2019
3(59)
DOI: 10. /arc190303
Introduction
This essay presents Søren Kierkegaard’s concept of
repetition and the analogy that can be drawn between it
and intaglio printmaking. The concept, thanks to its pro-
ductive capacity, serves as an articulation with other con-
cepts and thus can be considered a “hinge” concept. In
the concept of repetition many types of knowledge come
together, ranging from structural anthropology to mathe-
matical logic to linguistics. It can therefore be considered
effective and novel. Our intention is to put forward a code,
or a dialogue, between intaglio printmaking and philoso-
phy. These subjects clearly have an interest in the concept
of repetition. Both of them, each from its particular eld
of theory, proposes things that appear to be in conict with
each other and many other things that appear to have an
analogous point of view. Besides the debate that may arise
around these questions, dialogue between them is not just
tting, it is necessary. The advances made in these two
disciplines have underlined the pertinence of establishing
contact in order to rene concepts and ideas and it would
be ridiculous to suggest that the problem they have be-
fore them does not create a certain correspondence among
them. This article establishes links of communication that
reveal the true nature of human activity, preserving at all
Juan Carlos Ramos Guadix*
Repetition. A journey to the limits of the matrix
Powtórzenie. Podróż do granic matrycy
* ORCID: 0000-0002-4081-1516. Faculty of Fine Arts, Drawing
Department, University of Granada (Spain).
times the spirit of what Plato pointed out in The Repub-
lic (395b) when he said that human nature is coined into
small pieces.
And human nature, Adeimantus, appears to have been
coined into yet smaller pieces, and to be as incapable of
imitating many things well as of performing well the ac-
tions of which the imitations are copies [2, p. 249].
For this reason it is impossible for just one branch of
knowledge to have the only truth about the entirety of all
that is human.
So I will try to extract, without conict, that which is
helpful in building a dialogue, a dialogue based on an
analogy between Kierkegaard’s concept of repetition and
intaglio and printmaking systems as empirical phenome-
na. Keeping this purpose in mind, the analogy will be pre-
sented with regard to three well-differentiated moments.
They are: the matrix as a unique thing, printing as the
progress and process of transfer and, nally, the print as
the process of appropriating a story.
The matrix as a unique thing
The rst moment is its location in the context of the
line of memory, matrix. Here matrix refers to a unique and
individual instrument in which the origin is founded and
revealed. If in Kierkegaard repetition is dened in the con-
text of individual existence, in intaglio repetition is found
in the existence of the matrix, which in turn nds in the
print a new departure, a new understanding, a repetition.
It is quite true what Philosophy says: that Life must be understood backwards.
But that makes one forget the other saying: that it must be lived forwards.
S. Kierkegaard, Diary [1, p. 161]
20 Juan Carlos Ramos Guadix
We can therefore say that the matrix, conceived as
a palimpsest, […] is a decisive expression of what “re-
collection” was for the Greeks. Just as they taught that
all knowledge is recollection, thus will modern philoso-
phy teach that life itself is a repetition [3, p. 9]. So, if
all knowledge is recollection and all life is a repetition,
all matrixes are also repetition. Because in the matrix
knowledge is built like a palimpsest. It is that indestructi-
ble outt that adapts perfectly and delicately to our shape.
As Kierkegaard said with regard to repetition, the matrix
is: Repetition is a beloved wife of whom one never tires
because it is only the new of which one tires. One never
tires of the old, and when one has it before oneself one is
happy, and only a person who does not delude himself that
repetition ought to be something new, for then he tires of
it, is genuinely happy [3, p. 10].
The matrix is where we put our courage and energy so
as to achieve a clear idea of the meaning and transcen-
dence of our work. In line with the foregoing, the matrix
gives us that immanent characteristic of existence which
is the ability to make current the states of things past, but
without going back in time. Moreover, the idea of rep-
etition sustained by Kierkegaard has absolutely no hint
of involution. Repetition, said the philosopher with total
conviction, is and always will be a transcendence. In oth-
er words, repetition carries with it the idea that repetition
will enable us to go beyond.
Having reached this point it should be noted that there
is a possible meeting place for the philosophical concep-
tion of repetition in Kierkegaard, psychoanalysis and inta-
glio. In all of them, repetition always implies the wish to
go beyond and transcend the limits of the established. For
Kierkegaard each repetition makes us transcend towards
something new, towards something that we had not con-
sidered and that now becomes evident due to the return of
the past in the present. However, repetition is not just that,
because Kierkegaard also speaks of repetition as transcen-
dence inasmuch as it takes us to new stages along the path
towards perfection. In psychoanalysis, when the subject
is said to be “repeating”, it does not mean that the sub-
ject is remembering past events. “Repetition” means that
the subject is moving beyond the pleasure principle. With
each new return, the subject gets nearer to an experience
of fullness similar to what she/he had experienced at the
dawn of his/her existence.
