Death is here understood as an existential category but it also opens onto the organic death of the body. Indeed, to confront the corpse—in its material existence—as the fate of everyone we love is a challenge Knausgaard repeatedly poses to himself and to his reader. As we have seen, the first volume of My Struggle begins by depicting the moment of death in bacterial detail. The final paragraph of the same volume returns to the corpse, as Karl Ove visits the morgue to see the body of his deceased father one last time:
Now I saw his lifeless state. That there was no longer any difference between what once had been my father and the table he was lying on, or the floor on which the table stood, or the wall socket beneath the window, or the cable running to the lamp beside him. For humans are merely one form among many, which the world produces over and over again, not only in everything that lives but also in everything that does not live, drawn in sand, stone, and water. And death, which I had always regarded as the most important dignity in life, dark, compelling, was no more than a pipe that springs a leak, a branch that cracks in the wind, a jacket that slips off a clothes hanger and falls to the floor.73
A body has stopped breathing and thereby ceased to function as a living being, instead becoming an object among other objects in the world. “Dad was no longer breathing,” we read a bit earlier. “That was what had happened to him, the connection with the air had been broken, now it pushed against him like any other object, a log, a gasoline can, a sofa.”74 To see the living body thus reduced to its dead counterpart is to see that nature is indifferent to our interests and desires, leaving the body to wither away when we can no longer draw on the world to sustain ourselves. “He no longer poached air, because that is what you do when you breathe, you trespass, again and again you trespass on the world.”75 This ability to interact with the world—and project yourself into a future—is precisely what is lost in death. No longer “poaching” the air but simply subject to its physical pressure, the individual body decomposes and is incorporated into a cycle of matter in transformation.
There are two traditional ways of addressing this material death and the anxiety it may provoke. The first is to argue that we have an immortal soul that is separate from the decomposing matter of our bodies. Even though our bodies perish, we do not really die but ascend to a higher existence, independent of any body or endowed with an incorruptible body. The second strategy is to argue that we are continuous with matter and therefore have no reason to fear death. Because the matter of our bodies is transformed into something else, nothing substantial is actually lost but only takes on another form. This is, for example, the Stoic view of death. “Yes, you will cease to be what you are, but become something else of which the universe then has need,” as the Roman Stoic Epictetus holds in an influential argument.76
While these two perspectives are apparently opposed, they are united in their denial that death entails the loss of a life we should try to hold on to. In the first case, we are told to detach from the life that is lost in favor of an immortal soul. In the second case, we are told to detach from the life that is lost in favor of the continuation of matter. Both perspectives thus deny the tragedy of death. Only a secular faith—which remains committed to a life that irrevocably is lost in death—can counter these two forms of denial. Indeed, only a secular faith can account for why death is a tragic loss at all. The sense of tragic loss depends on keeping faith in the irreplaceable value of a life that is gone forever. Nature does not care whether we live or die, but that makes it all the more imperative that we care and remember what has been taken away.
VI
Precisely in and through a materialist vision of death, Knausgaard’s writing is devoted to secular faith. In forcing us to look at the dead body, he makes vivid what separates the dead from the living. For the living, time is distended: we recall a past and project ourselves into a future. This is the time of our lives, the time that Knausgaard is dedicated to exploring. The dead no longer see anything or feel anything, no longer recall a past and project a future. Our fidelity to the person who has died requires that we acknowledge this absolute loss of life. When faced with a dead body, we can remember that this body belonged to someone who lost everything in death. In mourning the death of another, we recognize that her own standpoint on her life is absolutely gone. Only by acknowledging the absolute loss of her own first-personal life can we remain faithful to the memory of a person who is irreplaceable. Moreover, only by anticipating our own death—only by running ahead into the risk of losing everything—can we bring our own finite life into focus.
The remarkable thing with Knausgaard’s writing is how the experience of mortality is allowed to be the source of both fear and love, terror and beauty. The anxiety before death is not something that can or should be overcome. Rather, it is an expression of love for a life that will cease to be.
Likewise, being bound to a mortal body can indeed be a source of terror. You may be crippled by injuries or ravaged by brain chemistry, and in the end all the living spirit you gather will dissipate in dead matter. Yet, being bound to a body that is beyond your control is also the condition for being touched and moved, the chance of being receptive to the vanishing beauty of the world.
Even in the most serene moments of bliss, Karl Ove is thus aware of mortality. The precious existence of those he loves is inseparable from their precarious material conditions:
I looked at Linda, she sat with her head against the seat, with her eyes closed. Vanja’s face was covered by hair, she lay like a tussock in her lap.
I leaned forward a little and looked at Heidi, who gazed back at me uninterestedly.
I loved them. They were my crew.
My family.
