Textual Immediacy and Sexual Intimacy: Kierkegaard’s Diary of a Failure

AbstractForegoing a moralistic approach to the figure of Johannes the seducer, the present article seeks to assess his aesthetic project by those criteria outlined in Forførerens Dagbog itself. By closely tracing the thread of performativity in his art, especially as it regards mirroring, the article will demonstrate how Johannes fails to abide by his own aesthetic philosophy at both the narrative and the narratological levels, thus dismantling the diary from within. In particular, it will be argued that the mimetic immediacy of the seducer’s project is inversely proportional to the intimacy it achieves. The article concludes by relating Johannes’ failure to Enten/Eller as a whole and, in turn, to Søren Kierkegaard’s view of Romanticism as well as his own “performance” of the diary in his public life.