2024.09.5 : View this Review Online | View Recent NDPR Reviews
Wojciech Kaftanski, Kierkegaard, Mimesis, and Modernity: A Study of Imitation, Existence, and Affect, Routledge, 2022, 241pp., $180.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780367695590.
Reviewed by Reviewed by Vanessa Rumble, Boston College
Wojciech Kaftanski’s book is a wide-ranging treatment of Søren Kierkegaard’s unremitting engagement with the topic of mimesis, not only in the latter’s early aesthetic musings, or in his trenchant observations on the dynamics of social levelling, but also in the philosophical anthropology woven throughout the Dane’s reflections on art, religion, and human existence. Kaftanski traces the theme of mimesis through signed and pseudonymous works, as well as Kierkegaard’s journals and notebooks. Initially, Kaftanski’s work on mimesis calls to mind Charles Bellinger’s The Genealogy of Violence (2001), but the two texts are different in scope. While Bellinger sets out to link (a) Girard’s persuasive account of the origin of violence in the proliferation and intensification of mimetic desire to (b) Kierkegaard’s belief in a universal anxiety that…
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