As pure biomass it was not very remarkable. Heidi weighed perhaps ten kilos, Vanja perhaps twelve, and if one added my and Linda’s weight we reached perhaps one hundred ninety kilos. That was considerably less than the weight of a horse, I would think, and about as much as a well-built male gorilla. If we lay close together our physical range was not much to brag about either, any given sea lion would be more voluminous. However, regarding what cannot be measured, which is the only important thing when it comes to families, regarding thoughts, dreams and emotions, the inner life, this group was explosive. Dispersed over time, which is the relevant dimension for understanding a family, it would cover an almost infinite surface. I once met my grandmother’s mother, which meant that Vanja and Heidi belonged to the fifth generation, and fate permitting they could in turn experience three generations. Thus, our little heap of meat covered eight generations, or two hundred years, with all that entails of shifting cultural and social conditions, not to mention how many people it included. A whole little world was being transported at full speed along the highway on this late spring afternoon.77
The gentle happiness here is all the more radiant because of the bifocal vision. On the one hand, the tender evocation of an intimate love, in which each member of the family is seen as an origin of the world, with “thoughts, dreams, and emotions” that distend beyond anything that can be measured. On the other hand, the reminder that this entire world depends on a limited “biomass” with a determinate weight and height, here even described as a “heap of meat” that is being “transported” along the highway. Remarkably, the latter perspective does not serve to denigrate the value of the lives that are interwoven. They can be lost forever if the car meets a fatal accident on the highway, transforming their biomass into a heap of dead meat. Yet the risk is not held out as a morbid fantasy, but as a reminder of how their lives are a treasure that cannot be taken for granted. Anticipating death in the midst of life is a way of focusing his gaze on the ones he loves, attaching himself to what he sees, making their unique existence vivid.
The love that radiates here is the love of a life that is secular in Augustine’s sense: bound by time, marked by history, dependent on generations that have
come before and may come after. Throughout My Struggle this temporal dimension is shown to hold the key to the passions of our lives. The distention of time marks every moment, but it can be stretched out in different ways and discloses the depths of who we are. Thus, Knausgaard explores the sedimentation and resuscitation of events in an individual body, the crystallization of a moment through memory and anticipation, the texture of time in a love relationship, intervals of pleasure and pain, the dead time of trauma, and the elation of bliss.
These are all forms of embodied time, through which we distend our lives beyond our physical location in space. At the same time, we are necessarily bound to a physical body. The wager of My Struggle is to hold these two perspectives together. We are spirit but also matter and the former depends on the latter. We can compose our lives—give them form and meaning—but in the end we will disappear in a meaningless process of decomposition. Knausgaard makes us confront such decomposition, while keeping faith in the value of finite existence. He turns us back to our lives to see both form and formlessness, integration and disintegration.
My Struggle thus moves in the opposite direction from the book whose title it takes over. Knausgaard’s Norwegian title Min Kamp is a direct translation of Mein Kampf, the title of Adolf Hitler’s autobiography. This may seem like a gratuitous provocation, but the choice of title is motivated in the final volume, where Knausgaard devotes more than four hundred pages to Mein Kampf and its context. Knausgaard gives a detailed account of the crisis of the times, as well as the complications of Hitler’s childhood and early adulthood, while showing how Mein Kampf systematically subordinates Hitler’s life story to ideology. The grittiness of everyday life is veiled by euphemism, the complexity of persons reduced to a typology of characters, and everything that is failure or suffering integrated in a narrative of gradual purification. Most importantly, all ambivalence, all doubts and hesitations, are dissolved in a discourse of certainty.
In a remarkable move, Knausgaard here shows how Hitler excludes a second-person mode of address. In Mein Kampf, there is an I, a we, and a they, but there is no you that would allow for an intimate relation. Hitler does not allow himself to be seen in any form of frailty, and he does not obligate himself to anyone else in his or her frailty. He merges himself with a strong, idealized we and projects all weakness onto an external they. Hitler’s way of narrating his life is thus bound up with his larger ideological scheme for making sense of the world. In Hitler’s universe, there is a pure, good “we” that is in peril of being corrupted by “them”: the impure and evil others who most prominently are figured as the Jews. To the extent that we are in trouble—to the extent that our lives are unresolved or difficult—it is because of them, because of their corrupting influence. If only they (the evil forces) could be eliminated, we would be saved.
Nazi ideology is thus another version—a particularly sinister version—of the religious longing for purity. Knausgaard acknowledges and reckons with such longing for purity, but his writing is an active resistance to any temptation of purification. Indeed, My Struggle is devoted to the very imperfection that Mein Kampf sets out to erase. Nothing will save us, since irresolution, difficulty, and frailty are essential parts of the lives we care about. And no one can offer us a final salvation, since everyone who enters our lives is themselves finite. To own our lives is to acknowledge this essential finitude, as both the chance of being together and the risk of breaking apart. This is why My Struggle—which apparently is so devoted to the I—ultimately turns out to be dependent on you. In turning toward you, Karl Ove exposes himself in his dependence on a world that is beyond his control. But he also trains you to see and to acknowledge your own dependence and the dependence of others. This recognition of finitude does not offer any guarantees that we will lead a responsible life and take better care of one another. But without the recognition of finitude, the questions of responsibility and care could not even take hold of us. To turn toward you—to focus our gaze on another and attach ourselves to what we see—is the deepest movement of secular confession. We are turned back to our lives, not as something that is our property but as a form of existence that is altogether finite and altogether dependent on others. This is not the end of responsibility; it is the beginning.