In intaglio the very term matrix comes from the idea of
gestation, from an idea that generates, is full of life and
has a wish to go beyond. The matrix-memory revises the
course of existence as a heterogeneous and fertile eld of
unexpected possibilities, full of small accidents that are
far from negligible, suspending any relationship of com-
mand and obedience between the subject and the repre-
sented, adding mystery and surprise, risk and expectation,
initiative and observation.
In the time of memory, it happens that every imped-
iment was a mere attempt, every project was decision,
vehemence, desire. That which arises from failure, devia-
tion, interruption, that which appeared to be antinomy, or
a logical or antisystematic contradiction, which should be
corrected or deleted, the matrix as a source of strategies,
as an existential impasse, which can inspire by challeng-
ing one’s intelligence with new points of view [4, p. 43].
Just as in the writings of Kierkegaard, in the process
of printing from the matrix there is access to a new order
and it nds the barrier of its memories, of its recollec-
tions. Printing is somewhere between what one believes
the work of art will be and what one knows it can never
become. The same way as when, in Kierkegaard, it is all
about fullling the experience of repetition. If Kierke
gaard returns to Berlin where he had felt innite plea-
sure, we also retrace our steps and it will be printing that
leads us along the path of our problem. That is, how and
why does everything that means essential progress have
to involve an obstinate repetition that carries within itself
the character of the adverse? Both in philosophy and in
intaglio, all repetition carries within it the possibility of
a transcendence that progresses towards the best stages
of existence.
The dialectics of repetition in intaglio are the same as
what Kierkegaard reveals when he says: […] the dialec-
tic of repetition is easy, because that which is repeated
has been, otherwise it could not be repeated; but precisely
this, that it has been, makes repetition something new [3,
p. 26].
Similarly, repetition in intaglio, the print as a multiple
original, demands something new; everything in repeti-
tion can vary and be diverse each time it is repeated – that
is why we can speak of a print as a multiple original – but
one thing that always stays the same is its meaning: the
béance, the idea of the other, towards which the subject
is moving, the matrix. The subject is always created from
the perspective of the other and when it is not created it
is because there is a aw in the encounter with the other.
For Jacques Lacan, sameness always comes from other-
ness [5, p. 68]. So we can state, categorically, the object,
the print, comes from the encounter with the subject, the
matrix.
Printing as progress and process of transfer
The printing process is a dialectical synthesis in which
the transfer or transposition of an element – matrix – en-
ables an object to be created. The object thus created be-
comes part of a Cartesian analysis which presents itself
not just as a purpose or for knowledge of the real, but as
much more than that; it can be manipulated. The object,
that is, that synthesis between subjective reality and ex-
ternal reality, is presented as something that we can ma-
nipulate through our perception. This process of transfer
allows us to extract data about the reality, hopes and proj-
ects deposited in the matrix. We complete what we see
with what we know, lending stability to something that
a priori has none. We interpret the data and give them
meaning.
So, one might think that a huge gap lies between the
matrix as a creative act and the process of printing. How-
ever, the said process, if we analyse it in its most elemen-
tal manifestations, is also an act of creation. Through
this process artists make the most of the information and
the knowledge that is transferred to them, allowing an
Repetition.Ajourneytothelimitsofthematrix /Powtórzenie.Podróżdogranicmatrycy 21
anticipated future to guide them toward the search for a -
nal project, the print.
According to Kierkegaard, the true meaning of repeti-
tion is transcendence, albeit a transcendence experienced
in the deceptive and concrete existence. An experience
that we ourselves sometimes provoke. To this perspective
there is something that must be added: when artists begin
to listen to the signs of their porous and relational inner
world – when they begin to be aware of the sensorial and
corporeal states they experience while interacting with the
material environment of the intaglio studio – they have
the opportunity to submerge themselves in the repetition
that leads to an emergent meaning, in a moment of rupture
with the experimental and creative process. To submerge
themselves in the recongurations and rematerializations
that the matrix may incite in them, whether in the succes-
sive prints made during the process leading to an edition
or to a particular result, and also, during the course of this
reproducibility, the transfer acquires another meaning. It
becomes a mingling of the different essential moments
(proven facts, sensorial and material experiences) of
the mo tion that is repetition in the broad and transcen-
dent sense.
This second moment is when repetition appears as
a demand. An object of desire and simultaneously of duty.
