Final Words: Training in Christianity as a Terminal Writing
Résumé
This essay aims to show how (in what sense and ti what extent) Training in Christianity can be seen as a « terminal » writing, how it can be understood, in every senses, as a last speech. Though Kierkegaard went on writing after publishing Training in Christianity, the last words of Anti-Climacus can be seen as a culminating point. They constitute what could be called the final words, or the words of the end. But this end could be understood in different ways: 1) as the end of a career and a definitive turn in the movement of self-becoming shaped and nourished by the act of writing; 2) as the highest point of the Kierkegaardian discourse (“superior pseudonymity”) inhabited by the highest figure, by the figure of the ideality ; 3) as the “situs” where the final categories or, rather, the categories of the end can be shown and uttered; 4) as the end of history, in so far as this discourse wants to take place at the end of a catastrophic and precisely anti-hegelian history, but also as it provides the category (contemporaneity) to end history or destroy the non-real reality of history.