Kierkegaarry Potter: Fear and Rowling (Adam Roberts, May 08, 2025, Substack-ships On Fire, Off The Shoulder Of Orion)
It’s the story of Abraham and Isaac from Isaac’s perspective; and it answers the question ‘but why must we die at the hands of the nom-de-la-mort Voldemort?’ with: because there is a little piece of this mort already inside your soul. But it does so in order to twist a surprise existential short-circuit out of the encounter: death ends up destroying not us but the shard of death inside us. Eucatastrophe!
This isn’t what Dumbledore thinks will happen, of course. It’s clear he believed that Harry would die. When his shade meets Harry after the event, he describes himself as a ‘master of Death’. ‘Was I better, ultimately, than Voldemort?’ he asks, and the question is not a rhetorical one. ‘I too sought a way to conquer death, Harry.’
“Hallows, not Horcruxes.”
“Hallows,” murmured Dumbledore, “not Horcruxes. Precisely.” …
“Grindelwald was looking for them too?”
Dumbledore closed his eyes for a moment and nodded.
“It was the thing, above all, that drew us together,” he said quietly. “Two clever, arrogant boys with a shared obsession.”
[Deathly Hallows, ch. 35]All the twists and turns of the seven novels, all the ‘Snape’s a baddie! no he’s a goodie! wrong, he’s a baddie! oh, final reveal, he’s a goodie!’ back and forth, they all resolve themselves into these three fundamentally Kiekegaardian problems. Is there a Teleological Suspension of the Ethical in the Potterverse? On what grounds might it operate? Voldemort, and Grindelwald, and young Albus all suspended the ethical in search of a particular telos: overcoming death. That led to great suffering: in Kierkegaardian terms, a tragic, rather than Abarahamic, outcome. But to continue with Kierkegaard’s problemata: how does the specific suspension of the ethical provision not to sacrifice Harry Potter merit any more suspension than those earlier experiments? Voldemort dispenses with the ethical for purely selfish reasons: that he himself might not die. Snape is prepared to do the same for less selfish reasons: to save the life of the woman he loves. But Dumbledore’s rebuke to him on this ground carries meaningful ethical force: “You do not care, then, about the deaths of her husband and child? They can die, as long as you have what you want?” Snape is abashed by this, and quite right too. So what about Dumbledore’s reasons for doing what he does? That’s trickier to justify, and trickier even to identify. The answer is to be found in the eucatastrophic survival of Harry himself, just as, in the Genesis story, Abraham’s faith is only retrospectively justified by the intervention of the angel, staying his hand. Could we say: the thing that justifies Dumbledore’s secret scheme literally to send Harry Potter to his death is that he is, in a Kiekegaardian sense, a knight of faith?