesthete's ecstatic lyrical thought, in the dialectical lyric of Fear and Trembling, the quaking of the idea remains outside thought, unstable and uncontainable. The stages elaborated in the diree Problemata of Fear and Trembling approach Abraham only tangentially, by analogy, precisely in order not to comprehend him. Indeed, highlighting Abraham's incomprehensibility, diey offer the measure of a deviation: "they were described, while being demonstrated each within its own sphere, only that in their moment of deviation they could, as it were, indicate the boundary of the unknown territory" (FT: 112). Abraham eludes his observer just as Don Giovanni eludes the aesthete. From within the language of thought, one can only (fail to) speak the boundary, margin or limit where Don Giovanni and Abraham deviate from speech and conceptualization. As noted above, Don Giovanni and Abraham both suffer the anxiety of the possibility of being able. Our interpretation of such anxiety is grounded upon two simple observations whose significance will unfold in what follows. First, contrary to what the casual glance might discern, for Don Giovanni, incarnation of the sensuous principle itself, the sexual relation does not take place. This fact indicates what might be termed die impossibility of die possible. The objects of Don Giovanni's desire are multiplied infinitely: in die measure that he finds each and every woman desirable, he sees all as possible. However, to die extent diat relation by definition must concretize and finitize itself, such an infinite exten-

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sion of the possible defers any actual relation. This observation will call for contextual definitions of relation and place, and it will require that we show in what way Don Giovanni's temporality, topicality, and language disallow any concrete relation. Secondly, concerning Abraham: on Mount Moriah, the cut does not take place. This observation points to what might be called the possibility of the impossible. The impossibility that Abrahm might at one and the same time sacrifice Isaac and receive him back becomes possible. The impossibility of Abraham's desire becomes possible in and through his absolute relation to the absolute. This observation will demand attention to the temporality, topicality, and language of Abraham and an elaboration of how these are tied to his absolute relation widi the absolute. Now, for Abraham "faith is a passion (FT:67). Abraham enacts "the power to concentrate the whole substance of his life and the meaning of actuality into one single desire" (FT:42-43; my stress). Unlike Don Giovanni's desire, which is dissipated in multiplicity, the desire of Abraham is singular and decisive. His temporality is correspondingly concrete. By contrast to Don Giovanni, who flies from conquest to conquest, Abraham "only creeps along slowly" (FT: 77). These are the elements of Abraham's anxiety: the passion of faith, the singularity of desire, and the utterly concrete temporality of a lifetime's waiting, a three day walk, and the decisive moment where Abraham must draw the knife. In his sketch of Abraham, de Silentio seeks to criticize and amend the interpretation wherein "what is omitted from Abraham's story is the anxiety" (FT:28). His anxiety is not incidental to Abraham's religious experience, it is essential. Abraham's is not a faith that renders his task a light one but rather "the faith that makes it difficult for him" (FT:30). To forget his anxiety is to lose Abraham altogether. We lose him when "We do not know anything about the anxiety, the distress, the paradox" (FT:63). Only in recognizing Abraham's particular anxiety can de Silentio's outline accommodate the religious contours of Abraham's dilemmawhich is to live a contradiction. It is precisely such contradiction that characterizes spiritual existence and its essential anxiety. Those who would deny Abraham's anxiety would render him spiritless and thereby fall into ethical misunderstanding or "aesthetic flirtation with the result" (FT:63). To rush straightaway to the result of Abraham's life, to breath a sigh of relief and reiterate that one was certain all along that he

