Opened by my degrading experience as a prisoner of war and, not least, by bearing witness to the horrendous Allied fire-bombing of Dresden, which killed over a hundred thousand civilians in one night and day raid, to this first self-de-struction of modern Western civilization, I was deeply receptive to its severe criticism by the humanist existentialists such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Simon De Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and others, who attributed its ultimate justification of violence to the metaphysical principle that “essence precedes [is ontologically prior to] existence.” And in the throes of that trauma, I read these radically revisiononist thinkers, particularly Sartre’s novels, avidly. And, in the process, I, as a student, disrupted many of the highly popular classes in the humanities I took at Wesleyan, which at that time were being taught by and large under the aegis of the traditional humanism, on the one hand, and the (antihumanist) New Criticism, on the other. But it was not until my sophomore year that I was enabled to feel/think the full impact of this intellectual retrieval of existence from the dominance of essence: temporality from its dependence on universality, be-ing on Being. That was, paradoxically, when, out of the clear blue, a fellow maverick student friend from Missouri, David Mize, attuned to my fraught intellectual confusions, offered me his copy of The Journals of Søren Kierkegaard, a selection edited by Alexander Dru published by Oxford University Press under the auspices of the Christian novelist/editor, Charles Williams, in 1939, the first translation of the Danish thinker’s works into English.

As I recall, I was profoundly struck by the first words of these journal entries: something like, “We think backwards, but live forward,” an existential assertion pointing in a shockingly irreversible way to the Western separation of mind and body, essence and existence—and the urgent need to reunify this debilitating separation by way of understanding human life as a form of being that is simultaneously outside (a limited consciousness) and inside nature—an ex-sistent in-sistent being unlike stones and animals. In another even more startling formulation of this same memorable insight, I encountered the following statement (quoted as the epigraph for this chapter) in Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous novel Johannes Climacus, or De Omnibus Dubitanduim Est shortly after my introduction to The Journals. It was a statement categorically rejecting disinterested inquiry and its (objective) Truth as a lie:

This can also be stated thus: Reflection is disinterested. Consciousness [“human life”] is relationship, and it brings with it interest or concern; a duality which is perfectly expressed with pregnant double meaning by the word “interest” (Latin interesse, meaning (i) “to be between,” (ii) “to be a matter of concern.”) (Søren Kierkegaard, Johannes Climacus, [Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,] pp. 151–152)

As I noted a long time ago, “interest” is the difference that being-in-the midst-of-time makes and the differences it always already disseminates. It was only when I encountered this Kierkegaardian Christian existentialist characterization of the human condition that I realized the full scope and depth—the ontological and political meaning—of Heidegger’s central but undeveloped assertion that care (Sorge) is the foundational element of Dasein, human being as being-in-the-world. It did not simply mean a burdened sense of responsibility for the rest of the being of being, one devoid of transcendental guidance. It also meant the dread incumbent on this fundamental condition—the absence of a God on which to rely for difficult decisions about being in the world. It meant freedom in the radical sense of word, as in Sartre’s memorable Kierkegaardian phrase “Man is condemned to be free.” This paradoxical meaning of Kierkegaard’s “interest” took on seismic proportions when, in the process of reading the Journals, I came across the entry recalling a day in his early life in the company of his aging father. They are walking in the overcast mountainous moors of Denmark toward some unknown destination, the father, silent, dour, self-absorbed, leading the way, and the boy struggling to keep up with him. Suddenly, the father halts, looks up, and, in an astonishing gesture of defiance, raises his clenched fist and shakes it against the skies. Kierkegaard, as I recall, does not say anything more about this apocalyptic moment, but clearly it was life-transforming for the young boy. On this occasion, his familiar, everyday world is suddenly shattered, and he is prematurely unhomed, as it were—thrown into the realm of the in-between. And, to me, his experience was something analogous to the night and day in Dresden when, as a young prisoner of war, I experienced an event that shattered whatever previous certainties about life I had derived from above, as it were. In that brief but terrible moment of unimaginable violence I was plunged, like it or not, into what I then identified as the zero zone—and later, because of its historically resonant etymology, as my “occasion”: from the Latin cadere, “to die,” “to perish,” from which occidere: “to go down, to set,” as in the “setting of the sun,” derives, to become the origin of the word “Occident” (German Abendland, “evening land”) that the West coined to distinguish it from the Orient (from oriens, participle of oriri; “rising,” “rising sun,” “east”). By this term I meant pretty much what Kierkegaard, no doubt recalling that time with his father in the Danish moors, by “interesse,” the realm of the in-between, where all the reference points fell away and he, having previously taken his vocation from the dictates of a Higher Cause, was henceforth “assigned to himself.” To put this apocalyptic beginning alternatively, that intense moment in the moors with his father initiated Søren to the dread (Danish, angest) that, as he put it in The Concept of Dread, “reveals the nothing” that is ontologically prior to Being.

