ABSTRACT
Constantin Constantius, in the course of his ‘Venture in Experimenting Psychology’ (Kierkegaard’s Repetition), depicts hope as sort of confinement. For Levinas, and for the Dane himself, ‘hope’ is richer than this. It may even be that the Kierkegaardian idea of the love that hopes all things contains something of his ‘repetition’, for all Constantin may distinguish and contrast the latter with hope:
Repetition’s love is in truth the only happy love. Like recollection’s love, it does not have the restlessness of hope, the uneasiness of discovery, but neither does it have the sadness of recollection. Hope is a new garment, stiff and starched and lustrous, but it has never been tried on, and therefore one does not know how becoming it will be or how it will fit. (FT/RPN 132; SV III 194)
The subjunctive and indicative may be counterparts as much as opposites. The indicative sometimes stands in the shade of the subjunctive and vice versa. We could call ‘ordinary’ the kind of subjunctive that aims at an indicative and carries meaning only in relation to that; this is where we are likely to see a grammatical usage. It is the subjunctive of the Racinian ‘Soit!’ (‘So be it!’ or ‘let it be so!’).
