ABSTRACT
Søren Kierkegaard’s Repetition begins with a tale of love, whose protagonist, the “young man,” desires, but fails to unite with, his beloved.1 The story moves the narrator, who is also the young man’s confidant, to speculate on the nature of fulfillment and loss and subsequently to undertake an experiment the aim of which is to determine whether a repetition in the form of a concrete realization of an abstract desire is possible at all. The young man has failed to pass the test of repetition: failed to translate his ideal love into the reality of a relationship. The young man’s failure, explains the narrator, is due to his inability to repeat the ideal as the actual. Genuine repetition would unite the young man with his beloved and allow for an expression of his affection in an actuality of a relationship. Instead of marrying his beloved, however, the young man only talks about his love, engaging in mere verbal repetitiveness. The ideal repetition never materializes and repetitions of the wrong kind proliferate in place of the ideal.