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would receive Isaac back, is precisely to bypass the process that is Abraham's life. To stress the result is to ignore the movements that are integral to Abraham's temporalitya time that is "one of anxiety, distress, and paradox" (FT:65). One cannot jump to the end without losing the concrete time within whose contradiction Abraham lives. On the road to Moriah, every step countsnot quantitatively, but qualitatively. Abraham's life embodies the paradox that the individual as individual is higher than the universal, the paradox that eternity touches time, "the paradox of existence" (FT:47). Hence the suffering: faith as passion. The passion of Abraham's singular desire springs from the contradiction between the ethical and the religious formulations of his relation to Isaac, fruit of his desire, sign of his faith. Within the ethical realm, Abraham would murder Isaac; within the religious realm he would sacrifice him. The contradiction engenders the anxiety that is essential: "without this anxiety Abraham is not who he is" (FT:30). The anxiety which the preachers forget, the anxiety of which they will not speak, is for Abraham fundamentally unspeakable. Indeed, Abraham's anxiety is largely that he cannot speak his anxiety. This redoubling of anxiety constitutes the double-bind, the paradox. To render the paradox, de Silentio seeks to elicit, indirectly, the forgotten anxiety of Abraham. He calls us to listen to the silence. The paradoxical relation of Abraham to the object of his desire is conditioned by his relation to language. The power to sacrifice Isaac is bound inextricably with the impotence to speak. "Abraham remains silentbut he cannot speak. Therein lies the distress and the anxiety. [. . .] He can say everything, but one thing he cannot say, and if he cannot say thatthat is, in such a way that the other understands itthen he is not speaking" (FT: 113). Abraham's silence utterly differentiates and isolates him. The pain of this silence consists precisely in the rending separation of the particular individual from the universal in which his speech might be received. This single individual, in absolute relation to the absolute, stands alone in the silence of his impotence, the incapacity to be mediated in the universal:
Abraham cannot be mediated; in other words, he cannot speak. As soon as I speak, I express the universal, and if I do not do so, no one can understand me. As soon as Abraham wants to express himself in the universal, he must declare that his situation is a

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spiritual trial [Anfoegtelse], for he has no higher expression of the universal that ranks above the universal he violates. (FT:60)

Before the universal, Abraham stands without appeal. Unlike Agamemnon's sacrifice of Iphigenia, Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac serves no purpose within a higher ethical teleology: "The difference between the tragic hero and Abraham is very obvious. The tragic hero is still within the ethical. He allows an expression of the ethical to have its telos in a higher expression of the ethical" (FT:59). Ethically, Abraham is not a hero but a murderer. "By his act he transgressed the ethical altogether and had a higher telos outside it, in relation to which he suspended it" (FT:59). There being no higher ethical purpose by which Abraham might justify his transgression of the universal, the murder of Isaac appears purely gratuitous. To explain himself ethically becomes for Abraham the greatest temptation. Such temptation marks the very tension of his life. And from such tension, Abraham knows no relief, for "the relief provided by speaking is that it translates me into the universal" (FT: 113). In this light, Abraham's anxiety can be seen as untranslatableor more precisely, as the dilemma of the untranslatable itself. It is not simply lack of disclosure, but the impossibility of disclosure that engenders anxiety. Abraham's life spells a cryptic text, it is "like a book under divine confiscation and never becomes publice juris [public property]" (FT:77). Abraham is radically solitary, irreducibly private. The interiority of his relation to the Absolute does not and cannot have disclosure as its greater end and consummation. Abraham does not stand as a "model" of faith that enthusiastic observers might seek to follow. Much rather, he indicates that each and every movement of faith can be undertaken only by the particular individual as particular. In tracing the parallels and divergences between the anxieties of Abraham and of Don Giovanni, one must juxtapose two different forms of inwardness. While Abraham suffers the passion of being unable to speak, Don Giovanni cannot speak the passion he suffers. The "total infinitude of passion" (EO:107) in Don Giovanni cannot be heard as articulate speech, but only immediately in music, the sole medium adequate to the power of sensuousness. Immediate by definition, Don Juan's power can bear no articulation, externalization, or reflection in language. To this extent his power remains an inwardness: "Don Juan is an inner qualification and thus cannot become visible or appear in bodily configura-

