5
The Knight of Faith and the Politics of Grace
In Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard, by way of Johannes de Silentio, depicts the figures of the knight of faith and the knight of infinite resignation as dancers. In leaping, each undertakes a double movement: the movement of elevation is, quite naturally, followed by the movement of descent. Significantly, the distinguishing feature of the knight of faith lies not in his upward motion but in his downward step. Unlike the knight of infinite resignation who wavers when he makes contact with the ground, the knight of faith proves graceful in his landing. The seamlessness of his return to terra firma and his reentry into the crowd signal his healthy, non-estranged relationship to the ordinary world of finitude. The difficulty of authentic subjectivity, it turns out, is not in transcending the world, pushing oneself up to greater and greater heights; rather, the praiseworthy achievement is in how one brings oneself down.
In this chapter, I seek to apply this insight concerning the paradox of faith to civic circumstances, especially cases of political resistance that necessitate the improvisatory skills of readiness and responsiveness. Conjoining recent scholarship from dance studies with examples from the civil rights movement, I will show that the disciplined actions of falling down and going limp constitute admirable practices of power. Achieved through training, they are unexpectedly effective responses to a range of constraints. Thus, the downward-focused illustration of faith found in Fear and Trembling may prompt us to overturn discourses of uplift and taut uprightness into flexible strategies of grace. Consider this, then, not an exercise in intellectual history—in no way am I claiming that modern dancers or protestors look(ed) to the knight of faith in Fear and Trembling as their model—but something akin to a constructive project in Kierkegaard studies—an illustration of how we might think with Kierkegaard across a range of disciplinary spheres, including the political.
It is intuitive to rank the following two feats differently. The first to be considered is this: to perform something amazing—an athletic move, a gesture of forgiveness, an academic requirement, a videogame maneuver—all the while conveying (perhaps through one’s body language or attitude) the difficulty of the difficult task. One senses the strain in the performer’s clenched teeth—in her stumbling, in her complaints, in her sweat. The second form of accomplishment is to carry out a demand of equal proportion but in such a way that the performer, instead of revealing the rigor that the act requires, makes it look easy. At no time is the observer’s attention diverted to thoughts of the hardness of the agent’s task. Rather, when watching her, the possibility of the feat is simply taken for granted. Her apparent ease becomes part of the enjoyment of beholding her as she unleashes her skill, for the audience does not have to worry about whether she will pull off the joke or make the point or finish the piece or remember the notes or clear the jump. Instead, spectators experience the sheer pleasure of seeing her make her movements and do what she is supremely gifted to do. The difference between these two achievements is similar to the difference between the knight of infinite resignation and the knight of faith in Fear and Trembling. The concealment of difficulty in the latter knight’s action is a mark of grace.229
Who is the knight of faith and what is his place in Fear and Trembling? Fear and Trembling is a sustained reflection on a life of complete faith in which Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous writer Johannes de Silentio shares his admiration for the biblical patriarch Abraham, repeatedly declaring wonderment over his greatness. In his meditation, de Silentio looks not only to the story of Abraham, the father of faith, but also to the way of life of the idealized knight of faith figure. The knight of faith is able to find pleasure in everything. He is a “participator,” taking part in everything. The invisible mark of who he is, though, his signature characteristic, is his reliance on the strength of the absurd in all he does.230 The strength of the absurd is the “how” of his faith.231
A case for the greatness of this faith is built in part on a contrast with a lesser individual, the knight of infinite resignation, whose life displays the gap between reality and the ideal—if not quite in awkwardness, in difference and recognizability.232 The knight of infinite resignation is unable to overcome impossibility on earth because he relies on his own limited strength. He exhausts his energies in making the first movement, the movement of renunciation. In order to cope with his loss, the knight of infinite resignation deals in escapism. It is precisely his flight to the realm of infinity that makes him unable to find joy amid finitude or to relate to the finite in sanguine ways. Thus, he distances himself from the world and shows disdain for the rank of the bourgeois philistine. By contrast, the knight of faith moves seamlessly between the acts of renunciation and retrieval. Despite his singularity, his status as the single individual who stands in an absolute relation to the Absolute, the knight of faith is not cut off from other people.233 He fits in with bourgeois philistines just fine. In his commensurability, he may even be mistaken for one.234
The knight of faith goes beyond resignation by making a second movement. It is in going further that he comes to faith.235 Precisely because his faith was finitude-directed, Abraham was able to receive Isaac back in this life immediately and joyfully after the call to sacrifice him on Mount Moriah.236 It is worth pausing over this point, because readers of the biblical text might be so overwhelmed by the horror of the call to sacrifice Isaac that we overlook the difficulty of receiving Isaac back. Do you think the time of trial is over once the Angel of the Lord stays Abraham’s hand?237 Is it not, rather, especially in the aftermath of trauma that grace is needed?