At the same time, the self becomes aware of the situa-
tion of failure it faces. The self sees itself with the task
of searching for the freedom it does not have. When it
nds itself there, feeling incapable, repetition becomes an
instantaneous demand, a vindication, a plea to God. As
a nal recourse, Kierkegaard gives the example of Job,
from the Old Testament. It is Job, in the second part of
the text, who will provide the idea of what a repetition
is. Job regains, in duplicate, what he had before: When
everything has ground to a halt, when thought ceases and
speech is silenced, when explanation retreats in despair –
then a thunderstorm is necessary [3, p. 80]. Kierkegaard
tries to distinguish a repetition that would be real. The
same repetition that occurs when we nish working on
the matrix and are no longer capable of understanding, or
even imagining, any other type of plastic solution for the
idea we have. It is at that exact moment that all certainties
and all conceivable possibilities cease to offer – as is log-
ical – any sort of explanation. In this sense of immediacy
everything is lost, everything is done. Just like Job, the
only thing left is to hope for a superabundant repetition.
So, printing can be understood as a possibility of move-
ment in the existential sense, since it involves progress.
With printing it can be said that there is a notion of move-
ment – kinesis – which corresponds to the modern cat-
egory of transition and this category, Kierkegaard says,
deserves maximum attention. For one thing, this will be
the moment to try to repeat the rst experience and see
if it has ended in failure or, instead, has run into some
type of impossibility. And another thing: this will be the
moment to ask oneself if it is desirable to repeat and what
is the meaning of repetition By repeating, do we win or
lose? In this stage, repetition has a nature more like that of
a project than a work of art with its pre-given conceptual
elaborations.
Printing appears as a possibility for subjective freedom
in each one of the beginnings of the edition. Each print
of the edition takes the form of a new beginning. As in
Kierkegaard, in the printing process also contains irony.
The print does not have the power of something new but
it does have, to a certain extent, the enthusiasm associated
with the annihilation of the old, which inspires and feeds
it. In one way or another, the print annihilates that which
inspired and feeds it, the matrix. An elastic link is always
formed when the incommensurability of the relationship
between the matrix and the print is experienced.
The repeated – that is, the reassumed, retaken, redu-
plicated or wellreected internally – is a reality as old
as it is new; something that already existed but starts to
be again. It is in this sense that printing is a repetition. It
is a process of progress, of transcendence, the absolute
beginning of which requires having absolute knowledge,
through the total reection of the subjectivity possible in
the current and necessary afrmation of itself. This is how
the creative universe will be fully transformed.
In consonance with this idea, the printing process can
be explained as the movement by which the original cre-
ative process subjects its possibilities to an internal need.
In this way it escapes fatalistic determinism and ensures
a presence that sustains the real order.
If Kierkegaard sustains that repetition is and always
will be transcendence [3, p. 142], it is reasonable to say
that printing is a process of progress, of transcendence.
This process is a model of individual freedom by which
to express a new reality that begins with an absolute de-
cision. The work done by the artist during the printing
process is, in the rst place, the concrete realization of
something that has been thought: in other words, a repe-
tition. As Kierkegaard would say: if God Himself had not
willed repetition, there would never have been a world [3,
p. 29]. If we did not want to create a print, we would not
create a matrix. That which was intellectual representation
in the matrix is subsequently repeated as the exemplary
cause of action and form, immanent and inherent of that
which is created in printmaking. It is through repetition
that during the printing process we discover our mistakes
in relation to the original and ideal integrity manifested in
the matrix. At the same time an initial internal reection
takes place. In it we notice the negative element that con-
tradicts its being while at the same time pushing it towards
a possible recovery.
This rst reection breaks the immediate relationship
between subjectivity and the real world, setting the matrix
against the emptiness of its own nothingness. However,
such a situation is nothing but the sine qua non condition
of a second reection, one that responds to the principle of
the inversion of opposites. According to this principle, the
positive coincides with the negation. Depending on this
inverse meaning and reection we can say that a dialec-
tical relationship is generated. It begins with nothingness
and only in a second moment, through appropriation, does
it enable the presence of our nal objective, the print.
In this same regard we can speak of the specic na-
ture of the process of printing, with its sole objective of
transcending the creative act performed on the matrix.
22 Juan Carlos Ramos Guadix
This means nally considering repetition, through the
print, as an event within the existence of the matrix itself.
A glance back at the unique and individual instrument.
The print as the process of appropriating a story
In a third moment, repetition in Kierkegaard takes
place as a life event in which the self receives freedom.
From that point onwards, the self can continue living,
taking up its past again as something acquired, captur-
ing the density of the present and opening up toward the
future. This is how the repetition event is connected to
a text from the Old Testament such as the Book of Job.
