Chapter 5 - A’s Religion of Boredom

Summary

I argue that “The Rotation of Crops” represents one of two culminations of the aesthete’s (i.e., “A’s”) position in Either/Or. Under the guise of his bantering remarks, A sketches a theory of the modern self as specifically constituted in relation to the problem of boredom: To be modern is to be bored and to be motivated by the desire not to be bored. A’s boredom is thus in some sense an experience of ultimate significance, a religious experience imminent within the terms of the secular life itself. A’s solution to the problem of boredom turns out therefore to require a wholesale conversion; the cure is nothing short of a totalizing spiritual practice that one must make the center of one’s life, if one hopes to keep things interesting. A’s position amounts at once to a transcendental critique and to a theology of boredom.