If we relate the upward and downward movements of the knight of faith’s leap to Abraham’s journey up and down Mount Moriah, we will see that what is even more demanding than ascending the mountain where the sacrifice is to be made is retaining equanimity on the descent. Abraham does not miss a beat on the way down. That is what confounds de Silentio—the instantaneousness of Abraham’s ability to pick back up with everyday life following the ordeal, “his needing no preparation and no time to rally to finitude and its joy.”238
Thus, de Silentio claims that the knight of faith makes the movement of faith successfully by returning to the world in a particular way. He belongs to the Absolute but blends in with the everyday. On one level then, that is, in the sense of outwardly fitting in with the crowd, he may even be said to go with the flow.239 Most importantly in light of his relation with the infinity of the Absolute, he “does not lose the finite but gains it whole and intact.”240 His gait reflects his readiness; it is the sign of his faith.
While the adjective “graceful” may be applied in innumerable contexts, movement is its special purview. The language of movement holds a significant place in de Silentio’s account as his choice for expressing different ways of being in the world. Conceiving of faith as a double movement leads him to employ dance imagery. The knights, representative of the paradigms of effort and ease, metamorphose into ballet dancers of uneven skill in this “leap into life” passage:
It is supposed to be the most difficult feat for a ballet dancer to leap into a specific posture in such a way that he never once strains for the posture but in the very leap assumes the posture. Perhaps there is no ballet dancer who can do it—but this knight does it. Most people live completely absorbed in worldly joys and sorrows; they are benchwarmers who do not take part in the dance. The knights of infinity are ballet dancers and have elevation. They make the upward movement and come down again, and this, too, is not an unhappy diversion and is not unlovely to see. But every time they come down, they are unable to assume the posture immediately, they waver for a moment, and this wavering shows that they are aliens in the world. It is more or less conspicuous according to their skill, but even the most skillful of these knights cannot hide this wavering. One does not need to see them in the air; one needs only to see them the instant they touch and have touched the earth—and then one recognizes them. But to be able to come down in such a way that instantaneously one seems to stand and to walk, to change the leap into life into walking, absolutely to express the sublime in the pedestrian—only that knight can do it, and this is the one and only marvel.241
The difference between the two kinds of knights is reflected in time. Unlike a knight of infinite resignation who wobbles slightly on his way to walking, a knight of faith hits his stride immediately upon landing.242 It is the gap in time as much as the wavering of motion in his descent that betrays the identity of a knight of infinite resignation. A close reading of this account may yield the surprising realization that the performances of knights of infinite resignation are nevertheless admired as “not unlovely.” De Silentio’s concession to their skill does not erase the fact of their strain, however. In privileging the pedestrian (walking doubling as ordinariness), de Silentio retrains readers’ focus from the beauty of the leap itself to the marvel of the fact that it is a leap not out of but into life. That this knight of faith is connected to reality is evinced therefore in his touching the ground. There is an inviting ease in finding the sublime within the everyday, which is manifested by the absence of any vacillation in the superior knight’s lowering movement.
Espen Dahl addresses the notion of the ordinary sublime in a charming chapter by that name in his study Stanley Cavell, Religion, and Continental Philosophy. Two of his points in particular shed light on Abraham’s story and de Silentio’s imaginative portrayal of the knight of faith. When Dahl writes that “the return after the sublime is therefore never to the same everyday—something is gained,” he gestures toward the advantage of an uncanny sense.243 The dialectical play of the ordinary and the sublime gives the knight of faith second sight. The remarkable figure who is not recognized for what he is by others in the crowd himself sees better for seeing differently. Moreover, Dahl indicates that precious value belongs to the ordinary sublime in virtue of its ordinariness. He describes the potential subtlety of the pedestrian sublime thus: “I regard it as a mark of the ordinariness of the ordinary sublime that it is inherently open to such diverging perspectives. No infinity or might imposes itself on the receivers and commands universal agreement in response—the ordinary sublime comes to pass in a vulnerable gesture that is possible to overlook or reject.”244 This insight concerning the out-of-hand declension of vulnerability has incredible relevance for political theology. For those who lack the eyes to see, power may be quickly dismissed as passivity. Quiet strength is still strength, however.
