‘Either/Or is an excellent title. It is piquant and at the same time it also has a speculative meaning.’ So wrote Kierkegaard of his own book. The title was intended to suggest the possibility of choosing between different modes of life (aesthetic, ethical and religious), and was written in two huge, rambling volumes, one called ‘Either’, the other ‘Or’. The title’s deliberate opacity, lack of descriptive content and Janus-faced quality place it at the forefront of a modern discipline that upholds ambiguity and polysemy as a virtue: literary theory. The use of the slash, or oblique, in the translation (the original was Enten – Eller, with a dash) was also influential. It seems - at least to the present author - that titles such as S/Z by Roland Barthes, Gyn/Ecology by Mary Daly, Marat/Sade by Peter Weiss, and academic papers by the truckload with titles such as Alien/ations, C/lit Culture, Pre/Text, Pragmatic/Machinic, Power/Knowledge - now all with a slightly dated feel - all have their intellectual roots in the tormented ambivalence of Kierkegaard.Consulted:
Kierkegaard, Søren: Either/Or, trans.David F. Swenson and Lillian Marvin Swenson (1959)
See a clickable index of all titles covered
Good point - I think it was shortened some time after the first performances. Whether it would have been shortened in precisely this way without Kierkegaard is difficult to say. I see that we have a modern version of this with Frost/Nixon (play, 2006).
ReplyDelete