This is the reason I have not started anything new along with proof-correcting except for the little review of Two Ages, which once more is concluding.20

But the “concluding” did not remain a punctuating period at the end of his work as an author. In retrospect he wrote: “With every new book I thought: Now you must stop. I felt this most strongly with Concluding Postscript. At this point I meant to stop—then I wrote the lines about The Corsair”21 Instead of a period, Postscript became a semicolon because of some lines22 by Frater Taciturnus printed a few days after the delivery of the Postscript manuscript to the printer. The result was the most famous literary controversary in Denmark23 and a change in Kierkegaard’s plans. “Now the situation is entirely different,” he wrote, “my circumstances so unrewarding that for the time it is appropriate, especially for a penitent, to stay where he is.”24 “But in the meantime external situations involved my public life in such a way that I existentially discovered the Christian collisions. This is an essential element in my own education.”25

How many times have I not said that a warship does not get its orders until it is out at sea, and thus it may be entirely in order for me to go further as an author than I had originally intended, especially since I have become an author in an entirely different sense, for originally I thought of being an author as an escape, something temporary, from going to the country as a pastor. But has not my situation already changed in that qua author I have begun to work for the religious? At first I planned to stop immediately after Either/Or. That was actually the original idea. But productivity took hold of me. Then I planned to stop with the Concluding Postscript. But what happens, I get involved in all that rabble persecution, and that was the very thing that made me remain on the spot. Now, I said to myself, now it can no longer be a matter of abandoning splendid conditions, no, now it is a situation for a penitent. Then I was going to end with Christian Discourses and travel, but I did not get to travel—and 1848 was the year of my richest productivity. Thus Governance himself has kept me in the harness. I ask myself: Do you believe that out in the rural parish you would have been able to write three religious books such as the three following Concluding Postscript? And I am obliged to answer: No! It was the tension of actuality that put new strength into my instrument, forced me to publish even more.26

Postscript thereby became not a concluding publication but, as termed in The Point of View for My Work as an Author (written in 1851), the “turning point”27 and the “midpoint”28 in Kierkegaard’s work as an author. It was the turning point inasmuch as what could be called the “second authorship” is direct communication, in contrast to the indirect communication of the pseudonymous works,29 and is “exclusively religious.”30

With Postscript no longer the stopping point, Kierkegaard again intended to cease writing after the publication of Christian Discourses (1848, preceded by Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits, 1847, Works of Love, 1847) and The Crisis and a Crisis in the Life of an Actress (1848)31 He could appropriately regard Postscript (1846) as the chronological midpoint in the pseudonymous series from Either/Or (1843) to Crisis (1848), and as the substantive midpoint between the pseudonymous series and the subsequent religious series. He was also mindful of the continuation of the dialectical relation between the two original parallel series represented first by the contemporaneous publication of Either/Or and Two Upbuilding Discourses (1843) and continued up through the almost simultaneous publication of Crisis and Christian Discourses.32 The pseudonym Inter et Inter for the author of Crisis seems to be a token of the two parallel series up to and beyond Postscript. Inter et Inter seems to exploit two meanings of inter [between]: intermediate in a series and reciprocally related. Crisis, which became the new midpoint between the pseudonymous series and the subsequent signed series of religious works, also represents a lateral relation between the pseudonymous series and the signed series: Either/Or (1843) to Crisis (1848) and Two Upbuilding Discourses (1843) to Christian Discourses (1848).

When Kierkegaard resumed writing after stopping a second time, his interest in maintaining the two parallel series of pseudonymous works and signed works is manifest anew in the publication of the second edition of Either/Or (the first of the few reprintings of Kierkegaard’s works during his lifetime) on May 14, 1849, and of the signed work The Lily in the Field and the Bird of the Air on the very same day.33

After the appearance of For Self-Examination in 1851, Kierkegaard did stop writing for publication until the end of 1854, a few months before his death (November 11, 1855). It was, however, a time of prolific journal writing, the time of the gathering storm that burst forth in polemical writings culminating in The Moment and the last of the signed works from his right hand: The Changelessness of God (September 3, 1855). He also formulated the title of what might have become his last work: “My Program: Either/Or,”34 a title epitomizing the authorship as a totality—beginning with Either/Or as the title of the first work and ending with “Either/Or” in the title of the proposed work, and with Postscript as the midpoint and turning point.

Climacus’s analyses and interpretations of the earlier pseudonymous and signed works35 render superfluous any discussion here of the substantive relations of the various works to Postscript. Climacus was pleased that he had told no one, not even his landlady, of his plans to write, “because it is indeed rather droll that the cause I had resolved to take up is advancing, but not through me.”36 Excluded from consideration are From the Papers of One Still Living and the dissertation. The Concept of Irony, both of which Kierkegaard regarded as ad hoc pieces and not as parts of the authorship proper, and of course the unpublished Johannes Climacus was also excluded. The discussions place Postscript climactically in the context of both the series of pseudonymous works and that of signed works. Thus, Postscript occupies a substantive midpoint position in the lateral relation between the two series, a position described in Point of View: “Concluding Unscientific Postscript is not esthetic, but, strictly speaking, neither is it religious. That is why it is by a pseudonymous writer, although I did place my name as editor, something I have not done with any purely esthetic work.”37

The reception of Postscript was generally silent, and the first of the few reviews immediately after publication were cool or negative. Sales of the volume were correspondingly meager. Three years after its publication, Kierkegaard wrote, “Perhaps fifty copies were sold.” How many had been given away is not known. By mid-July 1847 none of Kierkegaard’s books except Either/Or had sold out, and as his own publisher he sold all the remaining books, including 341 copies of Postscript (out of an edition of 525 copies), to Carl A.