Another interpreter of Kierkegaard’s leap into life passage points to how “sublimity, as it walks along the street,” is brought low.245 Why is the knight of faith able to reconcile the sublime in the ordinary but the knight of infinite resignation is not? Aside from the knights’ differing relations with the absurd, what accounts for the discrepancy in their landings?
Kierkegaard’s Christ-inspired understanding of the nexus of grace, strength, and paradox offers implications for political movements.246 A brief reference to training in a passage on the traits of the knight of faith is particularly revealing. After describing a number of the ways that the knight of faith treads the line between seriousness and levity—he is “carefree as a devil-may-care good-for-nothing, he hasn’t a worry in the world, and yet he purchases every moment that he lives, ‘redeeming the seasonable time’ [Eph 5:16] at the dearest price”—de Silentio explains the basis for the faithful person’s ability to live paradoxically. He is able to enjoy living in the finite realm even after the pain of renouncing finitude:
For his remaining in the finite bore no trace of a stunted, anxious training, and still he has this sense of being secure to take pleasure in it, as though it were the most certain thing of all. . . . He resigned everything infinitely, and then took everything back on the strength of the absurd. He is continually making the movement of infinity, but he makes it with such accuracy and poise that he is continually getting finitude out of it, and not for a second would one suspect anything else.247
Carefree and yet going about the business of redeeming time. Drowning in deep sorrow and yet experiencing bliss. Renouncing the earthly and yet remaining peacefully in finitude. How can the person of faith live in a state of simultaneous security and suspension? I posit that de Silentio’s claim that there is no hint of stunted, anxious training underlying his movement not only illumines the key to the knight of faith’s paradoxical way of life but also shows the source of the faithful knight’s poise. De Silentio cannot elaborate on the knight of faith’s preparation.248 Nevertheless, this statement (in which he gestures toward a type of training) offers a significant clue to the knight of faith’s superior movement: It implies that stunted preparation leads to awkward performance, which further suggests that if there is no grace going into his groundwork, there is no grace coming out of his play.
The pattern of the knight of faith relates in striking ways to the dynamic of preparation and responsiveness in the art of contact (dance) improvisation, which in turn relates to protest movements through the themes of performance and responsibility. Contact improvisation is a form of dancing traced back to the 1970s in America. In it, physical contact between dance partners provides a certain “communication” that informs choices of movement, leading especially to acts of lowering such as rolling and falling.249 Grace may be identified in the contexts of the knight of faith’s slipping into the public collectivity of a crowd, the improvisatory practice of dancing, and political activism as the twofold presence of the beauty of smooth movement and generosity of spirit.
In addition to the practice of improvisation itself, which is a growing source of expertise for them, improvising dancers rely on a history of strenuous discipline in order to move well together in the course of performing. That affords them the readiness to respond in appropriate and inspiring ways to the shifting constraints that they encounter onstage. In other words, it is how they become prepared to be unprepared. Graceful movement is not possible, therefore, without rigorous training.250
As the ability to handle something difficult with poise, grace is also a power, a “practice of freedom.” Paradoxically, such graceful power may be displayed in acts of surrender. This holds true in religion and politics as much as in the realm of aesthetic movement. Thus, instead of a protestor or dancer seeking to express control through vertical positions or motions that approximate flying (leaping out of life), improvisation might call for willfully falling down.251 These are among the claims borne out by Danielle Goldman in I Want to Be Ready: Improvised Dance as a Practice of Freedom.
A professional dancer and assistant professor of dance at the New School, Goldman shifts easily between philosophical, political, and kinesthetic sources. Announcing the cross-sections of these fields in the introduction to her book, Goldman claims that recognizing—rather than denying—the role of constraints in improvisation allows one to see improvisation’s “most significant power as a full-bodied critical engagement with the world, characterized by both flexibility and perpetual readiness.”252 Improvised dance is powerful as a practice that prepares one to make artful choices in response to constraints. Significantly, this includes constraints belonging to spheres apart from but addressable by dance, which is what allows Goldman to claim that improvisation is critical engagement with the world. As Bill T. Jones, a black, gay choreographer who introduced contact improvisation to mainstream modern dance with a piece he created for Alvin Ailey, states, “It was in an improvisation class taught by Richard Bull that I discovered that dance wasn’t only about pointing my feet or making lines in space. It was about how I could solve problems.”253
In performances as well as protests, one is likely to face the problems or constraints of self, society, and sin. First, if a player comes to an event with only slight or stunted training, she may not be able to improvise adequately. It is as if having learned fewer rules, she has fewer to break, or that without much practice (experience), she is at a loss for what to practice (enact). This underdeveloped inner state would limit the number of choices available to her during the piece and would affect her ability to be responsible to others. In Kierkegaardian terms, inauthentic subjectivity prevents one from making genuine choices. Indeed, one grows up existentially and becomes a true self in facing the crisis of the crossroads.254 This achieved selfhood then bears on how one interacts with others. Second, as underscored by the lives of many African American artists and activists, constraints might not be ludic or aesthetic, but political and social. Last, harkening back to the religious and specifically Christian interest in all of Kierkegaard’s authorships, it is worth mentioning the debilitating element of sin—something that estranges one from God and others.255 A valuable technê, then, for remedying constraints of ranging type and consequence is readiness.
