A Prelude to "Towards a Theory of the Christian Deed"

Sometimes, publishing a book that no one has read is a boon—indeed, for the author who has something to say and doesn’t merely pick up the scraps from the floor, it is the greatest boon. It means, first and foremost, that one has something to say, regardless of whether there is someone to hear it. That is something worth holding onto in an age where the aesthetic demand for the production and reproduction of life means that use-value is merely determined by the maw of the crowd, by how accessible the abstract, “average” individual finds the product and how loudly they declare it useful.

More than that, however, is that a muted response from the crowd shows that one is seemingly free and capable of operating without merely collapsing into causative chains of necessity—neither pushed by what came before nor pulled by what is to come, the author asserts their ability to become themself in a world where they can properly, even contently, possibly, publish into the void where that individual might find it and appreciate the use-value therewithin as opposed to baying to the crowd’s calls for “the demand of the times” or cower into the assurances of cannibalizing the corpses which brought the world to be such-and-such a way.

Interestingly, as is so often the case, this desire to “hold oneself back”1 finds itself realised through the pen of our dear Melancholic Dane—or, rather, from under the guise of Johannes Climacus. Note, those who only wish to appease the baying crowd:

Rarely, perhaps, has a literary undertaking been so favored by fate in accord with the author’s wishes as has my Philosophical Fragments. Doubtful and reticent as I am with regard to every private opinion and self-appraisal, I do without any doubt dare to say truthfully one thing concerning the fate of the little pamphlet: it has aroused no sensation, none whatever. Undisturbed and in accordance with the motto (”Better well hanged than ill wed”, the hanged, indeed, the well-hanged, author has remained hanging. No one—not even in sport or jest—has asked him for whom he did hang. But that was as desired: better well hanged than by a hapless marriage to be brought into systematic in-law relationship with the whole world. Relying on the nature of the pamphlet, I was hoping this would happen, but in view of the bustling ferment of the age, in

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