Here ideas are in constant motion. In view of this, Kierke-
gaard asks: What is Philoctetes’ situation compared to
Job’s, where the idea is in constant motion? [3, p. 10].
This dependence on the written past is no coincidence in
repetition. The idea of repetition in Kierkegaard takes all
of its strength from Greek philosophy. More specical-
ly from the pre-Socratic philosophers, whose points of
views often conicted with one another. Some thought
that there is no motion in the world – Parmenides and
the Eleatics – while others, such as Heraclitus, believed
that motion is the essence of the world, where everything
takes place in a continual ux. So, we ponder whether
repetition should be understood as the appropriation of
a meaning transmitted through a story, of a meaning as-
signed long ago and that is seen to be revealing for the
individual’s present. This nal aspect will be what holds
our attention, the print.
In this same sense, the tasks of the memory, the ma-
trix, stimulate our attention. They guide us with enthu-
siasm and a suspicious gaze towards the future, from the
symbolic and processual springs of the past, understand-
ing them as an uncovering of the matrix. The print – at-
tentive gaze – awakens looking toward the past, enjoying
and identifying itself in the images from another time,
evoked in the materials, in the alternation of successive,
superimposed bites as elements constituting a three-
dimensional object impregnated like a palimpsest – ma-
trix – which, far from acting as a nostalgic impediment,
sets up an imbalance in relation to the present, lived and
represented as a print [4, p. 42]. A print that appears as
the appropriation of a meaning transmitted by the story,
as a recollection.
All of the foregoing allows us to draw an analogy be-
tween the concept of repetition in Kierkegaard and the
concept of repetition in the two completely opposing re-
alities that make up the natural reality of intaglio printing
and printmaking systems; the matrix and the print. The
two items form a totality or a single indissoluble being,
although from an ontological point of view they do pres-
ent differences.
Translated by
Judith Alexia Weninger
References /Bibliografia
[1] Kierkegaard S., Papers and Journals, A. Hannay (transl.), Penguin
Classics, London–New York 1996.
[2] Plato, Six great Dialogues: Apology, Crito, Phaedo, Phaedrus, Sym-
po sium, The Republic, Dover Publications, Mineola, New York 2007.
[3] Kierkegaard S., Repetition and Philosophical Crumbs, Oxford Uni-
versity Press, New York 2009.
[4] Ramos Guadix J.C., En torno al grabado. La estampa y su práctica
reexiva, [1], Entorno Gráco Ediciones, Granada 2015.
[5] Psicoanálisis y realidad, A. Suarez (ed.), Siglo XIX Editores,
Mexico 1989.
Abstract
This paper presents Søren Kierkegaard’s concept of repetition and attempts to draw an analogy between it and intaglio printmaking, in relation to
three welldifferentiated moments. The rst moment is the location of repetition in the context of individual existence and its relationship with the
matrix as a unique thing. The second, its demanding nature, its search for freedom, where the question of printing is understood as the progress and
process of transfer. In this stage repetition becomes an instantaneous demand and vindication. Thirdly, the paper analyses the relationship between
repetition as a life event and the print as the process of appropriating a story by means of a graphic act. Here the analogy is drawn between the con-
cept of repetition by Kierkegaard and the concept of repetition in the two completely opposing realities that comprise the natural reality of intaglio
printmaking; the matrix and the print.
Key words: Kierkegaard, repetition, matrix, print, intaglio printmaking, mimesis
Streszczenie
Autor artykułu przedstawia koncepcje powtórzenia Sørena Kierkegaarda, próbując nakreślić analogię między nią a graką intaglio (graką wklę-
słodrukową) w odniesieniu do trzech różniących się od siebie momentów. Pierwszym z nich jest relacja powtórzenia wobec układu odniesienia,
jakim jest indywidualna egzystencja i jej związek z matrycą jako bytem wyjątkowym. Po drugie, ponieważ w jego charakterze leży kategoryczny
postulat wolności, który porusza kwestie drukowania jako procesu postępu i przekazu. Na tym etapie powtórzenie jest natychmiastowym żądaniem
i realizacją. Na koniec analizowany jest związek między powtórzeniem jako wydarzeniem istnienia a drukiem jako procesem zawłaszczenia historii
przez istnienie aktu gracznego. W tym kontekście autor zamierza ustanowić analogię między koncepcją powtórzenia Kierkegaarda a koncepcją
powtórzenia dwóch całkowicie przeciwnych rzeczywistości, które składają się na naturalną rzeczywistość miedziorytu i systemów drukowania,
takich jak matryca i druk.
Słowa kluczowe: Kierkegaard, powtórzenie, matryca, druk, intaglio, mimesis