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tions" (EO:106). Unlike that of Abraham, however, the inwardness of Don Juan is not the concrete inwardness of an individual, but the abstract inwardness of a power. "In its lyricism, it is a force, a wind, impatience, passion, etc." (EO:56). An impatient passion, the inwardness of Don Juan issues in the quickness of his tempo, the flight of the moment. His immediacy only comes to expression in the force of music. A passionate patience, Abraham's inwardness issues in the length of his waiting, the slowness of his walk, and the singular presence of the moment he draws the knife. His solitude comes to expression only in silence. Thus Don Giovanni and Abraham mark two inward qualifications, two temporalities of the moment, two instances of anxiety whose similarities highlight their difference. Overwhelming sound and overwhelming silence, Don Giovanni and Abraham both defy formulation in the universal language of the ethical. To this extent, they border upon the demonic. As de Silentio remarks, to come up against the paradox that cannot be mediated ethically is to come up against "the divine and the demonic, for silence is both" (FT:88). From without, silence can appear either as entrapment by the demon or as "divinity's mutual understanding with the single individual" (FT:88). The observer cannot distinguish one silence from the other. Like Abraham's silence, Don Giovanni's music can be seen as demonic, for music appears "as the art Christianity posits in excluding it from itself, as the medium for that which Christianity excludes from itself [the sensuous] and thereby posits. In other words, music is the demonic" (EO:63-64). Abraham's silence can figure as demonic in that it defies transposition within the universality of language; Don Giovanni's musical sensuousness figures as demonic because it is constituted in and through its very exclusion from the realm of spirit. The demonic in both cases indicates an ambiguous force that relates to the universal only as excluded therefrom. As the excluded, the demonic would always stand in a relation of anxiety before the universal, the ediical, the realm of spirit, the good. The anxious force of the demonic consists precisely in the tension begotten by this relation/exclusion. The ambiguity of the relation/ exclusion signals the present absence and the absent presence of anxiety. For Abraham, the anxiety of his paradoxical relation to the divine lies in the silence which that relation imposes. Don Giovanni is also essentially characterized by anxiety. His life is "the

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full force of the sensuous, which is born in anxiety; and Don Giovanni himself is this anxiety, but this anxiety is precisely the demonic zest for life" (EO:129; my stress). The anxieties of Abraham and of Don Giovanni clearly tend toward opposite extremes of the spiritual synthesis that is man. In order further to understand these anxieties, we turn to an analysis of that synthesis. Insofar as anxiety inevitably engenders sleeplessness, it would be appropriate to juxtapose the anxieties of Don Giovanni and of Abraham according to the wakeful perspective of Vigilius Haufniensis, author of The Concept of Anxiety. According to Vigilius, the experience of anxiety arises integrally with the synthetic constitution of man, and from the manner in which, constituted as such, man relates to himself. That anxiety makes its appearance is the pivot upon which everything turns. Man is a synthesis of the psychical and the physical; however, a synthesis is unthinkable if the two are not united in a third. This third is spirit. (C:43) Man experiences anxiety because he consists in a synthesis of body and psyche mediated by spirit. Insofar as man is man only through such a synthesis, he cannot but experience anxiety. The more forceful the movements of spirit, the more intense the anxiety, for anxiety is the very mode of spirit's self-relation: "How does spirit relate itself to itself and to its conditionality? It relates itself as anxiety" (C:44). Anxiety issues in the gaps of tension between the elements of this synthesis. To order the relation of these elements is the very task of the synthesis, and as suchas a task that turns on a contradictionthe movements of the synthesis open the spaces of possibility that are the spaces of anxiety. The psychic-somatic synthesis is further''defined through its transposition into the synthesis of the temporal and the eternal which also characterizes spiritual existence. "The synthesis of the temporal and the eternal is not another synthesis but is the expression of the first synthesis, according to which man is a synthesis of psyche and body that is sustained by spirit" (C:88). In what way is the synthesis of the temporal and the eternal a second, and necessary, expression of the psychic-somatic synthesis? Precisely in that it is a synthesis mediated by spirit. That the synthesis of psyche and body occurs via the work of spirit introduces the concept of eternity into that synthesis:

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The synthesis of the psychical and the physical is to be posited by spirit; but spirit is eternal, and the synthesis is, dierefore, only when spirit posits die first syndiesis along widi die second syndiesis of die temporal and die eternal. (C:90)

To recognize diat man's existence is spiritual is to recognize not only that he consists in both mind and body, but also that, as such, he necessarily embodies the very contradiction of the temporal and die eternal. A passage from a draft of the Concept clarifies the relation between body-psyche, on the one hand, and time-eternity on the odier: "The individual is sensuously qualified, and as such he is also qualified by time in time; but he is also spirit, i.e., he is to become spirit, and as such, the eternal" (C: 196-97). For the concerns of this essay, the temporal-eternal aspect of man's synthetic existence becomes significant precisely to the extent that the introduction of eternity marks the introduction of future-oriented possibility, of which the primary coordinate is anxiety:
Whenever die eternal touches die temporal, die future is diere, for, as stated, this is die first expression of the eternal. Just as in die preceding, spiritsince it was established in die syndiesis, or, radier, since it was about to be establishedappeared as freedom's possibility, expressed in the individual's anxiety, so the future is now die eternal's possibility and is expressed in die individual as anxiety. (C: 196-97)

