The Reply of the Quaedam. A reactive research on self-deception, the deceptive self and the desire to live in truth.

摘要

This dissertation endeavors to track down the phenomenon of self-deception by revealing its inherent traits and querying its various manifestations. An exploration of the current, analytic debate on self-deception sheds light on how the epistemological restrictions, the unsteady analogies and illegitimate assumptions stand in the way of the intelligibility of the phenomenon. The search for a more adequate approach that would do justice to the present topic of self-deception, hits thereby upon the oeuvre of the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard. Within the existentialistic framework of his authorship, this research finds an exquisite opportunity to incarnate self-deception in a textual manner, by means of Kierkegaard’s ‘indirect communication’. It sketches out a plan to establish an interactive dialogue with this pseudonymous author in order to be able to investigate and analyze the occurrence of self-deception by its own embodiment. This particular perspective is being conceived according to Deleuzes and Guattari’s notion of the “conceptual persona” to provide a theoretical embedment for the second part of the dissertation. This part is entirely written in the form of indirect communication: it is carried out through the newly developed perspective of the Quaedam – the conceptual persona, in which the reader recognizes its reactive ally while searching for the hidden writer behind the cryptic scriptures. She discovers self-deception from within, by analyzing her misrelation towards the conceptual subject of Kierkegaard’s writings: the single individual – or the so-called Quidam. Each of the five chapters rewrites and deepens a central narrative in Kierkegaard’s writings. Doing so, this dissertation is able to incarnate and exacerbate the complex phenomenon of self-deception in a highly original way, in order to unmask the self-deceiving tendencies and determine if and how the human condition could be able to divest them.