Lectures from the Allen Room & Wertheim Study: EVERYBODY’S AUTOBIOGRAPHY: Remarks on Anxiety and Pseudonymity in the work of SØren Kierkegaard and Charlie Kaufman

Charlie Kaufman is said to be an anxious man. Or perhaps that is a confused judgment based on speculation over the characters he creates—characters who appear to suffer from anxiety. Or perhaps it is the viewers themselves who experience anxiety in watching Kaufman’s films. Whatever is the case, the anxiety that Kaufman has, reflects, or engenders is not the kind of anxiety we think it is. In fact, Kaufman’s characters embody a kind of anxiety that bears a close resemblance to the anxiety Søren Kierkegaard theorized in the 1840s.

In this talk LaRocca articulates some points of relation between their work, in particular how Kaufman shares with Kierkegaard a radical deployment of pseudonymity as a way of responding to anxiety. Both writers rely on pseudonymity to transform autobiographical experience from something merely personal to something at a remove from its author —a distancing that enables the work to become relevant to a wider audience, indeed to the human community afflicted by the very anxiety they theorize and dramatize. Pseudonymity, in turn, animates a number of philosophically significant features of their work, including: the possibility of learning truth from lies; metaphysical varieties of acting; the presence of doubles and proxies; and the puzzling effects of work that repeats and reflects back on itself.

David LaRocca, Ph.D., a Writer in Residence in the Library’s Frederic Lewis Allen Room, a Fellow at The Moving Picture Institute in New York, and the author of many works of film criticism, including essays published or forthcoming on Lars von Trier, Spike Lee, the Coen brothers, Michael Mann, Tim Burton, Clint Eastwood, and Werner Herzog, will discuss ideas related to our experience of anxiety—in philosophy and film—drawn from his latest edited book, The Philosophy of Charlie Kaufman.

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