In distinguishing Don Giovanni and Abraham, it is not a question simply of posing sensuous aestheticism against spiritual religion, for both Don Giovanni and Abraham are qualified in relation to spirit. Distinctions between the two must be made at the level of their respective relations to the psychic-somatic synthesis, and in turn, to that of the temporal and the eternal. This means that distinctions must be made concerning the modes of their respective anxieties with regard to possibility. Because spirit is syndietic, one cannot speak of die sensuous without setting it in dynamic tension with die psychic and vice versa. To approach Don Giovanni, clearly, one must stress die sensuous aspects of his existence. As die aesthete points out, Don Giovanni's love "is sensuous, not psychical, and, according to its concept, sensuous love is not faithful, but totally faithless; it loves not one but allthat is, it seduces all" (EO:94; my stress). Abraham's love, by contrast, tends toward the psychical, which loves the individual. To approach Abraham, one should bear in mind the

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literally psychic aspect of his love: "When Amor leaves Psyche, he says to her: You will bear a child who will be divine if you remain silent, but will be human if you betray the secret" (FT:88). The love Abraham bears his childpsychic love, which is for the individual cannot be spoken. His love is divine to the extent that his silence is imposed by his very relation to the divine. Importantly, this psychic love borne for Isaac is only divine to the extent that it borders upon the demonic, for silence is both. This is its ambiguity. In their loves, Don Giovanni and Abraham tend toward opposite extremes of the psychic-somatic synthesis. They nevertheless remain equally subject to the anxiety that is integral to spiritual existence. In The Concept, Vigilius shows that anxiety is the mode in which spirit relates itself to itself. Man's self-relation in and as spirit is irreducibly ambiguous. Anxiety is both a precondition and a consequence of this spiritual self-relation. Its contradiction cannot be resolved. Spirit "relates itself [to itself and to its conditionality] as anxiety. Do away with itself, the spirit cannot; lay hold of itself, it cannot, as long as it has itself outside of itself1 (C:44). This ambiguous neither-nor dynamic constitutes the double-bind of spiritual existence. The double-bind characterizes the anxiety to which spiritual existence alone is subject, for only spiritual existence relates itself to itself in the quest for self-possession. The task of self-relation opens the space of radical possibility, which is the space of anxiety: "The actuality of the spirit constantly shows itself as a form that tempts its possibility but disappears as soon as it seeks to grasp for it, and it is a nothing that can only bring anxiety" (C:42; my stress). Here, the nothing of anxiety insinuates itself as that radical possibility which eludes actualizationa possibility that tempts, but cannot be grasped, fixed or mastered. Here again we see how anxiety differs from fear: fear implies a relation between self and its defined object, whereas anxiety signals a relation (or lack of relation) between self and its own undefined, infinite possibilitya possibility that cannot be reduced to any objective. The elusive character of possibility renders anxiety the ambiguous, binding force that it is. "Anxiety is a sympathetic antipathy and an antipathetic sympathy" (C:42). Anxiety loves that which it flees and it flees that which it loves: this double-bind indicates the impossibility of fixing any definite object that would allow anxiety to resolve itself. These binding movements of attraction and repulsion instill anxiety precisely insofar as they remain both contradic-

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tory and coincidental. Of man qualified as spirit Vigilius writes: "Flee from anxiety, he cannot, for he loves it; really love it, he cannot, for he flees from it" (C:44). The ambiguity of anxiety's relation to its "object" (or lack thereof) also informs desire's relation to its object. Desire's double-bind assumes inverted forms in Don Giovanni and in Abraham. Don Giovanni can love women only in sacrificing their concrete individuality; Abraham can sacrifice the concrete individual Isaac only in loving him. The ostensible victory of Don Giovanni over "all" women "is actually destitution" (EO:94), whereas Abraham's imminent loss is actually his infinite gain. However, insofar as the desires both of Don Giovanni and of Abraham remain bound with the force of anxiety, what is simultaneously feared and loved in either case cannot be a definite object. To repeat Vigilius' distinction between anxiety and fear, anxiety "is altogether different from fear and similar concepts that refer to something definite, whereas anxiety is freedom's actuality as the possibility of possibility" (C:42). This redoubling of possibility the possibility not of a particular act or actuality, but of possibility itselfenfolds a space wherein we might imagine the nothing that begets anxiety. Precisely this nothing would open the condition of possibility for possibility itself. In precisely this sense one might see that "Freedom is infinite and arises out of nothing" (C:112). While Don Giovanni's furious movements mark an infinite expectation within the finite realm of the possible, they in fact attest the human impossibility of consummating a desire such as his. To this extent, Don Giovanni's passion signifies the impossibility of the possible. Abraham's passion issues in a nearly perfect inversion of Don Giovanni's relation to the possible/impossible. Abraham hopes within a hope according to which the impossible itself is expected as possible: "One became great by expecting the possible, another by expecting the eternal; but he who expected the impossible became greatest of all" (FT: 16). Don Giovanni's madness would be his infinite pursuit of earthly delights; his conquests are propelled by the sheer power of the sensuous. Abraham's madness would be the singular struggle with himself; he confronts God in his own powerlessness: "Thus did they struggle on earth: there was one who conquered everything by his power, and there was one who conquered God by his powerlessness. [. . .] Abraham was the greatest of all by that power whose strength is powerlessness . . ." (FT: 16). Abraham's power rests in that powerlessness which