Like a solo from Alvin Ailey’s signature piece, Revelations, Goldman names her work after the black spiritual with the haunting but simple lyrics “I want to be ready, I want to be read-y, Lord, ready to put on my long white robe.” It may not be immediately clear to what the readiness in the song refers. Whether for baptism, death, judgment day, heaven, or some other encounter with God or the world, preparation is needed—and life ought to be lived differently in light of this need. One garners a sense of the inspiration that Ailey’s dance holds for Goldman in terms of readiness as well as practice and paradoxical descent (or “controlled fall”) through her exposition:
Although Revelations’ falls are always followed by recovery, [the piece] “I Want to Be Ready” suggests the need to be prepared, not just for salvation but also for a range of social and historical constraints. In this austere solo, with everything seemingly at stake, dance emerges as a practice of making oneself ready, Long-limbed and dressed entirely in white, the soloist begins seated in fourth position, hands planted firmly on the floor, gazing upward. A series of stretches and contractions ensues, danced in keeping with the slow cadences of the spiritual, beseeching in deep tones, “I want to be ready / I want to be read-y / Lord, ready to put on my long white robe.” Several times, the man in white rises from the floor with arms outstretched, only to find the floor again in a controlled, expressive fall. The dance’s final descent ends as the man dramatically reaches his right arm across the floor, head down.256
This downward turn is the provisional, not final, end. After all, the dance is meant to ready the soloist for something else. The next and final section of Revelations culminates in the starkly celebrative movements of the entire ensemble dancing, clad in bright yellow costumes. Ailey’s piece concludes on a triumphant note, suggesting that the preparation undertaken in the second section was worthwhile, successful. The message seems to be that falls can indeed lead to uplift or victory.257 To translate this into the terms of Fear and Trembling, finitude may be restored through downward motions undertaken with an absurd strength.
Such an interpretation of the specific dance piece Revelations points to a form of dance more broadly, one that relies on—while further cultivating—the art of perpetual readiness, what I earlier referred to as the preparation for being unprepared. In contact improvisation, dancers exhibit physical pliability and mental agility as they are responsive and responsible. They are responsible in that they owe each other something in the spur of the moment choices they make as they respond to one another. This art of interacting is not unlike Abraham’s immediate responsiveness to the voice of the Angel of the Lord, calling him to spare Isaac’s life.258 Furthermore, protestors are beholden to each other as they entrust one another with their lives in the fraught moments of direct action.259 In their performances, dancers and protestors alike demonstrate mutual accountability. Such answerability is a daunting objective; having no time for protracted reflection during the course of improvisatory moves, dancers and protestors are forced to rely on their intelligence, attentiveness, and reserve of skills to rise to current, unique challenges.260
To ascertain what responsiveness in improvisation entails, one may begin by explaining what being prepared is not. According to the widely celebrated musician Vijay Iyer (a jazzy knight of faith, if ever there was one), doing something memorized or pre-planned is a verboten move known as “giving a lie.”261 Slightly less offensive but still significantly out of line with the spirit of improvising are the following gestures: thinking of one’s next action in the midst of a fellow player’s “offering” and waiting for someone to finish solely so one can do what one wanted to do. These false modes of preparation bring about a sort of absence and rudeness, which remove a player from the flow of play in its teeming generosity. Reactivity “falls short,” then, of authentic, gracious responsiveness.262 Ultimately, these strategies hinder the desired spontaneity of improvisation and block the freedom of the kind of exchange being sought.
