| On the basis of readings of the works of literary and dramatic criticism within the Kierkegaardian authorship, I argue that authorship is, in the Kierkegaardian practice, best understood as akin to theatrical performance, at least insofar as such performance is theorized in the Kierkegaardian dramatic criticism. While the literary critical authors consistently demand of authors and written works that they cohere intelligibly around an ethical life-view---and thus, ultimately, that they set forth an unified authorial perspective---the works of the Kierkegaardian authorship itself are not of this sort at all. A duplicity and multiplicity of authorial perspectives is characteristic, not only of Kierkegaard's criticism, but of the Kierkegaardian authorship as a whole. The attempt to resolve that authorial abundance is, I argue, an attempt to deny the essence of the peculiar structures of authorship in the Kierkegaardian works. Rather, if there is to be any unity at all in the disparate works of the Kierkegaardian authorship, it will have to come from outside of the particular authorial perspectives at work within the authorship. I locate this unifying perspective, not in Soren Kierkegaard himself, but in an anonymous and unknowable "author of the authors," implied by the Kierkegaardian authors (including Kierkegaard) as themselves works of literary invention. In something of an analogy to the role played for Kant by the thing-in-itself, I argue that the author of the authors---what I call "the Kierkegaardian author"---must be posited behind the authors at work in the Kierkegaardian authorship, but cannot ever be known by the readers of that authorship. Each of the authorial perspectives within the authorship is performed by the Kierkegaardian author, but none of them is reducible to the Kierkegaardian author, such that we are left, as readers, with the daunting task of making sense of the authorship and its constitutive works and authors for ourselves---without reference to the Kierkegaardian author, except insofar as that author is the ground necessary for an understanding of Kierkegaard and the Kierkegaardian authors as themselves authored. |