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believes the impossible to be possible; Don Giovanni's powerlessness rests in that power which believes the possible to be possible. In the end, Don Giovanni's power betrays an impotence: Don Giovanni cannot not seduce, for by essence he is nothing other than the pure force of seduction. Abraham's power, on the other hand the power by which he can sacrifice Isaac in absolute relation to the absoluteis inverse to that of Don Giovanni, for it rests upon a fundamental capacity not to exercise his power, the capacity not to sacrifice Isaac: "At every moment, Abraham can stop" (FT: 115). Abraham's power rests at every moment upon the capacity not to pass to the act. The horror of Abraham's power lies not in the fact that he is able to do, but more fundamentally in the fact that he is able not to do that task which beckons, and which he steadily approaches. The horror of Don Giovanni's power is that he is not able not to do that which beckons, and which he can only approach in flight. Don Giovanni and Abraham mark two powers and two modes of impotence. Don Giovanni's power is his impotence, "Abraham's impotence his power. Don Giovanni embodies the infinite impossibility of the possible; Abraham executes the infinite possibility of the impossible. The temporal determination for both these modes of possibility can be situated in the moment, where time and eternity touch. In juxtaposing Don Giovanni and Abraham, we attempt to approach their anxieties via the relations thereof to possibility. Vigilius Haufniensis insists that the nothing of anxiety is awakened in Adam and in every subsequent individual as "the anxious possibility of being able" (C:44). This possibility is anxious in the very measure that it has no object. In the first stirrings of possibility, the individual "has no conception of what he is able to do" (C:44), he simply knows that he can. The middle term by which one passes from this "can" to its actualization is anxiety (C:49). In Abraham's case, we see that it is indeed his awareness of possibility that engenders anxiety. Abraham can, in one and the same movement, offer sacrifice to God and commit the murder of his son. Again, this ability only stands out against the ability not to go to Moriah, the capacity not to draw the knife. The power of Abraham, issuing from the capacity not to exercise his power, stands in relation to God's omnipotence. It is only in relation to God that Abraham believes that all is possible. This belief, however, includes no assurance that all will be well: "No, in possibility all things are equally possible, and whoever has truly been brought

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up by possibility has grasped the terrible as well as the joyful" (C:156; my stress). God can demand Isaac's sacrifice, and at the same time he can give Isaac back. But to see only one side of God's power by assuming from the beginning that Isaac will be returned is to eliminate the anxiety that all truly is possible. Abraham's anxiety lies in the acute awareness that, indeed, all things are equally possible. Don Giovanni's anxiety, by contrast, remains substantial, never attaining the degree of self-reflexivity that does Abraham's. Don Giovanni nevertheless does suffer the anxiety of possibility. The multiplicity of Don Giovanni's conquests indicates that he does not desire individual women, nor their concrete love; rather, he desires the desire of women as suchboth his desire for women and women's desire for him. Don Giovanni desires not any particular seduction, but the endless possibility of seduction as such. To this extent, his infinite desire remains undefinedendless but not absolute. The possibility according to which Don Giovanni orients himself does not take place in the fullness of time. To repeat: "The possibility is to be able" (C:49). In his critique of Hegelian logic, Vigilius contends that die one unquestioned presupposition of the system is transition, die very driving force of the system for which the system itself cannot account.
. . . there is no embarrassment at all over the use in Hegelian thought of the terms "transition," "negation," "mediation," i.e., the principles of motion, in such a way that they do not find their place in the systematic progression. If this is not a presupposition, I do not know what a presupposition is. (C:81)

