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M.G. Piety’s Website is Up and Running!

I said, when I started this blog, that I would let readers know when my website was finished. Well, it’s finished. The web address is mgpiety.org .  (The backslash is important. You will find there a complete list of my publications along with another more general interest blog.

There are a couple of publications on my website that will be of interest to Kierkegaard scholars. The first is an article entitled “What’s in a Face” that I published in the now defunct Lingua Franca back in 1995. It’s about portraits of Kierkegaard, or more specifically, about what have sometimes been taken to be portraits of Kierkegaard that are actually portraits of his contemporaries. There are copies of these portraits in the article.

The other piece that will be of interest to Kierkegaard scholars is entitled “Some Reflections on Academic Ethics.” This is one of the earliest articles I published on the controversy over Joakim Garff’s critically acclaimed biography of Kierkegaard.

The blog on my website, Reading Notes, while not about Kierkegaard, will address topics in the philosophy of religion, among other things, so it may be of interest to many readers of this blog. I plan to post on that blog about once a week. The post I have up there now is about publishing. I’m planning a post for next week though on religion, so if that’s a topic that interests you, check it out next week.

Finally, I’ve got some good posts coming up on this blog, including one on Kierkegaard and vampires, another on more online resources for Kierkegaard scholarship and one on my new book Ways of Knowing: Kierkegaard’s Pluralist Epistemology.

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Newly Discovered Caricatures of Kierkegaard

Caricature
Women fight over one of Kierkegaard’s shirts

One of the most important discoveries Peter Tudvad made when working on his book, Kierkegaards København (Kierkegaard’s Copenhagen), was that the attacks on Kierkegaard in the satirical newspaper The Corsair, were not confined to 1846, as scholars had assumed, but actually spanned the period from 1846 until Kierkegaard’s death in 1855. This makes Kierkegaard’s continued preoccupation with the Corsair, and its merciless caricaturing of him, appear less neurotic than has been assumed. He continued to be preoccupied with the newspaper because it continued to be preoccupied with him. Kierkegaard was hence not exaggerating when he described himself as an object of public ridicule.

The situation was even worse though than scholars have assumed. The Corsair was not the only paper to ridicule Kierkegaard. Another paper, Folkets Nisse (the people’s elf) also published caricatures of or relating to Kierkegaard over an extended period. The drawing above is one such caricature. Apparently, Kierkegaard’s effects were auctioned off after his death. The drawing depicts two women fighting over one of Kierkegaard’s shirts. It’s interesting not simply as an example of a hitherto unknown collection of contemporary caricatures but also because it tells us something about how Kierkegaard was viewed around the period of his death. Scholars have often portrayed him as a marginal figure in Danish history, one whose brilliance was really first discovered beyond the borders of his own country. The drawing makes clear, however, that he had become a kind of cult figure by the time of his death and that there was thus probably far more sympathy with his attack on the Danish Lutheran Church than is ordinarily assumed.

There are many more drawings like the one above in Folkets Nisse. I cannot claim credit for having discovered them. They were discovered by Paul A. Bauer in the late 1990s when he purchased a bound volume of Folkets Nisse from an antiquarian book dealer in Copenhagen. I am indebted to Anne Marie Furbo of the The Royal Library in Copenhagen for tracking down this particular drawing which I had remembered only vaguely but which I wanted to use for the cover of my forthcoming book, Fear and Dissembling: The Copenhagen Kierkegaard Controversy.

If you plan to go to Copenhagen, stop by The Royal Library. I’m sure the folks there will be similarly helpful to you if you want to track down more of these hitherto unknown caricatures.

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Bad News and Good News…

I have some bad news and some good news. The bad news is that Google, does not, in fact have the complete text of Repetition and Philosophical Crumbs online, but only a portion of it. Also, the site that promises a free ebook version of it is bogus. I’m indebted to Don Anderson for alerting me to these facts. This means that there is no searchable electronic version of this volume, or at least not one in general circulation. I have such a version, but Oxford would have my hide if I started sending it out to people. It was like pulling teeth to get them allow me to publish excerpts in the online journal The Smart Set.

I have a plan though. I am going to make an index for the volume myself and make it available free of charge to anyone who wants it. I probably won’t have it done until sometime this spring. I will let you know, though, when I’ve finished it.

The reason I won’t have the index done until spring is that I am hard at work on my new book Fear and Dissembling: The Copenhagen Kierkegaard Controversy. This book is going to be a collection of English translations of some of the articles that appeared in the Danish media on the controversy over Joakim Garff’s book SAK (GAD, 2000), or Søren Kierkegaard, A Biography (Princeton, 2005). Both Garff and his critic, Peter Tudvad, have tentatively agreed to be involved in the project. I will send each a list of the articles I plan to include for his approval and each is free to recommend additional articles he would like to see included. Garff has also suggested that a few original essays could be appended to the end of the book. I’m all for that if it we can get a good group of contributors and it doesn’t delay the project too much.

I think you’ll like this book. It won’t simply be about Kierkegaard, but about larger issues such as the nature of biography and how difficult it can sometimes be to draw a line between fact and fiction.

Postscript: I have abandoned the idea of doing an index for Crumbs because Oxford has brought out an ebook version that is searchable.