Chen, Seeing Hope in Trial: Kierkegaard and Shi Tiesheng Reading Job

Abstract: This essay compares the theme of suffering as a trial in Repetition (1843) and Shi Tiesheng’s Fragmented Writings between Sicknesses (2002). I identify four movements of the young man reading Job: turning inward, identifying with Job, identifying a false theology that suffering is a divine punishment, and teaching about “trial” affirming contending with God and pointing to hope. In similar moves, Shi reads Job to refute the Buddhist concept of suffering as karmic retribution. Shi’s narrative of becoming an individual and an author echoes Kierkegaard’s warning about the crowd. Doubting the existence of a preternatural heaven, Shi does not commit to the Christian religious subjectivity. He offers an antithesis to Kierkegaard’s individual, sharing existing Chinese literary and religious subject positions that he must reject in order to exist. This reading illuminates Shi’s thinking pattern in its affinity with and departure from Kierkegaard, clarifying the nature of Shi’s “religious syncretism."