In an effort to account explicidy and concretely for the category of transition, Vigilius evokes anxiety as the middle term between possibility and actuality. The move from possibility to actuality is not a quantitative logical progression, but a qualitative existential leap from one state to the next, a leap whose precondition is anxiety. Anxiety neither necessitates nor explains the leap causally, but remains nonetheless diat widiout which the leap does not take place. As the precondition of transition, anxiety is a category neither of freedom nor of necessity:
In a logical system it is convenient to say that possibility passes over into actuality. However, in actuality it is not so convenient, and an intermediate term is required. The intermediate term is

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anxiety, but it no more explains the qualitative leap than it can justify it ethically. (C:49)

From this text, one might understand the middle term, anxiety, to indicate a possibility whose potential conserves itself in the passage to actuality: it is the condition of possibility for every new actuality that itself does not become actual. In this sense, it both is and is not (see C:45). Always present as the possibility of a new state, it is a precondition but not a cause, and die new state that it allows cannot be derived from it (see C: 114-115). To this extent, properly speaking, anxiety does not take place. In other words, the condition of possibility for that which takes place does not itself take place. Since the "object" of anxiety cannot be placed or located, it is, literally, atopos: out of place, put of the way, it is strange, odd, absurd. The atopia of the "object" of anxiety renders lyrical thought ecstatic. As the third term in the passage from possibility to actuality, anxiety has its own extra-temporal temporality, the moment. The anxiety engendered by the psychic-somatic synthesis finds its temporal counterpart in the moment, where time and eternity touch. "In the individual life, anxiety is the moment . . ." (C:81). The psychic-somatic synthesis and the synthesis of the temporal and the eternal are connected in the moment. The extra-temporal category of the moment is crucial to the distinction between logical transition from possibility to actuality and transition for the particular individual within the realm of historical freedom. "Therefore," notes Vigilius, "when Aristotle says that the transition from possibility to actuality is kinesis [movement], it is not to be understood logically but with reference to historical freedom" (C:82). A passage deleted from the final copy of the Concept indicates the manner in which the moment of transition between possibility and actuality can itself be located neither in possibility nor in actuality: "Aristotle himself defines kinesis more precisely: It belongs neither to possibility nor to actuality" (C:195). That which rests between possibility and actuality is the quasi-temporal moment, which remains atopos. Vigilius looks to the "imaginatively constructing dialectic" of Plato's Parmenides to illuminate this uncanny precondition of movement that itself does not "take place:" It is assumed both that the one (to hen) is and that [it] is not, and then the consequences for it and for the rest are pointed out. As a result, the moment appears to be this strange entity (atopon [that

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which has no place), die Greek word is especially appropriate) that

lies between motion and rest without occupying any time, and into this and out from this that which is in motion changes into rest, and that which is at rest changes into motion. (C:83; my stress).

Vigilius emphasizes the strangeness of this entity that has no place by indicating the particular appropriateness of the Greek atopos which itself links the place-less or the out of place with the strange, the absurd, the marvelous, the disgusting, etc. Importantly, that which does not take place likewise occupies no time. It cannot be conceived within the successions of present presence. Why does Vigilius take such pains to recall the thought of the Greeks? Simply, and importantly, because he finds in the Greeks an estimation of non-being which the moderns have lost, and such non-being is related integrally to this spatio-temporal oddity of the moment. Temporally construed, non-being would fall under the category of the moment ". . . one should keep in mind that the moment is non-being under the category of time. Non-being (to me on; to henon [that which is not; the empty] of the Pythagoreans) occupied the interest of ancient philosophers more than it does modern philosophers" (C:82). Not only is the thought of nonbeing essential to an understanding of the moment, but it also underlies (though often being forgotten) fundamental Christian conceptions of genesis, history and ontology. Around die category of non-being and its temporal qualification in the moment are bound the cluster of affectspassion, desire, and anxietythat remain fundamental to any characterization of Don Giovanni and Abraham. The Christian view takes the position that non-being is present everywhere as the nothing from which things were created, as semblance and vanity, as sin, as sensuousness removed from spirit, as the temporal forgotten by the eternal; consequently the task is to do away with it in order to bring forth being. (C:83) To appreciate the marvel that creation issues from nothing is to recognize the irreducibility of non-being in human life, and hence the inevitability of desire, anxiety, and every possibility that these would imply or allow. In human terms, the task of bringing forth being is always yet to be effected. In this light one might understand diat anxiety is not simply an anxiety of possibility oriented toward the future, but equally an anxiety about the past. Because "subjectivity is not completed all at once" (C:197), the incomplete, fragmented subject is necessarily the anxious subject indwelt by

