Page 18 - University of Pretoria RESEARCH REVIEW 2018

The courage to be an absolute nobody
Duncan Reyburn, School of the Arts: Visual Arts
I’m not afraid to compete. It’s just the opposite. Don’t you see that? I’m afraid I will compete – that’s what scares me... I’m sick of not having the courage to be an absolute nobody – JD Salinger, Franny and Zooey
Scholars have not always known how to interpret the work of Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) in relation
to political thought, and so the recent release of the anthology Kierkegaard and Political Theology (Pickwick, 2018) is a welcome contribution, not just ‘for those who want to get a better grasp of Kierkegaard, but ... for all those
who want to understand our own predicament’.
One of the contributions is a provocative essay co-authored by
Dr Duncan Reyburn in the UP School of the Arts, and American scholar Professor Roberto Sirvent, from
Hope International University. Titled “The spotlight and the ‘courage to
be an absolute nobody’: Toward a Kierkegaardian-Chestertonian political theology of ego”, the essay analyses what the desire to be in the proverbial spotlight means for ethics and philosophy today.
The essay takes as point of departure the observation that many of the egotistical impulses evident in global culture are in fact masks, and that common obsessions with identity,
power, fame and fortune prevent more introspective forms of thought and contemplation – therefore giving rise to ‘virtue-signalling’ at the expense of actual virtue. Thus, Sirvent and Reyburn write that feelings of loftiness, godlikeness, and power often conceal despair and, consequently, that when the subject loses his or her place in the spotlight, what is experienced is not the despair of the loss itself but
a ‘moment of awakening to the true despair of being in the spotlight’.
Sirvent and Reyburn offer a way
to think about the subversive and much-needed role of failure in the contemporary political milieu. The idea is not that we should simplistically
aim to fail in order to challenge the normalisation of success, but that whatever successes we happen to
be capable of, and whatever good
we end up doing, must necessarily embrace and even appreciate those parts of our humanity that we often want to deny: our vulnerability, our dependence and interdependence, and, of course, our capacity for error and correction.
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