Not more than Sartre I would have to disagree. However, I would classify Kierkegaard as an exitentialist. Though his writings were religious in nature, he did an excellent job describing his perception of christian life as a possibly existential one. I remember one allegory from one of his books about Abraham being told to kill his son Isaacon Mount Moriah.

1) He was truly isolated in that experience inherently because it was religious. He would be even more isolated and an outcast had he actuallyperformed the sacrifice becuase even if he told other that God told him to do it, who would believe him. As existensialism emphasizes the uniqueness and isolation of the individual experience in a hostile or indifferent universe and regards human existence as unexplainable (at least to another).

2) The fact that he and his wife begged God for 100 years for a child and now he was rewarded with one and told to kill him, that had to be very painful. Especially given his faith (Which is still debated as to whether it was a test for Abraham, or whther god did it to prove to Abraham that he had faith, though he knew he did since he was doind it anyway. It took 3 days to climb mount moriah. I would say this satisfies the conditions necessary for anguish.

3) The fact the he was going to do it showed that he made a choice to do so and resigned to follow the will of God even thuogh it was contrary to his own. Self-resignation.

In Kierkegaardian terms he would have been called a Knight of Faith.

-Sweet

Well...I like the phrase, no matter how or why he wrote it...again doe circumstances and catagories really change or alter the meaning of things?

punk, i promise you, did used to -mean- something.

in fact, it meant something very, very much.

we are now living in the world no longer even of the signifier, but of the -sign-.

i find this frightening.

punks were very, very about living in the world of the signified. it was about getting back to the signified, & we were nowhere near the sign yet. we saw the sign coming, perhaps, but if the worst we had to battle was boston (& it was) we were still fighting signifiers that thought they were signifieds, that were really just overproduced & overmeddled signifieds.

it is -horrifying- to me that it has lost so much meaning that it can be now that of as a "term" whether hackneyed or not.

it was, emphatically, not a term.

nothing was just a term until probably mid 81. signifieds were leaning into signifiers before then, but things had not yet crossed over into having no meaning whatsoever. people were ironic about things that -mattered- to them, whether negatively or positively. there was no irony about irony yet.

punk was about stripping away devices to get to core meaning.

i know, i was there, i ran away from home to be there, for heavens sake, for heavens sake, it was the last thing where there were any true signifieds left at all.

it once had a meaning. one could definitely NOT say "i am a punk" & be a punk. one had to shoot dope, be bisexual & know who at least rimbaud was. or, lets say one was straighter (i was straighter, my parents were weird & i still lived at home, age 14, unlike many of the other 14 year olds i knew), one had to spend most of ones life on the streets, hang around w/ hustlers (this means prostitutes), do what would now be called "fetish" modeling (& then was called a variety of more dismissive things, ie, "not tall enough"), get so drunk one is falling asleep in spike heels whilst standing up, & know who at least rimbaud was.

it was not, btw, real easy to get into this club.

it was easy to name onesself a member, perhaps, but not to be one.

i am -certain- being an existentialist was once the same.

all of our postpost business has wrought an empty, but extraordinarily heavy rock full o' trouble for our culture, & via our culture, for our world.

when meaning is leached, you know, no meaning remains.

no other way to put it.