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non-being. The emptiness of non-being allows that future-oriented anxiety may also be past-oriented, and this emptiness is figured in terms of possibility: The past about which I am supposed to be anxious must stand in a relation of possibility to me. If I am anxious about a past misfortune, then it is not because it is in the past but because it may be repeated, i.e., become future. (C:91) The incompletion of the past is inevitably repeated in the future. The possibility of repetitionboth repetition's possibility and the possibility that necessitates repetitionsignals the future-orientation of anxiety about the past. The non-being out of which past creation springs returns in the future as the nothing of anxiety. In the Concept, the eternal is to be understood not so much in its opposition to time in general but more specifically in its opposition to the moment. "Here again the importance of the moment becomes apparent, because only with this category is it possible to give eternity its proper significance, for eternity and the moment become the extreme opposites . . . " (C:84). The significant difference between the eternal and the moment, however, only appears through the parallels between the two. Both the moment and the eternal are abstracted from the framework of time as a succession of past, present, future. The difference between the two arises in the connection of sensuousness with the moment and of spirit with the eternal: The moment signifies the present as that which has no past and no future, and precisely in this lies the imperfection of the sensuous life. The eternal also signifies the present as that which has no past and no future, and this is the perfection of the eternal. (C:87) The moment is the paradox of the instant: it neither is nor is not (present), but presents itself in already having fled. The present presence of the instant cannot be sustained in time. Like the blink of an eye (oiblikkef), the moment is no sooner present than gone; indeed, it presents itself only insofar as it is gone. Hence the paradoxical character of the moment: it is never fully present, and yet, like the eternal, it has no regard for past or future. "Nothing is as swift as the blink of an eye, and yet it is commensurable with the content of the eternal" (C:87). The moment coincides with the positing of spirit: "As soon as spirit is posited, the moment is present" (C:88). The positing of spirit, in turn, is integrally bound with the positing/exclusion of

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sensuousness as sin, and hence with the positing of history as a spiritual rather than a natural category of time: The moment is that ambiguity in which time and eternity touch each other, and widi diis die concept of temporality is posited, whereby time constandy intersects eternity and eternity constandy pervades time. (C:89) Only within spiritually posited temporality do eternity and the moment attain their true significance. The force of spirit springs from the conflict of time and eternity. "A blink is therefore a designation of time, but mark well, of time in die fateful conflict when it is touched by eternity" (C:87). The positing of spirit coincides with the concretion of its vehiclelanguage. The marginal relations to language of the two figures we are attempting to approach thus help to define their relations to spirit and to the moment. Vigilius's elaboration of the moment as atopos resonates with the extra-temporal temporality of Don Giovanni's music, which "has an element of time in itself but nevertheless does not take place in time except metaphorically" (EO:57; my stress). Precisely because it does not take place in time, music, the exquisite realm of the sensuous, can only flee from moment to moment, ever marking that which is atopos. To this the aesdiete explicitly refers: In the Middle Ages, much was told about a mountain that is not found on any map; it is called Mount Venus. There sensuousness has its home [. . .]. In diis kingdom, language has no home, nor the collectedness of thought, nor die laborious achievements of reflection; there is heard only the elemental voice of passion, the play of desires, die wild noise of intoxication. (EO:90) This sensuous no-place defies localization widiin the integral continuities of a narrative temporality grounded in present presence. Its extra-temporal temporality is radically discontinuous and nonlocalizable, dius remaining in a relation of marginality vis-a-vis spirit. Widi respect to temporality, one sees again that Abraham and Don Giovanni fall at opposite extremes of die spiritual synthesis. Don Giovanni literally does not have die time to commit to a love in continuity or faidifulness. He has but die moment, whose infinite repetitions can only betray die inessential, die indifferent. By definition faithless, Don Giovanni is barred from any concrete relation. Thus, numerous as his seductions may be, for Don Gio-