The preparation that frees one to act from a place of the fresh and unplanned goes hand in hand with proper responsiveness. Such an accomplishment requires attentive listening—listening that is intuitive, bodily, and of an almost total sort. When dancers let this way of listening determine their actions, they not only honor each other, demonstrating dutiful responsibility, they also create an atmosphere of relaxed awareness. “Relaxed awareness” is one translation for the French word disponibilité, an invaluable notion for training improvisers.263 The virtue of disponibilité may also be explained in terms of availability, openness, and even trust. Great improvisation arises out of the willingness of the players to test possibilities, to follow each other into and out of risks, and to be comfortable enough to keep the play going after producing phrases in movement or music that do not “work out.” The freedom of the improviser is the ability to be agile like Abraham, who did not miss a beat when he changed directions and started descending the mountain with Isaac.264 It is the freedom “to change the leap into life into walking” or to be like a clumsy-yet-graceful walker who recovers quickly from tripping. Limber and cool, he incorporates the fall into his walk.265 Whether in Jesus’ incarnation, the journey of faith, dance, jazz, or normal, pedestrian life, successful improvisation depends on a responsiveness that results from awareness and skill.
Note that the difficulty of this demand does not lead to rigidity but relaxation. Where one looks for exceptional excellence, one discovers the ordinary sublime; where one anticipates tension, there is easing up. This ease corresponds to the carefree, graceful manner of the knight of faith, not the awkwardness of the knight of infinite resignation. The ability to replace rigidity with relaxation does not come automatically but is an accomplishment reached through practice. Furthermore, a relaxed physical and psychological state is practically useful, powerful even. Until this point, we have noted the discrepancy between the exterior and the interior—grace disguising grit. Now we are led to see the contradiction of easy outward appearance and hard-edged effect—passivity covering up power. This second level of paradox is evident when the motion of falling takes on political significance, as it does in a range of performative protest movements, including the quest for the realization of African Americans’ civil rights.
Thus far, I have examined the leap of the knight of faith, whose movement into and out of the transcendent is a sign of his otherwise invisible ability to find the sublime in the ordinary; alongside his double movement, I have considered the emphasis on tumbling and falling in the modern dance form known as contact improvisation, and the controlled descent in the Alvin Ailey piece “I Want to Be Ready.” These downward-focused dance practices highlight the importance of training for improvisation, which itself cultivates and rewards physical—but also psychological—openness, ease, and relaxation (which are marks of grace). The task now is to turn to the power of paradox for politics, that is, to illuminate how forms of “falling” and the attendant values of improvisation were integral to the success of the civil rights movement. This consideration aligns with the work of political theologians such as Corey D. B. Walker, who examines race, the body, and “the conditions of possibility for the inauguration of a new practice of freedom.”266 To be explicit: I am not maintaining that positions of lowliness or limpness are the only, best, or most graceful ways to display resistance.267 Rather, I am drawing attention to the paradoxical power that can attend postures typically deemed weak, and to the association of those postures with faith and freedom.
The struggle for racial integration and justice in the American South in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s was marked by organized direct action, including Freedom Rides, sit-ins, boycotts, and marches. Training in theory and practice was needed in order to carry out these acts of civil disobedience in accordance with the principles of nonviolence. The inclination to retaliate against nasty insults and brutish attacks had to be undermined in advance. Thus, protestors studied Mohandas Gandhi’s teaching of satyagraha, translated as “truth force” and “soul force,” in order to overcome feelings of hatred and ill-will toward their aggressors. They also learned and evaluated specific physical techniques of peaceful noncooperation. Famous among those were going limp and staying seated.268
Slackness of musculature offered the following practical and personal advantages. A literal expression of noncooperation, it protracted the arrest process and placed a burden on the authorities. Going limp was also a protective strategy, as relaxed bodies were less susceptible to tissue damage than the bodies of the taut and tensed. Bruce Hartford’s “Notes from a Nonviolent Training Session (1963)” attest to these ideological and physiological points. In outline form, Hartford writes:
A. Defending Against Physical Attack
1. What. The “Non-Violent Position.” Dropping to ground and protecting self. Squirming to walls & curbs to protect back.
2. Why. Best Protection. Least threatening. Startles/scares attackers. Clarifies situation to onlookers and press.
B. Arrests
1. Going limp. Pros and cons. How to do it. Styles:
• The Buddha style
• The Flabby-limp style
• The Walking limp-collapse
• Going rough
These training materials, with other nonviolent action guides such as Martin Oppenheimer and George Lakey’s Manual for Direct Action, reveal the systematic preparation that civil rights activists undertook for the sake of peaceful, effective actions. After role-playing a variety of scenarios and experimenting with different responses in the safe setting of a training session, protestors had reasoned strategies on hand that they could employ and adapt in chaotic, charged environments.269 In short, they knew how and why to improvise falls.270
Closely related to protestors’ choice of loosening their posture was the adoption of motionless stances, including the powerful and recognizable examples of remaining seated at a lunch counter and Rosa Parks’s refusal to give up her seat on the bus. Like dropping to the ground, stillness reads as pacifist behavior and contrasts starkly with the cruel behavior of attackers; thus, it stands to win public approval. Such calm and controlled behavior also disarms the opponents, disrupting the escalating cycle of violence. Despite these strategic advantages, falling, going limp, and sitting motionless might be perceived (even among the protestors themselves) as forms of weakness. Though active and dignified—that is, genuinely civil—modes of resistance, they raised questions of apparent passivity and indignity.
In his stirring essay, “Which Way Is Down? Improvisations on Black Mobility,” the Canadian cultural critic and music professor Jason King ties claims about black identity together with the paradoxical notion of locating power in “downwardness”—those lowly postures and acts of falling that I have sought in this chapter to connect with the graceful, earthbound step of Kierkegaard’s paradox-driven knight of faith. By challenging the associations of verticality and dignity, on the one hand, and lowliness and shame, on the other, King upends traditional thinking while showing the unexpected advantages that black people in North America have found in socially and politically disadvantaged positions. Like improvisers empowered by skill, they have turned their constraints into means of freedom.
After he defines falling in terms of groundlessness, descent, and disorientation,271 King suggests that “perhaps no group has more to offer the phenomenon of falling than black people.”272 For, under a society dominated by whites, “to be black is to have already fallen.”273 The rootlessness of the Diaspora affords mobility, and black people have capitalized on that ability to move, conjoining the power of grace with the powerlessness of descent. The correct and proper direction of that movement—its orientation—is a matter for debate, though. Not only do people disoriented from falling or rootlessness need to figure out which way is up, they need to consider the value of verticality itself.274 Are forms of lowliness good in themselves or are they desirable only in relation to recovery and uplift? What if the piece “I Want to Be Ready” were the final act in Revelations, unsurpassed by a third movement and its victorious “Rocka My Soul” finale?
King acknowledges the language of uplift that belongs to celebrated works created by black artists, from Maya Angelou’s poem “And Still I Rise” to “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” the song that served as the “Negro National Anthem” in the civil rights movement.275 Curtis Mayfield’s “Move on Up” and Bob Marley’s “Get up, stand up / stand up for your rights” likewise fit into the paradigm that upholds upward mobility, uprightness, and resurrection.276 Yet King still leaves room for the potential of the Down Low (DL).277 He does not immediately eschew being on the DL but rethinks shame. Focusing on directionality, he writes, “What is fascinating, and even worthwhile, about DL is that it literally suggests a new direction for black identity, and it does so in the most unique way—through the metaphor of directionality and mobility. No dead-end is really an end. One can find pride crouching low to the ground, moving under the radar, not just up high, in the air.”278 In the end that is not an end, he sides with the paradox of “Black performance [that] moves toward the co-presence of mobility and immobility,” claiming that blackness itself is “ambivalent direction.”279 King implies more than the possible coexistence of freedom and control; he gestures toward the fruitfulness of locating freedom in paradox, whether the paradox of simultaneous mobility and stillness or falling-and-ascent. Similarly, the accomplished practitioner of contact improvisation Nancy Stark Smith affirms, “the expression ‘fall from grace,’ becomes an impossible statement when falling itself is experienced as a state of grace.”280 Today, the nexus of black identity, fallenness, grace, and political power takes on new life through the “die-ins” staged by activists in the Black Lives Matter movement.281 They, too, show how falling can be an assertive act, a power play.
As in the dance practice of contact improvisation, the upside-down logic of Kierkegaard’s knight of faith is recognizable in the arena of politics, which calls for in-the-moment responses to shifting constraints. The glory and grace of the knight of faith’s movement do not reside exclusively in his transcendence, as one might expect. It is how he slides into the everyday, finding the sublime within the ordinary, which shows his greatness. Similarly, the impetus to fall—to partner with gravity in moving downward rather than attempt to defy it by propelling oneself up in the air—is at odds with literally-minded interpretations of “standing up for one’s rights” as much as the traditional kinesthetic values of classical ballet. Because political constraints call for improvisation too, falling may be a social and spiritual exercise beyond a strategy in contact-driven, combinatorial movement. It may be a creative-yet-trained response to the unpredictable and physically fraught atmosphere of protests. Or, as the liturgical expert Janet Walton believes, falling may count in a particular context as an action but “really it’s a stance in life.”282
In brief, sublimely pedestrian motions, downward-bound movements, and powerful postures of lowliness are united under the umbrella of Kierkegaardian political theology insofar as they open a new way to think and embody grace as a paradoxical political mode.283
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229. Graceful ease may also be linked to the knight of faith’s incognito, degrees of concealment interrelating.
230. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, 39–40. References are to the Hongs’ translation of Fear and Trembling, unless otherwise noted.
231. “For the movement of faith must continually be made by virtue of the absurd” (ibid., 37). Cf. “[the knight of faith] can be saved only by the absurd, and this he grasps by faith” (ibid., 47).
232. Ibid., 38–39. To clarify, there are three camps of people in Kierkegaard’s indirect argument. The first group may be thought of as the masses, among whom there is neither striving nor resignation. The second group is made up of knights of infinite resignation. They represent an advance over the masses in that they “make an upward movement,” but they are not able to reconcile infinity with finitude (ibid., 41). And so this first class of knights is surpassed by the knights of faith, the third and greatest group. These figures of faith embody the highest calling of existence in living before the Absolute in such a way that cancels yet elevates their everyday being. Parallels may be drawn between these different sets of people (the masses, the knights of infinite resignation, and the knights of faith) and the three stages of existence that Kierkegaard identifies (the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious).
233. Ibid., 56.
234. Espen Dahl addresses the ambiguity that surrounds the role of familiarity in “opening . . . the worldhood of the world.” In a passage on Cavell, Wittgenstein, and Heidegger with understandably Kierkegaardian resonances, he writes, “such an opening of the world is double edged, for precisely the same means that open the world up tend to level it out. When the equipments are placed into the orbit of all our diverse occupations, they become transparent and then leveled into the average or fallen everyday life. A similar dynamics is operative in social life, where individuals fall into the anonymous life of das Man, the ‘they.’ Under such circumstances, the ordinary sublime tends to be missed” (Dahl, Stanley Cavell, 40). Similarly, the very way that the knight of faith relates to—or even uses—finitude, opening its possibilities, causes him to blend into the leveled out crowd of subjectively immature aesthetes. Like the incarnated Christ, he is easy to (dis)miss.
235. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, 37. De Silentio is highly critical of his age for presuming to go further than faith without ever having reached or accomplished faith. See, e.g., ibid., 7.
236. Ibid., 37.
237. Gen 22:12.
238. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, 37.
239. On modern, urban crowds in Copenhagen and their gawping, anonymous members, see Pattison, Kierkegaard, Religion, 50–71.
240. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, 37.
241. Ibid., 41.
242. Cf. King, “Which Way Is Down?,” 36.
243. Dahl, Stanley Cavell, 43.
244. Ibid., 38. Compare the above quotation to this one: “The Gandhian paradox: freedom through submission. Civil disobedience, then, is also about learning or creating a different obedience, in uncertain variation between a potential transgression and a necessary limitation.” Singh, “Reinhabiting Civil Disobedience,” 378.
245. Fenves, “Chatter,” 168.
246. The paradox of grace and strength is expressed in 2 Cor 12:9.
247. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling (trans. Hannay), 69–70, emphasis mine.
248. That is why de Silentio continually marvels at this figure; at most, he is able to describe the movements of faith but he can neither perform those movements nor supply a formula for how to make them. See, e.g., the swimming passage on pp. 37–38 in the Hong translation.
249. On the development of contact improvisation and its features, see the documentary Fall after Newton and Laine, “Is Contact Improvisation Really Dance?”
250. Cf. Foster, “Choreographies of Protest,” 399–401, 410.
251. Cf. King, “Which Way Is Down?,” 36; Jones, Last Night on Earth, 117.
252. Goldman, I Want to Be Ready, 5.
253. Jones, Last Night on Earth, 114; cited in Goldman, I Want to Be Ready, 114. Concerning the diverse repertory of Alvin Ailey and the way African American versatility was a strategy for survival, see DeFrantz, “Composite Bodies of Dance.”