Responsibility
I
He is born against all reasonable expectations. At the time, his mother is ninety-one and his father one hundred years old. No one else believes they can have a child. And yet he is born.
His father thinks the birth is a divine miracle, a fulfillment of the promise given to him by God. Through the son, the father shall establish a new people that will flourish and keep the memory of his name. “I will bless you and make your name great,” God has promised him, “and in you all the families of the Earth shall be blessed.”1
The father’s future—as well as the future of his people—depends on the continued life of his son. All their hopes rest on this child. And yet the father is ready to kill the child, kill his son with his own hands, when God commands him to do so. Without raising any objections, the father rises early in the morning and takes his son with him. After traveling for three days, they arrive at the mountain where the sacrifice will take place. The father draws the knife and is ready to kill his son—ready to give everything away—but then God intervenes to stop him, as a reward for his obedience. “Now I know that you fear God,” he is told, “since you have not withheld your son, your only son, from me.”2 As a reward for his obedience, the future that the father has been willing to give up—the future of his son and the future of generation after generation on earth—is given back to him in abundance. “Because you have done this thing and have not withheld your son,” God explains, “I will bless you and I will multiply your descendants as the stars of the heaven and as the sand on the seashore.”3
The story of Abraham’s devotion to God—and the sacrifice of his beloved son Isaac—is both one of the most enigmatic and most poignant episodes in the Bible. Sparsely told as an existential drama of religious faith, it continues to provoke passionate responses and troubled questions. These questions are all the more pressing because Abraham is regarded as the “father of faith” in all three major monotheistic religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam). How we understand Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac is therefore a central part of how we understand religious faith. The moral of the story may seem clear—man should subordinate his will to the command of God—but how we should respond to it remains an open question. Is Abraham a model of true faith because he obeys God even when doing so requires the sacrifice of what is dearest to him? Or does he exemplify a dangerous fanaticism that does not stop at anything in following what it takes to be the command of God?
While these questions have been debated for centuries, no one has pursued them with the philosophical depth and literary imagination of a young Danish philosopher in 1843. During a stay in Berlin, Søren Kierkegaard set out to bring the story of Abraham and Isaac back to life for a contemporary audience. The resulting work is Fear and Trembling, a book that more than any other has made Kierkegaard live on as an author and thinker. Professional philosophers as well as lay readers, religious believers as well as atheists, keep returning to Fear and Trembling as a profound exploration of what it means to have faith. This is a question that occupied Kierkegaard throughout all his works, but Fear and Trembling remains the book that attracts the most readers and inspires the most intense discussions. Kierkegaard himself seems to have predicted this response from posterity. “O, some day after I am dead,” he writes in a journal entry from 1849, “Fear and Trembling alone will be enough to immortalize my name as an author. Then it will be read and translated into foreign languages. People will practically shudder at the frightful emotion in the book.”4
Yet, as with the original Abraham story, it is far from clear how we should respond to the frightful emotion of Fear and Trembling. Kierkegaard himself regarded Fea
r and Trembling as part of his lifelong project to demonstrate how demanding it is to have religious—and especially Christian—faith. In Kierkegaard’s nineteenth-century Denmark, the majority of the population identified as Christian and the official religion of the state was Christianity. According to Kierkegaard, however, Christian faith had been reduced to a nominal belief and a social identity, as though it were enough to profess belief in God, be a member of the church, and attend service on Sundays in order to be a Christian. In contrast, Kierkegaard emphasizes how true Christianity requires that your entire existence be transformed by your faith. Christian faith is not reducible to what you believe but depends on how you believe. Merely to think or say that you believe in God is not sufficient; your faith in God has to change how you act, feel, and respond to what happens in your life.
Kierkegaard can thus be seen to revive the classical theological distinction between living and dead faith. The distinction is first formulated in the Letter of James, further articulated by Thomas Aquinas in his Summa Theologica, and most powerfully developed by Martin Luther in his catechetical writings. A living faith is one on which you are prepared to act, and it shapes how you are affected by what happens to you. At its strongest, it is the faith on which you are ready to stake your life. “Such faith which ventures everything on what it has heard concerning God, be it life or death, constitutes a Christian man,” as Luther maintains.5 A dead faith, by contrast, is one that does not make any real difference for how you live: something you claim to believe even though such faith is not manifested by your actions and even though you would never make your life depend on it.
In Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard invokes Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac as the most challenging example of what it means to have a living religious faith. To underline the challenge, Kierkegaard evokes Abraham’s wholehearted and life-defining love for Isaac. Isaac is “the most precious” in his life and Abraham embraces him “with a love that is inadequately described by saying he faithfully fulfilled the father’s duty to love the son.”6 Furthermore, Kierkegaard emphasizes that Abraham really does sacrifice Isaac. Even though Abraham in the end does not have to go through with the actual killing, the biblical story makes clear that he has completed the sacrifice of Isaac in his heart. Indeed, Abraham is rewarded precisely because God sees that he has given up Isaac (“you have not withheld your son, your only son, from me”).
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