“At blinke for Kniven”

Abstract

Reading Jensen’s The Fall of the King, this essay pursues the idea that the novel’s descriptions of hate, hate speech and idiosyncrasies not only serve as insights into troubled subjectivities and dehumanizing social logics but that they are crucial elements of the particular aesthetic practices that have helped turn the novel into a key document in Danish literary history. Drawing on recent theoretical work on the relationships between hate, hate-speech and literature, the article argues that the novel owes much of its shocking and undecidable qualities, its ability to make its reader flinch at the knife, to its engagement with the rhetoric and phenomenology of hate.