254. Kierkegaard, Either/Or, 2:157.
255. Kierkegaard, Sickness Unto Death, 77–131.
256. Goldman, I Want to Be Ready, 104, emphasis mine.
257. Challenges to the tautness and verticality of the classical dance form came from a number of sources, including the modern choreography of the Nietzsche-inspired Doris Humphrey. At the same time, it was recognized that falling could offer safety; laying low might ensure survival. As the transformation in value was taking place, however, falling was still being contrasted with “recovery,” the former representative of submission, the latter, control. On safety and survival, see Goldman, I Want to Be Ready, 101–6. For thinking about these themes in terms of the knight of faith, and the political consequence of his blending into the crowd, see Bagger, “From the Double Movement,” 342.
258. Gen 22:11–12.
259. Cf. Foster, “Choreographies of Protest,” 406.
260. Ibid., 412; Ryle, “Improvisation,” 73–74.
261. Iyer, “Imagination and Improvisation.”
262. This description is somewhat in tension with Gary Peters’s origin-focused account of improvisation in Philosophy of Improvisation.
263. Wells, Improvisation, 80.
264. “Even more difficult than setting out for Moriah to offer Isaac is the capacity, when one has already drawn the knife, in unconditional obedience to be willing to understand: It is not required.” Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, 268.
265. Robert E. Neale lightheartedly suggests that the incarnation—Jesus’ tumbling into the world—was a result of God slipping on a banana peel (in Moltmann, Theology of Play, 80). To think further on falling, walking, and graceful recoveries, consult: Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, 41; King, “Which Way Is Down?,” 36. On walking and dancing, recall Nietzsche: “Does [Zarathustra] not walk like a dancer?” Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 123.
266. Walker, “Race for Theology,” 137. Notably, Walker focuses in this chapter on how Howard Thurman’s analysis of spirituals opened new ways of thinking about death. A prominent African American theologian, Thurman traveled to India and met with Gandhi in 1935.
267. One of several compelling counterpoints is the image of Ieshia Evans calmly standing up to rushing police officers. Miller, “Graceful in the Lion’s Den.”
268. My discussion of civil rights activists’ preparation to adopt certain postures is informed by Goldman, I Want to Be Ready, 97–98. Other pertinent sources include: Chabot, Transnational Roots; Gregg, Power of Nonviolence, 141–75; Hohle, “Body and Citizenship,” esp. 293–95; and Singh, “Reinhabiting Civil Disobedience,” esp. 373–75.
269. “Performances are composed of ‘strips’ of ‘restored behavior,’ learned repertoires that are both symbolic and meaningful and can be creatively arranged and rearranged to express particular ideas and identities through rehearsal, adaptation, and experiment (Schechner 1985).” Juris, “Embodying Protest,” 231.
270. On the civility of civil disobedience, see Gandhi, “Civility,” 47–49. David Borgo points to the connection between the civil rights movement and free improvisation or free jazz. See Borgo, “Negotiating Freedom,” 168.
271. “Slipping, stumbling and tripping are all performances of disorientation, de-anchoring, rootlessness; they precursor the fall or the slide (the gliding fall) or the tumble (the rolling fall) or the flop (the thudding fall).” King, “Which Way Is Down?,” 27.
272. Ibid.
273. Ibid., 28. Black political theology is related to lowliness in that the “best of black political theology seeks to follow Jesus of Nazareth: to take up the cause of outcast, despised, and marginalized children, women, and men; to live at the disposal of the cross (Mark 8:34).” Such a step toward the downtrodden accords with James Cone’s conviction “that blackness was not so much a matter of skin color as of placing one’s heart, soul, mind, and body with the dispossessed.” Copeland, “Black Political Theologies,” 272, 283.
274. King, “Which Way Is Down?,” 32.
275. Ibid., 29–30.
276. Ibid., 32, 34.
277. Ibid., 38–40.
278. Ibid., 40.
279. Ibid., 42; cited in Goldman, I Want to Be Ready, 100.
280. Stark Smith, editor’s note, 2.
281. Susan Leigh Foster points to the “determined listlessness” of AIDS activists as they utilized die-ins in the 1980s (“Choreographies of Protest,” 404). She observes that the die-ins of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) “featured bodies moving from vertical standing to horizontal lying, occasionally exaggerating the fall with flare and angst” (ibid., 403).
282. Walton, “Imagination and Improvisation.”
283. For their intellectual generosity, I wish to thank the editors of this volume, Roberto Sirvent and Silas Morgan, my advisors Wayne Proudfoot and Mark C. Taylor, and Dennis Dalton, from whom I first had the privilege of learning about Gandhi, civil disobedience, and the discipline of love.