In a Flash of Lightning: Conversion and the Non-Object Through Kierkegaard and Eliot

In both T.S Eliot’s poetry and the writings of Søren Kierkegaard, conversion serves as an escape from the noise and din of social life. Similarly, both writers implicitly respond to Hegelian Absolute Idealism’s placement of poetry and religious practice within “picture-thinking,” outside of real knowledge. Conversion appears in both thinkers as a response to the pressures of social life, and as a breakdown in communication between religious adherents and their society. Kierkegaard especially articulates the impossible space of Christians within “Christendom.” This paper takes as its point of comparison Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” reading it through a lens from Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous works. First, I work through the development of anxiety as a social phenomenon in both, before turning to Eliot and Kierkegaard’s depiction of the conversion event as self-obliterative. I then explore the silence after conversion, with a particular interest in the cessation of metaphysical speculation.