Carlson: Possibility and Passivity

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vanni, the sexual relation does not take place. On the other hand, in his love for Isaac, and in his absolute relation to the absolute, the faithful Abraham has nothing but time. Abraham is essentially bound to the concrete time of a ninety year wait, a three day walk, and the single moment when he draws the knife. Abraham demonstrates diat "psychical love is continuance in time" while Don Giovanni shows that "sensuous love is disappearance in time . . ." (EO:95). Don Giovanni's life "is the sum of repellerende moments [Momenter] that have no coherence . . ." (EO:96). Don Giovanni lacks the time that Abraham has for reflective waiting, he lacks the patience for a three day walk: "He does not have that kind of continuance [as has the reflective individual] at all but hurries on in an eternal vanishing, just like the music, which is over as soon as the sound has stopped and comes into existence again only when it sounds once again" (EO:102). The speechless, immediate, unreflective inwardness of Don Giovanni stands at the somatic extreme of the synthesis at whose other end we find the equally speechless, but intensely reflective inwardness of Abraham. The multiple, inessential moments of Don Giovanni transpire in a time outside of time, while the single, decisive moment for Abraham arises in the fullness of time. The restlessness of Don Giovanni transpires in the flight of passion, the light play of desire, while the knight of faith, heavily, "only creeps along slowly" (FT:77). The temporality of Abraham's life becomes madness precisely in that the whole of his patience leads to one single moment in which he is called to sacrifice all he has awaited: "This is the content of 130 years. Who can endure it? Would not his contemporaries, if such may be assumed, have said, 'What an everlasting procrastination this is; Abraham finally received a son, it took long enough, and now he wants to sacrifice himis he not mad?' " (FT:77). The madness is redoubled in that Abraham cannot speak his patience. Hence the pathos: his passion eludes all language, and increases thereby. The madness of Abraham's temporality is that Abraham fights time within time. Unlike the moments of Don Giovanni, which are multiple and fleeting, Abraham's moment is utterly singular, it occurs in the fullness of time, and it marks at the same time the sacrifice of all that toward which Abraham's lifetime was directed: "he had fought with time and kept his faith. Now all the frightfulness of the struggle was concentrated in one moment" (FT: 19).

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The intensification of Abraham's time in the concrete, singular moment ends a lifetime of waiting, and it is tied in turn to a singular, localizable, necessary placeMoriah, the place designated by God. " 'And God tempted \fristede] Abraham and said to him, take Isaac, your only son, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah and offer him as a burnt offering on a mountain that I will show you' " (FT: 19). And yet, upon this place, this singular site designated by God, and in diis time, the utterly present moment in which Abraham must decide, the cut does not take place. Here, in the space and time of what does not take place, Abraham's potential goes unexhausted. The Mount of Venus or Mount Moriah. Two topics: a nonlocalizable atopos or the sacrificial altar designated by God. Two temporalities: an atemporal sensuous time or the concrete spiritual movements of a lifetime. Two moments: multiple and fleeting or singular and decisive. Two desires: infinitely desiring or desiring the infinite. Two anxieties: the sexual relation or the cut, neither of which takes place. Don Giovanni and Abrahama power and an individualare essentially related in anxiety. Nothing engenders their anxiety, for this is anxiety's very definition. Nothing issues from it: Don Giovanni's infinitely multiplied seductions constitute nothing but a list, an empty, endless quantity. Abraham's lifetime wait, and the infinity of his qualitative leap, culminate in a sacrifice, a cut, that does not take place. The aesthetic and the religious anxieties are infinitely distinct, and yet equally tied to an object that is nothing. Perhaps the greatest anxiety would lie at that point where two such nothings prove indistinguishable. Between the anxious desires of the aesthetic and the religious, the differences are great, as we have shown. And yet the greatness of the difference issues there where it is most slight. This slightness would be as subtle as a sliver, a splinter, a shiveras slight as the space of a trembling.

ABBREVIATIONS
C EO FT The Concept of Anxiety Either/Or Fear and Trembling

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REFERENCES
Kierkegaard, Soren 1980 1983 1987 The Concept of Anxiety. Ed. and Trans, by Reidar Thomte, in collaboration with Albert B. Anderson. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Fear and Trembling. Ed. and Trans, by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Either/Or. Ed. and Trans, by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Toward a Comparative Philosophy of Religions Edited by Paul J. Qriffiths, University of Chicago Laurie L. Pattern, Bard College
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