It was, above all, this Jobian occasion—this sudden disclosure of the belongingness in strife of heaven and earth—in the process of my encounter with Kierkegaard as an undergraduate at Wesleyan and as a graduate student at Columbia, that suddenly and irrevocably infused my memory of the Allied firebombing of Dresden with the affective—and political—resonance that I was to bring to my reading of Heidegger’s more abstract ontological appropriation of Kierkegaard’s concept of dread. (It was no accident that throughout the years between 1958, when I began writing my Ph. D. dissertation, The Christian Tradition Modern British Verse Drama: The Poetics of Sacramental Time, to 1993, when I published Heidegger and Criticism: Retrieving the Cultural Politics of Destruction, I was always uneasy about having to use the far less affective English translation of the German word Angst—“anxiety” rather than “dread,” which the English translators of Kierkegaard invariably use to render his Danish angest).

But the immediacy with Kierkegaard to which David Mize introduced me at Wesleyan did not terminate at that point. After a year of graduate study at Columbia, I took a teaching position at Mount Hermon, a college preparatory school in Northfield, Massachusetts, founded by prominent Protestant evangelists in the nineteenth century, with close ties to Union Theological Seminary, where under the influence of the Christian existentialist movement, particularly the German expatriate from Nazi Germany Paul Tillich and the American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, Kierkegaard’s thought had become central to a curriculum that was oriented by the radical anti-authoritative political initiatives of that time, not least the civil rights movements. It was not long after arriving at Mount Hermon that I met three recent graduates of Union, David Jewell, John Angevin, and the school’s chaplain James Whyte, all of whom in some degree or another were deeply influenced by Kierkegaard’s existentialist thought, not least, that engagement in the world that was the difficult imperative of being assigned to oneself.

As I have recalled elsewhere, I, like Edward Said, who was a student at Mount Hermon during my two-year stay there, found the school’s institutionalization of the Protestant work ethic difficult to tolerate. But unlike Said, my two years were redeemed by friendship with the extraordinary Union seminarians. And that was precisely because they were extending Kierkegaardian Christian existentialism into the sites of the ethical and the political, an extension that in the next decade was to render their unique kind of passive active Christian existentialism one of the primary agents of resisting America’s paranoid intervention in Vietnam in the name of its exceptionalist—God’s or History’s ordained—“errand.”

For a long time after this turn to Heidegger’s de-struction of the Western philosophical tradition—from the Romans’ reduction of the Greek a-lethéia (truth as unconcealment) to adequaetio intellecttus et rei (the adequation on mind and thing, i.e. truth as correctness) to the triumph of empiricism in modernity—and pursuing its worldly political implications, I felt that I had achieved a comportment toward being that satisfied the imperatives of being-in-the-world. It was during the early stages of this Heideggerian period that I discovered what seemed to me the parallel work of Michel Foucault and of Edward W. Said, particularly the latter’s insistent commitment to the secular. Along the way, however, I began to feel uneasy about the way the secular was being represented by all too many of those “worldly” critics whom Said influenced. More specifically, I was troubled by the bland abstractness of their “worldly” criticism. It seemed to me that this word (and, not incidentally, its correlate, “humanism”), which Said had deliberately chosen because of it subjective and historical resonance—its affiliation with its transcendental antithesis—had become routinized. It was, that is, lacking in the very existential force that led Said to adopt the term against the systematization intrinsic to “religious” criticism in the first place. Indeed, one got the impression from its usage by these worldly critics that the word had been divested of its original intensive belongingness with the transcendental, and in the process, as Said warned against in Orientalism, was rendered as “naturalized supernaturalism.” In order to forestall this possible reading of the secular, in fact, Aamir Mufti, one of Said’s most able and articulate students, points out the recuperative theological implications of the normal reduction:

Secular criticism in Said’...